Pub Date : 2024-04-23DOI: 10.3390/languages9050152
Juli Cebrian, Joan C. Mora
The effect of cross-linguistic similarity on the development of target-like categories in a second or additional language is widely attested. Research also shows that second-language speakers may access both their native and the second-language lexicons when processing second-language speech. Forty-three Catalan learners of English performed a perceptual assimilation task evaluating the perceived similarity between English and Catalan vowels and also participated in a visual world eye-tracking experiment investigating between-language lexical competition. The focus of the study was the English vowel contrasts /iː/-/ɪ/ and /æ/-/ʌ/. The perceptual task confirmed that English /iː/ and /æ/were perceptually closer to native Catalan categories than English /ɪ/ and /ʌ/. The results of the spoken word recognition task indicated that learners experienced greater competition from native words when the target words contained English /iː/ and /æ/, illustrating a close link between the two types of tasks. However, differences in the magnitude of cross-language lexical competition were found to be only weakly related to learners’ degree of perceived similarity to native categories at an individual level. We conclude that online tasks provide a potentially effective method of assessing cross-linguistic similarity without the concerns inherent to more traditional offline approaches.
{"title":"Online Assessment of Cross-Linguistic Similarity as a Measure of L2 Perceptual Categorization Accuracy","authors":"Juli Cebrian, Joan C. Mora","doi":"10.3390/languages9050152","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9050152","url":null,"abstract":"The effect of cross-linguistic similarity on the development of target-like categories in a second or additional language is widely attested. Research also shows that second-language speakers may access both their native and the second-language lexicons when processing second-language speech. Forty-three Catalan learners of English performed a perceptual assimilation task evaluating the perceived similarity between English and Catalan vowels and also participated in a visual world eye-tracking experiment investigating between-language lexical competition. The focus of the study was the English vowel contrasts /iː/-/ɪ/ and /æ/-/ʌ/. The perceptual task confirmed that English /iː/ and /æ/were perceptually closer to native Catalan categories than English /ɪ/ and /ʌ/. The results of the spoken word recognition task indicated that learners experienced greater competition from native words when the target words contained English /iː/ and /æ/, illustrating a close link between the two types of tasks. However, differences in the magnitude of cross-language lexical competition were found to be only weakly related to learners’ degree of perceived similarity to native categories at an individual level. We conclude that online tasks provide a potentially effective method of assessing cross-linguistic similarity without the concerns inherent to more traditional offline approaches.","PeriodicalId":52329,"journal":{"name":"Languages","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-04-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140668791","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-04-23DOI: 10.3390/languages9050153
Hanna Lappalainen, Maija Saviniemi
This article examines the metalinguistic commentary on address practices in a Finnish autobiographical novel series, the 26-volume Iijoki-sarja ‘Iijoki Series’ (1971–1998) by Kalle Päätalo. Our aim is to show how the forms of address affect the protagonist and other characters. The study is anchored in previous sociopragmatic research on address and in folk linguistics. The analysis is based on searches in the digital corpus of the whole series by means of keywords related to forms of address. The analysis proceeds chronologically, from Kalle’s childhood and adolescence to his marriage and working life, including his social rise from a poor country boy to a full-time novel writer. Our results show that Kalle, the fictional protagonist of the series, mirrors his own and others’ choices in address practices throughout his life against the norms he has learned in his childhood. These choices are explained by the (relative) age, sex, status and regional background of the interlocutors. Metalinguistic comments reflect the characters’ social relations and changes in them during the protagonist’s linguistic biography. We argue that fiction can open up perceptions and contexts related to address practices that are not easily accessible by other methods or datasets.
