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英文中文

Mandarin-speaking children’s acquisition of the additive particle ye ‘also’ 讲普通话的儿童对加点词 "也 "的习得

IF 1.1 3区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

Lingua

Pub Date : 2025-04-11 DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103936

Haiquan Huang , Yixiong Chen , Xuewu Qin , Xin Wang , Jie Xu

Previous studies have reported conflicting findings on children’s interpretation of additive particles. One of the previous studies has reported that Mandarin-speaking children up to 7 have difficulty deriving the presupposition triggered by the additive particle ye ‘also’. By contrast, another body of research has found that 3-to-4-year-olds can correctly interpret additive particles across languages. Such conflicting findings might have resulted from the different research techniques. Moreover, no study has been conducted to probe whether children are able to identify subject- versus object-associated focus in sentences with an additive particle. Against this backdrop, the current study attempts to systematically re-evaluate how Mandarin-speaking children interpret sentences with ye ‘also’, using an adapted research method. Two experiments were conducted with 3-to-4-year-olds and a group of adult controls. Experiment 1 probed whether children were able to identify object-associated focus in sentences with ye. Experiment 2 evaluated whether another group of children were able to identify subject-associated focus in sentences with ye. It was found that 3-year-olds already performed quite well and 4-year-olds nearly had adult-like performance in both experiments. The findings indicate that Mandarin-speaking preschoolers are able to identify subject- versus object-associated focus in sentences with ye, and such a linguistic ability develops in an incremental fashion. We discuss the methodological and theoretical implications of the findings.

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引用次数: 0

Linguistic indicators differentiating translated and untranslated diplomatic discourse: A diachronic analysis of the United Nations General Debate (1946–2022)

IF 1.1 3区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

Lingua

Pub Date : 2025-04-01 DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103933

Lin Shen , Haidee Kotze

This study examines the linguistic features that distinguish translated from untranslated English diplomatic discourse at the United Nations General Debate (UNGD) and investigates whether these features change from 1946 to 2022 and vary in relation to English language varieties. The translation features identified by elastic net regression analysis suggest that translated texts exhibit higher levels of formality, abstractness, and informational density than untranslated texts, aligning with existing studies on translated language. Over time, the translated texts tend to lag behind untranslated speeches in terms of language change, supporting the notion that UN translation is a conservative language variety: UN translators tend to be slow in adopting innovative usages, preferring established variants. Varietal differences are also evident in relation to the selected translation features. These findings contribute to the understanding of translated language and underscore the importance of considering diachronic analysis and varietal influences in relation to the features of translated language.

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引用次数: 0

“How is that unparliamentary?”: The metapragmatics of ‘unparliamentary’ language in the Australian Federal Parliament

IF 1.1 3区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

Lingua

Pub Date : 2025-03-29 DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103932

Sam Hames, Michael Haugh, Simon Musgrave

Parliamentary discourse is highly regulated, leading to an almost blanket avoidance of explicit vulgarity or overtly offensive language. Yet it is nevertheless replete with examples in which the language used by members is construed as ‘unparliamentary’. This study examines the occurrence of ‘unparliamentary’ as a metapragmatic label across the entire corpus of the Australian Federal Hansard from 1901 to 2024, and probes how it can be used to implement specific metapragmatic acts (i.e. doing something through labelling talk as ‘unparliamentary’), as well as how it can also become an object of metapragmatic discourse (i.e. a topic of debate in its own right). In so doing we explore how the boundaries of offensive, objectionable or otherwise disorderly language use in parliamentary discourse are established, maintained, contested, as well as change and evolve over time. As the Australian Federal Hansard constitutes a relatively large corpus of more than 900 million tokens, the study draws in a dialogic and iterative manner from both computational and interpretive methods of analysis. This dialogic form of analysis indicates that what is encompassed by the notion of ‘unparliamentary’ is broader and more complex than what is prescribed in the Standing Orders and associated codes of practice of the Australian Federal Parliament.

