IF 1.1 3区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

Lingua

Pub Date : 2025-04-24 DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103947

Steven Coats

This article examines the use of potentially offensive expressions, specifically “what the hell” and its euphemistic variants, in local government meetings across English-speaking countries. Two primary research questions are addressed: first, are there noticeable differences in the frequency of these expressions between countries and within regions? And second, how do euphemistic alternatives compare to “what the hell” in terms of emotional intensity and valence, both across and within national varieties? The study draws on data from three large, recent corpora of geolocated automatic speech recognition (ASR) transcripts and the corresponding underlying audio to explore the geographic distribution and emotional nuances of these expressions in various English-speaking countries, including the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. To assess the emotionality of expressions, specifically anger, the speech emotion recognition model emotion2vec is employed. The findings provide insight into how the acceptability and emotional weight of “what the hell” and variants differ across regions. Additionally, the study demonstrates the potential of vector-based representations of speech in multimodal corpus analysis, while empirically validating theoretical claims in semantics related to pejoration and euphemism.

本文研究了在英语国家的地方政府会议上使用的潜在冒犯性表达，特别是“what the hell”及其委婉变体。两个主要的研究问题：首先，这些表达在国家之间和区域内的频率是否存在显著差异？其次，在情感强度和效价方面，无论是跨国家还是国内，委婉语的替代品与“什么鬼”相比如何？该研究利用了三个最新的大型地理位置自动语音识别（ASR）文本和相应的底层音频语料库的数据，以探索这些表达在不同英语国家（包括美国、加拿大、英国、爱尔兰、澳大利亚和新西兰）的地理分布和情感细微差别。为了评估表情的情绪性，特别是愤怒，我们使用了语音情绪识别模型emotion2vec。研究结果揭示了不同地区对“管他的”及其变体的接受程度和情感分量的差异。此外，该研究还展示了基于向量的语音表示在多模态语料库分析中的潜力，同时从经验上验证了与贬损和委婉语相关的语义理论主张。

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引用次数: 0

Vulgarity in online discourse around the English-speaking world 英语世界网络话语中的粗俗

IF 1.1 3区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

Lingua

Pub Date : 2025-04-23 DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103946

Martin Schweinberger , Kate Burridge

This paper takes a corpus-based approach to study vulgar language in online communication across 20 English-speaking regions based on the Global Web-Based English Corpus (GloWbE). The identification of vulgarity combines word lists used in profanity detection with regular expressions to identify a wide range of vulgar elements including spelling variants and obscured forms. The results show a notable trend for inner circle L1-varieties to exhibit higher rates of vulgarity online compared to outer circle and L2-varieties. The results also show that inner circle varieties have lower adapted corrected type-token rations which indicates that inner circle variety speakers use more varied English vulgar forms compared with speakers from other circle varieties. In addition, there is a general register difference with vulgarity being more common in blog data compared with general web content. Finally, the results show that different regions exhibit preferences for specific vulgar lemmas feck being preferred in Ireland, cunt, in Britain, and ass(hole) in the United States. The findings are interpreted to show that cultural differences are reflected in region-specific preferences for vulgarity and that the creativity observed in inner circle varieties is linked to norm-setting compared to norm-reception associated with outer circle varieties.

本文采用基于语料库的方法，基于全球网络英语语料库（GloWbE）对20个英语地区的网络交流中的粗俗语言进行了研究。粗俗识别将粗俗检测中使用的单词列表与正则表达式相结合，以识别包括拼写变体和模糊形式在内的各种粗俗元素。结果表明，与外圈和l2品种相比，内圈l1品种的网络低俗率呈显著趋势；结果还表明，内圈品种的适应校正类型符号比例较低，这表明内圈品种的使用者使用的英语粗俗形式比其他品种的使用者更多样化。此外，与一般的网络内容相比，博客数据中的粗俗更为普遍，这是一个普遍的语域差异。最后，结果表明，不同地区对特定的粗俗词源表现出偏好，爱尔兰喜欢fek，英国喜欢cunt，美国喜欢ass（hole）。研究结果表明，文化差异反映在对粗俗的特定地区偏好上，与外圈品种相关的规范接受相比，内圈品种所观察到的创造力与规范设定有关。

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引用次数: 0

Nominalised Activities in Chinese History Texts: A Systemic Functional Linguistic Perspective 中国历史文本中的名词化活动：系统功能语言学视角

