Wide Range Of Linguistic Phenomena Research Articles

Role of English Language as a Global and Economical Language Around the Globe: A Case of Kachru's Model

This paper attempts to examine 'World Englishes' (WE) with connectivity to English as an International Language (EIL), Applied Linguistics and socio-linguistics. In the light of Kachru's model of English Language in the late 20th century. This model has three circles, inner circle, where English is used as native language, Outer Circle, mostly former colonies of British Empire, such as Singapore, India, Kenya, Ghana, Malaysia, Pakistan and others, and 3rd is Expanding Circle, include countries in which English is known as Foreign Language in schools and universities, mostly for communication and business or economic purposes as well with Inner and Outer circles. The term "English language" refers to various interesting and notable features, patterns, or aspects of the English language. These phenomena can encompass a wide range of linguistic phenomena, including grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, syntax, idioms, and more. English holds significant importance around the world because English is the most widely spoken language globally. It serves as a common language of communication among people from different linguistic backgrounds. Proficiency in English enables individuals to connect with a broader range of people, both in personal and professional contexts. English is the language of international business and economics as well. It facilitates global trade, negotiations, and collaboration between companies and individuals from different countries. Proficiency in English enhances employability and career opportunities, particularly in multinational corporations and industries with international reach. It recognizes the importance of both native and non-native varieties of English and acknowledges that each circle has its own linguistic norms, purposes, and language development. The study informs us that Kachru was an original thinker not in the field of English Language including applied linguistics, multilingualism, bilingualism, language policy, language creativity, code mixing, code switching, cross-cultural communication, sociolinguistics but also in the domain of politics of language and so many other issues including cross-cultural awareness.

Марийский язык в памятниках письменности: новые интерпретации и реконструкции Рецензия на книгу: Сергеев О. А. Язык памятников письменности марийского языка (конец XVII – XVIII вв.). Йошкар-Ола: МарНИИЯЛИ, 2021. 422 с.

The paper presents a review of one of the latest monographs of O. A. Sergeev. The work under consideration describes a wide range of linguistic phenomena reflected in the monuments of the written Mari language of the late 17th and 18th centuries. Special attention is paid to identifying all existing monuments of writing of that period, in which the Mari words and coherent texts are recorded. A detailed and holistic description of the chronologically earliest written monuments is presented, supplemented by a historical-linguistic and paleographic interpretation of lexical materials that are of particular interest for linguistic typology and objective reconstruction of the history of the Mari language. Every description of the phenomenon is followed by an extensive illustrative material. This review provides a brief summary of every chapter, highlighting the dominant topics that are of special significance not only for Mari linguistics but also for Finno-Ugric linguistics.

Normative inferentialism on linguistic understanding

The aim of this paper is to establish a specific view of linguistic understanding based on the framework of normative inferentialism. Normative inferentialism is presented as an overspecification (rich) account of meaning—the meaning of a sentence is understood as a cluster of context‐dependent contents. The standard psychological mechanism responsible for reaching understanding of an utterance depends on the ability to eliminate contextually irrelevant aspects/parts of meaning. The advantages of the view are that the mechanism can (a) explain a wide range of linguistic phenomena including polysemy, homonymy, and conversational implicatures, and (b) explain partial understanding of an utterance.

The TV and Movies corpora

AbstractThis paper discusses the creation and use of the TV Corpus (subtitles from 75,000 episodes, 325 million words, 6 English-speaking countries, 1950s-2010s) and the Movies Corpus (subtitles from 25,000 movies, 200 million words, 6 English-speaking countries, 1930s–2010s), which are available atEnglish-Corpora.org. The corpora compare well to the BNC-Conversation data in terms of informality, lexis, phraseology, and syntax. But at 525 million words in total size, they are more than 30 times as large as BNC-Conversation (both BNC1994 and BNC2014 combined), which means that they can be used to look at a wide range of linguistic phenomena. The TV and Movies corpora also allow useful comparisons of very informal language across time (containing texts from the 1930s and later for the movies, and from the 1950s onwards for TV shows) and between dialects of English (such as British and American English).

Piotrowski-Altmann law: State of the art

AbstractThe termPiotrowski-Altmann lawrefers to a wide range of linguistic phenomena which proceed in the “slow-fast-slow” fashion, i.e. drawing a sigmoid on a graph. They include the replacement of an old morphological form with a new one, lexical borrowing between languages, the growth of a child’s vocabulary, and many others. The paper briefly discusses the history of the law, its current variants and their applications, and lastly science theoretical problems connected with it. It concludes that our law is in fact a group of psycho- and sociological models, whose application to linguistics requires further deliberation.

