Cross-linguistic Research Research Articles

Vietnamese transitive cognate objects revisited

Abstract A cognate object construction (COC) is a construction in which a typically intransitive verb combines with a nominal phrase that has the same meaning or the same morphological stem, e.g., live a happy life. In the literature, the syntactic status of cognate objects (CO) is one of the most debated issues. Pham (1999) observes that in Vietnamese, COs can occur with transitive verbs in both the direct object and indirect object position. She concludes that examples of direct COs provide evidence for the view that COs are arguments, and the existence of indirect COs shows that they can also be indirect objects. First, this paper argues that direct COs cannot be treated as evidence for the argument status of COs since they are not additional arguments. Moreover, they are not nouns but classifiers. Second, indirect COs are not indirect objects but prepositional objects in an adverbial prepositional phrase. These findings reveal that Vietnamese transitive COs are complex and different from the description in Pham’s study. It is important to make a clear distinction between these transitive COs and intransitive COs, especially in cross-linguistic research.

GPT is an effective tool for multilingual psychological text analysis

The social and behavioral sciences have been increasingly using automated text analysis to measure psychological constructs in text. We explore whether GPT, the large-language model (LLM) underlying the AI chatbot ChatGPT, can be used as a tool for automated psychological text analysis in several languages. Across 15 datasets (n = 47,925 manually annotated tweets and news headlines), we tested whether different versions of GPT (3.5 Turbo, 4, and 4 Turbo) can accurately detect psychological constructs (sentiment, discrete emotions, offensiveness, and moral foundations) across 12 languages. We found that GPT (r = 0.59 to 0.77) performed much better than English-language dictionary analysis (r = 0.20 to 0.30) at detecting psychological constructs as judged by manual annotators. GPT performed nearly as well as, and sometimes better than, several top-performing fine-tuned machine learning models. Moreover, GPT's performance improved across successive versions of the model, particularly for lesser-spoken languages, and became less expensive. Overall, GPT may be superior to many existing methods of automated text analysis, since it achieves relatively high accuracy across many languages, requires no training data, and is easy to use with simple prompts (e.g., "is this text negative?") and little coding experience. We provide sample code and a video tutorial for analyzing text with the GPT application programming interface. We argue that GPT and other LLMs help democratize automated text analysis by making advanced natural language processing capabilities more accessible, and may help facilitate more cross-linguistic research with understudied languages.

Features of the part-speech composition of terms of international air law in English and Russian languages

The work reveals a problem of the part-of-speech composition in terms of the English and Russian languages in international air law. The study presents an analysis of the parts of speech included in the term structure in international air law according to the criterion of certain terminological field. The purpose of the study is to determine the most characteristic part-of-speech composition for the terms of several groups, identified on the basis of a common field in terminological systems Russian and English. This principle of analysis helps to compare terminological groups in different language systems. The objectives of the study were to identify the frequency of a certain part-ofspeech structure for the terms of the Russian and English languages. The work presents an empirical study, which prove that the proposed version of the analysis makes it possible to compare each lexical and semantic group in the English language with the Russian language in terms of the frequency of a certain part-of-speech structure; to identify the main dynamics in certain part-ofspeech structures in the English and Russian terminological systems of international air law. Based on the results of the study, the following conclusions were made: comparative analysis of the partof-speech structure based on the criterion of a single semantic core within the branch of international air law is the most objective criterion that allows the comparison of terms from two different language systems within the framework of cross-linguistic research; part-of-speech structures of terms are directly related to the structural features of the Russian and English languages.

Request for confirmation sequences in British and American English

Abstract This article presents the quantitative findings from a comparative study of request for confirmation (RfC) sequences in British English (BE) and American English (AE). The study is part of a large-scale cross-linguistic research project on RfCs in ten languages. RfCs put forward a proposition about which the speaker claims some knowledge but for which they seek (dis)confirmation from an informed co-participant. The article examines linguistic resources for building RfCs and their responses in the two English varieties. RfCs are analyzed with regard to their syntactic design, polarity, modulation, inference marking, connectives, question tags, and the prosodic design of confirmables and potential question tags. Responses to RfCs are analyzed with regard to response type, the use, type and position of response tokens, (non-)minimal responses in turns with a response token, response prefacing, and repeat responses. BE and AE are found to resemble each other closely in most categories. A major exception is their prosodic design, however. Specifically, the preference for the final pitch pattern of RfCs differs markedly in the two varieties: BE shows a strong preference for final falling pitch; AE shows a preference for final rising pitch. This suggests that the two varieties have routinized distinct intonation patterns for expressing epistemic (un)certainty in RfCs.

