Volume 60, Issue 1

The present study investigates the effects of late sign language acquisition on the linguistic strategies used in the first introductions of inanimate objects through comparisons between narrations produced by deaf signers exposed to sign language after early childhood (i.e., late signers) and those of deaf signers acquiring sign language from birth (i.e., native signers). According to the results, late sign language acquisition has no hindering effect on the acquisition of the linguistic strategies used in the first introductions of inanimate objects. In addition, both native and late-signing children do not display adult-like patterns. This study suggests that the acquisition of referent introduction seems to be resilient to the effects of late sign language exposure. It also highlights the necessity of more research on different domains to gain insights into the narrative skills of late signers.

Access to speech datasets is essential for the effective use of modern ASR systems in low-resource languages like Polish. However, the lack of centralized information and metadata describing available datasets poses a significant challenge to researchers and practitioners. In this paper, we address this issue by presenting the most comprehensive survey of Polish ASR speech datasets to date. We manually curated information on 53 publicly available datasets and annotated them with 61 attributes, providing a comprehensive catalog of these resources. The catalog facilitates the discovery and evaluation of available datasets, enabling researchers to identify datasets that suit their specific needs. It also enables the identification of gaps in the existing datasets, which may inform future research directions. The catalog is open and community-driven, which means that new data sets can be added and issues can be reported, ensuring its continued relevance and usefulness to the ASR community. Our work contributes to improving the accessibility and usability of ASR systems in low-resource languages such as Polish.

Korean coordination allows non-final conjuncts to appear either without a tensed verb as in gapping ( aka right-node-raising or right-peripheral ellipsis) or without a verbal tense morpheme as in bare ko- coordination. This study uses an acceptability judgment experiment designed to investigate whether tense mismatches degrade the acceptability of Korean gapping and bare ko- coordination with reference to full coordination. The experimental findings of the study indicate that tense-matched gapping is preferred over tense-mismatched gapping and that tense-matched bare ko -coordination is preferred over tense-mismatched bare ko -coordination. The results of the study also demonstrate that temporal order, whether it is sequential or reverse, does not affect the acceptability of Korean gapping and bare ko- coordination because tense-mismatched violations are symmetric so that they cause to affect all conjuncts. Overall, this study discusses how the phenomena of tense-mismatches are accounted for in full coordination, bare ko- coordination, and gapping. The tense-mismatches in these constructions are due to differences in conjunct size. The conjunct size is TP in full coordination (with two overt Ts) and bare- ko coordination (with a null T in the first conjunct and an overt T in the second conjunct), while it is vP in gapping (with an overt T in the second conjunct).

This paper shows how otherness , having a negative representation potential, is covered in media discourse with a focus on the first day of the Russia–Ukraine war. In this article, I specifically investigate the representation of otherness that weaves the web of relations within the “us versus them” narrative espoused most strongly by Teun A. Van Dijk (1992. Discourse and the denial of racism. Discourse and Society 3. 87–118, 2002. Discourse and racism. In David Goldberg & John Solomos (eds.), The Blackwell companion to racial and ethnic studies , 145–159. Oxford: Blackwell) and further developed within the premises of a proximisation theory ( e.g. , Cap 2013. Proximization: The pragmatics of symbolic distance crossing . Amsterdam: John Benjamins; Chilton 2004. Analysing political discourse: Theory and practice . London: Routledge). This framework concerns the positive self-representation of Ukraine and its performance contrasted with Russia’s negative other-presentation. Following this account, otherness serves as means of legitimising media actions as preventive measures taken to inform society about the past, create the present state of the world through assertions (Dunmire 2011. Projecting the future through political discourse . Amsterdam: John Benjamins; Searle 2010. Making the social world: The structure of human civilization . Oxford: Oxford University Press) which endorse media credibility and predict future outcomes with respect to the horror of the unfolding war. This study argues that the representation of otherness takes place at the proximisation level of certain lexico-grammatical choices that are used strategically by media to cover the narrative of a “permanent military standby” and the “immediacy of otherness”.

This study aims to re-examine the essential notion of “gap” in the studies of relative clauses. Following Creissels’ (Creissels, Denis. 2006. Syntaxe générale: une introduction typologique . Paris: Hermès; Creissels, Denis. 2019. Remarks on the typology of noun-modifying clause constructions. Paper presented at the Conference of Complex Sentences, Central China Normal University, 26–29 July) discussion, we argue that there are at least three types of gaps in terms of their respective compositions, namely the gap corresponding to a zero-marked constituent, the gap corresponding to a case-marked constituent, and the gap corresponding to an adposition-marked constituent. This classification, which is not based on the grammatical relation of the relativized constituent in the relative clause but focuses on the composition of the gap, can better explain the existence of the so-called “enlarged gap”, a special type of gap that has been almost completely ignored so far. Moreover, this marking-based approach can shed new light on Keenan and Comrie’s (Keenan, Edward & Bernard Comrie. 1977. Noun phrase accessibility and universal grammar. Linguistic Inquiry 8(1). 63–99) Accessibility Hierarchy. In particular, we argue that some interplay of the syntactic position and the morphological marking of a syntactic object determines whether the constituent can be relativized.