Pub Date : 2024-04-04DOI: 10.1515/lingvan-2023-0087
Michelle Troberg
The present study examines the diachronic consequence of a class of words that are superficially intransitive but that often have more than one possible underlying representation. We consider the hypothesis that structural underspecification and structure-based economy constraints on processing may drive a well-studied syntactic change in medieval French: the loss of directional/aspectual verb particles. A corpus-based approach demonstrates that, despite the prominence of Old French verb particles in the expression of motion events, they frequently occur in underspecified contexts for which a prepositional parse involving an implicit object is favored. The net result is very sparse unambiguous evidence for the conservative Old French grammar that underlies the particles.
{"title":"A diachronic consequence of intransitivity: structural underspecification and processing biases in Old French","authors":"Michelle Troberg","doi":"10.1515/lingvan-2023-0087","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2023-0087","url":null,"abstract":"The present study examines the diachronic consequence of a class of words that are superficially intransitive but that often have more than one possible underlying representation. We consider the hypothesis that structural underspecification and structure-based economy constraints on processing may drive a well-studied syntactic change in medieval French: the loss of directional/aspectual verb particles. A corpus-based approach demonstrates that, despite the prominence of Old French verb particles in the expression of motion events, they frequently occur in underspecified contexts for which a prepositional parse involving an implicit object is favored. The net result is very sparse unambiguous evidence for the conservative Old French grammar that underlies the particles.","PeriodicalId":55960,"journal":{"name":"Linguistics Vanguard","volume":"39 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140574447","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-04-01DOI: 10.1515/lingvan-2023-0110
Myung Hye Yoo
Previous research has demonstrated that dependencies between reflexives and their licensors resist attraction effects from structurally illicit but feature-matching attractors. However, mechanisms guiding reflexive licensing in control clauses remain insufficiently explored. To address this gap, this paper examines whether reflexives in adjunct control clauses primarily seek their licensors within the same clause (i.e., from the null subject) or access noun phrases in higher clauses by probing attraction effects from attractors in the higher clauses. The licensing of the null subject is dependent on the animacy requirement of the main clause subject. Therefore, if the reflexive searches for its licensor from the higher clause, the gender manipulation of noun phrases in the higher clause should exclusively impact the reflexive processing, not the null subject licensing. A self-paced reading task reveals that the licensing of reflexives is sensitive to attraction effects, but only when the overall gender feature of the main clause subject is complex. This finding suggests that reflexives in adjunct control clauses do not exclusively rely on the null subject as a licensor; instead, they extend their search beyond the local domain of the adjunct clause, using gender cues. The observed selective attraction effects support the notion that the distinctiveness of the main clause subject matters.
{"title":"Processing reflexives in adjunct control: an exploration of attraction effects","authors":"Myung Hye Yoo","doi":"10.1515/lingvan-2023-0110","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2023-0110","url":null,"abstract":"Previous research has demonstrated that dependencies between reflexives and their licensors resist attraction effects from structurally illicit but feature-matching attractors. However, mechanisms guiding reflexive licensing in control clauses remain insufficiently explored. To address this gap, this paper examines whether reflexives in adjunct control clauses primarily seek their licensors within the same clause (i.e., from the null subject) or access noun phrases in higher clauses by probing attraction effects from attractors in the higher clauses. The licensing of the null subject is dependent on the animacy requirement of the main clause subject. Therefore, if the reflexive searches for its licensor from the higher clause, the gender manipulation of noun phrases in the higher clause should exclusively impact the reflexive processing, not the null subject licensing. A self-paced reading task reveals that the licensing of reflexives is sensitive to attraction effects, but only when the overall gender feature of the main clause subject is complex. This finding suggests that reflexives in adjunct control clauses do not exclusively rely on the null subject as a licensor; instead, they extend their search beyond the local domain of the adjunct clause, using gender cues. The observed selective attraction effects support the notion that the distinctiveness of the main clause subject matters.","PeriodicalId":55960,"journal":{"name":"Linguistics Vanguard","volume":"39 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140574608","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-03-22DOI: 10.1515/lingvan-2022-0140
Katharina Ehret
Against the backdrop of the sociolinguistic-typological complexity debate which is all about measuring, comparing and explaining language complexity, this article investigates how Kolmogorov-based information theoretic complexity relates to linguistic structures. Specifically, the linguistic structure of text which has been compressed with the text compression algorithm gzip will be analysed. One implementation of Kolmogorov-based language complexity is the compression technique (Ehret, Katharina. 2021. An information-theoretic view on language complexity and register variation: Compressing naturalistic corpus data. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory (2). 383–410) which employs gzip to measure language complexity in naturalistic text samples. In order to determine what type of structures compression algorithms like gzip capture, and how these compressed strings relate to linguistically meaningful structures, gzip’s lexicon output is retrieved and subjected to an in-depth analysis. As a case study, the compression technique is applied to the English version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its lexicon output is extracted. The results show that gzip-like algorithms sometimes capture linguistically meaningful structures which coincide, for instance, with lexical words or suffixes. However, many compressed sequences are linguistically unintelligible or simply do not coincide with any linguistically meaningful structures. Compression algorithms like gzip thus crucially capture purely formal structural regularities. As a consequence, information theoretic complexity, in this context, is a linguistically agnostic, purely structural measure of regularity and redundancy in texts.
