Language Sciences最新文献

This study examines diachronic changes in number use in written American English from 1923 to 2008 in TIME magazine, analyzing a 170-million-token corpus. We investigate the effects of magnitudes, roundness, and representational formats on number frequency, along with the evolution of culturally salient numbers reflecting societal shifts. Utilizing Bayesian negative binomial regression for in-depth corpus analysis, our findings demonstrate a consistent influence of magnitudes and roundness, with smaller magnitudes and rounder numbers appearing more frequently. We observe a significant standardization in portraying large numbers, marked by a shift from numerical to mixed forms (e.g., “6,000,000,000” to “6 billion”) around 1940s. This reflects changes in both formal writing conventions and editorial practices of numerical representation. Our research further identifies distinct culturally significant numbers for each decade, linked to social, economic, and technological trends, underscoring the role of numerical analysis in media to decode complex cultural and societal patterns. This study contributes significantly to understanding the dynamic interplay between language, culture, and media in the context of numerical representations.

In scientific inquiry and the dissemination of knowledge, bibliographies emerge as cornerstone elements within the expansive communication system, serving multifaceted roles indispensable to scholarly dialogue and the popularization of scientific findings. This study delves into the intrinsic significance and application of bibliographies, highlighting their roles in the communication process and retrieval of diverse entities, including books, articles, and electronic resources. The construction of bibliography entries utilizes a specialized bibliographic language characterized by its quasi-natural, uncontrolled vocabulary designed to facilitate communication. The strength of this bibliographic language is notably anchored in its grammar, imparting to it a universal communicative capacity that allows for the comprehension of meanings solely through the bibliographic scheme. This research examines bibliographies embedded within scientific texts to confirm references to existing sources, aiming to assert the universality of bibliographies as a language tool in scientific communication. Through an analysis of the functions and structure of bibliographic language, it is demonstrated that such bibliographies not only enhance the flow of information but also play a crucial role in conveying reliable and verifiable data, thereby fostering the advancement of scientific discovery.

The critical period hypothesis (CPH) as an explanation of age effects on language learning has been a perennial source of contention in the field of second language acquisition (SLA). Although this hypothesis – which suggests that adult language learning is constrained by biological or maturational changes in the brain – has been based on the work of Eric Lenneberg (i.e. Biological Foundations of Language, 1967), it does not reflect Lenneberg's original biological theory of language. In this paper, the CPH is examined in light of a comprehensive review of Lenneberg's work and related disciplines. By outlining Lenneberg's notion of epigenesis in language development, it is argued that the CPH interpretation of the critical period notion that has long skewed the debate over age effects in SLA must be re-evaluated, and that any reference to “Lenneberg's CPH” can – and should – be abandoned.

When Harvey Sacks and Emanuel A. Schegloff explored the possibility of a ‘naturalistic observational discipline that could deal with the details of social action(s) rigorously, empirically, and formally’ (Schegloff and Sacks, 1973), it was not by chance that their attention was attracted by records of natural conversations and by conversation as an activity in its own right. For, in conversation, every action, every speaking turn of its participants presents itself as a clearly determinable unit with a beginning and end. This appearance is reinforced by the conversation's transcript, which presents in a seeming order, a sequence of turns. Sequence analysis was developed for ‘conversations’ from this observational basis. In this paper, the requirements and implications concerning the role of indexicality in organising and interpreting participants' turns are examined critically and it is investigated whether sequence analysis is also applicable as a proof procedure to ‘talk in interaction’ and multimodal face-to-face interaction. It is argued that unclearly determined non-verbal actions and multiple forms of simultaneous events may restrict the applicability of sequence analysis or even prevent its successful application altogether. It is argued that for different forms of (communicative) interaction and their constitutive conditions of perception an empirical investigation of the relation between simultaneity and sequentiality may be necessary.

Linguistic expressions of confusion (e.g., perplexing, puzzling, confusing) are important lexico-grammatical resources for academic authors to construct knowledge, enhance persuasion, and promote their research. Drawing on a frame-semantic approach, this paper examined whether the deployment of such expressions differed between male and female academics and between authors based in the Core countries (i.e., Anglophone countries, Western and North European countries), which represent the locus of dominance, power and resource in scholarly publishing, and their counterparts affiliated with the Periphery ones (i.e., the remaining countries). The analyses of 640 research articles sampled from 4 disciplines and semi-structured interviews with 16 disciplinary experts revealed multiple gender- and location-based differences in authors’ use of linguistic expressions of confusion for scientific communication. These observed differences can be attributed to the female and Periphery-based academics’ underrepresentation in the disciplinary community as well as the epistemological positioning and academic literacies that they developed in their particular contexts.