IF 1.1 3区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

Lingua

Pub Date : 2025-04-22 DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103935

Jing Hao

This paper examines the nominal realisations of activities in Mandarin Chinese history texts from a Systemic Functional Linguistic perspective, focusing specifically on texts that recount historical activities. Drawing on a distinction between experiential metaphors (i.e. metaphorical realisations of figures) and activity entities, the study investigates how these two resources function within text-wide language patterns. The analysis is conducted from a metafunctional perspective, exploring how the two resources interact with textual, interpersonal, and ideational meanings in the text. The findings reveal that both resources exhibit important characteristics across metafunctions. Textually, they present and presume meanings similarly in higher-level Themes, but differently in troughs and higher-level News. Interpersonally, they interact differently with evaluative resources. Ideationally, they function similarly in their relation to figures and sequences of figures within the unfolding text. These findings contrast with their distinctive metafunctional orientations (textual vs. ideational) previously recognised from a grammatical perspective.

本文从系统功能语言学的角度考察了汉语普通话历史文本中活动的名义实现，特别关注叙述历史活动的文本。利用经验隐喻（即数字的隐喻实现）和活动实体之间的区别，本研究探讨了这两种资源如何在文本范围内的语言模式中发挥作用。本文从元功能的角度进行分析，探讨这两种资源是如何与语篇意义、人际意义和观念意义相互作用的。研究结果表明，这两种资源都表现出跨元功能的重要特征。在文本上，它们在更高层次的主题中呈现和假设的意义相似，但在槽和更高层次的新闻中则不同。在人际关系上，他们与评估资源的互动方式不同。理论上，它们在展开的文本中与人物和人物序列的关系中发挥着相似的作用。这些发现与之前从语法角度认识到的它们独特的元功能取向（语篇与概念）形成对比。

引用次数: 0

Language contact and translation: dependency relations as a lens for source language influence in fiction 语言接触与翻译：从依存关系看小说中源语的影响

IF 1.1 3区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

Lingua

Pub Date : 2025-04-16 DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103937

Isabelle Chou , Kanglong Liu , Han Xu

Recognising translation as a site of language contact, this study utilises measures of dependency relations, namely dependency distance and dependency direction, to examine the influence of the source language in translation and how this influence is shaped by directionality and language pair. The data was obtained from a large-scale bidirectional multilingual corpus of original fiction and its translation across ten language pairs, with English serving as either the source or the target language in each pair. The findings reveal a balanced presence of source language influence in both translation directions, as shown by the patterns in variation of the mean dependency distance. However, this influence was not observed across all language pairs, which suggests that its manifestation was affected more by language pair than by directionality. At the same time, this study identifies a tendency for the characteristics of the translated fiction’s dependency direction to align with the word order convention of the target language, indicating that the influence of the source language is limited. Additionally, this study found that simplification, a widely recognised “translation universal”, may not be a unique property of translational language. Rather, it results from language contact, where the linguistic properties of the source language permeate the target language, causing the latter to reflect structural features of the original text.

本研究认识到翻译是语言接触的场所，利用依赖关系的度量，即依赖距离和依赖方向，来考察源语言在翻译中的影响，以及这种影响是如何由方向性和语言对形成的。数据来自一个大规模的双向多语言原始小说及其翻译的语料库，跨越10个语言对，英语作为源语言或目标语言。研究结果表明，从平均依赖距离的变化模式可以看出，源语影响在两个翻译方向上都是平衡存在的。然而，这种影响并不是在所有语言对中都观察到的，这表明其表现受语言对的影响大于方向性。同时，本研究发现，翻译小说的依赖方向特征有与译语语序习惯相一致的趋势，表明源语的影响是有限的。此外，本研究还发现，简化这一被广泛认可的“翻译共性”可能并不是翻译语言的独特属性。相反，它是语言接触的结果，源语的语言特性渗透到目的语中，使后者反映出原文的结构特征。

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引用次数: 0

Mandarin-speaking children’s acquisition of the additive particle ye ‘also’ 讲普通话的儿童对加点词 "也 "的习得

IF 1.1 3区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

Lingua

Pub Date : 2025-04-11 DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103936

