Language Sciences最新文献

Discourse markers can function to mark epistemic and deontic modality. This study aims to explore how children and adults apply the discourse marker deh to signal their epistemic and deontic rights. Previous studies only dealt with how the deontic aspect of deh is used in determining future actions. There is no discussion on how the speakers use epistemic and deontic rights in interactions even though both are interrelated. Furthermore, the previous studies only dealt with adults' language. The present study explores how epistemic and deontic rights are marked by children and adults with deh by conducting a discourse analysis. The data were obtained from the CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System). Speakers' neglect of information offered to them reveals that they instead make decisions based on the knowledge they get from their experiences. With this knowledge, the speakers make the message they deliver when they direct others' future actions. Deh reveals speakers' expectations that others will take an action based on the speakers' requests. While children still produce indirect arguments or even, they do not make any arguments, in some cases, adults directly provide arguments to support the claims of adults' deontic rights. Adults tend to talk about hypothetical events in the future in defending their ideas. It never happens in the case of children. The speakers of deh position themselves as the ones with higher epistemic and deontic rights. When the speakers manage future actions and the others do not agree with them, they do not insist that the recipients do what they ask. They realize that the recipients also have the right to decide. Ignoring others’ rights will harm their social relationships.

Previous studies have noticed that depression, neuroticism, extraversion, and mood can leave linguistic fingerprints, particularly on pronoun use. The first aim of the present study was to examine the linguistic associations and impacts of these psychological constructs among Iranian native speakers of Farsi. Secondly, the linguistic correlates of depression, neuroticism, and extraversion were investigated in English, as a foreign language. For these goals, 220 Iranian adults (58.2% female, Mage = 25.2; SD = 5.19) participated and were assigned to four different groups (positive, neutral, and negative Farsi mood groups and a neutral English group). As expected, depression correlated with I-talk in Farsi (r = 0.217, p < 0.05). It was also associated with more negative emotion words (r = 0.355, p < 0.05), less positive emotion words (r = 0.421, p < 0.05), and less we-talk (r = 0.22, p < 0.05). Nonetheless, the results were not supportive of the association between I-talk and neuroticism or extraversion. Consistent with former observations, induced negative mood decreased self-referential language. The English responses showed that speaking in one's foreign versus native language can strongly diminish the linguistic effects of the psychological constructs.

The Arabic script has a set of optional diacritics (taškīl) that primarily indicate short vowels. These diacritics are used to varying extents, giving a form of orthographic variation potentially affecting every word in a text and various aspects of the reading process. This study is the first empirical investigation into the variation in how Arabic diacritics are used. It employs quantitative corpus linguistic methods to explore diacritization in a 72-million-word corpus consisting of book-length texts of various genres. Children’s literature and poetry were found to vary considerably in the number of diacritics used, while books of normal prose fall within a narrow range of limited use of diacritics. Furthermore, the different diacritics, subdivided by function, were found to follow a hierarchical order of priority that is largely consistent across genres. These findings call into question common descriptions of the Arabic writing system as binarily diacritized or undiacritized. Further lines of research based on these findings are suggested.

This paper presents an account of nominal attribute incorporation in Akebu, a Kwa language spoken in Togo. The regular way of encoding quality attributes is by placing stems of an adjective or of a quality verb between the stem of the noun and its noun class suffix. Other verbs can also be incorporated into a noun. After providing the necessary background on Akebu, the paper addresses phonological, morphological and syntactic features of incorporated complexes, as well as alternative constructions and structures that differ from attribute incorporation. While the phonological and morphological evidence for the wordhood of Akebu incorporated complexes is rather ambiguous, it is clear that syntactically incorporated stems are not full-fledged attribute constituents and have very limited syntactic possibilities. Akebu data thus elucidates the phenomenon of incorporation, illustrating the interrelation of morphological and syntactic issues of incorporation, as well as the complexity of attribute incorporation, as opposed to noun incorporation, which is the type most widely discussed.

The present study investigated the comprehension of narrative with reference to global coherence, i.e., the global representation of story meaning and connectedness, across two different expressive modalities: stories conveyed through written language and stories conveyed through sequences of images. Two cognitive abilities possibly underpinning such comprehension were assessed: Central Coherence (CC) and Theory of Mind (ToM). Two groups of children with typical development aged between 8.00 and 10.11 years were included in the study: 40 participants received the narrative comprehension task in the linguistic modality; 40 participants were administered the narrative comprehension task in the visual condition. Analyses revealed that a change in the expressive code used to convey narratives did not entail a change in the overall comprehension performance: children of the two groups performed similarly on the narrative task. As for the cognitive abilities, CC and ToM scores were positively correlated with narrative comprehension score only in the visual narrative comprehension task, and not in the linguistic one. Moreover, a regression analysis showed that, along with age, CC significantly predicted the visual narrative comprehension score. The implications of these results are discussed.

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.

The meta-analysis proposed in this study combines data from neuroscience, network science, pragmatics and cognitive linguistics in an attempt to determine the structures that are involved in acts of pragmatic meaning in the human connectome. Acts of pragmatic meaning involve mappings entailing value-based conceptualizations viewed as forms of specific neuronal activity constituting idealized cognitive models (ICMs). The article describes idiosyncratic ICMs as distributed subnetworks of the human cognitome, their anatomical counterparts at the connectome level, and the possible architectures of such models, particularly, those associated with acts of pragmatic meaning. The idea that ICMs have the characteristics typical of an undirected graph with its nodes constituting cogs is also developed. The metonymic nature of the ICM is stressed upon when the cogs within an ICM are implicatively connected with each other. The authors find a correlation between neural network architectures and acts of pragmatic meaning within ICMs. Besides, the role of cogs as elements of experience (including pragmatic experience) associated with activations of specific nodes in the connectome is discussed. A key hypothesis for the study is that the same neuronal pathways may participate both in the acts of pragmatic meaning and in the body's reactions to fear and danger, which enables a new classification for pragmatic meanings based on the presence or absence of excitation in the limbic system (primarily, the amygdala). This approach in its turn allows to distinguish between the dynamic and static phases of the ICM. Possible ways for further empiric development of the ICM theory are also suggested.

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.

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.

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.