Salient Linguistic Features Research Articles

Metalinguistic Concepts and Attitudes toward Mexican Spanish in Oaxaca de Juárez, Mexico

This paper investigates metalinguistic concepts and language attitudes toward Mexican Spanish varieties and Spanish-Amerindian language contact in Oaxaca, Mexico. Theoretical-methodological approaches from Perceptual Dialectology and Metapragmatic Sociolinguistics are used to analyze non-linguists’ views of linguistic variation and their prestige attributions in the multilingual communicative space of southern Mexico. On the data basis of semi-narrative interviews with speakers from the metropolitan region of Oaxaca, we discuss the results of a discourse analysis of these perceptions. The results show a tripartite division of the Oaxacan dialectal space with sporadic mention of salient linguistic features for each conceptualized variational space, an overt prestige for the urban Oaxacan variety and its close link to the Mexico City standard, and a negative attitude toward linguistic interferences coming from Spanish-indigenous language contacts.

Okay, what we’re just going to do now is…: Discourse functions of wh-clefts in YouTube How-to Videos

Procedural knowledge is often transferred by spoken ‘how-to’ instructions delivered with simultaneous hands-on demonstration. As reflected by the popularity of YouTube instructional videos, such spoken texts have become a common way to learn how to learn a wide range of things. Surprisingly, there is a lack of research concerned with salient linguistic features and communicative functions associated with this type of discourse, referred to in the paper as procedural monologues. This study moves towards filling this gap by investigating discourse functions in procedural monologues associated with wh-clefts (e.g., What you want to do is use a screwdriver). This construction, considered as a highlighting device to mark relevant important points in spoken discourse, is frequently found in instructional videos. Extracted from a specialized corpus of 100 how-to-videos posted on YouTube, 130 wh-clefts were categorized by function to better understand how speakers shift between guiding listeners through the essential sequence of procedural steps and providing additional content to produce a coherent and cohesive text. With the underlying goal of supporting pedagogical approaches to prepare learners of English as a second or foreign language to produce communicatively dynamic procedural monologues, the study describes seven possible functions highlighted by wh-cleft utterances.

An Overlooked Source of Wangerooge Frisian: The Birthday Invitation of Louwine Luths

The paper presents and discusses a hitherto overlooked text in Wangerooge Frisian, a short birthday invitation written in 1934 by the native speaker Louwine Luths. The text was first published in the members’ bulletin of a local genealogical society, which is currently only available in print in a few German archives. In the paper I re-publish the birthday invitation – along with another short fragment of Wangerooge Frisian from the bulletin – and discuss a number of salient linguistic features. The two short texts are of particular interest because they were written down by native speakers of Wangerooge Frisian.

“We Pau ?”: Culturally Responsive Language Assessment of Pidgin (Hawaiʻi Creole)–Speaking Children

Purpose: The purpose of this tutorial is to introduce speech-language pathologists to the salient characteristic of the creole language of Hawaiʻi. This language variety is called Hawaiʻi Creole by linguists, but speakers of the language variety generally call it Pidgin. Conclusions: This tutorial reviews the available literature on this understudied language variety to provide a brief overview of Pidgin's historical development and social context and its clinically salient linguistic features. Suggestions for culturally and linguistically responsive assessment of Pidgin-speaking children as well as suggestions for further reading on Pidgin are also provided.

The code of the streets in Beijing: Style-shifting and changing personae in the performance of Beijing male rappers

Abstract This study explores the link between stylized forms of language and the construction of social identities in performance in the Beijing hip hop community. It focuses on the indexical process by which rappers rely on existing characterological figures and local linguistic variables in Beijing Mandarin (i.e. rhotacized syllable finals, lenited retroflexes, interdentalized dental sibilants, and fronted palatals) to construct hip hop affiliated identities. A variationist analysis provides evidence of style-shifting between two generations of Beijing male rappers, who employ these socially salient linguistic features to different degrees, but always in a semiotically coherent package, in their performance. The analysis further demonstrates how the rappers maintain street credibility through a cultural alignment between hip hop and local social types. By examining the indexicality of these variables, the study highlights the interplay of hip hop ideology, local linguistic features, and local social types in stylistic practices and personae construction. (Hip hop, indexicality, iconicity, performance, Mandarin Chinese)*

