Contact Situations Research Articles

L’imperfetto resiano fra tempo, aspetto e modo

The present paper gives a description of the forms and functions of the imperfect in Resian, a Slovene-based micro-language spoken in northern Italy, which has been in a situation of language contact with Romance varieties for centuries. The comparison between the imperfects found in the oldest documents (eighteenth and nineteenth century) and those used in modern Resian shows a significant shift of its functions. The imperfect, in fact, has lost its original aspect-temporal values, now expressing mainly counterfactuality and the future in the past. Our analysis includes a discussion on the possible role of foreign influence in these developments.

The influence of hip revision stem spline design on the torsional stability in the presence of major proximal bone defects.

Despite the success of primary total hip arthroplasty, the number of revisions remains high. Infection, aseptic loosening, periprosthetic fractures and dislocations are the leading causes of hip revision. Current revision stem designs feature a tapered body with circumferential placed longitudinal thin metal splines that cut into the femoral cortex of the diaphysis to provide axial and rotational stability. Modifications to the spline design may help improve primary stability in various bone qualities. The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether the rotational stability of a revision hip stem can be improved by an additional set of less prominent, wider splines in addition to the existing set of splines. It is hypothesized that the additional splines will result in greater cortical contact, thereby improving torsional strength. The ultimate torsional strength of an established modular revision stem (Reclaim®, DePuy Synthes) was compared to a Prototype stem design with two sets of splines, differing in prominence by 0.25 mm. Five pairs of fresh-frozen human femurs (n = 10) were harvested and an extended trochanteric osteotomy was performed to obtain common bone defects in revision. Stems were implanted using successive droptower impacts to omit variability caused by mallet blows. The applied energy was increased from 2 J in 1 J increments until the planned implantation depth was reached or seating was less than 0.5 mm at 5 J impact. The ultimate torsional strength of the bone-to-implant interface was determined immediately after implantation. Image superposition was used to analyze and quantify the contact situation between bone and implant within the femoral canal. Cortical contact was larger for the Prototype design with the additional set of splines compared to the Reclaim stem (p = 0.046), associated with a higher torsional stability (35.2 ± 6.0 Nm vs. 28.2 ± 3.5 Nm, p = 0.039). A second set of splines with reduced prominence could be shown to improve primary stability of a revision stem in the femoral diaphysis in the presence of significant proximal bone loss. The beneficial effect of varying spline size and number has the potential to further improve the longevity of revision hip stems.

Analysis of the Closing Section of Line Chat in Japanese-Korean Contact Situations : Focusing on Closing Patterns, Composition Elements and Expression Forms

Analysis of the Closing Section of Line Chat in Japanese-Korean Contact Situations : Focusing on Closing Patterns, Composition Elements and Expression Forms

Two Raji Dialects Converge with Persian: Contrasting Responses to Contact Influence

AbstractRaji is a Central Plateau (Iranic) language spoken in Kashan district, in the north-west corner of Esfahan Province, Iran. Here, we investigate the nature of Persian influence on the lexicon of two closely-related Raji dialects: that of Abuzeydabad, a desert outpost at 947m above sea level, and Barzok, a well-watered farming community at 2080m in mountains nearby. As expected, our analysis shows many inherited similarities due to linguistic relationship among the three Iranic varieties; cases of difference and innovation that distinguish them; and profound impact of Persian on both Raji dialects. Nonetheless, the degree and patterning of convergence with Persian is uneven, with the dialect of Abuzeydabad showing greater wholesale borrowing from Persian, as well as evidence of structural hybridization. To account for the divergent effects of Persian influence, we review social and geographic dynamics in the language contact situation. Key factors such as population, distance from the nearby Persian-speaking city of Kashan, language identity, and the impact of media and education are equivalent. However, a stark contrast between the towns’ geographic settings defines their social networks and patterns of mobility, and in turn how speakers of each linguistic code respond to Persian influence.

