The influence of linguistic and social attitudes on grammaticality judgments of singular ‘they’
Publication date: March 2020Source: Language Sciences, Volume 78Author(s): Evan D. BradleyAbstractThe lack of consensus on a true gender-neutral singular personal pronoun for the third person in standard English has led to many continuing attempts to reform the language to be more gender-neutral and to accurately refer to nonbinary persons. Singular they has a long history of use, but continues to draw criticism from prescriptivist commentators. Recent research has found that those who endorse more binary gender ideology tend to reject singular they more often than those who hold more egalitarian gender views. The present ...
Source: Language Sciences - February 2, 2020 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Changes in the modal domain in different varieties of English as potential effects of democratization
Publication date: Available online 29 January 2020Source: Language SciencesAuthor(s): Svenja Kranich, Elisabeth Hampel, Hanna BrunsAbstractOne well-investigated recent change in English that has been linked to democratization is the ongoing change in the modal domain, which is characterized by a decline of some of the core modals (such as may, might, must) and a rise of the so-called semi-modals (such as be able to, have to, have got to) (cf. Leech, 2003; Mair and Leech, 2006; Leech, 2013). This process is advanced to different degrees in different varieties of English (cf. Collins, 2009a/b). Although a correlation between...
Source: Language Sciences - January 30, 2020 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Conversationalization and democratization in a radio chat show: a grammar-led investigation
Publication date: Available online 25 January 2020Source: Language SciencesAuthor(s): Nicholas SmithAbstractThis paper investigates the closely-related concepts of conversationalization and democratization in a specialized register, the biographical radio chat show, represented by BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs (DID). To explore these concepts in the show we first undertake a data-driven stylistic analysis of ‘key’ parts-of-speech (POS) tags, i.e. statistically significant grammatical categories that distinguish a corpus of DID talk from a corpus of conversation. We then track these grammatical features over four sa...
Source: Language Sciences - January 26, 2020 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Democratisation in the South African parliamentary Hansard? A study of change in modal auxiliaries
Publication date: Available online 22 January 2020Source: Language SciencesAuthor(s): Haidee Kotze, Bertus Van RooyAbstractParliaments are a primary site where political and social democratisation can be seen in action, making parliamentary discourse, as represented in the Hansard of Commonwealth countries, a particularly relevant source of linguistic evidence for the effects of democratisation on language change. South Africa offers an exemplary case of social change which may influence language use. This paper first outlines the historical trajectory of democratisation in the South African parliament. It subsequently set...
Source: Language Sciences - January 24, 2020 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Person reference and democratization in British English
This article explores the interrelatedness of societal changes and changes in language practices. By using a combination of corpus linguistic and socio-pragmatic methods, we track diachronic changes in word patterns and interpret findings in the framework of democratization. The data comes from a small and representative corpus of British English (ARCHER-3.1) and from three “big data” sets (Google Books, British Library Newspapers and The Economist). We suggest that data triangulation, including sociohistorical contextualization, allows us to conclude that especially from the mid-nineteenth century onwards words signal...
Source: Language Sciences - January 24, 2020 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Bottom-up probabilistic information in visual word recognition: interactions with phonological and morphological functions
This study investigates the role of probabilistic phonotactics in the processing of consonant clusters (as opposed to consonant-vowel sequences) and of complex words (as opposed to monomorphemic words) in two experiments of visual word recognition with masked fragment priming. Target words are more efficiently recognized when the transition probabilities between an initial fragment and the following segment in the target are high, but this effect is not equally distributed across all areas of the phonology. It was found that speakers rely more heavily on transition probabilities between segments of a consonant cluster than...
Source: Language Sciences - January 14, 2020 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Twitter trolls: a linguistic profile of anti-democratic discourse
This article focuses on anti-democratic discourse and investigates the linguistic profile of Twitter trolls. The troll data consist of some 3.5 million messages in English obtained through Twitter in late 2018. These data originate from potentially state-backed information operations aimed at sowing discord in Western societies. The baseline data, against which the troll data are compared, contain circa 4.4 million messages in English drawn from the Nordic Tweet Stream corpus. A machine learning application that enables us to select genuine personal messages in this corpus is used to prune the data. The empirical part inve...