Haiquan Huang , Yixiong Chen , Xuewu Qin , Xin Wang , Jie Xu

Previous studies have reported conflicting findings on children’s interpretation of additive particles. One of the previous studies has reported that Mandarin-speaking children up to 7 have difficulty deriving the presupposition triggered by the additive particle ye ‘also’. By contrast, another body of research has found that 3-to-4-year-olds can correctly interpret additive particles across languages. Such conflicting findings might have resulted from the different research techniques. Moreover, no study has been conducted to probe whether children are able to identify subject- versus object-associated focus in sentences with an additive particle. Against this backdrop, the current study attempts to systematically re-evaluate how Mandarin-speaking children interpret sentences with ye ‘also’, using an adapted research method. Two experiments were conducted with 3-to-4-year-olds and a group of adult controls. Experiment 1 probed whether children were able to identify object-associated focus in sentences with ye. Experiment 2 evaluated whether another group of children were able to identify subject-associated focus in sentences with ye. It was found that 3-year-olds already performed quite well and 4-year-olds nearly had adult-like performance in both experiments. The findings indicate that Mandarin-speaking preschoolers are able to identify subject- versus object-associated focus in sentences with ye, and such a linguistic ability develops in an incremental fashion. We discuss the methodological and theoretical implications of the findings.

以往的研究报告对儿童解释加点词的结果相互矛盾。其中一项研究报告指出，7 岁以下讲普通话的儿童很难推导出加点词 ye "也 "所引发的预设。与此相反，另一项研究发现，3 到 4 岁的儿童可以正确解释不同语言的加法语气词。这种相互矛盾的研究结果可能是由不同的研究技术造成的。此外，还没有研究探究过儿童是否能够识别句子中带有加点的主语和宾语相关的重点。在此背景下，本研究试图采用一种经过调整的研究方法，系统地重新评估讲普通话的儿童如何解释带有ye "也 "的句子。本研究以 3-4 岁儿童和一组成人对照组为对象，进行了两项实验。实验 1 探讨了儿童是否能够识别带有 ye 的句子中与对象相关的重点。实验 2 则评估了另一组儿童是否能够识别带 ye 的句子中与主语相关的重点。结果发现，在这两项实验中，3 岁儿童的表现已经相当不错，而 4 岁儿童的表现几乎与成人相当。研究结果表明，说普通话的学龄前儿童能够识别带ye的句子中与主语或宾语相关的重点，而且这种语言能力是以渐进的方式发展起来的。我们讨论了研究结果的方法论和理论意义。

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引用次数: 0

Linguistic indicators differentiating translated and untranslated diplomatic discourse: A diachronic analysis of the United Nations General Debate (1946–2022) 区分翻译和非翻译外交话语的语言指标：联合国一般性辩论的历时分析（1946-2022）

IF 1.1 3区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

Lingua

Pub Date : 2025-04-01 DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103933

Lin Shen , Haidee Kotze

This study examines the linguistic features that distinguish translated from untranslated English diplomatic discourse at the United Nations General Debate (UNGD) and investigates whether these features change from 1946 to 2022 and vary in relation to English language varieties. The translation features identified by elastic net regression analysis suggest that translated texts exhibit higher levels of formality, abstractness, and informational density than untranslated texts, aligning with existing studies on translated language. Over time, the translated texts tend to lag behind untranslated speeches in terms of language change, supporting the notion that UN translation is a conservative language variety: UN translators tend to be slow in adopting innovative usages, preferring established variants. Varietal differences are also evident in relation to the selected translation features. These findings contribute to the understanding of translated language and underscore the importance of considering diachronic analysis and varietal influences in relation to the features of translated language.

本研究考察了联合国一般性辩论（UNGD）中区分翻译和非翻译英语外交话语的语言特征，并调查了这些特征在1946年至2022年期间是否发生了变化，以及这些变化是否与英语语言种类有关。弹性网络回归分析发现，翻译文本的形式性、抽象性和信息密度高于非翻译文本，这与已有的翻译语言研究结果一致。随着时间的推移，翻译后的文本在语言变化方面往往落后于未翻译的演讲，这支持了联合国翻译是一种保守的语言变体的观点：联合国翻译人员在采用创新用法方面往往很慢，更喜欢已有的变体。品种差异在选择翻译特征方面也很明显。这些发现有助于理解翻译语言，并强调了考虑历时分析和变化影响与翻译语言特征的重要性。

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引用次数: 0

“How is that unparliamentary?”: The metapragmatics of ‘unparliamentary’ language in the Australian Federal Parliament “这怎么不符合议会？”：澳大利亚联邦议会中“非议会”语言的元语用

