Volume 61, Issue 3

Our investigation explored the novel findings regarding how high vowel syncope is metrically conditioned in Najdi Arabic (NA), a dialect that is spoken in the Najd province in Saudi Arabia, based on Harmonic Serialism (HS). Our study examined the serial interaction of high vowel syncope and stress/footing, which relies on syllable weight and position in NA. Our findings showed that high vowel syncope in NA occurred in accordance with derivational steps in a feeding order. Moreover, HS is effective for expressing metrically conditioned high vowel syncope in NA.

Drawing data from the International Corpus of English, this study investigates the complexity of direct objects (DOs) and indirect objects (IOs) of the verb give in Hong Kong English (HKE), Indian English (IndE) and British English (BrE) based on two metrics: length and dependency distance (DD). The findings are as follows: (1) DOs in HKE and IndE are shorter or structurally simpler than those in BrE, potentially due to second language acquisition simplification strategies, object pronominality and language contact effects. (2) The lack of a significant difference in IO length across the three English varieties may be attributed to the pronominality of IOs. However, IndE exhibits a significantly greater DD of IOs compared to HKE and BrE, likely due to differences in complementation pattern preferences. (3) The DD of DOs and IOs in the three English varieties remains within a certain range, which may reflect the “principle of least effort” in human language use. Moreover, DOs are longer and exhibit a greater DD than IOs, a difference that may be attributed to the pronominality of objects and the proportion of adjacent dependencies. This study introduces DD as a feasible metric for studying world Englishes.

This study examines online advice-giving behaviors among health professionals of varying genders and investigates how patient gender influences their communication styles. It analyzes 100 advice messages authored by psychiatrists in response to patient inquiries on two medical consultation websites in Taiwan. The analysis focuses on the pragmatic aspects of advice and referral expressions and the mechanisms employed to modify these suggestive comments. The findings reveal that despite their inclination towards direct advice, male and female psychiatrists employ distinct advising and referring strategies, tailoring their approaches to enhance receptivity among advice-seekers based on gender. Specifically, female medical experts tend to adopt patient-centered communication styles, showing heightened sensitivity to the emotional needs of their patients. In contrast, male professionals are more inclined to emphasize the significance and immediacy of their recommendations, displaying a greater degree of confidence in asserting their expertise.

In this study, the performance of Turkish-speaking adolescents with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in long-distance (LD) binding conditions of anaphors, a topic that remains insufficiently explored in the existing literature, was investigated. The relationship between their performance and theory of mind (ToM), as well as working memory (WM) skills, was also discussed. Adolescents aged 12–18 years with ADHD ( n  = 42) and typically developing adolescents (TD; n  = 40) were tested on their interpretation of the reflexive kendisi ‘self.3sg’, which has logophoric features in Turkish, using comprehension and self-paced reading tasks. The ADHD group performed poorly on LD-anaphors for the end-of-trial questions, and their reading times were shorter compared to TD peers. It has been suggested that short reading times for sentences containing LD-anaphors indicate shallow processing and that the failure is linked to inadequate WM or (and) ToM skills. This study emphasizes that the interpretive performance of LD-anaphors is not only associated with WM limitations, but also strongly associated with empathy and pragmatic use of language. The study underlines the need for future research efforts to examine these complex relationships in ADHD in greater depth.

The paper presents an analysis of utterances extracted from a corpus of written Czech that contain the adverbs navzájem/vzájemně ‘each other, mutually’ or the adverb spolu ‘with each other’ used as markers of reciprocity in a way that does not correspond to the semantic type of the reciprocal expression that the marker syntactically combines with. When used in this way, the two markers are interchangeable and thus represent grammatical variants. The paper focuses on the functional and semantic differences between the two variants, as well as on possible motives for using the non-basic variant. The general semantic relationship between the variants is also examined, taking into account their relative frequency of use.

This article argues that the ‘why + not + XP’ construction is similar to Stripping and why-Stripping in some aspects, but it has its unique representation and derivation. As syntax encodes information that helps realize the performance of speech act, this article proposes that a syntactic structure consists of a representation of the addressor and the addressee high above in syntax; there is a response layer below and the proposition is realized in the CP layer. Accordingly, syntax is interfaced with pragmatics in the ‘why + not + XP’ construction. This article also argues that the derivation of the ‘why + not + DP’ construction involves the covert movement of the DP to [Spec, FocP] and the base-generation of the wh -phrase why in [Spec, ForceP]; the negative marker not is base-generated in the specifier of a polarity phrase which is sandwiched between ForceP and FocP; a subsequent deletion of FinP at PF derives the well-formed ‘why + not + DP’ construction. This analysis can also be extended to the explanation of similar constructions with VP, PP, AP, AdvP and CP remnants and the construction with ‘why + not’, thus providing a principled explanation of the ‘why + not + XP’ construction.