Corpus-based variationist linguistics

175. Eating Behaviors and Body Image Perceptions in a Latino Community Clinic Adolescent Population

Discover the intricate dynamics of L2 prosody with this pioneering study, which examines how advanced learners from Czech, German, and Spanish backgrounds engage with British and American English intonation. By employing a multidimensional approach - spanning phonetic, phonological, discourse-pragmatic, and sociolinguistic perspectives - this book provides a comprehensive overview of L2 prosodic features, highlighting patterns of intonational phrasing, f0 range, and the use of tones and uptalk. Building on foundational works by Pierrehumbert, Mennen, and Gut, this work bridges significant gaps in the field by comparing different L1 and L2 varieties, integrating diverse linguistic variables, and proposing a multifactorial model of L2 prosody. Relevant for linguists, language educators, and researchers in SLA, the findings offer valuable insights for reducing foreign accents and enhancing intelligibility, making it an essential resource for improving language teaching methodologies and learner outcomes. Dive into this essential guide and elevate your understanding of L2 prosody and its impact on effective communication.

I would like to respond to Nick Chadwick's recent review (Music & Letters, 89 (2008), 274–9) of my translation of the Berg–Adorno correspondence. Though Chadwick clearly has a solid grasp of German, he understandably lacks some of the sense of nuance that native speakers of both languages possess, and accordingly bites off rather more than he can chew when he lists a number of alleged mistakes on my part and supplies corresponding ‘corrections’. In the third of his examples of supposed mistranslation, Chadwick cites an extended passage from Adorno's letter to Berg of 17 December 1928 (Letter 83, pp. 132–3). Chadwick feels that Adorno's gratitude to Berg for his comments on the former's songs should concern his ‘confirmation’, not ‘affirmation’—as if the difference were an empirical one, whereas it is in fact the difference in tone between mere verification and personal encouragement. Chadwick thinks that rather than ‘proving’ a dialectical understanding, Berg's potential insight would merely ‘signify’ it—again, a question of emphasis, not semantic accuracy. He claims that ‘to the extent that’ is unequivocally different from ‘if’, pointing out that the original word is wofern, a rather archaic word often translated as ‘provided that’, whose flavour is actually rather different from the more commonplace choice wenn. Chadwick also thinks that the verb bitten, whose character ranges from ‘request’ to ‘beseech’, cannot be translated as ‘insist’. One cannot argue over personal taste, but it is simply misguided to offer supposedly factual corrections that are nothing but alternative interpretations. Chadwick clearly has his own preferences, but to state that a word is translated incorrectly, when all that he can argue (or rather assert) is that it is translated undesirably, is unreasonable. His assertion that ‘train station’ or ‘overly’ are Americanisms, despite the fact that not only a British translator, but also a British external reader and a British copy-editor did not consider this to be the case, is similarly a matter of preference rather than objective fact. His objections to different spellings of ‘Stokowski’, some of which were Berg's own (the composer refers to ‘Stokowsky’), show a sour pedantry, especially when the presence of the correct spelling elsewhere in the book makes it clear that one is dealing here with slips, not a consistent misconception.

The comprehension and correct use of German modal particles poses manifold problems for learners of German as a foreign language since the meaning of these particles is complex and highly dependent on contextual features which can be linguistic as well as situational.Following the premise that German modal particles occur with greater frequency in the spoken language, the article presents an analysis which is based on corpora representing spoken German.The concept "spoken language" is discussed critically with regard to the corpora chosen for analysis and narrowed down in relation to the use of modal particles.The analysis is based on the following corpora: Freiburger Korpus, Dialogstrukturenkorpus, and Pfeffer-Korpus.In addition, a collection of telephone conversations (Brons-Albert, 1984) was scanned into computer-readable files and analysed using MicroConcord (Scott & Johns, 1993).A quantitative analysis was carried out on all corpora.The qualitative analysis was limited to the telephone conversations and looks at the constraints on and functions of the different occurrences of the form eben.