{"title":"Metalinguistic Commentary on Forms of Address in a Finnish Autobiographical Novel Series","authors":"Hanna Lappalainen, Maija Saviniemi","doi":"10.3390/languages9050153","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9050153","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the metalinguistic commentary on address practices in a Finnish autobiographical novel series, the 26-volume Iijoki-sarja ‘Iijoki Series’ (1971–1998) by Kalle Päätalo. Our aim is to show how the forms of address affect the protagonist and other characters. The study is anchored in previous sociopragmatic research on address and in folk linguistics. The analysis is based on searches in the digital corpus of the whole series by means of keywords related to forms of address. The analysis proceeds chronologically, from Kalle’s childhood and adolescence to his marriage and working life, including his social rise from a poor country boy to a full-time novel writer. Our results show that Kalle, the fictional protagonist of the series, mirrors his own and others’ choices in address practices throughout his life against the norms he has learned in his childhood. These choices are explained by the (relative) age, sex, status and regional background of the interlocutors. Metalinguistic comments reflect the characters’ social relations and changes in them during the protagonist’s linguistic biography. We argue that fiction can open up perceptions and contexts related to address practices that are not easily accessible by other methods or datasets.","PeriodicalId":52329,"journal":{"name":"Languages","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-04-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140670498","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-04-21DOI: 10.3390/languages9040151
I. Olza
Cognitive and behavioral alignment plays a major role in simultaneous interpreting, the interpreter centrally monitoring and accommodating his/her behavior to that of the speaker-source. In parallel, the place of gesture in the interpreters’ practice, as well as its degree of convergence with respect to the gestures of the speaker-source, has been scarcely analyzed until very recently. The multimodal data for this study were collected under (quasi-)experimental conditions in a real court interpreting setting during spoken training exercises performed by two novice interpreters. In this exploratory study, the gestural performance of the interpreters, including their degree of gestural alignment towards the speaker-source, is analyzed and compared using a mixed-methods approach to a randomized sample of the recorded data. The analysis combines a basic descriptive quantification of body movements and a qualitative and comparative analysis of the gesture types performed by the speaker-source and the interpreters. The results show that, in spite of individual differences in interpreting fluency and gestural styles, both interpreters tend to align with the speaker-source’s gestural behavior in several ways, and thus a basic taxonomy of gestural convergence between the speaker-source and the interpreters is defined according to several criteria (mainly, gesture presence and gesture type). Our conclusions also allow us to formulate new research questions and hypotheses to be tested in future studies (e.g., types of gestures by the speaker-source that prompt a higher degree of alignment).
{"title":"Gestural Alignment in Spoken Simultaneous Interpreting: A Mixed-Methods Approach","authors":"I. Olza","doi":"10.3390/languages9040151","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9040151","url":null,"abstract":"Cognitive and behavioral alignment plays a major role in simultaneous interpreting, the interpreter centrally monitoring and accommodating his/her behavior to that of the speaker-source. In parallel, the place of gesture in the interpreters’ practice, as well as its degree of convergence with respect to the gestures of the speaker-source, has been scarcely analyzed until very recently. The multimodal data for this study were collected under (quasi-)experimental conditions in a real court interpreting setting during spoken training exercises performed by two novice interpreters. In this exploratory study, the gestural performance of the interpreters, including their degree of gestural alignment towards the speaker-source, is analyzed and compared using a mixed-methods approach to a randomized sample of the recorded data. The analysis combines a basic descriptive quantification of body movements and a qualitative and comparative analysis of the gesture types performed by the speaker-source and the interpreters. The results show that, in spite of individual differences in interpreting fluency and gestural styles, both interpreters tend to align with the speaker-source’s gestural behavior in several ways, and thus a basic taxonomy of gestural convergence between the speaker-source and the interpreters is defined according to several criteria (mainly, gesture presence and gesture type). Our conclusions also allow us to formulate new research questions and hypotheses to be tested in future studies (e.g., types of gestures by the speaker-source that prompt a higher degree of alignment).","PeriodicalId":52329,"journal":{"name":"Languages","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140678404","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-04-18DOI: 10.3390/languages9040149
Anaer Nulahan, Yvan Rose
In this paper, we discuss a child Kazakh speaker’s acquisition of English as her second language. In particular, we focus on this child’s development of the English segments |f, v, θ, ð, ɹ, ʃ, ʧ|, which are not part of the Kazakh phonological inventory of consonants. We begin with a longitudinal description of the patterns that the child displayed through her acquisition of each of these segments. The data reveal patterns that range from extremely rapid to rather slow and progressive acquisition. The data also reveal patterns that were unexpected at first, for example, the slow development of |ʧ| in syllable onsets, an affricate that occurs as a contextual allophone in syllable onsets in Kazakh. We analyze these patterns through the Phonological Interference hypothesis, which was recently extended into the Feature Redistribution and Recombination hypothesis. These models predict the transfer into the L2 of all of the relevant phonological features present within the learner’s first language and their recombination to represent segments present in the L2. We also discuss contexts where feature-based approaches to L2 acquisition fail to capture the full range of observations. In all such contexts, we show that the facts are modulated by phonetic characteristics of the speech sounds present in either the child’s L1 or her L2.
