Foreword

Abstract

The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age in the price we pay for the vigor of youth. (Steven Pinker) …, however, from the viewpoint of a linguist, it is definitely worth having it all. The articles for the summer 2022 issue mainly involve topics either on second language learning and acquisition or historical language changes and the motives for them. They were carefully picked up from numerous proposals, and we are very grateful to every single contributor and also to the reviewers. This issue opens with the article “Examples of Corpus Data Visualization: Collocations in Chinese” in which Ľuboš GAJDOŠ and Elena GAJDOŠOVÁ lightheartedly share a highly beneficial practical procedure that can be used in the visualization of language data, especially in language pedagogy. In a very similar manner to the visualization, DENG Qi presents a tangible example from Japanese in the article “Choice Between the Synonymous Pairs of Sutoppu and Teishi: A Case Study on Synonyms of Western Loanwords and Sino-Japanese in Modern Japanese Based on Corpus”, discussing their usage and functions. Yet another article “The Roman Alphabet Within the Japanese Writing System: Patterns of Usages and Their Significance” by Hironori NISHI explores the usages of the Roman alphabet within the present writing system of Japanese, which is, as the author suggests, induced by more and more frequent horizontal writing and the ever-increasing international interaction. The following article was written by GUO Qingli and CHEW Fong Peng and is entitled “Liushu-based Instruction and Its Effects on the Motivation and Intended Learning Efforts: The Case of Laos Learners of Standard Chinese”. It introduces the Liushu-based instruction and examines its effects on the students' motivation and intended learning efforts. LIU Sha wrote the article “Exceptions vs. Non-exceptions in Sound Changes: Morphological Condition and Frequency”, in which the author tries a unique approach to locate factors that explain exceptions in the diphthongization of [i] to [ei] in Mandarin. Last but not least, Nina GOLOB in her article “Word-Prosodic Typology: The Traps of Seemingly Similar Japanese and Slovene” offers a brief review of research trends on prosody, and by introducing the phonetic properties of the two languages and acquisition difficulties by Slovene speakers of Japanese questions the typological similarity between Japanese and Slovene. Editors and Editorial board wish the regular and new readers of the ALA journal a pleasant read full of inspiration, and a rise of new research ideas inspired by these papers.