A Chronicler Hath a Facebook Page: Enregistering “Old Romanian” Online

Drawing on Agha’s (2003, 2005) theory of enregisterment, our research is concerned with the linguistic practices through which “old Romanian” as an imagined variety is perceived and represented online by educated non-linguists contributing to the Letopiseț (“chronicle”) Facebook page. The administrator and the community gathered around this page write humorously about current political or social events using, more or less competently, an approximation of 17th-century Romanian – an endeavour similar to the one found on Geoffrey Chaucer hath a blog (Bryant 2010) and other pages. The purpose of our paper is to analyse how “old Romanian” is enregistered as such and what are the salient linguistic and cultural features indexically linked to the idea of “archaicity”. We contend that, on the Letopiseț Facebook page, “old Romanian” is enregistered in three main ways: by using a set of archaic graphic, morphosyntactic and lexical features (either authentic or invented by the administrator); by using dialectal features, thought of as old; and by using quotes and pseudo-quotes (Minugh 1999) from old Romanian texts. In the end, we discuss a few possible reasons for using “old Romanian” online.

Language attitudes in Northwestern Tunisia and their implication for speech patterns

Abstract Our paper investigates the relationship between language attitudes and practices in Tunisia, particularly in the two mainly rural governorates of Siliana and Jendouba situated in Northwestern Tunisia. The data that underlie our analysis were gathered in 43 qualitative interviews and through participant observation during fieldwork in spring and summer 2019, and by methodical inquiry into salient linguistic features. First, speakers’ attitudes towards and their evaluation of (1) their own local dialect and (2) the dialect of the capital Tunis reveal that the capital Tunis and coastal towns such as Sousse are perceived as urban and advanced – in education as well as in lifestyle – whereas the central and north-western regions of Tunisia are perceived as rural and culturally backward. We show how speakers apply social meanings to certain linguistic variables such as the use of the urban [q] that is considered as fīnu ‘genteel, refined’ in contrast to the rural [g]. Others, though also clearly urban features, are not equally charged with stereotypes, among them the adoption of the urban personal pronoun of the 1st person sg. ǟna. Second, the impact these evaluations have on speech patterns and consequently on intra-dialectal levelling processes and language change is analysed and its patterns described. We show that language ideologies and attitudes are determined by the intersection of age, gender and level of education, and that young, educated women with a rural background are among the first to adopt urban features. As women in Siliana and Jendouba are expected to act more fīnu than their male peers, they are more inclined to adopt the [q]. The situation of the personal pronoun of the 1st person sg., the plural of III-weak verbs and the loss of gender distinction in verbs, however, is less clear.

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.

Salience is in the brain of the beholder: ERPs reflect acoustically salient variables

A recent paper by Boswijk, Loerts & Hilton (Boswijk et al., 2020) in this journal discusses how technological advances allow us to explore the cognitive processing of so-called salient linguistic features, and how this could provide us with quantifiable measures of ‘salience’. The paper concludes that, although promising, the used measure of pupil dilation seems to be limited as a measure for linguistic salience, and therefore refers future research to other measures, specifically Event Related Potentials (ERPs). In this paper we therefore replicate the Boswijk et al. study using the ERP measure with the hypothesis that linguistic salience evokes distinct ERP components. We use the same materials that were used in the Boswijk et al. (2020) paper to observe changes in Dutch participants' pupil sizes when listening to stimuli containing salient and non-salient variants of linguistic variables.Using Generalized Additive Mixed Modelling (GAMM), we find distinct responses for five of six stimuli categories. We consider our findings in light of the literature on linguistic salience and discuss how our findings relate to the Boswijk et al. (2020) study. We find that ERPs provide a more fine-grained measure of theoretically salient stimuli.

“In the name(s) of the moon!”: ‘Japaneseness’ & Reader Identity in Two Translations of Sailor Moon

Manga has become increasingly popular in the United States since the 1990s, and over time, the strategies employed in translating these texts for English-speaking audiences have shifted. As translation practices have changed, so too has the status of the sociocultural construct of 'Japaneseness' – a commodified branding of Japanese elements – in translated manga. A striking example of this shift can be seen in two English translations of Naoko Takeuchi's 1991 manga Bishôjo Senshi Sêrâ Mûn (Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon) for the U.S. market, released 13 years apart: the 1998 Mixx/TokyoPop translation and the 2011 Kodansha translation. In this paper, we examine the use of four linguistic features – loanwords, honorifics, onomatopoeia, and iconicity – in both translations, and find that each version broadly employs a different strategy to either erase (in the case of the earlier translation) or amplify and actively create (in the case of the later translation) 'Japaneseness' within the text. These strategies in turn afford two different ways for readers to engage with Sailor Moon, so following our analysis of the texts themselves, we then examine fan discourse to show how readers construct distinct identities by drawing on salient linguistic features of each translation. The shift from a preference for domesticated reading experiences to a desire for translations to retain as much Japanese character as possible reveals the construct of 'Japaneseness' as central to the commodification of Japanese language and culture in both manga publishing and Anglophone fandom more broadly.

