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Merchant (2001:120–127) presents 10 arguments against an analysis of sluicing that posits an elided cleft in the ellipsis site. This seems at odds with the growing body of literature that argues sluicing can resort to underlying clefts in order to circumvent otherwise illicit instances of preposition stranding. In this short paper I reexamine Merchant's arguments and show (a) that some of them are orthogonal to the issue at hand, and (b) that the remaining ones are compatible with the Last Resort scenario adopted by the sluicing-as-cleft literature. As such, the discussion sheds new light on the precise form of the unpronounced syntactic structure found in sluicing.

Pakistan is home to diverse multilingual practices. However, these practices have not been extensively explored. This paper unpacks the interactive practices of a group of students in a university in Pakistan from the perspective of translanguaging. In particular, the paper examines the languages students use in informal class discussions in a university setting and explores their motivations for using different languages within this setting. Data collected through observations, video-recording and semi-structured interviews were ethnographically analysed. The findings indicate that although the Medium of Instruction at the university is English, the students displayed unconscious use of translanguaging in their discussions of mainly English and Pashto (their native language), and some Urdu (the national language).

Based on qualitative analysis of signed data generated in the context of ten focus groups conducted with 31 deaf signers throughout Germany, the paper explores how deaf users of German Sign Language (Deutsche Gebardensprache, DGS) position themselves in conversational settings. It will be shown that creatively manipulating the visual-spatial articulatory resources of DGS, the protagonists subtly but clearly delineate themselves from others, socially positioning themselves not only as rather skillful, but even more crucially, as authentic signers. Examining the enregisterment of creative language use (CLU) as indexical of authentic signing within the DGS community, the paper paves new ground by proposing that Agha's framework of enregisterment can be meaningfully applied not only to signed languages, but also to much wider, ‘softer’ conceptual categories as well.

This paper experiments with frequency-based corpus similarity measures across 39 languages using a register prediction task. The goal is to quantify (i) the distance between different corpora from the same language and (ii) the homogeneity of individual corpora. Both of these goals are essential for measuring how well corpus-based linguistic analysis generalizes from one dataset to another. The problem is that previous work has focused on Indo-European languages, raising the question of whether these measures are able to provide robust generalizations across diverse languages. This paper uses a register prediction task to evaluate competing measures across 39 languages: how well are they able to distinguish between corpora representing different contexts of production? Each experiment compares three corpora from a single language, with the same three digital registers shared across all languages: social media, web pages, and Wikipedia. Results show that measures of corpus similarity retain their validity across different language families, writing systems, and types of morphology. Further, the measures remain robust when evaluated on out-of-domain corpora, when applied to low-resource languages, and when applied to different sets of registers. These findings are significant given our need to make generalizations across the rapidly increasing number of corpora available for analysis.

This study investigates Italian blending from a synchronic perspective, based on data extracted from a dictionary of neologisms attested over the past two decades. The first part of the paper addresses the boundaries between blends and other morphological units. Neologisms in which at least one of the two constituents has undergone a shortening have been classified into three categories (i.e., compounds with combining forms, secreted affixation, and blends), and described according to a set of semantic and formal parameters. The second part of the paper provides an updated description of Italian blending by analyzing a sample of 200 blends. The analysis reveals that Italian blends exhibit a wide variety of structures, according to the parameters of linearization, shortening, and overlap. Overlap, along with the phonological resemblance, proved to be a factor that favors blend formation. Moreover, it is shown that although blending in Italian is an irregular mechanism overall, in rare cases (such as that of -iota from idiota ‘idiot’), a blend's part may acquire regularity and affix-like properties.

