Cross-linguistic Research Research Articles

Phasal polarity in Tunisian Arabic

This paper gives a corpus-based descriptive account of the phasal polarity system (still, already, not yet, and no longer) in the Arabic vernacular of Tunisia. The aim is to broaden the empirical foundations for cross-linguistic research in this domain, and to narrow the gap between typologically oriented and philological research on Arabic varieties. Like many languages (van Baar 1997: 118), Tunisian Arabic has autochthonous expressions for the three concepts still, not yet, and no longer. still is primarily expressed via a construction < ‘has not ceased’. Despite its conceptual transparency, this appears to be a cross-linguistically uncommon source. not yet is expressed via the inner negation of still, and no longer via a construction < ‘has not repeated’. For already, northern sedentary varieties have borrowed from French (replacing an older autochthonous expression), whereas southern Bedouin varieties have a “gap” in their system. The description further includes notes on the synchronic and diachronic variation of individual items, and functions of these outside the realm of phasal polarity.

Reconstructing the expression of placement events in Danish as a second language.

Cross-linguistic research on event typology has revealed considerable variation in the linguistic conceptualization of placement events. Previous studies on second language acquisition have primarily dealt with the semantic re-categorization of placement verbs in a second language, but placement constructions have received less attention. The present study fills this gap by examining the constructions used by Spanish learners of L2 Danish (B1 and B2 levels) and by monolingual speakers of both languages. Data were elicited by means of the PUT task consisting of oral video descriptions and then classified into six main placement construction categories based on their frequency and structure. Results from the learner group suggest learning difficulties when reconstructing the expression of placement events in L2 Danish. In contrast to L1 Danish data, learners (i) kept using their L1 Spanish basic placement construction more often, (ii) avoided semantically more complex constructions, (iii) employed fewer spatial particles, (iv) showed difficulties in selecting the L2 appropriate spatial particles for specific placement scenes, and (v) used non-caused motion constructions. These findings suggest the creation of a linguistic conceptualization pattern on the part of the learners that is different from the respective L1 and L2 monolingual patterns, thus providing further empirical support for proposals arguing that bilinguals' multicompetence is not equivalent to those of two monolinguals.

Going to space

Motion between earth and outer space can be construed in different ways in different languages. The aim of this study is to identify all prepositional constructions used to describe motion from earth to space in English and Swedish and investigate how they contribute to different conceptualizations of earth, space, and the journey in between. It also aims to highlight some challenges of using corpora for cross linguistic research. The data was collected from Corpus of Contemporary American English and Korp and analyzed through the lenses of image-schema and construal. The study shows that there are many ways to construe this type of motion in both languages. Different parts of the journey can be put into focus, and earth and space can be construed in different ways, depending on the perspective of the speaker. The most common constructions in both languages focus on the goal and construe earth and/or space as containers.

Multimodal mitigation: how facial and body cues index politeness in Catalan requests

Abstract Recent cross-linguistic research has demonstrated that speakers use a prosodic mitigation strategy when addressing higher status interlocutors by talking more slowly, reducing the intensity and lowering the overall fundamental frequency (F0). Much less is known, however, about how politeness-related meaning is expressed multimodally (i.e., combining verbal and multimodal channels). The present study investigates how Catalan native speakers encode politeness-related meanings through facial and body cues. We test whether speakers apply a gestural mitigation strategy and use specific hedging devices in socially distant situations (e.g., when asking an older person of higher status for a favor). Twenty Catalan speakers were video-recorded while participating in a discourse elicitation task where they were required to produce requests in polite and non-polite contexts. In the resulting recordings, a set of 21 facial and body cues associated with speech were coded and analyzed. The results show that politeness-related meanings are expressed through gestural mitigation strategies that go hand-in-hand with previously reported prosodic mitigation strategies.

Degrees and grammar

AbstractIn this article, we discuss some fundamental issues as well as several unresolved questions of degree-based theories in contemporary linguistics from the perspective of East Asian languages, with a view to pointing out some directions for future research. We first focus on several controversies surrounding the studies of comparative constructions in the literature, i.e., phrasal comparison vs. clausal comparison, individual comparison vs. degree comparison, big DegP vs. small DegP, the points of cross-linguistic variation, etc. We then expand the discussion to comparative constructions and other degree-related constructions in Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and demonstrate how an East Asian perspective offers a novel insight into those controversies and uncovers considerable in-depth commonality underlying a variety of degree-related constructions cross-linguistically. We conclude by suggesting some directions for future within- and cross-linguistic research.

A cross-linguistic study of spatial parameters of eye-movement control during reading.