Therapists’ response strategies in a group session involving French-speaking children with autism spectrum disorder

The focus in this article is on how two therapists orient a group of four French-speaking boys with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) towards achieving meaningful learning outcomes with regard to the topic of conversation. The analysis concentrates on the therapists’ output or response strategies when they orient the group discussion and assess speech produced by the children, either validating it or parts of it, or inviting them to provide more valid input. The material to be analysed comprises salient linguistic and interactional features in five examples representing the most frequent response categories. In terms of methodology, the study falls within the framework of conversation analysis, although insights from discourse analysis are also used to enhance the data interpretation. The results show that although a specific response category may have many functions, the aim in all of them is to maintain intersubjectivity among the participants. This is visible in the absence of overtly negative feedback, for example. The prosody gives strong clues concerning the additional meanings in the therapists’ response particles. Whereas the children maintain eye contact and show nuanced expressions such as smiling, the therapists’ attention is often directed towards notetaking and writing artefacts, behaviour that contradicts the ideal of ‘typical’ communication.

Introduction

Introduction Douglas R. Parks This special issue of Anthropological Linguistics contains ten articles on personal names in Native languages of North America. All but one of these articles are revised versions of papers originally presented at the special session "American Indian Personal Names: A Neglected Lexical Genre" at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA) in Portland, Oregon, on 7 January 2012.1 There is no modern, comprehensive linguistic description of American Indian naming systems. Published sources of names are primarily lists compiled by anthropologists, linguists, and historians. Even though personal names are an integral part of the languages and cultures of Native peoples, linguists usually do not document names for the languages they study: they do not utilize names as data for their grammars, and they generally do not include names in their dictionaries. The purpose of the special session was to bring together a group of Americanist linguists who have an interest in personal names in the languages they study; contributions were selected to represent the diversity of naming systems found in Native North American language families and to enable the participants to identify major issues in the study of names. The resulting articles describe the salient linguistic and semantic features of the names in these languages, illustrating how names are important semantic and grammatical domains in Native American languages, forming systems within the larger linguistic context, and why their study is essential for language documentation—for morphological and syntactic analysis, and for the compilation of richer dictionaries. They also illustrate how for most North American groups, rich archival corpora of names are available that have rarely been utilized by linguists and exemplify the methods and challenges of studying them. Even though personal names are a relatively neglected subject in North American linguistics and anthropology, significant work has been done over the years; some of the more noteworthy contributions may be mentioned here. The earliest linguist to give notable attention to personal names on the Plains was James Owen Dorsey, who beginning in 1871 devoted more than twenty years to documenting the Dhegiha and other Siouan languages. He recorded hundreds of personal names for each, but he published only one article, "Indian Personal Names" (1890). Although he planned to write a monograph on Siouan personal names, he died before completing it. Today his manuscripts are archived primarily in the National Anthropological Archives. [End Page 1] Other early linguists working on the Plains included C. C. Uhlenbeck; he published "Geslachts- en Persoonsnamen der Peigans" (1912), in which he cites the names of Piegan bands and a representative number of individuals' personal names, and discusses the historical incidents upon which the names were based. Edward Sapir (1924) compiled a list of ninety-four Sarsi names that he published in phonetic transcription, together with literal and free English translations, and then grouped into seven semantic categories: geographical references, tribal names, war names, names referring to horses and riding, names based on incidents or objects, and names referring to personal characteristics. Later in the century, James A. Goss (1973) reported on his attempt to develop a model for the naming practices of the Southern Ute Indians of Colorado that would enable him to predict, on the basis of a set of binary features, the sex, age, kin affiliations, and shamanistic powers from a name itself. Throughout the early twentieth century a small number of linguists and anthropologists who engaged in fieldwork with particular groups recorded lists of names, some of which were published, while others remain unpublished. For example, in the Southwest, the Franciscan Fathers at St. Michael's Mission on the Navajo Reservation documented various aspects of the language. In 1910, they published An Ethnologic Dictionary of the Navaho Language, an innovative linguistic work in which the entries have English head words arranged according to a vast array of cultural topics and activities as well as natural phenomena. Among them is a long entry entitled "Personal Names" that identifies seven categories of names: for boys, for girls, and for women; for men; for distinguished chiefs, treaty signers, and American residents; and tribal names. N. H. Winchell published in The Aborigines of...