Languages differ along multiple dimensions (lexis, phonology, morphology, syntax). Related languages descend from a common ancestor language but have diverged over time. This paper asks whether languages diverge equally along all dimensions, and, to the extent that they do not, which dimension reflects the traditional language family tree best. We computed measures of (i) lexical distance (ii) phonetic distance, and (iii) syntactic distance. The measures were computed on all words and sentences extracted from a corpus of translations of four relatively short English texts into another four Germanic languages (Danish, Dutch, German, Swedish), five Romance languages (French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish) and six Slavic languages (Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Polish, Slovakian, Slovenian). We examined the correlation structure of the distances for all pairs of Germanic (10), Romance (10) and Slavic (15) languages (i.e., within-family comparisons only). The results indicate that the linguistic dimensions are generally correlated (weakly but significantly), and that the correlations are stronger for pairs within families than when all 35 pairs are examined together. Cladistic family trees correlate best with the lexical distance (.851 < r < .887). This confirms that the genealogical language trees are predominantly based on lexical rather than phonetic or syntactic considerations.

This paper builds on the previous studies of emotion in relation to face which suggest that emotion/emotional reactions are fundamental component of relational work (Culpeper, 2011; Langlotz and Locher, 2013; Spencer-Oatey, 2007; Terkourafi, 2007), and thus they might be constitutive of facework. Based on a detailed discussion of natural language data, it is argued that Chinese participants in a mediation session display their emotional concerns as part of their topical requests in order to solicit emotivity from the other party. A proposal is thus put forward to move beyond the current focus on lexemes in studies of face in Chinese, and to provide empirical evidence regarding emotivity invoked as a discursive resource in the interactional accomplishment of face. It is hoped that this paper can stimulate more research not only on face in Chinese in relation to emotivity, but also on other contexts in different languages and cultures where emic concepts of emotivity are strategically invoked in relational work.

The widespread use of English in academia has been reported to have detrimental effects on other academic languages and to pose considerable language problems to those scholars that use English as an Additional Language. This paper, however, seeks to bring into focus the functionality of English along with that of other academic languages for campus-wide internationalization. Using data from semi-structured interviews with university faculty, the paper examines the plurilingual practices of a localized disciplinary community in a non-Anglophone academic setting. The data show that while several causal and intervening conditions promote English in the domain of research communication, context-specific factors support the use of Spanish in the domain of education. Regarding the spoken mode, faculty accounts of language-related phenomena (language mixing, translanguaging and parallel language use) reveal complex multilingual interactions. Furthermore, their accounts of informal academic interactions and of features of English as a Lingua Franca confirm that they communicate effectively in English with other academics even if their English does not fully conform to the English Native Language norms. Given that macro-level (institutional) language policies have a dramatic impact on language practices, we advocate effective language planning and management to preserve and enhance plurilingualism on campus.

The present paper reports the results of two corpus studies of multi-word verbs in the context of Cognitive Construction Grammar. The main claim of the constructionist approach adopted in this paper is that the meaning of specific multi-word verbs (MWVs), that is, combinations of a verb proper and a particle (spatial adverb, preposition, or both), overlaps the meaning of the argument structure construction in which it appears, thereby facilitating the positing of motivated categories. This theoretical claim is supported by the results of a two-staged corpus study. The first part of the study uses the affordances of the online interface of the 520-million-word Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The results show that the identified MWVs in the corpus are skewed toward motional usages in spoken registers. The list of frequent MWVs provides the data for the second study. In this case, the results confirm the hypothesis that MWVs overlap specific argument structure constructions following distinct attachment patterns. This finding also suggests that argument structure constructions are high-order constructions that interface thought and language at a deep cognitive level.

A long-standing question in the syntax of null subject languages (NSLs) has been whether preverbal DP is a ‘real’ subject or a (clitic) left-dislocated element. Formally, is Spec,TP an A-position or an A-bar position? The problem arises because preverbal DP in these languages displays A- as well as A-bar properties. This paper proposes that Chomsky's recent framework of feature inheritance can have a straightforward answer. Specifically, the paper argues that Spec,TP is generally an A-position, which becomes an A-bar position if T inherits the feature EF from C. EF is looked at here as a formal ‘criterial’ feature that can enter into a valuation relation. The paper extends the analysis to certain subject-related phenomena in Arabic (presumably borne out in other NSLs). It also considers certain facts from Arabic that seem to threaten the analysis, but ultimately smoothly fall out.

