Volume 59, Issue 3

This study aims to describe the production of English monophthongs by nonnative Saudi speakers. It acoustically examined the production of English monophthongal vowels by Saudi second language (L2) speakers. Sixteen L2 participants produced twelve English monophthongs in carrier words. Comparable data were obtained in native Saudi Arabic and native Southern Standard British English to aid interpreting the L2 results. Formant frequencies and durations were measured for all vowels. Similar to Saudi Arabic, the English vowels produced by the Saudi L2 speakers occupied a smaller vowel space than the vowels produced by the native English speakers. There was overlap between many of the English vowel categories produced by the L2 speakers. However, the L2 speakers were found to employ similar durational characteristics to those employed by the native English speakers. L1 influence seems to play a major role in the L2 learners’ production of English vowels. The limited vowel space of the L2 speakers’ L1 appears to have limited their ability to produce the more acoustically peripheral English vowels.

This article argues that DP in Hail Arabic is dominated by a C-domain, with C-layers, adducing empirical evidence from C-particles that interact with DP-internal material, ʔektɪn marking Topic and zad marking Contrastive Focus. Analyzing Construct State phenomenon, it is shown that ʔektɪn exclusively marks the possessum N. The possessor DP is marked without a C-particle. The mechanism of topicalizing the possessor DP is via co-indexation with a clitic φ-agreeing with the possessor DP, spelled out on the possessum N, where the possessum N functions as Lexical Strategy . Lexical Strategy though is not an option to topicalize the possessum N; the possessor DP cannot host a clitic that φ-agrees with the possessum N. Merger of ʔektɪn is thus motivated on morphological grounds. HA syntax instantiates a C-layer above DP, materialized by ʔektɪn which φ-agrees with the possessum N, what I term Functional Strategy . Further, a C-layer encoding Contrastive Focus headed by C-particle zad and a C-layer headed by the Shifting Topic C-particle ʕad , both of which mark by movement of the CS-internal constituent, merge above DP and co-occur with ʔektɪn . Within the backbones of the Cartographic approach, this phenomenon provides evidence that the DP architecture in HA is ripe for Split-DP analysis.

This paper discusses how German parasitic gap data from various earlier publications illustrate two patterns of systematic grammatical variation in the language, which have not been previously identified as such in the literature. I show how Heck and Himmelreich’s (Heck, Fabian & Anke Himmelreich. 2017. Opaque intervention. Linguistic Inquiry 48. 47–97) analysis for one pattern, although not able to currently capture both patterns, can be extended by allowing for variation in the positions targeted by scrambling along with the phrase markers that constitute domains for linearization. The resulting unifying analysis highlights how different grammatical mechanisms can in various ways (both local and global) have the effect of preserving the hierarchical relations involved in multiple movement dependencies.

In this corpus-informed cross-linguistic study, we focus on (1) ‘phraseology markers’ (PMs), which are recurrent and fixed word combinations used to demarcate instances of linguistic prefabrication, and (2) novelty markers (NMs), which are conventional expressions that mark novel phrasings of either new or familiar conceptualizations. Both classes of expressions have been largely neglected in phraseological studies conducted to date. Using selected corpora of general and spoken English and Polish, we study the use and discoursal functions of three pairs of loosely equivalent pre-selected phraseology markers and attempt to determine the amount of prefabricated language demarcated by those linguistic items. We found that the PMs and NMs perform opposing primary and secondary functions. By default, they are used to mark either prefabricated or supposedly novel expressions. In many contexts, however, PMs are used to break phraseology, that is, to mark expressions or phrases that represent unusual, unconventional, idiosyncratic phrasings unattested or rarely used in native texts.

A number of discourse functions of canonical antonyms have been quantified and classified in English and across languages, each of which is associated with typical syntactic frames. Taking such a classification of canonical antonymy as an analytical toolkit, (Davies, Matt. 2012. A new approach to oppositions in discourse: the role of syntactic frames in the triggering of noncanonical oppositions. Journal of English Linguistics 40(1). 41–73) quantified and qualified the role of these frames in triggering non-canonical oppositions in English news discourse. Synergizing the provisional typologies of canonical antonymy (Hassanein, Hamada. 2018. Discourse functions of opposition in Classical Arabic: The case in ḥadīth genre. Lingua 201. 18–44; Jones, Steven. 2002. Antonymy: A corpus-based perspective . London and New York: Routledge.) and non-canonical opposition (Davies, Matt. 2012. A new approach to oppositions in discourse: the role of syntactic frames in the triggering of noncanonical oppositions. Journal of English Linguistics 40(1). 41–73), this study has sought to develop a dynamic toolkit for the quantitative and qualitative analyses of non-canonical opposition across Arabic varieties and potentially other languages. The toolkit was tested quantitatively and qualitatively against a dataset of 2125 non-canonical oppositional pairs collected from the Qur’an with reference to the Qur’anic Arabic Corpus. Results showed that the syntactic frames which house a wide range of co-occurring canonical antonyms also house a wider range of non-canonical oppositions in binary and trinary representations of abstract and concrete entities. The role of syntactic frames in the triggering of non-canonical oppositions is quantitatively and qualitatively significant for locating and explicating the ideological repercussions of oppositions towards Qur’an interpretation. It is concluded that a synergy of typologies results in a replicable pathway for analysis.

When faced with intelligibility problems, listeners resort to contextual information. The present study explores the use of lexical context by listeners when identifying segments with various degrees of foreign accent. Native English listeners identified words into which a single Spanish-accented segment from a 5-step continuum had been inserted. Listeners also identified vowel-consonant or consonant-vowel sequences containing the same accented segments. While lexical context helped, the lexical advantage was largely independent of degree of foreign accent, with a slight benefit only for the most accented consonants. To examine the influence of listeners’ first language on the usefulness of lexical context, a second experiment was carried out with Spanish, Japanese and Czech non-native listeners. As was the case for native listeners, there was little evidence that a lexical context helps more for foreign-accented than native segments. Normalised for word familiarity, overall non-native identification patterns were comparable to native listeners’ perceptions. Listeners’ first language phonetic inventory had an effect on identification levels, particularly in the case of vowels. Lexical context benefits for vowel identification can be explained by their generally less categorical processing, their realisational variability in English, and symbol mapping issues.

This paper provides data from a regional dialect of Persian, Hamedanian Persian, where a verb is grammaticalized to be used as epistemic modality marker, frequently used in interrogatives. The verb didan , objectively means ‘to see’, but subjectivized in many instances to mean ‘understand’. However, in this dialect, bini , originally the subjunctive second person singular form of the verb didan ‘to see’, is used as epistemic marker. It is used in content and polar questions, where uncertainty is a common feature. Our fieldwork data show that the verb didan is used rarely to mean ‘to see’ and it extended to mark epistemic modality, used as probability marker. This modal marker is only used in questions, which share the stance of uncertainty with epistemic markers. The various features of this grammaticalization path are discussed and an explanation based on egophoricity is provided.