{"title":"“How is that unparliamentary?”: The metapragmatics of ‘unparliamentary’ language in the Australian Federal Parliament","authors":"Sam Hames, Michael Haugh, Simon Musgrave","doi":"10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103932","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103932","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Parliamentary discourse is highly regulated, leading to an almost blanket avoidance of explicit vulgarity or overtly offensive language. Yet it is nevertheless replete with examples in which the language used by members is construed as ‘unparliamentary’. This study examines the occurrence of ‘unparliamentary’ as a metapragmatic label across the entire corpus of the Australian Federal Hansard from 1901 to 2024, and probes how it can be used to implement specific metapragmatic acts (i.e. doing something through labelling talk as ‘unparliamentary’), as well as how it can also become an object of metapragmatic discourse (i.e. a topic of debate in its own right). In so doing we explore how the boundaries of offensive, objectionable or otherwise disorderly language use in parliamentary discourse are established, maintained, contested, as well as change and evolve over time. As the Australian Federal Hansard constitutes a relatively large corpus of more than 900 million tokens, the study draws in a dialogic and iterative manner from both computational and interpretive methods of analysis. This dialogic form of analysis indicates that what is encompassed by the notion of ‘unparliamentary’ is broader and more complex than what is prescribed in the Standing Orders and associated codes of practice of the Australian Federal Parliament.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47955,"journal":{"name":"Lingua","volume":"320 ","pages":"Article 103932"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143734786","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Do we swear more with friends or with acquaintances? F#ck in social networks

IF 1.1 3区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

Lingua

Pub Date : 2025-03-28 DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103931

Mikko Laitinen , Paula Rautionaho , Masoud Fatemi , Mikko Halonen

We investigate the uses of fuck in digital social networks from social media, Twitter/X in this case. Social media outlets have so far been predominantly treated as massive text collections, but they can be effectively used to investigate the role of social networks in shaping human communication. We use user-generated texts from 5,660 social networks (with 435,345 users and 7.8 billion words) from three settings (UK, US, and Australia). With embedded network information, this massive dataset enables us to investigate how network properties, that of the size and the strength of the network, influence the use of offensive words in these three settings. Our findings show that Americans use fuck most frequently, while Australians least frequently but they are highly creative with spelling variants of the word. Contrary to prior studies, we observe that people on this social media application swear more with acquaintances than with friends, but only in smaller networks − in larger networks of >100 people, the differences level out. Overall, this study highlights the benefits of using social media data that can be enriched to allow access to the social networks that people interact in.

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引用次数: 0

Deciphering cross-genre dynamics: Testing the Law of Abbreviation and the Meaning-Frequency Law in Chinese across genres

IF 1.1 3区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

Lingua

Pub Date : 2025-03-27 DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103934

Zhuolun Li , Lei Lei

The study examined the applicability of two linguistic laws, i.e., the Law of Abbreviation and the Meaning-Frequency Law, in Chinese across four text genres. Linear mixed-effects models were employed to explore the genre-mediated effects on the two laws. The results confirmed the validity of both laws at the character level in Chinese while also demonstrating significant genre-specific variations. The effect of genre on the relationships among character length, polysemy, and frequency was particularly pronounced in less formal genres. Additionally, across all genres, character polysemy consistently exhibited a stronger effect on character frequency than character length. The results were discussed from several perspectives, including the underlying mechanisms of the two laws (i.e., the principle of least effort and the lexical synergetic system theory), trade-offs between communication accuracy versus efficiency across genres, and the differing impacts on communication costs of character polysemy and character length. Implications of the study are also discussed for researchers interested in Zipfian laws across languages.

