Levels Of Linguistic Structure Research Articles

The Pragmatic Motivation of Atypical English Way into/to Construction

The English way construction exhibits distinct constructional meaning and semantic features; however, the prepositional slot in this construction has not received sufficient attention, and there remains a lack of comparative research regarding different prepositions in this field. This study set out to examine the semantic classification, mapping features, cognitive factors in the subcategory English way into/to construction, and to improve the algorithm of ΔPratio. The research adopted a bottom-up corpus-driven approach based on the BNC and used HAC (Hierarchical Cluster Analysis) to explore the semantic categories of the verb collexemes and compare the lexical richness in these two constructions. The results revealed that at the level of linguistic structure, coercion and metaphor, as well as family resemblance, served as legitimization methods for verb entry into the construction, while the principles of economy and expressivity disclosed the intentions and motivations behind the semantic extensions of constructions at the pragmatic level. Additionally, this research found that the latter two principles were competitive in the interpretation process of way into/to construction, providing insights into understanding the psychological and social factors in language communication.

Complex Variation in the Construction of a Sociolinguistic Persona: The Case of Vice President Kamala Harris

Over the past few decades, sociolinguists have begun to take greater interest in how public figures, such as politicians, may employ variation at different levels of linguistic structure in the construction of a public persona. These figures are of particular interest because their public and constructed usages may also illuminate wider social usages and indices of specific linguistic variables. This paper presents results from analyses of multiple aspects of ethnolinguistic variation in the speech of Vice President Kamala Harris during the 2019-2020 Democratic Party Primary debates. In particular, it focuses on her use of selected morphosyntactic features associated with African American Language (AAL), vowel systems associated with California and African American identities, and topic-based differences in the use of selected prosodic variables. Together, these results show how VP Harris selectively employs both enregistered and subtle linguistic variables in the establishment of a highly specific sociolinguistic identity that comports with her unique positions politically, socially, and racially. The results of this study expand our knowledge about how the complexities of speaker identity are reflected in sociolinguistic variation, while further illuminating how speakers in the public sphere use variation reflect and construct both who they are and who we want them to be.

An Emmet's tale: The duality of social and lexical change

Stockwell and Minkova (2001: 34) state that ‘the lexicon is the language layer most responsive to socio-political and cultural changes’. Despite this, lexis has been labelled as the ‘Cinderella of sociolinguistics’ (Beal 2010; Durkin 2012) due to the lack of focus on this level of linguistic structure by variationist sociolinguists. This article redresses the dearth of lexis-oriented sociolinguistic studies by considering the ways in which the lexicon is responsive to cultural changes in Cornwall, UK, by providing a case-study of the polysemous noun emmet (‘ant’ or ‘tourist’). From a study of 80 speakers from Cornwall, I consider the variation and change of emmet from the perspectives of semasiological and onomasiological usage as well as its social meaning. I conclude that this article provides support for Stockwell & Minkova’s (2001) claim and that lexical variation can provide unique insights to the sociolinguistic endeavour and enable sociolinguists to tell new stories about language and society.

Bilingual Complex Abstract Lexical Structure and Its Relevance to Interlanguage Studies

This study adopts two assumptions about abstract lexical structure. One is that lexical structure is modular: lexical information is organized into subsystems pointing to different levels of linguistic structure, and parts of lexical structure can be split and recombined. The other concerns the sources of morphemes actually occurring in surface strings. As commonly recognized, abstract lexical structure contains three levels: lexical-conceptual structure, predicate-argument structure, and morphological realization patterns. This study argues that abstract lexical structure becomes “complex” because the bilingual mental lexicon contains lemmas (i.e., abstract entries about lexemes) from different sources, such as learners’ first language, their target language, and their interlanguage. By adopting a multi-layered speech production model (Levelt, 1989; Myers-Scotton & Jake, 2001; Wei, 2002, 2015, 2020), it further argues that different types of morphemes are accessed at different levels of language production, resulting in different degrees of learning difficulty (an implicational hierarchy of second language morpheme acquisition) and different types of learner errors in interlanguage production. The typical instances of learner errors for the study are collected from interlanguage performance by adult second language learners with various first language backgrounds. This study aims to explore the nature of the bilingual mental lexicon and mechanisms of interlanguage development.

