Linguistic Production Research Articles

Place‐Based Accentedness Ratings Do Not Predict Sensitivity to Regional Features

ABSTRACTDiscussions of sociolinguistic awareness are often about how patterns observed in one practice (often linguistic production) appear in others (often person perception or metalinguistic commentary). Models like Labov's indicator/marker/stereotype trichotomy force this complexity into a single dimension, due to presupposing a conscious/unconscious distinction unsupported in current cognitive psychology. A more effective approach takes a theoretical step back, asking basic questions about how analogous sociolinguistic meanings relate across activities. In this article, I do so by asking whether explicit verbal reports and speaker evaluations of accentedness in Ohio correlate in strength across individual language users. Such a correlation would suggest a shared representation and/or a shared learning process. A total of 1106 participants listened to Ohio talkers reading word lists of trap, dress, lot, or goose tokens. Participants rated each talker's accentedness, then the accentedness of seven Ohio places. The expected main effects emerged: southern and rural Ohio were most accented, then northern Ohio, and lastly cities and central Ohio. Likewise, the acoustic features influenced talker ratings. Crucially, however, these two effects largely did not interact: those most likely to describe northern (southern) Ohio as accented were no more or less sensitive to northern (southern) vowel features. These results support the small but growing evidence that indexical relationships are learned and used independently across linguistic practices. They also move us further from a unidimensional model of awareness toward an approach where different systems are treated independently.

The Adaptation Of Sabahattin Ali’s Stories “The Unrescuable Masterpiece” And “The Swallows” For B2 Language Proficiency Level

Language, which is a qualified tool for the socialization of people, is a phenomenon that has continued its existence from past to present. Societies developing with language have come a long way in transferring their linguistic productions over time. In this context, written texts created for cultural transmission and literary pleasure in Turkish are one of the elements that best describe human communication with language. In this context, literary texts created over time with the accumulation of societies have an important place in both mother tongue teaching and mother tongue teaching in the learning and teaching process. In the process of teaching Turkish as a foreign language to individuals who have come together from different cultures in the process of teaching Turkish as a foreign language, the use of literary texts emerging from the accumulation of society in the process will make learning permanent. The research aims to contribute to the field of teaching Turkish as a foreign language within the scope of simplified texts. In the process, the main idea was preserved by preserving the meaning structure given by the text. The related stories were taken from the 33rd edition of Sabahattin Ali's Yapı Kredi Publications published in 2018. In this respect, the main purpose is to enable the student to understand the text better. Bulding on this perspective, the research is based on the adaptation of Sabahattin Ali's stories titled The Unrescuable Masterpiece and The Swallows, which are included in the story book called The Mill, taking into account the B2 level criteria of the Common European Framework of Reference. The related stories were adapted and restructured through text simplification. In the process, the simplification process was reorganized by paying attention to the textuality criteria and using the appropriate methods of text preservation, text modification, text summarization and deletion. This study, which includes document analysis and descriptive analysis methods from qualitative research methods, the stories discussed in this study are aimed to arouse an aesthetic pleasure in the reader and improve reading comprehension skills in the teaching process, and within the framework of the adapted text, various examples of practical activities to be used in the course are included.

Using computational modeling to validate the onset of productive determiner–noun combinations in English-learning children

Language is a productive system--we routinely produce well-formed utterances that we have never heard before. It is, however, difficult to assess when children first achieve linguistic productivity simply because we rarely know all the utterances a child has experienced. The onset of linguistic productivity has been at the heart of a long-standing theoretical question in language acquisition--do children come to language learning with abstract categories that they deploy from the earliest moments of acquisition? We address the problem of when linguistic productivity begins by marrying longitudinal behavioral observations and computational modeling to capitalize on the strengths of each. We used behavioral data to assess when a sample of 64 English-learning children began to productively combine determiners and nouns, a linguistic construction previously used to address this theoretical question. After the onset of productivity, the children produced determiner-noun combinations that were not attested in our sample of their linguistic input from caregivers. We used computational techniques to model the onsets and trajectories of determiner-noun combinations in these 64 children, as well as characteristics of their utterances in which the determiner was omitted. Because we knew exactly what input the model was trained on, we could, with confidence, know that the model had gone beyond its input. The parallels found between child and model in the timing and number of novel combinations suggest that the children too were creatively going beyond their input.

