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The Red Hen Audio Tagger Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2024-04-17 Sabyasachi Ghosal, Austin Bennett, Mark Turner
The International Distributed Little Red Hen Lab, usually called “Red Hen Lab” or just “Red Hen”, is dedicated to research into multimodal communication. In this article, we introduce the Red Hen Audio Tagger (RHAT), a novel, publicly available open source platform developed by Red Hen Lab. RHAT employs deep learning models to tag audio elements frame by frame, generating metadata tags that can be
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Metalinguistic awareness as a factor in contact-induced language change Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2024-04-14 Nicole Hober
This opinion paper considers the role of metalinguistic awareness as a cognitive factor in contact-induced change (CIC). Although research in neighboring fields – for example, language pedagogy and second and third language acquisition – has shown that metalinguistic awareness is a non-structural factor, but does interact with cross-linguistic influences, metalinguistic awareness and its connection
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A diachronic consequence of intransitivity: structural underspecification and processing biases in Old French Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2024-04-04 Michelle Troberg
The present study examines the diachronic consequence of a class of words that are superficially intransitive but that often have more than one possible underlying representation. We consider the hypothesis that structural underspecification and structure-based economy constraints on processing may drive a well-studied syntactic change in medieval French: the loss of directional/aspectual verb particles
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Processing reflexives in adjunct control: an exploration of attraction effects Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2024-04-01 Myung Hye Yoo
Previous research has demonstrated that dependencies between reflexives and their licensors resist attraction effects from structurally illicit but feature-matching attractors. However, mechanisms guiding reflexive licensing in control clauses remain insufficiently explored. To address this gap, this paper examines whether reflexives in adjunct control clauses primarily seek their licensors within
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Through the compression glass: language complexity and the linguistic structure of compressed strings Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2024-03-22 Katharina Ehret
Against the backdrop of the sociolinguistic-typological complexity debate which is all about measuring, comparing and explaining language complexity, this article investigates how Kolmogorov-based information theoretic complexity relates to linguistic structures. Specifically, the linguistic structure of text which has been compressed with the text compression algorithm gzip will be analysed. One implementation
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Missing link: code-switches, borrowings, and accommodation biases Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2024-03-22 Hendrik De Smet, Marlieke Shaw
When words are transferred from a source language into a target language, they may become conventionalized and appear to fully adopt target-language morphosyntactic behavior. Such words are traditionally regarded as borrowings. Even borrowings, however, are subject to probabilistic usage constraints, which we refer to as “accommodation biases” and which distinguish borrowings from native vocabulary
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The meaning of morphomes: distributional semantics of Spanish stem alternations Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2024-03-20 Borja Herce, Marc Allassonnière-Tang
Romance stem alternations have been argued to represent exclusively morphological objects (or “morphomes”) independent from semantic and syntactic categories. This conclusion has been based on feature-value analyses of the inflected forms, and definitions of natural classes that are theoretically driven and about which no consensus exists. Individual examples of morphomes are thus frequently challenged
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Conative animal calls in Macha Oromo: function and form Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2024-03-19 Alexander Andrason, Onsho Mulugeta, Shimelis Mazengia
This article studies the category of conative animal calls (CACs) in a Cushitic variety – Macha Oromo (Ethiopia). The authors analyze the function (pragma-semantics) and form (phonetics and morphology) of 52 CACs collected during fieldwork activities and conclude the following: the category of CACs in Macha Orono largely complies with the prototype of a CAC posited recently in literature. Moreover
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Effects of grammatical gender on gender inferences: Evidence from French hybrid nouns Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2024-03-18 Benjamin Storme, Laura Delaloye Saillen
A growing body of research shows that readers and listeners are biased by the grammatical gender of a noun when making inferences about the gender of its referent. This result is central in debates about gender-fair language but has mostly been established using masculine generics. This paper presents two preregistered studies on French that aim to replicate this result but using a lesser-studied type
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Cognitive mechanisms driving (contact-induced) language change: introduction to the special issue Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2024-03-18 Michael Percillier, Yela Schauwecker
This special issue focuses on the interaction of the disciplines of historical linguistics and psycholinguistics to obtain new insights into which cognitive factors are potentially relevant for language change. The contributions address questions related to the cognitive mechanisms at play, their evidence in historical data, who the agents of change may be, which experimental methods can be implemented
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Bilingualism-induced language change: what can change, when, and why? Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2024-03-18 John A. Hawkins, Luna Filipović
