Foreword

Abstract

This last year has been busy for the journal not only in terms of the volume of submissions but also due to the newliest demands as an online journal. Words of appreciaton go to the authors who have contributed to this edition, all the reviewers, finally to the production team, who prepared the papers for publication. Altogether this summer’s edition of the journal brings together six research articles.
 The first paper was authored by Karen HUANG, who acoustically analyzed neutral tone syllables in Taiwan Mandarin to show the effects of stress and accent on its tone patterns. 
 The following paper is a corpus study on phonemic status of Bangla nasal vowels and was written by Jahurul ISLAM. It offers a new insight into the number of such vowels, which is lower than reported up until now.
 Nina GOLOB and Mateja PETROVČIČ wrote an article on vowel sequences in Japanese and Chinese, and reviewed their appearance in official Latin scripts of the two languages and pronunciation catches in those scripts.
 A paper by Liulin ZHANG dedicates its attention to a character-based historical overview of the notional passive construction in Chinese through corpus analysis.
 Yet another paper on Chinese was written by LI Wenchao, who focused on the evolution of the Chinese verb 断 (duàn ‘break’) and discussed the development of its several syntactic functions.
 Last but not least, I-hao WOO’s paper on Mandarin Chinese perfective suffix -‍le proposed a straightforward definition on the core function of the suffix, and provided a simple way for the instruction of it.
 Editors and Editorial Board wish the regular and new readers of the ALA journal a pleasant read full of inspiration.