Language Sciences最新文献

People describe olfactory phenomena in various ways. Some, like Umpila speakers (Pama-Nyungan, Cape York Peninsula, Australia), most commonly describe smells in terms of their pleasantness and other subjective evaluations (e.g., kanti ‘intense of sense’, miintha ‘good’, kuntha ‘strong’). Others, like English speakers, most commonly refer to real-world entities (e.g., floral, woody, like pizza). However, the reasons why a language community might use one strategy over another is not yet clear. Drawing on Cultural Model Theory, this study elucidates why speakers of each language may rely on their preferred strategy in accordance with the different olfactory-related cultural practices and ideologies in the respective speaker communities. Umpila speakers have salient cultural models of Country (i.e., the conceptualisation of land/seas/skies as a being with which the Umpila people form a reciprocal relationship with interconnected rights and responsibilities) and resultingly, Country recognises ‘locals’ from ‘strangers’ according to their smell. Being recognised as a local or stranger can have good/bad effects, aligning with the reliance on evaluative descriptions. Important Western cultural models include histories of using smells to signify class and smells being treated as carriers of disease. These models feed into the modern deodorisation and perfuming practices of today, which require a balance between subjective information and precise perceptual detail, which source-based descriptions allow for. The connection between cultural models and linguistic behaviour allows us to further understand the relationship between not only olfactory but sensory culture and sensory language in the minds of speakers.

The literature on the nominal classification system of Mabia languages reveals a consistent pattern where nominals are often classified based on their morphology, phonology and semantics. What has not received mention is the role of ethnolinguistics and linguistic anthropology in the classification of nominals in these languages. This study offers a comparative analysis of the nominal class systems of three Mabia languages: Dagbani, Kusaal and Mampruli. The main purpose is to examine the role of semantics from the angles of both ethnolinguistics and linguistic anthropology in the nominal classification system of these languages. The hypothesis is that the morphophonology of nominal classes in these languages is triggered by a shared semantic network and pragmatic association of member elements influenced by the beliefs, traditions and world views of speakers of these languages. The sameness or near sameness of beliefs, and world views of these people explains the observation of identical items from all the languages in specific groups. Nouns in the various categories behave the same morphologically, phonologically and semantically. Nouns are classified under 5 concepts: Human-beings and kin relationship, spirituality, protection, shape and Non-count nouns. This work is entirely qualitative.

This exploratory study examined the discursive practices of solidarity discourse, contributing to the performative theory of solidarity discourse. Five discursive practices were identified. It was noted that plurality and assimilation practice, complete assimilation, and partial assimilation were the most frequently employed practices. Assimilation is accomplished using three strategies: inclusive first plural pronouns, collective nouns, and spatialization. The second discursive practice was appraisal. There are three strategies that are utilized by speakers: to appraise and praise the ‘self’ or one's support, to appraise or bash and attack the ‘other,’ and to appraise and praise the ‘us/we.’ The third practice is representation and positioning, which is realized by intertwined representations of the ‘us,’ the common enemy/challenge representation, and self-positioning/representation. Endorsement is the fourth discursive practice to achieve solidarity through which the speaker endorses policies or ideologies to show solidarity. Finally, storytelling is a practice employed to build solidarity, manage knowledge, achieve performative acts, and shape the future through past events. The current paper contributed to our understanding of solidarity and expanded our perspective on discourse in general, and solidarity discourse in particular. In addition, the application of this study can bridge the gap between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ by addressing the ‘us/we.’

This paper contributes to the growing body of literature on nouns of measurement and the multifaceted processes that they are susceptible to undergo. It spotlights the Russian prepositional phrase po mere, lit. ‘by measure’, which originally held a compositional meaning referring to size measurement but has shifted towards a relator function as a temporal preposition marking simultaneity. The paper unravels the grammaticalization mechanisms behind this development by tracing across three centuries the constructional change, the entrenchment of the new temporal function and its eventual dominance over the older uses, based on the Russian National Corpus data.

This article addresses two previously unresolved puzzles regarding the relationship between temporal and spatial conceptualizations in Mandarin Chinese. First, apparently conflicting data have led to disagreement over whether temporal usages of the terms qian and hou, whose spatial meanings of ‘front’ and ‘back’ are often considered to be primary, are based on a canonical facing of Ego towards past or towards future. We argue that this issue can be resolved by positing invariant Sequential (S-)Time meanings of, respectively, earlier and later for these terms, with variable uses to refer to past and future events and perspectives in Deictic (D-)Time being secondary and contextually governed. Second, the question of which of the sagittal, vertical and lateral orientational axes are more fundamental in spatio-temporal language and cognition for Mandarin Chinese speakers has been much debated. We review these issues, propose solutions based on linguistic analysis and report five experiments to test the analysis. Our findings are consistent with our analysis of the primacy in Mandarin Chinese of the invariant S-time construal of the terms qian ‘front’ (=earlier) and hou ‘back’ (=later) over their contextually governed D-time interpretations as referring to pastness and futurity. We find also that the preferred lexicalization of temporal relations between events by Mandarin speakers involves the sagittal axis terms qian and hou, but this does not mean that this linguistic conceptualization is also imposed by speakers as a preference for the sagittal axis for non-linguistic representations of event sequences. Finally, our data indicate that the temporal meanings of qian and hou (earlier and later) are more salient for speakers than their spatial meanings (front and back) in motion event conceptualizations.

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.

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.