{"title":"Through the compression glass: language complexity and the linguistic structure of compressed strings","authors":"Katharina Ehret","doi":"10.1515/lingvan-2022-0140","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2022-0140","url":null,"abstract":"Against the backdrop of the sociolinguistic-typological complexity debate which is all about measuring, comparing and explaining language complexity, this article investigates how Kolmogorov-based information theoretic complexity relates to linguistic structures. Specifically, the linguistic structure of text which has been compressed with the text compression algorithm <jats:italic>gzip</jats:italic> will be analysed. One implementation of Kolmogorov-based language complexity is the compression technique (Ehret, Katharina. 2021. An information-theoretic view on language complexity and register variation: Compressing naturalistic corpus data. <jats:italic>Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory</jats:italic> (2). 383–410) which employs <jats:italic>gzip</jats:italic> to measure language complexity in naturalistic text samples. In order to determine what type of structures compression algorithms like <jats:italic>gzip</jats:italic> capture, and how these compressed strings relate to linguistically meaningful structures, <jats:italic>gzip</jats:italic>’s lexicon output is retrieved and subjected to an in-depth analysis. As a case study, the compression technique is applied to the English version of Lewis Carroll’s <jats:italic>Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland</jats:italic> and its lexicon output is extracted. The results show that <jats:italic>gzip</jats:italic>-like algorithms sometimes capture linguistically meaningful structures which coincide, for instance, with lexical words or suffixes. However, many compressed sequences are linguistically unintelligible or simply do not coincide with any linguistically meaningful structures. Compression algorithms like <jats:italic>gzip</jats:italic> thus crucially capture purely formal structural regularities. As a consequence, information theoretic complexity, in this context, is a linguistically agnostic, purely structural measure of regularity and redundancy in texts.","PeriodicalId":55960,"journal":{"name":"Linguistics Vanguard","volume":"304 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140198802","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-03-22DOI: 10.1515/lingvan-2023-0088
Hendrik De Smet, Marlieke Shaw
When words are transferred from a source language into a target language, they may become conventionalized and appear to fully adopt target-language morphosyntactic behavior. Such words are traditionally regarded as borrowings. Even borrowings, however, are subject to probabilistic usage constraints, which we refer to as “accommodation biases” and which distinguish borrowings from native vocabulary. A case study is presented on accommodation biases in French-based verbs and adjectives in Middle English, showing that accommodation biases are robustly attested and can be diachronically persistent over long periods. In structural terms, accommodation biases resemble some of the familiar morphosyntactic constraints on code-switching. Combining the empirical evidence with theoretical argumentation, it is proposed that accommodation biases reflect a processing cost that is specifically associated with transferred items, and that arises from dual-language activation in bilingual speakers. Thus, accommodation biases indicate that even conventionalized borrowings may be more akin to code-switches than hitherto assumed.