Evolution and Spread of Politeness Systems inIndo‐European

AbstractIn this paper, we investigate the phenomenon of pronominal politeness in the Indo‐European languages and demonstrate that the processes of change of pronominal systems related to politeness follow two evolutionary regimes, one inside the ‘Standard Average European’ (SAE) linguistic area and another outside of it. Historical processes of language change differ at different levels of linguistic structure. In general, we presume that lower level, unconscious aspects of language change slowly over phylogenetic time, giving rise to patterns of relationship that can often be described as a family tree. Aspects of language that are consciously manipulated by speakers are expected to vary at a faster rate and to diffuse within areas of contact. Politeness is a social phenomenon, so we expect these systems to be highly susceptible to areal norms of interaction. We show that the similarities of SAE politeness systems can be accounted for with a model of convergence due to parallel evolution in a shared (social‐demographic) environment, rather than by genealogical relatedness or borrowing. By quantifying and testing factors determining rates of structural change, we offer a novel and realistic approach that can explain similarities between distantly related languages sharing the same environment.

On the semiotic diversity of language

Abstract Language is complex in many respects. When conceived as a system that is to be analysed at all levels of linguistic structure, it is interpreted as a static and abstract phenomenon in which the rules are disconnected from their context of use. However, the ability to do language, construed as a fundamentally social practice grounded in our in situ face-to-face interactions, does not exclusively rely on knowing the rules that govern the grammatical principles in a given language, nor does it limit itself to understanding the lexical content of utterances. Language is more than that; it is fundamentally social and inherently multimodal in that it enables all humans to create, express, and construe meaningful utterances through their bodies. For a long time, however, linguistic theories have neglected to consider the diverse and rich ways humans do language using their bodies. In this introduction, particular attention is paid to the different roles the body plays across a range of distinct sign languages and contexts. In that respect, a short historical detour into the evolutive stages of sign language research is provided first. Next, the aims and the different contributions of this volume are outlined. Finally, some conclusions are drawn.

Relating agent prominence to discourse prominence: DO-clefts in German

Abstract The article investigates the hypothesis that prominence phenomena on different levels of linguistic structure are systematically related to each other. More specifically, it is hypothesized that prominence relations in morphosyntax reflect, and contribute to, prominence management in discourse. This hypothesis is empirically based on the phenomenon of agentivity clines, i.e. the observation that the relevance of agentivity features such as volition or sentience is variable across different constructions. While some constructions, including German DO-clefts, show a strong preference for highly agentive verbs, other constructions, including German basic active constructions, have no particular requirements regarding the agentivity of the verb, except that at least one agentivity feature should be present. Our hypothesis predicts that this variable relevance of agentivity features is related to the discourse constraints on the felicitous use of a given construction, which in turn, of course, requires an explicit statement of such constraints. We propose an original account of the discourse constraints on DO-clefts in German using the ‘Question Under Discussion’ framework. Here, we hypothesize that DO-clefts render prominent one implicit question from a set of alternative questions available at a particular point in the developing discourse. This then yields a prominent question-answer pair that changes the thematic structure of the discourse. We conclude with some observations on the possibility of relating morphosyntactic prominence (high agentivity) to discourse prominence (making a Question Under Discussion prominent by way of clefting).

Differences that Make No Difference and Ambiguities that Do

Differences that Make No Difference and Ambiguities that Do

Optimization of morpheme length: a cross-linguistic assessment of Zipf’s and Menzerath’s laws

Abstract Zipf’s Law of Abbreviation and Menzerath’s Law both make predictions about the length of linguistic units, based on corpus frequency and the length of the carrier unit. Each contributes to the efficiency of languages: for Zipf, units are more likely to be reduced when they are highly predictable, due to their frequency; for Menzerath, units are more likely to be reduced when there are more sub-units to contribute to the structural information of the carrier unit. However, it remains unclear how the two laws work together in determining unit length at a given level of linguistic structure. We examine this question regarding the length of morphemes in spoken corpora of nine typologically diverse languages drawn from the DoReCo corpus, showing that Zipf’s Law is a stronger predictor, but that the two laws interact with one another. We also explore how this is affected by specific typological characteristics, such as morphological complexity.

How Korean English L2ers Comprehend Exhaustiveness in English ‘It’-Clefts: An ERP Study

From an L2 experimental perspective, the present paper aims at shedding new lights on the nature and the source of exhaustiveness in the two English constructions: (i) ‘it’-clefts; ‘only’-foci. We report experimental evidence that the cancellation of the exhaustiveness construal normally available to the constructions at issue gives rise to different processing costs. Specifically, we provide the results by comparing the ERP patterns that arise when the (marked) cancellation of exhaustiveness is processed in either ‘it’-clefts or ‘only’-foci. Our findings show that during on-line sentence processing, highly proficient Korean English leaners can discern the two different types of exhaustiveness, which in turn indicates that they can recruit different levels of linguistic structure.