{"title":"Full Transfer and Segmental Emergence in the L2 Acquisition of Phonology: A Case Study","authors":"Anaer Nulahan, Yvan Rose","doi":"10.3390/languages9040149","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9040149","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, we discuss a child Kazakh speaker’s acquisition of English as her second language. In particular, we focus on this child’s development of the English segments |f, v, θ, ð, ɹ, ʃ, ʧ|, which are not part of the Kazakh phonological inventory of consonants. We begin with a longitudinal description of the patterns that the child displayed through her acquisition of each of these segments. The data reveal patterns that range from extremely rapid to rather slow and progressive acquisition. The data also reveal patterns that were unexpected at first, for example, the slow development of |ʧ| in syllable onsets, an affricate that occurs as a contextual allophone in syllable onsets in Kazakh. We analyze these patterns through the Phonological Interference hypothesis, which was recently extended into the Feature Redistribution and Recombination hypothesis. These models predict the transfer into the L2 of all of the relevant phonological features present within the learner’s first language and their recombination to represent segments present in the L2. We also discuss contexts where feature-based approaches to L2 acquisition fail to capture the full range of observations. In all such contexts, we show that the facts are modulated by phonetic characteristics of the speech sounds present in either the child’s L1 or her L2.","PeriodicalId":52329,"journal":{"name":"Languages","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140688701","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-04-18DOI: 10.3390/languages9040150
Margaret E. L. Renwick
Accounts of phonological contrast traditionally invoke a binary distinction between unpredictable lexically stored phonemes and contextually predictable allophones, whose patterning reveals speakers’ knowledge about their native language. This paper explores the complexity of contrasts among Italian mid vowels from a multifaceted perspective considering the lexicon, linguistic structure, usage, and regional variety. The Italian mid vowels are marginally contrastive due to a scarcity of minimal pairs alongside variation in phonetic realization. The analysis considers corpus data, which indicate that the marginal contrasts among front vowels vs. back vowels are driven by different sources and forces. Functional loads are low; while front /e ɛ/ have the weakest lexical contrast among all Italian vowels, back /o ɔ/ are separated by somewhat more minimal pairs. Among stressed front vowels, height is predicted by syllable structure and is context-dependent in some Italian varieties. Meanwhile, the height of back mid vowels is predicted by lexical frequency, in line with expectations of phonetic reduction in high-frequency contexts. For both front and back vowels, the phonetic factor of duration predicts vowel height, especially in closed syllables, suggesting its use for contrast enhancement. The results have implications for a proposed formalization of Italian mid vowel variation.
{"title":"Robustness and Complexity in Italian Mid Vowel Contrasts","authors":"Margaret E. L. Renwick","doi":"10.3390/languages9040150","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9040150","url":null,"abstract":"Accounts of phonological contrast traditionally invoke a binary distinction between unpredictable lexically stored phonemes and contextually predictable allophones, whose patterning reveals speakers’ knowledge about their native language. This paper explores the complexity of contrasts among Italian mid vowels from a multifaceted perspective considering the lexicon, linguistic structure, usage, and regional variety. The Italian mid vowels are marginally contrastive due to a scarcity of minimal pairs alongside variation in phonetic realization. The analysis considers corpus data, which indicate that the marginal contrasts among front vowels vs. back vowels are driven by different sources and forces. Functional loads are low; while front /e ɛ/ have the weakest lexical contrast among all Italian vowels, back /o ɔ/ are separated by somewhat more minimal pairs. Among stressed front vowels, height is predicted by syllable structure and is context-dependent in some Italian varieties. Meanwhile, the height of back mid vowels is predicted by lexical frequency, in line with expectations of phonetic reduction in high-frequency contexts. For both front and back vowels, the phonetic factor of duration predicts vowel height, especially in closed syllables, suggesting its use for contrast enhancement. The results have implications for a proposed formalization of Italian mid vowel variation.","PeriodicalId":52329,"journal":{"name":"Languages","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140687051","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-04-17DOI: 10.3390/languages9040148
Brandon Joseph Martínez
Tags, compared to other types of pragmatic markers (PMs), are typically considered as separate yet related phenomena and are usually differentiated by their syntactic positions and discourse functions, among other factors. The current work explores this differentiation utilizing 36 sociolinguistic interviews with Spanish-English bilinguals in southern Arizona, USA. Standard language variation and change (LVC) methodologies were used in the extraction, coding, and statistical analyses of this dataset (n = 591), with four PM variants identified for study through an exploratory methodology: the tags no and qué no and the discourse markers (DMs) you know and saber. The results of our analyses indicate that, while utterance position, self-reported gender, and length of residence were all significant in the multivariate analysis, discourse function was dropped from the statistical model. Therefore, we interpret this finding as an indication that functional differences between these two pragmatic resources have been levelled through grammaticalization, demonstrating that for Arizona Spanish, tags and DMs belong in the same functional category of PMs. Furthermore, an analysis of codeswitching behavior triggered by the incoming variant you know demonstrates that it is becoming incorporated into the Spanish pragmatic system, patterning similarly to its counterpart saber in terms of function and position, without attrition of the native variant.
