Metalinguistic Representations Research Articles

Artificial language creation as a tool for assessing children’s metalinguistic abilities

The author aims to analyse two projects of the artificial language Uniling. They were created by students of years 5 to 11 within the linguistic framework of the "Formula de Integreco" training camp in June 2017 and January 2018. The research methods included structural analysis of the artificial language, as well as its creation process in comparison with Russian, i. e. the native language for all participants in the experiment. Research results: the specific conditions for artificial language development enable us to trace the stages of its accelerated "evolution" and complexity buildup at all levels. The latter becomes possible by shifting the initial focus away from observing the economy principle in language and raising randomly occurring exceptions to the status of a rule. Such rules are further extrapolated to other same-level units of the artificial language. This indicates that children attach importance to the concept of linguistic norm, as well as the possibility of clear grammatical differentiation when the grammatical meaning is secondary relative to the lexical-conceptual one. Children give no less significance to the inner form of words, which makes it possible to create lexemes employing the means of the artificial language itself without relying on the material of natural substrate languages. Moreover, the inner form helps to outline the systemic connections within the thematic groups. However, the hypernym/hyponym relations are obviously weak as generic concepts are not found in the Uniling lexis. At the same time, the aesthetics and euphony notions often come to the fore, which is reflected in the expression plane of artificial language lexemes and in the idea of the pragmatic potential of the language. This is most clearly seen at the syntax level due to the introduction of particular semantic role markers not typical of the Russian language (benefactives and malefactives). Conclusions: artificial language analysis enables us to identify the strengths and weaknesses of children’s metalinguistic representations, which can be considered in the process of teaching Russian at school.

Boosting Bilingual Metalinguistic Awareness Under Dual Language Activation: Some Implications for Bilingual Education

AbstractMost studies on bilingual children's metalinguistic awareness assess metalinguistic awareness using monolingual tasks. This may not reflect how a bilingual's languages dynamically interact with each other in creating metalinguistic representations. We tested 33 Greek–Italian bilingual children (8–11 years) for metalinguistic awareness using acceptability‐rating tasks in which they had to judge and explain grammatical errors. The tasks were in monolingual and bilingual modes in order to show how far metalinguistic awareness in Italian benefited from the activation of Greek. The participants exhibited better metalinguistic awareness abilities in Italian in the bilingual acceptability‐rating task in which Greek was activated. The benefits of the bilingual mode were visible in the judgment and explanation of errors and were modulated by syntactic processing abilities in Italian, length of exposure to Italian, type of structure, and age. The results show that metalinguistic awareness can be shared across languages. We discuss the pedagogical implications of our findings.

Sociolinguistic representations of variation in Moroccan spoken Arabic: discourses, practices and internet memes

Abstract This paper explores metalinguistic representations of Moroccan Arabic, through speakers’ discourses – taken from various spontaneous recordings and interviews with Moroccan Arabic speakers, of various ages, social backgrounds, and, for the most part, living in Meknes – and humoristic images and memes mocking local accents to be found on social media. By comparing language practices and metalinguistic representations with internet memes related to language stereotypes, our objective is to highlight indexicality, iconization and rhematization, in the circulation of metalinguistic representations, especially their reproduction through copy and imitation, which is the main attribute of memes that interests us. Markers, values, meanings associated with variation constantly change and shift through speakers’ practices and discourses, interacting with language ideologies, representations and stereotypes. With that in mind, we examine metalinguistic discourses and sociolinguistic variables in parallel to each other in order to study old and new representations along with social categories such as young/old, virile/effeminate, as well as regional stereotypes.

The Jebli speech between the media and the city: exploring linguistic stereotypes on a rural accent in Northern Morocco

AbstractThe symbolic values that speakers attribute to certain linguistic features constitute an important sociolinguistic topic which, barring a few seminal works, has not drawn much attention from scholars working on Maghrebi Arabic, and more specifically, Moroccan varieties. The present paper aims to deepen our understanding of metalinguistic representations of Jebli, a sedentary rural variety of Moroccan Arabic, within the speech communities of Larache and Ouezzane, two urban centres lying on the southern periphery of the Jbala region of Northern Morocco. We first analysed several samples of performed speech taken from an online Moroccan comedy sketch series entitledJebli & Beldi, which includes a character epitomizing the Jebli accent, in order to identify those salient linguistic features that are perceived as being typically Jebli. As these phonetic and morphosyntactic traits are consciously selected in performed speech, it may be assumed that they make up a linguistic stereotype. We then asked a group of informants in the cities of Larache and Ouezzane to describe what they regarded as the typical features of Jebli speech and also their attitudes towards these features. The results of our study show that the features informants named partly coincided with our own sketch-based selection, and their attitudes towards these features were generally negative. These features did not appear in the speech of most informants, suggesting either their absence in their dialect or a deliberate avoidance strategy on their part. A small number in fact used these features but denied doing so, suggesting that the features are socially stigmatized. We argue that the symbolic values ascribed to some typical Jebli features may trigger their avoidance, which in turn may generate linguistic variation and even lead to linguistic change.