{"title":"Missing link: code-switches, borrowings, and accommodation biases","authors":"Hendrik De Smet, Marlieke Shaw","doi":"10.1515/lingvan-2023-0088","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2023-0088","url":null,"abstract":"When words are transferred from a source language into a target language, they may become conventionalized and appear to fully adopt target-language morphosyntactic behavior. Such words are traditionally regarded as borrowings. Even borrowings, however, are subject to probabilistic usage constraints, which we refer to as “accommodation biases” and which distinguish borrowings from native vocabulary. A case study is presented on accommodation biases in French-based verbs and adjectives in Middle English, showing that accommodation biases are robustly attested and can be diachronically persistent over long periods. In structural terms, accommodation biases resemble some of the familiar morphosyntactic constraints on code-switching. Combining the empirical evidence with theoretical argumentation, it is proposed that accommodation biases reflect a processing cost that is specifically associated with transferred items, and that arises from dual-language activation in bilingual speakers. Thus, accommodation biases indicate that even conventionalized borrowings may be more akin to code-switches than hitherto assumed.","PeriodicalId":55960,"journal":{"name":"Linguistics Vanguard","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140198851","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-03-20DOI: 10.1515/lingvan-2023-0010
Borja Herce, Marc Allassonnière-Tang
Romance stem alternations have been argued to represent exclusively morphological objects (or “morphomes”) independent from semantic and syntactic categories. This conclusion has been based on feature-value analyses of the inflected forms, and definitions of natural classes that are theoretically driven and about which no consensus exists. Individual examples of morphomes are thus frequently challenged, while their autonomously morphological nature has never been tested quantitatively or experimentally. This is the purpose of the present study. We use context-based embeddings to explore the semantic profile of Spanish verb stem alternations. At the paradigmatic level, our findings suggest that Spanish morphomes’ cells are characterized by significantly above-chance distributional-semantic similarity. At the lexical level, similarly, verbs that show more similar patterns of alternation have also been found to be closer in meaning. Both of these findings suggest that these structures may have an extramorphological function. Using gradient distributional-semantic similarity offers a way to objectively assess the degree of (un)naturalness of a set of forms and meanings, something which has been lacking from most discussions on the structure of features and the architecture of paradigms.
{"title":"The meaning of morphomes: distributional semantics of Spanish stem alternations","authors":"Borja Herce, Marc Allassonnière-Tang","doi":"10.1515/lingvan-2023-0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2023-0010","url":null,"abstract":"Romance stem alternations have been argued to represent exclusively morphological objects (or “morphomes”) independent from semantic and syntactic categories. This conclusion has been based on feature-value analyses of the inflected forms, and definitions of natural classes that are theoretically driven and about which no consensus exists. Individual examples of morphomes are thus frequently challenged, while their autonomously morphological nature has never been tested quantitatively or experimentally. This is the purpose of the present study. We use context-based embeddings to explore the semantic profile of Spanish verb stem alternations. At the paradigmatic level, our findings suggest that Spanish morphomes’ cells are characterized by significantly above-chance distributional-semantic similarity. At the lexical level, similarly, verbs that show more similar patterns of alternation have also been found to be closer in meaning. Both of these findings suggest that these structures may have an extramorphological function. Using gradient distributional-semantic similarity offers a way to objectively assess the degree of (un)naturalness of a set of forms and meanings, something which has been lacking from most discussions on the structure of features and the architecture of paradigms.","PeriodicalId":55960,"journal":{"name":"Linguistics Vanguard","volume":"22 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140201834","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-03-19DOI: 10.1515/lingvan-2023-0056
Alexander Andrason, Onsho Mulugeta, Shimelis Mazengia
This article studies the category of conative animal calls (CACs) in a Cushitic variety – Macha Oromo (Ethiopia). The authors analyze the function (pragma-semantics) and form (phonetics and morphology) of 52 CACs collected during fieldwork activities and conclude the following: the category of CACs in Macha Orono largely complies with the prototype of a CAC posited recently in literature. Moreover, Macha Oromo data suggest a few novel generalizations (a close relationship between summonses and onomatopoeias, and between dispersals and motion-inciting/sustaining directionals, as well as a general preference for close I/U vowels) and raise a question regarding the validity of the hierarchy of semantic types of CACs proposed in some studies.