Composite Abstract Lexical Structure in Interlanguage Production

Most previous studies of difficulties in learning a second/foreign language focused on sources of learner errors caused by cross-linguistic differences in various levels of linguistic structure, but most of such studies remain at a rather superficial level of description. This study explores sources of learning difficulties at an abstract level by studying the nature and activity of the bilingual mental lexicon during interlanguage production. The bilingual mental lexicon is defined as the mental lexicon containing abstract entries called cross-linguistic “lemmas” underlying particular lexeme. This study claims that it is language-specific lemma which drives interlanguage production at three levels of abstract lexical structure: lexical-conceptual structure, predicate-argument structure, and morphological realization patterns. It further claims that it is cross-linguistic lemma variations in abstract lexical-conceptual structure which result in not only inappropriate lexical choices but also errors in interlanguage production of target language predicate-argument structure and morphological realization. Naturally occurring interlanguage production date for the study include several native and target language pairs: Japanese-English, Chinese-English, and English-Japanese. Some typical instances of language transfer involving other language pairs are also cited in support of the argument that the lexical-conceptual approach to interlanguage production is fundamental in any study of the nature of learner errors in interlanguage development.

Aboriginal English and Responsive Pedagogy in Australian Education

Aboriginal English1, the language many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students bring to the classroom, represents the introduction of significant change into the English language. It is the argument of this paper that the linguistic, social and cultural facts associated with the distinctiveness of Aboriginal English need to be taken into account in the English language education of both Aboriginal/Torres Strait Islander and non-Indigenous students in Australia.
 The paper illustrates seven significant changes of expression which Aboriginal English has made possible in English. It then proposes a “responsive pedagogy” to represent a realistic and respectful pedagogicalresponse to the linguistic, social and cultural change which underlies Aboriginal English, drawing on current literature on second language and dialect acquisition and making frequent reference to materials whichhave been developed to support such pedagogy.
 It is implied that only with a pedagogy responding to Aboriginal English as it is, and to its speakers, will a viable English medium education for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people be enabled.
 1Aboriginal English” is the term used to denote “a range of varieties of English spoken by many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and some others in close contact with them which differ in systematic ways from Standard Australian English at all levels of linguistic structure and which are used for distinctive speech acts, speech events and genres” (Malcolm 1995, p 19).

The differential diversification of Mongolic

Abstract This paper examines the Mongolic family of languages from the point of view of their different paths and rates of evolution, and with a view on the general problem concerning the speed of language change. All extant Mongolic languages descend from a relatively recent ancestral form of speech, Proto-Mongolic, spoken by the historical Mongols in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries and documented in a number of written sources conventionally known as Middle Mongol. A comparison of the modern Mongolic languages with Proto-Mongolic and Middle Mongol reveals considerable differences in their rates of evolution, with some languages being highly innovative, while others are conspicuously conservative. These differences are evident at all levels of linguistic structure and substance, including phonology, grammar, and lexicon. The reasons for the different rates of evolution can be sought in a variety of linguistic and extralinguistic factors, including not only the linguistic environment, but also the political and geographical context of the speakers, as well as their demographic structure, economic and cultural profile, and degree of mobility.

Syllables in Sync Form a Link: Neural Phase-locking Reflects Word Knowledge during Language Learning.

Language is composed of small building blocks, which combine to form larger meaningful structures. To understand language, we must process, track, and concatenate these building blocks into larger linguistic units as speech unfolds over time. An influential idea is that phase-locking of neural oscillations across different levels of linguistic structure provides a mechanism for this process. Building on this framework, the goal of the current study was to determine whether neural phase-locking occurs more robustly to novel linguistic items that are successfully learned and encoded into memory, compared to items that are not learned. Participants listened to a continuous speech stream composed of repeating nonsense words while their EEG was recorded and then performed a recognition test on the component words. Neural phase-locking to individual words during the learning period strongly predicted the strength of subsequent word knowledge, suggesting that neural phase-locking indexes the subjective perception of specific linguistic items during real-time language learning. These findings support neural oscillatory models of language, demonstrating that words that are successfully perceived as functional units are tracked by oscillatory activity at the matching word rate. In contrast, words that are not learned are processed merely as a sequence of unrelated syllables and thus not tracked by corresponding word-rate oscillations.