In multilingual environments, the “digital language divide” as the primary barrier preventing the speakers of small languages, the educationally deprived, the elderly, and the disabled, from their full integration into the emerging digital societies is a highly relevant as the grounds for digital inequality for billions of people worldwide. The paper aims to define and critically analyse the digital language divide focusing on how digital language technologies contribute to discrimination and inequality. The research is based on the analysis of the selection of studies and language policy reports related to digital inequality, linguistic diversity and digital language technology mainly from the sociolinguistic perspective. The analysis shows that small languages are excluded from access to information, emerging social inequalities and a growing need for inclusive language policies in further development of the communication based on AI and digital technologies.

Background: The World Health Organization released lower Body Mass Index (BMI) cutoff points for Asian individuals to account for increased body fat percentage (BF%) and risk of obesity-related conditions at a lower body mass index. Purpose: This preliminary study: (1) explores the impact of utilizing Asian BMI standards (compared to universal standards) on the overweight/obese categorization of Asian females and males; and (2) determines whether age, gender, acculturation, and living arrangements are associated with BMI and BF%. Methods: Data on demographic variables, height and weight, BF%, living situation, and language spoken at home were collected from 170 Asian students enrolled in a health course at a public university in California. Results: When Asian BMI cutoffs were applied, categorization of Asian males and females as normal weight decreased significantly. Language spoken at home was not significantly associated with BMI; however, acculturated females tended to have higher BMIs than non-acculturated females, while acculturated males tended to have lower BMIs than non-acculturated males. Discussion: Utilization of Asian-specific BMI cutoffs will significantly increase the reported prevalence of overweight and obesity among Asians. Acculturation to the United States may be a risk factor for overweight/obesity especially among Asian females. Translation to Health Education Practice: Asian-specific BMI cutoffs may be appropriate in clinical settings, given that overweight-obesity related conditions occur at relatively lower rates of BMI and BF% among Asians.

This paper examines some characteristics of interpreter discourse in a corpus of European parliament proceedings, arguing that the language of fluent interpreters relies heavily on recurrent formulaic phraseologies. The use of these formulae arguably reduces the simultaneous interpreter’s effort to negotiate the “tightrope” of balancing competing demands on limited cognitive resources—as well as affective ones. Since formulaic phraseologies are seemingly stored in memory as single lexical units with default prosodies, they can therefore be produced (or indeed slightly modified) with little processing work, providing a resource which facilitates fluent speech production in particularly stressful contexts. The literature however suggests that the formulaic repertoire of second language speakers is generally much smaller than that of first language speakers, hence pointing to the need for interpreters working into their second language to enlarge this repertoire as far as possible. Even where working into their first language, extending their second language repertoire may facilitate the task of the interpreter by reducing the processing load in reception. In consequence it is suggested that the training of simultaneous interpreters should place considerable emphasis on the acquisition and use phraseological units, many of which have default lexicogrammatical and prosodic structures which go beyond the traditional emphases in terminology, both in size and in scope. This need emerges clearly from the analysis of European Parliament interpreting transcripts, where we find such recurrent phraseologies used as give the floor to (linked to turn-taking management) and we need to ensure that (linked to justification).

Discourse markers have been extensively studied in spoken languages from different perspectives, covering monolingual, contrastive, and translation studies. However, research on these items remains limited for signed languages, with only a handful of scattered publications. Following a corpus-based approach, this paper aims to investigate discourse markers in French Belgian Sign Language (LSFB), including their types, functions, and translation/s into written French. An 18 min sample of three dialogues and six signers was analyzed using a two-level independent taxonomy (domain and function) previously applied to spoken and signed data. Overall, 251 discourse markers were identified in the LSFB sample. They can be manual, nonmanual, or a combination of both, the latter type being the most frequent. In contrast to the previous literature, discourse markers cannot be spatial in LSFB. Regarding their functional spectrum, most discourse markers belong to the sequential domain (i.e., they are mostly used to structure discourse) and express ‘addition’ (i.e., providing more information) or ‘monitoring’ (i.e., keeping control over one’s turn or over the interaction). When examining the translation of DMs, most are either omitted or substituted by other non-discourse marking items in the target texts. Although these results are generally similar to previous studies on DMs in spoken languages, more research on these items in other signed languages is needed to obtain a precise overview of their role in human communication.