Contact between languages has become increasingly recognized as a major source of historical change, as linguistic properties are introduced from one language into another. Yet contact does not necessarily lead to such changes. In fact, arguably most of the properties that contrast between two languages in contact at a given place and time do not change. This paper argues that historical and contact
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Semantic change and socio-semantic variation: the case of COVID-related neologisms on Reddit Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2024-03-15 Quirin Würschinger, Barbara McGillivray
COVID-19 has triggered innovations in science and society globally, leading to the emergence or establishment of formal neologisms such as infodemic and working from home (WFH). While previous work on COVID-related lexical innovation has focused on such formal neologisms, this paper uses data from Reddit to study semantic neologisms like lockdown and mask, which have changed in meaning due to the pandemic
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Construction grammar and procedural semantics for human-interpretable grounded language processing Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2024-03-14 Liesbet De Vos, Jens Nevens, Paul Van Eecke, Katrien Beuls
Grounded language processing is a crucial component in many artificial intelligence systems, as it allows agents to communicate about their physical surroundings. State-of-the-art approaches typically employ deep learning techniques that perform end-to-end mappings between natural language expressions and representations grounded in the environment. Although these techniques achieve high levels of
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Causal clauses as source of sentential complementation: cross-linguistic evidence and methodological issues Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Rodrigo Hernáiz
In many languages, causal clause markers can also function as – or are formally identical to – complement markers (e.g., Bulgarian če, Twi se, or Latin quod). This isomorphism is often explained as the result of independent developments from a common source (interrogatives, relativizers, etc.). By contrast, it is also frequently accepted that in some cases the aforementioned identity originates in
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Across time, space, and genres: measuring probabilistic grammar distances between varieties of Mandarin Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Yi Li, Benedikt Szmrecsanyi, Weiwei Zhang
This paper aims to quantify distances between varieties of Mandarin (diachronic, regional, and situational) as a function of the similarity in the choice between syntactic variants in the Mandarin theme-recipient alternation (yŭ/gěi dative alternation). We use a novel corpus-based method, Variation-Based Distance and Similarity Modeling, which draws inspiration from work in comparative sociolinguistics
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The role of syntax in hashtag popularity Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Ming Feng Wan
Research on hashtag popularity presumes hashtag popularity to be correlated with its semantics and lexical clarity, and the popularity of its topic. However, within a single event, hashtags of identical stances can have contrasting popularity; one may attribute this to the assumption that a certain type of hashtag is preferred, but hashtags of identical syntactic format can also have contradictory
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“All women are like that”: an overview of linguistic deindividualization and dehumanization of women in the incelosphere Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Ewelina Prażmo
This article provides an overview of linguistic strategies used in the incel community to deindividualize and dehumanize women. Among the most common ways of referring to women there is the use of generic labels (Stacy, Becky), conceptual metaphor (warpig, landwhale) including creative metaphorical morphology (foid, femoid), conceptual metonymy (hole, extrahole), and conceptual metaphtonymy (roastie)
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Sociolinguistic auto-coding has fairness problems too: measuring and mitigating bias Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Dan Villarreal
Sociolinguistics researchers can use sociolinguistic auto-coding (SLAC) to predict humans’ hand-codes of sociolinguistic data. While auto-coding promises opportunities for greater efficiency, like other computational methods there are inherent concerns about this method’s fairness – whether it generates equally valid predictions for different speaker groups. Unfairness would be problematic for sociolinguistic
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Plains Cree Order as alternation Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2024-02-20 Atticus G. Harrigan, Antti Arppe
This paper describes the Plains Cree phenomenon of Order as a form of alternation not yet described as such in the literature. First, we provide a brief description of relevant Plains Cree grammar and Order as a phenomenon. This is followed by an overview of how the concept of alternation has been used in linguistics as an analytic tool. Finally, we discuss how conceiving of Order as an alternation
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Null and overt se constructions in Brazilian Portuguese and the network of se constructions Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2024-02-14 Susana Afonso, Augusto Soares da Silva
Middle voice (MV) comprises a set of marked constructions associated with situation types (Kemmer 1993. The middle voice. Amsterdam: John Benjamins), in which the middle marker functions as an intransitivizer. MV constructions in Portuguese are se constructions in which the clitic se is typically overt, but in Brazilian Portuguese there is variation between constructions with and without the clitic
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In alternations, not all semantic motivation comes from semantic contrast Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2024-01-24 Yingying Cai, Hendrik De Smet