The Duality of Patterning in Language and its Relationship to Reading in Children with Hearing Loss.

Duality of Patterning has long been recognized as a unique design feature of human language, and refers to the distinct bi-level structure in which words comprise one level (semantic) and word-internal, phonetic elements comprise the other level (phonological). This report describes this design feature and offers a perspective on why and how it should help shape reading interventions for children with hearing loss. Three components comprise this report. Section I offers an overview of Duality of Patterning. Section II reviews results from a longitudinal study illustrating how children with and without hearing loss acquire each level of linguistic structure, and how each level contributes to reading acquisition for each group differently. Section III of this report provides suggestions for how to incorporate this information into interventions for children with hearing loss. Outcomes presented illustrate that semantic structure begins to take form first, with phonological structure following. Semantic structure is related to reading comprehension, and phonological structure is related to word recognition, at least for alphabetic orthographies. Children with hearing loss acquire a less differentiated linguistic system, with structure at the phonological level only partly, or coarsely acquired, and with a lack of clear distinction from the semantic level of structure. Consequently the roles of each level of structure in reading acquisition are less clearly defined for children with hearing loss. For children with normal hearing, learning to read is compartmentalized: Emerging sensitivity to phonological structure supports development of word recognition, and semantic-level skills support reading comprehension. Hearing loss diminishes language skills overall, but especially phonological sensitivity. Children with hearing loss, especially those with cochlear implants, must rely on all language skills to learn to read, including both word recognition and reading comprehension, which creates a highly inefficient processing strategy.

FUNCTIONING OF THE CATEGORY OF MODALITY IN ENGLISH- LANGUAGE DISCOURCE

The category of modality in linguistics is considered to be not fully investigated phenomenon. Not all authors clearly distinguish between two types of modality, namely grammatical and logical ones. There is still no consensus on the question of whether the modality is assigned to the category of modality: whether modality is a category of morphology, syntax or semantics. The concept of modality (from Latin modus – measure, method), which was introduced in relation to the logic of judgment, in fact, yet by Aristotle and which was further developed in the works by I. Kant, further passed into classical philosophical systems, and later found its application in linguistics. The term “modality” is used to define a wide range of phenomena that are heterogeneous in their volume, grammatical properties and degree of decoration at different levels of linguistic structure. The modality sphere includes the following: opposition of statements by the nature of their communicative goal (statement–question– motivation); opposition with the sign of “statement–negation”; gradation of values in the range of “reality–irreality” (reality–hypothetical reality– irreality); different degrees of confidence of the speaker in the reliability of the content of the statement; various modifications of the relationship between the subject and the predicate, expressed by various lexical means (“wishes”, “can”, “should”, necessary”), etc. By modality, we mean the integral system of those aspects of meanings of expression that manifest the speaker’s attitude to the following: to the type of connection between the meaningful content of the utterance and the fragment displayed beyond linguistic reality; to the beyond linguistic reality fragment reflected in the statement; to the type of relationship between the subject and the subject of the propositional content of the utterance; to the listener (analyzing the interaction between the speaker and the listener), that is the relationship that emerges in the speaker’s desire to influence the listener in an informed aspect.

ACTIVE PROCESSES IN MODERN RUSSIAN IN THE LIGHT OF DETERMINANTAL ANALYSIS

The authors of the article discuss the possible ways to analyze the facts of mass modern Russian speech, which are traditionally considered from a normative-didactic point of view, from the standpoint of systemic linguistics, that is, applying analysis of the relationship between the determinants of a language of a certain morphological type and particular phenomena at all levels of linguistic structure. Such facts include, for example, violation of case coordination, use of nominative case instead of indirect, occurrence of the plural in abstract nouns outside the formation of concrete figurative meanings, incorrect usage of verb voice forms, luck of correlation between subject and verbal participle, lack of correlation of wordorder structure of a sentence to the communicative (thematic-rhematic) structure of an utterance, the misuse of synonyms, etc. The method of determinant analysis of languages developed within the framework of a systemic typology allow researchers to identify the tendency to break down inflectional connections between words at a formal and substantive level, which is surely fixed in modern Russian, and increase the analytical methods of constructing a phrase. The deformation of the inflection of the Russian language, caused by the growth of the national, social and cultural heterogeneity of the linguistic group, while retaining such parameters of the external determinant that determine the inflectional grammatical type, like the scale of the linguistic collective and the mode of communication, not only makes it difficult to express complex meanings, but also makes them ultimately account unclaimed in society, reducing the continuity in the transfer of socially significant experience. The authors focus on such problems as comparing the typological standard of inflectional languages and characteristics of the grammatical system of the Russian language, the correspondence of the accepted literary norm to the typological ideal, the correspondence of mass speech practice with the literary norm, the factors changing the frequency of grammatical forms, the interaction of external and internal determinants of the modern Russian language. The theoretical basis of the article was developed in the second half of the 20th century, but still not widely known in linguistics the systemic linguistic concept of Professor Gennady Prokop'evich Mel’nikov, which revealed large prospective for the synthesis of special linguistic disciplines, as well as linguistics, semiotics and computer science.

