Diglossia

The models of linguistic networks and their analytical tools constitute a potential methodology for investigating the formation of structural patterns in actual language use. Research with this methodology has just started, which can hopefully shed light on the emergent nature of linguistic structure. This study attempts to employ linguistic networks to investigate the formation of modern Chinese two-character words (as structural units based on the chunking of their component characters) in the actual use of modern Chinese, which manifests itself as continuous streams of Chinese characters. Network models were constructed based on authentic Chinese language data, with Chinese characters as nodes, their co-occurrence relations as directed links, and the co-occurrence frequencies as link weights. Quantitative analysis of the network models has shown that a Chinese two-character word can highlight itself as a two-node island, i.e., a cohesive sub-network with its two component characters co-occurring more frequently than they co-occur with the other characters. This highlighting mechanism may play a vital role in the formation and acquisition of two-character words in actual language use. Moreover, this mechanism may also throw some light on the emergence of other structural phenomena (with the chunking of specific linguistic units as their basis).

The main concern of this paper will be to demonstrate corpus-based analysis and informants’ intuition as native speakers being mutually essential for a thorough understanding of authentic language use. Corpus-based analysis has been utilised by many linguists to determine appropriate word or phrase usage. However, in such analyses, the statistically imperfect properties of the corpora in question were not considered. Thus, the possibility that the corpora indeed may not appropriately represent language use was ignored. On the other hand, other linguists advocate the validity of informants’ intuition as native speakers, not paying sufficient heed to the deviation of linguistic intuition from actual language use. To clarify the significance of the collaboration of corpus-derived information and informants’ intuition, it will be shown by thorough investigation of ‘NP1 + promise + NP2 + to-clause,’ ‘ill + personal noun,’ and ‘just now’ with the present perfect aspect that the results of corpus-based quantitative analysis and intuition-based qualitative analysis can differ significantly. The matter of corpus representativeness will then be discussed, dealing with the frequency distributions of ‘subject-to-subject raising and extraposed that-clauses controlled by likely,’ ‘major modal auxiliaries’ (will, would, can, could, may, might, should and must) and three synonymous adjectives (big, large and great). Finally an investigation of the use of ‘lest …(should)… ’and ‘introductory which’ will bring to light the deviation of linguistic intuition from actual language use.

Using Jamaica, a former British colony where Jamaican Creole (JC) is the mass vernacular but Standard Jamaican English is the official language, as an illustrative case, this critical ethnographic study in three Jamaican schools examines the theoretical and practical challenges of language education policy (LEP) development and implementation in English-lexified Creole contexts where official recognition of the mass vernacular is absent and politically contentious; standard language ideology is pervasive; language boundaries are blurred; linguistic self-identification does not match actual language use; and language attitudes are deeply entrenched and contradictory. Data were collected and analyzed through classroom observations of six teachers over 9 months, interviews, demographic questionnaires, and curricular documents. Findings reveal conflicting teacher attitudes towards JC, and classroom practices heavily influenced by national examinations, that created a de facto LEP. Teachers simultaneously resisted and appropriated dominant linguicist ideologies in a Creole-speaking environment in response to actual vernacular language use in classrooms, adding a more complicated agentive dimension to Shohamy’s (Language policy: hidden agenda and new approaches. Routledge, New York, 2006) framework linking ideologies to LEP through institutional structures.

Conditional constructions (if–then) enable us to express our thoughts about possible states of the world, and they form an important ingredient for our reasoning and argumentative capabilities. Different types and argumentative uses have been distinguished in the literature, but their applicability to actual language use is rarely evaluated. This paper focuses on the reliability of applying classifications of connections between antecedents and consequents of conditionals to discourse, and three issues are identified. First, different accounts produce incompatible results when applied to language data. Second, a discrepancy between theory and data was observed in previous studies, which sometimes discard existing classifications for being detached from actual language use. Finally, language users construct various cognitive relations between clauses of conditionals without being able to rely on overt linguistic features, which poses problems for the annotation of conditionals in argumentation and discourse. This paper addresses these issues by means of comparing theoretical types and actual uses of conditionals, by inspecting the dispersion of types in natural-language corpora, and by conducting an experiment in which the inter-rater reliability of classifications was assessed. The results show that the reliability of classifications of conditionals when applied to language data is low. With respect to the aforementioned issues, different classifications produced incompatible results, a discrepancy between theory and data was indeed observed, and low reliability scores indicated a largely interpretative nature of types of conditionals. Given these results, suggestions for the enhancement of reliability in corpus studies of conditionals and beyond are provided to enhance future classification design.

