IF 1.1 3区文学

Lingua Pub Date : 2025-09-01 Epub Date: 2025-06-07 DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103989

Kamil Długosz , Megan Brown-Bousfield

{"title":"The acquisition of grammatical gender in German as an additional language: A comparison of L1 English and L1 Polish learners with and without knowledge of other gendered languages","authors":"Kamil Długosz , Megan Brown-Bousfield","doi":"10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103989","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103989","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study examines the acquisition of lexical and syntactic knowledge of grammatical gender in German as an additional language (Ln) among L1 Polish speakers (whose native language has grammatical gender) and L1 English speakers (whose native language lacks grammatical gender), both with and without proficiency in other non-native gendered languages (primarily Spanish). We tested learners of German as an additional language at lower to upper-intermediate proficiency levels using two tasks: a gender decision task and an acceptability judgment task with correction. Our findings provide consistent evidence for a significant advantage of L1 Polish learners over L1 English speakers in both gender assignment and gender agreement, regardless of German proficiency. Notably, L1 Polish learners do not exhibit lexical gender congruency effects, suggesting that their advantage is not due to gender overlaps between Polish and German. Instead, our results indicate that the mere presence of a grammatical gender feature in L1 facilitates Ln gender acquisition. Additionally, knowledge of other gendered languages heightens learners’ sensitivity to gender agreement violations in German. Finally, participants’ performance varies by case, showing higher judgment accuracy for definite phrases in the nominative but no defaulting to a specific gender.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47955,"journal":{"name":"Lingua","volume":"324 ","pages":"Article 103989"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144242215","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}

引用次数: 0

Perspective-taking in referential discourse among Mandarin-speaking children during three-party conversations 普通话儿童三方对话中指称语篇的换位思考

IF 1.1 3区文学

Lingua Pub Date : 2025-09-01 Epub Date: 2025-06-19 DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.104002

Xiaobei Zheng , Yageng Li

{"title":"Perspective-taking in referential discourse among Mandarin-speaking children during three-party conversations","authors":"Xiaobei Zheng , Yageng Li","doi":"10.1016/j.lingua.2025.104002","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.lingua.2025.104002","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>During conversations, individuals continuously need to take others’ perspectives to constrain the referential domain. The present study specifically investigates how 3-year-old Mandarin-speaking children take the visual perspectives of two partners in three-party communications. In two experiments, two speakers took turns instructing children to identify objects on a shelf, using critical nouns that semantically matched two identical referents from the child’s visual perspective. However, one of these referents might not be visible to the speakers. The critical nouns were presented in the form of bare nouns, allowing for definite or generic interpretations in the Mandarin context, leading to a competition between single and dual references. In Experiment 1, when both speakers only saw one shared candidate object, children preferred definite interpretations, using their partners’ perspectives to narrow the referential domains. However, in Experiment 2, one of the speakers could see both candidate objects while the other could see only the shared one. Results showed that children tended to interpret both partners’ discourse similarly and preferred generic interpretations. Additionally, eye-tracking data indicated that children implicitly processed each partner’s visual perspective. This research sheds light on visual perspective-taking strategies among 3-year-old children in a Mandarin context and provides insight into how children integrate multiple perspectives in communication.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47955,"journal":{"name":"Lingua","volume":"324 ","pages":"Article 104002"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144314501","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}

引用次数: 0

Evidence for syntactic audience design from the production of active and passive relative clauses in Chinese 从汉语主动和被动关系从句的产生看句法受众设计的证据

IF 1.1 3区文学

Lingua Pub Date : 2025-08-01 Epub Date: 2025-05-22 DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103962

Lan Tao , Johannes Gerwien

{"title":"Evidence for syntactic audience design from the production of active and passive relative clauses in Chinese","authors":"Lan Tao , Johannes Gerwien","doi":"10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103962","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103962","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study examines audience design at the syntactic level. We report two language production experiments investigating how Mandarin Chinese speakers choose between object relative clauses (ORCs) and passive subject relative clauses (pSRCs) to refer to patients in target events. These structures differ in syntactic function assignments. The production experiments vary in whether or not speakers interact with a real listener (Experiment 1 and 2). Two factors were manipulated: (1) the number of events in the visual stimuli eliciting verbal responses, and (2) the animacy configuration of referents. Results show that speakers adjust their syntactic choices to facilitate comprehension, with effects varying by the presence of a listener. Syntactic adaptations also increase production difficulty to some extent. A third experiment complements the findings with a language comprehension study using the visual world paradigm. The target responses from Experiments 1 and 2 served as the linguistic structures from which auditory stimuli were produced. Results reveal that the structure speakers avoided to produce under certain conditions (pSRCs with two depicted events) hindered comprehension, whereas the same structure improved comprehension in simpler contexts (pSRCs with one event). We discuss the findings with reference to different language production models.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47955,"journal":{"name":"Lingua","volume":"323 ","pages":"Article 103962"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144115999","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}

引用次数: 0

Nasalization reduction and grammaticalization of genre in Swiss French: a corpus-based sociophonetic study 瑞士法语体裁的鼻音化、降格化与语法化：基于语料库的社会语音研究

IF 1.1 3区文学

Lingua Pub Date : 2025-08-01 Epub Date: 2025-05-21 DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103960

Delin Deng , Fenqi Wang , Ratree Wayland

引用次数: 0

The typology of degree marking 学位标记的类型

IF 1.1 3区文学

Lingua Pub Date : 2025-08-01 Epub Date: 2025-05-26 DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103938