{"title":"On the Functional Convergence of Pragmatic Markers in Arizona Spanish","authors":"Brandon Joseph Martínez","doi":"10.3390/languages9040148","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9040148","url":null,"abstract":"Tags, compared to other types of pragmatic markers (PMs), are typically considered as separate yet related phenomena and are usually differentiated by their syntactic positions and discourse functions, among other factors. The current work explores this differentiation utilizing 36 sociolinguistic interviews with Spanish-English bilinguals in southern Arizona, USA. Standard language variation and change (LVC) methodologies were used in the extraction, coding, and statistical analyses of this dataset (n = 591), with four PM variants identified for study through an exploratory methodology: the tags no and qué no and the discourse markers (DMs) you know and saber. The results of our analyses indicate that, while utterance position, self-reported gender, and length of residence were all significant in the multivariate analysis, discourse function was dropped from the statistical model. Therefore, we interpret this finding as an indication that functional differences between these two pragmatic resources have been levelled through grammaticalization, demonstrating that for Arizona Spanish, tags and DMs belong in the same functional category of PMs. Furthermore, an analysis of codeswitching behavior triggered by the incoming variant you know demonstrates that it is becoming incorporated into the Spanish pragmatic system, patterning similarly to its counterpart saber in terms of function and position, without attrition of the native variant.","PeriodicalId":52329,"journal":{"name":"Languages","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140692528","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-04-16DOI: 10.3390/languages9040146
C. Farkas
The emergence of symbolic gestures is a solid milestone in early childhood development. Interventions that intentionally promote them have contributed to children’s language, cognitive, and socioemotional development. However, these studies have mainly been conducted in the USA with middle-SES families, and such research has considerably decreased in recent years. This study aimed to assess the effects of an intentional intervention for promoting symbolic gestures in the expressive and comprehensive language of Chilean children who were aged 18 months. Sixty-nine highly psychosocially at-risk children were assessed at 5–9 months and then at 18 months. Teachers from half of the nurseries involved in the study received the intervention. The assessment included a report on the children’s gestural vocabulary, the CDI, and the language scale of BSID-III. The results showed that the children in the intervention group had a significantly greater gestural vocabulary at 18 months and they performed better in their expressive language than the children in the control group did. Additionally, this study aimed to analyze if this intervention affected children differentially in consideration of their language development (adequate and at-risk). The results showed that children with adequate development improved their language when they received the intervention, but those from the at-risk group did not. The implications of these results for the design of interventions at an early age are discussed while considering children from different sociocultural backgrounds and with different language development.