The Effect of Orthography on the Lexical Encoding of Palatalized Consonants in L2 Russian.

The current study investigated the potential facilitative or inhibiting effects of orthography on the lexical encoding of palatalized consonants in L2 Russian. We hypothesized that learners with stable knowledge of orthographic and metalinguistic representations of palatalized consonants would display more accurate lexical encoding of the plain/palatalized contrast. The participants of the study were 40 American learners of Russian. Ten Russian native speakers served as a control group. The materials of the study comprised 20 real words, familiar to the participants, with target coronal consonants alternating in word-final and intervocalic positions. The participants performed three tasks: written picture naming, metalinguistic, and auditory word-picture matching. Results showed that learners were not entirely familiar with the grapheme-phoneme correspondences in L2 Russian. Even though they spelled almost all of these familiar Russian words accurately, they were able to identify the plain/palatalized status of the target consonants in these words with about 80% accuracy on a metalinguistic task. The effect of orthography on the lexical encoding was found to be dependent on the syllable position of the target consonants. In intervocalic position, learners erroneously relied on vowels following the target consonants rather than the consonants themselves to encode words with plain/palatalized consonants. In word-final position, although learners possessed the orthographic and metalinguistic knowledge of the difference in the palatalization status of the target consonants-and hence had established some aspects of the lexical representations for the words-those representations appeared to lack in phonological granularity and detail, perhaps due to the lack of perceptual salience.

Perceptual variety linguistics: <em>Jerezano</em> speakers’ concepts and perceptions of phonetic variation in western Andalusian Spanish

This article deals with the metalinguistic knowledge of Jerezano speakers about the phonetic variation within the Andalusian dialectal continuum, applying the perceptual variety linguistics. In particular, we investigate the metalinguistic knowledge about a possible phonic norm in western Andalusia that presumably diverges from the national standard of Peninsular Spanish. Methodologically, we distinguish between representations based on concrete perceptions and metalinguistic representations, in order to know if there are divergences between permanent metalinguistic knowledge and knowledge based on direct perceptions: both results show a clear division between a ceceante (Jerez and rural western Andalusia) and another seseante zone (the capital of Seville and the other provincial capitals of western Andalusia). Consequently, the speakers themselves believe in the non-existence of a Sevillian norm based on seseo for the community of speech analyzed. This metalinguistic knowledge strengthens more recent socio-phonic data on the speech community of Jerez. Therefore, the successful combination of the perspectives of linguists and the speakers themselves constitutes a very promising methodological triangulation for the phonetic-phonological research of the Hispanic varieties in general.

A perífrase verbal estar a V (inf) no português europeu contemporâneo : contribuições para uma análise transcategoria

A perífrase verbal estar a V (inf) no português europeu contemporâneo : contribuições para uma análise transcategoria

Persistent stress ‘deafness’: The case of French learners of Spanish

Previous research by Dupoux et al. [Dupoux, E., Pallier, C., Sebastián, N., & Mehler, J. (1997). A destressing “deafness” in French? Journal of Memory Language 36, 406–421; Dupoux, E., Peperkamp, S., & Sebastián-Gallés (2001). A robust method to study stress’ deafness. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 110, 1608–1618.] found that French speakers, as opposed to Spanish ones, are impaired in discrimination tasks with stimuli that vary only in the position of stress. However, what was called stress ‘deafness’ was only found in tasks that used high phonetic variability and memory load, not in cognitively less demanding tasks such as single token AX discrimination. This raised the possibility that instead of a perceptual problem, monolingual French speakers might simply lack a metalinguistic representation of contrastive stress, which would impair them in memory tasks. We examined a sample of 39 native speakers of French who underwent formal teaching of Spanish after age 10, and varied in degree of practice in this language. Using a sequence recall task, we observed in all our groups of late learners of Spanish the same impairment in short-term memory encoding of stress contrasts that was previously found in French monolinguals. Furthermore, using a speeded lexical decision task with word–nonword minimal pairs that differ only in the position of stress, we found that all late learners had much difficulty in the use of stress to access the lexicon. Our results show that stress ‘deafness’ is better interpreted as a lasting processing problem resulting from the impossibility for French speakers to encode contrastive stress in their phonological representations. This affects their memory encoding as well as their lexical access in on-line tasks. The generality of such a persistent suprasegmental ‘deafness’ is discussed in relation to current findings and models on the perception of non-native phonological contrasts.