Current theories of oculomotor control in reading differ in their accounts of saccadic targeting. Some argue that targets for saccades are solely selected on the basis of the rapidly changing sensory input, whereas others additionally allow for the reader's experiential biases to modulate saccade lengths. We investigated this debate using cross-linguistic data on text reading in 12 alphabetic languages from the Multilingual Eye-Movement Corpus (MECO) database. These languages vary widely in their word length distributions, suggesting that expected word lengths and corresponding biases toward optimal saccade lengths may also vary across readers of these languages. Regression analyses confirmed that readers of languages with longer words (e.g., Finnish) rather than shorter words (e.g., Hebrew) landed further into the word, even when sensory aspects relevant for saccade planning (e.g., word lengths) were controlled for. In the prevalent saccade type, a one-letter difference in mean word length between languages came with one-quarter-letter of a difference in initial landing position and saccade length, and a decrease in 1.5% in refixation probability. Interpreted in the Bayesian framework, the findings highlight the relevance of global language-wide settings for accounts of spatial oculomotor control and lead to testable predictions for further cross-linguistic research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Static and dynamic spectral characteristics of Swedish voiceless fricatives.

Descriptions of the acoustic characteristics of Swedish voiceless fricatives are scarce and are limited to static measures derived from the speech of a small number of speakers. The current study provides an updated acoustic description of the static (spectral, temporal, and intensity) characteristics of word-initial voiceless fricatives in Central Standard Swedish. In addition, temporal variation of spectral centre of gravity is modelled using a generalized additive mixed model. Results show that fricatives were differentiated in terms of spectral properties, duration, and intensity level, such that sibilant fricatives were generally longer and more intense than non-sibilant fricatives. Spectral centre of gravity differentiated between all places of articulation apart from labio-dental /f/. Gender differences were found for centre of gravity in /s/ but overall, sex/gender differences were small. Dynamic analyses revealed differences in curvature as well as overall level of spectral centre of gravity across the duration of the fricative, associated with place of articulation and mediated by vowel context, fricative duration, and speaker specific patterns. The results from the present study are valuable for future cross-linguistic research, and as reference for investigations concerning children's acquisition of Swedish voiceless fricatives.

Children’s acquisition of new/given markers in English, Hindi, Mandinka and Spanish: Exploring the effect of optionality during grammaticalization

We investigated the effect of optionality on the acquisition of new/given markers, with a special focus on grammaticalization as a stage of optional use of the emerging form. To this end, we conducted a narrative-elicitation task with 5-year-old children and adults across four typologically-distinct languages with different new/given markers: English, Hindi, Mandinka and Spanish. Our starting assumption was that the Hindi numeral ‘ek’ (one) is developing into an indefinite article, which should delay children’s acquisition because of its optional use to introduce discourse referents. Supporting the Optionality Hypothesis, Experiment 1 revealed that obligatory markers are acquired earlier than optional markers. Experiment 2 focused on Hindi and showed that 10-year-old children’s use of ‘ek’ to introduce discourse characters was higher than 5-year-olds’ and comparable to adults’, replicating this pattern of results in two different cities in Northern India. Lastly, a follow-up study showed that Mandinka-speaking children and adults made use of all available discourse markers when tested on a familiar story, rather than with pictorial prompts, highlighting the importance of using culturally-appropriate methods of narrative elicitation in cross-linguistic research. We conclude by discussing the implications of article grammaticalization for common ground management in a speech community.

Semantic Continuity in a Cross-Linguistic Perspective: Evidence from Slavic Verbs of Pulling and Pushing

This article presents some results of cross-linguistic research on verbs of pushing and pulling in nine Slavic languages. These data call into question the traditional notion of the semantic field as a clear-cut class of lexical units. It is shown that, due to semantic adjacency, fields may overlap, so that in different languages the same event may be described by verbs that would be assigned to different semantic fields in the traditional approach. The violation of inter-field boundaries is evidenced by both synchronic and diachronic data.

Exploring dangran ‘of course’ responses to polar questions in Taiwan Mandarin talk-in-interaction

Building on previous conversation analytic studies on question resistance across languages, this study examines Taiwan Mandarin dangran ‘of course’ as a response to polar questions in order to probe into Mandarin speakers’ methods of pushing back question constraints. Data consists of 159 cases from 232.5-h ordinary conversations and institutional interactions. Adopting multimodal conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, the study identified and analyzed dangran as a single response and as one of the elements in different response types. Findings have shown that respondents commonly apply dangran to indicate the undoubtedness of the matter under discussion, thus treating the question as unaskable and holding the questioners morally responsible in asking a question that contains the information they should have known. In contrast to “of course” in English, dangran does not always suggest a morality counterchallenge by the respondents (i.e., not the kind of person implied in the question). Regarding those responses where dangran manifests a moral concern, they tend to co-occur with a final particle a. Through multimodal analysis, these findings are supported by various semiotic resources utilized by participants in their dangran responses. This study advances the understanding of resistant answers to polar questions in cross-linguistic research.