This paper presents an underspecification account of type mismatch in English and Mandarin Chinese ‘BEFORE/AFTER’+non-event-complement (NEC) constructions, with a view to uncovering the mechanisms underlying the semantic well-formedness of type mismatch in surface structure. As this construction is used to locate an event on the time axis, it requires a point of time complement. The study finds that when the complement slot, which is typically filled by a telic event or a time phrase, is filled by NECs (artifact nouns, proper nouns, kin terms, pronominals or number-classifiers), the construction will coerce the NECs into telic events from which a point in time could be derived; and in that meaning enrichment process, the NECs are semantically underspecified. The research suggests that type coercion does not solely operate at the level of lexical semantics in that many cases of type coercion are more conventionalized and more contextualized than lexical. Therefore, other factors such as world knowledge, linguistic context and conventionality have to be taken into consideration in order to get an adequate account of the phenomenon. Based on the mechanisms uncovered, the paper makes a formal description of the syntactic process in which type coercion works, and builds a usage-based hierarchy of proneness to type coercion for English and Mandarin NECs.

This article intends to conduct a corpus-based study on the correlation between technicality and two typical ideational metaphors in English texts, i.e., nominalization which is typical experiential metaphor and verbalization which is typical logical metaphor. A general distribution pattern of the typical ideational metaphors within the contexts of genre and discipline was investigated in the BNC. Based on this general pattern, the use of typical ideational metaphors was investigated, both in the academic papers of natural sciences and social sciences written by Chinese users of English as a foreign language (EFL) and those by native English users. The first investigation based on the BNC shows that typical ideational metaphors are not only genre sensitive but also discipline sensitive, and the technicality of text is determined by the use of verbalizations rather than by that of nominalizations. The second investigation based on the research papers shows that native English users write more technical English than EFL Chinese users, and among the four groups of research papers, the EFL Chinese science papers are farther from the native English science papers than the EFL Chinese linguistic papers from the native English linguistic papers in technicality. This research is of implication to the discipline-based English training of the non-native English learners.

This paper investigates whether V + V combinations in Jordanian Arabic (JA) and English could be classified as either serial verb constructions (SVCs) or V + V compounds. Through applying the cross-linguistic criteria of SVC, which have been established in the relevant literature, it seems that V + V combinations in JA and what have been considered as V + V compounds in English satisfy all the criteria of SVC. The analysis shows that the criteria found in the literature to identify compounds and SVCs show a great deal of overlap, especially with regard to the fact that both types of construction are inseparable. We argue that the criteria discussed in this paper and in much of the literature to identify SVCs are necessary, but insufficient, conditions for SVC-hood. Alternatively, we propose that as far as JA and English are concerned, SVC and V + V compounds may exist on a continuum.

This paper deals with the discursive constructions of transformative, agentive and creative ethnolinguistic self-conceptualizations and positionings of some select members of the approximately 3000-member Greek diasporic community in the State of Qatar. It is a digital and linguistic ethnographic study focusing on the linguistic and semiotic ways whereby Greeks in Qatar negotiate, challenge, process and ultimately respond to the sociopolitical and cultural narratives that constitute "nostalgia," namely remembrance and homesickness for Greece. The main argument put forward is that multimodal and translanguaging group styling is employed for the construction of diasporic nostalgia discourse, and the assertion of nostalgic diasporic identities, which in unison construct community membership anew all the time. Nostalgia, as a constructed discourse with (in)authenticity-related spatiotemporal dimensions, and diaspora, as a web of creatively styled sociolinguistic and semiotic identities, are two concepts found in tension primarily due to the contextual precarity Greeks in Qatar live in. The paper contributes empirical and methodological knowledge to the field of language and identity in diaspora by focusing on an under-researched diasporic group, and by employing an emic ethnographic perspective in its discursive and sociolinguistic practices. A first draft of this paper was presented at the Liberal Arts International Conference 2019 at Texas A&M University of Qatar. I would like to thank the audience for their useful feedback. Also, thanks are due to Harris Kalogiannis and Caterina Vasilaki Vrettou for their help in the data collection process as well as to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this work. This study was funded by Qatar National Research Fund with a Junior Scientists Research Experience Program Grant (JSREP 4-009-6-003 ). Any ideas expressed here and any potential inaccuracies are my own. Scopus

