Lingua最新文献

This study examines Chinese parents’ English naming practices for their children through the analytical lens of translanguaging and transculturality, with the former conceptualised as the linguistic manifestation of the latter. A survey was conducted with 416 Chinese-speaking parents living in four metropolitan cities in the Chinese mainland: Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou. Forty of these parents were also interviewed. The results revealed that 89% of the respondents (n = 334) had given English names to their children. Among the 334 English names collected, only 6 names were randomly chosen, demonstrating that most parents put considerable thought into selecting English names for their children. Linguistic analysis of the 328 carefully-selected names revealed that 208 names involved translanguaging, and five subcategories were identified: Pinyin romanisation, translingual rhyming, translingual homophony, literal translation, and meaning association. The remaining 120 names manifested a ‘transcultural recontextualisation’ of English names, mainly including names of movie/book characters and celebrities. The results shed light on boundary-crossing in translanguaging practices and provide new insights into translanguaging creativity as a means of creating transcultural identities. They further show that transculturality is a multi-directional process at the level of cultural flow and a scaled continuum in terms of cultural hybridity.

This paper delves into the phenomenon of subjectivity, with a particular focus on one of its components – perspective taking. It explores two linguistic cues categories: verb tenses in their perspectival usages and Free Indirect Discourse (FID). In this paper, we experimentally test how readers process sentences in which the French Passé Simple is employed in a perspectival manner within two types of subjective contexts: those with FID and those without FID markers. In addition, we consider whether the processing is influenced by the type of emotion expressed in these subjective contexts, whether it is positive or negative. We find a facilitation effect exclusively in FID contexts and only when the emotion expressed is positive. This could suggest that it is not the verb tense itself which is a cue for speaker’s subjectivity, but rather its occurrence in contexts such as FID. To interpret the results, we build on an array of empirical results found on connectives, verb tenses, and FID to put forward a comprehensive pragmatic model of subjectivity.

This study investigates how social forces and language-internal mechanisms interact to give rise to stance markers that reflect the speaker’s subjective and intersubjective stance. Using data from the NIKL (Motwuuy) Spoken Corpus and Daily Conversation Corpus and the Sejong Spoken Corpus, we examine how the Korean noun taypak (‘large gourd’) has become culturally associated with good fortune. With the meteoric rise of South Korea as an economic miracle in recent years, the country is also witnessing great economic disparity and more people are tempted to try moving up the socio-economic ladder through taypak, that is, ‘hitting the jackpot’. In this ‘try to get rich quick’ climate, the use of taypak in the sense of ‘hitting the jackpot’ rose in frequency, and its evaluative use (e.g., ‘awesome’) has further developed into an interjection (equivalent to English ‘wow!’). Using a discourse grammar framework, we discuss how language-internal mechanisms such as metonymic extension, conversion, cooptation and (inter)subjectification intertwine with socio-cultural forces to give rise to a near-ubiquitous stance marker that reflects a new cultural trend. The findings of this study contribute to our better understanding of how social factors can influence the development and uses of a common word that we otherwise would hardly notice.

Psych(ological) verbs pose a problem to theories about argument realization that assume a uniform and universal mapping between semantic relations and syntactic configurations. A number of attempts try to explain variation in argument structure in terms of the aspectual differences, assuming that the argument realization of a predicate is a reflection of the temporal properties of the predicate to some extent. However, it is challenging to classify psych verbs into any of Vendler’s four aspectual classes because of the “inchoativity” of these verbs. In this study, we take the notion of 'boundary' and its different types as relevant semantic components to describe the internal temporal structure of predicates. We demonstrate that Japanese psych verbs are not aspectually homogeneous but include different types of inchoatives. Accordingly, we propose that the argument realizations of psych verbs can be ascribed to the types of the ‘boundary’ (i.e. left boundary, right = left boundary and its explicitness/implicitness) the predicates denote.

This article analyzes spelling-change conflicts linked to Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian. These standard languages share a long history of common sociopolitical identity and high mutual intelligibility, and the spelling standardization processes became embroiled in the Yugoslav disintegration process and the creation of new political entities. This study presents results from a 2022 survey of 2000 participants in four countries (matched to country census quotas on five demographic criteria), and is thus one of the largest data sets of speakers’ attitudes and beliefs about language identity and its sociopolitical context. I argue that analyzing spelling-change conflicts can uncover the motives for spelling changes and the causes of such conflicts. I propose, based on this analysis, three principles for predicting (inter)national spelling-change conflicts. These principles offer a novel contribution to the state of the art in comparative standardology and sociological studies of conflicts.

