Lingua最新文献

Figurative mechanisms, both mainstream and marginal, are pervasive in thought and language. While mainstream figures have been studied extensively and remain the focus of extensive ongoing research, marginal figurative mechanisms have either been overlooked or treated along with more commonly occurring figurative mechanisms. The present study reflects on the emphasis assigned to central figures of speech, and allocates equal importance to peripheral figures that have so far received minimum attention. It is suggested, in this Introduction, as well as in all papers of the Special Issue, that marginal figures are not simply rhetorical devices that occupy the margins of figurativity, as has long been thought, but rather comprise necessary reasoning processes that serve special cognitive and communicative needs. It remains to be investigated whether marginal figures are subordinate to the general class of mainstream figures, or whether they, too, occupy a central position in thought and language. The exploration and in-depth analysis of marginal figures is likely to have a significant impact on the overall study of figurative language.

Speakers across different languages structure a similar set of target domains (e.g., emotions, time, ideas) as spatial motion, relying on the same metaphorical mappings (abstract concept as moving entity; abstract concept as location). These crosslinguistic similarities co-occur with crosslinguistic differences in the lexicalization of the source domain, with some languages encoding manner more frequently than others . But do these patterns of similarities and differences extend to translations of written texts? In this study, we analyzed metaphorical motion expressions from novels written in typologically distinct (German vs. Spanish) vs. typologically similar languages (German vs. Polish) and their translations into a language from the opposite (German vs. Spanish) or the same typological group (German vs. Polish). We observed strong crosslinguistic similarities in target domains and metaphorical mappings and systematic crosslinguistic differences in the lexicalization of the source domain, with translations largely adhering to the patterns of the target language. Our findings thus suggest that translations of metaphorical motion events to a target language—be it of a similar or a different typological group—follow the same patterns in the target and source language in structure (mappings) but adhere to the patterns of the target language in the lexicalization of the metaphorical event.

Recent typological studies have identified some major functions associated with copulas, including tense-aspect-mood (TAM) and agreement (AGR) marking. In this paper, using conversational data from Odia, an Indo-Aryan language, we examine the speaker stance functions in copula constructions. More specifically, in addition to focus marking as a highlighting strategy, we show how copulas help to anchor the speaker’s subjective (attitudinal and affective) and intersubjective (socio-interactional) stance. Our analysis reveals that these (inter)subjective stances can be realized epistemically through the tense-mood marking functions of the copula, socio-interactionally through its agreement marking functions, and emphatically through its focus marking functions. The findings from this study contribute to our understanding of the relationship between copulas and stance-taking/stance-marking in spontaneous conversations in Indo-Aryan languages, and potentially other languages as well.

Prepositions with a range over several conceptual domains are often described as polysemous between these domains. Typically, spatial senses are seen as basic, while temporal and abstract senses are assumed to be derived from space. The present article argues in favour of an alternative analysis in which domain-neutral properties of prepositions are used to account for similarities between instances in different domains. Methodological considerations with respect to the analytical depth, generality and simplicity of semantic accounts speak in favour of such a domain-neutral approach. The approach is illustrated with two Swedish prepositions, från ‘from’ and till ‘to’, both of which span numerous domains. To facilitate semantic descriptions of the relation between domain-neutral and domain-specific content, a semantic notation in the form of feature structures is introduced

Bilingual children can perform natural interpreting in two different spontaneous settings, i.e., at home when acquiring their two languages and when practicing language brokering. In both cases, as natural interpreters and as child brokers, bilingual children can act as interpreters between two monolingual adults, although the scenario in which they interpret (domestic versus non-domestic settings, respectively) and the goal (raising children bilingually versus mediating for their family, respectively) may differ. Recently, some scholars have revealed how negatively or positively child brokers may see their role as family-society mediators. Likewise, natural interpreters may show positive or negative attitudes towards interpreting, and these may vary as they grow up as bilinguals. In order to observe how bilingual children respond to interpreting as they develop linguistically, experimental data from CHILDES involving a pair or twins across three elicited interpreting sessions were used (i.e., ages 4;6, 5;05, 6;03). The results show that both children translate efficiently and mainly when required to do so, providing predominantly simplified translations in their first experience and later an equal proportion of simplified and literal translations. To interpret these results, some external variables associated with experimental conditions (e.g., the aim behind interpreting; the interlocutors’ needs and roles; the duration of the sessions) are also taken into consideration which help characterize how natural interpreters face natural interpreting.

Imageability norms are presented for 90 single- and multiword spatio-temporal expressions of English including classic prepositions (e.g., at, in front [of]), intransitive prepositions (e.g., away), and common combinations such as up against. This 90-item set is a substantial enlargement and enhancement of a 56-item set collected in relation to a recently published study of phrasal verbs. For nearly half of the expressions in that earlier set there are now revised mean ratings based on proportionally large increases in the number of respondents from whom ratings were obtained. The enlarged set includes 34 newly rated spatio-temporal expressions, 19 of which appear to have no other published imageability rating. The 90-item list appears to be unique in its coverage of multiword prepositions and unusual in that 20% of the ratings pertain to items that raters saw with disambiguating information (e.g., “back, as in move back”). These 90 norms could be useful in many streams of research owing both to the importance of spatio-temporal prepositions in communication and to the well-established association of lexeme imageability with enhanced memorability, speedy mental processing, and learnability.

Jordanian Arabic (JA) has two main patterns for verbal negation, i.e., preverbal negation (ma: ….) and discontinuous negation (ma: …. -ʃ). This article provides a variationist account of the distribution of these two patterns in light of a number of social and linguistic factors. The social factors include age, gender, educational attainment and region. The linguistic factors, on the other hand, include the transitivity of the verb, the tense of the associate utterance, the stativity and the lexical type of the verb (i.e., cognitive, desiderative, speech and perception), as well as the person, animacy and definiteness of the associate subject. Following distributional and multivariate analyses of 40 sociolinguistic interviews (more than 30 hours of audio-recordings), we find that all social factors (education, gender, region and age), the lexical type of the verb, the definiteness of the subject and the tense of the associate utterance have a significant impact on the selection of the negation patterns in JA. Such preferences are argued to follow from independent factors, including the speaker's regional background, gender identity and prestige.