Patient-centered radiology : What patients want from radiologists

In the transition from volume-based to value-based radiology, patient communication plays acrucial role in terms of patient-centeredness in radiology. This overview article aims to describe various patient contact situations in aradiology setting and discuss them based on current literature, including any recommendations for action if applicable. What do patients wish for from radiologists? Digital literature research with anarrative summary of important publications on patient-centeredness in the context of communication in the radiology-patient relationship. There is limited literature available in most areas regarding communication between radiology and patients. The most common type of literature found is surveys that assess patients' opinions, which sometimes yield divergent results regarding preferences for direct communication with radiologists after the examination. However, it has been shown that direct patient conversations and an empathetic physician-patient relationship allow for apositive evaluation of radiology and foster asense of appreciation. As we transition from volume-based to value-based radiology, it will be crucial for radiology to optimize the physician-patient relationship through improved communication, both verbally and by utilizing new media.

Backflagging revisited: A case study on bueno in English-Spanish bilingual speech

Most approaches to discourse markers tend to rely on observation on the behavior of monolingual classes of markers. In this paper, we offer a detailed analysis of the behavior and function of a single Spanish discourse marker, namely bueno, in bilingual discourse as opposed to its bilingual counterpart well. In particular, we compare pragmatic factors, and namely fine-grained differences between Spanish bueno and English well, with interactional factors such as the position of the marker in monological vs. dialogical sequences. Finally, we also take into account the impact of individual linguistic choices by comparing the behavior of different speakers when using the scrutinized discourse marker. Thus, we do not only contribute to and expand on previous literature on the behavior of discourse markers, but we also offer a new perspective to further study discourse markers in situations of language contact.

Pairing peers and pears

Abstract Migration events splitting speaker communities and establishing novel contact situations are among the major drivers of language variation and change. While the precise processes that lead to change cannot usually be determined for past events with any certainty, the study of minority and heritage language usage in apparent time may provide insight into the contribution of the linguistic behavior underlying the dynamics. We capitalize on this and compare parts of speech usage in Pear Story renarrations across Gheg Albanian speakers of three generations in German-speaking environments, applying methods from information theory. The results suggest that the changing conventions in parts of speech usage across generations and places of residence can be attributed to changing linguistic behavior within the speaker community in the migration setting. These findings highlight the impact of changing sociocultural embedding and the roles of vertical and horizontal transmission in language change.

Declarative intonation of Japanese-Spanish bilinguals in Spanish casual speech

This study presents an analysis of Spanish intonation produced by native speakers of Japanese. The analysis focuses on the nuclear configurations of 828 declarative tokens in the semi-spontaneous Spanish speech of 12 Japanese-Spanish bilingual speakers living in Valencia, Spain. Results of the analysis show that the speakers can produce the prosodic differences between two declarative utterance types that are differentiated in peninsular Spanish by pitch peak timing and final boundary contours. Specifically, the speakers of this study favored rising final boundary tones when maintaining their turn and the falling final contours for the end of turn. Results show interlanguage with greater variation in final contours and pitch peak placement than predicted. The study contributes to acoustic research on learner intonation by late bilinguals, particularly in a language contact situation involving an Asian language and romance language pair.

Testing Frenchification: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of French Loan Morphology in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Dutch

There is a long history of social, cultural and political contact between the Dutch and French language areas, which has also resulted in language contact. In the Dutch language area, the cultural and linguistic contact situation has resulted in an anti-French discourse of alleged Frenchification from the sixteenth century onwards. The peak of influence from French is traditionally located in the eighteenth century. However, corpus-based research of the actual influence of French on Dutch in the Early and Late Modern periods is still scarce. We investigate the use of 31 French loan suffixes (e.g. the verbal suffix -eren, nominal suffixes such as -age and -teit, and adjectival suffixes such as -aal) in the Letters as Loot Corpus, which is a socially stratified corpus of private and business letters from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, written by men and women from various regions in the northern Low Countries. A regression analysis shows that the overall distribution of French loan suffixes is quite similar in the two periods, except for the capital Amsterdam, where there is a significant increase in the eighteenth century. Further significant effects are found for men and for the higher social ranks, and for business or mixed letters (as opposed to purely private letters). The results suggest that French-origin items entered the language of the northern Low Countries as relatively formal or conceptually written forms, mainly adopted by upper (middle) class men from the cosmopolitan city of Amsterdam.