Bei Zhou, Matthias Gerner

{"title":"The typology of degree marking","authors":"Bei Zhou, Matthias Gerner","doi":"10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103938","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103938","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Most languages involve up to seven degree constructions in which adjectives can occur: <em>bare</em>, <em>intensified</em>, <em>mitigative</em>, <em>superlative</em>, <em>superior</em>, <em>inferior,</em> and <em>equative</em>. In a sample of 157 languages, we classify and quantify the lexical, synthetic, and analytic marking strategies of each degree construction. From this classification, we derive an implicational hierarchy (Bare < Equative < Superior < Superlative < Intensified < Inferior < Mitigative) which predicts the relative markedness of individual degree forms. If a language employs a degree form for a particular position on the hierarchy, it will also exhibit a degree form that is equally or less marked for any position ranking lower. The hierarchy is motivated by two cognitive factors: firstly, by a <em>discourse principle,</em> which rates a subject characterized by an inferior/mitigative adjectival degree as pragmatically marked since it conveys information in an atypical manner, and secondly by a <em>quantity</em> (or <em>informativeness</em>) <em>principle,</em> which tracks degree forms as quantifiers with increasingly complex profiles. Finally, we introduce two new concepts, <em>à priori</em> and <em>à posteriori</em> hierarchies, and demonstrate that the degree hierarchy is <em>à posteriori in nature</em>.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47955,"journal":{"name":"Lingua","volume":"323 ","pages":"Article 103938"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144139694","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}

引用次数: 0

Stance-taking and (inter)subjective roles of Mandarin zhende (ma/a) 普通话真德的立场与（间）主体性角色（ma/a）

IF 1.1 3区文学

Lingua Pub Date : 2025-08-01 Epub Date: 2025-05-14 DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103951

Shuang He, Ling Zhou , Shaojie Zhang

{"title":"Stance-taking and (inter)subjective roles of Mandarin zhende (ma/a)","authors":"Shuang He, Ling Zhou , Shaojie Zhang","doi":"10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103951","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103951","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study explores the non-interrogative functions of the newsmark <em>zhende (ma/a)</em> (‘really’) in Mandarin conversation interaction, focusing on its stance-taking and (inter)subjective roles in systematically context-sensitive ways. Drawing on spontaneous conversational data and a discourse-pragmatic approach, we identify affective, evaluative, and alignment stances associated with <em>zhende (ma/a)</em> that extend beyond its epistemic function as a reaction to unexpected information and its affective role as an expression of surprise. The nuanced stance-taking activities reveal three key manifestations of (inter)subjectivity, primarily tied to the stance object targeted: (1) a device for involvement and rapport-building responding to irrelevant information; (2) an emotionally charged stance marker when addressing relevant information; and (3) a buffering mechanism for managing awkward moments, maintaining rapport in response to assessments directed at the <em>zhende (ma/a)</em> speaker. Additionally, the syntactic position of <em>zhende (ma/a)</em> also facilitates its intersubjective impact, particularly regarding its metadiscursive function. This study highlights the nuanced interplay between stance-taking and (inter)subjectivity and underscores the importance of contextual features in interpreting the non-interrogative functions of newsmarks, offering valuable insights into stance-taking and its (inter)subjective roles in Mandarin conversation interaction and beyond.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47955,"journal":{"name":"Lingua","volume":"323 ","pages":"Article 103951"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143947566","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}

引用次数: 0

Language contact and translation: dependency relations as a lens for source language influence in fiction 语言接触与翻译：从依存关系看小说中源语的影响

IF 1.1 3区文学

Lingua Pub Date : 2025-07-01 Epub Date: 2025-04-16 DOI: 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":"2025-07-01","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}

引用次数: 0

‘What the X’ in Anglophone government meetings: Areal distribution, emotionality, and euphemism 英语国家政府会议中的“What the X”：地域分布、情绪和委婉语

IF 1.1 3区文学

Lingua Pub Date : 2025-07-01 Epub Date: 2025-04-24 DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103947

Steven Coats

{"title":"‘What the X’ in Anglophone government meetings: Areal distribution, emotionality, and euphemism","authors":"Steven Coats","doi":"10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103947","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103947","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article examines the use of potentially offensive expressions, specifically “what the hell” and its euphemistic variants, in local government meetings across English-speaking countries. Two primary research questions are addressed: first, are there noticeable differences in the frequency of these expressions between countries and within regions? And second, how do euphemistic alternatives compare to “what the hell” in terms of emotional intensity and valence, both across and within national varieties? The study draws on data from three large, recent corpora of geolocated automatic speech recognition (ASR) transcripts and the corresponding underlying audio to explore the geographic distribution and emotional nuances of these expressions in various English-speaking countries, including the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. To assess the emotionality of expressions, specifically anger, the speech emotion recognition model emotion2vec is employed. The findings provide insight into how the acceptability and emotional weight of “what the hell” and variants differ across regions. Additionally, the study demonstrates the potential of vector-based representations of speech in multimodal corpus analysis, while empirically validating theoretical claims in semantics related to pejoration and euphemism.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47955,"journal":{"name":"Lingua","volume":"321 ","pages":"Article 103947"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143864481","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}

引用次数: 0

Vulgarity in online discourse around the English-speaking world 英语世界网络话语中的粗俗

IF 1.1 3区文学

Lingua Pub Date : 2025-07-01 Epub Date: 2025-04-23 DOI: 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":"2025-07-01","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}

引用次数: 0

Polyadic fronting does not exist in German (but crowded CPs do): Cyclic internal Merge and multiple external Merge in the left edge of the clause 在德语中不存在多进对齐（但拥挤的cp有）：循环内部合并和多个外部合并在子句的左边缘

IF 1.1 3区文学

Lingua Pub Date : 2025-07-01 Epub Date: 2025-05-12 DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103950

Nicholas Catasso

引用次数: 0

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