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This study examines the effectiveness of visual displays in improving the mastery of the forms and functions of English intonation among Chinese L2 students. Over a four-week period, two groups of learners (visual-training and auditory-training) took part in five sessions of intonation training, while a control group received no training. Each session began with a 25-minute lesson on the forms and functions of intonation, followed by a 40-minute practice session. All sentences were presented in communicative contexts. With the aid of speech visualization technology, the visual-training group was taught linguistic categories and English intonation structures, and was encouraged to imitate and practice intonation patterns using visual displays of the intonation of each sentence. The auditory-training group learned and practiced intonation by carefully listening to audio clips of each sentence. Intonation production was assessed using speech data from pre- and post-tests. Results showed that the visual-training group outperformed the other two groups, making the greatest progress in mastering the forms of English intonation (pitch accents and boundary tones) and its functions (expressing prominence and marking modality).

The mass–count distinction in Mandarin Chinese has been heatedly debated in linguistics. Previous research investigated the mass–count distinction primarily through qualitative methods. Our study applied mutual information and created three variation conditions to explore the relationship between Chinese nouns and the individuation function of classifiers. Furthermore, we examined the mass–count distinction by quantitatively analyzing 1,000 instances of Num–CL–N (numeral–classifier–noun) structures. The computational results indicate that the individuation function of classifiers is influenced by noun homogeneity. Moreover, we argue that Chinese nouns exhibit an inclination for homogeneity and the deep semantic processing of nouns is similar to classes or sets, providing evidence for the broad mass noun hypothesis and the collective-name hypothesis in the philosophy of language.

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.