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引用次数: 0

Implicit and explicit linguistic biases: The influence of social dominance orientation (SDO) upon hierarchical language attitudes

IF 1.1 3区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

Lingua

Pub Date : 2025-03-20 DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103928

Robert M. McKenzie , Kristofor McCarty , Mimi Huang

Research indicates that various social factors can predict language attitudes. However, although social dominance orientation (SDO), the individual’s preference for societal hierarchies, has been found to determine evaluations of a range of social groups and socially meaningful topics, its role in predicting more deeply embedded implicit attitudes in conjunction with more deliberative explicit attitudes towards specific language varieties and their speakers is currently unknown. The present research examined the effect of SDO upon English nationals’ (N = 306) explicit and implicit evaluations of phonological variants indexical of (i) Northern English speech and (ii) Southern English speech in England on competence (Study 1) and warmth (Study 2) dimensions. Regression analysis, controlling for demographic variables, demonstrated that high-SDO predicted negative explicit competence and warmth attitudes towards Northern English speech. Conversely, SDO did not determine self-report Southern English speech evaluations. Likewise, SDO did not predict implicit competence or warmth attitudes. The study findings are discussed in relation to the methodological and theoretical value for (socio)linguists of incorporating SDO measures into research investigating language attitudes at different levels of evaluational awareness.

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引用次数: 0

The role of phonetic radical information in compound character recognition during sentence reading

IF 1.1 3区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

Lingua

Pub Date : 2025-03-13 DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103921

Simin Zhou , Tianlin Wang , Miao Yu , Xiujuan Shi

The role of phonology in Chinese character recognition has been a subject of ongoing debate. While evidence suggests that phonetic radicals play a significant role in compound character recognition, previous studies have often mixed phonological and orthographic information associated with radicals. To address this limitation, two eye-tracking experiments were conducted to further investigate the role of phonetic radical phonology and the time course of its influence on character recognition. In Experiment 1, we employed an error disruption paradigm to explore the role of phonology in Chinese character recognition. The results revealed that, for regular target characters, the total reading time was shorter in the phonologically similar substitute condition compared to the unrelated condition. The findings suggest that phonological information facilitates Chinese character recognition, but only in the late processing stages. In Experiment 2, the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm was utilized to investigate how phonetic radical information influences the recognition of compound characters. Results showed that, regardless of a character’s regularity, the single fixation duration, first fixation duration, and gaze duration were all shorter in the phonologically similar condition than in the unrelated condition. The findings suggest that phonetic radical phonology consistently facilitates the processing of Chinese characters, both in the early and late stages. This study offers new insights into the phonological processing of Chinese characters, particularly highlighting the crucial role of radicals in decoding word meanings and emphasizing the importance of sub-lexical processing in reading comprehension.

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引用次数: 0

An empirical study on parameters affecting the recoverability of deictic null subjects in Korean

IF 1.1 3区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

Lingua

Pub Date : 2025-03-06 DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103913

Arum Park

Korean is a null subject language, allowing the omission of overt subjects in sentences. Within the framework of principle and parameter theory, Korean null subjects have traditionally been explained by the topic-drop parameter, which assumes that omitted subjects are recovered through topic chains linking them to an explicit discourse topic. However, this mechanism alone is insufficient to account for deictic null subjects, which primarily refer to the speaker or addressee and do not require a previously introduced topic. This study empirically and systematically evaluates the contribution of linguistic parameters within verbal complexes in resolving Korean deictic null subjects. A total of 208 heuristic rules were developed, integrating various morpho-syntactic and lexical features, and were incorporated into a unified null subject resolution system—the first attempt to comprehensively assess multiple parameters within a single system. The system was tested on 15,883 predicates containing null subjects, measuring the impact of each parameter in recovering discourse participant-referents. The system successfully identified 86% of discourse participant-related null subjects, achieving an accuracy rate of 99%. Additionally, an analysis of individual rule performance highlighted the crucial role of verbal suffixes in identifying and restoring deictic null subjects. These findings underscore the significance of explicit linguistic features in verbal complexes for the recoverability of deictic null subjects in Korean, particularly those linked to discourse participants.