Functional explanations of alternations often invoke semantic contrast between alternates. In some cases, however, new alternations may arise not to code contrast but simply because the grammar supports multiple roughly equivalent solutions to the same coding problem. Our study illustrates this by exploring the history of English prepositional phrase complements (PPCs) to mental predicates, with a
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The morphosyntactic alternation between exterior locative case affixes and postpositions in Estonian Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2024-01-22 Jane Klavan
This paper investigates three morphosyntactic alternations in Estonian – those between the exterior locative cases allative, adessive, and ablative and the corresponding postpositions peale ‘onto’, peal ‘on’, and pealt ‘off’. It is assumed that the influence of different predictors on speakers’ choices will be relatively stable in terms of the direction of those predictors, but the strength of these
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Introduction: what are alternations and how should we study them? Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2024-01-17 Dirk Pijpops, Karlien Franco, Dirk Speelman, Freek Van de Velde
The research paradigm of alternation studies is forming an increasingly large share of the empirical foundations of usage-based linguistics. As the paradigm is essentially an amalgamation of research traditions from various subfields of linguistics, including sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, and construction grammar, it sports various definitions of the concept of “alternation”
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Bear in a Window: collecting Australian children’s stories of the COVID-19 pandemic Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2024-01-17 Chloé Diskin-Holdaway, Barbara F. Kelly, Joanne Arciuli, Beena Ahmed
The Bear in a Window project captures Australian children’s experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic. We focused on children’s experiences of lockdown, or extended periods of home confinement, ranging from one to 100 days at a time between 2020 and 2021. Using the online experimental platform, Gorilla, we invited children aged 3–12 to record themselves telling stories about the positives and negatives
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Gettin’ sociolinguistic data remotely: comparing vernacularity during online remote versus in-person sociolinguistic interviews Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2024-01-08 Matt Hunt Gardner, Viktorija Kostadinova
The following paper examines the use of the stable sociolinguistic variable (-ing) across two different interview modalities: “classic” in-person sociolinguistic interviews and identical interviews conducted remotely over online video chat. The goal of this research was to test whether a change in modality results in style-shifting, as quantified by different rates of formal/standard [-ɪŋ] versus
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Alternations (at) that time: NP versus PP time adjuncts in the history of English Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2024-01-08 Eva Zehentner
The present paper investigates variation between nominal and prepositional adjuncts of time as in, for example, [on] that day, they left. The main goals are (i) to assess potential changes in the distribution of these variants in the history of English, specifically from Middle English to Late Modern English (1150–1914), and (ii) to test which factors most strongly impact the choice between the two
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Disentangling constructional networks: integrating taxonomic effects into the description of grammatical alternations Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2024-01-08 Piotr Wyroślak, Dylan Glynn
This study considers an approach to alternations in which constructions are understood as non-binary choices between non-discrete usage patterns. To these ends, it seeks to develop usage-based methods for the identification and description of constructions without presupposing their level of formal granularity. Instead of deciding a priori what level of granularity is best for making generalizations
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Concrete constructions or messy mangroves? How modelling contextual effects on constructional alternations reflect theoretical assumptions of language structure Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2024-01-04 Dylan Glynn, Olaf Mikkelsen
Depending on the theory of language employed, the paradigmatic and lexical variation associated with a given composite form-meaning pair is treated in different ways. First, variation can be treated as independent of the constructional semantics, an approach typical of modular theories. Second, paradigmatic variation can be considered indicative of constructional semantics; its variation constituting
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Investigating the relationship between the speed of automatization and linguistic abilities: data collection during the COVID-19 pandemic Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2024-01-04 Ashley Blake, Ewa Dąbrowska
Our research explores the relationship between cognition and language. The focus of this paper is to discuss how we embarked upon remote data collection with children during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this study we investigate cognitive processes of non-verbal intelligence, working memory, implicit statistical learning, and speed of automatization (measured with the multiple-trial Tower of Hanoi puzzle)
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Differential indexing in Kamang: a viewpoint alternation Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-12-30 Katherine Walker
In Kamang (Alor-Pantar, Indonesia), some verbs alternate between indexing the S or P argument with a prefix (from several different series) and occurring unprefixed; that is, Kamang has differential argument indexing. Through a qualitative study of a spoken-language corpus, this paper investigates the alternation between one of the prefix series and zero-marking. Previously described as indicating
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Getting “good” data in a pandemic, part 1: assessing the validity and quality of data collected remotely Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-12-21 Viktorija Kostadinova, Matt Hunt Gardner
