Recipient passives in Mozambican Portuguese: A case of constructional alternation in the making

This paper examines the standardisation and codification in non-dominant varieties of pluricentric languages (NDVs). It focuses on the specific challenges that are connected with the fact that NDVs are sharing a common language and at the same time develop their own linguistic norms which, among other things, serve to express the social and national identity of their speakers. The paper informs about the state of the art in the codification of different pluricentric languages and it explores general models of codification, quantitative and qualitative stages of standardisation and the stages of linguistic decolonization which lead to endonormative stabilization and dialect birth. In this respect, specific corpus planning strategies that either retain the linguistic connection with the other varieties of the language or lead to different degrees of linguistic independence are also explored. Criteria for the delimitation of standard and non-standard features of NDVs are discussed and a list of relevant criteria for the selection of linguistic items of NDVs (in a self-defining codifying concept) is presented. 1. The codification of non-dominant varieties of pluricentric languages – obstacles and political struggles The concept of domination and non-domination in pluricentric languages has been developed by Michael Clyne (1992) and elaborated through the papers of the first and second conferences on non-dominant varieties in 20111 und 2012 and the papers of this volume. From those features that are fundamental for non-dominant varieties (NDVs) and listed in Muhr (2012: 39ff) the following can be expected to have an impact on the codification and standardisation of NDVs:

This article examines the discourse of appointment, promotion, and tenure (APT) documents for academic librarians. Discourse analysis can illuminate the social role of language, social systems, and social practices. This qualitative research analyzes the APT documents for librarians from a group of US universities (n = 50) whose librarians are tenured faculty (n = 35). Linguistic features were examined to identify genre (text type) and register (language variety) characteristics. The documents showed strong relationships with other texts; vocabulary from the language of human resources (HR); grammatical characteristics such as nominalization; passive constructions; few pronouns; the “quasi-synonymy” of series of adjectives, nouns, or verbs; and expression of certainty and obligation. The documents have a sociolinguistic and social semiotic component. In using a faculty genre, librarians assert solidarity with other faculty, while the prominent discourse of librarians as practitioners detracts from faculty solidarity. This research is limited to librarians at US land grant institutions. It has implications for other research institutions and other models of librarian status. This research can help academic librarians fulfill their obligations by understanding how values encoded in these documents reflect positive and negative approaches. Higher education and academic librarianship are in a state of flux. Understanding the discourse of these documents can help librarians encode appropriate goals and values. Little has been written on the discourse of librarianship. This is a contribution to the understanding of librarians as a discourse community and of significant communicative events.

This matched-guise study provides data on attitudes toward Mandarin Chinese-accented English by eliciting both Angloand Asian Americans'reactions to a male speaker. Study 1 discovered that in the context ofan employment interview, a speaker of Chinese-accented English was treated no differently than a standard American-accented English counterpart was and thatAsian American listeners were less evaluatively generous when it came to estimations of the speaker's attractiveness than their Anglo-American counterparts were. Study 2 explored the results further and found that the same Chinese-accented speaker was deemed less attractive than the standard American-accented speaker in the context of a college classroom. Tbgether, these studies demonstrate a need to understand better the role played by context in shaping attitudes toward varieties of language.

This paper deals with the passive construction in Basketo, a North Omotic language predominantly spoken in Basketo Special Woreda in Southern Nation Nationalities and Peoples Regional State, Ethiopia. The passive suffix - int- is also morphologically involved in reciprocal, reflexive, and spontaneous constructions. So, it can be regarded as a valency-reducing suffix having a de-transitivizing effect on the transitive. From the viewpoint of information structure, the passive construction is a strategy foregrounding the patient while backgrounding the agent. For this effect, OSV word order is used because the initial noun phrase of a sentence becomes a topic. On the other hand, in the interpretation of sentences with trivalent verbs, the noun phrase immediately preceding the verb is taken as focus. If this noun phrase is marked by instrumental (comitative) case -bara, the morpheme -int- of derived, verb stems must be interpreted as reciprocal, if accusative case (object), then passive. The passive form is also used in resultative constructions of telic verbs, i.e. those referring to a state that has happened as the result of a previous event. The object of the previous event is promoted to nominative, and the verbal noun of the derived verb stem with-int- is followed by the present auxiliary verb woɗe ‘exist’. Finally, the impersonal passive expresses a state of habitual or generic activity.