{"title":"Conative animal calls in Macha Oromo: function and form","authors":"Alexander Andrason, Onsho Mulugeta, Shimelis Mazengia","doi":"10.1515/lingvan-2023-0056","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2023-0056","url":null,"abstract":"This article studies the category of conative animal calls (CACs) in a Cushitic variety – Macha Oromo (Ethiopia). The authors analyze the function (pragma-semantics) and form (phonetics and morphology) of 52 CACs collected during fieldwork activities and conclude the following: the category of CACs in Macha Orono largely complies with the prototype of a CAC posited recently in literature. Moreover, Macha Oromo data suggest a few novel generalizations (a close relationship between summonses and onomatopoeias, and between dispersals and motion-inciting/sustaining directionals, as well as a general preference for close I/U vowels) and raise a question regarding the validity of the hierarchy of semantic types of CACs proposed in some studies.","PeriodicalId":55960,"journal":{"name":"Linguistics Vanguard","volume":"119 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140171210","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-03-18DOI: 10.1515/lingvan-2022-0064
Benjamin Storme, Laura Delaloye Saillen
A growing body of research shows that readers and listeners are biased by the grammatical gender of a noun when making inferences about the gender of its referent. This result is central in debates about gender-fair language but has mostly been established using masculine generics. This paper presents two preregistered studies on French that aim to replicate this result but using a lesser-studied type of noun: generic hybrid nouns. These nouns can refer to both male and female individuals but are either masculine or feminine, depending on the noun (e.g. un talent ‘a talent’ and une vedette ‘a star’). The availability of both genders for hybrid nouns allows for a more comprehensive test of the effect of grammatical gender than permitted by masculine generics. Overall, the paper replicates the role of grammatical biases in gender inferences, with masculine hybrid nouns being judged as more likely to refer to male individuals as compared to feminine hybrid nouns. However the results did not reveal a symmetric bias for feminine nouns, which were interpreted as gender-neutral. But this latter result should be interpreted with caution as it could be due to uncontrolled effects of gender stereotypes coming from the specific stimuli used in the study.
越来越多的研究表明，读者和听众在推断指代对象的性别时，会受到名词语法性别的影响。这一结果在有关性别公平语言的争论中占据核心地位，但大部分研究都是在使用阳性属词的情况下得出的。本文介绍了两项预先登记的法语研究，旨在使用一种研究较少的名词类型：通用混合名词来复制这一结果。这些名词既可指男性个体，也可指女性个体，但根据名词的不同，有的为阳性，有的为阴性（如 un talent "天才 "和 une vedette "明星"）。混合名词同时具有两种性别，这使得我们可以比阳性属词更全面地检验语法性别的影响。总体而言，本文重复了语法偏差在性别推断中的作用，与阴性混合名词相比，阳性混合名词被判断为更有可能指代男性个体。然而，结果并没有显示出女性名词的对称性偏误，女性名词被解释为性别中性。但对后一结果的解释应谨慎，因为这可能是由于研究中使用的特定刺激物所产生的性别刻板印象的不可控影响。
{"title":"Effects of grammatical gender on gender inferences: Evidence from French hybrid nouns","authors":"Benjamin Storme, Laura Delaloye Saillen","doi":"10.1515/lingvan-2022-0064","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2022-0064","url":null,"abstract":"A growing body of research shows that readers and listeners are biased by the grammatical gender of a noun when making inferences about the gender of its referent. This result is central in debates about gender-fair language but has mostly been established using masculine generics. This paper presents two preregistered studies on French that aim to replicate this result but using a lesser-studied type of noun: generic hybrid nouns. These nouns can refer to both male and female individuals but are either masculine or feminine, depending on the noun (e.g. <jats:italic>un talent</jats:italic> ‘a talent’ and <jats:italic>une vedette</jats:italic> ‘a star’). The availability of both genders for hybrid nouns allows for a more comprehensive test of the effect of grammatical gender than permitted by masculine generics. Overall, the paper replicates the role of grammatical biases in gender inferences, with masculine hybrid nouns being judged as more likely to refer to male individuals as compared to feminine hybrid nouns. However the results did not reveal a symmetric bias for feminine nouns, which were interpreted as gender-neutral. But this latter result should be interpreted with caution as it could be due to uncontrolled effects of gender stereotypes coming from the specific stimuli used in the study.","PeriodicalId":55960,"journal":{"name":"Linguistics Vanguard","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140171099","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-03-18DOI: 10.1515/lingvan-2023-0164
Michael Percillier, Yela Schauwecker
This special issue focuses on the interaction of the disciplines of historical linguistics and psycholinguistics to obtain new insights into which cognitive factors are potentially relevant for language change. The contributions address questions related to the cognitive mechanisms at play, their evidence in historical data, who the agents of change may be, which experimental methods can be implemented to investigate language change, and how language change can be theoretically modeled in terms of cognitive mechanisms. In this introductory article, we first outline our aims by describing the call for papers and the workshop which laid the foundation for this special issue. We then provide a state of the art on the integration of research on cognitive mechanisms and language change before introducing the contributions and listing which of the central questions they address.