Ethnolinguistic Vitality, Social Identity and Inter Group Relationship in a Multilingual Contact Situation

Indian language contact situations are multilingual in nature, due to presence of
 different cultural and linguistic groups. In majority of the Indian multilingual contact
 situations, language groups are not clearly divided under dimensions of dominant/
 non-dominant, majority/minority, etc. In this backdrop the present paper makes an
 effort to understand the nature and dynamics of ethnolinguistic identity of three
 language communities of central Kolkata and their relationships with each other based
 on a study conducted in a language contact situation. The language groups taken for
 the study were English speaking Anglo-Indians, native Bengali speakers, and Urdu
 speaking Muslims of central Kolkata region. The study with help of theoretical principals
 of cross-cultural and social psychological perspectives tried to explore the dynamics of
 a multilingual contact situation, where none of the languages in the contact situation
 clearly fits the dimensions of majority/minority, dominant/non-dominant groups.

Anaphora resolution and age effects in Greek-Spanish bilingualism: Evidence from first-generation immigrants, heritage speakers, and L2 speakers

The present study compares anaphora resolution (AR) data from Greek and Spanish monolinguals and Greek-Spanish bilinguals who live in Chile to identify differences in resolving third-person null subjects (NSs) and overt pronominal subjects (OSPs) in ambiguous non-focused linguistic contexts. Overextension of the scope of OSPs in contexts where NSs are discursively expected has been consistently observed in different language contact situations, including pairs of null subject languages. According to the Interface Hypothesis, this is a compensatory strategy that occurs on account of bilingualism itself (inefficiency in syntax-pragmatic mappings). The study evaluates the Interface Hypothesis, focusing on the understudied combination of Greek and Spanish, by comparing three types of bilinguals: first-generation immigrants, heritage speakers, and L2 speakers, together with monolingual baseline groups. In addition, the study examines the age effects on speakers’ performance. Five groups of speakers (N = 115; age range 16–87; mean: 50.13, SD = 19.33) performed a self-paced auditory AR task. No overextension of the scope of OSPs was found in any of the bilingual groups, against the predictions stemming from the Interface Hypothesis. Significant age effects were found in the interpretation of NSs by both monolingual and bilingual speakers of Greek.

Regional variation in articulation rate in French spoken in Canada

This study examines articulation rate in three varieties of Canadian French and includes consideration of speaking style (reading vs. spontaneous), speaker’s age and gender, and length of inter-pause intervals. The varieties are spoken in different geographic areas of Canada – Quebec City (Quebec), Tracadie (New Brunswick), and Windsor (Ontario) – where there are different degrees of French–English contact. The main research question asks how these different contact situations are related to variation in articulation rate. Results show that in both reading and spontaneous speech articulation rates were faster among Quebec City speakers, where French is in a low-contact setting, and slower among speakers from Tracadie and Windsor, where there are greater degrees of contact. The effects of other factors are the same across the three regions: AR was faster in spontaneous productions than in reading; AR decreased with age in the reading task; AR was faster as the length of the inter-pausal intervals increased. The discussion points to similarities and differences with varieties of French spoken in Europe and underscores the importance of language contact in accounting for variation in articulation rate.

Identifying the dialectal background of American Finnish speakers using a supervised machine-learning model

Abstract This study presents results of two experiments using supervised machine-learning models to examine individual Finnish speakers’ dialectal backgrounds. Data come from interviews conducted with heritage speakers of Finnish in northern Wisconsin and are compared to data from the Finnish Dialect Syntax Archive. The models were constructed and then, following successful validation testing, used to identify the dialectal background of five individual American Finnish speakers. Results showed individual variation in dialectal backgrounds and some correlation to speakers’ likely language input. Our approach offers a new methodological tool for examining speakers’ dialectal backgrounds in situations of language contact.