Más las oigo, mejor me parecen: comparativas proporcionales idiolectales

Abstract In this work, the symmetric comparative correlatives attested in the journalist Rubén Amón’s speech and writing are analysed. The interest of these constructions lies in the fact that they are virtually non-existent in European Spanish (and have very low frequency in American varieties, as I show). By exhaustively analysing the linguistic production of this journalist, I describe these idiolectal syntactic uses (which have not always been part of his grammar) and I propose a hypothesis about their origin, based on language contact with Italian and French. To understand how an individual feature persists despite not being shared by other members of the community, I examine the perceptions of European Spanish speakers of these constructions.

Mean length of utterance in words (MLUw) and lexical diversity among Urdu speaking children between 3 to 3.11 years of age

Background: Language is an excellent and convenient means of communication. Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) measures linguistic productivity in children. Objectives: to find the mean length of utterance in words and lexical diversity among children aged 3-3.11 years typically developing Urdu-speaking. Methods: The data of n=100 children of both genders of age between (3 to 3.11 years) who performed on blank levels 1 and 2 was collected through a cross-sectional survey. The data was collected from daycare centers and schools in Rawalpindi and Islamabad from November 2022 to June 2023. MLU calculation procedure was carried out through activities from ICW and Blank Level. For the calculation of MLU, the formula was used. Results: The Mean Length of Utterance at word level (MLUw)of children aged between 3 to 3.11 years was 3.43. In lexical diversity (LD) children have used Nouns (NN) most abundantly as 55% of Verbs (VB) with 35% Tense Auxiliaries (TA)30%. Conclusion: It is found that children's MLUw of 3.43 between the ages of 3 and 4 indicates an increase in speech complexity. Nouns, verbs, and tense auxiliaries have been recognized as the main elements via lexical analysis.

“When there’s something wrong, it’s the colour”

Abstract Haitian pupils challenge the homogenous and monolingual imaginary of the Chilean classroom primarily given their limited proficiency in Spanish and their skin colour. One bottom-up strategy implemented by some schools is the recruitment of a Haitian intercultural facilitator, whose aim is to offer linguistic and cultural support primarily through interpretation and translation. The main objective of the present article is to explore how Haitian intercultural facilitators mediate the intersection between language and race in emerging multilingual Chilean classrooms. In order to do so, the article analyses three in-depth interviews with Haitian intercultural facilitators employing the main conceptual tools offered by the model of linguistic production and circulation developed by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. The main results outline that both Haitian pupils and Haitian intercultural facilitators go through a process of racialisation carried out by the rest of the school community. In turn, this affects how Haitian pupils are perceived and treated, as well as how Haitian facilitators can mediate the tensions emerging at the intersection between language and race. These findings represent novel insights into the complex but little explored multilingual schooling processes in the Global South.

Mapping shared lexical bundles onto rhetorical moves in nursing research articles: A comparative study of paradigmatic variation

Abstract Previous studies have identified frequent lexical bundles associated with qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods research paradigms. These paradigmatic investigations of lexical bundles conducted thus far seem to have two limitations. One is that they have primarily concentrated on distinctive lexical bundles, without much analysis of the shared bundles in qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods research paradigms. Another shortcoming is that they tend not to explore in which contexts lexical bundles are likely to occur. These two problems deserve attention, as shared bundles are also frequently used to facilitate fluent linguistic production and analysing lexical bundles in their surrounding contexts can help reveal their specific textual meanings. To address these two limitations, this study seeks to link shared lexical bundles with rhetorical moves based on a corpus consisting of qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods nursing research articles. The findings of this study show that in certain move-steps, shared lexical bundles have distinctive discourse functions in mixed methods research. Meanwhile, the findings also show that there are move-steps where shared lexical bundles have similar discourse functions in two or three research paradigms. Revealing shared lexical bundles’ discourse functions in specific contexts may enable learners to know where to use the bundles in a text.

Minority, collectivity, and the short story cycle. Identity and difference in Chika Unigwe’s Better Never Than Late

This essay expands the politics of minor literature that, in the influential work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, rests on the identification between the individual and the collective, by drawing on the affordances of the genre of the short story cycle. While highlighting the relational dynamics between the minor and the major that underlies Deleuze and Guattari's account, I show how a focus on genre offers the critical tools to articulate the enclosure of community with the pluralities of subjective belonging. The short story (cycle) has often been considered to have close affinities with minor literature due to its fairly low reputation, its interest in marginal characters, and its typical narratives of community. The essay complicates this equation through a discussion of Chika Unigwe’s Better Never Than Late (2019), a series of interconnected stories illuminating the shared struggles of a group of Nigerian migrants in Belgium. While the cycle as a whole conveys a sense of belonging in which linguistic difference provides the very ground of group formation, the individual stories reveal the gaps within the collective and illustrate the ways in which identity and migration are affected by divergent intersectional subject positions marked by class and gender. By examining how political and aesthetic concerns go hand in hand in Unigwe’s short story cycle, the essay argues that minorities’ political struggles for emancipation do not necessarily require internal cohesion, but can also be enhanced through social diversification and multiple literary practices that shift with new contexts of linguistic production and global circulation.