{"title":"Cognitive mechanisms driving (contact-induced) language change: introduction to the special issue","authors":"Michael Percillier, Yela Schauwecker","doi":"10.1515/lingvan-2023-0164","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2023-0164","url":null,"abstract":"This special issue focuses on the interaction of the disciplines of historical linguistics and psycholinguistics to obtain new insights into which cognitive factors are potentially relevant for language change. The contributions address questions related to the cognitive mechanisms at play, their evidence in historical data, who the agents of change may be, which experimental methods can be implemented to investigate language change, and how language change can be theoretically modeled in terms of cognitive mechanisms. In this introductory article, we first outline our aims by describing the call for papers and the workshop which laid the foundation for this special issue. We then provide a state of the art on the integration of research on cognitive mechanisms and language change before introducing the contributions and listing which of the central questions they address.","PeriodicalId":55960,"journal":{"name":"Linguistics Vanguard","volume":"120 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140171376","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-03-18DOI: 10.1515/lingvan-2023-0089
John A. Hawkins, Luna Filipović
Contact between languages has become increasingly recognized as a major source of historical change, as linguistic properties are introduced from one language into another. Yet contact does not necessarily lead to such changes. In fact, arguably most of the properties that contrast between two languages in contact at a given place and time do not change. This paper argues that historical and contact linguistics should now look more systematically at different kinds of bilingualism rather than contact per se and should incorporate recent sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic findings from this literature, since these can help us understand both when change occurs and when it does not. In this context we build on the general model of bilingualism, CASP (short for “complex adaptive system principles”), proposed by Filipović and Hawkins and explore its predictions for whether and when changes will occur in one or the other language of a bilingual. In the event that the relevant speech community comprises monolinguals in addition to bilinguals, these changes may then spread to the wider community when social and demographic circumstances favor this. The paper gives illustrative data supporting CASP’s predictions for change in both language usage and grammar among bilinguals.
{"title":"Bilingualism-induced language change: what can change, when, and why?","authors":"John A. Hawkins, Luna Filipović","doi":"10.1515/lingvan-2023-0089","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2023-0089","url":null,"abstract":"Contact between languages has become increasingly recognized as a major source of historical change, as linguistic properties are introduced from one language into another. Yet contact does not necessarily lead to such changes. In fact, arguably most of the properties that contrast between two languages in contact at a given place and time do not change. This paper argues that historical and contact linguistics should now look more systematically at different kinds of bilingualism rather than contact per se and should incorporate recent sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic findings from this literature, since these can help us understand both when change occurs and when it does not. In this context we build on the general model of bilingualism, CASP (short for “complex adaptive system principles”), proposed by Filipović and Hawkins and explore its predictions for whether and when changes will occur in one or the other language of a bilingual. In the event that the relevant speech community comprises monolinguals in addition to bilinguals, these changes may then spread to the wider community when social and demographic circumstances favor this. The paper gives illustrative data supporting CASP’s predictions for change in both language usage and grammar among bilinguals.","PeriodicalId":55960,"journal":{"name":"Linguistics Vanguard","volume":"119 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140171100","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-03-15DOI: 10.1515/lingvan-2023-0106
Quirin Würschinger, Barbara McGillivray
COVID-19 has triggered innovations in science and society globally, leading to the emergence or establishment of formal neologisms such as infodemic and working from home (WFH). While previous work on COVID-related lexical innovation has focused on such formal neologisms, this paper uses data from Reddit to study semantic neologisms like lockdown and mask, which have changed in meaning due to the pandemic. First, we identify words that have undergone meaning changes since the start of the pandemic. Our approach, based on word embeddings, successfully detects a variety of COVID-related terms that dominate the resulting list of semantic neologisms. Next, we generate community-specific semantic representations for the communities r/Coronavirus and r/conspiracy, which are both highly engaged in COVID-related discourse. We analyse socio-semantic variation along two dimensions: an evaluative dimension, based on amelioration/pejorization, and the loyalty/betrayal dimension of Moral Foundations Theory. Our findings reveal that the detected semantic neologisms exhibit more negative and betrayal-related associations in r/conspiracy, a subreddit critical of COVID-related sociopolitical measures. Mapping the community-specific representations for the term vaccines on a shared semantic space confirms these differences and reveals more fine-grained denotational and connotational differences between the two communities.