The Role of Basal Ganglia Reinforcement Learning in Lexical Ambiguity Resolution.

The current study aimed to elucidate the contributions of the subcortical basal ganglia to human language by adopting the view that these structures engage in a basic neurocomputation that may account for its involvement across a wide range of linguistic phenomena. Specifically, we tested the hypothesis that basal ganglia reinforcement learning (RL) mechanisms may account for variability in semantic selection processes necessary for ambiguity resolution. To test this, we used a biased homograph lexical ambiguity priming task that allowed us to measure automatic processes for resolving ambiguity toward high-frequency word meanings. Individual differences in task performance were then related to indices of basal ganglia RL, which were used to group subjects into three learning styles: (a) Choosers who learn by seeking high reward probability stimuli; (b) Avoiders, who learn by avoiding low reward probability stimuli; and (c) Balanced participants, whose learning reflects equal contributions of choose and avoid processes. The results suggest that balanced individuals had significantly lower access to subordinate, or low-frequency, homograph word meanings. Choosers and Avoiders, on the other hand, had higher access to the subordinate word meaning even after a long delay between prime and target. Experimental findings were then tested using an ACT-R computational model of RL that learns from both positive and negative feedback. Results from the computational model simulations confirm and extend the pattern of behavioral findings, providing an RL account of individual differences in lexical ambiguity resolution.

The Development of Bimodal Bilingualism: Implications for Linguistic Theory.

A wide range of linguistic phenomena contribute to our understanding of the architecture of the human linguistic system. In this paper we present a proposal dubbed Language Synthesis to capture bilingual phenomena including code-switching and 'transfer' as automatic consequences of the addition of a second language, using basic concepts of Minimalism and Distributed Morphology. Bimodal bilinguals, who use a sign language and a spoken language, provide a new type of evidence regarding possible bilingual phenomena, namely code-blending, the simultaneous production of (aspects of) a message in both speech and sign. We argue that code-blending also follows naturally once a second articulatory interface is added to the model. Several different types of code-blending are discussed in connection to the predictions of the Synthesis model. Our primary data come from children developing as bimodal bilinguals, but our proposal is intended to capture a wide range of bilingual effects across any language pair.

Composing alternatives

There is a prominent line of work in natural language semantics, rooted in the work of Hamblin, in which the meaning of a sentence is not taken to be a single proposition, but rather a set of propositions—a set of alternatives. This allows for a more fine-grained view on meaning, which has led to improved analyses of a wide range of linguistic phenomena. However, this approach also faces a number of problems. We focus here on two of these, in our view the most fundamental ones. The first has to do with how meanings are composed, i.e., with the type-theoretic operations of function application and abstraction; the second has to do with how meanings are compared, i.e., the notion of entailment. Our aim is to reconcile what we take to be the essence of Hamblin’s proposal with the more orthodox type-theoretic framework rooted in the work of Montague in such a way that both the explanatory utility of the former and the solid formal foundations of the latter are preserved. Our proposal builds on insights from recent work on inquisitive semantics, and it also contributes to the further development of this framework by specifying how the inquisitive meaning of a sentence may be built up compositionally.

Linear grammar as a possible stepping-stone in the evolution of language.

We suggest that one way to approach the evolution of language is through reverse engineering: asking what components of the language faculty could have been useful in the absence of the full complement of components. We explore the possibilities offered by linear grammar, a form of language that lacks syntax and morphology altogether, and that structures its utterances through a direct mapping between semantics and phonology. A language with a linear grammar would have no syntactic categories or syntactic phrases, and therefore no syntactic recursion. It would also have no functional categories such as tense, agreement, and case inflection, and no derivational morphology. Such a language would still be capable of conveying certain semantic relations through word order-for instance by stipulating that agents should precede patients. However, many other semantic relations would have to be based on pragmatics and discourse context. We find evidence of linear grammar in a wide range of linguistic phenomena: pidgins, stages of late second language acquisition, home signs, village sign languages, language comprehension (even in fully syntactic languages), aphasia, and specific language impairment. We also find a full-blown language, Riau Indonesian, whose grammar is arguably close to a pure linear grammar. In addition, when subjects are asked to convey information through nonlinguistic gesture, their gestures make use of semantically based principles of linear ordering. Finally, some pockets of English grammar, notably compounds, can be characterized in terms of linear grammar. We conclude that linear grammar is a plausible evolutionary precursor of modern fully syntactic grammar, one that is still active in the human mind.