Request for confirmation sequences in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract As a social action, requesting confirmation involves presenting a proposition to be (dis)confirmed and seeking another’s (dis)confirmation of the proposition. This article provides an overview of the lexico-syntactic and prosodic resources used by participants to perform requests for confirmation (RfCs) and to respond to RfCs in Mandarin face-to-face interactions. Drawing on statistical results of the frequencies of a variety of linguistic resources in RfC sequences, this study shows that declaratives are the most frequently used syntactic forms for RfCs in the Mandarin data. Tags, such as shiba ‘right?’, are also frequently used by the speaker to seek (dis)confirmation from the recipient. The RfCs in the data also exhibit one prominent prosodic pattern. That is, a larger number of RfC turns in Mandarin end with falling pitch movement with very moderate slope from mid (M) to low (L). This prosodic pattern stems from the interplay between tones and intonation in Mandarin. In the responses to RfCs, a majority of them are confirmations. Also, response tokens, such as dui ‘right’ and en ‘en’ with falling intonation, are used highly frequently in responses to RfCs in the Mandarin data. Findings in this study afford cross-linguistic research on RfC sequences.

Russian culture through the prism of English, Finnish and Japanese languages: Reflections or refractions?

Thinning borders in the modern world result in intense translingual/transcultural communication. Yet, a language is originally fit to describe its own culture, while cultural reorientation requires considerable adaptation. The paper aims at researching the mechanisms of languages’ cultural reorientation as exemplified by the Japanese-, English- and Finnish-language Russia-centred discourse. The cultural reorientation of a language is seen as a mode of translation – translation of culture. Research questions are: What linguistic techniques to introduce exocultural context are preferred by the focus languages? What elements of the source culture are selected for constructing the Russia-centred discourse in the focus languages? The research is based on data in three unrelated languages. The data is organised in manually annotated corpora of culturally loaded texts of book titles. The analysis of translation techniques employed by different languages in the process of cultural reorientation revealed (a) the specificity of the strategy of translating culture as contrasted to that of traditional translation; (b) the features of the exoculture-centred discourse as affected by language-specific linguistic factors. The study of xenonyms, selected to represent the source culture, shows a considerable variation in the choice of representatives, while the types of xenonyms are largely comparable. The cross-linguistic research of Russia-centred discourse is crucial for understanding established discursive canon, which must serve as guidance for presenting and promoting Russian culture in intercultural dialogue.

Doing More than Confirming: Expanded Responses to Requests for Confirmation in German Talk-in-Interaction

Abstract While requests for confirmation (RfCs) make a yes/no-response relevant, recipients often produce more than a mere confirmation. Our paper explores expanded responses to RfCs in German talk-in-interaction. We focus on responses consisting of a confirmation and an additional TCU/action. Drawing on video data from mundane and institutional settings, we demonstrate how expanded responses are designed and fit the sequential environments in which they occur. We show four different functions fulfilled with expanded responses: (i) specifying and elaborating on the topic introduced in the RfC, (ii) accounting for the intelligibility of the speaker’s prior actions, (iii) resisting the terms of the RfC, and (iv) challenging a RfC by referring to the recipient’s pre-existing knowledge. Finally, we summarize interactional features relevant for the occurrence of expanded responses in our data. In addition, we discuss the implications of our results for future cross-linguistic research.

The Absence of Islands in Akan: The Role of Resumption

The precise nature of Ā-dependencies that terminate in a pronoun has been a long-standing subject of cross-linguistic research. Traditionally, it has been assumed that there are two derivational strategies to form resumptive Ā-dependencies: movement and base generation. Island configurations have played a crucial role in determining which derivational strategy is employed in a given language, as islands effects are expected to arise from dependencies created by movement but not by base generation. The body of cross-linguistic research on resumption has shown that the situation is more complicated once other diagnostics are taken into account, as languages can have mixed resumption profiles. In this paper, we discuss resumption in Ā-dependencies in Akan, a Kwa language spoken in Ghana, and illustrate that, despite their general insensitivity to islands, resumptive dependencies also show many classic hallmarks of movement. We situate these findings in the broader context of a general understanding of resumption cross-linguistically and discuss how the conflicting diagnostics might be reconciled with a movement-based analysis.

Infants' sensitivity to phonotactic regularities related to perceptually low-salient fricatives: a cross-linguistic study.