COVID-19 在全球范围内引发了科学和社会的创新，导致了诸如 infodemic 和 working from home (WFH) 等正式新词的出现或确立。以往有关 COVID 相关词汇创新的研究主要集中在此类正式新词上，而本文则利用 Reddit 上的数据研究了锁定（lockdown）和面具（mask）等语义新词，这些词的含义因大流行而发生了变化。首先，我们识别了自大流行病开始以来意义发生变化的词语。我们基于词嵌入的方法成功地检测出了各种与 COVID 相关的词汇，这些词汇在由此产生的语义新词列表中占据了主导地位。接下来，我们为高度参与 COVID 相关讨论的 r/Coronavirus 和 r/conspiracy 社区生成了特定社区的语义表征。我们从两个维度分析了社会语义变异：基于改善/贬低的评价维度和道德基础理论的忠诚/背叛维度。我们的研究结果表明，在对 COVID 相关社会政治措施持批评态度的 r/conspiracy 子reddit 中，检测到的语义新词表现出更多与背叛相关的负面关联。在共享语义空间上绘制疫苗一词的特定社区表征图证实了这些差异，并揭示了两个社区在指称和内涵方面更细微的差异。
{"title":"Semantic change and socio-semantic variation: the case of COVID-related neologisms on Reddit","authors":"Quirin Würschinger, Barbara McGillivray","doi":"10.1515/lingvan-2023-0106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2023-0106","url":null,"abstract":"COVID-19 has triggered innovations in science and society globally, leading to the emergence or establishment of formal neologisms such as <jats:italic>infodemic</jats:italic> and <jats:italic>working from home</jats:italic> (<jats:italic>WFH</jats:italic>). While previous work on COVID-related lexical innovation has focused on such formal neologisms, this paper uses data from Reddit to study semantic neologisms like <jats:italic>lockdown</jats:italic> and <jats:italic>mask</jats:italic>, which have changed in meaning due to the pandemic. First, we identify words that have undergone meaning changes since the start of the pandemic. Our approach, based on word embeddings, successfully detects a variety of COVID-related terms that dominate the resulting list of semantic neologisms. Next, we generate community-specific semantic representations for the communities <jats:italic>r/Coronavirus</jats:italic> and <jats:italic>r/conspiracy</jats:italic>, which are both highly engaged in COVID-related discourse. We analyse socio-semantic variation along two dimensions: an evaluative dimension, based on amelioration/pejorization, and the loyalty/betrayal dimension of Moral Foundations Theory. Our findings reveal that the detected semantic neologisms exhibit more negative and betrayal-related associations in <jats:italic>r/conspiracy</jats:italic>, a subreddit critical of COVID-related sociopolitical measures. Mapping the community-specific representations for the term <jats:italic>vaccines</jats:italic> on a shared semantic space confirms these differences and reveals more fine-grained denotational and connotational differences between the two communities.","PeriodicalId":55960,"journal":{"name":"Linguistics Vanguard","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140150345","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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