Metalinguistic Comments Research Articles

Metalingvistiskie komentāri par latviešu valodu sociālajos medijos

From a sociolinguistic point of view, it is important that posts and comments in Latvian are published on social media, which shows the language’s viability in the digital environment. The users of social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, are mostly not indifferent to language issues, so the metalinguistic comments reflect the writers’ linguistic attitude towards the Latvian language and its use. The aim of the study is to analyse metalingual commentaries about the Latvian language on social media by the addressee. The addressee to whom the content of the metalingual commentaries refers is recognised as primary. In this view, it is possible to distinguish the addressee in the first, second and third person. The empirical material is the original posts and comments of users published on social media Facebook and Twitter, which describe some aspects of the Latvian language used by themselves or others. It consists of approximately 400 items. The article explains the concept of metalingual commentary and provides an overview of research to date. Metalingual commentaries on social media are addressed to a third person, i.e. to others in a generalised or specific sense, to the second person as a communication partner, who can be a language specialist or any other Facebook or Twitter user, and conditionally – to the first person in cases where the author of the post reveals his/her own language user experience. This study found negative and positive, rarely indifferent linguistic attitudes towards the Latvian language and the quality of its use on social media.

Funkciniai metakalbiniai komentarai skliaustuose Martino Fordo knygoje „Rise of the Robots“ ir jų vertimas į lietuvių kalbą

Research on the translation of metalinguistic comments (MLCs) in parentheses is rather scarce considering the relevance of the topic. The quality of the translation largely depends on the use of translation strategies such as the omission and addition of MLCs in the target texts as well as the retention or displacement of punctuation marks based on the function of the comment in the original language and the pragmatic aspects of punctuation. The aim of the study is twofold: to determine the functions of MLCs in parentheses in a popular science text and the strategies of their translation into Lithuanian. The study is mainly based on the typology of the functions of MLCs in parentheses and the classification of translation strategies, developed by Levin and Ström Herold (2021). The results of the study revealed that MLCs in parentheses in popular science texts were mostly used for the purposes of specification and were always retained in target texts. MLCs in parentheses that appeared only in the target text included cases of additions and shifts that were used to maximise the pragmatic effect, to highlight the author’s subjective opinion or to hide information that was not particularly relevant to the target reader. Omission, on the other hand, was more of a coincidence than a tendency.

Investigating language ideologies and attitudes toward dubbing Disney movies into Arabic

This study analyzes the online discussions surrounding the dubbing of Disney movies into two Arabic varieties: Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA). The objective is to uncover the language ideologies and attitudes taken by Disney Facebook commenters and verbal-guise technique (VGT) participants online. Dubbing Disney movies into these two varieties has sparked numerous debates on social media, particularly on Facebook. The study employed stance-taking to analyze the metalinguistic comments made by Facebook users about the use of these two Arabic varieties in the context of Disney. A VGT experiment was conducted on Disney excerpts to complement the results. The findings provided valuable insights into how Arab social media users’ stances are influenced by their ideologies and attitudes. Lastly, the VGT experiment provided another perspective on how Arabs evaluate MSA and ECA in the context of Disney movies and how they express their indirect language attitudes. The findings showed the differences in language attitudes between Maghreb, Mashreq, and Arab Peninsula countries. The language attitudes of Mashreq and Peninsula countries were closer to each other than to those of the Maghreb countries. Moreover, ECA competes with MSA in prestige and pleasantness. MSA is seen as the thread that connects the Arab World and is admired for its connection with the Arab heritage, religion, and education. However, it is less favored for its rigidity, unintelligibility, and unnaturalness as a spoken variety. Finally, ECA is favored for its simplicity, humor, closeness, familiarity, intimacy, naturalness, and entertainment.

