Volume 59, Issue 2

We examined the contributions of segment type (consonants vs. vowels) and segment ratio to word recognition in Arabic sentences, a language that has a nonconcatenative morphological system in which consonants indicate semantic information, while vowels indicate structural information. In two experiments (with a balanced vowel-to-consonant ratio in Experiment 1 and an imbalanced ratio in Experiment 2), we presented participants with spoken sentences in Modern Standard Arabic, in which either consonants or vowels had been replaced by silence, and asked them to report what they could understand. The results indicate that consonants play a much greater role than vowels, both for balanced and also imbalanced sentences. The results also show greater word recognition for stimuli that contained a higher ratio of consonants to vowels. These results support and supplement previous findings on the role of consonantal roots in word recognition in Semitic languages, but clearly differ from those previously reported for non-Semitic languages which highlight the role of vowels in word recognition at the sentence level. We interpret this within the framework of root-and-pattern morphology, and further argue that segmental effects on word recognition and speech processing are crucially modulated by morphological structure.

The present article provides the first systematic analysis of the formal (phonetic and morphological) facet of interjections in Hadza. By using a prototype-driven approach to an interjective category and drawing on original evidence, the authors demonstrate that Hadza interjections closely comply with an interjective prototype. Hadza interjections meet most prototypical features and the exceptions attested fully match the exceptions that have previously been observed in other languages. Overall, the study corroborates the validity of the prototype postulated in scholarly literature, although certain refinements are also proposed.

This study investigates whether the perception–production link in phonological acquisition varies with stages of L2 development. It also examines whether the perception–production link for L2 vowels varies according to vowel properties, or whether the L2 vowels match or mismatch with L1 vowels. Korean learners of English in the UK were divided into more experienced and less experienced groups based on age of arrival and length of residence. The learners completed English vowel production, English vowel identification, and English–Korean vowel mapping tasks with English words (e.g., beat, bot ). The intelligibility of their production and the accuracy of their vowel identification were assessed. Results show that only the more experienced learners’ perception and production were significantly correlated. Among L2 Standard Southern British English vowels similar to L1 Korean vowels (/i, ʌ, u/) only /i/ showed a significant correlation between perception and production, while among L2 vowels dissimilar to L1 vowels (/eɪ, ɘʊ, ɑ, ɒ/) only /ɑ/ showed a negative correlation, indicating that the correlation varied with vowel properties. The study contributes to the L2 phonological acquisition literature by exploring the perception–production link in terms of different stages of L2 development and L2 vowel properties.

Place-names occupy a special area in the vocabulary of the Polish language. Their shape occasionally differs to a greater or lesser extent from that of words which constitute the bulk of the lexicon. They have been investigated in terms of semantics and etymology by various linguists, but their phonological analysis is only occasionally provided. In this paper, word-initial consonant combinations found in Polish place-names are presented and analysed from the viewpoint of Government Phonology in its most recent version called Complexity Scales and Licensing. The analysis, covering bi-consonantal, tri-consonantal and tetra-consonantal clusters, will be conducted with a view to finding out how the model shows the possible governing relationships between consonants. Of specific interest is the question of whether these toponyms are totally peculiar or just normal in terms of the phonotactics of the Polish language.

In Generative Linguistics of the past 40 years an ever increasing stress was put on the intricacies of the information load contributed by morpho-syntactic structure above the level of the root. Roots, seen as naked roots , entities without grammatical categories and arguments to be introduced into morpho-syntactic representations of clauses, contain basic encyclopaedic and phonological information. This paper seeks to show that the information coded by roots has to be more extensive; Roots representing Mental Property meanings in Polish have to apportion eventive arguments to explain diversities in the production of morpho-syntactic structures. To capture some interesting facts about the complementation of Mental Property adjectives in Polish and eventive implications of their cognate nominals, we have to resort to the representation of roots as entities responsible for apportioning arguments. Otherwise, our model would lack descriptive adequacy and it would make wrong predictions about Mental Property morpho-syntax of Polish. Extensive material of Polish Mental Property adjectival and nominal forms shows that eventiveness of some Mental Property adjectives and nominals is not a property of morpho-syntactic structures building such forms, but rather an idiosyncratic property of individual roots with Mental Property meanings. These findings may suggest that Mental Property adjectives and nominals in other languages may require a re-analyses which would take under consideration a possible non-structural, but lexical source of their eventiveness.

One of the main research questions concerning multi-word expressions (MWEs) is which of them are transparent word combinations created ad hoc and which are multi-word lexical units (MWUs). In this paper, we use selected corpus-linguistic and machine-learning methods to determine which lexicalization criteria guide Polish and English lexicographers in deciding which MWEs (bigrams such as adjective+noun and noun+noun combinations) should be treated as lexical units recorded in dictionaries as MWUs. We analyzed two samples: MWEs extracted from Polish and English monolingual dictionaries, and those created by the annotators, and tested two custom-designed criteria, i.e., intuition and paraphrase, also by using statistical methods (measures of collocational strength: PMI and Jaccard). We revealed that Polish lexicographers have a tendency not to include compositional MWEs as lexical entries in their dictionaries and that the criteria of paraphrase and intuition are important for them: if MWEs are not clearly and unambiguously paraphrasable and compositional, then they are recorded in dictionaries. We found that in contrast to Polish lexicographers English lexicographers tend to record also compositional and partly compositional MWEs.

Ra -marking in Persian has been a hotly debated topic over five decades. The postposition is primarily a definite marker of accusative objects in Standard Persian. However, the possibility for it to accompany indefinite accusative objects has paved the way for the emergence of further accounts such as ra being a marker of specificity, topicality, or identifiability. In colloquial Persian, the postposition also appears in displacement constructions where it marks clause-external possessors or obliques serving as so-called topics. In this paper, we argue that ra -marking is not unique to topical DOs and displaced NPs. A ra -marked NP also partakes in the constitution of focus structure while the postposition is taken to be an identifiability marker. We situate our account within a Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) framework to delineate that ra -marking at the Persian left-periphery is an example par excellence of the (mis)match between identifiability as a discourse-based concept and the pragmatic functions that the ra -marked displaced NPs serve in information structure. It becomes clear that a displaced NP legitimately plays an array of information-structural roles varying from a primary and secondary topic to a contrastive focus.

This paper aims to analyze the non-native use of Spanish verbs of different aspectual classes by Mandarin Chinese speakers performing oral narrative tasks. In this work, we adopt Vendler’s (Vendler, Zeno. 1967. Linguistics in philosophy . Ithaca: Cornell University Press) lexical-aspect classification (states, activities, accomplishments, and achievements), and we analyze the Spanish L2 acquisition of these categories by sinophones both at the level of the lexical form acquisition and at the semantic level. Based on data obtained from two oral narrative tasks elicited from storyboard vignettes performed by three groups of learners of L2/L3 Spanish (ranging from B1 to C1 levels of the CEFR), this work supports Jiang’s (Jiang, Nan. 2000. Lexical development and representation in a second language. Applied Linguistics 21(1). 47–77) L2 lexical acquisition pattern at the lexical form level, as our sinophone learners show a similar pattern to the one observed in native speakers in the use of aspectual class of compositional form (accomplishments)and aspectual classes of individual form (states, activities and achievements). However, at the lexical semantic level, we found that, besides L2 proficiency, the properties of lexical semantics may also impact learners’ L2 lexical processing.