Source: Language Sciences - January 14, 2020 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Methods of data collection in English empirical linguistics research: Results of a recent survey
Publication date: March 2020Source: Language Sciences, Volume 78Author(s): Ignacio M. Palacios MartínezAbstractMost handbooks on research in English Linguistics state that in conducting any kind of research-based study, the method of data collection should be in agreement with the purpose of the research itself. However, the reality is that many studies into language pay very little attention to this central element of research. In this paper, which can be regarded as a partial replication of Krug and Schlüter (2013) study, I will reflect on this issue, basing my observations primarily on a survey carried out to identify...
Source: Language Sciences - December 28, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Associative plural as indexical category
Publication date: Available online 18 December 2019Source: Language SciencesAuthor(s): Michael DanielAbstractThe Animacy Hierarchy was introduced as a cross-grammatical factor which governs, in different languages, widespread splits of nominal categories, including case or number marking. Among othser phenomena, the Animacy Hierarchy has been invoked to describe the lexical distribution of associative plurals. In this paper I argue that associative plurals as an interpretation of nominal plurality is not licensed by the high position the respective noun holds on the Animacy Hierarchy but is a combined effect of coercion by...
Source: Language Sciences - December 18, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
A micro-typological perspective on resultative secondary predicates: the case of nomination verb constructions
Publication date: March 2020Source: Language Sciences, Volume 78Author(s): Justine Métairy, Peter Lauwers, Renata Enghels, Miriam Taverniers, Marleen Van PeteghemAbstractThe present paper investigates a subtype of (analytical) resultative constructions1, viz. Nomination Verb Constructions (e.g. Henry was proclaimed King of England), within a comparative Germanic – Romance perspective. Resultative constructions are a priori atypical of Romance languages, which belong to the so-called class of ‘verb-framing’ languages (cf. Talmy 1985, 1991) and hence are not expected to encode the result of an event outside the matrix...
Source: Language Sciences - December 7, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Editorial Board
Publication date: January 2020Source: Language Sciences, Volume 77Author(s): (Source: Language Sciences)
Source: Language Sciences - December 6, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
More lexically-specific knowledge and individual differences in adult native speakers' processing of the English passive
This study complements these corpus-based studies by providing evidence from an on-line processing task that tests whether native speakers are sensitive to the observed distributions. The results support a usage-based functional account of processing and interpreting English be and get passive constructions. Participants' performance was influenced by frequency and lexical specificity. The study also provides evidence of education-related differences in language attainment – the higher educated participants were significantly better at interpreting be and get full passive constructions than the lower educated participan...
Source: Language Sciences - December 6, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Do Speaker's emotions influence their language production? Studying the influence of disgust and amusement on alignment in interactive reference
Publication date: March 2020Source: Language Sciences, Volume 78Author(s): Charlotte Out, Martijn Goudbeek, Emiel KrahmerAbstractThe influence of emotion on the early stages of spoken language production such as content selection has received little scholarly attention. During content selection in dialogue, speakers often take the utterances of their dialogue partners into account. For example, while speakers generally prefer to use color in their descriptions, they start to use dispreferred attributes such as orientation and size more when they are primed by a prerecorded partner using these dispreferred attributes (Goudb...
Source: Language Sciences - December 4, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Are ableist insults secretly slurs?
Publication date: January 2020Source: Language Sciences, Volume 77Author(s): Chris CousensAbstractPhilosophers often treat racist and sexist slurs as a special sort of puzzle. What is the difference between a slur and its correlates? In attempting to answer this question, a second distinction has been overlooked: that between slurs and insults. What makes a term count as a slur? This is not an unnecessary taxonomical question as long as ableist terms such as ‘moron’ are dismissed as mere insults. Attempts to resolve the insult/slur distinction by considering the communicative content of slurs are not promising. A bette...
Source: Language Sciences - November 7, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Issues with molecules in Natural Semantic Metalanguage
Publication date: Available online 11 October 2019Source: Language SciencesAuthor(s): Kamil LemanekAbstractThe paper examines the theoretical merit of “semantic molecules” in Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). Although semantic molecules are said to trace semantic dependence and necessity, compress complexity, and to account for what I call its productivity, that doesn't appear to be the case. This can be illustrated on the basis of a comparison of two explications for the same complex meaning—one containing a molecule and the other its decomposed elements. Counterfactual considerations suggest that the latter is n...
Source: Language Sciences - October 12, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