Metalinguistic Commentary on Forms of Address in a Finnish Autobiographical Novel Series

This article examines the metalinguistic commentary on address practices in a Finnish autobiographical novel series, the 26-volume Iijoki-sarja ‘Iijoki Series’ (1971–1998) by Kalle Päätalo. Our aim is to show how the forms of address affect the protagonist and other characters. The study is anchored in previous sociopragmatic research on address and in folk linguistics. The analysis is based on searches in the digital corpus of the whole series by means of keywords related to forms of address. The analysis proceeds chronologically, from Kalle’s childhood and adolescence to his marriage and working life, including his social rise from a poor country boy to a full-time novel writer. Our results show that Kalle, the fictional protagonist of the series, mirrors his own and others’ choices in address practices throughout his life against the norms he has learned in his childhood. These choices are explained by the (relative) age, sex, status and regional background of the interlocutors. Metalinguistic comments reflect the characters’ social relations and changes in them during the protagonist’s linguistic biography. We argue that fiction can open up perceptions and contexts related to address practices that are not easily accessible by other methods or datasets.

The Metalinguistic Dimension of Literary Multilingualism: Linguistic Biographies in Italian Fiction

ABSTRACT In this article, I argue that a thorough analysis of literary multilingualism and code-switching needs to take their metalinguistic dimension into account. Many scholars have noticed multilingual authors’ tendency to frame code-switches with metalinguistic comments, but they are sometimes treated marginally, or as just one of the many functions of code-switching. My article argues that metalanguage is, in fact, a fundamental characteristic of literary multilingualism, and key to its interpretation. This is particularly evident when we look at how the contemporary Italian writers Laura Pariani, Silvana Grasso and Elena Ferrante construct their characters through linguistic biographies, and how they describe dialect use, bilingualism, language loss and shift and other collective and individual sociolinguistic processes. I also show that metalanguage needs to be analysed together with other tools used by authors to flag multilingualism: namely intratextual translations and peritextual elements (such as glossaries or notes), but also visual cues, such as italics.

Socio-Onomastics of Distorted Names: Nicknaming Practices among Punjabi Speakers in Pakistan

Due to hierarchical power relations and the difficulty of confronting others or expressing disdain explicitly in small rural communities, nicknames and spoiled names can be an overt avenue for venting displeasure, ridiculing, expressing social inequality, asserting superiority, conveying judgment, or warning against improper behaviour. The study focuses on how native Punjabi speakers in rural Punjab, Pakistan, distort names to express disdain, rage, affection, or frankness towards people in their presence or absence. Distorted names used both overtly (in the person’s presence) or secretly have been collected through a questionnaire filled in by 22 participants belonging to 22 villages in Punjab, Pakistan. Socio-cultural implications of those names have also been investigated and discussed. The author shows that the boundary between distorted names and nicknames is indistinct. This applies to both their formal features, semantic and pragmatic properties. Speakers not only morphologically distort the formal names but also use the names of castes, animals, physical attributes, and professional titles as address forms or referential expressions. Although distorted names generally offend the referent, they, like nicknames, can be used in both positive and negative contexts. The article describes the main motivational patterns of distorted names, similar to those usually pointed out for nicknames, and focuses mainly on their pragmatic features as noted in the metalinguistic comments of the respondents. Though the use of such naming labels may display quite universal regularities, the socio-cultural situation of the caste-based traditional rural communities of Punjab brings its own specifics to the way distorted names and nicknames are used in the area under study.

Regionalne odmienności fonetyczne w świadomości językowej użytkowników Internetu

The article attempts to show what place phonetic phenomena occupy in the linguistic awareness of Poles. One aspect of the issue is analysed, namely how people without linguistic education treat regional pronunciation peculiarities. It is shown which phonetic phenomena are present in the linguistic awareness of non ‑philologists (e.g. intonation, accent, rate of speech, numerous features of dialectal pronunciation, hypercorrect realisations), how internauts write about phonetic regionalisms and dialectisms and how they evaluate these phenomena. The analysis makes use of the metalinguistic comments of Internet users published in various forums and blogs.

(Mis)pronunciations of Hispanic Given Names in the U.S.: Positionalities and Discursive Strategies at Play

This qualitative study examines the indexical nature of given names and their role in self-positioning within diverse social contexts. The study centers on the pronunciation of Hispanic given names in the United States. The analysis is grounded in interviews with six young adults who recognize that their names have Spanish and English variants, and it demonstrates that bearers’ phonological awareness plays a critical role in distinguishing name variants and mispronunciations, as evidenced through metalinguistic comments. These distinctions are additionally shaped by personal criteria. By examining the participants’ narratives and one participant’s discursive strategies in particular, I show that the pronunciation of given names constitutes a significant linguistic resource intentionally mobilized and managed to negotiate social positionings. Moreover, this research highlights that conferring Hispanic given names in the U.S. constitutes a sociocultural strategy that extends beyond an indexical ethnocultural naming practice across generations. This practice is found to be a means of fostering and maintaining intergenerational relationships.