Set within the greater metropolitan area of Newark, New Jersey, U.S.A., this paper outlines a novel example of language and diasporic belonging by focusing on Ecuadorian and Honduran migrants who orient to the local Portuguese-centric diaspora, a group that reflects neither their ethnolinguistic heritage nor the regionally dominant culture. Communication Accommodation Theory ( Giles, 1973 , Giles, 2016 ), together with its power implications ( Stell and Dragojevic, 2017 ), grounds this paper's investigation into the sociolinguistic characteristics of this orientation; the three primary components of investment – ideology, identity, and capital ( Darvin and Norton, 2015 , Norton, 2000 ) – serve as the lenses through which to account for this positionality. Analysis of interviews and observations through these theoretical frames provides evidence of horizontal assimilation ( Prashad, 2001 ), the act of strongly affiliating with the culture of a non-dominant group that is different from one's own. These findings stretch the definition of diaspora beyond the dichotomies that have traditionally limited members’ attachment to either the homeland or the receiving state ( Grossman, 2019 ). By pointing to this space for Hispanophone Latinas within this Portuguese-centric diaspora community, these results illustrate the heterogeneity and agency that increasingly characterize diaspora groups ( Deumert and Mabandla, 2013 , Li Wei, 2018 , Li Wei and Zhu, 2013 ) albeit in a new way.

This paper considers the modelling of aspects of context of situation and aspects of discourse in such a way as to bring out inequalities in status between speakers and the effects of these on the exchanges of which the discourse is composed. The paper is also concerned with ways of playing down/reinforcing such inequalities. First a partial model of context of situation will be introduced designed to distinguish different types of inequality in status, and then a model of exchange structure designed to bring out differences in discourse. It will be shown that these existing models, when applied to naturally occurring discourse, can already to some extent reveal differences of the types under consideration. However the paper will then move on to discuss how the models might be developed further. The work of other researchers who have used the models will be reviewed, notably that of Martin et al. (2009), Zappavigna and Martin (2018), Rose (2014), Muntigl, 2004, Muntigl, 2009, O’Donnell, 1990, O’Donnell, 1999. What problems have these researchers encountered, what revisions have they proposed? After discussion of particular problems and possible revisions, the paper will move to more general discussion of what is meant by dynamism in modelling.

This paper traces the development of speech reporting styles across historical varieties of Arabic and seeks to explain aspects of such development. To this end, the study examines and compares speech reporting patterns in corpora representing Modern Standard Arabic and different stages of Pre-modern Arabic. The comparison reveals that Modern Standard Arabic uses speech reporting methods that were extremely rare or totally lacking in the Pre-modern varieties, such as indirect speech, mixed reporting, and quotation fronting. The paper argues that such changes are attributable to language-external rather than language-internal factors, namely, the impact exerted on Arabic by modern European languages, especially English, which is the most learned and most translated foreign language in the Arab world. The study proposes that such changes have occurred through massive translation into Arabic from English and through bilingual writers who may use foreign patterns in their writing. This argument is further supported by the close structural similarity between the newly introduced styles and those established in English, the adoption of the Western punctuation system, and the high frequency of the new styles in genres that were themselves borrowed from the West, which suggests that there is a reciprocal relationship between borrowing a given genre and borrowing the linguistic patterns associated with it. The study also shows that the new reporting styles serve pragmatic purposes that cannot be achieved by employing the conventional speech reporting methods alone.