Les représentations métalinguistiques ordinaires face à la nomination, l'institution et la normalisation des langues. Un micro-sondage

Andrée Tabouret-Keller: Ordinary metalinguisitic representations in front of nomination, institutionalization and normalization processes. Everyday metalinguistic representations are inquired into through talks with a small sample of bilingual French - Patois speakers of an alpine valley belonging to the Occitan domain of Franco-Alpine Provençal. Six topics are explored: differences between French and Patois, speaking and writing, child and adult speech, oral and written discourse, known and foreign languages, ordinary personal and young people's language. The main results concern the centrality of an abstract, unvarying entity called "French", with no further qualification, opposed to an empirical entity, named "Patois", usually indexed by its local origin and linked to some behavioural rules. Naming a language, by way of its' institutionalization, standardization, is seen as the main factor influencing ordinary metalinguistic representations.

Metalinguistic awareness in a case of early-adolescent dysphasia

Aphasia has been characterized as the loss of aptitude for metalinguistic operations. This article analyses the metasyntactic deficits in a case of early-adolescent dysphasia in terms of a psycholinguistic model of metalinguistic development, and characterizes the metasyntactic deficit according to the level of metalinguistic representation achieved and the type of processing invoked. The results suggest that aphasia can differentially affect syntactic and metasyntactic competence. They also suggest that the psycholinguistic model permits a systematic description of the nature and the significance of the metasyntactic deficit by specifying the level at which metasyntactic knowledge is impaired, and by providing a precise analysis of the representational status of metalinguistic awareness for a given linguistic structure. The model permits the definition of a hierarchy of difficulty among metasyntactic tasks by systematically defining the level of knowledge which each might recruit. It is suggested that a systematic analysis of the representational status of a linguistic structure such as the one conducted in this study permits an efficient planning of remediation by selecting therapy targets and therapy tasks.

Contrastive metalinguistic representations: The case of ‘Very French’ learners of English

The paper is based on experimental research. It deals with some of the linguistic and metalinguistic transfers that arise when French students learn comprehension and production in English. It analyses how part of the metalinguistic (more or less adequate) knowledge they have of French (imparfait, passe compose, passe simple) is transferred into the metalinguistic knowledge of English they are building, especially concerning simple preterite vs preterite + be + ing. These transfers do not play the same role in L2 comprehension and production. The paper analyses what kind of L1 and L2 ‘grammar’ is taught, the role of L1 as a linguistic and metalinguistic structuring filter, the nature of learners’ different metalinguistic activities, the degrees of awareness they reveal, their transferability, their fossilisation. The inefficient and often nonsensical language activity represented by the learners’ actual use of memorised metalinguistic cliches should be replaced by an accurate and comprehensible contrastiv...

Représentations métalinguistiques et explication grammaticale. Etude de quelques emplois du modal shall en indépendantes et principales

Metalinguistic representations and grammatical theory. A study of shall in independent and main clauses. In this article, we propose to see how metalinguistic representations can account for various uses of shall in independent and main clauses. Thee study is made within the framework of Culioli's enunciative theory in which one term is referred to, or located by, another. This concept of oriented reference is used to analyse an etymological semantic value in which two subjets are viewed in reference to each other. We then examine how other oriented relations between terms exert constraints on semantic values or help create new ones : the nature of the terms related - subjects as parameters of the system of reference, syntactical subjects or notional domains - must also be taken into account.

Catégories grammaticales et opérations cognitives

ABSTRACT : Grammatical meanings are the meanings of inflexional morphemes, prepositions, conjonctions, and other devices, such as word order. Each grammatical category is defined as a 4-tuple : 1. a system of grammatical forms ; 2. a system of meanings ; 3. a system of rules relating forms and meanings ; 4. a set of strategies that ensures the choice of the semantic value associatedwith the occurrence of a grammatical form in a specific context. Meanings of grammatical categories are defined by means of "mental operations". Some of these operations (identification, différenciation and ruption) are the same for different grammatical categories such as person, aspect and tense, deictic spaces. These operations are used for organizing general cognitive categories that are related to other representations (linguistic and metalinguistic representations) in a general cognitive edifice.