IF 1.1 3区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

Lingua

Pub Date : 2025-03-29 DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103932

Sam Hames, Michael Haugh, Simon Musgrave

Parliamentary discourse is highly regulated, leading to an almost blanket avoidance of explicit vulgarity or overtly offensive language. Yet it is nevertheless replete with examples in which the language used by members is construed as ‘unparliamentary’. This study examines the occurrence of ‘unparliamentary’ as a metapragmatic label across the entire corpus of the Australian Federal Hansard from 1901 to 2024, and probes how it can be used to implement specific metapragmatic acts (i.e. doing something through labelling talk as ‘unparliamentary’), as well as how it can also become an object of metapragmatic discourse (i.e. a topic of debate in its own right). In so doing we explore how the boundaries of offensive, objectionable or otherwise disorderly language use in parliamentary discourse are established, maintained, contested, as well as change and evolve over time. As the Australian Federal Hansard constitutes a relatively large corpus of more than 900 million tokens, the study draws in a dialogic and iterative manner from both computational and interpretive methods of analysis. This dialogic form of analysis indicates that what is encompassed by the notion of ‘unparliamentary’ is broader and more complex than what is prescribed in the Standing Orders and associated codes of practice of the Australian Federal Parliament.

议会话语受到高度管制，导致几乎全面避免明确的粗俗或公开的攻击性语言。然而，它仍然充满了成员使用的语言被解释为“非议会”的例子。本研究考察了“非议会”作为元语用标签在1901年至2024年整个澳大利亚联邦议事录语料库中的出现情况，并探讨了如何使用它来实施特定的元语用行为（即通过将谈话标记为“非议会”来做某事），以及它如何成为元语用话语的对象（即本身的辩论主题）。在这样做的过程中，我们探讨了在议会话语中使用攻击性、令人反感或其他无序语言的界限是如何建立、维持、争议的，以及随着时间的推移而变化和演变的。由于澳大利亚联邦议事录构成了一个相对较大的超过9亿个代币的语料库，该研究从计算和解释分析方法中以对话和迭代的方式进行。这种对话形式的分析表明，“非议会”概念所包含的内容比澳大利亚联邦议会的常设程序和相关行为守则所规定的内容更广泛、更复杂。

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引用次数: 0

Do we swear more with friends or with acquaintances? F#ck in social networks 我们对朋友骂人多还是对熟人骂人多？f# ck在社交网络

IF 1.1 3区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

Lingua

Pub Date : 2025-03-28 DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103931

Mikko Laitinen , Paula Rautionaho , Masoud Fatemi , Mikko Halonen

We investigate the uses of fuck in digital social networks from social media, Twitter/X in this case. Social media outlets have so far been predominantly treated as massive text collections, but they can be effectively used to investigate the role of social networks in shaping human communication. We use user-generated texts from 5,660 social networks (with 435,345 users and 7.8 billion words) from three settings (UK, US, and Australia). With embedded network information, this massive dataset enables us to investigate how network properties, that of the size and the strength of the network, influence the use of offensive words in these three settings. Our findings show that Americans use fuck most frequently, while Australians least frequently but they are highly creative with spelling variants of the word. Contrary to prior studies, we observe that people on this social media application swear more with acquaintances than with friends, but only in smaller networks − in larger networks of >100 people, the differences level out. Overall, this study highlights the benefits of using social media data that can be enriched to allow access to the social networks that people interact in.

我们从社交媒体（Twitter/X）调查了fuck在数字社交网络中的使用情况。到目前为止，社交媒体主要被视为大量的文本集合，但它们可以有效地用于研究社交网络在塑造人类交流中的作用。我们使用来自5,660个社交网络（435,345个用户和78亿个单词）的用户生成文本，这些文本来自三个设置（英国、美国和澳大利亚）。通过嵌入网络信息，这个庞大的数据集使我们能够研究网络属性，即网络的大小和强度，如何影响这三种设置中攻击性词汇的使用。我们的研究结果显示，美国人使用fuck的频率最高，而澳大利亚人使用频率最低，但他们在拼写这个词的变体方面非常有创意。与之前的研究相反，我们观察到人们在这个社交媒体应用程序上对熟人比对朋友说脏话更多，但这只是在较小的网络中——在100人的较大网络中，差异趋于平缓。总的来说，这项研究强调了使用社交媒体数据的好处，这些数据可以被丰富，以允许访问人们互动的社交网络。

