Volume 59, Issue 1

This study investigates the production of vowel reduction among Jordanian–Arabic speakers of English. Two groups of speakers, intermediate and advanced, and a control group of English native speakers were asked to read a story. The phonetic properties of reduced vowels, namely duration, intensity, F0, F1, and F2 were measured and compared as produced by the three groups. Results show that there were considerable differences in duration as the reduced vowels produced by the Arabic speakers exhibited longer duration values than those produced by the native speakers. Slight differences were attested between the two proficiency groups. Also, it was found that lower F0, but not intensity, was used by all groups to signal lack of stress. Results revealed that advanced Arabic speakers of English failed to produce English schwa in a native-like manner both in terms of quantity and quality.

Focus is a universal category of information structure. However, focus is encoded by different focus marking strategies in world languages such as prosodic, morphological, or syntactic marking. In addition to the cross-linguistic perspective distinctions, one-to-one mapping is not observed in the coding of focus in individual languages. In contrast to the view that argues there is one-to-one mapping between focus and immediately preverbal position in Uyghur, this paper will argue that in-situ focus is also possible. In other words, it will be claimed that there are two focusing devices in Uyghur, syntactic and prosodic. The two focusing strategies can be used interchangeably, with some limitations in the distribution of non-focal elements, and these can encode different pragmatic focus subtypes.

The present study investigates the scope of metaphors evoked by the culinary term bake in American English and its Peninsular Spanish equivalent hornear . The data analysed was extracted from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the Corpus del Español: Web/Dialects . The target frames evoked and the frame elements involved in the metaphorical mappings were used to identify and analyse the metaphorical expressions. Furthermore, the type of process and thematic roles performed by the frame elements in the conceptual projections were examined to make divergences explicit. Our results suggest that metaphor diversity is broader in American English, as the source frame evoked by bake expresses metaphorically a larger number of target frames than hornear in Peninsular Spanish. Consequently, these lexical items are not exact equivalents. Each language seems to place the experiential focus on different frame elements and thematic roles to create their metaphorical mappings, which points to differential cognitive preferences between both cultures.

The diversity of syntactic units in second language has attracted much scholarly attention. Most existing studies on syntactic diversity have focused on only a small number of syntactic structures, and it is difficult to find studies that consider the full range of syntactic dependencies present in the dataset. Based on a syntactic annotated interlanguage corpus that we constructed, this paper is a quantitative study of dependencies in English-speaking Chinese learners’ interlanguage across proficiency levels. We fit the frequency distributions of dependency type, word class (both as dependent and governor), verb as a governor, and noun as a dependent with a modified right-truncated Zipf-Alekseev distribution and Zipf’s law. Our findings show that: (1) from the mathematical model, interlanguage followed distributional regularities like natural languages in terms of the syntactic structure distribution; (2) most of the determination coefficients’ R 2 were high, indicating that the investigated distributions in interlanguage fit the distributional law finding in natural languages. This also demonstrated that both interlanguages and natural languages consistently conform to the law of linguistic diversity and uniformity; (3) the dependency relation distribution parameters a and b manifest the developmental trend of L2 learners’ proficiency levels, demonstrating that the parameters had universal applicability in reflecting interlanguage proficiency.

This study investigates the emergence of (mor)phonological consonant clusters in L1 acquisition. Following the Strong Morphonotactic Hypothesis (SMH), distribution and preferability of word-medial consonant clusters in the corpus of three children acquiring Croatian were explored. VCCV and VCCCV clusters were extracted from the Croatian Corpus of Child Language. Subsequently, all word-medial clusters were tagged as exclusively phonotactic, exclusively morphonotactic, and ones that occurred in both contexts. The results partially corroborated SMH, strengthening the premise that morphological richness of a language moderates the interaction between morphology and phonology in early language acquisition. The data showed a clear predominance of morphonotactic clusters in one out of three subcorpus. Developmentally, an increase in all three cluster types was observed and generally all clusters were predominantly less preferred. Early emerging phonotactic clusters appeared to be mostly preferred, while the first morphonotactic clusters comprised less preferred combinations, with a gradual increase in preferability. Individual differences in cluster distribution and preferability blurred the role of the importance of morphonotactic information in L1 acquisition, suggesting that children employ different paths to acquire a language, but also suggesting that further exploration of this hypothesis in different languages and using different approaches is needed.