Variation in acceptability of neologistic English pronouns

This acceptability-judgment survey of English neopronouns, including xe, fae, ey, and ze, shows that while neopronouns are not fully ungrammatical for most English speakers, they are rated as less grammatical than canonical third-person singular pronouns like she, he, and they. We found that several social variables correlated with ratings of neopronouns in sentences, including age, gender, and sexual orientation. The neopronouns that bear orthographic resemblance to canonical pronouns were rated highest, and metalinguistic comments from participants identified that analogy was an important factor in whether they found neopronouns grammatical.

Alterity marking and enhancing accessibility in lexical borrowing: meta-information techniques in the use of incipient anglicisms in French and Italian

Abstract Previous research has highlighted that the use of lexical borrowings is often accompanied by metalinguistic elements that have been analysed as flags or alterity markers. This paper aims to investigate the use of these markers from a usage-based perspective, focusing on their functions in communication. It will first be argued that lexical borrowings may pose certain challenges to recipient-language speakers; these challenges will be rephrased as features of reduced accessibility. The notion of reduced accessibility will be elaborated by commenting on both form-related aspects concerning the items’ conformity with respect to the RL system (pronunciation, spelling, morphology) and content-related aspects concerning semantic transparency as defined in diachronic cognitive onomasiology. It will then be argued that in addition to the function of alterity marking, the markers also serve to enhance the accessibility of lexical borrowings. A revised categorisation of three types of relevant meta-information techniques will be proposed (flagging, metalinguistic comments, frame information). A survey on the use of recent anglicisms in French and Italian newspaper articles will reveal how the use of meta-information techniques can be seen as a strategy to communicatively negotiate and facilitate the use of borrowed items. Finally, implications of the usage-based approach to alterity marking and enhancing accessibility will be discussed.

Alterity marking and enhancing accessibility in lexical borrowing: meta-information techniques in the use of incipient anglicisms in French and Italian

AbstractPrevious research has highlighted that the use of lexical borrowings is often accompanied by metalinguistic elements that have been analysed as flags or alterity markers. This paper aims to investigate the use of these markers from a usage-based perspective, focusing on their functions in communication. It will first be argued that lexical borrowings may pose certain challenges to recipient-language speakers; these challenges will be rephrased as features of reduced accessibility. The notion of reduced accessibility will be elaborated by commenting on both form-related aspects concerning the items’ conformity with respect to the RL system (pronunciation, spelling, morphology) and content-related aspects concerning semantic transparency as defined in diachronic cognitive onomasiology. It will then be argued that in addition to the function of alterity marking, the markers also serve to enhance the accessibility of lexical borrowings. A revised categorisation of three types of relevant meta-information techniques will be proposed (flagging, metalinguistic comments, frame information). A survey on the use of recent anglicisms in French and Italian newspaper articles will reveal how the use of meta-information techniques can be seen as a strategy to communicatively negotiate and facilitate the use of borrowed items. Finally, implications of the usage-based approach to alterity marking and enhancing accessibility will be discussed.

Linguistic Variation, Social Meaning and Covert Prestige in a Northern Moroccan Arabic Variety

This paper addresses how gender and age, as macro-sociological factors, influence variation and change in the Northern Moroccan Arabic variety of Ouezzane, and how social meaning plays a role in this variation. To do so, it examines the high degree of variability in the realization of two phonetic variables, the voiceless alveolar plosive /t/ and the voiceless uvular plosive /q/, in a corpus of semi-scripted interviews with 20 local informants. The data for the study was gathered during several fieldwork campaigns carried out between 2014 and 2021. The analysis combines quantitative and qualitative methods. Quantitative comparisons are drawn across gender and three age categories (under 30, between 30 and 50, and over 50) to search for gender and/or age markers, while the data are qualitatively analyzed with regard to the increase in the use of certain allophones, attrition and loss of other variants, and metalinguistic comments made by informants on those traits. These two methods make it possible to identify how the phonetic variables analyzed contribute to the construction of various identities, such as an “older person” identity, as well as self-affiliation with particular social groups, such as “artisans” or “rural women”, from which other groups, such as male university graduates, are keen to distance themselves.

