Linguistic Focus Research Articles

Linguistic identity play in zones of interculturality

Ladino, the heritage language for many Sephardic Jews in Bulgaria and beyond, is often discussed in terms of language endangerment and of cultural loss for this community and humanity more widely. However, for intercultural communication specialists, especially those with a linguistic focus, the Ladino experiences of Sephardic Jews in Bulgaria, as set against the backdrop of their changing political and social realities, provide rich insights regarding the linguistic complexities of identity. Through the Ladino-framed narratives of (often elderly) members of this community, I have learned how they drew, and continue to draw, upon their diverse linguistic and cultural resources to define themselves, to articulate their various identities, and to communicate within and beyond Bulgarian society. In order to connect these insights to current discussions of interculturality, and as informed by intercultural thinking, I present the following five-zone framework: (1) the (intra-)personal, that is a zone of internal dialogue; (2) the domestic, that is a zone for the family; (3) the local, that is a zone for the Sephardic community in Bulgaria; (4) the diasporic, that is a zone for the wider Sephardic Jewish community; and (5) the international, that is the international community of Spanish-speakers. Further, the project presented here is methodologically innovative involving several languages, i.e. it was researched multilingually as well as focused on multilingual communities. /Keywords: workshop, education, interculturality, linguistic identity play

Global language geography and language history: challenges and opportunities

As the several thousand languages spoken by people all around the world became more and more systematically assessed and catalogued in the 20th century, it became clear that linguistic diversity is unevently distributed across the globe. Up to the present day, the reasons for that are poorly understood. Linguists are thus in the embarassing situation that they do not understand significant regularities in the way the objects of their study –languages– pattern; human sciences at large are faced with the fact that the way humans produce that key cultural product which is often seen as defining the essence of what makes them humans –language–remains in the dark. In this essay, I explore three interrelated strands of thought associated with the problem of explaining patterns in global language diversity to create a perspective that is different from those explored so far. First, I suggest that instead of looking at present-day levels of diversity and find parameters of variation between the regions in which they are spoken, we should take a process-based approach that looks into how these distributions were generated. Related to this point and in contradistinction to extant work, second, I advocate an inductive approach that departs from qualitative case studies which inform theory-building. Third, I ponder that, in contrast to the traditional focus of historical linguistics on language diversification and expansion, understanding how the ranges of languages are reduced might be the key missing piece of evidence in a global theory of language diversity and its genesis.

Musical experience is linked to enhanced dimension-selective attention to pitch and increased primary weighting during suprasegmental categorization.

Speech perception requires the integration of evidence from acoustic cues across multiple dimensions. Individuals differ in their cue weighting strategies, that is, the weight they assign to different dimensions during speech categorization. In two experiments, we investigate musical training as one potential predictor of individual differences in prosodic cue weighting strategies. Attentional theories of speech categorization suggest that prior experience with the task-relevance of a particular dimension leads that dimension to attract attention. Experiment 1 tested whether musicians and nonmusicians differed in their ability to selectively attend to pitch and loudness in speech. Compared to nonmusicians, musicians showed enhanced dimension-selective attention to pitch but not loudness. Experiment 2 tested the hypothesis that musicians would show greater pitch weighting during prosodic categorization due to prior experience with the task-relevance of pitch cues in music. Listeners categorized phrases that varied in the extent to which pitch and duration signaled the location of linguistic focus and phrase boundaries. During linguistic focus categorization, musicians upweighted pitch compared to nonmusicians. During phrase boundary categorization, musicians upweighted duration relative to nonmusicians. These results suggest that musical experience is linked with domain-general enhancements in the ability to selectively attend to certain acoustic dimensions in speech. As a result, musicians may place greater perceptual weight on a single primary dimension during prosodic categorization, while nonmusicians may be more likely to choose a perceptual strategy that integrates across multiple dimensions. These findings support attentional theories of cue weighting, which suggest attention influences listeners' perceptual weighting of acoustic dimensions during categorization. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Translation in Language Teaching - The Need for Redefinition of Translation

Translation has been long excluded from language classes due to its association with the drawbacks of the Grammar Translation Method (GTM). However, in recent years, translation has made a comeback with its positive impact on students’ language performance. The effect of translation on the learner’s language knowledge has been finite compared with other language activities. The paper presents a critical analysis of research on translation in language teaching. It is found that the limited results of studies on the impact of translation may involve linguistic focus. Generally, most of the studies did not focus on the meaningfulness of linguistic items, which can only be achieved by placing them in context. In other words, the linguistic view of translation is still common in studies supporting translation. The redefinition of translation should incorporate communicative aspects of translation and the function of translation in a communicative context. The literature-based paper reinstates the importance of a communicative view of translation in language teaching, and it makes proposals related to the inclusion of translation in language learning classes.

