LinguaPub Date : 2025-04-23DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103946
Martin Schweinberger , Kate Burridge
{"title":"Vulgarity in online discourse around the English-speaking world","authors":"Martin Schweinberger , Kate Burridge","doi":"10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103946","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103946","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper takes a corpus-based approach to study vulgar language in online communication across 20 English-speaking regions based on the Global Web-Based English Corpus (GloWbE). The identification of vulgarity combines word lists used in profanity detection with regular expressions to identify a wide range of vulgar elements including spelling variants and obscured forms. The results show a notable trend for inner circle L1-varieties to exhibit higher rates of vulgarity online compared to outer circle and L2-varieties. The results also show that inner circle varieties have lower adapted corrected type-token rations which indicates that inner circle variety speakers use more varied English vulgar forms compared with speakers from other circle varieties. In addition, there is a general register difference with vulgarity being more common in blog data compared with general web content. Finally, the results show that different regions exhibit preferences for specific vulgar lemmas <em>feck</em> being preferred in Ireland, <em>cunt</em>, in Britain, and <em>ass(hole)</em> in the United States. The findings are interpreted to show that cultural differences are reflected in region-specific preferences for vulgarity and that the creativity observed in inner circle varieties is linked to norm-setting compared to norm-reception associated with outer circle varieties.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47955,"journal":{"name":"Lingua","volume":"321 ","pages":"Article 103946"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-04-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143864576","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 : 2025-04-22DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103935
Jing Hao
{"title":"Nominalised Activities in Chinese History Texts: A Systemic Functional Linguistic Perspective","authors":"Jing Hao","doi":"10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103935","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103935","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper examines the nominal realisations of activities in Mandarin Chinese history texts from a Systemic Functional Linguistic perspective, focusing specifically on texts that recount historical activities. Drawing on a distinction between experiential metaphors (i.e. metaphorical realisations of figures) and activity entities, the study investigates how these two resources function within text-wide language patterns. The analysis is conducted from a metafunctional perspective, exploring how the two resources interact with textual, interpersonal, and ideational meanings in the text. The findings reveal that both resources exhibit important characteristics across metafunctions. Textually, they present and presume meanings similarly in higher-level Themes, but differently in troughs and higher-level News. Interpersonally, they interact differently with evaluative resources. Ideationally, they function similarly in their relation to figures and sequences of figures within the unfolding text. These findings contrast with their distinctive metafunctional orientations (textual vs. ideational) previously recognised from a grammatical perspective.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47955,"journal":{"name":"Lingua","volume":"320 ","pages":"Article 103935"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143855984","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 : 2025-04-16DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103937
Isabelle Chou , Kanglong Liu , Han Xu
{"title":"Language contact and translation: dependency relations as a lens for source language influence in fiction","authors":"Isabelle Chou , Kanglong Liu , Han Xu","doi":"10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103937","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103937","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Recognising translation as a site of language contact, this study utilises measures of dependency relations, namely dependency distance and dependency direction, to examine the influence of the source language in translation and how this influence is shaped by directionality and language pair. The data was obtained from a large-scale bidirectional multilingual corpus of original fiction and its translation across ten language pairs, with English serving as either the source or the target language in each pair. The findings reveal a balanced presence of source language influence in both translation directions, as shown by the patterns in variation of the mean dependency distance. However, this influence was not observed across all language pairs, which suggests that its manifestation was affected more by language pair than by directionality. At the same time, this study identifies a tendency for the characteristics of the translated fiction’s dependency direction to align with the word order convention of the target language, indicating that the influence of the source language is limited. Additionally, this study found that simplification, a widely recognised “translation universal”, may not be a unique property of translational language. Rather, it results from language contact, where the linguistic properties of the source language permeate the target language, causing the latter to reflect structural features of the original text.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47955,"journal":{"name":"Lingua","volume":"321 ","pages":"Article 103937"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-04-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143839264","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 : 2025-04-11DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103936
Haiquan Huang , Yixiong Chen , Xuewu Qin , Xin Wang , Jie Xu
