Lingua最新文献

In this paper, we investigate variable past inflection in four New Englishes. Our data are drawn from the conversational parts of the Hong Kong, India, Jamaica, and Philippine subcomponents of the International Corpus of English. We investigate the entire range of language-internal factors that have been found to influence non-obligatory past marking in varieties of English. This includes morpho-phonological verb class, lexical aspect, grammatical aspect, marker persistence, the presence or absence of a temporal adverbial, and, for consonant-final regular verbs, preceding and following phonological environment. We also consider verb frequency, which has received only scant attention in past inflection research so far. Employing both mixed-effects regression and random forests, we argue that, despite inter-variety differences, there is a core grammar of past inflection, which is constrained by general structural and cognitive phenomena such as grammatical aspect and marker persistence, with frequency also exerting an important and consistent effect. This has implications for debates about universals vs. substrate influence or creole effects in morphosyntactic variation in English.

German onsets allow a consonant cluster spelt <qu>, as in Qualm 'fume'. While it has been traditionally assumed that this orthographic form corresponds to a sequence of a plosive /k/ followed by a voiced fricative /v/, closer examination of the cluster demonstrates free variation between the consonant sequences of [kv], [kf] and [kʋ]. In each case, the second member of the cluster differs in terms of voicing (voiceless [f] vs. voiced [v ʋ]) or the manner of articulation (fricatives [f v] vs. approximant [ʋ]). Given that the three clusters are allophones of a single phoneme sequence, we tested whether any of the allophones facilitates word recognition, and if so, which one. On the basis of a lexical decision experiment, reaction times as well as correctness rates were analysed in relation to three variables; (a) cluster variants ([kv vs. kf vs. kʋ]), (b) word existence (real vs. nonce), and (c) the quality of the following vowel (front [i e] vs. back [a o]). The results of the study show systematic differences in the perception of real words and nonce words as well as in the perception of the three cluster variants. In particular, we report on the interactions between the factors studied.

Double definiteness is always optional in Romanian, and this raises the issue of its semantic contribution. Based on a corpus study, I argue that the semantic import of double definiteness is familiarity, understood as the presence, in the common ground, of a referent characterized as the maximal element satisfying the complex N∧A property (where A is the denotation of the modifier and N the denotation of the NP). The corpus study also shows that the use of double definiteness is register-dependent, occurring more frequently in texts that make us of older forms (poetry, religious texts, fairy tales), where it may be used purely as a stylistic feature or to facilitate a non-restrictive reading. I compare Romanian double definites with recognitional (or evocative) demonstratives (which also involve familiarity) and with the bleached demonstratives licensed by relative clauses, arguing that double definites differ from both. I propose a semantic analysis of demonstratives that is meant to capture the property that recognitional demonstratives share with anaphoric and deictic demonstratives but not with double definites: salience. As for the ‘bleached’ demonstratives licensed by relative clauses, they differ from double definites in that they lack familiarity. Nevertheless, the syntax of double definites resembles that of demonstratives in that it involves an additional functional layer immediately below the definite Determiner.

This paper investigates age-graded variation in the use of the Inverted Double Object Construction (IDOC) in Hong Kong Cantonese. IDOC is unique because it is currently only attested in Cantonese, not in Mandarin or English, and its grammaticality is determined by prosodic factors rather than purely syntactic ones; however, its use is now declining. We conducted a web-based acceptability task using audio stimuli that contrasted different types of direct objects (DO) and indirect objects (IO), and the presence or absence of a pause between DO and IO. The effect of age was also analysed. Participants were asked to rate test sentences produced with neutral focus intonation on a Likert scale. Our results showed that the acceptability of IDOC was determined by (i) the prosodic weight of IO; (ii) the relative prominence of DO and IO; (iii) the presence of a pause; and (iv) listeners’ age.

Both Czech deverbal and deadjectival nouns are often endowed with valency, but they differ significantly in how they reflect active and passive constructions of their motivating predicates: while deverbal nouns derived from transitive verbs may display both active and passive syntax, deadjectival nouns (even those indirectly motivated by a transitive verb) typically only allow either the active or the passive syntax, not both. This notable difference results from the syntactic behavior of the verbs and adjectives from which the nouns are directly derived, and from the way the nouns reflect the syntactic behavior. Unlike verbal constructions, adjectival syntactic structures are predetermined to arrange arguments of the adjectives by adopting either the active or the passive syntax of their base predicates, not both. Typically, this depends on the derivational type the adjectives represent. Valency structures of nouns directly derived from adjectives adhere to morphosyntactic rules that determine the syntactic representation and forms of the adnominal arguments, which results in preserving either the active or the passive syntax of the base adjective. Following the classification of adjectival derivational types, Czech deadjectival nouns are categorized according to the typical syntax (active or passive) used.