Features of Translation on Ancient Memorials Based on Interpersonal Function Analysis-Exemplified by a Selection of Classical Chinese Essays from Guwen Guanzhi

Translation has been a prominent focus in linguistics for six decades, yet scant attention has been paid to the stylistic nuances found in ancient Chinese memorials. The study aims to find out the linguistic features of translations of the ancient memorials. The paper starts with a brief introduction of Halliday’s interpersonal function theory and the definition of the memorial. Through analyzing the data, we collected from the two well-known Chinese ancient memorials. The former is State of Dispatching Troops and the later is Memorial to the Emperor Stating My Case. Results show the features of memorials regarding mood, modality, and personal pronoun and how these features achieve interpersonal functions through quantitative and qualitative research. This paper provides a simple model for analyzing Chinese ancient literary style memorials and compensates for the lack of theory about stylistic linguistic and systemic-functional linguistics in the English-Chinese translation field. The realization of interpersonal functions reflects the speaker’s status, intentions, tendencies and, the other information. In essays, more polite usage is used instead of the common first-person I and second-person pronoun you. The above analysis is considered by translators when they translate the memorials into English.

In conversation, answers are remembered better than the questions themselves.

Language is used in communicative contexts to identify and successfully transmit new information that should be later remembered. In three studies, we used question-answer pairs, a naturalistic device for focusing information, to examine how properties of conversations inform later item memory. In Experiment 1, participants viewed three pictures while listening to a recorded question-answer exchange between two people about the locations of two of the displayed pictures. In a memory recognition test conducted online a day later, participants recognized the names of pictures that served as answers more accurately than the names of pictures that appeared as questions. This suggests that this type of focus indeed boosts memory. In Experiment 2, participants listened to the same items embedded in declarative sentences. There was a reduced memory benefit for the second item, confirming the role of linguistic focus on later memory beyond a simple serial-position effect. In Experiment 3, two participants asked and answered the same questions about objects in a dialogue. Here, answers continued to receive a memory benefit, and this focus effect was accentuated by language production such that information-seekers remembered the answers to their questions better than information-givers remembered the questions they had been asked. Combined, these studies show how people's memory for conversation is modulated by the referential status of the items mentioned and by the speaker's roles of the conversation participants. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Antifocal Anaphoras in Hip-Hop Vocals

Abstract This article examines the pitch content of the delivery of anaphoric lyrics in hip-hop. Anaphoric lyrics consist of lines with a reiterated beginning and a novel ending. Because new information is presented at the ends of lines, the “linguistic focus” of the line is at the end. Therefore, from the standpoint of intonational phonetics, pitch height would tend to rise to highlight the new information. However, from the standpoint of hip-hop delivery, lines tend to descend toward the end. Using a corpus approach, I document a general tendency toward “focally consistent” delivery in which pitch height supports new information. Then, I explore the afforded meanings of “antifocal” delivery—delivery in which the repeated text is pitched higher—in examples from B-Real, the poet Najee Omar, and Kendrick Lamar. I hope that these examples will attract other scholars to view vocal performances simultaneously through lenses of intonational phonology and music analysis and, further, that correspondences between pitch contours and principles of phonology might prove useful as singing, reciting, and rapping increasingly coexist under the banner of “hip-hop.”

Analysis of Theme and Thematic Progression in Expository Texts

Effective lesson planning and execution are ensured by deep text interpretation. The New English Curriculum reform currently places greater demands on students’ ability to read at a deep level, which raises the bar for fully evaluating the arrangement and structure of textual content. The focus of modern text linguistics, the theme-rheme theory and thematic progression pattern, play a significant role in interpreting textual composition and internal information structure of a discourse. Therefore, in order to increase the explanatory power in textual analysis, this study tries to apply theme-rheme theory and thematic progression to analyze the textual organization characteristics of expositions in National College Entrance Examination(NCEE) Volume A reading materials. Finally, this study gives the front-line teachers some reference based on the findings in order to improve their text interpretation, reading, and writing instruction, which will ultimately support effective teaching design and implementation.