This paper examines the passive construction in Japanese. Focusing on the behavior of two types of by-phrase, ni and ni yotte, it is argued that the essential components that trigger the passive construction cannot be determined on the basis of structural properties such as ‘the suppression of an external argument’ or ‘defocusing the agent’. Rather, its formation is influenced mostly by factors which accord with a cognitive approach to language, in which our subjective judgment or experience of the world comes to the fore in the determination of the grammaticality of clausal structures. More precisely, the aforementioned observation suggests that the formation of Japanese passives requires more than purely structural or syntactic information. The paper further argues that the notion of EMPATHY, though it is often alluded to as being of primacy in Japanese passives in the previous literature, is still not sufficient in the light of the data at hand. The paper proposes five cognitive components, TEMPORALITY, DEPENDENCY, INVOLVEMENT, TYPICALITY, and SALIENCE, revealing that the grammaticality of Japanese passives is determined crucially by multiple human conceptualization.

Traditionally, it has been claimed that the non-canonical word order of passives makes them inherently more difficult to comprehend than their canonical active counterparts both in the first (L1) and second language (L2). However, growing evidence suggests that non-canonical word orders are not inherently more difficult to process than canonical counterparts when presented with discourse contexts that license their information structure constraints. In an eye-tracking experiment, we investigated the effect of information structure on the online processing of active and passive constructions and whether this effect differed in monolinguals and L1-Spanish–L2-English speakers. In line with previous corpus studies, our results indicated that there was an interaction between word order and information structure according to which passive sentences were much more costly to process with new–given information structure patterns. Crucially, we failed to find evidence that the effect of information structure on word order constraints in comprehension differed between monolingual and L2 speakers.

The existence of language varieties has a considerable impact on communication. They influence the interaction between language users from various centres due to the number of linguistic differences observed on the level of phonetics, spelling, grammar, lexis, and pragmatics. On the one hand, pluricentric languages connect people from various centres by using the “same” language, and on the other hand, they separate them by developing national norms. This article aims to demonstrate the importance of teaching language varieties in foreign language classes because the knowledge of national norms of pluricentric languages is essential in communication with people from various centres. Both English and German are pluricentric languages. Advanced language users should be aware of the differences between language varieties and be able to use the appropriate variety according to the communicative situation. The research undertaken in this article is meant to verify the undergraduate students’ knowledge of English and German varieties, emphasising terminology used in everyday life and their abilities to communicate in languages other than English or German.

English syntax used to have a version of the verb-second rule, by which the finite verb moves to second position in main clauses. This rule was lost in Middle English, and this article argues that its loss had serious consequences for the information structure of the clause. In the new, rigid subject-verb-object syntax, the function of preposed constituents changed, and the function of encoding ‘old’ or ‘given’ information in a pragmatically neutral way was increasingly reserved for subjects. Pressure from information structure to repair this situation subsequently led to the rise of new passive constructions in order to satisfy the need for more subjects; the change in the informational status of preposed constituents triggered the rise of clefts. If information structure can be compromised by syntactic change in this way, this suggests that it represents a separate linguistic level outside the syntax.

Functionally defined Passive Constructions are characterized as the conversive ones of corresponding active constructions, where a patient is promoted to the subject position, and an agent is demoted and transformed into a prepositional phrase. Georgian passive constructions do not always show such a conversion and actually express a variety of semantics: deponents, reflexives, reciprocals, potentials, etc. The peculiarities of Georgian passive define the restrictions of their usage in the processes of information structuring, where patient foregrounding implies certain morphosyntactic changes characteristic for conversive-passive constructions. The analysis of the Georgian sentence information structure provides a strong argument for interpreting Georgian passive as a grammatical category mostly governed by cognitive-semantic, and not simply by syntactic, features. This paper suggests a cognitive productive model and some semantic features that define the choice of either the passive or active formal models for grammatical representations of verbs showing so-called medial semantics.

In this paper, we will examine a range of factors that may potentially influence a language user's choice of a full or bare infinitive following HELP. The factors include language variety, language change, spoken/written distinction, semantic distinction, and syntactic conditions, namely, an intervening noun phrase or adverbial, the number of intervening words, to preceding HELP, the passive construction, inflections of HELP, and it as the subject. Six corpora are used in this paper, four written corpora (LOB, Brown, FLOB and Frown) and two spoken corpora (the speech section of the BNC and the Corpus of Professional Spoken American English, CPSA).

