Language Sciences最新文献

The Malagasy language belongs to the Austronesian Family and it is particularly close to some of the languages spoken in Indonesia, a fact that was first noticed at the beginning of the XVIIth century. The link to a precise Indonesian language is due to Dahl who, in 1951, firmly established a striking kinship with Maanyan, spoken in the South-East of Kalimantan. The introgression of Bantu terms is extremely limited, on the contrary the genetic makeup of the Malagasy people is African and Indonesian with comparable proportions. While genetics and linguistics agree that the colonization of Madagascar by Indonesian sailors took place in the second half of the first millennium, they disagree concerning the role of East-Africa in this event. Here we show that the dichotomy emerges because linguistics uses qualitative arguments where genetics has a consolidated tradition in the use of quantitative methods. After having collected the largest and most complete existing dataset for Malagasy, covering the entire island (207-terms Swadesh lists of 60 different dialects), we adopt new quantitative tools that allow us to confirm the genetics point of view that Indonesian sailors directly colonized Madagascar, without the East-African stopover conjectured in various studies in linguistics. The key point of our approach is the analysis of the geographical distribution of the degree of Bantu languages contamination of Malagasy dialects.

While conceptual metaphors yield various linguistic expressions that reflect conceptual mappings between the source and target domains, there is another type of metaphor which is also constructed cognitively except that these metaphors are “single”, in the sense that they are not reflected by several metaphorical expressions. These metaphors do not constitute a conceptual scheme in which many metaphorical expressions enforce the association between the source and target domains. On the basis of Critical Metaphor Analysis Approach, this paper systematically analyses the types and function of metaphor used in a specialised corpus containing 9.5 million words collected from two Jordanian newspapers to describe economic concepts in the Jordanian context. It also explores the interaction between conceptual and single metaphors, on the one hand, and conventional and novel metaphorical expressions, on the other. The results reveal that conceptual metaphors and conventionalised metaphorical expressions in Jordanian economic discourse perform a function that can be distinguished from that of single metaphors and novel metaphorical expressions. I argue that the use of the latter seems to be a matter of ‘luxury’ rather than ‘necessity’ where luxury refers to linguistic creativity.

Little research on pragmatic transfer has examined disagreement by Chinese speakers of English using naturally occurring conversations. This study uncovers the patterns and frequencies of disagreement in L2 English, L1 English, and L1 Chinese, and the evidence of pragmatic transfer, by analyzing naturalistic conversations. R is employed to compute frequencies, calculate proportions, and perform Chi-square tests and one-sample Z-tests. Results show a significant difference in the use of disagreement between L1 English and L2 English but no significant difference between L2 English and L1 Chinese, indicating negative pragmatic transfer. Strong disagreement significantly outnumbers weak disagreement in non-L1 English data, suggesting that strong disagreement may be normative in mundane conversations in some regions of China. This study can inform teaching and learning L2 English.

It is through news reports in the press or on television, radio or the Internet that people learn most of what they know about their environment or the world beyond their daily experiences. This paper raises the question: to what extent can a trending topic in news discourse become the source of metaphorical creativity, and which factors contribute to this fact? It uses the systematic analysis of multimodal metaphors in a corpus of political cartoons. The genre conventions of the political cartoon generate a particular form of engagement with the news, which in turn shapes the metaphors that political cartoonists use in their work. An editorial or political cartoon is a text, especially one in a newspaper or magazine, concerning a topical event and therefore, by definition, plays a crucial role in the reproduction of knowledge. Finding a fresh angle on a breaking news story and using this to create another piece of media content, such as an editorial or political cartoon, is often referred to as news-jacking. The question is not whether topical news stories are reproduced by journalists — it is whether they offer unique opportunities to journalists, influencing their choice of metaphors. A comparative study of cartoons about a range of topics across different cultures would deliver useful insights into how topical news items may shape the metaphors that political cartoonists use to offer expert comment. In so doing, this paper moves beyond the confines of conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), presenting fundamental challenges to a theory that was originally developed based on linguistic and artificial data.

In this paper we evaluate the role of prosodic information in inferring dialogue-specific functions of speech acts. We report the results of an empirical study in which participants are exposed to recordings of certain utterances and, next, asked to recognize discursive contexts from which the heard utterances may come. The recorded utterances are quotations: staged utterances produced by speakers asked to read aloud dialogues specially constructed for the study. We analyse prosodic cues produced by recorded speakers and argue that they play a key role in depicting demonstrated target utterance. We assume that participants’ decisions manifest their implicit understanding of dialogue-specific functions of target utterances. The empirical part of our study shows that the efficiency rate of the prosodic cues produced by recorded speakers is 76%. We use the results of our prosodic analysis of recorded utterances to account for some cases of incorrect interpretations reported in the study.