Zmiany językowe w świadomości użytkowników gwary Łomżyńskiego i Suwalszczyzny (na przykładzie pola leksykalnego „pożywienie człowieka”)

The subject of the description in the article are metalinguistic comments of the residents of the villages of the former Łomża and Suwałki provinces, which contain information relating to their attitude to linguistic changes. Various types of chronological qualifiers, also called metatextual operators, metadialect operators, distance signals show the diachrony – synchrony relationship between words distinguished in the speaker's awareness [obsolete (archaic, old words) – new words]. This way of qualifying lexis is an expression of the active attitude of rural residents towards their language. Dialects of Łomża and Suwałki regions, sociological dialectology, linguistic changes

Number-neutral indefinite objects in Brazilian Portuguese as a case of semantic incorporation

This paper provides empirical evidence for a verb-noun construction in Brazilian Portuguese, which has not yet been analyzed in the linguistic literature. It is argued that certain indefinite direct objects, typically when adjacent to a particular group of verbs, are interpreted as incorporated structures, receiving non-quantified atelic activity readings. It is shown that despite being rather infrequent, speakers have quite robust intuitions about their structure and interpretation, treating them on a par with bare objects, for which semantic incorporation analyses have been proposed. Evidence is presented from an Acceptability Judgment Task, a Truth Value Judgment Task, and native speakers' metalinguistic comments. Following the incorporation approach of Carlson (2003), these number-neutral indefinites are compared to bare and weak definite direct objects and it is argued that they provide a new type of evidence for the analysis of weak indefinites proposed by Carlson (2003) and subsequent work, which is not found in other article languages. The paper also discusses the pragmatic effects of the construction in the context of related phenomena in Brazilian Portuguese and English.

‘We don’t speak the same language:’ language choice and identity on a Tunisian internet forum

Abstract The linguistic situation in the Arab world is in an important state of transition, with the “spoken” vernaculars increasingly functioning as written languages as well. While this fact is widely acknowledged and the subject of a growing body of qualitative literature, there is little quantitative research detailing the process in action. The current project examines this development as it is occurring in Tunisia: I present the findings from a corpus study comparing the frequency of Tunisian Arabic–Standard Arabic equivalent pairs in online forum posts from 2010 with those from 2021. The findings show that the proportion of Tunisian lexical items, compared to their Standard Arabic equivalents, increased from a minority (19.7%) to a majority (69.9%) over this period. At the same time, metalinguistic comments on the forum reveal that, although its status is still contentious, Tunisian has become unmarked as a written language. These changes can be attributed to major developments in Tunisian society over the period of study – including internet access and the 2011 revolution. These findings suggest destabilization of the diglossic language situation in Tunisia and a privileging of national identity vis-à-vis the rest of the Arab world.

Variation in English gendered pronouns

Abstract This paper describes an ongoing shift in the pronominal system of English that is primarily related to transgender and non-binary identities. Apparent time evidence suggests that this is an ongoing change, and metalinguistic comments support the indexical link between the change and the increased visibility of transgender and non-binary English speakers. Sociopragmatic variation enabled by this change shows that the pronoun system of English functions much less like a grammatical gender (noun class) system, and much more like a system of honorifics. The second half of the paper puts forward a position for social justice around pronoun use and gender autonomy, including advice for professional linguists who work in related fields.

