Language and Linguistics Compass最新文献

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.

Aguilar-Guevara, A., & Oggiani, C. (2023). Weak definite nominals. Language and Linguistics Compass, e12503. https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12503

This is the ORCID information for author Carolina Oggiani: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7104-4738

On page 20, author biographies, Carolina Oggiani’s information is as follows:

Carolina Oggiani’s main area of research is the syntax-semantics interface of the nominal domain, mainly in Rioplatense Spanish. Carolina Oggiani obtained a PhD in Linguistics from Universidad de Buenos Aires and currently has a position at Universidad de la República, Uruguay.

Impersonal constructions describe generic statements, usually about people. In this article, I discuss implications of impersonal constructions for Generative theories of morphological features, grammatical case, verbal projections, and how referentiality is derived in the syntax.

Previous reviews have extensively explored structural priming, but there is a noticeable absence of comprehensive discussion on its potential as a tool for mapping linguistic representations in various fields. This paper addresses this gap by reviewing studies that have utilised structural priming to tackle psycholinguistic issues beyond the persistence of syntactic structures itself. We discuss how structural priming can be employed to map syntactic representations and processes that underlie sentence comprehension, to decipher grammatical encoding in sentence production, to probe the way lexical entries interrelate, to arbitrate alternative syntactic analyses for disputed constructions in experimental syntax, and to illuminate linguistic representations in large language models. We conclude that structural priming, as an experimental paradigm, presents an exciting and promising pathway towards a nuanced, empirically-grounded understanding of linguistic representations and processes.

Argumentation has long been studied in a number of disciplines, including several branches of linguistics. In recent years, computational processing of argumentation has been added to the list, reflecting a general interest from the field of natural language processing (NLP) in building natural language understanding systems for increasingly intricate language phenomena. Computational argumentation analysis – referred to as argumentation mining in the NLP literature – requires large amounts of real-world text with manually analyzed argumentation. This process is known as annotation in the NLP literature and such annotated datasets are used both as “gold standards” for assessing the quality of NLP applications and as training data for the machine learning algorithms underlying most state of the art approaches to NLP. Argumentation annotation turns out to be complex, both because argumentation can be complex in itself and because it does not come across as a unitary phenomenon in the literature. In this survey we review how argumentation has been studied in other fields, how it has been annotated in NLP and what has been achieved so far. We conclude with describing some important current and future issues to be resolved.

Weak definite nominals are a class of nominals composed of weak definites and bare singulars occurring in the same linguistic environments within and across languages. They display several characteristic properties: restricted distribution, non-unique reference, sloppy identity in VP-ellipsis sentences, acceptability in sluicing contexts, narrow-scope interpretation, lexical constraints, restricted modification, restricted number morphology, meaning enrichment, and discourse referential defectiveness. In this review we explore two main theoretical approaches accounting for the meaning of these expressions, namely, one that treats them as pseudo-incorporated nominals and another one that attributes to them an abstract object reference. We first discuss the properties of weak definite nominals using Rioplatense Spanish data and then evaluate how both approaches can account for these properties.