The aim of our study is to investigate possible relevant relationships between declared attitudes toward Spanish borrowing and actual language use among speakers of Nahuatl in the Huasteca Potosina in Mexico. The main source of our quantitative data was a survey collected from 121 speakers, which included questions on attitudes toward borrowing, self-assessed language proficiency, and demographic background, as well as a section inviting respondents to choose between more puristic and more Hispanicised sentence options. Twenty participants of the survey also took part in a visual stimuli-based language proficiency assessment experiment in which we tested for the presence of Spanish loanwords. The results of the quantitative study were confronted with qualitative data involving interviews and participant observation. The analysis of the quantitative data revealed strong negative attitudes toward Spanish borrowing in Nahuatl and a correlation between declared purism, i.e.negative attitudes to borrowing, and preference for puristic sentence options. However, declared purism had little reflection in actual language use in the proficiency assessment experiment. This study demonstrates that use of a variety of materials and careful methodology are needed in order to make advances in thistopic.

In two paper-and-pencil studies on university students and trainees, we studied how general language competence and the motivation to use accurate language are linked to people’s actual and potential gender-fair language use. Overall, participants’ actual gender-fair language use was lower than their potential. The higher the participants’ language competence, the higher their potential. Trainees’ actual gender-fair language use was predicted by the interaction of language competence and motivation to use accurate language, those with relatively high language competence used less gender-fair language the higher their motivation to use accurate language was.

The place of Mandarin Chinese in Talmy’s two-way typology of motion expressions has been a focus of debate. Based primarily on linguistic intuition, some researchers consider Mandarin a Satellite-framed language, and some others consider it a Verb-framed language. This paper reports results from analyses of three different types of data from speakers’ actual language use in narrative discourse (one from elicited adults’ spoken narratives, one from written narratives in nine contemporary novels, and one from elicited children’s spoken narratives from ages 3 to 9) that suggest otherwise. Specifically, Mandarin shows a unique discourse style that matches neither Satellite-framed nor Verb-framed languages. The data provide evidence for categorizing Mandarin Chinese as the third language type: an equipollently-framed language. It is argued that examination of language use in discourse can provide insights for solving nutty problems that may not be resolved by merely looking at static linguistic structures.

An examination of the dynamic feature of WTC through dyadic group interaction

Lexical processing and second language acquisition

The media is a crucial site of the articulation, contestation, and inculcation of beliefs about language, or language ideologies. In media discourse, these ideologies are not only represented in actors' and journalists' judgments about language matters, but also realized in the actual use of language. This article analyzes ideologies of language use which are articulated and embodied in contemporary Ukrainian media discourse. By examining both the presentation of language processes in society and the language practices of the media itself, I show how this discourse presents a rather ambivalent idea of the actual and appropriate language use in post-Soviet Ukraine. On the one hand, Ukrainian is assumed to be the only/primary language of the state and society, a symbolic marker of the nation, and a language that (all) citizens identify with; on the other, Russian appears to be an (equally) acceptable language of virtually all social practices. Thus the media both reflects an ambivalent normality that Ukrainian citizens inherited from the Soviet times and reproduces it in the interests of the dominant political and media elites.

The study of the conceptual representations that underlie the use of language is a problem motivated from both a cognitive research point of view and that of construing language models for various language processing tasks. In this work, we organized 600 Finnish verbs using the SOM algorithm. Three experiments were conducted using different features to encode the verbs: morphosyntactic properties, individual nouns, and noun categories in the context of the verb. In general, the morphosyntactic properties seem to draw attention to semantic roles, whereas nouns as features seem to highlight clusters formed on grounds of topics in the text.

