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This study proposes a new approach to the transitivity variation of the Mandarin Verb-Object (VO) compound by focusing on the role of the potential objects instead of the incorporated object. This new approach highlights the interactions between language change and variation. Previous approaches to the transitivity variation of VO compounds, especially Mandarin Chinese VO compounds, have typically focused on the purported blocking effect of the incorporated object (O). Recent corpus-driven studies, however, have attested that Mandarin VO compounds can take objects. This study compared clausal contexts in two Chinese varieties when VO compounds take direct objects and showed that the same noun phrase tends to require a context of higher transitivity to function as a direct object in the Mainland variety, complementing the previously established tendencies that Taiwan Verb-Object compounds have higher object-taking abilities. Both changes and variations can be interpreted as lexical constructionalization, supplemented with insights from noun incorporation and lexical diffusion. Argument advancement after compound formation represents lexical constructionalization, motivated by a tendency to encode transitivity with less compositionality. The contrasting contextual and lexical transitivity trends in the two varieties support the shifting encoding of transitivity generalization, illustrating different stages of lexical constructionalization.

It has been regularly maintained that, while widespread in satellite-framed languages, constructions that associate an atelic verb of manner of motion with a spatial prepositional phrase (PP) to denote a telic motion are very rare in verb-framed languages. Yet, in French, these constructions are not as marginal as usually claimed especially as they involve an atelic vs. telic contrast, beyond the mere manner vs. path opposition. After a preliminary delimitation of the constructions studied and a brief presentation of the theoretical framework, this contribution checks the specific meaning properties of French atelic motion verbs that appear in telic motion constructions, using attested data. Cotextual, contextual and pragmatic parameters of the constructions are similarly highlighted by the qualitative analysis carried out. The paper also examines how the telic interpretation arises from the interplay of “tendential” verbs and spatial prepositions/PPs. This study completes a previous analysis by the author on various points, providing an in-depth delineation of the phenomenon at stake and its underpinnings, and focusing on several verbs and verbal locutions that, for different reasons, depart from the criteria identified (e.g., aller ‘to go’, se déplacer ‘to move (around)’, glisser sur ‘to slide on’, grimper à ‘to climb (up)’, tomber ‘to fall’).

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.