The aims of this paper are twofold. The first objective is to check whether Polish anticausatives are causative in their lexical semantic or syntactic representation. Four diagnostics supporting the presence of a cause in anticausatives are examined against the Polish data, including cause PPs, modification by by itself, the interpretation of negation, and the occurrence of dative causes. Evidence is provided that none of these diagnostics proves the presence of a cause in syntax or semantics of Polish anticausatives. The causative meaning of anticausatives comes from the complex event structure built in the syntax, but interpreted as causative at the syntax-semantics interface. The paper also aims to offer a syntactic analysis of Polish anticausatives in the Minimalist Program of Chomsky (2000, et seq.). The validity of three approaches to the structure of anticausatives is tested against the Polish data, including the unaccusative analysis of Schafer (2008), the reflexive account of Koontz-Garboden (2009) and Cuervo, 2014, Cuervo, 2015, and the predication-based approach of Den Dikken and Dekany (2019). Schafer's (2008) analysis seems to best fit the Polish data, since Polish anticausatives are unaccusative and contain a reflexive marker, equipped with φ-features, but lacking a theta role, hence functioning as an A-expletive.

The paper argues that cognitive mechanisms responsible for implicatures are the same no matter what language someone uses. However, linguistic knowledge, conceptual knowledge, encyclopedic knowledge and contextual effect that are all needed for producing and comprehending implicatures vary significantly in ELF users. They cannot be expected to act in accordance with the conventions and norms of the societal culture of native English-speaking communities. It is claimed that in ELF discourse participants must create their own temporary norms and conventions with implicatures among them. Consequently, it seems mistaken to test L2 users or ELF speakers on the use of L1-based conversational and/or frozen implicatures (functioning as idioms) as many studies have done. The paper offers a modified understanding of implicatures with the notion of “simplicature”, and a model to explain the relationship and interplay between factors that affect implicature processing: linguistic knowledge, conceptual knowledge, encyclopedic knowledge and contextual effect.

Even when both use and cognition are incorporated in its theorizing about grammatical change, research in diachronic construction grammar which explicitly subscribes to a “usage-based” approach does not always distinguish between abstraction from the observed usage of a linguistic community and individual linguistic knowledge. Given that language change starts with innovations by individuals, such a distinction crucially needs to be made to arrive at a realistic usage-based account of grammatical change. This paper first assesses the extent to which the conflicting models of Elizabeth Traugott and Olga Fischer succeed in teasing apart internal and external systems, concluding that while the former's reanalysis model results from an external semasiological perspective, the latter's analogy model is more radically usage-based in that it does not inherently entangle intra- and extra-individual knowledge. By way of illustration of a fundamentally analogy-based approach, the main part of the paper proposes an onomasiological account of how the pattern be bound to came to be used as a non-deontic/epistemic necessity marker, offering an alternative to viewing it as a development from the historically prior deontic be bound to construction. The data are mainly drawn from the Oxford English Dictionary and the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts.

This paper argues that folk linguistic research methods have much to offer critical sociolinguists concerned with linguistic inequalities and power structures. In as much as critical theory considers knowledge as inherently woven into power relations, the folk linguistics research tradition shows that knowledge about language and the sociolinguistic world is not only the domain of academics but also resides, and is actioned, in the community. This paper specifically explores the contribution folk linguistic research methods can make to critical sociolinguistics. The paper argues that folk linguistic methods are not only well-placed to identify and trace community-based claims of knowledge that create and sustain inequalities between languages and speakers, but also allow us to localise sociolinguistic knowledge by understanding local phenomena through local world-views. Ultimately, this helps to decolonise sociolinguistics by voicing, legitimising and indeed applying more ontologies and epistemologies of language than those from the West that generally still dominate sociolinguistic scholarship.

