Cross-linguistic Research Research Articles

Bilingual parsing strategies in Basque and Spanish

Over the last several years, one area of sentence processing research that has received considerable attention is how native speakers resolve structural ambiguities while reading, as in Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony (e.g., Cuetos & Mitchell 1988). Cross-linguistic research on this kind of ambiguous relative clause (RC) attachment has revealed that speakers of some languages prefer to attach the RC who was on the balcony to the first noun phrase (the servant), whereas speakers of other languages prefer attachment to the second noun phrase (the actress). From the perspective of bilingual sentence processing, research on RC attachment can provide insight into a number of important issues related to language transfer, language attrition, and processing efficiency. The present study, therefore, seeks to build upon some of these lines of research by examining the on-line parsing strategies among native speakers of Basque (N = 17) on two self-paced reading tasks in Basque and Spanish. Our purpose was to investigate which parsing routines these bilinguals utilized for each language in order to determine whether they maintained separate strategies or adopted one strategy for both languages. Analyses of reading times at critical regions in experimental sentences suggest that this group of bilinguals employed a single parsing strategy in Basque and Spanish. The findings are discussed within recent proposals of monolingual and bilingual sentence processing.

The encoding of emotions in Kakataibo (Panoan)

AbstractKakataibo (a Panoan language spoken in Peru) encodes emotional meanings by means of various morphological and prosodic devices. Some of them may be related to pragmatic implications (like the expression of affection by the diminutive), but others constitute dedicated emotional markers (as is the case of the illocutionary suffixes, augmentative nominalizers and nasalized imperatives). The fact that almost all the emotional markers carry nasalization is interpreted here as a possible case of language-internal sound-symbolism between nasalization and (negative) emotional meanings. This paper also shows that in Kakataibo we find a systematic pattern according to which dedicated emotional markers express negative emotions and never positive ones. Both the phonological and the semantic systems described in this paper may reveal patterns relevant for the cross-linguistic research on the grammar of emotions.

Emerging Language Spaces Learned From Massively Multilingual Corpora

Translations capture important information about languages that can be used as implicit supervision in learning linguistic properties and semantic representations. In an information-centric view, translated texts may be considered as semantic mirrors of the original text and the significant variations that we can observe across various languages can be used to disambiguate a given expression using the linguistic signal that is grounded in translation. Parallel corpora consisting of massive amounts of human translations with a large linguistic variation can be applied to increase abstractions and we propose the use of highly multilingual machine translation models to find language-independent meaning representations. Our initial experiments show that neural machine translation models can indeed learn in such a setup and we can show that the learning algorithm picks up information about the relation between languages in order to optimize transfer leaning with shared parameters. The model creates a continuous language space that represents relationships in terms of geometric distances, which we can visualize to illustrate how languages cluster according to language families and groups. Does this open the door for new ideas of data-driven language typology with promising models and techniques in empirical cross-linguistic research?

Semantic Typology and Efficient Communication

Crosslinguistic research on domains including kinship, color, folk biology, number, and spatial relations has documented the different ways in which languages carve up the world into named categories. Although word meanings vary widely across languages, unrelated languages often have words with similar or identical meanings, and many logically possible meanings are never observed. We review research suggesting that this pattern of constrained variation is explained in part by the need for words to support efficient communication. This research includes several recent studies that have formalized efficient communication in computational terms and a larger set of studies, both classic and recent, that do not explicitly appeal to efficient communication but are nevertheless consistent with this notion. The efficient communication framework has implications for the relationship between language and culture and for theories of language change, and we draw out some of these connections.

Promoting Cross-linguistic Awareness: English motion events in a multilingual teaching model

Abstract – The younger generations often learn English along with a number of other languages. Research into language learning seems to agree that multiple language acquisition and use is dynamic and concerns the whole mind system, where languages are interwoven (Cook 2016; Jessner 2008). This appears to encourage multilingual didactics, where the learners’ diverse languages are considered and transfer is viewed as an essential aspect of language development (Peukert 2015; Treffers-Daller, Sakel 2012). However, despite the existence of multilingual school programmes in the world, there seems to be a dearth of information on how teachers are prepared for multilingual teaching, a challenge that warrants attention in teacher education. Multilingual practices need to be informed by theoretical and practical knowledge and delivered by confident practitioners, who should have sound cross-linguistic awareness. The present article emphasises the importance of promoting cross-linguistic knowledge among primary teachers in education who will operate in multilingual educational contexts. It describes how Ladin student primary teachers in South Tyrol (Italy) are educated on how to develop and implement multilingual teaching strategies in the quadrilingual schools where they will work. At South Tyrolean Ladin schools, English is taught as a fourth language after Ladin, Italian, and German. More specifically, this article presents a qualitative case study on the teaching of English motion verbs within the multilingual didactic framework Integrated Linguistic Education at primary schools and in teacher education programmes (Cathomas 2015; Le Pape Racine 2007). The topic of motion events provided a good example of how students in education can be exposed to cross-linguistic research and of how theory and practice can be integrated.