English/Spanish Relatives and Their Relative Information Structure: A View from Language Contact in Puerto Rico

The goal of this paper is to analyse the impact of Main Clause Phenomena (MCP) such as Negative Preposing (NPr) in four types of relative clauses, namely definite restrictive, indefinite restrictive, non-restrictive and kind-defining relative clauses, establishing a contrast between English and Spanish and discussing the interconnection of the two languages in a language contact situation such as the one observed in Puerto Rico. To this end, I have carried out an experiment with monolingual native speakers of the two languages (control groups), where they have to judge the grammaticality/acceptability of the different types of relatives when NPr takes place. In addition, the same task is carried out by a bilingual group of Puerto Ricans (PR). The main purpose was to detect any interference of one language upon the other one regarding the licensing conditions of NPr in relative clauses. The main empirical result shows that English makes a distinction in terms of acceptability between types of relatives with NPr, whereas in Spanish NPr is licensed in all types of relatives, and this situation seems to be mimicked in the language contact situation in Puerto Rico, though some crucial differences are detected which suggest that PR bilinguals have an integrated I-language (sensu López 2020). The results support the idea that there are two big groups of relatives, namely asserted (very similar to root clauses) and non-asserted relatives. The latter include definite restrictive relatives, whereas the former include non-restrictive relatives, kind-defining relatives and indefinite restrictive relatives. Based on discourse-feature inheritance, intervention and the projection of a factive operator in non-asserted relatives (subject to parametric variation), I argue that the PR results show that when processing one specific language they may apply a syntactic rule of the other language, which I take to support the integrationist view of bilingualism.

The ‘Big DP’ Hypothesis: New Evidence from Gender Agreement in a Shipibo-Spanish Language Contact Situation

Previous evidence suggests clitics and determiners do not enter the same type of gender agreement relations in contact varieties of Spanish, despite proposals that treat clitics as determiners (big DP – Determiner Phrase – hypothesis) (Uriagereka 1995; Cecchetto 1999, 2000; Belletti 2005). We conducted a study on gender agreement between clitics and their antecedents, and determiners and nouns among adult Shipibo-Spanish bilinguals to answer the following question: Do Shipibo- Spanish bilingual speakers have similar patterns of local vs. long-distance gender agreement? Our results show gender agreement between D and N obtains categorically, but gender agreement between the clitic and its antecedent is at chance-level. We propose an alternative analysis for our data that does not assume the big DP hypothesis.

Urartian Stelae in Late Antique and Early Medieval Armenia

Abstract This article concerns how Armenian communities throughout the 1st millennium A.D. reinterpreted and redeployed cuneiform inscriptions originally carved in the Iron Age as meaningful traces of the local past. It focuses on the deliberate re-use by early Armenian Christians of Iron-Age stelae bearing Urartian cuneiform inscriptions in the region around Lake Van. Scholars have noted such re-use in passing since the 19th century A.D., but there has been no concerted effort to collect or interpret relevant evidence holistically. The article distinguishes several distinct trends in Armenian engagements with cuneiform (and hieroglyphic) inscriptions in their native territories over the course of the 1st millennium A.D. Combining literary and archaeological evidence, it contextualizes cases of re-use as clashes of historical consciousness, expressed via material culture, in dynamic situations of colonial contact and religious conversion.

Social identity threat is related to ethnic minority adolescents' social approach motivation towards classmates via reduced sense of belonging.