Global TALES feasibility study: Personal narratives in 10-year-old children around the world.

Personal narratives make up more than half of children's conversations. The ability to share personal narratives helps build and maintain friendships, promotes physical and emotional wellbeing, supports classroom participation, and underpins academic success and vocational outcomes. Although personal narratives are a universal discourse genre, cross-cultural and cross-linguistic research into children's ability to share personal narratives is in its infancy. The current study addresses this gap in the research by developing the Global TALES protocol, a protocol comprising six scripted prompts for eliciting personal narratives in school-age children (excited, worried, annoyed, proud, problem situation, something important). We evaluated its feasibility with 249 ten-year-old children from 10 different countries, speaking 8 different languages, and analyzed researchers' views on the process of adapting the protocol for use in their own country/language. At group-level, the protocol elicited discourse samples from all children, although individual variability was evident, with most children providing responses to all six prompts. When investigating the topics of children's personal narratives in response to the prompts, we found that children from around the world share many commonalities regarding topics of conversation. Once again individual variability was high, indicating the protocol is effective in prompting children to share their past personal experiences without forcing them to focus on one particular topic. Feedback from the participating researchers on the use of the protocol in their own countries was generally positive, although several translation issues were noted. Based on our results, we now invite clinical researchers from around the world to join us in conducting further research into this important area of practice to obtain a better understanding of the development of personal narratives from children across different languages and cultures and to begin to establish local benchmarks of performance.

A proposal for research on the acquisition of prosodic focus marking in diverse languages: A response to Kidd and Garcia (2022)

Kidd and Garcia demonstrate a dire lack of diversity in language acquisition research. We present a concrete proposal to improve language and area coverage in the field. Our approach outlines key questions in an understudied area, that is, prosody, methods for collecting and analyzing data, resources for training and tools, and a means to foster research collaboration and publication of crosslinguistic findings. The proposal, if implemented on a publicly accessible website, will facilitate crosslinguistic research on prosody acquisition.

The view from Hebrew: A commentary on Kidd and Garcia (2022)

The commentary opens by pointing out why Kidd and Garcia’s study is an important milestone in research on child language. The commentary goes on to survey insights from crosslinguistic research in the domain, focusing on the author’s work in acquisition and development of Israeli Hebrew as a first language, from toddlers via schoolchildren to adolescents. And it calls for further research to enhance our understanding of what is universally shared by children across the world compared with developmental factors filtered by the impact of a particular target language.

Lexical typology and semantic maps: Perspectives and challenges

AbstractThe paper outlines the basics of data collection, analysis and visualization under the frame-based approach to lexical typology and illustrates its methodology using the data of cross-linguistic research on verbs of falling. The framework reveals several challenges to semantic map modelling that usually escape researchers’ attention. These are: (1) principles of establishing lexical comparative concepts; (2) the effective ways of visualization for the opposition between direct and figurative meanings of lexical items; (3) the problem of the borderlines between semantic fields, which seem to be very subtle. These problems are discussed in detail in the paper, as well as possible theoretical decisions and semantic modelling techniques that could overcome these bottlenecks.

Faroese children’s first words

AbstractResearch has shown the importance of vocabulary development in relation to other parts of language development, e.g. grammar and reading development. Cross-linguistic research has shown similar as well as dissimilar tendencies regarding content in different languages. This study examines, for the first time, the characteristics of Faroese children’s early productive vocabulary utilizing a Faroese adaptation of the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDI). The study participants were 415 children aged 8 to 20 months. The results provide information on the composition and characteristics of lexical development in Faroese children and demonstrate that nouns are dominant among first words, as are onomatopoetic words and words describing family relationships. Faroese children are comparable to children learning other languages with respect to rate of acquisition and composition of words, with a somewhat higher share of words describing family members as stable words in the emerging language.

Lexical restrictions on grammatical relations in voice and valency constructions

AbstractThis paper introduces the topic and the contributions of this special issue. While lexical restrictions are well-studied for grammatical relations defining argument coding (case marking and indexation), they are also common with voice and valency constructions, be they morphologically coded or not. The paper defines relevant terms and sketches the development of current usage-based approaches to lexical restrictions, in reaction to earlier lexicalist and constructional approaches. It then reviews existing studies of lexical restrictions on valency-preserving and valency-changing constructions, drawing connections with the other papers in this issue. In closing, it recommends further corpus-based cross-linguistic research of lexical restrictions.

Expanding horizons of cross-linguistic research on reading: The Multilingual Eye-movement Corpus (MECO).