A Machine Translation System from Hindi to Sanskrit Language using Rule based Approach

Machine Translation is an area of Natural Language Processing which can replace the laborious task of manual translation. Sanskrit language is among the ancient Indo-Aryan languages. There are numerous works of art and literature in Sanskrit. It has also been a medium for creating treatise of philosophical work as well as works on logic, astronomy and mathematics. On the other hand, Hindi is the most prominent language of India. Moreover,it is among the most widely spoken languages across the world. This paper is an effort to bridge the language barrier between Hindi and Sanskrit language such that any text in Hindi can be translated to Sanskrit. The technique used for achieving the aforesaid objective is rule-based machine translation. The salient linguistic features of the two languages are used to perform the translation. The results are produced in the form of two confusion matrices wherein a total of 50 random sentences and 100 tokens (Hindi words or phrases) were taken for system evaluation. The semantic evaluation of 100 tokens produce an accuracy of 94% while the pragmatic analysis of 50 sentences produce an accuracy of around 86%. Hence, the proposed system can be used to understand the whole translation process and can further be employed as a tool for learning as well as teaching. Further, this application can be embedded in local communication based assisting Internet of Things (IoT) devices like Alexa or Google Assistant.

A Corpus-Based Study of Corporate Image Restoration via Public Apology

As one of the most effective measures for corporations to manage crises, public apology has received extensive attention from both practitioners and researchers. This paper attempts to conduct a corpus-based and interdisciplinary study on English public apologies issued by foreign corporations, and to explore how the corporations repair their images via public apology under the tentative theoretical framework adapted from Benoit’s image restoration discourse theory (IRDT) and Coombs & Holladay’s situational crisis communication theory (SCCT). Results show that three salient linguistic features are identified in corporate apology corpus: (a) highly frequent use of modal verbs “will” and “can”; (b) highly frequent use of personal pronouns “we” and “you”; (c) highly frequent use of demonstrative pronouns “this” and “that”. It is found that five pragmatic strategies (strategy of expressing apology, strategy of intensifying affection, strategy of mitigating responsibility, bolstering strategy, and rebuilding strategy) are most frequently employed to express mortification to the victims, to reduce the offensiveness of acts and to minimize or to evade responsibility. Furthermore, it is also found that corporate image is restored by means of weakening the negative impression and re-building a responsible and benevolent image. These findings would not only shed light on the corporate image restoration studies, but also offer implications for the practitioners in the business world.

Stylistic Analysis of an Extract from Purple Hibiscus

This study attempts to carry out an in-depth stylistic analysis of an extract from Purple Hibiscus by Chichamanda Ngozi Adichie to demonstrate how a detailed stylistic analysis can reveal the ways in which the different linguistic features can be manipulated to achieve a wide range of significant effects. Salient linguistic features in the construction of meaning and frameworks fruitful in the discussion of the particular extract based on a close reading of the literature are employed for approaching the stylistic analysis. The study examines, in particular, the linguistic control of viewpoint, speech and thought presentation as well as how readers are invited to get into central characters’ head throughout the extract, which give insights into the narrator’s external perception of the particular event in the fictional world. Furthermore, close attention is paid to the interpersonal function of language in the analysis of the conversational part of the extract. Methods of discourse analysis in terms of body language, turn-taking mechanism, co-operation, politeness and the character are applied to investigate the linguistic strategies and patterns indicated in the dialogue. Findings demonstrate the personalities of characters, their tense relationship, and the struggle for the dominance of power in the interaction. Moreover, the alternative world is applied to further probe how the concept of different worlds of the characters in the textual universe can be used to describe the conflicts which start the plot of the novel and internal structure of the fictional worlds. Based on findings, general conclusions and implications for future studies are revealed. Keywords: stylistic analysis, point of view, mind style, speech and thought presentation, conversational analysis, alternative worlds DOI: 10.7176/JLLL/68-07 Publication date: May 31 st 2020

Salience is in the eye of the beholder: Increased pupil size reflects acoustically salient variables

‘Salience’ is a term frequently used in linguistics but an exact definition for the concept is lacking. Recent technological advances which allow us to explore the cognitive processing of so-called salient linguistic features could provide us with quantifiable measures of ‘salience’, and lead to a further understanding of the concept and its relationship to language acquisition and change. In this paper we measure pupil dilation with the assumption that auditory salience results in a change in pupil size, as an effect of cognitive load. We report an experimental study observing Dutch participants' pupil sizes when listening to stimuli containing salient and non-salient variants of linguistic variables (e.g. Dutch coda/r/; speech intensity, word frequency). Using Generalized Additive Mixed Modelling (GAMM), we find pupil size increases for three of six stimuli categories. We consider our findings in light of the speech processing literature, address the (dis)advantages of the technique, and formulate some recommendations for future advances in neurophysiological measures in (socio)linguistics.