Inherent to the debate on creole genesis is the question of grammatical continuity between creoles and their lexifier languages. This issue, in turn, relates to the disputed claim that creoles descend from pidgins: proponents of that claim postulate a negligible degree of grammatical transmission from the lexifier into the creole and no genetic relatedness between them; opponents claim the reverse. To shed light on the issue, this article compares two contact varieties (Guyanais, a French-lexified creole, and Gardiol, a diaspora variety of Occitan) to their respective lexifiers. The comparison shows that although Guyanais and Gardiol can both be called contact varieties, the latter has clearly inherited the grammar of its lexifier, whereas the former gives the appearance of a break in transmission, as predicted by the pidgin-creole cycle theory.

The development of cultural competences between interlocutors with different cultural and linguistic backgrounds has become a particularly fruitful area of interest in the L2 arena. One area that has not gained much attention is the role empathy plays in the development of cultural competences. In this exploratory study, five students with different cultural and linguistic backgrounds volunteered to join a five-week class. As for empathetic behavioral markers, using vetted assessment procedures, we look at the frequency of head-nodding and consider various perspectives as to what the raw numbers are indicating. Our results suggest that empathetic head-nodding increases as interlocutors develop more trust with one another; it increases for individuals designated as leaders; it either increases or decreases based upon cultural norms; it decreases when there are distractions and also when interlocutors cannot relate to the topic being discussed. As this study acts as a stepping-stone, it is hoped that researchers who are interested in intercultural and L2 interaction as well as those who are concerned about how empathy is expressed, both in linguistic and paralinguistic ways, will not only find value in the present study but will augment and broaden the scope of its findings.

Since Bühler’s influential work on context-dependent, deictic expressions, much research has been devoted to the underlying concepts and cross-linguistic variation of linguistic deixis. Focussing on the semantics of deictic locatives like here and there, the present article starts with an overview of deictic theories and phenomena. It is shown that proposals which either utilize the semantic idea of abstract pointing from some reference point (origin, ground), or the pragmatic concept of joint attention, do not explain the data sufficiently. As an alternative, specific parts of Takubo’s theory of deixis are then combined with an attentional semantics according to which “selective attention” plays an essential role in cognition and for language. It is argued that deictics as description-lean terms rather express basic aspects of attentional reference to an entity of some (cognitive) domain than specific content related to pointing or anchoring. Finally, further aspects and possible extensions of the novel attentional semantics of deictics are discussed.

The original Hallidayan term “polarity metaphor” (PM) originally illustrated a linguistic phenomenon under interpersonal metaphor, but no further studies on PM have been seen in the literature since then. The present study thus aims to define and identify PM so as to add understanding to the theory of grammatical metaphor. Instances from the BNC have been observed and it is found that PM is a category with both ideational and interpersonal meanings. Ideational PM can be categorized into participation, qualification, processation, and circumstantiation, while interpersonal PM can be realized through the tension between mood and speech function, or through the variational expressions of modality. With such observations, a comparatively delicate cline of polarity can be drawn ranging from full positivity to full negativity, PM being in between. Likewise, a cline of PM can be drawn with validity and actualization on one end and arguability and negotiability on the other.

This article aims to reopen the issue of Greeklish, the Latin-alphabet Greek used for the past 30 years, sparking a lot of debate in Greek society. Greeklish transliterations (phonetic, mixed, and orthographic) that are still used in digital environments have been associated with negative effects on students’ literacy skills. The current study used eye-tracking to examine the eye movement patterns of forty adolescent students (aged 11–15) during reading Greeklish transliterated single-words (nouns/verbs) and sentences relative to their counterparts in the Greek alphabet in a sample of Greeklish users. The results of duration and numerosity reading measures that were studied support the view that Greeklish transliterations are harder to read than their Greek alphabet corresponding. Differences between Greeklish transliteration types have also been observed across all stimuli, with the orthographic one being more difficult for nouns but easiest for verbs. In contrast, the mixed transliteration has caused less processing cost when reading sentences.