Lingua最新文献

With respect to how to answer polar questions, languages are taken to employ either the polarity-based system (e.g., English) or the truth-based one (e.g., Japanese). This dichotomy, however, is challenged when speakers make use of different negation forms and contextual information, particularly when answering negative polar questions (NPQs). This study investigates how two negation forms (short-form and long-form) and contextual bias affect the way speakers answer NPQs in Korean. The acceptability judgment experiment we conducted in this study shows that contextual bias, interacting with the negation form, often overrides the two-way distinction of answering systems. The results imply that a proper description of the variations in the Korean answering system to NPQs requires tight interactions among various grammatical components, including the discourse structure, rather than a syntax-based account that resorts solely to the syntactic structures of negation forms involved.

This study investigates the language profiles of Mandarin-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and those with Autistic Language Impairment (ALI) through their repetition of passive sentences. It examines both long and short passives, predicting worse performance for the former structures than the latter. 15 children with DLD (aged 4;0–6;3), 18 children with ALI (aged 4;7–6;0), and 22 typically developing age-matched (TDA) children (aged 4;4–5;11) repeated 10 long and 10 short passives, the latter including manner adverbs to match the long passives’ length. Unexpectedly, no clear advantage for short over long passives emerged across groups. Both children with DLD and those with ALI performed less well than their TDA peers, with children with ALI slightly outperforming those with DLD. Both groups employed non-target and simpler responses to mitigate syntactic complexity, with notable differences in strategy between children with DLD and those with ALI. The study reveals syntactic difficulties in children with DLD and ALI, with more pronounced impairment in DLD. The Edge Feature Underspecification Hypothesis may account for these challenges, suggesting that the underspecified EF [+Topic] leads to alternative strategies. Additionally, the difficulty with manner adverbs might contribute to challenges with short passives, and children with ALI showed more pragmatic errors.

Acquiring L2 segments is particularly challenging for L2 learners, especially when the L1 and L2 inventories involve different contrasts and acoustic cues. The present research investigated the perception and production of L2 English vowels by adult Greek-Cypriot learners and examined the effects of orthographic cues and consonantal context in their performance. Perceptual performance was assessed through a forced-choice identification task and production performance through a wordlist-reading and an elicitation task, both analyzed acoustically and through intelligibility ratings. The findings showed the influence of the L1 on both the perception and production of L2 segments, supporting the assumptions of current models of speech perception and production. Learners faced challenges in perceiving the members of L2 contrasts and mostly used their L1 articulatory routines in their productions of L2 vowels. Orthographic cues or consonantal context did not significantly affect learners’ productions or overall perception, although strong contextual effects were observed in individual target vowels. This study is the first to provide an in-depth comparison of CYG and English vowels as well as an examination of the acquisition of L2 English vowels by this population, which can guide EFL teachers and course developers in developing appropriate EFL curricula that incorporate pronunciation instruction.

Adopting the methodology of Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics, this study investigates the uses of the response token o in Mandarin Chinese face-to-face conversation. The analysis of naturally occurring interactions shows that o features centrally in the practices by which speakers display a change in cognitive states, either from previously being uninformed to now being informed, or from non-understanding to understanding regarding relevant information that was just mentioned by a co-participant. It is also revealed that there is an interrelatedness between the sequential environment/turn shape of o and the epistemic claim that it conveys. That is, the o marking now-knowing typically occurs in response to informings (especially extended tellings) and it primarily plays a continuative forward-looking sequential role in freestanding form, which makes it distinct from the English oh. Furthermore, other turn-initial uses of o are routinely followed by components of repetition or assessment which are sequence-curtailing in character. Different from the o marking now-knowing, the o marking revised understanding is exclusively found in third position following the speaker’s first-position claim or question, and where that claim or question contains an incorrect assumption which has either been corrected or disconfirmed in second position.

The present study investigates first language (L1) and second language (L2) associative stability (AS), operationalized as the repetition rate of response words over two sessions of the same word association test. Specifically, we compare the overall patterns of L1 and L2 AS, examine between-language AS correlations within individual learners, and explore the position effect of response words on AS. A total of 40 Chinese English learners completed two sessions of continuous word association tests over two weeks, in which they were required to produce three responses to each of the 30 cue words. The results revealed (1) a significantly higher repetition rate for L2 than for L1 word association responses; (2) a significant effect of response position on repetition rate, which declined from the first to the third position in both languages; and (3) a strong correlation between L1 and L2 response repetition for individual participants. These findings provide evidence for intra-individual consistency in L1 and L2 word association behavior and highlight the discrepancies between L1 and L2 lexical organization, which are probably due to weaknesses in the organization of the L2 semantic network. Implications for vocabulary teaching and future research are also discussed.