{"title":"An empirical study on parameters affecting the recoverability of deictic null subjects in Korean","authors":"Arum Park","doi":"10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103913","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103913","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Korean is a null subject language, allowing the omission of overt subjects in sentences. Within the framework of principle and parameter theory, Korean null subjects have traditionally been explained by the topic-drop parameter, which assumes that omitted subjects are recovered through topic chains linking them to an explicit discourse topic. However, this mechanism alone is insufficient to account for deictic null subjects, which primarily refer to the speaker or addressee and do not require a previously introduced topic. This study empirically and systematically evaluates the contribution of linguistic parameters within verbal complexes in resolving Korean deictic null subjects. A total of 208 heuristic rules were developed, integrating various morpho-syntactic and lexical features, and were incorporated into a unified null subject resolution system—the first attempt to comprehensively assess multiple parameters within a single system. The system was tested on 15,883 predicates containing null subjects, measuring the impact of each parameter in recovering discourse participant-referents. The system successfully identified 86% of discourse participant-related null subjects, achieving an accuracy rate of 99%. Additionally, an analysis of individual rule performance highlighted the crucial role of verbal suffixes in identifying and restoring deictic null subjects. These findings underscore the significance of explicit linguistic features in verbal complexes for the recoverability of deictic null subjects in Korean, particularly those linked to discourse participants.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47955,"journal":{"name":"Lingua","volume":"319 ","pages":"Article 103913"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143561773","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Bilingual influences and sources of variability in acceptability judgments: A case study of Chinese

IF 1.1 3区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

Lingua

Pub Date : 2025-02-28 DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103911

Hai Hu , Aini Li , Yina Patterson , Jiahui Huang , Chien-Jer Charles Lin

The replicability of grammaticality judgments forms the foundation of data quality in linguistic research. Previous work has mostly focused on judgments from ideal “native speakers,” disregarding speakers of different language backgrounds. This study examines whether acceptability judgments in Chinese can be replicated by linguistically diverse native speakers, “monodialectal” and “multidialectal” speakers of Chinese, and then explores how various factors influence such judgments. First, we obtained a representative dataset by randomly sampling 337 minimal pairs from 68 journal articles on Chinese syntax from the past decade. Then, two groups of participants—monolingual Mandarin speakers from Beijing and Mandarin-Cantonese bilinguals from Guangzhou—completed an acceptability rating task (Experiment 1). Two forced-choice experiments (Experiments 2 and 3) were conducted to further examine the unreplicated pairs from Experiment 1. The results of these three experiments showed a convergence rate of 92% between our participants and the syntacticians who authored the examples. Importantly, the language backgrounds of the participants and the authoring syntacticians were not found to play a role in acceptability judgments, whereas sentence length and the language of the journals did. The multilingual status of Cantonese-Mandarin bilinguals has a subtle but limited influence on judgments in Mandarin Chinese. We argue that the reliance on a monolingual “ideal” native speaker for eliciting judgments may have been overemphasized in linguistic research.

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引用次数: 0

On Korean progressive/perfect constructions

IF 1.1 3区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

Lingua

Pub Date : 2025-02-27 DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103903

Kwang-sup Kim

It is well-known that the −ko iss- form in Korean is ambiguous, being interpreted as either a progressive reading or a resultant state reading. The primary claim of this article is that −ko iss- is, in fact, six-way ambiguous. This ambiguity arises from the interplay of three factors: the ambiguity of −ko, the ambiguity of iss-, and the optional presence of the light verb v*. The morpheme −ko is ambiguous between ‘simultaneous’ (+Simul) and ‘non-simultaneous’ (−Simul) readings. When used as an aspect marker, −ko_[+Simul] denotes the in-progress state of an event, while −ko_[−Simul] indicates either a resultant state or a continuative state of the event or state. Meanwhile, iss- can be interpreted either as a raising predicate or as a control predicate. Furthermore, the −ko iss- form can optionally co-occur with the light verb v*. Given these ambiguities, there are theoretically eight possible −ko iss- constructions. However, this article shows that only six of these are attested, as some combinations result in pragmatic anomaly. In accounting for the −ko iss- form, this article demonstrates that Korean progressive and perfect constructions share a striking similarity with their English counterparts, as both rely on the same underlying mechanism.

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