This study examined whether entity-denoting complements of psych verbs and aspectual verbs engender identical processing profiles. Previous literature has suggested that both verb types require an event-denoting complement and “coerce” an underspecified event sense when combined with an entity-denoting complement. The present study, including three norming tests and a self-paced reading experiment, recorded reading times of Mandarin Chinese speakers on entity complements preceded by three types of verbs: aspectual verbs, which require an eventive complement; psych verbs, which are subject to debate recently on their complement constraints; and control verbs, which select an entity complement, as represented in zuòjiā kāishǐ/xiǎngshòu/zhuànxiě zhè-běn xiǎoshuō “The author started/enjoyed/ wrote the novel.” It is found that the entity complements following aspectual verbs elicited longer reading times than those following psych and control verbs, particularly at the two words immediately after the complement. The results confirm the processing cost yielded by complement coercion, and more importantly, contribute evidence to constrain the mechanism of complement coercion to aspectual verbs only.

The present study investigates the rules which govern antonym sequences in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) by means of triangulation, i.e., a mixed-method design of quantification and qualification, whereby corpus tools are utilized to identify and examine antonym sequences in the Arabic corpus arTenTen18 integrated in Sketch Engine online interface. Ranging from qualitative to quantitative analyses, several studies took the order of antonym pairs in various languages as their focus, but no previous study examined this linguistic phenomenon in MSA using corpus-based methods. To give a panoramic account and conduct a rigorous analysis of antonym sequence in MSA, the current study combines both quantitative and qualitative approaches based upon studies across English, Serbian, Chinese, Persian, and Qur’anic Arabic, respectively. The study concludes that all the previously investigated antonym sequence rules drawn from English, Serbian, Chinese, Persian, and Qur’anic Arabic are replicable with an MSA corpus. Moreover, the rules controlling the co-occurrences of antonym pairs were also found to occasionally overlap. Contextual factors were found to play a crucial role in determining which rules are operative and which are solidly overruled.

This paper proposes a novel approach to collocation-based comparative linguistic analysis. The approach defines Firthian collocation as a range of collocates parameterized with positional information and association strength, and facilitates Firthian-collocation-based comparative analyses with a suite of quantitative tools including visualization, semantic abstraction, and similarity computation. The application of this approach is showcased in the synonym differentiation of four adverbs—actually, genuinely, really, and truly—and the collocation accuracy measurement of L2 learners that uses Chinese Learners English Corpus as the learners’ corpus and British National Corpus as the reference corpus. These case studies demonstrate that the approach not only enables intuitive and holistic inference of syntactic and semantic functions of node words, but also supports large-scale quantitative investigation of lexical knowledge.

The collocation of a monosyllable and a disyllable stands as a distinctive prosodic feature of Chinese. Whether rhythm is the decisive factor for acceptability of the collocation is still controversial in Chinese linguistics. This study has investigated this issue by exploring the influence of rhythmic patterns (2 + 1 disyllable + monosyllable vs. 1 + 2 monosyllable + disyllable) on the reading of Chinese noun-noun compounds (NN compounds) through an event-related potential (ERP) experiment. We found that, in terms of behavioral data, rhythmic patterns exerted a distinct meaning-modulating effect, namely, the abnormal rhythmic pattern (1 + 2) tends to reduce the semantic acceptability of NN compounds. ERP data showed that, the normal rhythmic pattern (2 + 1) elicited a larger N100 component than the abnormal one in semantically incongruent conditions; a rhythm-modulated N400 component was followed by a later positive component (LPC) associated with the re-analysis of compounds. Both behavioral and ERP data revealed a greater cognitive effort required to process NN compounds when semantics and rhythm were incongruent. These findings indicate that rhythmic patterns and semantics interactively affect the reading processing of Chinese NN compounds, and that rhythmic expectations may prevail in the semantic processing of Chinese compounds.

Based on data extracted from two French sociolinguistic corpora, ESLO 1 (1968–1971) and ESLO 2 (2008–), this article discusses the case of a new linguistic variation and change in French native speech in France: the fortition of the word-initial fricative /ʒ/. In total, 12,276 occurrences of words beginning with /ʒ/ were identified. Mixed-effect logistic regression analyses were conducted to examine both phonological environments (the preceding phonemes and the coronal status of the preceding phonemes) and social factors (the age, gender, and socioeconomic status of the speakers). The results demonstrate that the fortition of the initial /ʒ/ is influenced by both linguistic and social factors. Notably, the initial fortition in this study was an ongoing change led by men in ESLO 1. However, its use has already spread to both gender groups in ESLO 2. From a diachronic perspective, this study suggests that the observed initial fortition is not a reverse deaffrication process but rather a gradual increase in its natural occurrence.