Infants' sensitivity to language-specific phonotactic regularities emerges between 6- and 9- months of age, and this sensitivity has been shown to impact other early processes such as wordform segmentation and word learning. However, the acquisition of phonotactic regularities involving perceptually low-salient phonemes (i.e., phoneme contrasts that are hard to discriminate at an early age), has rarely been studied and prior results show mixed findings. Here, we aimed to further assess infants' acquisition of such regularities, by focusing on the low-salient contrast of /s/- and /ʃ/-initial consonant clusters. Using the headturn preference procedure, we assessed whether French- and German-learning 9-month-old infants are sensitive to language-specific regularities varying in frequency within and between the two languages (i.e., /st/ and /sp/ frequent in French, but infrequent in German, /ʃt/ and /ʃp/ frequent in German, but infrequent in French). French-learning infants preferred the frequent over the infrequent phonotactic regularities, but the results for the German-learning infants were less clear. These results suggest crosslinguistic acquisition patterns, although an exploratory direct comparison of the French- and German-learning groups was inconclusive, possibly linked to low statistical power to detect such differences. Nevertheless, our findings suggest that infants' early phonotactic sensitivities extend to regularities involving perceptually low-salient phoneme contrasts at 9 months, and highlight the importance of conducting cross-linguistic research on such language-specific processes.

Interactional Infrastructure across Modalities: A Comparison of Repair Initiators and Continuers in British Sign Language and British English

Abstract: Minimal expressions are at the heart of interaction: Interjections like "Huh?" and "Mhm" keep conversations flowing by establishing and reinforcing intersubjectivity among interlocutors. Crosslinguistic research has identified that similar interactional pressures can yield structurally similar words (e.g., to initiate repair across languages). While crosslinguistic comparisons that include signed languages remain uncommon, recent work has revealed similarities in discourse management strategies among signers and speakers that share much of their cultural background. This study contributes a crossmodal comparison of repair initiators and continuers in speakers of English and signers of British Sign Language (BSL). We combine qualitative and quantitative analyses of data from sixteen English speakers and sixteen BSL signers, resulting in the following: First, the interactional infrastructure drawn upon by speakers and signers overwhelmingly relies on behaviors of the head, face, and body; these are used alone or sometimes in combination with verbal elements (i.e., spoken words or manual signs), while verbal strategies alone are rare. Second, discourse management strategies are remarkably similar in form across the two languages: A held eye gaze or freeze-look is the predominant repair initiator and head nodding the main continuer. These results suggest a modality-agnostic preference for visual strategies that do not occupy the primary articulators, one that we propose is founded in recipiency; people maintain the flow of communication following principles of minimal effort and minimal interruption.

한국어의 피동과 비피동

The purpose of this paper is to classify the types of Korean passive sentences using the main characteristics of passive voice. To achieve this goal, we conducted a review of cross-linguistic research on passive voice and identified four key characteristics. These characteristics were then used to classify Korean passive sentences, with a detailed description of the characteristics and differences of each type. As a result, we identified Types I and II as prototypical passive sentences and Types III and IV as non-prototypical passive sentences. Additionally, we confirmed the existence of non-passive sentences among those previously discussed as passive sentences. Through this discussion, we examined the characteristics and reality of Korean passive sentences more closely. Furthermore, our understanding of Korean passive sentences was expanded by employing a prototypical approach to describe various types of passive sentences as a continuum.

Production of Advice Speech Act by Non-Native Speakers of English: The Case of Kurdish EFL Learners

Speech act studies are commonly used in Second Language Acquisition research to assess second language learners’ pragmatic skills. Contrary to other speech acts, the speech act of offering advice has not been sufficiently studied and has not been a topic of cross-cultural or cross-linguistic research either, particularly among Kurdish EFL learners. The study aimed to conduct a comparative analysis of the advice speech act as expressed by Kurdish EFL learners and native English speakers. Thus, the study looked at the proficiency of Kurdish EFL users in selecting appropriate pragmatic expressions during the act of providing advice and discernible differences between male and female learners regarding the degree of (in)directness while advice is offered. Hence, the study included 82 undergraduate students from various universities in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region, particularly in Erbil. This group consisted of 42 females and 40 males, all majoring in English Language Teaching. Additionally, 30 native English speakers also took part in the research. Data collection was conducted through a 12-item discourse completion test, and the collected data were subsequently subjected to analysis using SPSS. The results unveiled a significant difference between Kurdish EFL learners and native speakers. It figured out that Kurdish EFL learners are not quite aware of the social power and social distance of interlocutors while giving advice. Additionally, it was indicated that female learners are more indirect in offering advice than their male counterparts. Moreover, the findings also unearthed a visible indication of first language pragmatic transfer, though it was not a variable of the study.

