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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.

One of the principal concepts instrumental in cognitive linguistic research is that of schemas, defined as general, partly abstract mental outlines shared by the memories of specific concepts and experiences. They are mental frameworks guiding the way we perceive and remember information, and they play a major role in language learning and processing. While the concept of schemas has been addressed by many authors, who have described their nature and functioning, our understanding of schematic knowledge is still relatively speculative. For example, to account for how schemas emerge, “lossy compression” is postulated, which means that abstraction is achieved through forgetting. Such conjectures can be tested against some recent insights from memory research on engrams, defined roughly as networks of neurons activated in the processing of specific pieces of information. This overview paper presents findings from engram research suggesting that abstract schemas form in ways other than simple forgetting or erasure of information from memory. Instead, abstraction is achieved by accumulating different representation strengths for memory traces underlying frequent and infrequent (incidental) information.

Gender-fair language (GFL) is currently a widely debated topic in the German-speaking context, yet research on the subject is rather scarce with limited comparative data for the three largest German-speaking countries, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. The present study seeks to address this research gap with a corpus-based analysis of the use of different forms of GFL over the last two decades in these three countries. Given that the language used by journalists reaches a vast target audience, the corpus for this study consists of some of the most widely circulated and politically diverse daily newspapers in the three countries. The results of the study not only show differences in the frequency of GFL in the three countries, with Austria using GFL most frequently, but also indicate a diverging usage trend from 2021 onwards and variations in the strategies of GFL used. Furthermore, the political orientation of the selected newspapers is not predictive of the frequency of GFL and the strategies used.

Discourse markers are known to be derived from various sources, among the frequently cited being adverbials and prepositional phrases (e.g., English well and in fact). In this paper, we examine how Korean discourse marker nay mali ‘right’ develops from a nominal phrase. Using spoken data from the NIKL and Sejong corpora, and adopting a Discourse Grammar framework, we trace the development of nay mali as it transitions from a noun phrase meaning ‘my word’ to a solidarity-enhancing agreement marker via two major processes—ellipsis and cooptation. Ellipsis occurs when the predicate ku maliya is deleted from the sentence nay mali ku maliya (‘my word is the word’ > ‘that’s what I am saying’), giving rise to the agreement and affiliative use of nay mali ‘right’. Cooptation occurs as discourse and contextual cues are pragmatically incorporated into the semantics of nay mali, extending its range of function beyond the sentence grammar level into the discourse grammar level (i.e., the metatextual level). In this study, we further use spectograms from Praat analyses to provide evidence of the detachment of discourse marker nay mali from the sentence level, as well as to reveal prosodic distinctions between the different contexts-of-use of discourse marker nay mali as a solidarity-enhancing agreement marker in Korean natural conversations. Findings from this study point to an intimate interplay between prosody and pragmatics, and may contribute to prosodic studies of discourse markers in other languages as well.

The existential-presentational construction yǒu rén [exist person] is the dominant strategy for encoding indefinite human reference in Chinese. In this sense, it is functionally equivalent to the indefinite pronoun someone, into which it naturally translates – especially in biclausal constructions (e.g., yǒu rén lái [exist person come] ‘someone is coming’). However, this equivalence is not always straightforward, as in some cases the “someone” translation is unavailable (e.g., yǒu rén shuō… [exist person say] ‘some people say…’). Our initial hypothesis posits that the interpretation of yǒu rén tends towards two prototypical meanings, Entity-referring and Kind-referring, each expected to exhibit a preferred alignment in translation. Using a parallel corpus of Chinese-to-English aligned novels, the analysis confirms alignment preferences for the two prototypes, in which the meaning of the referring expression (e.g., “someone” vs. “some people”) interacts with tense marking, specifically the nonpresent tense, and the co-occurrence of locatives in the aligned sentence, in bringing out Entity-referring interpretations. Additionally, findings indicate that preverbal subjects dominate in the aligned dataset, primarily due to the prevalence of biclausal constructions in the source subcorpus. It is argued that yǒu rén constructions are invariably anchored, either to spatiotemporal variables or to generic sets of entities. Despite their diversity, the situations they depict offer favorable contexts for the acceptance of discourse-new indefinite subjects in English. This also suggests, more broadly, that anchoring might in fact be the fundamental property of structures encoding indefinite human reference, not only in Chinese yǒu rén constructions but potentially across languages.

In the anglophone Caribbean, varieties of English typically coexist with English-based Creoles in a continuum of sociolinguistic variation. In the small Eastern Caribbean island of Dominica, English has historically coexisted with a French-based Creole. Only in recent decades has a major shift towards Dominican English Creole (DEC) occurred. This study investigates morphosyntactic variation in spoken English based on speech data from interviews conducted at two Dominican secondary schools. A cline is found where the teachers incorporate DEC features least into their speech, while the students from one of the schools use these and other non-standard morphosyntactic features the most. Furthermore, different features seem to be associated with DEC to different degrees, another finding which supports the notion of a continuum. The absence of stylistic uses of DEC morphosyntactic features can be attributed to the interview situation. At the same time, given limited recognition and identification with DEC, stylistic uses in connection with the expression of identity in discourse are not necessarily expected. The further development of variation in spoken English in Dominica in connection with the ongoing language shift will merit further investigation.

Sentential relative clauses (hereafter SRCs) resemble comment adverbial clauses and can be paraphrased as and-coordinate equivalents. This study unravels the logical status of SRCs in English from a multifunctional perspective under the framework of systemic functional linguistics, with a view to revealing their distinguishing features in tactic (traditionally grammatical) and logico-semantic (traditionally semantic) relations. A review of relevant literature reveals that as researchers have been using varied formal criteria in examining their logical status, there is great controversy over whether SRCs are hypotactic elaborating clauses or paratactic extending clauses. Therefore, a multifunctional framework is constructed to ascertain the defining criteria: the taxis of an SRC is dependent on its status of speech function in discourse, and the logico-semantic relations on its experiential semantics in a wider discourse context. With extensive attested examples analyzed, we conclude that tactically, textual SRCs stand in a paratactic relation to their initiating clauses, while experiential SRCs stand in a hypotactic relation to their dominant clauses, and that logico-semantically, textual SRCs tend to enhance their initiating clauses along the textual line, while experiential SRCs expand their dominant clauses by elaboration, extension and enhancement along both the textual and experiential lines.

This study investigates the impact of interpreting direction on interpreters’ syntactic processing strategies, utilizing a bidirectional parallel corpus from UN Security Council meetings of Chinese-English simultaneous interpretations and their original speeches. Two syntactic measures of dependency, namely, dependency distance and dependency direction, are used to examine the syntactic complexity and typological characteristics of interpreted speech in comparison to that of non-interpreted speech in the target language, to reflect how interpreters process sentences. The study showed that when interpreters worked from L2 to L1, they employed less complex syntactic structures, indicating a tendency towards simplification, while such a pattern was not observed in the opposite direction. Additionally, interpreters were found to adjust the word order of interpreted speech in both directions to produce an idiomatic rendition. These findings suggest that when professional interpreters prepare adequately, the constraint of directionality on their cognitive capability appears to be limited. Language pair-related factors, including the influence of the source language and the normative requirement to comply with target language conventions, tended to have a greater impact on how they processed sentences in both directions.