The articles presented in this special issue contribute to recent scholarship on remote data collection. The topics covered can be described in terms of two focal areas. The first focus is on the ways in which research can be adapted to remote data collection, and the second on the ways in which data collected remotely should be considered alongside data collected using “traditional” methods. The overarching
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On the semantics of (negated) approximative kaada in Classical Arabic: a case for embedded exhaustification Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-12-12 Abdel-Rahman Abu Helal
The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it proposes a compositional semantic analysis for approximative kaada in Classical Arabic which has the property of being a clause-level rather than predicate-level operator: [KAADA α] is paraphrased as [α is false but there exists β close to α such that β is true]. The analysis is based on the integrated semantics of Penka (Penka, Doris. 2006. Almost there:
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Constraction: a tool for the automatic extraction and interactive exploration of linguistic constructions Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-12-11 Hengbin Yan, Yinghui Li
A central task in empirical and quantitative language studies is the extraction of linguistic constructions important to linguistic theory and application. The great number and variety of such constructions increasingly necessitates computer-assisted extraction, which often proves challenging as it entails a simultaneous analysis of multiple layers of linguistic information latent in large-scale corpora
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Contextualized word senses: from attention to compositionality Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-11-29 Pablo Gamallo
The neural architectures of language models are becoming increasingly complex, especially that of Transformers, based on the attention mechanism. Although their application to numerous natural language processing tasks has proven to be very fruitful, they continue to be models with little or no interpretability and explainability. One of the tasks for which they are best suited is the encoding of the
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The overlooked effect of amplitude on within-speaker vowel variation Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-11-24 Joshua Wilson Black, Jennifer Hay, Lynn Clark, James Brand
We analyse variation in vowel production within monologues produced by speakers in a quiet, well-controlled environment. Using principal component analysis (PCA) and generalized additive mixed models (GAMMs), applied to a large corpus of naturalistic recordings of New Zealand English speakers, we show that the first formant of monophthongs varies significantly with variation in a speaker’s relative
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The impact of Star Wars on the English language: Star Wars-derived words and constructions in present-day English corpora Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-11-22 Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer
Since George Lucas’s film A New Hope was first screened in 1977, the Star Wars saga has become a pop-culture phenomenon incorporating films, videogames, books, merchandise, and a quasi-religious philosophy, but linguistic research on Star Wars is scarce and has mainly focused on language use in the films. There is as yet no investigation of the impact of Star Wars on the English language, and the present
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The language of men and women in Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: Discovery Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-11-15 Tanja Behrens
This article investigates the language of men and women in Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: Discovery through corpus analysis. To that end, the transcripts of 13 episodes of The Original Series and five episodes of Discovery were analyzed. More specifically, this paper focuses on clause types, particularly interrogatives and imperatives, as well as interruptions and certain recurring phrases
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From Star Trek to The Hunger Games: emblem gestures in science fiction and their uptake in popular culture Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-11-14 Peta M. Freestone, Jessica Kruk, Lauren Gawne
Research on emblems to date has not drawn on corpus methods that use public data. In this paper, we use corpus methods to explore the use of original fictional gestures in the real world. We look at two examples from popular science fiction, the Vulcan salute from Star Trek and the three-finger salute from The Hunger Games. First, a Twitter corpus of the Vulcan salute emoji shows that it is used to
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“So, I trucked out to the border, learned to say ain’t, came to find work”: the sociolinguistics of Firefly Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-11-09 Catherine Laliberté, Melanie Keller, Diana Wengler
Firefly is a TV series that aired in 2002 and 2003 in the United States. The series belongs to the space western subgenre, which allies science fiction and western tropes by layering, in this case, a dystopian society, space travel, standoffs in desolate landscapes, and saloon brawls. This juxtaposition of genres is reflected in the language of Firefly’s characters in three ways: world-specific slang
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“There was much new to grok”: an analysis of word coinage in science fiction literature Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-11-09 Matt Gee
As can be witnessed in projects such as The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction (Prucher, Jeff. 2007. Brave new words: The Oxford dictionary of science fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press), science fiction has been fertile ground for the creation of new words and concepts. Whereas the aforementioned dictionary was constructed by eliciting examples and citations from volunteers, this paper presents