The background of this research deals with two problems, firstly language as an instrument of communication which is used by society and secondly the society as users and speakers of language as well as changes on vocabulary or acronyms. This research focused on the process of acronym formation in the Sociolinguistics perspective. Events in society are reflected in language, in this study the formation of acronyms. This study is a descriptive qualitative study, where social phenomena are described by their characteristics. The data were collected by observing and recording the acronym found. The source of this research data is Refly Harun's program on YouTube with the title "UBER" throughout 2022. The sample of this research is the "UBER" program on Refly Harun's YouTube in April and May 2022. The result of this study was 12 acronyms found, after being analyzed there were 3 groupings of the formation process. With the uniqueness of the process of determining the Indonesian language component mixed with a foreign language, it is shortened to an Indonesian acronym. Acronyms in the form of abbreviations that have been formed have meanings that attract attention.

Language experience predicts music processing in a half-million speakers of fifty-four languages

The cognitive power of human mind to imagined, create and borrow new skills or ideas in different field of human endeavour such as sciences and technology, the languages users were not left behind. The English language spoken in Nigeria can be identified with many creativity and borrowing in its usage as a result of bilingual, multilingual and sociolinguistic influences on the English language by the native languages. However, the aim of this paper is to discuss the meaning and functions of language and to identify the creativity and borrowing by the users of English language as second language L2/target language TL. The work also, identified the causes of such creativity and borrowing in our daily communication and come up with samples of some native words turned to English. The paper adopts an appraisal to trace these words, their source (language) and their meaning. This major aim was achieved through consultation of bilingual and multilingual users of English, linguist, previous research, language books, journals, newspapers, magazines and other electronic sources of data collection. However, it is observed that a speech community of the users of English as a second language must have certain percentage of their native language.

Sociolinguistics means many things to different people. It is a field that studies the relationship between the users of language and the social structures in which they live. “A sociolinguistic analysis of Ogba proverbs” focuses on the study of Ogba proverbs, exploring the sociolinguistic aspects. Its aim is to explore and analyse Ogba proverbs from the sociolinguistic perspective in the context of English as a second language in Nigeria. This will go a long way to offer a sociolinguistic insight to the contributions of Ogba language, culture and way of life. The data for the study were collected orally through interviews of competent Ogba first language speakers and translated to the English language for analysis. The qualitative and descriptive research designs were adopted for the analysis. In all, twenty (20) proverbs were analysed using Dell Hyme’s Ethnography of Communication Theory as the major analytical framework with insights from Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. This is because of the relevance of Dell Hyme’s Speaking which accounts for such sociolinguistic variables as setting, scene, participants, act sequence, instrumentality and genre as is evidenced in the data, and how the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis allows this paper to relate its data to aspects of Ogba worldview and culture. This paper establishes that Ogba proverbs are relevant to both oral and written communications within and outside the Ogba environment. They are employed to embellish, spice and beautify oral and written communications commonly but proudly exploited in Ogba people’s interpersonal relations through conversations. On typology, Adedimeji’s (2003) typological classification is applied for the classification of the data into types. It was discovered that Speaking allows for the comprehensive understanding of the data for this paper which is as a result of its explicit and analytic potential, while Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis shows aspects of Ogba Culture that manifest in Ogba proverbs.

This article is based on a survey that aimed to explore the Northern Sotho language name discrepancies in informative and descriptive documentation and also in general language use. The survey was conducted in two selected South African universities (Tshwane University of Technology (A) and the University of Limpopo (B)). The quota sampling method was used to gather data from 90 students and ten lecturers who were then doing Northern Sotho as a first-language module or teaching any of these modules, their age groups varying from 17 to 75. These students and lecturers participated by responding to survey questionnaires and the lecturers additionally took part in interviews. The causes for the use of Sepedi and Sesotho sa Leboa in informative documentation and in general language, as well as the language name which was preferred by the research participants were investigated, based on the mixed-methods research approach. From a sociolinguistic perspective, the survey strove to ascertain which of the two language names the research participants preferred and why. It was found that Sesotho sa Leboa was the name opted for by most of the research participants who considered Sepedi as a dialect, not as a standard language.