This paper offers a responsibility-based model of the move system as an alternative to the current speech-functional model in discourse semantics in Systemic Functional Linguistics, particularly for exchanges revolving around the giving and demanding of goods-&-services. It argues that at move rank speakers have at their disposal the choice between positioning and not positioning each other. When positioned, the speaker may or may not be positioned as responsible for carrying out the negotiated action; and at the same time, the addressee may or may not be positioned as responsible. Drawing on simple examples mainly from TV programmes, the paper shows how certain options in the move system are preselected and activated by different structural functions in an action exchange. The responsibility-based model proposed in this paper sheds light on a number of problems identified in the current speech-functional model of the move system in discourse semantics.

Taking Frame Semantics as its theoretical framework, this corpus-based study addresses a lack of research on semantic knowledge in research articles at the genre level, as opposed to the discipline level, by identifying the dominant Semantic Frames in the academic portion of the Corpus of Contemporary American English. Semantic Frames in the corpus were first automatically identified with a pre-trained large language model fine-tuned with data from FrameNet, a large database built on the principles of Frame Semantics. Subsequently, 84 dominant Semantic Frames in research articles were extracted based on the frequency distributions of identified semantic frames, constituting a Research Article-specific Semantic Frame List. Based on their definitions and detailed analyses of typical example sentences, these 84 Research Article-specific Semantic Frames were classified into three groups: Academic Activity Frames, which describe typical activities for creating knowledge, Academic Communication Frames, which relate to typical ways for disseminating knowledge, and Academic Interest Frames, which include typical entities or attributes that interest researchers across disciplines. The Research Article-specific Semantic Frame List sheds light on the semantic knowledge that is characteristic of the research article genre and shared across disciplines, thereby paving the way for compiling a research article-specific framenet. Further research is encouraged to explore the Frame Element distribution patterns of Research Article-specific Semantic Frames and Semantic Frames specific to other academic genres.

This paper examines the distribution and functions of phrasal and clausal temporal adjuncts in left-peripheral and right-peripheral position across three genres of written English discourse, i.e. informative, argumentative and narrative discourse. Drawing on data from news reports and commentaries from The Guardian, as well as personal narratives written by students from the Universities of Portsmouth and Sussex, the study aims to provide answers to the following research questions: (1) In how far does the use of phrasal and clausal temporal adjuncts vary across syntactic positions as well as across discourse genres? (2) How can discourse-genre-specific preferences in the positional distribution of temporal adjuncts in written English discourse be accounted for? The analysis shows that left-peripheral temporal adjuncts are considerably more frequently used in commentaries and student stories than in news reports, where temporal adjuncts are most frequently placed in right-peripheral position. This genre-specific variation is accounted for by various syntactic, semantic and discourse-related factors which are systematically related to the specific communicative purposes of the underlying discourse genres. Ultimately, this paper aims to argue that the macro-level concept of discourse genre plays a crucial role in determining and constraining the positional distribution of temporal adjuncts in written English discourse.

The dative alternation, e.g., he gives me two books vs. he gives two books to me, has been extensively studied in World Englishes. However, it remains relatively underexplored in second language learner English, particularly in relation to the influence of verb semantics and contextual factors involving recipient and theme characteristics. Comparative analyses of the probabilistic grammars of the dative alternation across different registers of learner English are also rare. To address these gaps, this study examined the variation of the dative alternation in spoken and written Chinese learner English compared to British English. Using four corpora, we extracted 5,021 instances of dative variants (ditransitive vs. prepositional). Mixed-effects regression analyses revealed similarities in the probabilistic grammars of the dative alternation across registers and varieties, indicated by shared effects of factors such as length, complexity, pronominality and animacy of recipients and themes as well as their interactions. However, distinctions were found in four determinants, including verb sense, head noun frequency of both recipients and themes and definiteness of themes, which are more attuned to acquisitional challenges and cognitive processing limitations.

The current work explores the concept of construal in German and English, focusing specifically on the communicative feature of (im)personalization. Incorporating insights from cognitive linguistics, semantics and pragmatics, it takes as object of analysis a means of impersonalization, namely the use of human impersonal pronouns (HIPs) and, using a form-to-function approach, analyzes the dedicated HIPs man and one, as well as impersonally used 2nd personal pronouns du and you regarding their featural composition and pragmatic effects. The data consists of two parallel corpora of negative online hotel reviews taken from Booking.com. The findings reveal that German-speaking reviewers make use of HIPs more frequently and use the ‘less personal’ of the HIPs (man) as compared to English-speaking reviewers (who use the ‘more personal’ you), confirming the established contrast of German speakers using more impersonalized language. They further uncover a flexibility in the distribution and usage of German man that is not yet widely established in the literature, showing that German speakers use man in a myriad of ways to simultaneously impersonalize certain aspects of their reviews and indicate relevance to the reader. The findings point to a mixture of typological and linguacultural influences at play regarding the HIPs’ role in impersonalization in German and English negative online hotel reviews.