Die diachrone Entwicklung des Gedankenstrichs vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zum Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts

Abstract This article focuses on the development of a punctation mark that has hardly been the focus of historical linguistics so far: the dash. On the basis of a corpus analysis of printed texts, an insight into the quantitative and qualitative development of the dash since the end of the 18th century will be given. On the one hand, I argue that the dash has been used since the end of the 18th century in contexts that also characterize it in contemporary German. On the other hand, I want to show that the read-controlling function of the dash, as assumed by Bredel (2002, 2008), already underlies some of its early uses.

Processing of linguistic focus depends on contrastive alternatives

Readers progressed through a sentence in the Maze task (Forster et al., 2009), deciding at each word between a sensical and a non-sensical continuation. Contexts presented before these sentences manipulated whether words were linguistically focused and whether they were given or new (Experiment 1); focused targets were read more slowly even when they were given, and new targets were read slowly in general. This both replicated earlier results in which slowdowns were found in the reading of focus (Benatar and Clifton, 2014; Birch and Rayner, 1997; Lowder and Gordon, 2015), and demonstrated that focus slowdowns are not reducible to newness. To clarify earlier results in which speed-ups were found on focused words (Birch and Rayner, 2010; Morris and Folk, 1998), contexts manipulated whether contrastive alternatives to focused words were presented with a focus particle (Experiment 2) or in a cleft construction (Experiment 3). Focused targets were read less slowly when a contrastive alternative was present in the context. This effect of contrastive alternatives cannot be reduced to simple semantic associate priming: Contexts also manipulated whether a semantically associated expression was present independently of the presence of a contrastive alternative (Experiment 4). Readers slowed down less when an alternative was present in the context, even when this alternative was not semantically associated to the target. These results indicate that the processing of focus depends on contrastive alternatives, in their interaction with newness, semantic association, and focus construction.

Canine Agency and Its Mitigation in the Characterization of Dogs in the Novels by Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë

As is well known to scholars of the life and work of the Brontë novelists, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë had three family dogs, Grasper, Keeper and Flossy. Less well-known is the fact that they included dogs in all seven of their novels. Emily is the best known on both counts, for her great bond with Keeper, and for the importance of the dogs in Wuthering Heights (1847), but also for the possibility that she may have held views about what can broadly be described as ‘human-animal equivalence’, a topic also of interest to current Animal Studies. In this article, I consider how the dogs in the novels are characterized, through naming and the attribution of sentience, but in particular in terms of the agency attributed to them in the language of the narrator and other human characters, including in relation to cognition. While there is evidence of attributed agency aplenty, from all three novelists, a sharp linguistic focus shows the cognition to be often mitigated. Emily does not stand out from her sisters in this respect. This characterization of the fictional dogs by all three authors offers something of a challenge to the notion of the dog-human binary.

Test Control of English Grammatical and Lexical Competencies of Secondary School Pupils in Ukraine

The article is dedicated to the test control of English grammatical and lexical competencies of secondary school pupils (five-grade). The study examined the nature and structure of the concepts of “control,” “test” and “test control.” This scientific research aims to investigate the features of the designed exercises for monitoring the formation of the English competencies of pupils of the middle level mentioned above. The significance of the study is determined by the focus of modern linguistics and pedagogics on identifying the features of the methodological control of the formation of English grammatical and lexical evaluation of five-grade school pupils. The main question of the research is how testing control can ensure the successful implementation of the purpose and all functions of control, as well as meet the requirements for its quality. The conditions for the effective use of the mentioned methods in controlling the competence in grammar and lexicon of five-grade school pupils are determined. The Physiological features of students and their psychological readiness for tests were revealed. Methodological analysis was made for the choice of exercises or activities to check for grammar and vocabulary of pupils of the fifth grade. Experimental verification of exercises is designed to check for grammatical and lexical competence of five-grade pupils. To control and evaluate the knowledge and skills of the pupils, at the end of the pedagogical experiment, we held a kind of control competition between the experimental and control grades, for the implementation of which the test tasks were thought out.