This study aimed to investigate how priming a metaphor by the gestural representation of its schema affects the understanding of that metaphor. In each of the two tests, different groups of participants were invited to judge the sensibility of the same 20 metaphors preceded by congruent versus incongruent gesture primes as compared to no prime. In the congruent gesture-prime conditions, each metaphor was preceded by a gesture that represented the schema of the subsequent metaphor whereas this gesture was not compatible with the schema of the subsequent metaphor in the incongruent gesture-prime conditions. Results showed that a higher proportion of sentences were judged to be sensible in the congruent gesture-prime conditions compared to no-prime and incongruent gesture-prime conditions. Also, response times of sensibility judgements were shorter in congruent gesture-prime conditions compared to no-prime and incongruent gesture-prime conditions. These results suggest that metaphor schema affects metaphor comprehension through the activation of metaphorically-relevant information and suppressing irrelevant information.

Left-node-raising (LNR), as a mirror image of right-node-raising (RNR), is a phenomenon in which the leftmost constituent is shared by the two conjuncts. In this paper, we empirically and theoretically explore two distinctive properties of LNR in Korean: licensing Case-mismatches of a shared element and the dependent plural marker tul . We argue that the first conjunct Case-licensing of the shared element in LNR is crucial across Case types. We thus confirm the explanatory edge of the scrambling-plus -pro analysis of LNR, nullifying previous symmetric analyses of LNR such as across-the-board scrambling and multidominance. Additionally, we argue that LNR is not a mirror image of RNR in that symmetric analyses may explain the distribution of the dependent plural marker in RNR but not that of the dependent plural marker in LNR. Therefore, we argue against a unified analysis of RNR and LNR. We further show that the island effect of LNR is evidence of the scrambling-plus -pro analysis of LNR.

In the higher education environment, peer-to-peer evaluation is a common learning activity and is beneficial to students’ development. Nevertheless, peer evaluations often include unsolicited advice, which potentially damages the face of advice-receivers and their interpersonal relationship with advice-givers. In the literature, little is known about how the potentially face-destructive advice messages in the academic discourse are pragmatically constructed by Chinese speakers who generally define advice-giving as a rapport-building behavior. The present study, therefore, investigated how Chinese language users rhetorically manage their unsolicited peer advice in an online learning activity. Also, whether and how the gender of the advice-givers and receivers exert impacts on the advice configurations in the formal institutional setting were examined. The corpus involved 1,118 units of advice speech events elicited from peer evaluations given by 43 Chinese-speaking Taiwanese students. The results revealed that the institutional context where the advice was addressed was critical to the advice-giver’s linguistic implicitness and selections of redressive modifiers. Besides, the gender of both the advice-givers and receivers had significant impacts on the pragmatics of the given advice. While the females often employed conditional constructions and reasoning discursive moves, the males preferred using subjectivizers to redress their advice, especially those addressed to men.

This paper explores the pragmatics of the comment clause, it is well , with a view to examining its origin, frequency, structural features, and extended discourse-pragmatic functions in Nigerian English, from a grammatical-pragmatic approach. The data for the study are collected from the Global Web-based English corpus (Davies, Mark. 2013. Corpus of Global Web-Based English: 1.9 billion words from speakers in 20 countries (GloWbE) . Available at: http://corpus.byu.edu/glowbe/) and questionnaires, and are analysed quantitatively and qualitatively. The results show that the origin of the clause in Nigerian English is the Bible. The clause occurs most frequently at utterance-final position, and collocates with other discourse-pragmatic features. The results also reveal that the clause performs both textual and interpersonal functions. Textually, it is used as a silence filler and to terminate discourse. Interpersonally, it is employed as a part of a prayer, to express hope, offer comfort, indicate resignation, show (reluctant) acceptance of other people’s actions, and to express sarcasm, amongst other functions. The study shows that the use of it is well is related to the cultural and religious beliefs of Nigerians as well as to the political and economic situation in Nigeria.

This article is concerned with “abstract rhetors”, i.e. inanimate nouns used as subjects of active verbs, in Polish and English academic texts. The few existing studies that deal with abstract rhetors in Polish indicate that their use is limited in comparison with English in both quantitative and qualitative terms. However, no suggestions have been offered so far as to the potential factors that may underlie these limitations, especially with regard to the qualitative differences. Focusing on a special type of abstract rhetors, namely active verbs used with text-denoting subjects, the article offers a comparable corpus-based analysis of Polish and English abstracts of research articles in linguistics with a view to determining their frequencies and shedding some light on the possible causes of the limited use of the structure in Polish. The results show that the use of active verbs with nouns referring to the abstracted article or its part is more than twice less frequent in Polish than in English, with considerable differences between the types of verbs employed in such contexts in the two languages. Three factors are proposed as potentially affecting the compatibility of the Polish verb with an inanimate, text-denoting noun: the type of agency, the supported metaphor/metonymy for the research article, and verb aspect/telicity.