Effects of subject-case marking on agreement processing: ERP evidence from Basque

Previous cross-linguistic research has found that comprehenders are immediately sensitive to various kinds of agreement violations across languages. We focused on Basque, a verb-final ergative language with both subject–verb (SV) and object–verb (OV) agreement. We compared the effects of SV agreement violations on comprehenders' event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in transitive sentences (where OV agreement is present, and the subject is ergative) and intransitive sentences (where OV agreement is absent, and the subject is absolutive). We observed a P600 effect in both cases, but only violations with intransitive subjects elicited an early posterior negativity. Such a qualitative difference suggests that distinct neurocognitive mechanisms are involved in processing agreement with transitive subjects (which are marked with ergative case) versus intransitive subjects (which bear absolutive case). Building on theoretical proposals that in languages such as Basque, true agreement occurs with absolutive subjects but not with ergative subjects, we submit that the early posterior negativity may be an electrophysiological signature for true agreement.

An L2 perspective on possessives: Contrasts and their possible consequences

The present paper presents the contrastive background and the basic objectives of a cross-linguistic research project (POSS) that takes an L2-oriented perspective on possessives in English, Norwegian, German, French and selected Slavic languages. Our paper focuses on L1/L2 pairs involving Norwegian as L2 or L1. Section 1 outlines the rationale behind our project. The morphosyntactic (‘core’) systems of English, French, German, Norwegian and Russian 3rd possessives are described and compared in section 2 while section 3 draws attention to dimensions of contrasts that fall outside the scope of our project. Section 4 specifically addresses the L2 issue, presenting for selected L1/L2 pairs our basic assumptions concerning challenges to the acquisition of the L2 possessive core system. Section 5 contains a concluding summary.

Within- and cross-language contributions of morphological awareness to word reading development in Chinese–English bilingual children

A growing body of cross-linguistic research has suggested that morphological awareness plays a key role in both L1 and L2 word reading among bilingual readers. However, little is known about the interaction and development of L1 and L2 morphological awareness in relation to word reading. We addressed this issue by evaluating the unique contributions of L1 Chinese and L2 English morphological awareness to word reading in both Chinese and English across Grades 2 (N = 150), 5 (N = 158), and 8 (N = 159) Hong Kong Chinese–English bilingual children. Children completed five tasks of Chinese morphological awareness which tapped for compounding awareness, homophone awareness, homographic awareness, semantic radical awareness, and affix awareness, and six English morphological judgment and analogy tasks that assessed morphological awareness at three levels: inflection, derivation, and compounding. English phonological awareness, Chinese and English vocabulary, and nonverbal ability were measured as controls. Word reading was assessed in both languages. Within-language analyses revealed that Chinese morphological awareness accounted for 27, 22, and 12% of unique variances in Chinese word reading above the control measures in Grades 2, 5, and 8 respectively. In contrast, English morphological awareness explained small but significant unique variances in English word reading, i.e., 4, 8, and 2%, across Grades 2, 5, and 8 respectively. Critically, there were cross-language influences: Chinese morphological awareness explained 4% of unique variance in English word reading in Grade 2 after controlling for IQ, English vocabulary, English phonological awareness, and English morphological awareness; English morphological awareness explained significant variances in Chinese word reading, i.e., 4, 3, and 4% in Grades 2, 5, and 8 respectively, after the relevant controls. These findings suggest a bi-directional cross-language transfer of morphological awareness to word reading in L1 Chinese and L2 English. However, the direction of its transfer may be constrained by some language-specific morphological features.

Cross-linguistic Spatio-temporal Association: Empirical Studies by Boroditsky

This paper provides a critical review of cross-linguistic empirical research on spatio-temporal association among English and Chinese languages to see if it is possible to render the actual relations between language and reality in a systematic manner. It discusses a selection of relevant studies conducted by scholars within this domain. Hopefully this paper will shed light on the cross-linguistic studies of the relationship between language and thought in mental conceptualization. Implications are also given for future empirical research.

Move Structure of Research Article Abstracts on Management: Contrastive Study (the Case of English and Russian)

Although a plethora of papers have proved a seminal role of move-based genre analysis in cross-linguistic research of academic communication and EAP/ESP teaching and learning, there is a lack of respective linguistic or pedagogically motivated studies of research articles (RAs) and their parts aimed at comparing English and Russian. Using Hyland’s (2000) 5-move model, the current research seeks to determine the most obvious cross-linguistic differences in the move structure of abstracts of research articles on management for these languages. Based on a move analysis of the English- and Russian-language corpora each comprising 20 unstructured RA abstracts, the research revealed conformity of most English-language abstracts to Hyland’s model, while the Russian abstracts principally displayed a three-move structure containing ‘purpose’, ‘method’ and ‘product’, and included the ‘introduction’ and ‘conclusion’ moves only occasionally. Other significant discrepancies comprised the English-language authors’ tendency to provide precise or detailed indication of research methods and results, in contrast to their brief indication or over-generalized mentioning by Russian writers, as well as greater length of the English-language abstracts and their stricter concordance to standard move sequence than those of the Russian abstracts. Though the research was conducted on relatively small corpora and was descriptive in nature, its findings might be of interest to genre analysts as well as to L2 theorists and practitioners.

