Volume 60, Issue 3

English loanwords in Croatian have been thoroughly investigated in terms of the degree of their adaptation, use across different styles and domains, and speakers’ attitudes. Most studies rely on selectively chosen examples or specialized corpora. To provide systematic data on a subgroup of English loanwords, those that occur in orthographically unadapted forms, new resources have been recently developed. They provide the data on the identification of unadapted English loanwords in Croatian, their meaning, native equivalents, and frequency. The aim of this paper is to bring together recent findings on unadapted English loanwords in Croatian, obtained from a set of studies in which computational-linguistic and corpus linguistic methods were used, with the purpose of providing a new insight into the phenomenon.

This study explores the extent to which perceptual and other factors (i.e., orthography and standardization) affect vowel adaptation in English loanwords in Korean. It also examines whether perceptual variability gives rise to adaptation variability, and it further addresses whether the degree of perceptual influence in vowel adaptation is different from that in consonant adaptation. Data on Korean listeners’ perceptual mapping patterns for English vowels were collected in an English-to-Korean vowel category mapping experiment and compared to the patterns in a loanword database. The results indicate that perceptual factors have a great impact on the adaptation of English vowels into Korean, in line with de Jong and Cho’s (de Jong, Kenneth & Mi-Hui Cho. 2012. Loanword phonology and perceptual mapping: Comparing two corpora of Korean contact with English. Language 88. 341–368) findings for the adaptation of English consonants into Korean. Consequently, factors such as orthography and standardization are viewed as deviations from these perceptual influences. The impact of perceptual adaptation is, however, rather limited because the correlation between perceptual mappings and loanword mappings is less robust for English vowel adaptation than for English consonant adaptation possibly due to the less categorical nature of vowels relative to consonants. Additionally, the results show that increased strength of modal perceptual mappings is related to less loanword variability in vowel adaptation.

This paper looks into how aggression against Meghan Markle is deployed in a sample of X replies that address her directly through the lens of Appraisal Theory coupled with impoliteness. A sample of tweets containing the seed word “Meghan Markle” was retrieved with Export Comments (December 2022–April 2023). Replies were run through the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count-22 to assess the tone and prevalence of emotions in the corpus. Results indicated high values for negative emotions, interpersonal conflict, and moralization words. Then, a random sample was manually codified to identify the use frequencies for the Attitude system’s affect, judgment, and appreciation categories when employed to convey hostility against the public figure. Tweets were overwhelmingly negative and explicitly conveyed through the negative judgment of Meghan Markle’s previous sexual and professional life. The veracity of her words and actions was also a source of aggression while tapping into the widely accepted stereotype that depicts women as liars or as incompetent and lacking determination, while some tweets also touched upon her mental instability. Findings reveal that aggressive tweets on X rely on appraisal resources and impolite-related language to promote and perpetuate culturally bound and traditional beliefs about women that ultimately reflect an underlying patriarchal system.

Bilingual language processing literature has pointed out that all bilinguals are not equal and many of the differences in processing strategies can be traced to ‘the bilingual experience’. This is true for the famed bilingual advantage debate as well, as the control process associated with bilinguals can be dependent on many factors in the behavioural ecology of the bilingual groups. In this light, the current study investigates bilingual language processing in the Rongmei Naga community in Manipur, North East India. The Rongmeis speak two indigenous/heritage languages as their first and second language: Rongmei and Meitei. These two languages belong to the same language family and the communities speaking them live side by side. The paper investigates the effect of community specific cues on language processing through a primed translation recognition task. The task is carried out on two groups of bilinguals: (educated, urbane) young group and (less educated, rural) old group. The result of the study shows that the mismatch condition has an adverse effect on the response latency across groups and translation directions, thus pointing to the possibility that in spite of cultural and linguistic closeness, prevailing social dimensions may be pointers for possible impact of such cues.