This paper discusses the derivation of fake nominal quantifiers in Chinese, including both duration phrases and frequency phrases found in attributive positions. The paper argues that the appearance of fake nominal quantifiers is due to the demand for Case. Fake nominal quantifiers, semantically, are verbal quantifiers, which are to be assigned (oblique) θ-roles, but they first should be assigned Cases so as to be visible. In order to satisfy that, they either enter positions governed by verbs to grab the Cases that are assigned by the verbs to their objects (thus forcing the verbs’ objects to retreat or enter verb-copying constructions), or appear in the attributives of NPs, where they may get Cases, if necessary, through agreement. If the latter is chosen, fake nominal quantifiers are obtained. Therefore, fake nominal quantifiers involving duration phrases and frequency phrases are mainly the results of syntactic operations

This paper deals with the genealogical structure of the Tsezic language group with a special focus on the position of the Hinukh language within the group, which has remained controversial in previous research. Most specialists have treated Hinukh as the closest relative of the Tsez (Dido) language, and some previously proposed formal classifications based on lexical data appear to confirm this. However, the new and advanced lexicostatistical classification used in this paper suggests that Hinukh and Tsez do not in fact form a distinct clade. We examine Hinukh and Tsez historical phonology as well as morphological and syntactic features, upon which the traditional expert classifications have rested, and find that all exclusive traits seemingly shared by Hinukh and Tsez are either illusory or due to contact-driven parallel development or may simply represent Proto-Tsezic retentions. In other words, there is no phonological and grammatical evidence for a hypothetical Tsez-Hinukh protolanguage. On the contrary, there are some exclusive grammatical features of the Tsez and Khwarshi languages that may be regarded as innovations of a Tsez-Khwarshi protolanguage, conforming with a distinct Tsez-Khwarshi node in the new lexicostatistical classification of Tsezic. Therefore the traditional criterion of shared innovations supports the validity of the modern version of the lexicostatistical method employed in this paper.

The paper provides a detailed description of the relationship between linguistic diversity and biological diversity (biodiversity henceforth). For the sake of ease of the presentation the paper has been organized into sections. Each section begins with a question. In Section 2 that follows the Introduction, diversity and its various types have been described. The third section deals with attitude, in general, toward diversity. Section 4 compares linguistic diversity with biodiversity, while Section 5 compares the pace of extinction between language and living organism. Sections 6 and 7 discuss linguistic diversity across the world and in India, respectively. Linguistic landscape in India has been discussed with reference to diversity in language and script and features of Indian multilingualism. The next three Sections 8–10 attempt to answer the questions, such as – why linguistic diversity occurs, how is it assessed and how languages are lost? Consequences of language loss and concern for language revitalization have been discussed in the last two Sections 11 and 12 of the paper.

This work introduces a subset of informational features (termed core intentional features ), different from standard pragmatic features such as topic and focus. Adopting the basic tenets of the Minimalist program, core intentional features are defined as edge features which sit in the relevant phases and are subject to parametric variation. They are assumed to drive the derivation of the sentence so that it constitutes an intentionally-adequate object (i.e. a categorical or a thetic statement) even in the absence of a particular communicative situation. The paper specifically focuses on one of these features, [DI] ( discourse intention ), and on how it determines the eventual position of the subject in a discourse-prominent language such as Spanish. A preliminary distinction is made between sentences that inaugurate the discourse (d-sentences) and sentences which are integrated in a particular context (context-dependent sentences). It is argued that the SV/VS order in Spanish follows from the conditions of valuation of [DI] in each case; in particular, valuation of [DI] in d-sentences will be a matter of structural and semantic prominence whereas in context-dependent sentences it will depend on pragmatic conditions. The paper also addresses a number of significant contrasts in the much-debated issue of the placement of the subject in Spanish, which receive a principled explanation under the theory of core intentional features proposed here.

The aim of this paper is to shed new light on the various discourse uses of view-point adverbs in - wise and to provide an account within the Functional Discourse Grammar model. Semantically, adverbs in - wise are generally regarded as identifying a relevant point of reference in respect of which the clause derives its truth value, that is, the scope of view-point adverbs is not the phrase but the whole clause. However, a closer look at their use in larger stretches of discourse and in conversational contexts reveals several functions other than restricting the scope of the proposition. The main concern of this paper will be to disentangle the semantics and discourse functions of this type of adverbs and to propose how they can be accounted for using the FDG architecture.