OPUS corpus toolkit for ensuring intelligent translation (case study of L1 and L2 texts of English-Ukrainian film discourse)

The article explains the concept of “translation memory” and defines it as a computer database where segments of texts of different L1 discourses are represented, as well as equivalents of these segments in L2. Computer-Aided Translation, Machine Translation and Parallel corpus toolkit are outlined as the main types of translation memory. In particular, Computer-Aided Translation is considered as the process of translating L1 text to obtain L2 by using specialized computer software. In this way, the human factor plays one of the most important missions in the process of performing Computer-Aided Translation, because the L1 text is subjected to three types of processing: pre-, inter- and post-editing. Machine Translation is viewed in a narrow sense as the process of translating a text from L1 to L2, that is performed by a computer in whole and/or in part, and in a broad sense as a branch of scientific research, that is in the focus of Linguistics, Mathematics and Cybernetics, and aims to build a system that implements Machine Translation in the narrow sense of this concept. Parallel corpus toolkit is a database with a set of L1 and L2 texts, that contains a large number of texts of different discourses, issues and topics. In addition, the attention is paid to the OPUS corpus toolkit as one of the translation memory types, which ensures the efficiency of the process of intelligent translation and is currently a free corpus system in the public domain, which contains corpora of texts from L1 and L2 to L3...Ln from numerous Internet resources and is constantly updated. The tested resource capabilities of the OPUS corpus tool have proved their effectiveness in the process of verification of one-, two-, and three-component L2 lexical constructs on the example of L1 and L2 text fragments belonging to film discourse.

Telaah Metodologis Kitab Tafsir Irsyad al-‘Aql al-Salim Ila Mazaya al-Kitab al-Karim Karya Abu al-Su’ud Al-‘Imadi

The purpose of this paper is to analyze Abu al-Su'ud Al-'Imadi's exegetical manual, Irsyad al-'Aql al-Salim ila Mazaya al-Kitab al-Karim, focusing on the manual's sources of interpretation (mashdar), techniques of interpretation (manhaj), and interpretation orientation (ittijah). The mufassir's life story, his scientific discoveries, and the context of the commentary's composition are all briefly covered. This method of research is qualitative and takes a literature-based approach. From the perspective of the source, Abu al-Su'ud Al-'Imadi's commentary Irsyad al-'Aql al-Salim ila Mazaya al-Kitab al-Karim falls into the category of interpretation bi al-Ra'yi; from the perspective of the method, it employs the tahlili; and from the perspective of the orientation, it includes the lughawi. Abu al-Su'ud al-'Imadi was a scholar who lived during the Ottoman Empire's golden age, when the population enjoyed economic success, political stability, and scientific advancement. This seems to be the driving force behind Abu al-interpretation Su'ud's from a linguistic perspective. His ardor for the Arabic language and literature, which has elevated him to the level of an expert in the field, is another important factor in the linguistic focus of his interpretations (lughawi).

The Dialogue between Universalized Dialectics and Logic of Interpersonal Communication: Manifesting the Discourse Reciprocity

The aim of the article is to bridge the gap between linguistic segmentations of the dialogue and philosophical integrations of its structure in the course of revealing the reciprocal character of correlation between discourse models generalizing the mutuality of interlocutors’ personal positions realized in communicative interactions to manifest singularities in the variety of their verbalized worldviews and dialogicity matrices singularizing the general discursive mutual connection between “the Self” and “the Other” in their communicability manifestations intended to comprehend the Source of being as the Universal Verity. The relevance of the study is determined by both the rediscovery of the communication sense-producing resource in the field of post-non-classical thought and the exposure of the dialogical deadlock denoted by the attempts to rationalize the acceptance of the Inescapable Alterity as a unity core of the Personality at the background of post-metaphysical declaration of limited potential of rational cognition. Combining the methods of hermeneutics and phenomenology with the approaches of structural linguistics and textology in the interdisciplinary area formed by philosophy and philology to problematize the interdiscursivity as an activity of the person’s self-manifestation, the research reveals an effect of the disguised discourse reciprocity emphasizing the irreducibility of interpersonal relations in both the theories objectivizing the speech multiple entities by abstracting dialogue-forming intentions and reactions from the subjectivity and the conceptions substantiating the intersubjective understanding diversification as a mode of comprehending the objective truth and the Non-Objectivized Authenticity. The authors prove that the philosophical accents on “the Self’ – “the Other” relationship as the primary dimension of the dialogicity argue for transcending the reduced subject’s position marked by the linguistically substantiated complex discursive unities distinguished as sequences of stimulating replica and reacting replica, while the linguistic focus on the communicative dialogue intentionality initiates the realization of cognitive limits established in the sphere of philosophizing to objectivize the rationally unmediated communicability.

Poetic Resistance: Girls’ Autograph Albums during World War II in Norway

Poetic Resistance: Girls’ Autograph Albums during World War II in Norway

Research on the dynamic viseme of the lip shape based on facial motion capture technology.