Investigating the Role of Proverbs and Idiomatic Expressions in Conveying the Discursive Meanings of Discourse

This paper aims to answer the question, “To what extent do proverbs and idiomatic expressions convey the embedded meanings of discourse between the addressers and addressees?” to bring to light that proverbs and idiomatic expressions convey the embedded meaning of discourse. Therefore, the analysis concentrates on such linguistic means as nominalization and lexicalization. These means have been chosen as primary tools for the analysis due to the fact that they are closely related to the two kinds of constraints, such as nouns and words, that are used in the context. The critical discourse analysis is used to respond to such situations. Language is stated to deliver messages between the audience, namely addressers and addressees. The approach is concerned with the analysis of how ideologies mediated through context are embodied in linguistic production and reception perspectives. The result of the analysis has proved that the proverbs and idiomatic expressions were used metaphorically to convey the embedded meaning of the discourse as a highly sophisticated communication of language.

Two question-embedding strategies and answer-orientedness

Japanese and Turkish attitude predicates combine with two main kinds of embedded clauses: Nominalizations, and clauses introduced by the morphemes to and diye. We describe their interrogative variants, showing that nominalizations give rise to answer-oriented inferences with responsive predicates (e.g., factivity, belief), but that diye/to interrogatives are question-oriented and entail that the attitude holder linguistically produces the interrogative. We propose a compositional fragment where attitude predicates take nominalizations as arguments, which they may impose semantic restrictions on, and where diye/to-clauses modify and enrich attitude meanings with a linguistic production inference.

Transgressive Russianness: Claiming authenticity in the Russian woman assemblage

The question of sociolinguistic authenticity has been widely researched with reference to authentic linguistic production and authentic language users. Globalization and intense language contacts have brought increased attention to the question of authenticity as it applies to what linguistic and cultural production is considered authentic and what facets of linguistic and cultural production are most salient to authenticity. The study examines the notion of authenticity in relation to the linguistic presentation of Russian womanhood by the Tajik-Russian singer Manizha in her song Russian woman . We aim to show how linguistic and cultural transgression underlying her performance prompted contestable interpretations and opened up the evaluative divide among the audience. Using Pennycook’s semiotics of transignification (Pennycook 2007), we analyze the performance at different levels (pretextual history, contextual relations, subtextual and intertextual meanings, and post-textual interpretations). We juxtapose the song, the singer’s post-performance interviews, and the viewers’ online comments in order to reveal the authenticating and deauthenticating discourses of gender and ethnicity. We have identified the opposing conceptions of Russian womanhood in the performance, both of which can be deemed authentic or inauthentic. We argue that authentication and deauthentication of this textual assemblage are driven by different ideologies and often depend on a single textual level or element. Moreover, authenticity may be recontextualized and renegotiated through discourse. The study highlights the co-existence of multiple and competing authenticies within a single multimodal performance and demonstrates how semiotics of transignification may be used to un-cover these competing ideological orientations.

Female Language in Popular Science

Abstract Fewer women than men are involved in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields and one of the reasons might be a lack of exposure to familiar linguistic structures in reading materials designed to spark interest and to recruit new scientists. Popular science, as a multifaceted genre, creates an accessible kind of exposure to the scientific world that can potentially lead to a career in that field. Considering this potential of the genre and keeping in mind that most popular science is written by men, the present study examined fifteen articles (five written by men, five by women, and five co-written by authors of both genders) for the presence of female language. Female language was differentiated from gendered language (which is tied to female stereotypes) and identified based on the frequency of certain linguistic markers found in texts produced by women. The results demonstrate that women and teams of authors that include women write differently than men do, thus confirming previous investigations into differences in linguistic production between men and women. The study suggests that exposing young women considering a career in science to popular science written by females might be beneficial in cementing their aspirations, as language has a strong connection to self-perceived gender identity.