When MIPVU goes to no man’s land: a new language resource for hybrid, morpheme-based metaphor identification in Hungarian

AbstractThe aim of the article is to present a new language resource for metaphor analysis in corpora that is (i) a MIPVU-inspired, morpheme-based process for identifying metaphor in Hungarian and (ii) the refinement and innovative version of metaphor identification extending the scope of the process to multi-word expressions. The elaboration of language-specific protocols in metaphor identification has become one of the central endeavors in contemporary cross-linguistic research on metaphor, but there is a gap in the field regarding languages with rich morphology, especially in the case of Hungarian. To fill this gap, we developed a hybrid, morpheme-based version of the original method, which can handle morphologically complex metaphorical expressions. Additional innovations of our protocol are the measurement and tagging of idiomaticity in metaphors based on collocation analysis and the identification of semantic relationships between the components of metaphorical expressions. The present paper discusses both the theoretical motivation and the practical details of the adapted method for metaphor identification. As a conclusion, the presented protocol can provide new answers to the questions of metaphor identification in languages with rich morphology and shed new light on the internal semantic organization of linguistic metaphors.

Systematic Literature Review of Crosslinguistic Analysis of Stance Markers in EFL Learners’ Academic Writing in English

Evaluating the use of stance markers is an important approach to investigate the interactional and persuasive nature of academic writing in English. However, the problems EFL learners’ face using of stance markers and its research methodologies in crosslinguistic analysis are uncertain. This systematic literature review examined problems EFL learners’ face in using of stance markers and the research methodologies used to identify these problems in crosslinguistic research. The current study employed the PRISMA 2020 paradigm to conduct a systematic literature review (SLR) of crosslinguistic analysis of stance markers in EFL learners’ academic writing in English. Keywords queries on “stance*”, “academic writing*”, “metadiscourse*” and “metadiscursive*” were used to retrieve articles from Scopus and Web of Science databases. Following screening, 34 articles were included in the final analysis. EFL learners had problems in using hedges, boosters, self-mentions and attitude markers, and their main challenges were in the overuse of boosters and underuse of hedges. Chinese EFL learners had the most problems in using stance markers. All the 34 articles adopted an empirical approach and most were a corpus-based study. Researchers were fond of argumentative essays, dissertations, and research articles from coursework. In addition, scholars preferred one-way comparisons especially between native language and interlanguage (NL vs IL). Enhancing EFL learners' awareness of stance markers would require more instructions regarding stance markers in academic writing classrooms and future research should use three-way or four-way comparisons in crosslinguistic analysis.

The case for broader copulas

Abstract Discovering, comparing, and contrasting natural kinds is critical for scientific progress. It should be the goal of linguistic inquiry to seek out natural kinds within and between languages. Unfortunately, the most common definition of a copula is consistently inadequate for categorizing and comparing the data in cross-linguistic research on this topic. The categories of pseudo-copula and semi-copula have been offered to account for constructions which resemble the copular relationship between subject and complement, though with added meaning in that relationship. I will argue that copulas, defined more broadly, function in diverse ways cross-linguistically to instantiate the alterable feature-driven relationship between subject and complement. This article presents a gradient view of copulas based on a set of binary featural parameters with which a language may represent with one or more copulas. A formal description of this phenomena is also offered within in the framework of Distributed Morphology, building on Wilson (2020).

Subordination in Turkish Heritage Children with and without Developmental Language Impairment

A large body of cross-linguistic research has shown that complex constructions, such as subordinate constructions, are vulnerable in bilingual DLD children, whereas they are robust in bilingual children with typical language development; therefore, they are argued to constitute a potential clinical marker for identifying DLD in bilingual contexts, especially when the majority language is assessed. However, it is not clear whether this also applies to heritage contexts, particularly in contexts in which the heritage language is affected by L2 contact-induced phenomena, as in the case of Heritage Turkish in Germany. In this study, we compare subordination using data obtained from 13 Turkish heritage children with and without DLD (age range 5; 1–11; 6) to 10 late successive (lL2) BiTDs (age range 7; 2–12; 2) and 10 Turkish adult heritage bilinguals (age range 20; 3–25; 10) by analyzing subordinate constructions using both Standard and Heritage Turkish as reference varieties. We further investigate which background factors predict performance in subordinate constructions. Speech samples were elicited using the sentence repetition task (SRT) from the TODİL standardized test battery and the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN). A systematic analysis of a corpus of subordinate clauses constructed with respect to SRT and MAIN narrative production comprehension tasks shows that heritage children with TD and DLD may not be differentiated through these tasks, especially when their utterances are scored using the Standard Turkish variety as a baseline; however, they may be differentiated if the Heritage Turkish is considered as the baseline. The age of onset in the second language (AoO_L2) was the leading performance predictor in subordinate clause production in SRT and in both tasks of MAIN regardless of using Standard Turkish or Heritage Turkish as reference varieties in scoring.