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A corpus-based study of quoi in French native speech Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-11-06 Delin Deng, Fenqi Wang
Based on data drawn from two corpora collected in Orléans, France, in two waves (ESLO 1, 1968–1971; ESLO 2, 2008–) over a 40-year period, this paper investigated the use of quoi as a discourse marker (DM) in the speech of 234 French native speakers. Our results indicate that the DM quoi has increased in frequency in the more recent corpus. The distribution of its discursive functions has changed between
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Tapped /r/ in RP: a corpus-based sociophonetic study across the twentieth century Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-11-01 Delia Belando
This paper aims to explore the use of the tap allophone [ɾ] in Received Pronunciation (RP) in word-internal and linking /r/ contexts over three decades (1940s–1960s) and considering three age cohorts (<35 years old, 35–54 years old, and ≥55 years old). A spoken corpus of formal register materials was compiled to conduct further perceptual and acoustic analysis and classify the articulation of /r/ into
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Perceiving with strangeness: quantifying a style of altered consciousness as estrangement in a corpus of 1960s American science fiction Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-10-26 Elizabeth Oakes
In 1960s American science fiction, representations of altered consciousness may function as a novum, framing how protagonists perceive and interact with the storyworld, motivating their actions, and estranging readers. Representations of these states are rooted in the lexical particulars of style, which became of central concern to the rising New Wave subgenre. As a result of the defamiliarized focalization
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Introduction to the special issue on “The language of science fiction” Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-10-23 Sofia Rüdiger, Claudia Lange
In this introduction, we provide a short rationale for the genesis of the special issue on “The language of science fiction” and introduce its main theme – science fiction, with particular consideration of the language of estrangement – and main methodological framework – corpus linguistics. In addition, we give an overview of the contributions and motivate their grouping into four parts: (1) the influence
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Cyberpunk, steampunk, and all that punk: genre names and their uses across communities Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-10-18 Francesco-Alessio Ursini, Giuseppe Samo
The goal of this paper is to offer an analysis of cyberpunk, steampunk, and other genre names related via the punk element. We study the emergence and popularity of these names among science fiction fans and scholars, comparing them with “mainstream” appreciators. We carry out a corpus study that analyses data extracted from textual corpora in four languages (English, German, French, and Italian) and
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“To boldly go where no man has gone before”: how iconic is the Star Trek split infinitive? Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-10-18 Patricia Ronan, Gerold Schneider
“To boldly go where no man has gone before”, popularized by the science fiction series Star Trek, has provided an iconic example for the use of split infinitives. From its introduction, the series may have paved the way for the broader use of split infinitives in contemporary, informal English in spite of prescriptive grammars shunning the structure. The current qualitative and quantitative study is
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Subverting motion in science fiction? Beam in the Star Trek TV series Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-10-10 Kajsa Törmä
Characters in science fiction TV have to move through the universe at the speed which the plot necessitates. In Star Trek, characters can beam from one location to another in an instant. In the visual modality, there is no continuous path of motion between the source and the goal, which would technically disqualify beam from most linguistic definitions of motion. This study aims to map out the usage
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Sensory experience ratings (SERs) for 1,130 Chinese words: relationships with other semantic and lexical psycholinguistic variables Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-10-09 Chenggang Wu, Xin Mu
Sensory experience rating (SER) is a subjective semantic variable that measures the extent to which a word generates a sensory experience when a reader processes the word, and it has been explored in English, French, and Spanish. The present study collected the SERs of 1,130 Chinese words and explored the correlation between SER and other lexical and semantic variables. SER was significantly associated
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Agreeing objects in Zulu can be indefinite and non-specific Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-10-05 Jochen Zeller
In a number of Bantu languages, object marking is correlated with a definite or specific interpretation of the agreeing object DP, and similar claims about the semantic effects of object marking have also been made for Zulu (Nguni; S42). This paper examines these claims by applying a range of diagnostic tests for (in)definiteness and (non-)specificity to sentences with object-marked objects in Zulu
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Validation of two measures for assessing English vocabulary knowledge on web-based testing platforms: brief assessments Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-09-13 Lee Drown, Nikole Giovannone, David B. Pisoni, Rachel M. Theodore
Two measures for assessing English vocabulary knowledge, the Vocabulary Size Test (VST) and the Word Familiarity Test (WordFAM), were recently validated for web-based administration. An analysis of the psychometric properties of these assessments revealed high internal consistency, suggesting that stable assessment could be achieved with fewer test items. Because researchers may use these assessments
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Validation of two measures for assessing English vocabulary knowledge on web-based testing platforms: long-form assessments Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-09-12 Lee Drown, Nikole Giovannone, David B. Pisoni, Rachel M. Theodore
