LinguaPub Date : 2025-01-01DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2024.103841
Cliff Goddard
{"title":"The conceptual building blocks of kinship terminologies","authors":"Cliff Goddard","doi":"10.1016/j.lingua.2024.103841","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.lingua.2024.103841","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Kinship terminology was once a major focus of structural linguistics, yet the arcane symbols and notations of structural linguistics cannot plausibly represent the cognitive realities of speakers, and therefore hold little appeal for today’s cognitive linguists. This study seeks to put kinship semantics back on the cognitive linguistics agenda. It demonstrates that the emic-conceptual meanings of kinship terms can be successfully modelled using ordinary language words which make sense to the people concerned; and, furthermore, that this approach supports systematic cross-linguistic comparison. The study represents a re-boot of Wierzbicka’s “ordinary-language model” of kinship terminologies, retaining birth and conception as prototypes while shifting the model into the realm of the social. Revised explications of ‘mother’ and ‘father’ take account of adoption and similar practices. Original explications are proposed for ‘wife’ and ‘husband’. While acknowledging cultural elaborations, it is argued that these four concepts (‘mother’, ‘father’, ‘husband’, ‘wife’) may be substantially shared among the world’s linguacultures. With these basic conceptual building blocks in hand, it is demonstrated, using examples from English, Chinese, and Pitjantjatjara, that diverse language-specific kinship concepts can be built up in a systematic fashion. The study overviews a distinctive cognitive linguistic approach to the conceptual semantics of kin terms.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47955,"journal":{"name":"Lingua","volume":"313 ","pages":"Article 103841"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143092929","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
LinguaPub Date : 2025-01-01DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2024.103852
Tory Sampson , Rachel I. Mayberry
{"title":"Nonverbal predication and SELF-assertive truth-conditionality in American Sign Language","authors":"Tory Sampson , Rachel I. Mayberry","doi":"10.1016/j.lingua.2024.103852","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.lingua.2024.103852","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Our understanding of nonverbal predication wherein canonically non-verbal phrases such as nouns and adjectives are predicated in American Sign Language (ASL) is fragmentary. ASL has been reported to make extensive use of the null copula in nominal predication, but this claim was countered by recent evidence of an overt copula in the form of the sign SELF. There is also scant description and evidence regarding the structure of adjectival predication in ASL. Thus, we undertake two Likert-scale experiments investigating the relationship between several signs serving as potential copulas (SELF, IX, and null) and a variety of non-verbal predicates including nouns and adjectives in ASL. We find that SELF appears to be the primary means of expressing nominal predication as a copula in contrast to IX and null. As for adjectival predication, there is a preference to use the copular SELF with adjectives exhibiting more permanent properties such as DEAF and TALL. Paired with the finding that all adjectives in ASL appear to be predicative, we propose that the copular SELF carries an additional semantic contribution of grammatical modality. Signers appear to use it to assert truth and certainty, which is a novel finding in sign languages. We conclude that this grammaticalization process in sign languages parallels the account that lexical information historically expressed using non-manual markers eventually takes on a manual form.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47955,"journal":{"name":"Lingua","volume":"314 ","pages":"Article 103852"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143180585","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
LinguaPub Date : 2025-01-01DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2024.103855
Haidee Kotze , Melanie Ann Law Favo
{"title":"Prescriptivism, editing, and morphosyntactic variation in written South African Englishes: A case study of relative who, that and which","authors":"Haidee Kotze , Melanie Ann Law Favo","doi":"10.1016/j.lingua.2024.103855","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.lingua.2024.103855","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In variationist research there is little reflection on the multiple agents involved in written textual production, whose distinct linguistic and normative representations influence the linguistic composition of a text. In this study, we ask where the uniformity and prescription-oriented nature of published written language originate – directly from writers, or from those responsible for editorial intervention. Focusing on the alternation between <em>who</em>, <em>that</em> and <em>which</em> in subject restrictive relative clauses with animate antecedents, we analyse patterns of variation in unedited written texts and their edited counterparts, across three subvarieties of South African English. We find that, generally, in the unedited writing of the subvarieties the distribution of relativisers patterns similarly to other varieties of English, reflecting the stability of the English relativisation system. However, in line with previous findings on New Englishes, there are lower-level divergences in the subvarieties investigated – and, in general, higher proportional frequencies of <em>that</em> and <em>which</em> with animate antecedents in restrictive relative clauses in subject position than is generally the case in previous studies that have focused on written language. Where a variety tends towards less prototypical usage, editorial interventions at times mask this by amending usage towards more prototypical usage. However, the patterns of intervention are not always consistent. The linguistic background of the editor in relation to that of the author (i.e. whether they are users of the same subvariety of South African English or not) appears to be one of the factors conditioning editorial intervention.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47955,"journal":{"name":"Lingua","volume":"314 ","pages":"Article 103855"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143180586","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
LinguaPub Date : 2025-01-01DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2024.103872
Hui Kang , Yaxin Zhang