“It Eclipsed Cairo and Outshone Baghdad!”: Ibn Rashīq’s Elegy for the City of Qayrawan

Ibn Rashīq’s popularity in the Arab world as one of the most distinguished classical Maghribi poets owes much to what is often called in Arabic school textbooks “Nūniyyat Ibn Rashīq fī rithāʾ al-Qayrawān,” or simply “Nūniyyat Ibn Rashīq.” Ibn Rashīq composed his city-elegy, the nūniyyah while living in exile to lament the destruction (kharāb) and desolation (khalā̄ʾ) of Qayrawan in the wake of the Hilālī sacking of the city in 1057 ce. A full English translation of Ibn Rashīq’s printed and standardized nūniyyah follows an introductory essay that enumerates salient linguistic and rhetorical features, and offers a manuscript and publication history for the poem. The essay pivots around the lack of elegiac and nostalgic representation of Qayrawan’s once majestic ‘cityscape’ and iconic worldly buildings in the nūniyyah, finding the mnemonic and nostalgic focus of the Maghrib’s most renowned city-elegy to be rather the loss of the city’s fuqahāʾ (Islamic scholars or jurisprudents).

AN EXPLORATION OF GRAFFITI ON UNIVERSITY’S WALLS: A CORPUS-BASED DISCOURSE ANALYSIS STUDY

Graffiti have received a great attention from scholars as they have been considered a vital cultural phenomenon for many years (Trahan, 2011; Divsalar & Nemati, 2012; Zakareviciute, 2014; Farnia, 2014; El-Nashar & Nayef; 2016). Although there are extensive contemporary researches on graffiti in many disciplines, such as linguistics, cultural studies, politics, art, and communication (Pietrosanti, 2010; Farnia, 2014; Oganda, 2015), there are few studies exploring graffiti on classrooms’ walls in higher education milieus (Farnia, 2014). To the best knowledge of the researchers, very few studies were done on the Jordanian context (e.g. Al-Haj Eid, 2008; Abu-Jaber, et al., 2012) and none was done on the Jordanian universities. Therefore, this study aims at analysing the content and communicative features of writings found on universities’ classrooms’ walls, corridors, and washrooms and their relation to the socio-cultural values of the society in order to explore how universities help students voice their attitudes and thoughts. The linguistic features that characterise these writings were also examined. Graffiti-writings, which were collected from the University of Jordan and the Hashemite University, were coded and analysed using the thematic content analysis technique (Braun & Clarke, 2006) and Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1995). The analysis of the data has shown that graffiti serve different communicative language functions related to personal, social, national, religious, political, and taboo matters. The most salient linguistic features of these graffiti are simplicity and variation. It can be concluded that graffiti are distinctive and silent ways of communication, particularly in students’ society. The study will be of great importance to linguists, sociologists, educators, administrators, teachers and parents. It is enrichment to the available literature on linguistic studies.

The History of Scottish English and A Brief Description of the Salient Linguistic Features That Characterize The Scots Dialect

A brief history of the Scots dialect shall be presented, and, the salient Linguistic Features that characterize Scots shall be discussed. Some observers have different views regarding these linguistic features. I shall provide examples of these differences and conclude with the fact that the Great Vowel Shift played a major role in forming Scots and, as a result, Scots has its own characteristics that distinguishes it from other dialects.

Massimo Teofilo, traduttore del Nuovo Testamento

This study examines some of the salient linguistic features of the New Testament translated into Tuscan by the Florentine Benedictine monk Massimo Teofilo (editio princeps printed in Lyon, 1551). The first two paragraphs present the historical and cultural background against which the translation was prepared, followed by an examination of its vocabulary. In order to highlight the greater expressivity and literary quality of Massimo Teofilo's text, notable lexical choices are compared with the vocabulary used in other contemporary translations. Finally, the study focuses on the syntactic and textual aspects of the translation, highlighting Massimo Teofilo's humanistic quest to translate the Holy Scripture in a clear and worthy vernacular.