Constant conditional entropy and related hypotheses

Constant entropy rate (conditional entropies must remain constant as the sequence length increases) and uniform information density (conditional probabilities must remain constant as the sequence length increases) are two information theoretic principles that are argued to underlie a wide range of linguistic phenomena. Here we revise the predictions of these principles in the light of Hilberg’s law on the scaling of conditional entropy in language and related laws. We show that constant entropy rate (CER) and two interpretations for uniform information density (UID), full UID and strong UID, are inconsistent with these laws. Strong UID implies CER but the reverse is not true. Full UID, a particular case of UID, leads to costly uncorrelated sequences that are totally unrealistic. We conclude that CER and its particular cases are incomplete hypotheses about the scaling of conditional entropies.

From poets to padonki: Linguistic authority and norm negotiation in modern Russian culture (review)

Ingunn Lunde and Martin Paulsen, eds. From poets to padonki: Linguistic authority and norm negotiation in modern Russian culture. Bergen: University of Bergen, 2009. [Slavica Bergensia, 9.] The issues discussed in From poets to padonki became a part of my life in 1999 when I began my university studies and using Russian and Estonian became my everyday reality. Choosing different languages for different purposes, code-switching, and multilingual play have all been part of my daily use for the last eleven years. This collection challenges definitions of what can be meant by language, and the linguistic norm. It acquaints readers with a wide range of linguistic phenomena in modern Russian culture. Padonki refers to a subculture within the Russian-speaking Internet (Runet), whose representatives use erratic spellings for words, aiming at creating a comic effect. Their nickname padonki itself illustrates such a trend--it is an alteration of podonki 'dregs'. Padonki is also characterized by gratuitous use of profanity and a penchant for obscene subjects. During the last decade, a body of literature has emerged proposing that (socio)linguists direct their attention away the traditional focus of linguistics, i.e., as a bounded system, towards broader semiotic resources, to see what is really going on when people use language (Stroud 2003, Jacquemet 2005, Shohamy 2006, Makoni and Pennycook 2007, Blommaert 2010). The notion of language becomes especially questionable in cases of (multilingual) computer-mediated communication. The last decade has also witnessed rising scholarly interest in on and of the Internet in general and in e-mails and postings on Internet discussion forums or message boards in particular (e.g., Koutsogiannis and Mitsikopoulou 2003, Palfreyman and al Khalil 2003, Hinrichs 2006, Dorleijn and Nortier 2009, Androutsopoulos 2006, 2009). Garda (2009: 32) instead of language offers a more suitable term for the multiple discursive practices--languaging, i.e., social practices that are actions performed by our meaning-making selves. For her, dialects, pidgins, creoles, and academic are all examples of languaging, as there are differences between practices at home, in communities, and in academic contexts. I would argue that standard languages are idealized constructs, and none can remain unaffected by contacts during its entire history. While studying use by individuals, it is important to shift from focus on structure to focus on function--from focus on linguistic form in isolation to linguistic form in human context (Hymes 1974: 77). The volume under review offers fascinating reading for (socio)linguists, who work with different manifestations of real practices rather than seeking for linguistic norm descriptions. Comprising 17 contributions written in English and Russian, the book summarizes analyses of the norm in modern Russian culture based on data multiple sources: fiction, Internet slang, literary criticism and aesthetics, writers' blogs, linguistic play, and various arenas for 'talk about talk,' such as the classroom, blogs, the media, the courtroom, etc. (11). The book opens with Ingunn Lunde and Martin Paulsen's excellent general introduction, an insightful synthesis of how various approaches to the standard Russian language, its norms, and linguistic standards see the history, development, and future of the Russian culture. The first paper, Living by Henning Andersen, gives a comprehensive overview of the history and development of the notion of norms. Andersen reviews historical contributions to the understanding of norms. Making a distinction between declarative and deontic norms and dividing them further into explicit and implicit norms, he highlights the leading ideas in the field of (socio)linguistic studies that concern the position of norms. …

Logical structures in the lexicon

The lexical entry for a word must contain all the information needed to construct a semantic representation for sentences that contain the word. Because of that requirement, the formats for lexical representations must be as detailed as the semantic forms. Simple representations, such as features and frames, are adequate for resolving many syntactic ambiguities. However, since those notations cannot represent all of logic, they are incapable of supporting all the function needed for semantics. Richer semantic-based approaches have been developed in both the model-theoretic tradition and the more computational AI tradition. Although superficially in conflict, these two traditions have a great deal in common at a deeper level. Both of them have developed semantic structures that are capable of representing a wide range of linguistic phenomena. The paper compares these approaches, and evaluates their adequacy for various kinds of semantic information that must be stored in the lexicon. It presents conceptual graphs as a synthesis of the logicist and AI representations designed to support the requirements of both.