Scientific studies of language behavior need to grapple with a large diversity of languages in the world and, for reading, a further variability in writing systems. Yet, the ability to form meaningful theories of reading is contingent on the availability of cross-linguistic behavioral data. This paper offers new insights into aspects of reading behavior that are shared and those that vary systematically across languages through an investigation of eye-tracking data from 13 languages recorded during text reading. We begin with reporting a bibliometric analysis of eye-tracking studies showing that the current empirical base is insufficient for cross-linguistic comparisons. We respond to this empirical lacuna by presenting the Multilingual Eye-Movement Corpus (MECO), the product of an international multi-lab collaboration. We examine which behavioral indices differentiate between reading in written languages, and which measures are stable across languages. One of the findings is that readers of different languages vary considerably in their skipping rate (i.e., the likelihood of not fixating on a word even once) and that this variability is explained by cross-linguistic differences in word length distributions. In contrast, if readers do not skip a word, they tend to spend a similar average time viewing it. We outline the implications of these findings for theories of reading. We also describe prospective uses of the publicly available MECO data, and its further development plans.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13428-021-01772-6.

How diverse is child language acquisition research?

A comprehensive theory of child language acquisition requires an evidential base that is representative of the typological diversity present in the world’s 7000 or so languages. However, languages are dying at an alarming rate, and the next 50 years represents the last chance we have to document acquisition in many of them. Here, we take stock of the last 45 years of research published in the four main child language acquisition journals: Journal of Child Language, First Language, Language Acquisition and Language Learning and Development. We coded each article for several variables, including (1) participant group (mono vs multilingual), (2) language(s), (3) topic(s) and (4) country of author affiliation, from each journal’s inception until the end of 2020. We found that we have at least one article published on around 103 languages, representing approximately 1.5% of the world’s languages. The distribution of articles was highly skewed towards English and other well-studied Indo-European languages, with the majority of non-Indo-European languages having just one paper. A majority of the papers focused on studies of monolingual children, although papers did not always explicitly report participant group status. The distribution of topics across language categories was more even. The number of articles published on non-Indo-European languages from countries outside of North America and Europe is increasing; however, this increase is driven by research conducted in relatively wealthy countries. Overall, the vast majority of the research was produced in the Global North. We conclude that, despite a proud history of crosslinguistic research, the goals of the discipline need to be recalibrated before we can lay claim to truly a representative account of child language acquisition.

Aspect construal in Mandarin: a usage-based constructionist perspective onLE

AbstractDespite extensive research efforts to explain the Mandarin Chinese particlele, confusion persists in the absence of a unitary theory and sufficient empirical evidence. This study provides a unitary account ofleby adopting a usage-based constructionist approach, one that liberates grammatical aspect from, and is able to accommodate, lexical aspect. We argue thatleparticipates in two distinct family resemblance constructions of aspect construal associated with two distinct sentential positions. The clause-internalleconstruction construes the closing or final boundary of an event and the clause-finalleconstruction construes the opening or initial boundary of an event. Corpus analysis showed that the two aspect constructions have distinct patterns in natural language uses that are consistent with the proposed construals. Results from elicited response data showed that native speakers paid attention to construction-level formal and semantic cues in making family resemblance judgments about tokens of the two constructions. This study has both theoretical and methodological implications for crosslinguistic research on grammatical aspect in relation to lexical aspect and for usage-based constructionist approaches to grammatical categories beyond aspect.

Nou toch eigenlijk best wel eng hoor. About semantic value, interpretation and translation possiblility of Dutch particles

Dutch particles are among the most difficult elements of the Dutch language to learn. Most students do not know what to do with particles and regularly omit them in text translations. However, the interpretation and translation of Dutch particles is a problem not only for students. Teachers, researchers, and translators also have great difficulties with them. This contribution focuses on research into the biggest problems with Dutch particles. My attention is focused on the semantic value, interpretation, and translation possibility of Dutch particles. This article also discusses the taxonomy of particles in Dutch based on current elaborations. I then proceed with the distribution of particles based on the discursive levels at which they function. The aim of this paper is also to present the characterization of the category of Dutch particles next to the category of Dutch adverbs. This article demonstrates also an overview of approaches to particles taken in Dutch linguistics area with the aim of identifying their most important points and suggesting a framework for further analysis. Eventually, it states that the category of particles is also an absorbing object of cross-linguistic research for a number of reasons. First, the category of particles has not been clearly defined in many languages so far. Second, the criteria used to identify this category differ not only crosslinguistically, but even within Dutch studies. Lastly, the classification of particles in many languages has still not been thoroughly researched and an accurate identification of Dutch particles equivalents has yet to be established.