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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
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Expression of (in)definiteness in Polish-German bilinguals: an example of contact-induced grammaticalization Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-05-31 Izabela Błaszczyk
This study offers new insights into the marking of (in)definiteness by Polish-German bilinguals. In contrast to monolinguals, some bilinguals speaking Polish use the demonstrative ten and the numeral jeden in contexts that are restricted to articles only. Both the distance that the speaker’s variety of Polish is from the norm to which they were exposed and pattern replication seem to play an important
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How did COVID-19 impact the use of Japanese complex words with masuku ‘mask’ in 2020? Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-05-22 Kiyoko Toratani
This paper examines how the situation caused by COVID-19 impacted the use of a well-entrenched word in Japanese: masuku ‘mask’. An inspection of data gathered from an online newspaper shows a sharp increase in token and type frequency in the use of complex words with masuku ‘mask’ in 2020 (mid-pandemic) compared to 2019 (pre-pandemic), implying the recurrence and variegation of mask-related topics
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Brazilian Portuguese-Russian (BraPoRus) corpus: automatic transcription and acoustic quality of elderly speech during the COVID-19 pandemic Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-05-22 Irina A. Sekerina, Anna Smirnova Henriques, Aleksandra S. Skorobogatova, Natalia Tyulina, Tatiana V. Kachkovskaia, Pavel A. Skrelin, Svetlana Ruseishvili, Sandra Madureira
This article presents the Brazilian Portuguese-Russian (BraPoRus) corpus, whose goal is to collect, analyze, and preserve for posterity the spoken heritage Russian still used today in Brazil by approximately 1,500 elderly bilingual heritage Russian–Brazilian Portuguese speakers. Their unique 100-year-old variety of moribund Russian is disappearing because it has not been passed to their descendants
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Perception of regional and nonnative accents: a comparison of museum laboratory and online data collection Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-05-15 Tessa Bent, Holly Lind-Combs, Rachael F. Holt, Cynthia Clopper
Online testing for behavioral research has become an increasingly used tool. Although more researchers have been using online data collection methods, few studies have assessed the replicability of findings for speech intelligibility tasks. Here we assess intelligibility in quiet and two noise-added conditions for several different accents of English (Midland American, Standard Southern British, Scottish
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Measuring language complexity: challenges and opportunities Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-05-04 Katharina Ehret, Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, Christian Bentz, Alice Blumenthal-Dramé
This special issue focuses on measuring language complexity. The contributions address methodological challenges, discuss implications for theoretical research, and use complexity measurements for testing theoretical claims. In this introductory article, we explain what knowledge can be gained from quantifying complexity. We then describe a workshop and a shared task which were our attempt to develop
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Using social media as a source of analysable material in phonetics and phonology – lenition in Spanish Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-04-06 Karolina Broś
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that alternative methods of data collection are necessary to continue working in certain fields of linguistics. This is a challenge for (socio)phoneticians and phonologists who have to rely on good quality sound but cannot do fieldwork or gather recordings in a traditional manner. In this paper, I show that audio recordings made via social media can help alleviate this
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Same or different? Subject realization in the majority and the heritage language of Polish-German bilingual children Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-03-22 Bernhard Brehmer, Aldona Sopata, Massimiliano Canzi
The paper examines the extent to which bilingual children select lexical noun phrases and null and overt pronouns as referring expressions in their majority language German and their heritage language Polish. Both languages are similar regarding the availability of lexical noun phrases but differ in terms of the distribution of null and overt pronominal forms. Our focus lies on discourse contexts with
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A unified account of the multiple applications of German D-pronoun Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-03-16 Dagmar Bittner
The paper discusses the broad and seemingly diverse uses of the German D-pronoun. It is argued that the pronoun carries the invariant semantic feature [+distance] and that all its various uses are derived from this feature. That is, the D-pronoun expresses varying forms of distance between the referent of the pronoun and another discourse variable that functions as the perspectival center. The diverse
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Imperatives as persuasion strategies in political discourse Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-02-21 Ayman Khafaga
This paper attempts to explore the extent to which imperatives, linguistically manifested in direct commands, attention-getters, and let-constructions, function as persuasion strategies in one of the speeches of President El-Sisi of Egypt. The main objective of this paper is to test the hypothesis that imperatives, irrespective of their type, do not necessarily require a verbal or physical response
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Possessive pronouns in Russian-German language contact: variation or change? Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-01-16 Tatiana Perevozchikova
The article addresses the question of what happens to internal linguistic variability in a language contact situation by looking at how first-generation Russian immigrants in Germany use two variants of possessive pronouns (reflexive and non-reflexive) for referencing the subject. To what extent does the frequency of the variants, as well as linguistic constraints on their use, remain the same as in
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Primate origins of discourse-managing gestures: the case of hand fling Linguistics Vanguard (IF 0.896) Pub Date : 2023-01-02 Pritty Patel-Grosz, Matthew Henderson, Patrick Georg Grosz, Kirsty Graham, Catherine Hobaiter
The last decades have seen major advances in the study of gestures both in humans and non-human primates. In this paper, we seriously examine the idea that there may be gestural form types that are shared across great ape species, including humans, which may underlie gestural universals, both in form and meaning. We focus on one case study, the hand fling gesture common to chimpanzees and humans, and