This paper is a further step toward the construction of an ecologically valid framework for the emergence of symbolic communication in development. Building on recent advancements, which view language learning in terms of the increasingly skillful usage and navigation of interactive affordances within a re-enacted social world, we present a more detailed investigation of the timing of such affordances and the role of that timing in the progressive structuring of communication toward symbolic language. Seeking conceptual similarities with an action-based ecological framework, we extend the concepts of that framework to the context of early social interaction. We abandon a conception of language learning by infants as based on sound-reference mappings and envision this process as an attunement to structures in time, which entails the infant becoming increasingly able to engage in those structures, that is, to navigate and shape the relevant interactive dynamics skillfully. We illustrate attunements to several timing orders that are essential to the emergence of language: i) to participants' actions within routines, which leads to the emergence of social affordances; ii) to partners’ vocalizations within an individuated layer, which supports perception of the systemic properties of language; and iii) to larger structures in time, shaped by energetic and affective envelopes, which facilitates discerning important semantic units. The goal of this work is to show how embodied interactions gain their linguistic character for the infant and how the structure of interactive engagements becomes increasingly complex and language-dependent without ever becoming fully ungrounded from interaction. Highlighting the importance of timing for learning to participate should improve our understanding of the progressive saturation of language with interactive structures for a child on the one hand and our understanding of the structuring of language as an interactive control on different timescales on the other.

Examining the linguistic landscape of the new capital city of Kazakhstan, Nur-Sultan (formerly Astana), this article demonstrates the sociolinguistic transformations following adoption of neoliberal economic policies during the post-Soviet period. The study uses ‘neoliberal governmentality’ as a conceptual lens to examine how neoliberalism as an economic policy evolves into a form of governance reinforcing the logic of the market in peoples' linguistic behaviors. Drawing on a photographic survey of the linguistic landscape and ethnographic interviews, the study shows that liberalization and flexibilization of the linguistic market has allowed English and Latinized brand names in several foreign languages to occupy a substantial space, frequency, and prominence in the LL. English appears to challenge the decades old dominance of the Russian language as it evidently wields remarkable visibility as the most valued marketing tool. Glimpses of Latinized Kazakh signboards indicates a gradual bottom-up shift to Latinization of the Kazakh language. By situating language as a socially grounded practice, ethnographic analysis of linguistic landscape can provide valuable theoretical insights about different manifestations of neoliberalism, particularly showing how neoliberal governmentality shapes mental linguistic hierarchies, mobilizing peoples' subjectivities to associate language (s) with the quality of goods/products, their prices, bargaining strategies, lifestyles, and social standing.

This paper proposes a typology of fractional numbers. A few fractional numbers can be expressed by suppletive (non-systematic) forms, whereas analytical (systematic) linguistic patterns of formation produce “bi-dimensional” numerical forms which refer to both the numerator and the denominator (double argument), or “mono-dimensional” forms which refer to only one of these numbers (single argument). Moreover, a fraction in a partitive expression can be an indivisible semantic unit or may, on the contrary, have a noun or a measure word inserted between its constituents.

Specification of information sources in human speech – evidentiality – prevents misunderstandings and allows listeners to assess the validity of the information communicated. Some of the same linguistic forms used for evidentiality, including grammatical markers and lexical items, are also reported to have a ‘mirative’ function, and can be used by speakers to express their surprise. Importantly, languages differ in the type of forms they typically use for evidentiality. For instance, corpus analyses suggest that German uses lexical items, while Korean typically encodes evidentiality via grammaticalized sentence-ending (SE) markers. Little is known, however, about the extent to which such linguistic differences are reflected in speakers' use of these forms in verbal interaction. To fill this gap, we carried out an experimental study in which Korean and German speakers were presented with events in audio and/or visual modalities and asked to describe them verbally as well as to rate their degree of surprise about the events. The results revealed several major differences between the two languages. Korean speakers used a high frequency of evidential SE markers, particularly the hearsay marker -tay, while German speakers, who relied on lexical items, encoded evidentiality much less frequently. In Korean, grammatical markers of evidentiality showed pragmatic extensions: The hearsay marker -tay carried an overtone of mirativity. Korean speakers seldom used markers having to do with perception, -te(la) and -ney; instead, it was the neutral marker -e that correlated with the salience of the visual evidence. In contrast, German speakers encoded hearsay and visual perception with lexical verbs in comparable frequencies, slightly prioritizing visual evidence. In German, lexical expressions (sagen/hören ‘say/hear’, sehen ‘see’) did not show pragmatic extension, and unmarked sentences did not imply a visual information source. These and other findings offer important insight into the lexical-grammatical continuum in evidentiality and the relationship between language and cognition in general.

Guided by a dynamic systems theory framework, this study observed and investigated how the motivation of students learning interpreting changed during an undergraduate English-Chinese interpreting course, with the aim of delineating, if any, typical trajectories. Nine students submitted anonymous reflective learning logs five times to yield qualitative data; one of the nine participated in an in-depth interview. All the data were coded and analysed on the basis of grounded theory. The findings revealed the intra- and inter-individual variability in terms of motivational dynamics, which constantly evolved and interacted with a variety of factors. For these students, high motivation in the initial conditions did not guarantee stable performance later. Throughout the study, the students self-organised into different attractor states under the influence of various internal and external elements. For them, an encouraging teacher led to increased motivation, whereas deeply ingrained diffidence eroded it. Two swing factors, which refer to factors that either strengthen or weaken motivation, were mid-term exams and practice. Furthermore, an archetype of a strongly motivated student was identified and discussed at length, thereby adding another piece of jigsaw to the broader picture of motivational dynamics in second language acquisition. The conclusions drawn from the present study are expected to enhance the understanding of teachers and researchers about the intricate nature of language-learning motivation, especially for interpreting learning, and the encompassing potential embedded in dynamic systems theory.