Between Syntax and Pragmatics: The Causal Conjunction Protože in Spoken and Written Czech

Research into causal conjunctions suggests that there are various degrees of causality and that causality is better situated on a cline between strong and weak. Some studies of English because/’cause/cos suggest a diachronic change in the spoken language, where the use of because is shifting from prototypical subordinator to discourse marker (Stenstrom, in: Jucker, Ziv (eds) Discourse markers, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 1998; Burridge in Aust J Linguist 34(4):524–548, 2014). This study examines in detail the use of the most frequent Czech causal conjunction protože in both written and spoken language, thus making a further contribution to cross-linguistic research into causality and to research into the differences between spoken and written language more generally. There are two major language varieties of Czech: the common vernacular and the standard literary language (the codified norm). These two varieties differ in a number of respects—at the morphological, lexical and phonological levels. In comparing spoken and written Czech, very few studies include syntactic features and none are based on large-scale authentic spoken data. Based on the corpus data, the conjunction protože occurs strikingly more frequently in spoken Czech than in written language. This study looks at some differences in its distribution. The study is based on extensive corpus data of both written Czech (comprising fiction, newspapers and academic texts) and spoken Czech (corpora of spontaneous conversations and TV debates).

Multilingual Metaphor Processing: Experiments with Semi-Supervised and Unsupervised Learning

Highly frequent in language and communication, metaphor represents a significant challenge for Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. Computational work on metaphor has traditionally evolved around the use of hand-coded knowledge, making the systems hard to scale. Recent years have witnessed a rise in statistical approaches to metaphor processing. However, these approaches often require extensive human annotation effort and are predominantly evaluated within a limited domain. In contrast, we experiment with weakly supervised and unsupervised techniques—with little or no annotation—to generalize higher-level mechanisms of metaphor from distributional properties of concepts. We investigate different levels and types of supervision (learning from linguistic examples vs. learning from a given set of metaphorical mappings vs. learning without annotation) in flat and hierarchical, unconstrained and constrained clustering settings. Our aim is to identify the optimal type of supervision for a learning algorithm that discovers patterns of metaphorical association from text. In order to investigate the scalability and adaptability of our models, we applied them to data in three languages from different language groups—English, Spanish, and Russian—achieving state-of-the-art results with little supervision. Finally, we demonstrate that statistical methods can facilitate and scale up cross-linguistic research on metaphor.

The typology of property words in Oceanic languages

AbstractThis paper describes the morphosyntactic behavior of different semantic types of property words in a balanced sample of 36 Oceanic languages. After a brief general introduction to the functional typology of property words, I first discuss diversity in Oceanic property word classes from a family-internal perspective. In the second part of the paper, Oceanic property words are placed in a world-wide typological perspective. Specifically, I test their behavior with regard to two implicational universals proposed in the literature, concerning the relation between the encoding of predicative property words, the presence of grammatical tense, and locus of marking at the clause level. In typological studies, the Oceanic language family has been claimed to display verbal predicative property words, to lack tense, and to be head- or zero-marking, with marginal exceptions. This paper shows that, even though such an overall profile can be discerned, Oceanic property words exhibit more variation than is acknowledged in crosslinguistic research. Moreover, my findings for property word classes are fitted into a larger picture of lexical categorization in Oceanic languages.

Methodological Issues in Cross-Linguistic and Multilingual Advertising Research

This article discusses methodological issues related to language in advertising research. We introduce a framework that distinguishes between cross-linguistic research settings, where several languages are used in the study and different samples of respondents are studied in their own language, and multilingual research settings, where only a single language is used and multilingual respondents are studied either in their native or nonnative language. We review key principles that govern cross-linguistic and multilingual effects in advertising research to formulate guidelines for research design and data analysis. In the cross-linguistic context, these principles address nonuniform cross-linguistic differences in responses (related to nonequivalence of individual questionnaire items) versus uniform response effects (related to nonequivalence of verbal response category labels). In the multilingual context, we bring together evidence that shows how—even when comprehension is not a problem—stimuli, questions, and response categories may be processed differently in respondents' native versus nonnative language.