{"title":"Mandarin-speaking children’s acquisition of the additive particle ye ‘also’","authors":"Haiquan Huang , Yixiong Chen , Xuewu Qin , Xin Wang , Jie Xu","doi":"10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103936","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103936","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Previous studies have reported conflicting findings on children’s interpretation of additive particles. One of the previous studies has reported that Mandarin-speaking children up to 7 have difficulty deriving the presupposition triggered by the additive particle <em>ye</em> ‘also’. By contrast, another body of research has found that 3-to-4-year-olds can correctly interpret additive particles across languages. Such conflicting findings might have resulted from the different research techniques. Moreover, no study has been conducted to probe whether children are able to identify subject- versus object-associated focus in sentences with an additive particle. Against this backdrop, the current study attempts to systematically re-evaluate how Mandarin-speaking children interpret sentences with <em>ye</em> ‘also’, using an adapted research method. Two experiments were conducted with 3-to-4-year-olds and a group of adult controls. Experiment 1 probed whether children were able to identify object-associated focus in sentences with <em>ye</em>. Experiment 2 evaluated whether another group of children were able to identify subject-associated focus in sentences with <em>ye</em>. It was found that 3-year-olds already performed quite well and 4-year-olds nearly had adult-like performance in both experiments. The findings indicate that Mandarin-speaking preschoolers are able to identify subject- versus object-associated focus in sentences with <em>ye</em>, and such a linguistic ability develops in an incremental fashion. We discuss the methodological and theoretical implications of the findings.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47955,"journal":{"name":"Lingua","volume":"320 ","pages":"Article 103936"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-04-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143816545","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 : 2025-04-01DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103933
Lin Shen , Haidee Kotze
{"title":"Linguistic indicators differentiating translated and untranslated diplomatic discourse: A diachronic analysis of the United Nations General Debate (1946–2022)","authors":"Lin Shen , Haidee Kotze","doi":"10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103933","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103933","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study examines the linguistic features that distinguish translated from untranslated English diplomatic discourse at the United Nations General Debate (UNGD) and investigates whether these features change from 1946 to 2022 and vary in relation to English language varieties. The translation features identified by elastic net regression analysis suggest that translated texts exhibit higher levels of formality, abstractness, and informational density than untranslated texts, aligning with existing studies on translated language. Over time, the translated texts tend to lag behind untranslated speeches in terms of language change, supporting the notion that UN translation is a conservative language variety: UN translators tend to be slow in adopting innovative usages, preferring established variants. Varietal differences are also evident in relation to the selected translation features. These findings contribute to the understanding of translated language and underscore the importance of considering diachronic analysis and varietal influences in relation to the features of translated language.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47955,"journal":{"name":"Lingua","volume":"320 ","pages":"Article 103933"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143748541","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 : 2025-03-29DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103932
Sam Hames, Michael Haugh, Simon Musgrave
{"title":"“How is that unparliamentary?”: The metapragmatics of ‘unparliamentary’ language in the Australian Federal Parliament","authors":"Sam Hames, Michael Haugh, Simon Musgrave","doi":"10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103932","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103932","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Parliamentary discourse is highly regulated, leading to an almost blanket avoidance of explicit vulgarity or overtly offensive language. Yet it is nevertheless replete with examples in which the language used by members is construed as ‘unparliamentary’. This study examines the occurrence of ‘unparliamentary’ as a metapragmatic label across the entire corpus of the Australian Federal Hansard from 1901 to 2024, and probes how it can be used to implement specific metapragmatic acts (i.e. doing something through labelling talk as ‘unparliamentary’), as well as how it can also become an object of metapragmatic discourse (i.e. a topic of debate in its own right). In so doing we explore how the boundaries of offensive, objectionable or otherwise disorderly language use in parliamentary discourse are established, maintained, contested, as well as change and evolve over time. As the Australian Federal Hansard constitutes a relatively large corpus of more than 900 million tokens, the study draws in a dialogic and iterative manner from both computational and interpretive methods of analysis. This dialogic form of analysis indicates that what is encompassed by the notion of ‘unparliamentary’ is broader and more complex than what is prescribed in the Standing Orders and associated codes of practice of the Australian Federal Parliament.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47955,"journal":{"name":"Lingua","volume":"320 ","pages":"Article 103932"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143734786","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 : 2025-03-28DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103931
Mikko Laitinen , Paula Rautionaho , Masoud Fatemi , Mikko Halonen
{"title":"Do we swear more with friends or with acquaintances? F#ck in social networks","authors":"Mikko Laitinen , Paula Rautionaho , Masoud Fatemi , Mikko Halonen","doi":"10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103931","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103931","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We investigate the uses of <span>fuck</span> in digital social networks from social media, Twitter/X in this case. Social media outlets have so far been predominantly treated as massive text collections, but they can be effectively used to investigate the role of social networks in shaping human communication. We use user-generated texts from 5,660 social networks (with 435,345 users and 7.8 billion words) from three settings (UK, US, and Australia). With embedded network information, this massive dataset enables us to investigate how network properties, that of the size and the strength of the network, influence the use of offensive words in these three settings. Our findings show that Americans use <span>fuck</span> most frequently, while Australians least frequently but they are highly creative with spelling variants of the word. Contrary to prior studies, we observe that people on this social media application swear more with acquaintances than with friends, but only in smaller networks − in larger networks of >100 people, the differences level out. Overall, this study highlights the benefits of using social media data that can be enriched to allow access to the social networks that people interact in.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47955,"journal":{"name":"Lingua","volume":"320 ","pages":"Article 103931"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143725158","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 : 2025-03-27DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103934