WRITTEN LANGUAGE PRODUCTION AT A HIGHER LEVELOF MASTERING CROATIAN AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

Productive (active) knowledge of a foreign language is asso­ciated with speaking and writing. Deviations from the norm in writing or speaking are an unavoidable part of acquiring a fo­reign language, but they are not the only indicator of how well a person has mastered it. In addition to testing the accuracy of a student’s spoken and written production of a foreign langu­age, recent research includes (among other things) the testing of grammatical and lexical complexity and fluency. This paper analyzes the written linguistic production of non-native speakers of Croatian at a higher level of mastery of Croatian as a forei­gn language. The first part of the paper analyzes the grammati­cal complexity, accuracy and fluency of their written material, and the second part deals with deviations at the orthographic, phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexico-semantic and word-formation levels. Furthermore, the relationship between complexity, accuracy and fluency in the individual and overall written material produced is compared.

Academic Discourse Socialization Through Oral Activities in Higher Education: A Systematic Review

Despite several attempts made to analyze students’ socialization into academic discourse in relevant reviews, we still lack a topical study providing an overview of how students are apprenticed into academic communities through oral activities at post-secondary institutions. This study aims at contributing to a comprehensive overview of both theoretical and empirical studies in the field of academic discourse socialization (ADS). A systematic review approach was adopted due to the qualitative and quantitative research design and connections between theory and evidence. The material search of ADS literature published between 2000 and 2022 resulted in 72 studies in total. While the synthesis of theoretical studies reveal the extant definitions, categorization of characteristics and theoretical orientations, the empirical study findings compare differences in participants and contexts, research approaches, communication events, and academic outcomes. This review also discusses major areas of research concerning ADS, mainly types of socialization agents, students’ feedback, learners’ identity construction, and assessment of consequences of ADS. With limitations concluded, the review encourages further focused investigation into micro-macro connections, application of digital technologies, a wider range of participants, disciplines and contexts, multiple types of oral activities and perspectives, learners’ linguistic production as well as correlation of oral and written texts, and joint efforts from multiple sides.

Post-educator relaxation in the U-shaped curve: Evidence from a panel study of Tyneside (ing)

AbstractAge-grading—a cornerstone of sociolinguistic theorizing—is hypothesized to follow a U-shaped pattern. Vernacular forms peak in adolescence, abate in middle age, and increase again in retirement, forming a vernacular tail. A complete understanding of age-grading has been hampered by a lack of empirical evidence across the entire adult trajectory and a relatively narrow understanding of speakers’ motivations to change. This paper presents data from a dynamic panel dataset of Tyneside English speakers, covering successive cohorts over the entire adult lifespan. An analysis of (ing) reveals that the U-shaped curve is occupationally niched; only professional educators demonstrate clear retrenchment followed by a tail. Drawing on educational policy research, we argue this effect is largely driven by institutional (and heavily policed) expectations of UK educational policies. We are the first to demonstrate the occupationally niched nature of the U-shaped curve and provide quantitative evidence of the effect of educational policy on linguistic production.

The Role of Communication in Teaching Swimming

"The present research study includes, in the first part, the synthesis of the literature regarding the theoretical framework of meaning construction, from information theory to the semiotics of reception and the concept of “horizon of expectation” in the reception of the teacher’s linguistic productions, and in the second part, it includes the research methodology. The results of the research identify the average frequency of responses for all situations. After the study took place resulted 6 important findings like a direct and unambiguous reading strategy for the teacher (P), a considerable loss of meaning between the teacher’s language production and the student’s reception, higher reading fluency in the GE group, reading difficulties in GT group, recognition of meaning is earlier and more relevant in GE, and the fact that verbal productions make it possible to complete sequence, a misunderstanding for GT. The conclusions reveal that the messages transmitted through verbal and non-verbal teacher-student communication are received rather by connotation than by denotation. Keywords (in English): teaching swimming, learning and teaching of swimming, communication, semiotics, linguistic productions."

Subcortical Role in Figurative Processing by Persian- speaking Alzheimer and Parkinson’s Patients