{"title":"Socio-cognitive influences on translating forward causal connectives: A multivariate analysis of English translations of Tao Te Ching","authors":"Hui Kang , Yaxin Zhang","doi":"10.1016/j.lingua.2024.103872","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.lingua.2024.103872","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Building on previous research that has primarily focused on explicitation and implicitation in the translation of causal connectives, this study investigated the socio-cognitive imprints that influence the translation of these seemingly neutral function words. We examined the translated expressions of forward causal connectives, which signify both objective (motivator-result) and subjective (support-proposition) inter-clausal relationships, in nine English translations of the ancient Chinese classic <em>Tao Te Ching</em>. Using multivariate analyses, including cluster analysis, factor analysis, and correspondence analysis, we found that translators’ decisions might be influenced by their reasoning traditions (inductive vs. deductive) and the inherent properties of their native languages. Moreover, personal experiences affect these translations within a broader sociocultural context. Viewed through the lens of function word translation, our findings support and extend the principles of Social Cognitive Theory, highlighting the pervasive impact of sociocultural dynamics on translation practices.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47955,"journal":{"name":"Lingua","volume":"314 ","pages":"Article 103872"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143180581","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
LinguaPub Date : 2025-01-01DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2024.103854
Tatiana Pashkova, Shanley E.M. Allen
{"title":"Explicitness of referring expressions in heritage speakers’ majority English","authors":"Tatiana Pashkova, Shanley E.M. Allen","doi":"10.1016/j.lingua.2024.103854","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.lingua.2024.103854","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Several studies on heritage speakers’ (HSs) majority language (ML) have indicated that HSs might be more explicit than monolingually-raised speakers (MSs) of this language. A reason for this might be HSs’ frequent communication with L2 speakers of the ML (e.g., HSs’ parents), which is an under-explored source of influence on the ML. However, explicitness in the ML has not been systematically addressed yet, and studies pointing to HSs’ higher explicitness are scarce.</div><div>Filling this gap, we conducted two studies analyzing referring expressions produced by German, Greek, Russian, and Turkish HSs in majority English as well as English MSs in formal and informal narratives. Results indicated that Russian and Turkish HSs were more explicit in informal narratives: they used more noun-headed NPs than English MSs (Study 1). This aligns with the reasoning that HSs’ explicitness stems from frequent communication with L2 speakers since HSs and L2 speakers usually interact in informal settings. However, we found no evidence of HSs’ higher explicitness in the use of pronouns and null anaphora (Study 1) or modified referring expressions (Study 2). Overall, our findings confirm HSs’ higher explicitness in some ML areas compared to MSs, although the effect appears limited to certain phenomena and speaker groups.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47955,"journal":{"name":"Lingua","volume":"314 ","pages":"Article 103854"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143180584","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
LinguaPub Date : 2024-12-02DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2024.103851
Paula Rubio-Fernandez
{"title":"First acquiring articles in a second language: A new approach to the study of language and social cognition","authors":"Paula Rubio-Fernandez","doi":"10.1016/j.lingua.2024.103851","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.lingua.2024.103851","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Pragmatic phenomena are characterized by extreme variability, which makes it difficult to draw sound generalizations about the role of social cognition in pragmatic language by and large. I introduce cultural evolutionary pragmatics as a new framework for the study of the interdependence between language and social cognition, and point at the study of common-ground management across languages and ages as a way to test the reliance of pragmatic language on social cognition. I illustrate this new research line with three experiments on article use by second language speakers, whose mother tongue lacks articles. These L2 speakers are known to find article use challenging and it is often argued that their difficulties stem from articles being <em>pragmatically redundant</em>. Contrary to this view, the results of this exploratory study support the view that proficient article use requires automatizing basic socio-cognitive processes, offering a window into the interdependence between language and social cognition.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47955,"journal":{"name":"Lingua","volume":"313 ","pages":"Article 103851"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142759291","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
LinguaPub Date : 2024-12-02DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2024.103850
Xiao Zhao , Jiahui Huang
{"title":"Interpreter mediation as other-initiated self-repair in court: Effects on the defence in Chinese bilingual criminal trials","authors":"Xiao Zhao , Jiahui Huang","doi":"10.1016/j.lingua.2024.103850","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.lingua.2024.103850","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study examines the linguistic phenomenon of other-initiated self-repairs (OISRs) in the specific context of Chinese inquisitorial criminal courts. These OISRs are prompted by interpreters and implemented by non-native English-speaking African defendants, adversely affecting the defendants’ defence strategies. Transcriptions of five interpreter-mediated trials are analysed to understand the dynamics at play in court settings. Quantitative analysis of turn distribution data and subsequent qualitative conversation analysis reveal that linguistically vulnerable defendants are relegated to a constrained discursive space with limited support from their lawyers in Chinese bilingual courts. In these settings, frequent interpreter-initiated repairs hinder defendants disproportionately, undermining their ability to establish credibility, present new evidence, argue for exoneration or use sympathy cues for leniency. Placing these findings in the context of Chinese court power dynamics, we argue that the pervasive interpreter-initiated OISRs in Chinese courtrooms should be considered a shared responsibility rooted in the court’s language ideology and its legal beliefs and culture, which, at present, systemically marginalise defendants’ right to a fair trial.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47955,"journal":{"name":"Lingua","volume":"313 ","pages":"Article 103850"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142759292","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
