Language Sciences最新文献

In this study, we investigate the use of ‘face’-related expressions in the Minnan Dialect of Chinese. Minnan is often referred to as a ‘conservative’ dialect because of its large inventory of archaic and local expressions, including a rich variety of ‘face’-related expressions. To date, little research has been dedicated to this ‘face’-related inventory in Minnan, supposedly because it is often assumed that ‘face’ is a homogeneous notion in Chinese. In this paper, we critically revisit this assumption. In our study, we first collected and categorised Minnan dialectal ‘face’-related expressions and their use with the aid of data drawn from audio-recorded conversations, online videos, dictionaries, literary works and interviews. The results pointed to significant differences between Minnan ‘face’-expressions and their Mandarin counterparts. We then distributed a test to two groups of speakers: speakers of Mandarin who were not fluent in Minnan and a group of Minnan speakers. The aim of this test was to find out whether both groups can interpret Minnan ‘face’-related expressions in a written form. We hypothesised that Minnan ‘face’-related expressions in a written form can easily be interpreted by Mandarin speakers because Mandarin and Minnan use roughly the same writing system. However, this hypothesis was falsified because a significant number of Minnan ‘face’-related expressions triggered various types of interpretational difficulties for Mandarin-speakers for various reasons. This outcome indicates that Minnan ‘face’-related expressions should be studied as a repertoire, which is different from but related to Mandarin.

Beginning by noting the lack of precision between what is cultural appropriation and cultural borrowing, the author turns to similarly imprecise distinctions regarding linguistic appropriation. Specifically considered are imprecise, from a Marxian lens, accounts of linguistic appropriation and dispossession. The author fleshes out the Marxian roots of appropriation and accumulation by dispossession, tracing the latter back to Marx’s primitive accumulation. It is argued that neither appropriation or dispossession of language can follow from a Marxian lens.

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.

By confronting two linguistic myths, a strong linguistic relativist thesis and the idea that communication is the only means of language, this article demonstrates that some aspects of language mold some habits of thought and that language provides different speech communities with distinct behavioral patterns to accomplish specific social actions adequately. The article, thus, argues that there is strong empirical evidence to support a reciprocally influential relationship between language, thought, and society.

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 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.