This article presents a conceptual history of identity in Swedish minority language policy, exploring how “develop[ing] a cultural identity” became integral to the minority language curriculum. Following the methodology of Wacquant (2022), which combines Bourdieu's sociology with the conceptual history of Koselleck, the study tracks identity through archived documents from the political, media and academic fields of the 1968–74 immigration inquiry in Sweden and subsequent actualisation of the so-called Home Language Reform in 1977. This reform continues to entitle children who are raised speaking a language other than Swedish to state-mandated tuition in this language via mother tongue instruction (MTI). As a space for non-hegemonic language practice, MTI struggles for political and societal legitimacy and existing research has yet to explore how identity is entangled in its (de)legitimation. Following debate in the 1960s about the unsuitability of “adjustment”, the IC aimed to construct a new conceptual framework for migrant discourse. Analysis of bills, publications, minutes and media op-eds show that agents acted as brokers to jointly construct identity as a flexible framework to cover diverse needs within and across their respective fields. Within the media field, pundits argued either for the right of the individual to choose their level of engagement with established groups, or for the autonomy of migrant groups to establish their own schools and communities. Within the political field, inspiration came from the perceived successes of Canadian immigration reform, while key academics took interest in North American social psychology research. The focal point of this cross-field negotiation was a hybrid concept, a necessarily flexible frame of reference whose meaning differed slightly within each field. Given the lack of semantic precision of hybrid concepts, reflexive language science ought to consider and problematise their application in MTI research and in further academic enquiry.

This paper investigates the construction of “Wangmian Si-le Fuqin” (Wangmian lost his father) in Mandarin Chinese from the perspective of Cardiff Grammar. It aims to answer three key questions: (i) What Process type and Participant Roles are expressed by this construction? (ii) What is the functional syntactic structure of the construction under study? (iii) What are the functional motivations for using the construction? After reviewing the previous studies and explaining the basic notions of Cardiff Grammar, the semantics, syntax and functional motivations of this construction are analyzed and discussed. The results show that (i) this construction realizes a Possessive Relational Process, and has two Participant Roles of Affected-Carrier and Possessed, which is different in meaning from other similar constructions, such as Wangmian de fuqin si-le (Wangmian's father died); (ii) the functional syntax of the construction is “SˆMˆC”, with the Subject conflated with Affected-Carrier, the Complement with Affected-Possessed, and le after the Main Verb si is an Aspect Particle; (iii) the functional motivation of this construction is three-fold: emphasizing the Process of “gain or loss”, making Wangmian the Subject Theme, and representing background information.

Roleplay, as a form of speaker imitation, has commonly been used as a tool to investigate the emergence of sociolinguistic expectations in children. In this paper, we integrate previous methodological insights on roleplay with the aim to draft a unified protocol for its design and analysis in (developmental) (socio)linguistics. Special attention is paid to guiding principles for (1) role selection, (2) roleplay elicitation, (3) roleplay identification, (4) isolation of the linguistic variable and (5) cross-verification of the results. The roleplay protocol is applied to a case study on English insertions in Belgian Dutch by five preadolescents, where it seems to effectively capture sociolinguistic expectations: respondents increasingly insert English elements in their performances of English-oriented roles (e.g. rapper) and limit those elements in their performances of Dutch-oriented roles (e.g. farmer). Overall, this paper unites previous insights on the implementation of roleplay designs, aiming to further empirical investigations into speaker imitation in developmental sociolinguistics and the study of linguistic behavior in roleplay in general.

This paper introduces the results of an exploratory study, aimed at designing and testing an ecological discourse analysis framework, applicable to texts in Chinese language. Focusing on vocabulary, the study followed an iterative deductive-inductive process. First, a preliminary framework of lexical indicators was identified through literature review, adapted to Chinese language by means of a pilot analysis, and validated based on experts’ judgement. The framework was then tested on a sample of documents relevant to an environmental justice case in China. Results indicate that our Chinese Language Ecological Discourse Analysis (C-LEDA) framework can assist a coherent ecolinguistic characterization of Chinese texts by highlighting lexical patterns that reflect diverse social-ecological values and worldviews. Our work is a meaningful contribution to developing reliable tools for ecolinguistic analysis and lays the ground for further advancements in the field. More specifically, it constitutes a first step to support the development of: (a) multi-criteria annotation schemes for quantitative, corpus-assisted ecological discourse analysis; (b) qualitative and quantitative comparative studies, broadening the scope of analysis to the wider Sinophone context; and (c) co-creative protocols to re-story documents used in environmental planning to address the extractivist bias inherent in such processes.

This article investigates the relationship between language policy and spatial production. The regulation of language is inextricably tied to extra-linguistic—social, cultural, political and economic –processes permeating the broader sociolinguistic ecology. The article argues that language policy creates territorial space in this otherwise open ecology. Territories emerge from the tension between two dimensions of language policy: the free-flowing language activities in circulation and the coordinated regulation of boundaries in space. The article examines the relation between these two dimensions through the concepts of ‘languaging’ and ‘assemblage’. This theoretical argument is illustrated with the developing Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area in southern China as an example. The example suggests two theoretical implications. First, language policy regulates not only linguistic features or varieties but the coordination between linguistic and extra-linguistic practices of languaging. Second, territorial spaces are created not by externally imposed orders but by assemblages formed within the processes of languaging.