Zhuolun Li , Lei Lei
{"title":"Deciphering cross-genre dynamics: Testing the Law of Abbreviation and the Meaning-Frequency Law in Chinese across genres","authors":"Zhuolun Li , Lei Lei","doi":"10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103934","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103934","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The study examined the applicability of two linguistic laws, i.e., the Law of Abbreviation and the Meaning-Frequency Law, in Chinese across four text genres. Linear mixed-effects models were employed to explore the genre-mediated effects on the two laws. The results confirmed the validity of both laws at the character level in Chinese while also demonstrating significant genre-specific variations. The effect of genre on the relationships among character length, polysemy, and frequency was particularly pronounced in less formal genres. Additionally, across all genres, character polysemy consistently exhibited a stronger effect on character frequency than character length. The results were discussed from several perspectives, including the underlying mechanisms of the two laws (i.e., the principle of least effort and the lexical synergetic system theory), trade-offs between communication accuracy versus efficiency across genres, and the differing impacts on communication costs of character polysemy and character length. Implications of the study are also discussed for researchers interested in Zipfian laws across languages.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47955,"journal":{"name":"Lingua","volume":"320 ","pages":"Article 103934"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143715462","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 : 2025-03-20DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103928
Robert M. McKenzie , Kristofor McCarty , Mimi Huang
{"title":"Implicit and explicit linguistic biases: The influence of social dominance orientation (SDO) upon hierarchical language attitudes","authors":"Robert M. McKenzie , Kristofor McCarty , Mimi Huang","doi":"10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103928","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103928","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Research indicates that various social factors can predict language attitudes. However, although social dominance orientation (SDO), the individual’s preference for societal hierarchies, has been found to determine evaluations of a range of social groups and socially meaningful topics, its role in predicting more deeply embedded implicit attitudes in conjunction with more deliberative explicit attitudes towards specific language varieties and their speakers is currently unknown. The present research examined the effect of SDO upon English nationals’ (<em>N</em> = 306) explicit and implicit evaluations of phonological variants indexical of (i) Northern English speech and (ii) Southern English speech in England on competence (Study 1) and warmth (Study 2) dimensions. Regression analysis, controlling for demographic variables, demonstrated that high-SDO predicted negative explicit competence and warmth attitudes towards Northern English speech. Conversely, SDO did not determine self-report Southern English speech evaluations. Likewise, SDO did not predict implicit competence or warmth attitudes. The study findings are discussed in relation to the methodological and theoretical value for (socio)linguists of incorporating SDO measures into research investigating language attitudes at different levels of evaluational awareness.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47955,"journal":{"name":"Lingua","volume":"319 ","pages":"Article 103928"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143685796","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 : 2025-03-13DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103921
Simin Zhou , Tianlin Wang , Miao Yu , Xiujuan Shi
{"title":"The role of phonetic radical information in compound character recognition during sentence reading","authors":"Simin Zhou , Tianlin Wang , Miao Yu , Xiujuan Shi","doi":"10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103921","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103921","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The role of phonology in Chinese character recognition has been a subject of ongoing debate. While evidence suggests that phonetic radicals play a significant role in compound character recognition, previous studies have often mixed phonological and orthographic information associated with radicals. To address this limitation, two eye-tracking experiments were conducted to further investigate the role of phonetic radical phonology and the time course of its influence on character recognition. In Experiment 1, we employed an error disruption paradigm to explore the role of phonology in Chinese character recognition. The results revealed that, for regular target characters, the total reading time was shorter in the phonologically similar substitute condition compared to the unrelated condition. The findings suggest that phonological information facilitates Chinese character recognition, but only in the late processing stages. In Experiment 2, the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm was utilized to investigate how phonetic radical information influences the recognition of compound characters. Results showed that, regardless of a character’s regularity, the single fixation duration, first fixation duration, and gaze duration were all shorter in the phonologically similar condition than in the unrelated condition. The findings suggest that phonetic radical phonology consistently facilitates the processing of Chinese characters, both in the early and late stages. This study offers new insights into the phonological processing of Chinese characters, particularly highlighting the crucial role of radicals in decoding word meanings and emphasizing the importance of sub-lexical processing in reading comprehension.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47955,"journal":{"name":"Lingua","volume":"319 ","pages":"Article 103921"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143619422","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}