Lingua最新文献

There has been a dearth of studies in language attitude research focusing on the association between ethnic categorisation and underlying reasons for the categorisation of accents of Nigerian English. This paper examines the ethnic categorisation of speakers of Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba Englishes and the reasons for categorising their accents into ethnic groups by 406 participants from three Nigerian universities. The findings reveal that participants found it challenging to distinguish between speakers of Igbo and Yoruba Englishes, which points to a possibility of language change in progress in the speech of Igbo and Yoruba ethnic groups in Southern Nigeria. The results show a significant association between good educational background (GEB) and de-ethnicised speech, demonstrating that GEB helps to minimise common L1 interference features. This study offers a new perspective for the study of language attitudes: it demonstrates participants’ levels of exposure to Nigerian Englishes; and it reveals the sociopsychological processes that underlie accent recognition and ethnic categorisation of accents.

Metaphors inviting viewers to see and experience one thing in terms of another have been demonstrated as persuasive in print advertisements. However, the extent to which metaphors in video advertisements influence viewers remains underexplored. Given the increasing attention to depression in China and attempts at greater inclusivity in its media representation, we examine metaphors in video advertisements for depression-related products. We examined the influences of metaphors on (i) perceived complexity, (ii) cognitive elaboration, (iii) affective elaboration, (iv) attitudes toward the ad, and (v) purchase intentions through an experimental survey (N = 299) and semi-structured interviews (N = 29). The survey adopted a 3 (metaphor uses: feature-highlighting metaphors vs. needs-highlighting metaphors vs. literal) × 2 (product types: search products vs. experience products) design. The results showed that for (i) cognitive elaboration, (ii) affective elaboration, (iii) attitudes towards the ad, and (iv) purchase intentions, needs-highlighting metaphors outperformed other conditions regardless of product types. For experience products, features-highlighting metaphors outperformed other conditions, whereas for search products, this condition generated the lowest scores. Findings from interviews showed that metaphors activated mental images, elicited diverse emotions, and mediated the persuasive power of advertisements. However, reinforced negative appeals may elicit negative perceptions. Practical implications are discussed.

This paper explores the interactional uses of the oath-expression waḷḷāhi ‘by God’ in Egyptian Arabic. Based on everyday conversational data (Arabic CALLHOME), and drawing on conversation-analytic and interactional linguistics methods, the analysis shows that waḷḷāhi rarely introduces a solemn act of swearing; rather, it is conventionally used as a marker expressing or inviting the expression of commitment and certainty. waḷḷāhi can occur in turn-initial and utterance-final position, where it frames or modifies the current speaker’s contribution, or as a freestanding response token. In epistemically divergent contexts, waḷḷāhi serves to resist the other party’s assumptions or claims about a certain state of affairs by asserting commitment to a different state of affairs, or by questioning the certainty of the prior speaker. Commitment indexed by turn-initial tokens is relativized to the speaker’s potentially restricted access and rights to knowledge, and is therefore more reserved; utterance-final tokens do not invoke this subjective reference and serve to express absolute commitment. In epistemically congruent and affiliative contexts, waḷḷāhi undergoes indexical reanalysis and is interpreted as an index of involvement, earnestness, and interest. The analysis aligns with a widely observed path of semantic and pragmatic development of discourse markers whereby markers come to assume more specific relational functions as they extend to new contexts of use.

This study presents an analysis of Spanish intonation produced by native speakers of Japanese. The analysis focuses on the nuclear configurations of 828 declarative tokens in the semi-spontaneous Spanish speech of 12 Japanese-Spanish bilingual speakers living in Valencia, Spain. Results of the analysis show that the speakers can produce the prosodic differences between two declarative utterance types that are differentiated in peninsular Spanish by pitch peak timing and final boundary contours. Specifically, the speakers of this study favored rising final boundary tones when maintaining their turn and the falling final contours for the end of turn. Results show interlanguage with greater variation in final contours and pitch peak placement than predicted. The study contributes to acoustic research on learner intonation by late bilinguals, particularly in a language contact situation involving an Asian language and romance language pair.

This study investigates the simplification hypothesis in interpreting, as well as its cognitive implications, by examining features of syntactic dependency in three language varieties: English speech simultaneously interpreted from Chinese, original English speech produced by native speakers (L1 speech), and original English speech produced by non-native speakers (L2 speech). Two measures of the dependency relation, namely dependency distance and dependency direction, are employed to explore the distinction among the three language varieties in terms of their syntactic complexity, amount of cognitive demand, and the typological property of word order. The findings reveal that interpreted speech has the lowest mean dependency distance (MDD), followed by L2 speech and L1 speech, which indicates that interpreted English speech is syntactically more simplified than original English speech. The lowest MDD in interpreted speech is associated with the high cognitive demand in simultaneous interpreting, suggesting that increased cognitive demand in language processing is likely to lead to simplification of the syntactic structure of the linguistic output. Furthermore, dependency direction analysis of the three language varieties indicates that interpreted English tends to be more head-final than L1 English speech, confirming a typological word order distinction between translational and original language.