The integration of ethnic minority youth can only be successful if they are motivated to establish and maintain social relationships in important institutions such as school. At the same time, worries about negative stereotypes about one's ethnic group can undermine ethnic minority students' motivation to approach others. In the present study, we tested whether social identity threat predicts ethnic minority adolescents' social approach motivation via reduced sense of belonging. We also examined whether multiple social identities (i.e., high endorsement of ethnic and national idenitiy) buffer against the negative effects of social identity threat. In a sample of 426 ethnic minority students from 36 9th -grade classes in Germany, social identity threat was indirectly related to social approach motivation via reduced sense of belonging to the school and class. The interplay of students' ethnic and national identity moderated the relationship of social identity threat and sense of belonging. The relationship was particularly negative for students who endorsed either ethnic or national identity. However, it was less negative for students with integrated multiple social identities and non-significant for students who identified neither with the ethnic nor the national group. Results generalized for social approach motivation towards ethnic majority and minority classmates. These patterns were only found for social approach motivation in face-to-face contact situations, but not in online situations. We discuss these findings in light of the literature on social identity threat and multiple social identities. Practical implications include measures to foster students' sense of belonging and to reduce social identity threat.

Greek Inscriptions in Mesopotamia (and Babylonia)

This article provides a short overview on the few Greek inscriptions from Mesopotamia which date to the period between the third century bce and the first century ce. It argues that since the concept of “identity” has certain shortcomings for a historical analysis of an ancient society it might be useful to apply the concepts “commonality,” “connectedness,” and “groupness” for a somehow further and deeper insight. Due to the lack of a larger group of Greek documents in the timeframe mentioned, these concepts are used for some short remarks on the graffiti of the Nebuchelos-Archive from Dura-Europos which dates to the third century ce. The article attempts to show how, in a situation of cultural contact which produced hybrid and ambiguous forms of cultural practices, individuals used different cultural markers and practices of the different societies to demonstrate and publicly display their “commonality” and “connectedness.”

Dialect differences and linguistic divergence

Abstract This article presents a new type of comparative linguistic survey, analyzing (socio)linguistic variation in a database of 1,155 grammatical constructions drawn from 42 diverse languages. We focus in particular on variation in the expression of grammatical meanings, and the extent to which grammatical variation differentiates geographic dialects. This is the first study we know of to present a systematic, crosslinguistic survey of dialect differentiation. We identify three main structural types of grammatical variation—form, order, and omission—and find that in situations of close contact between dialects, where signaling of distinct group identities is more relevant, form variables are more likely to differentiate dialects than the other two types. Order and omission variables usually only differentiate dialects that have minimal contact. Our survey suggests that social signaling may have a substantial role in the divergence of grammars, and provides systematic support for previous proposals regarding convergence and divergence under contact.

Linguistic Contact in Perspective: Lateral Coda in Principense Portuguese

Abstract This paper discusses the lateral /l/ in coda in Principense Portuguese (PP). Based on an elicited corpus recorded in situ, composed of 852 occurrences of 78 lexical items, we found that the lateral /l/ in coda can be vocalized or deleted. For instance, bolso ‘pocket’ can be pronounced as [ˈbow.sʊ] or [ˈbo.sʊ], as reported in some Brazilian Portuguese varieties. In PP, vocalization and deletion are phenomena that arise from a confluence of factors. It gathers characteristic features of the formative grammatical structure of Portuguese. At the same time, it reflects the linguistic contact scenario in which PP is inserted, since the lenition of consonants in semivowels, as well as strategies to avoid codas, are also reported in Lung’Ie (LI), a language in synchronic contact and present in the constitution of the PP (Agostinho, Ana Lívia. 2015. Fonologia e método pedagógico do lung’Ie [Phonology and pedagogical method of Lung’Ie]. São Paulo: University of São Paulo dissertation). Both Portuguese and Lung’Ie support vocalization and deletion in their grammars, fostering a relevant overlap of features to the alternation [ɫ] ∼ [w] ∼ ∅ in PP. We conclude that, in addition to specific features of Portuguese grammatical structure, PP’s linguistic contact situation must be considered as a relevant factor for the deletion and vocalization of laterals in coda in PP.