Language and Linguistics Compass最新文献

What do demonstratives, like this/that and here/there, encode about their referents? The traditional answer argues that the deictic content of demonstratives is mostly about distance from the speaker – that proximals like this encode that the referent is near the speaker, while distals like that mean it is far from them. This speaker-centered, distance-based view is intuitively appealing, but recent research in linguistics, psychology, and anthropology has challenged it in many ways. I review three of the most active debates in this new literature, where recent authors – in contrast to the traditional view – have argued that (i) the spatial deictic content of demonstratives is about location relative to socially or perceptually defined perimeters, not distance; (ii) deictic content often concerns perception or attention, not space; and (iii) deictic content can relate the referent to the addressee or the speaker-addressee interactive dyad, as well as to the speaker. Under these new analyses, the deictic content of demonstratives is fundamentally social and interactive, not purely speaker-centered or distance-based.

Xitsonga, a southern Bantu language (S53) spoken in South Africa, possesses rich phonological patterns that have been underreported in the literature. This paper aims to provide an overview of the phonology of Xitsonga with a focus on segmental phonology, building up on existing literature. The consonants of Xitsonga show a four-way laryngeal system with phonation contrast in sonorants and several lateral consonants. These consonants display alternations of post-nasal hardening, affrication, and lateral-nasal alternation. Vowel raising and vowel coalescence are also examined. Data with variation from previous studies have been updated to reflect the status of lexical items in contemporary Xitsonga.

This paper gives an overview over two different kinds of protagonists' perspective taking in narrative texts, Free Indirect Discourse (FID) and Protagonist Projection (PP)/Viewpoint Shifting (VS), and the most important analyses of these phenomena that have been proposed within the framework of formal semantics and pragmatics. While FID is a special form of reporting self-reflexively conscious thoughts and utterances which in contrast to indirect and direct discourse is not overtly marked as such, PP/VS renders the content of protagonists' perceptions and beliefs. The paper discusses empirical differences between these two kinds of protagonists' perspective taking with respect to syntactic embeddability and the licencing of deictic expressions and considers various analytical options to capture these differences.

This article aims to fill a gap in the typological literature by discussing the typology of overt denominal verb formation strategies, that is, morphosyntactic strategies other than conversion/zero-derivation that are used to derive a verb from a nominal base. We analyse the morphological, syntactic and semantic properties of these strategies in a variety sample of 222 languages. These properties include the morphological status, the productivity, and the semantic effects of the overt verbaliser, as well as the features of the nominal base and the polysemy patterns that characterise verbalisers across languages. The typological survey is complemented by a section on the diachronic typology of overt denominal verb formation strategies, in which we identify the most common diachronic sources of overt verbalisers and discuss the diachronic dynamics that involve them in relation to other denominal verb formation strategies such as conversion/zero-derivation.

Intensive research on Obligatory Control (OC) in the past 2 decades has revealed a rich crosslinguistic terrain of deviations from the classical format. Five types of noncanonical OC are surveyed here: Finite control, controlled overt pronouns, partial control, proxy control and crossed control. Each one is described and illustrated, paying attention to methodological difficulties in establishing its characteristic empirical signature. We then turn to a critical assessment of leading theoretical accounts of these phenomena, pointing to merits and faults, and indicating how they can be integrated with broader concerns of syntactic theory.

A'ingae (or Cofán, ISO 639-3: con) is an indigenous language isolate spoken in northeast Ecuador and southern Colombia. This paper presents the first comprehensive overview of the A'ingae phonology, including descriptions of (i) the language's phonemic inventory, (ii) phonotactics and a number of related phonological rules, (iii) nasality and nasal spreading, as well as (iv) stress, glottalisation, their morphophonology, and aspects of clause-level prosody.

A common diagnostic for distinguishing between arguments and adjuncts is obligatoriness/optionality: as a rule of thumb, arguments are obligatory and adjuncts are optional. However, there are many examples of optional arguments, which have led researchers to question the usefulness of this diagnostic and sometimes even the very distinction between arguments and adjuncts. This paper aims to show that arguments are not simply optional; they are omissible only under identifiable grammatical and pragmatic conditions. By contrast, there are no conditions on when adjuncts can be omitted. There are instead pragmatic conditions that dictate the inclusion of adjuncts.

In recent years, the gap between academic linguistics and language education has become increasingly apparent, hindering the effective transmission of linguistic knowledge to students. This paper presents an overview of recent empirical research (mostly originating in the Netherlands) that seeks to bridge this gap by teaching students how to think like linguists within the context of L1 grammar education. The paper takes Dielemans' and Coppen's pedagogical framework for linguistic reasoning as its starting point, relates this framework to comparable initiatives and shows how recent studies have empirically examined different aspects of linguistic reasoning, including general linguistic reasoning ability, the role of linguistic metaconcepts and developing an appropriate epistemic attitude. The paper concludes with some desiderata for future research into this emerging research field.

Swearing a naturalisation oath, such as the US oath of allegiance, is the culminating step of naturalised citizenship and a moment that exposes tensions between linguistic theory and the law. Drawing on speech act theory, discourse analysis, and ethnography, this article exposes these tensions by deconstructing the language and history of the US naturalisation oath, its role in naturalisation ceremonies, and the ways it is taught in citizenship classes. This article describes the exclusionary history of the US oath and its role as a present-day enforcer of English hegemony. We then analyse how the authoritative discourse of the naturalisation oath signals its historical significance, while also imbuing it with a level of lexical and syntactic complexity that can hamper comprehension. Throughout, we notice that policies and practitioners carry different understandings of when the exact transitory moment occurs from non-citizen to citizen, which could be seen as undermining the illocutionary act of promising the oath. We end by offering recommendations for educators to integrate a discussion of the naturalisation oath into their citizenship class curriculum.

While many theoretical proposals about the relationship between language and music processing have been proposed over the past 40 years, recent empirical advances have shed new light on this relationship. Many features are shared between language and music, inspiring research in the fields of linguistic theory, systematic musicology, and cognitive (neuro-)science. This research has led to many and diverse findings, making comparisons difficult. In the current review, we propose a framework within which to organise past research and conduct future research, suggesting that past research has assumed either domain-specificity or domain-generality for language and music. Domain-specific approaches theoretically and experimentally describe aspects of language and music processing assuming that there is shared (structure-building) processing. Domain-general approaches theoretically and experimentally describe how mechanisms such as cognitive control, attention or neural entrainment can explain language and music processing. Here we propose that combining elements from domain-specific and domain-general approaches can be beneficial for advances in theoretical and experimental work, as well as for diagnoses and interventions for atypical populations. We provide examples of past research which has implicitly merged domain-specific and domain-general assumptions, and suggest new experimental designs that can result from such a combination aiming to further our understanding of the human brain.