Enabling Elaboration and Offering Candidate Understandings. Finnish Turn-Final vai ‘or’ in Requests for Confirmation

Abstract Like many other languages, in Finnish the alternative conjunction vai (‘or’) can be used in a turn-final position without the presence of an (explicit) alternative. This article discusses the contribution of turn-final vai ‘or’ in requests for confirmation. It argues that there are two main contexts of use. The forward-looking vai-turn seeks confirmation for something that is not based on the previous talk. In this case, vai marks the content of the question as merely one possible alternative. In backward-looking use, the vai-turn offers an interpretation of something that was implied in the previous talk and typically contrasts with a previously held, alternative assumption. The former type enables a (dis)confirmation with elaboration, whereas the latter type makes relevant a (dis)confirmation with minimal specification/explanation. The study contributes to the cross-linguistic research on turn-final particles and specifically, the particle ‘or’.

The Role of Animacy in Turkish Relative Clause Production and Distribution.

Relative clause (RC) production has been a major tool used for understanding language production mechanism in experimental linguistics. The present study analyzes language production mechanisms in Turkish by utilizing animacy effect on RC production. A picture description task was applied to two participant groups. The data were combined and analyzed to see how animacy influenced RC formation. The outcomes were also compared to the distributions of RC use in corpus data. Both participant and corpus data demonstrated significant level of passivization for RCs with animate heads, strongly affirming the grammatical function assignment proposal by Bock and Warren (Cognition 21(1):47-67, 1985) as well as the premise of Production-Distribution-Comprehension account (MacDonald in Front Psychol 4:226, 2013), emphasizing the relationship between language production mechanisms and typology. However, the corpus data were observed to have higher numbers of passivization with animate condition. Accordingly, a coarse comparison of the participant RC production proportions in the current study with some other crosslinguistic research suggests that some language-specific or discourse-related interventions can also compete with the animacy accessibility during the sentence planning procedure, which needs an extra inquiry especially in Turkish language.

A multi-method approach to estimating subjectivity of causal connectives: The case of ‘poetomu’ and ‘tak chto’ in Russian

Cross-linguistic evidence shows that languages often employ specialized causal connectives to express subjective versus objective relations. This evidence mostly comes from corpus studies. However, the phenomenon of connective specialization can also be approached with experimental methods. The present study set out to compare different methods of investigating subjectivity profiles of causal connectives in a language, uncovering the different aspects of connective specialization that they elucidate. A combination of the traditional corpus analysis (Study 1), a connective insertion experiment (Study 2), and a sentence continuation experiment (Study 3) was applied to Russian forward causal connectives poetomu ‘that’s why’ and tak chto ‘so’, which have not been studied in this respect. The results of all three methods show that, across discourse types, tak chto prefers subjective relations more than poetomu, which expresses objective relations. The specialization of connectives is most pronounced in the connective insertion experiment due to the constraining nature of this task and the prototypicality of the stimuli. The corpus study and the sentence continuation experiment show less strong specialization profiles of connectives because they are more sensitive to other contextual factors. Our research illustrates the importance of combining different methods and contributes to the cross-linguistic research in the field.

한국어와 그리스어 이동사건의 어휘화 대조 연구

The following research investigates the lexicalization patterns of motion events in Korean and Greek. Cross-linguistic differences in the encoding of motion events are typically attributed to differences in encoding strategies offered by languages and the limited possibilities for organizing semantic components of movement (i.e., Manner and Course). According to Talmy (1985, 2000), Korean and Modern Greek have been classified as “verb-framed languages,” although there is some disagreement among researchers regarding this classification. Korean language, while debatably not clearly belonging to the verb-framed language or some third category, generally exhibits the characteristics of a V-language. Modern Greek, on the other hand, is a language that demonstrates the coexistence of verb and satellite-framed language, sharing certain properties with satellite language systems, and is situated in an intermediate position on the typological continuum between V and S-languages. Through the research, it is confirmed that the two languages, while initially categorized as V-languages, display unique features in the lexicalization patterns of motion events. Based on the results of this study, further cross-linguistic research can be conducted to explore the individual characteristics of each language in relation to language acquisition.