A distinctive feature of dialogue is the convergence of linguistic choices. The Interactive Alignment Model posits that this convergence is obtained by a mechanism of priming that operates at all levels of linguistic representation. Under the model, priming is supposed to foster mutual understanding. Experimental research has confirmed that priming increases language production and comprehension ease. However, the influence of constraints caused by the medium of communication on alignment remains unexplored. In this paper, we look at structural alignment in face-to-face and synchronous text-based communication. In our study, we analysed the influence of different factors on structural alignment in two datasets, one of computer-mediated conversation and the other of spoken conversations, and found that the likelihood of structural alignment in both cases is determined by the same factors. However, when comparing the overall magnitude of structural alignment in the two datasets, we found a greater magnitude of structural alignment in text-based conversations. In our view, this result suggests that structural alignment is used to trade off the constraints of the text-based medium.

Research on the representation of schizophrenia in the media has revealed that it might have become the new illness as metaphor and that its pejorative metaphorical use is a determining factor in its negative public perception. Drawing on Conceptual Metaphor Theory, this study presents the first systematic analysis of the use of “schizophrenia” as a metaphor beyond the media by examining the use, distribution, framing and evaluative/argumentative functions of the terms “schizophrenia”, “schizophrenic” and “schizophrenics” in the largest freely available corpus of contemporary American English, the COCA corpus. The results show that the metaphorization of “schizophrenia” is particularly frequent in internet-based genres and that it is employed to describe a wide range of phenomena ranging from people and political ideologies to religion, law, and social attitudes toward topics such as sex, drugs, or immigration. It usually conveys negative connotations (94% of cases identified in the corpus) and is instrumentalized for different argumentative purposes including its use as a derogatory or dismissive remark or as a word of caution.

This study argues that individually unproductive processes of morphology can be highly productive for certain other tasks in sequential productions when they occur in combination with certain other processes. Unlike the relevant literature, which generally treats -(y)I as a phonological piece of the agentive suffixation in Modern Turkish, -(y)ICI, the study argues that -(y)I in instances like kır-ı-cı (break-nominalizer-agentive) ‘breaker/offending, hurtful’, is a stem-formative, creating novel stems required for further operation, -CI. Importantly, the -(y)I nominalization, with no semantic motivation, provides numerous (bound) V-(y)I- forms which are unattested in isolation without further derivation. Thus, the recognition of such a stem-formative is crucial. It shows that (i) form, meaning, and categorial separateness is necessary, and (ii) bound derivations and bound productivity can constitute a good part of the grammar. The study supports the formal analyses via the experimental findings of a recent survey of the productivity of a group of paradigmatic nominalizations including -(y)I in Turkish, and concludes that stem-formative operations may output “preforms”, which are bound but productive derivatives fulfilling the formal conditions of forthcoming operations, and that semantics-free stem-formations may involve categorial modifications. This leads us to categorial separation and its possible autonomy in grammar.

A means to control how writers mark their presence, negotiate knowledge claims, and engage with their audience, metadiscourse is one of the most prominent approaches to analysing academic writing. The present systematic review attempts to take stock of the existing literature by investigating how metadiscourse has been researched in academic writing by analysing a sample of 370 high-quality empirical studies published between 1990 and 2021. Studies were coded for their conceptual frameworks, research designs, data sources, study contexts, writers, texts, corpora, and reporting practices. It was found that over 80% of research involved cross-sectional descriptive corpus-based analysis, drawing on intercultural rhetoric. Owing to its impact, ease of application, and study comparability, most research adhered to the ‘broad’ tradition in metadiscourse. Representative of this approach, Hyland’s interpersonal framework and models of stance and engagement were prevalent, although difficulties in undertaking a ‘thick’ analysis of such a wide variety of features coupled with publishing constraints meant that many authors narrowed their focus to a few select features (especially hedges, boosters, and self-mentions). Approximately 37% of corpus-based research followed the ‘thin’ tradition, with an emphasis on marker frequency counts over contextually-bound interpretations. Corpora of English texts, notably, research articles, were prominently studied, with little research taking place outside of university contexts or recruiting human participants as informants. We discuss avenues to advance research in metadiscourse, through identifying possible future inquiries and improving study quality.

Research has shown a close temporal relationship between prominence-lending tonal movements in speech and prominence in manual gesture. However, prosodic structure consists of not only prosodic heads (i.e., pitch accentuation) but also prosodic edges. To our knowledge, no previous studies have assessed the value of prosodic edges (nuclear vs. phrase-initial prenuclear pitch accents) as anchoring sites for different types of gestures (i.e., referential vs. non-referential) while independently controlling for the relative degree of prominence associated with the pitch accent. The English M3D-TED corpus, which contains over 23 minutes of multimodal speech, was analyzed in terms of prosody and gesture. Results showed that while the majority of manual gesture strokes overlapped a pitch accented syllable (85.99%), apex alignment occurred at a relatively low rate (50.4%) and alignment rates did not significantly differ between referential and non-referential gestures. At the phrasal level, crucially our results also showed that strokes align with phrase-initial prenuclear pitch accents over nuclear accents, and this relationship is not driven by relative prominence. These findings show that both prosodic heads and prosodic edges (i.e., phrase initial and final positions) are key sites for both referential and non-referential gesture production.