The goal of the current work was to develop and validate web-based measures for assessing English vocabulary knowledge. Two existing paper-and-pencil assessments, the Vocabulary Size Test (VST) and the Word Familiarity Test (WordFAM), were modified for web-based administration. In Experiment 1, participants (n = 100) completed the web-based VST. In Experiment 2, participants (n = 100) completed the
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Rapport-building attempts in technology-mediated job interviews during the COVID-19 crisis Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-09-04 Melina De Dijn, Dorien Van De Mieroop
The COVID-19 situation has turned job interview practices upside down: while it was common to organize face-to-face job interviews, there is now a surge in technology-mediated job interviews (TMJIs). This shift to a digital medium self-evidently affects these interactions and earlier research has indeed drawn attention to the – often negative – impact of technology on interactions. For job interviews
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Words of scents: a linguistic analysis of online perfume reviews Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-07-31 Larisa Nikitina, Fumitaka Furuoka
This study explored linguistic resources that people employ to express their perceptions and opinions of a fragrance. Several natural language processing (NLP) techniques were used, including sentiment analysis, topic modelling, and supervised classification. The data were collected from the website of Fragrantica, popular among perfume lovers, and the reviews pertained to a niche market fragrance
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Basic word order typology revisited: a crosslinguistic quantitative study based on UD and WALS Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-07-26 Jianwei Yan, Haitao Liu
This study quantitatively examines the first five universals of Greenberg’s basic word order typology based on 74 large-scale annotated corpora from two perspectives. The results show that (1) the dominant orders extracted from corpora concur with those retrieved from the World Atlas of Language Structures (henceforth, WALS) and provide knowledge of dominant orders to languages absent in the WALS,
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On the role of metaphors in COVID-related political communication: an examination of Jacinda Ardern’s metaphorical language in managing the health crisis Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-07-24 Marta Degani
In comparison to many other countries across the world, New Zealand stands out as a positive example of successfully dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic during its first outbreak. A pivotal role in this has been attributed to Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s prime minister, who has been praised for her effective communication throughout the crisis and her capacity to connect empathetically to the people
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Novel metaphor and embodiment: comprehending novel synesthetic metaphors Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-07-24 Yin Zhong, Kathleen Ahrens, Chu-Ren Huang
Linguistic synesthesia links two concepts from two distinct sensory domains and creates conceptual conflicts at the level of embodied cognition. Previous studies focused on constraints on the directionality of synesthetic mapping as a way to establish the conceptual hierarchy among the five senses (i.e., vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch). This study goes beyond examining the directionality
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Cerebral asymmetries in the processing of opaque compounds in L1 Polish and L2 English Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-06-22 Krzysztof Hwaszcz, Hanna Kędzierska
We report the results of a cross-modal priming study investigating the processing of opaque compound words, when followed by figuratively and literally related primes, in L1 (Polish) and L2 (English). Additionally, the half-divided visual field paradigm was used to verify which cerebral hemisphere is responsible for semantic decomposition, and whether the language status will lead to different activation
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The effect of L2 German on grammatical gender access in L1 Polish: proficiency matters Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-06-16 Kamil Długosz
Previous research has shown that bilinguals process nouns that have the same grammatical gender in their two languages faster than nouns that differ in gender between L1 and L2. This finding, referred to as the gender congruency effect, has so far only been documented in L2. Hence, the aim of the present study was to examine whether late unbalanced bilinguals would also show gender congruency effects
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Outsourcing teenage language: a participatory approach for exploring speech and text messaging Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-06-05 Kadri Koreinik, Aive Mandel, Maarja-Liisa Pilvik, Kristiina Praakli, Virve-Anneli Vihman
This paper presents a remote method used for engaging teenagers as citizen sociolinguists within the research project Teen Speak in Estonia. The project, launched in January 2020, aims to investigate young people’s language by creating the first systematic dual corpus of Estonian teenagers’ spoken language and text messaging. Previously, youth language in Estonia has not been the subject of much research
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Are preschool children sensitive to the function of accessibility markers? A visual world study with German-speaking three- to four-year-olds Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-06-03 Ina Lehmkuhle, Sarah Schimke
Little is known about when children understand the function of anaphoric referring expressions to signal different degrees of accessibility of discourse referents. This visual world study investigates German-speaking three- to four-year-olds’ online processing and offline interpretation of repeated names and personal pronouns in a context where reference is made to highly accessible discourse referents