{"title":"An Early Intervention in Gestural Communication in Chilean Children from Psychosocially At-Risk Backgrounds and Its Impact on Language Skills at 18 Months Old","authors":"C. Farkas","doi":"10.3390/languages9040146","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9040146","url":null,"abstract":"The emergence of symbolic gestures is a solid milestone in early childhood development. Interventions that intentionally promote them have contributed to children’s language, cognitive, and socioemotional development. However, these studies have mainly been conducted in the USA with middle-SES families, and such research has considerably decreased in recent years. This study aimed to assess the effects of an intentional intervention for promoting symbolic gestures in the expressive and comprehensive language of Chilean children who were aged 18 months. Sixty-nine highly psychosocially at-risk children were assessed at 5–9 months and then at 18 months. Teachers from half of the nurseries involved in the study received the intervention. The assessment included a report on the children’s gestural vocabulary, the CDI, and the language scale of BSID-III. The results showed that the children in the intervention group had a significantly greater gestural vocabulary at 18 months and they performed better in their expressive language than the children in the control group did. Additionally, this study aimed to analyze if this intervention affected children differentially in consideration of their language development (adequate and at-risk). The results showed that children with adequate development improved their language when they received the intervention, but those from the at-risk group did not. The implications of these results for the design of interventions at an early age are discussed while considering children from different sociocultural backgrounds and with different language development.","PeriodicalId":52329,"journal":{"name":"Languages","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-04-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140697674","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-04-16DOI: 10.3390/languages9040147
J. Fazekas, Giovanni Sala, Julian Pine
Error-based learning theories of language acquisition are highly influential in language development research, yet the predictive learning mechanism they propose has proven difficult to test experimentally. Prime surprisal—the observation that structural priming is stronger following more surprising primes—has emerged as a promising methodology for resolving this issue as it tests a key prediction of error-based learning theories: surprising input leads to increased structure repetition as well as learning. However, as prime surprisal is a relatively new paradigm, it is worth evaluating how far this promise has been fulfilled. We have conducted a systemic review of PS studies to assess the strengths and limitations of existing approaches, with 13 contributions selected out of 66 search results. We found that alongside inconsistency in statistical power and how the level of surprisal is measured, the limited scope of current results cast doubt on whether PS can be used as a general tool to assess error-based learning. We suggest two key directions for future research: firstly, targeting the scope of the prime surprisal effect itself with reliable statistical power and appropriate surprisal measurements across a greater variety of languages and grammatical structures; and secondly, using the prime surprisal method as a tool to assess the scope of an error-based learning mechanism utilising conditions in which prime surprisal has been reliably established.
{"title":"Prime Surprisal as a Tool for Assessing Error-Based Learning Theories: A Systematic Review","authors":"J. Fazekas, Giovanni Sala, Julian Pine","doi":"10.3390/languages9040147","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9040147","url":null,"abstract":"Error-based learning theories of language acquisition are highly influential in language development research, yet the predictive learning mechanism they propose has proven difficult to test experimentally. Prime surprisal—the observation that structural priming is stronger following more surprising primes—has emerged as a promising methodology for resolving this issue as it tests a key prediction of error-based learning theories: surprising input leads to increased structure repetition as well as learning. However, as prime surprisal is a relatively new paradigm, it is worth evaluating how far this promise has been fulfilled. We have conducted a systemic review of PS studies to assess the strengths and limitations of existing approaches, with 13 contributions selected out of 66 search results. We found that alongside inconsistency in statistical power and how the level of surprisal is measured, the limited scope of current results cast doubt on whether PS can be used as a general tool to assess error-based learning. We suggest two key directions for future research: firstly, targeting the scope of the prime surprisal effect itself with reliable statistical power and appropriate surprisal measurements across a greater variety of languages and grammatical structures; and secondly, using the prime surprisal method as a tool to assess the scope of an error-based learning mechanism utilising conditions in which prime surprisal has been reliably established.","PeriodicalId":52329,"journal":{"name":"Languages","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-04-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140696076","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-04-15DOI: 10.3390/languages9040142
Esther L. Brown, Javier Rivas
Compared to neighboring Romance languages, Galician currently maintains a more ubiquitous usage of the construction [haber (present) + (de) + infinitive] as a future marker in variation with the periphrastic construction with ir ‘go’ and the morphological future. We examine this under-studied construction to gain a better understanding of Galician grammar and also contribute new data with which to consider diachronic change regarding the grammaticalization of the future from obligation markers. We conduct a variationist analysis of 1589 tokens of future forms in recorded conversations (CORILGA) in order to determine the frequency of usage, patterns of variation, linguistic conditioning and degree of grammaticalization of the periphrastic forms with haber and ir in contrast to the morphological variant. We find evidence to suggest that the periphrastic construction with haber is highly grammaticalized as a future marker and we identify factors of the production context that modulate the grammaticalization process.