LEFT DISLOCATION: A TYPOLOGICAL OVERVIEW

The Left Dislocation construction is a typologically universal phenomenon that has received detailed analysis, from both formal and functional perspectives, in a number of genetically and areally diverse languages. The present paper aims to provide a general overview of this cross-linguistic research with a concentration on: 1) the comparison of syntactico-semantic features of LD across languages, 2) the generalized cross-linguistic patterns and categories attested for LD, and 3) the explanations offered for LD in terms of its motivation and function in discourse. Accordingly, the paper will proceed in two parts. The first part will entail a brief survey of the syntactic and semantic attributes that have established LD as a typological category. In light of these attributes, linguists generally distinguish between two broad types of LD on the basis of particular syntactic patterns and constraints. Thus, a general description of these types is provided, along with a brief description of several less prototypical LD types. The second part of the paper will focus on the explanation of LD both in terms of the cognitive and contextual constraints that motivate its use in discourse, as well as the communicative goals and pragmatic effects achieved by the construction in particular contexts.

Helping struggling learners of English as an additional language succeed with interactive multisensory structured strategies

Based on cross-linguistic and interdisciplinary research of several decades that bridges learning an additional language with the field of learning differences/disabilities, this article shares research-evidenced practices to effectively address the needs of struggling foreign and second language learners of English in Brazil. These multisensory structured strategies enhance pronunciation, listening, reading and writing skills and strengthen grammar and vocabulary competencies of struggling learners. The selected multisensory structured metacognitive strategies can easily be infused into existing English as a foreign/second language curricula.

Lamunkhin Even evaluative morphology in cross-linguistic comparison

Cross-linguistic research has shown diminutives to be more widespread than augmentatives: they are found in more languages, attach to a wider variety of bases, and occur more frequently in discourse. Common features of such affixes are their categorial neutrality and the changes they bring about in the semantics of the base. The evaluative morphology of Lamunkhin Even, the westernmost still viable dialect of this Northern Tungusic language, differs strikingly from this cross-linguistic pattern. The evaluative suffixes form a structured set of diminutives and augmentatives with a primary function of size denotation. Typologically rare features of these morphemes are the transference of evaluative meaning from adjectives to their head noun and from verbs to their subject as well as their use to derive adjectives and adverbs from descriptive verbs. These suffixes show different base specifications: some are restricted to nominals, others to verbs, and only one diminutive-augmentative pair occurs with a wide variety of bases; this has also developed disparate semantics.

Adverbs of certainty in a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective

The increasing interest in cross-linguistic research in the area of epistemic modality calls for developing a common theoretical framework within which the inventories and uses of epistemics can be compared across languages. The aim of this study is to compare the repertoires of English and Polish adverbs of certainty taking as the starting point the classification employed by Simon-Vandenbergen and Aijmer (2007). It attempts to examine the validity of their typology for cross-linguistic studies with reference to data from English and Polish. The uses of English and Polish epistemics are illustrated with examples from the British National Corpus and the PWN corpus, respectively. Because the means of expressing epistemic modality differ both the cross-linguistically and cross-culturally, the findings are placed in a cross-cultural perspective.

Motion for emotion: an empirical cross-linguistic study of conceptual construals

abstractThis study reports a methodological itinerary aimed at developing a statistically supported investigative procedure useful for the empirical verification of hypotheses in Cognitive Linguistics research. It targets motion–emotion construals and explores the possible conceptual link between upward-oriented movements encoded in some motion verbs and the emotional state of happiness. The results emerging from the observation of two typologically different languages (English and Italian) lend empirically verified evidence for basic hypotheses in cognition and language research regarding the conceptualization of emotions and also for findings in cross-linguistic research on emotion representation.

Language-general biases and language-specific experience contribute to phonological detail in toddlers’ word representations.

Although toddlers in their 2nd year of life generally have phonologically detailed representations of words, a consistent lack of sensitivity to certain kinds of phonological changes has been reported. The origin of these insensitivities is poorly understood, and uncovering their cause is crucial for obtaining a complete picture of early phonological development. The present study explored the origins of the insensitivity to the change from coronal to labial consonants. In cross-linguistic research, we assessed to what extent this insensitivity is language-specific (or would show both in learners of Dutch and a very different language like Japanese), and contrast/direction-specific to the coronal-to-labial change (or would also extend to the coronal-to-dorsal change). We measured Dutch and Japanese 18-month-old toddlers' sensitivity to labial and dorsal mispronunciations of newly learned coronal-initial words. Both Dutch and Japanese toddlers showed reduced sensitivity to the coronal-to-labial change, although this effect was more pronounced in Dutch toddlers. The lack of sensitivity was also specific to the coronal-to-labial change because toddlers from both language backgrounds were highly sensitive to dorsal mispronunciations. Combined with results from previous studies, the present outcomes are most consistent with an early, language-general bias specific to the coronal-to-labial change, which is modified by the properties of toddlers' early, language-specific lexicon.