This article introduces the reader to the sociolinguistic issues surrounding the adoption of a writing system for sign languages. Initially, some background on sign language and Deaf culture is presented, followed by a discussion of several alternatives for writing sign languages and how these alternatives have been used and/or adopted. Sign languages in most parts of the world compete with spoken languages (languages that have established written traditions), resulting in diglossia. Though many scholars who work with the deaf community have tried to develop ways to write sign language(s), many Deaf do not feel the need for a writing system, either because they use video media or because they see writing as best done in the dominant language in their diglossic situation.

Spain’s Minoritized Languages in Brief Sociolinguistic Perspective Andrew Lynch Since 1978, when Article 3 of the democratic Constitution officialized the “other languages of Spain in their respective Autonomous Communities” and guaranteed them “special respect and protection,” Basque, Galician, and Catalan have undergone a significant process of institutional expansion. Laws of linguistic normalization passed in the respective Autonomous Communities during the early 1980s thrust each of these languages into public life, concomitantly disconfiguring their diglossic relationship to Castilian, a vestige of Franco’s staunch one language-one nation ideology. Today one could affirm that the theoretical premise of bilingualism and diglossia (Fishman) – whereby one language serves public, formal functions and another is restricted to private, informal domains – no longer characterizes the sociolinguistic landscape of Spain. Linguistic normalization has been a bit of a double-edged sword, however. Growing literacy rates in Basque, Galician, and Catalan appear not to correlate with increased social use of these languages. In what follows, I will briefly consider the challenges of sociolinguistic continuity in each case. In the Basque context, normalization has perhaps created the sort of diglossia that Ferguson originally described, involving two or more varieties of the “same” language,1 because of the relative artificiality of Batua – the standardized variety of Euskera which is taught in schools and used in formal communication – and the dialectal differences found [End Page 15] throughout Euskal Herria.2 Indeed, the great diversity of Basque prompted the founder of the Basque Nationalist Party, Sabino Arana Goiri (1865–1903), to argue for a different standard variety in each of six historical provinces that would conform a unified Basque Country: Bizkaia, Gipuzkoa, Araba, Nafarroa, Lapurdi, Zuberoa (Hualde & Zuazo 148).3 Serious debate about standardization did not begin until the founding of the Basque Academy, or Euskaltzaindia, in 1918. Interrupted by the Civil War in 1936 and Franco’s declaration of Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa as “provincias traidoras” – backdrop for his prohibitive language policies to come, the debate would go unresolved for five more decades. Unlike Catalan or Galician, Basque had not hitherto functioned as a formal language or in any official capacity, and had been a language of very sparse literary production (Olaziregi). When Batua was finally agreed upon for normalization by the Basque Academy in 1968, it was “nobody’s spoken language,” as Hualde & Zuazo affirm (152).4 This apparently remains true today. A matched guise study carried out by Echeverria in eleven secondary schools in Donostia (San Sebastián) in 2005 documented more positive attitudes toward the local vernacular Basque (region of Goierri) than toward Batua or standard Castilian, a tendency that held true even for those students who came from Castilian-speaking homes and were enrolled in schools where Castilian was the language of instruction. Echeverria observed a strong correlation between exposure to vernacular Basque beyond the school setting and attitudes toward Basque and Castilian general. She concluded that if Basque is to prosper as a language of interaction among the general population, local varieties must be recognized in academic settings and more emphasis placed on the vernacular for purposes of instruction. After an official evaluation revealed inadequate levels of Basque proficiency among two-thirds of students graduating bilingual [End Page 16] programs and one-third of those exiting all-Basque programs in 2005, the government called for language policy reform to make Basque the sole vehicular language of schooling (Azumendi). In sum, the normalization of Basque has produced, in educational terms, a bilingual majority who, for everyday social purposes, interact largely in Castilian and, to a lesser extent, in another variety of Basque. Data from Eustat for 2006 confirm this tendency: only 19% of the population of Euskadi claimed Euskera as a first language and 5% both Euskera and Castilian as first languages; only 31% claimed to be functionally bilingual; 45% claimed to speak principally Euskera at home; 47% claimed the same for interactions with friends; 48% with coworkers. A similar situation is observed in Galicia. Loredo Gutiérrez et al. affirm that: “At the present moment, when the transmission of Galician to the next generation is falling . . . schools have to attain a higher importance as an environment in which to learn Galician” (44). The success...