与邻近的罗曼语相比,加利西亚语目前更普遍地使用[haber(现在时)+(de)+不定式]结构作为将来时标记,并与带有ir'go'和形态将来时的periphrastic结构进行变化。我们对这一研究不足的结构进行了研究,以更好地理解加利西亚语语法,并提供了新的数据,用于考虑义务标记将来时语法化的异时变化。我们对记录对话(CORILGA)中的 1589 个将来时形式标记进行了变异分析,以确定与形态变体相比,带有 haber 和 ir 的会话形式的使用频率、变异模式、语言条件和语法化程度。我们发现有证据表明,作为未来标记,haber 的短语结构语法化程度很高,我们还确定了影响语法化过程的生产语境因素。
{"title":"Variant Choices of Future Time Reference in Galician: The Grammaticalization of [haber (de) + infinitive] as a Window to Diachronic Change","authors":"Esther L. Brown, Javier Rivas","doi":"10.3390/languages9040142","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9040142","url":null,"abstract":"Compared to neighboring Romance languages, Galician currently maintains a more ubiquitous usage of the construction [haber (present) + (de) + infinitive] as a future marker in variation with the periphrastic construction with ir ‘go’ and the morphological future. We examine this under-studied construction to gain a better understanding of Galician grammar and also contribute new data with which to consider diachronic change regarding the grammaticalization of the future from obligation markers. We conduct a variationist analysis of 1589 tokens of future forms in recorded conversations (CORILGA) in order to determine the frequency of usage, patterns of variation, linguistic conditioning and degree of grammaticalization of the periphrastic forms with haber and ir in contrast to the morphological variant. We find evidence to suggest that the periphrastic construction with haber is highly grammaticalized as a future marker and we identify factors of the production context that modulate the grammaticalization process.","PeriodicalId":52329,"journal":{"name":"Languages","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140700079","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-04-15DOI: 10.3390/languages9040145
A. M. Cestero Mancera, Mercedes Díez-Prados
This study sheds light on the types and frequencies of kinesic signs used in business pitches by entrepreneurs in Spanish and English, as well as the functions these nonverbal signs fulfil to contribute to the persuasiveness of their presentations. The corpus consists of 20 pitches (10 in each language) from two equivalent TV programs (the reality shows Dragons’ Den and Tu Oportunidad from the UK and Spain, respectively). A specific method of analysis previously developed by Cestero Mancera is used to identify signs in an inductive, qualitative way that allows us to apply a quantitative methodology to distinguish among the different subpopulations of the subjects studied (male and female presenters in Spanish and English presentations). The results show that facial gesturing is the most frequent type used by all presenters, although speakers of each language seem to have diverse preferences for the rest of the signs (head, hand and other body gestures). Kinesic signs apparently display the same pragmatic functions in Spanish and English, although they are more frequently used in Spanish (63.78% of the 784 signs found) than English (36.22%). Gender may be considered an influential factor when observed within the same language but not as a variable; furthermore, gender preferences are reversed when associated with language (i.e., female Spanish presentations display the most signs, while English presentations by females display the least; male presentations are in between these, there being more in Spanish than in English presentations).
{"title":"Use and Function of Gestures in Persuasive Business Communication: A Contrastive Study between Spanish and English","authors":"A. M. Cestero Mancera, Mercedes Díez-Prados","doi":"10.3390/languages9040145","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9040145","url":null,"abstract":"This study sheds light on the types and frequencies of kinesic signs used in business pitches by entrepreneurs in Spanish and English, as well as the functions these nonverbal signs fulfil to contribute to the persuasiveness of their presentations. The corpus consists of 20 pitches (10 in each language) from two equivalent TV programs (the reality shows Dragons’ Den and Tu Oportunidad from the UK and Spain, respectively). A specific method of analysis previously developed by Cestero Mancera is used to identify signs in an inductive, qualitative way that allows us to apply a quantitative methodology to distinguish among the different subpopulations of the subjects studied (male and female presenters in Spanish and English presentations). The results show that facial gesturing is the most frequent type used by all presenters, although speakers of each language seem to have diverse preferences for the rest of the signs (head, hand and other body gestures). Kinesic signs apparently display the same pragmatic functions in Spanish and English, although they are more frequently used in Spanish (63.78% of the 784 signs found) than English (36.22%). Gender may be considered an influential factor when observed within the same language but not as a variable; furthermore, gender preferences are reversed when associated with language (i.e., female Spanish presentations display the most signs, while English presentations by females display the least; male presentations are in between these, there being more in Spanish than in English presentations).","PeriodicalId":52329,"journal":{"name":"Languages","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140699838","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}