In the study of articulatory phonetics, lip shape and tongue position is the focus of linguists. In order to reveal the physiological characteristics of the lip shape during pronunciation, the author takes the Tibetan Xiahe dialect as the research object and defines the facial parameter feature points of the speaker according to the MPEG-4 international standard. Most importantly, the author uses the facial motion capture technology to obtain the dynamic lip viseme feature data, during the stop's forming-block, continuing-block, removing-block, and co-articulation with vowels in the CV structure. Through research and analysis, it is found that the distribution of lip shape change the characteristics of different parts' pronunciation is different during the stop's forming block. In the co-articulation with [a], the reverse effect is greater than the forward effect, which is consistent with the relevant conclusions in many languages obtained by many scholars through other experimental methods. The study also found that in the process of pronunciation, the movement of the lip physiological characteristics of each speaker is random to a certain extent, but when different speakers pronounce the same sound, they can always maintain the consistency of the changing trend of the lip shape characteristics.

Newsworthiness in the Reporting of Donald Trump’s Presidential Victory: Linguistic Analysis of News Values in Pakistani News Channels

The win of Donald Trump in the 45th Presidential American Elections has perverted the World’s political views. This study focuses on the analysis of News Discourse presented in the reporting of Donald Trump’s victory by the two Pakistani News channels-PTV and Geo News. The study employs Bednarek and Caple’s (2017) Discursive News Values Analysis (DNVA) which investigates how news values are constructed through linguistic devices; therefore, empowering judgments into shared news and adding linguistic focus to the news studies. Results reveal the use of news values such as Consonance, Eliteness, Impact, Negativity/Positivity, Personalization, Proximity, Superlatives, Timeliness, and Unexpectedness in the data sets; residing with variation in the ‘preferred’ norms specific to the organization. Moreover, the results highlighted the larger contribution of Consonance, Eliteness, Negativity, Proximity, and Superlatives in comparison with other ones. The findings also reveal Positivity in news discourse, while the impact of the event seemed to be highlighted.

Are Lawyers Really That Bad? A Qualitative Assessment of Psychological “Lawyer Traits”

Lawyer personalities are often characterized in a negative manner in popular culture and some scholarly sources, and how and when lawyer personality traits develop remains to be fully explored. This study serves to eliminate this ambiguity by analyzing two fundamental questions: what lawyer attributes are and when they develop with respect to endeavors within the legal field. Using grounded theory and abductive methods, a qualitative strategy centralized around providing more individualistic perspectives through a linguistic focus, I surveyed 10 individuals practicing and pursuing legal careers and analyzed 20 interviews across various forms of media to clarify lawyer personality traits on the following dimensions: relating to self vs. relating to others, cognitive- vs. emotion- focused, and characterizing the development of these traits as happening via either attraction to – or selection by – the field of law itself. I uncovered thirteen major lawyer qualities: analytical, empathetic, money-driven, argumentative, self-aware, deceptive, ambitious/challenge-oriented, organized/time management, competitive, confrontational, prestige-driven, arrogant, and persistent. I also found that these attributes develop both inherently and as a product of education and experience. The implications for both theory and practice include combating negative stereotypes for lawyers and gaining comprehension of human behavior in the legal profession, which may further aid aspiring lawyers in their selecting and in job matching.

Preservice teachers learning to integrate language within content instruction in dual language classrooms

ABSTRACT Having a dual focus on teaching content information and language is important in language-learning contexts and is a defining feature of dual language bilingual education (DLBE). However, systematically teaching both language and content is challenging for DLBE teachers. This exploratory mixed methods study of nine Spanish-English bilingual Latinx preservice teachers (PSTs) placed in United States DLBE primary classrooms sought to determine how PSTs attended to language acquisition and development during content instruction. Seventy videos of PSTs teaching content-area lessons were analyzed quantitatively using a researcher-created rubric for Integrated Language and Content and Attention to Language. Forty of these relatively high-scoring videos and transcripts were analyzed qualitatively by coding linguistic and multimodal communication to further describe PSTs’ instructional moves. Findings indicate that throughout their preparation programme, PSTs improved their integration of language and content and attention to language, but their linguistic focus remained limited to vocabulary instruction. PSTs also focused more on students’ receptive than expressive language development. Understanding PSTs’ developing abilities to integrate content and language has implications for teacher education to support DLBE PSTs’ emerging pedagogy.