Portuguese is a native language of only a handful of people in Mozambique. However, it successfully plays the role of a common language of communication in the field of politics and economics. At the same time, it is a determinant of social status and, in the world of literature, it gives one the opportunity to break through to the readers around the Globe. Portuguese in Mozambique presents many differences from the European standard, and the specific characteristics of this variant can be found in the texts of Mia Couto. The purpose of this article is to present the differences between the variant of Mozambique and the European model of Portuguese, mainly in the field of morphosyntax, observed in the texts of Mia Couto. The marked differences can be seen, among others, in the use of prepositions, order of pronominal elements, in the structure of periphrastic and passive constructions, and the selection of verbal arguments. The features are highly repetitive, but at the same time, they occur quite irregularly, together with the structures accepted by the standard. It is, therefore, difficult to speak of a systematic language variant, but surely it is on its way to be established.

This paper deals with passive constructions in the Old Serbian translation of The Romance of Troy. Following a thorough theoretical introduction and conceptualization of the passive voice, we will begin our empirical analysis by exploring the morphosyntactic features of participial and reflexive passives. We will examine the roles these passive constructions play in the text’s informational structure and the reasons for using the passive voice instead of the active voice. We will present our findings and highlight the unique characteristics of both passive types, supplemented by a brief comparative-historical overview of Slavic languages.

Syntactic valence, information structure, and passive constructions in Kaqchikel

Introduction.The paper reviews features of the French language policy inFrance,Belguim,Canada, andSwitzerland. The novelty of the study is implied by the fact that features of the language policy are analyzed with previously unknown circumstances taken into account: the circumstances that allow French to be seen as a pluricentric language. The relevance of the study is conditioned by the necessity of observing the sociopolitical space of language functioning, as well as the importance of both analyzing the dynamics of pluricentric languages spreading and identifying mechanisms of using a single language for either uniting disparate nations or countries manipulating.Methodology and sources.The method of the study is a comprehensive approach with a number of linguistic and social variables correlations. The study was conducted using official websites of Organisation international dela Francophonie describing official bodies and institutions responsible for language policy implementation, as well as articles of various publications (Le soir, The Guardian, Ethnologies), devoted to the discussion of French norm regulation problems as the material of the study.Resultsanddiscussion.The main result of the study is a review of the status of French as a pluricentric language worldwide, particularly in countries considered to be centres of French variants development and having French as an official language. Main features of a pluricentric language, as well as the factors that turn a monocentric language into a pluricentric one (through the example of French) are looked at. The actions taken by the Organisation internationale dela Francophonie and aimed at the strengthening of relations between French-speaking countries and the promoting of the French language worldwide are described. The study also illustrates the dependence of peripheral language centres fromFrance. An emphasis is put on the politics of the Académie Française aimed at the French language unification in all the countries having it as an official language. An assumption on the reasons of different deviation extent of French variants inCanada,Belgium, andSwitzerland from Standard French is made.Conclusion.It is impossible to consider language to be an independent and isolated phenomenon as it exists and evolves within society serving its needs. Institutions pursuing a language policy are in position to affect its development directly, yet in the context of pluricentric languages it is insufficient to have a single centre of linguistic regulation. Local institutions may have a policy that runs contrary to the language policy of the centre. Gender reforms can also become a new wave of linguistic changes leading to further distancing of different language variants.

Variational pragmatics (VP), an interdisciplinary field at the intersection of pragmatics and dialectology (Barron and Schneider 2009, Schneider and Barron 2008), aims at investigating the effect of macrosocial factors, such as region, ethnicity, age, social class and gender, on intra-lingual pragmatic conventions. VP to date has predominantly focused on varieties of Indo-European pluricentric languages, such as English (Barron 2005a, 2008a, b, Jautz 2008, O'Keeffe and Adolphs 2008, Schneider 2008, 2012), Spanish (Félix-Brasdefer 2008, 2009, 2010b, García 2008, 2009, Márquez Reiter 2002, Placencia 2008), German (Muhr 2008, Warga 2008), Dutch (Plevoets et al. 2008) and French (Schölmberger 2008). Few VP studies have examined varieties of other pluricentric languages, especially non-Indo-European languages. Of these, it is noteworthy that Chinese, the national lingua franca in both Mainland China and Taiwan spoken by over 1 billion people (P. Chen 1999, Li 2006), has not been investigated in the VP literature, with the exception of two studies (Lin et al. 2012, Ren et al. 2013). Considering the increasing importance of China in global economic, social and cultural areas, investigating varieties of Chinese is arguably pivotal to successful intercultural communication.