The Use of Toponyms in the Spontaneous Speech of Hungarians Living in Vojvodina and Prekmurje

The paper discusses for the first time the toponyms occurring in the spontaneous speech of Hungarians living in the bilingual regions of Vojvodina (Serbia) and Prekmurje (Slovenia). The author aims to reveal the patterns and general trends in the use of Hungarian and Slavic forms of toponyms in the speech of informants of two contact regions. Another task is to outline the features of morphological adaptation of borrowed place names to the case system of the Hungarian language (cases expressing direction and location). The data for the study was collected from 2012 to 2019 during the author’s field research, specifically by conducting semistructured interviews with informants. It is stated that the interlocutors use both Hungarian and Slavic toponyms in their spontaneous speech. We can often find variability: in the speech of one informant, both options may occur. The use of the Slavic form of a toponym is accompanied by metalinguistic comments, explaining the choice of this form in the narrative. The comments can be brief or more detailed. Both Hungarian and Slavic toponyms are used mainly with external local cases (supersessive, sublative, delative). However, there are cases of interference with Slavic languages, when Hungarian variants of toponyms, as well as borrowed toponyms from Slavic languages, are used in internal local cases (equivalents of Slavic case constructions), but this is less common. In broad terms, there’s a lot of uniformity regarding the use of toponyms in the speech of the respondents from Vojvodina and Prekmurje. It now is planned to verify whether similar processes occur in the speech of Hungarians living in other bordering countries (both Slavic and non-Slavic), to build a more comprehensive typology. Slavic forms of toponyms should be included in the Termini dictionary which lists borrowings in the speech of Hungarian diaspora.

Ještě dneska mám zimomriavky, když si na ten nádherný příběh vzpomenu... Slovakizmy v češtine ako výsledok aj dôkaz česko-slovenského jazykového kontaktu

Slovakisms in Czech as a result of the linguistic contact of Czechs and Slovaks are a specific subject of interest from the viewpoint of linguistic, but not only linguistic analysis. The contacts between Czech and Slovak,which are closely-related and mutually understandable Western Slavic languages, led to the presence of contact phenomena in the both languages. While bohemisms in Slovak have been attracting wide expert and lay attention, slovakisms in Czech, which originated in various historical periods, remain, by comparison, less explored. The paper introduces the view on slovakisms based on several sources, including their description in the Czech dictionaries of the National Revival period, compared with the dictionaries of the 20th century. Furthermore, various linguistic works focussed on slovakisms and also specific forms of their introduction into contemporary Czech texts, often come with metalinguistic comments that document their evaluation from the point of view of Czech speakers. The word zimomriavky is a suitable example for such procedure. A deeper look at the slovakisms in Czech confirms them not only being a result of the mutual language contact but, at the same time, as the clear proof of the language contact and a way to gain specific knowledge of the historical, social and political background of the Czech-Slovak language contact.

A Review of E. D. Bondarenko, Naivnaya lingvistika i dialektnoe yazykovoe soznanie [“Naive Linguistics” and Dialect Consciousness]. Moscow: Indrik, 2021, 584 pp.

The book is based on an analysis of metalinguistic comments by native speakers of different dialects. These remarks concern both self-descriptions and the language of neighbors. The approach is relatively new for Russian dialectology: folk linguists’ perceptions of dialectal variation have not been considered before. The study provides the first systematic description of beliefs about Russian dialects and includes a large volume of new field data. It can provide important insights on speaker opinions and attitudes about language and the constructions of local identity.

Accuracy development in L2 writing: Exploring the potential of computer-assisted unfocused indirect corrective feedback in an online EFL course

AbstractIn a previous study (Sarré, Grosbois & Brudermann, 2019), we explored the effects of various corrective feedback (CF) strategies on interlanguage development for the online component of a blended English as a foreign language (EFL) course we had designed and implemented. Our results showed that unfocused indirect CF (feedback on all error types through the provision of metalinguistic comments on the nature of the errors made) combined with extra computer-mediated micro-tasks was the most efficient CF type to foster writing accuracy development in our context. Following up on this study, this paper further explores the effects of this specific CF type on learners’ written accuracy development in an online EFL course designed for freshmen STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) students. In the online course under study, this specific CF type was experimented with different cohorts of STEM learners (N= 1,150) over a five-year period (from 2014 to 2019) and was computer-assisted: CF provision online by a human tutor was combined with predetermined CF comments. The aim of this paper is to investigate the impact of this specific CF strategy on error types. In this respect, the data yield encouraging results in terms of writing accuracy development when learners benefit from this computer-assisted specific CF. This study thus helps to gain a better understanding of the role that CF plays in shaping students’ revision processes and could inform language (teacher) education regarding the use of digital tools for the development of foreign language accuracy and the issues related to online CF provision.