LinguaPub Date : 2024-12-02DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2024.103835
Nazik Dinçtopal Deniz
{"title":"Sentence processing in Turkish: A review and future directions","authors":"Nazik Dinçtopal Deniz","doi":"10.1016/j.lingua.2024.103835","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.lingua.2024.103835","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper reviews sentence processing research conducted on Turkish and offers insights into future projects that can examine some further questions that take advantage of the typological properties of Turkish. Sentence processing research has focused mainly on processing ambiguous constructions and linguistic dependencies, and sentence processing research in Turkish has followed a similar path. The findings of the reviewed work on Turkish support the primacy of syntax views in sentence processing, since non-syntactic factors were found to be either delayed or observed in sentence-final decisions. The results of the review have also indicated that, despite Turkish being a head-final language, most sentence processing research on Turkish (on both ambiguity and dependency resolutions) showed patterns like those in head-initial languages, except for two studies that showed language-specific behavior dependent on morphology. Although the majority of work on Turkish is supportive of a universal rather than an experience-based parsing mechanism, there appears to be some language-specific tuning that cannot be attributed to head-finality. Future research can further tap into this question and examine the factors that determine experience-based processing. The questions currently addressed in the field are evolving in a different direction. The review concludes with how the typological properties of Turkish –its head finality, flexible word order, and rich morphology- provide generous test grounds for these questions.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47955,"journal":{"name":"Lingua","volume":"313 ","pages":"Article 103835"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142759290","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
LinguaPub Date : 2024-11-28DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2024.103849
Zhenyi Liao, Lei Liang
{"title":"The merger of falling tones: A perception study in Taiyuan Jin Chinese","authors":"Zhenyi Liao, Lei Liang","doi":"10.1016/j.lingua.2024.103849","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.lingua.2024.103849","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Traditionally, there are five lexical tones in Taiyuan dialect including one rising tone and four falling tones, but previous studies have shown that some speakers merged the four falling tones Ping Sheng (T1)/ Shang Sheng (T2)/ Yin Ru (T4)/ Yang Ru (T5) in production. The current study investigates how 25 participants (14 females) with different age groups perceive four falling tones by means of discrimination and identification tasks. Both accuracy rate and reaction time are measured. Results show that: (i) the stabilization sequence in perception is as follows: T2 > T1 > T4 > T5, indicating that T2 is the most stable tone while T5 is the most susceptible to merge with other tones. (ii) T4 and T5 exhibit the highest degree of merger, with a tendency to perceive T5 as T4. (iii) there are two stages of tone merger in Taiyuan dialect at the perceptual level. The pronounced confusion between T4 and T5 is at the first stage, with a primary trend of T5 merging into T4. And the confusion among T1 and the entering tones (Yin and Yang Ru) is at the second stage, indicating a possibility that the entering tones are more likely to merge with the non-entering tone, T1, after the loss of the glottal coda.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47955,"journal":{"name":"Lingua","volume":"313 ","pages":"Article 103849"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-11-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142743366","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Visual priming and parsing preferences: A self-paced reading study of PP-attachment ambiguity in Dutch verb-final structures","authors":"Sara Shoghi , Seçkin Arslan , Roelien Bastiaanse , Srdan Popov","doi":"10.1016/j.lingua.2024.103840","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.lingua.2024.103840","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Understanding how language users navigate through syntactic ambiguities is crucial for unravelling the intricacies of sentence processing. This study explored ambiguity resolution within verb-final double prepositional phrase structures in Dutch. While previous research has largely focused on SVO structures such as those found in English, there is a scarcity of evidence regarding initial syntactic decisions in verb-final structures. The study pursued two aims: firstly, to investigate whether visual cues can direct the parser towards an intended interpretation; and secondly, to examine the potential of visual cues in priming verb subcategorization information within ambiguous sentences in the absence of linguistic input. A reading task was administered to address these objectives by assessing per-word reading times. Furthermore, ambiguity within the structures was resolved by presenting an animation clip that displayed the intended interpretation of each sentence before reading it. The results indicated that the animations provided before the reading task modulated the processing of NP- and VP-attachment interpretations of the ambiguous structures under study. However, these contextual cues did not prime subcategorized information of verbs earlier than their appearance within the sentence, as evidenced by unchanged reading profiles for the regions preceding the verb. This study demonstrates that visual contexts modulate the word-by-word processing of Dutch verb-final structures, and that verb argument structure appears to influence this process. The results are examined through various sentence processing theories, lending support to constraint-based models.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47955,"journal":{"name":"Lingua","volume":"313 ","pages":"Article 103840"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142704321","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}