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引用次数: 0

Deciphering cross-genre dynamics: Testing the Law of Abbreviation and the Meaning-Frequency Law in Chinese across genres 解读跨体裁动态：跨体裁汉语缩略语规律和意义频次规律的检验

IF 1.1 3区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

Lingua

Pub Date : 2025-03-27 DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103934

Zhuolun Li , Lei Lei

The study examined the applicability of two linguistic laws, i.e., the Law of Abbreviation and the Meaning-Frequency Law, in Chinese across four text genres. Linear mixed-effects models were employed to explore the genre-mediated effects on the two laws. The results confirmed the validity of both laws at the character level in Chinese while also demonstrating significant genre-specific variations. The effect of genre on the relationships among character length, polysemy, and frequency was particularly pronounced in less formal genres. Additionally, across all genres, character polysemy consistently exhibited a stronger effect on character frequency than character length. The results were discussed from several perspectives, including the underlying mechanisms of the two laws (i.e., the principle of least effort and the lexical synergetic system theory), trade-offs between communication accuracy versus efficiency across genres, and the differing impacts on communication costs of character polysemy and character length. Implications of the study are also discussed for researchers interested in Zipfian laws across languages.

本研究考察了汉语缩略语规律和意义频次规律在四种文本体裁中的适用性。采用线性混合效应模型探讨类型对这两个定律的中介效应。结果证实了这两个规律在汉字水平上的有效性，同时也显示出显著的体裁差异。体裁对字符长度、多义词和频率之间的关系的影响在不太正式的体裁中尤为明显。此外，在所有体裁中，字符多义性对字符频率的影响始终强于字符长度。研究结果从两个方面进行了讨论，包括两个规律的潜在机制（即最省力原则和词汇协同系统理论），跨体裁的传播准确性与效率的权衡，以及汉字多义性和字符长度对传播成本的不同影响。本研究的意义也讨论了研究人员感兴趣的齐普法跨语言。

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引用次数: 0

Implicit and explicit linguistic biases: The influence of social dominance orientation (SDO) upon hierarchical language attitudes 内隐和外显语言偏见：社会支配倾向对等级语言态度的影响

IF 1.1 3区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

Lingua

Pub Date : 2025-03-20 DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103928

Robert M. McKenzie , Kristofor McCarty , Mimi Huang

Research indicates that various social factors can predict language attitudes. However, although social dominance orientation (SDO), the individual’s preference for societal hierarchies, has been found to determine evaluations of a range of social groups and socially meaningful topics, its role in predicting more deeply embedded implicit attitudes in conjunction with more deliberative explicit attitudes towards specific language varieties and their speakers is currently unknown. The present research examined the effect of SDO upon English nationals’ (N = 306) explicit and implicit evaluations of phonological variants indexical of (i) Northern English speech and (ii) Southern English speech in England on competence (Study 1) and warmth (Study 2) dimensions. Regression analysis, controlling for demographic variables, demonstrated that high-SDO predicted negative explicit competence and warmth attitudes towards Northern English speech. Conversely, SDO did not determine self-report Southern English speech evaluations. Likewise, SDO did not predict implicit competence or warmth attitudes. The study findings are discussed in relation to the methodological and theoretical value for (socio)linguists of incorporating SDO measures into research investigating language attitudes at different levels of evaluational awareness.

研究表明，各种社会因素可以预测语言态度。然而，尽管社会支配取向（SDO），即个体对社会等级的偏好，已经被发现决定了对一系列社会群体和社会意义话题的评价，但它在预测更深入嵌入的内隐态度以及对特定语言种类及其说话者更审慎的外显态度方面的作用目前尚不清楚。本研究考察了SDO对英语国民（N = 306）对英国北部英语和南部英语语音变体指数在能力（研究1）和温暖（研究2）维度上的外显和内隐评价的影响。在控制人口统计学变量的情况下，回归分析表明，高sdo对北方英语言语的外显能力和热情态度有负向的预测作用。相反，SDO不决定自我报告的南方英语语音评价。同样，SDO也不能预测内隐能力或热情态度。研究结果讨论了（社会）语言学家将SDO测量方法纳入不同评价意识水平的语言态度研究的方法论和理论价值。

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引用次数: 0

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