Проблемы преподавания тувинского языка как неродного студентам Турции

Тувинский и турецкий языки — родственные языки. На протяжении многих тысячелетий они не имели прямых контактов, но тем не менее в них сохранились общие черты на всех уровнях. В то же время наблюдается немало отличий, которые они приобрели со временем. Поэтому тувинский язык не относится к числу языков, который сразу и легко поймет носитель турецкого языка. В силу этого его освоение турецкими студентами требует большего времени и усилий. В настоящее время в Турции в ряде университетов есть кафедры современных тюркских языков и литератур, где преподают студентам разные тюркские языки, в том числе тувинский язык.Автор статьи преподает тувинский язык в Университете Памуккале и делится рядом наблюдений, формулирует проблемы, которые сопровождают учебный процесс. Студенты здесь начинают изучать тувинский язык специально со второго курса, изучив до этого общую сопоставительную грамматику алтайского, хакасского, тувинского и якутского языков, а также язык орхоно-енисейских рунических памятников. Благодаря этому, они успешно осваивают грамматику тувинского языка. Тем не менее есть и ошибки, обусловленные фонетическими особенностями, морфологией тувинского языка и др., которые еще предстоит систематизировать, изучать и анализировать их природу. Особой проблемой является нехватка старых тувинско-турецкого и турецко-тувинского словарей, а также создание новых.В преподавательской работе автор разработала и использует некоторые «шаблоны» по определенным темам: знакомство, рассказ о семье, диалоги и др. Также ею разработан раздел тувинских текстов книги «Переводы текстов с современных тюркских языков» (Çağdaş Türk Lehçeleri Metin Aktarmaları, 2016), которая имеет характер дидактического пособия. Тексты даны в следующем порядке: на языке оригинала, в транскрипции на латиницу и в переводе на турецкий язык.

Speaking about the past from different perspectives: the acquisition of Italian L2 by Norwegian and Russian learners

This study investigates the influence of L1 language-specific patterns on the acquisition of L2 structures. The lack of certain grammatical categories is often compensated for at another level of linguistic structure. This study analyses how Italian past tenses (connected with the category of aspect) are acquired by Russian and Norwegian learners. In Norwegian, in contrast to Russian and Italian, there is no grammatical aspect.
 The data analyzed contain a written narration of a short story presented through four pictures and were collected from several groups of informants: Russian and Norwegian native speakers, learners of Italian (levels B1 and C1), and Italian native speakers (the control group).
 The results obtained show that Norwegian learners, independently of their level, use more temporal connectors in their narratives. However, verbal semantics or temporal connectors (usually considered to be triggers of Italian past tenses) do not help them use the correct form. Russian learners performed better on the test. Their errors show that the textual function of the verb is more important for them than its semantics. However, they overuse coordinative connectors (e ‘and’ and ma ‘but’) at the beginning of sentences. These results lead to further discussion of textual features in the three languages and the role of the tense-aspect category in text structure.

Crosslinguistic Intelligibility of Russian and German Speech in Noisy Environment

This paper discusses the results of the pilot experimental research dedicated to speech recognition and perception of the semantic content of the utterances in noisy environment. The experiment included perceptual-auditory analysis of words and phrases in Russian and German (in comparison) in the same noisy environment: various (pink and white) types of noise with various levels of signal-to-noise ratio. The statistical analysis showed that intelligibility and perception of the speech in noisy environment are influenced not only by noise type and its signal-to-noise ratio, but also by some linguistic and extralinguistic factors, such as the existing redundancy of a particular language at various levels of linguistic structure, changes in the acoustic characteristics of the speaker while switching from one language to another one, the level of speaker and listener’s proficiency in a specific language, and acoustic characteristics of the speaker’s voice.