Using frequency findings from corpus linguistics, this paper explores the relationship between the information presented in ESL-EFL materials and what is known about actual language use based on empirical studies. Three aspects of materials development for grammar instruction are discussed: the grammatical features to be included, the order of grammatical topics, and the vocabulary used to illustrate these topics. For each aspect, we show that there are often sharp contrasts between the information found in grammar materials and what learners encounter in the real world of language use. In our conclusion, we argue that a selective revision of pedagogy to reflect actual use, as shown by frequency studies, could result in radical changes that facilitate the learning process for students.

In the field of English as a Foreign Language (EFL), the authenticity of classroom tasks is crucial in facilitating effective language learning. Authentic tasks allow learners to experience the language in a manner that is close to how the language is utilized in real life, thereby fostering communicative competence and learner motivation. "In the Türkiye setting, English language education is guided by a common national curriculum, and textbooks are prepared under the auspices of the Ministry of National Education (MoNE). Textbooks are authored by subject specialists and are implemented uniformly in state schools. However, despite their wide usage, relatively limited research has been conducted to evaluate these materials through the lens of task authenticity, which is a vital component of effective language learning. This study evaluates and compares the 8th-grade MoNE English coursebook and the internationally used Headway Pre-Intermediate textbook through the lens of Tomlinson’s (2012) framework of authentic tasks. The analysis focuses on task design, the type of language elicited, and the extent to which tasks promote meaningful communication. Two tested assessment tools—Demir and Ertaş's (2014) ELT Coursebook Evaluation Checklist and Arıkan's (2008) Teacher Textbook Evaluation Form—were adapted and applied to both textbooks. The original binary YES/NO scores of the checklists were converted to 5-point Likert-scale means to allow for more nuanced comparison. Ersöz's (n.d.) authenticity level framework was also utilized to further place the analysis in an empirical context. Findings reveal that while the Headway textbook integrates a wider range of communicative, open-ended, and contextually rich tasks, the MoNE textbook relies heavily on mechanical activities such as translation, gap-filling, and controlled drills. These tasks expose learners to extremely narrow actual language use and provide little room for actual language use and do not address learners' genuine real-life communication skills. The study concludes by emphasizing the imperative need to develop task authenticity in nationally published textbooks so that language teaching is brought nearer to communicative and learner-centred teaching ideologies. The study highlights a pressing need for locally developed coursebooks to incorporate higher levels of task authenticity in order to better support learner engagement and the development of communicative skills in EFL classrooms in Türkiye.

The following article gives an overview of the weak points in the lexicographical coverage of phrasemes. The main problem with previous phraseography is that the dictionary entries are not based on comprehensive corpus analyses of actual language use. Hence I make a case for a “corpus-based phraseography” (Steyer 2010) and in using selected examples, I demonstrate how a pragmatic approach that is focused on actual language use can help to improve the lemmatization of formulaic expressions. This also shows which consequences and changes may occur from a corpus-analytical point of view as compared to the traditional phraseographical approach. For this purpose, I use the German reference corpus/Deutsches Referenzkorpus and the analysis system COSMAS II. Central to my analysis are the phenomena that have scarcely received any attention: the differentiation of modifications and phrase schemata, the valence spectrum of phrasemes as well as formulaic expressions with unique components.

The paper reports on a cross-linguistic study on speech data produced by monolingual and bilingual Dutch and Danish teenagers. The prediction that both monolingual and bilingual Danish youngsters show less variation in grammatical gender due to more morphological input cues for gender in Danish than in Dutch is borne out. More precise results of this cross-linguistic study are that free morphemes may vary in teenagers’ actual language use in Danish whereas bound morphemes may not. Further, the teenagers produce far more common than neuter nouns in both languages and the bilinguals overuse common gender of the definite determiner in Dutch and, though demonstrably less, the indefinite determiner in Danish.