Introduction: The production of figurative expressions, particularly idioms, and proverbs, is negatively affected by damage to the left hemisphere and subcortical area of the brain. Alzheimer patients, thanks to the preservation of basal ganglia, can produce these expressions. In contrast, compared to Alzheimer’s patients, Parkinson’s patients cannot produce these expressions due to the malfunction of the basal ganglia. This study attempts to compare the linguistic and cognitive performance of Persian-speaking patients with Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and healthy counterparts regarding the production and comprehension of these figurative expressions.
 Materials and Methods: In doing so, by selecting a sample of participants composed of 10 Alzheimer’s patients, 10 Parkinson’s patients, and 10 healthy individuals matched with each other regarding age and education. Then, different tests, including Arizona battery for communication disorders of dementia, famous names, and face test, structured conversation, figurative expression completion, elicitation of response based on situational context, Northridge evaluation of idioms and proverbs in situational context, conventional and figurative expression evaluation were condcuted to analyze their performance.
 Results: The results of Arizona battery for communication disorders of dementia indicated that Alzheimer’s patients were in the middle stage of the disease while Parkinson’s participants were classified as non-dementia patients. Although the result of the Renown face and name recognition test demonstrated a significant difference between Alzheimer’s patients and the healthy group regarding cognition and confidence levels, the same result was not observed between healthy control and Alzheimer’s patients. Furthermore, in the test of structured conversation, the proportion of produced words by Alzheimer’s patients was more than that of Parkinson’s patients. However, the results of sentence and figurative expression completion tests corroborated the weaker performance of Alzheimer’s patients compared to their Parkinson and healthy counterparts. Furthermore, notwithstanding in the test of Elicitation of response based on Situational Context, Parkinson’s patients performed more poorly than their Alzheimer and healthy counterparts, in the tests of conventional and figurative expression evaluation, Alzheimer’s patients’ pattern of performance was different from that of other groups as they performed more weakly than Parkinson patients.
 Conclusion: The observed dissociation in the performance of Alzheimer as well as Parkinson’s patients in the linguistic production and comprehension tests shed light on the significant role of the subcortical area of the brain in the production of idioms and proverbs.

Colossal Scrawls and Divine Naughts: Images of Formlessness in Gottfried Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich and Robert Walser’s Jakob von Gunten

Abstract In Robert Walser’s novel Jakob von Gunten (1909), a specific metanarrative revolves around the long-standing opposition between form and formlessness. This metanarrative redefines the ill-reputed non-form, establishing it as the core of aesthetic and linguistic productivity. At the same time, it provides insights into the literary precursors and theoretical contexts that reverberate throughout the novel. Literary resonances include Gottfried Keller’s canonical work Der grüne Heinrich, whose images of formlessness are adapted and transformed in Jakob von Gunten. On a theoretical level, it is a contemporary strand of Formal Aesthetics that elucidates the form-conceptual innovations in Jakob von Gunten. Reconstructing the references that structure the novel and its underlying poetology of form, this article reviews a literary manifestation of the theory of form that shapes the aesthetic discourse in the 1900 s.

Multiplication, addition, and subtraction in numerals: formal variation in Latin’s decads+from an Indo-European perspective

AbstractWhile formal variation in Latin’s numerals is generally acknowledged, little is known about (relative) incidence, distribution, context, or linguistic productivity. Addressing this lacuna, this article examines “decads+” in Latin, which convey the numbers between the full decads: the teens (‘eleven’ through ‘nineteen’) as well as the numerals between the higher decads starting at ‘twenty-one’ through ‘ninety-nine’. Latin’s decads+are compounds and prone to variation. The data, which are drawn from a variety of sources, reveal (a) substantial formal variation in Latin, both internally and typologically; (b) co-existence of several types of formation; (c) productivity of potential borrowings; (d) resilience of early formations; (e) patterns in structure and incidence that anticipate the Romance numerals; and (f) historical trends. From a typological and general linguistic perspective as well, Latin’s decads+are most relevant because their formal variation involves sequence, connector, and arithmetical operations and because their historical depth shows a gradual shift away from widespread formal variation, eventually resulting in the relatively rigid system found in Romance. Moreover, the combined system attested in decads+in Latin – based on a combination of inherited, innovative and borrowed patterns and reflecting different stages of development – presents a number of typological inconsistencies that require further assessment.

Exploring individual variation in Turkish heritage speakers’ complex linguistic productions: Evidence from discourse markers

AbstractResearch on multilingual speakers is often compared to monolingual baselines which are commonly treated as if they were homogeneous across speakers. Despite recent research showing that this homogeneity does not hold, these practices reproduce native-speakerism and monolingualism. Heritage language research, which established itself in the past two decades, is no exemption. Focusing on three predefined linguistic groups, namely Turkish speakers which are framed as monolingual in Turkey as well as two heritage bilingually framed groups in Germany and the USA, we ask: (1) Do heritage speakers of Turkish produce more discourse and fluency markers (FMs) than monolingual speakers? (2) Are the groups homogeneous, or is there wide variation between speakers across groups? We focus on the variation between and within groups using Bayesian Linear Regression with a multilevel model for speakers and heritage groups. Our findings confirm that the use of discourse and FMs is largely defined through individual variation, and not through the belonging to a certain speaker group. By focusing on variation across groups rather than between groups, our study design supports the growing body of literature that questions common heritage language research practices of today and shows alternative paths to understanding heritage grammars.