Although a great deal has been written about citation in expert research writing, and about novice students’ acquisition of citation skills for the purposes of argumentation, little is known about the typical uses of citation in undergraduate student coursework, in different disciplines, and at different levels of study. This paper describes how typical citations patterns can be retrieved from undergraduate assignments in the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus, and examines the linguistic features of these patterns with reference to the types of sources cited and the different functions of citation. It reveals a wide variety of patterns and purposes, well beyond those described in student writing guides. Students’ use of citation was found to increase as they progressed through the years of undergraduate study, although citation was not an essential feature of every type of writing assignment, and was performed in different ways according to discipline. The search queries presented in the paper can be used by researchers, students, and writing tutors as a basis for further investigation into citation practices. The findings also have implications for teaching, and the training of EAP practitioners.

This paper focuses on -er synthetic compounds with a deverbal second constituent having a Latinate origin, such as office manager or service-provider. In particular, in the paper we elaborate synchronic, diachronic, and distributional differences between Latinate and non-Latinate synthetic compounds in order to (1) expand the role of Latinate word formation in English and (2) propose a new subtype of borrowed (or contact) morphology, i.e., a post-loan word formation pattern as an internal English development after one of its loaned elements. In this subtype of contact-induced morphology, native English synthetic compounds constitute the model for Latinate formations, which occurred much later and integrated Latinate bases into the English pattern. Hence, we claim that Latinate synthetic compounds are neither borrowed nor extracted from borrowed material, but produce a word formation pattern which has been newly developed within English, by analogy with already existing non-Latinate models, but without developing semantic subfamilies, in contrast to non-Latinate synthetic compounds. From a theoretical viewpoint, we demonstrate that Latinate synthetic compound families primarily encourage a compositional analysis, unlike non-Latinate families, which suggest either compounding or derivation, or the complementarity (superposition) of both.

In this paper, I present a new account of word stress in Hindi. I begin with the attempt to show that the apparently different patterns of Hindi stress described in the literature are in fact bound by one core pattern. The core pattern crucially involves an interdependence between rhythm and quantity in the placement of stress within a window of three syllables from the right. The Hindi data pose the following challenge to metrical stress theory and OT: ternary feet arise not from Extrametricality or Nonfinality but from a weight and rhythm-based foot structure in which both the factors are integrated. The new analysis presented in this paper meets the challenge in terms of the constraints Window ( Kager, 2012 ), PERFECTGRID and PG – FORWARDPULL. The latter constraints are proposed following the insights in Prince (1983) and Hayes (1995) .

The paper explores a phenomenon that has yet to be considered by proponents of the Distributed Language Perspective, namely concept-infused perceptual activity. This kind of comportment need not entail utterance activity (or other kinds of expressions for that matter) nor the co-presence of an interlocutor. Drawing on insights mainly from Wittgenstein and Heidegger, I introduce the neologism of ‘conceptual attaching’ as a non-representationalist notion for coming to terms with acts of perception where concepts play a part. Further, I show how such behavior comprises a cornerstone in human practice-based behavior and, in so doing, shed light on a basic phenomenon that not only enables subjects to engage concept-infused activity but also to partake in language games. The paper explores a phenomenon that has yet to be considered by proponents of the Distributed Language Perspective, namely concept-infused perceptual activity. This kind of comportment need not entail utterance activity (or other kinds of expressions for that matter) nor the co-presence of an interlocutor. Drawing on insights mainly from Wittgenstein and Heidegger, I introduce the neologism of ‘conceptual attaching’ as a non-representationalist notion for coming to terms with acts of perception where concepts play a part. Further, I show how such behavior comprises a cornerstone in human practice-based behavior and, in so doing, shed light on a basic phenomenon that not only enables subjects to engage concept-infused activity but also to partake in language games.

Particle stacking, a phenomenon that sees more than one sentence-final particle used to mark an utterance, occurs in various languages, including Singlish, also commonly known as Colloquial Singapore English (CSE) or Singapore Colloquial English (SCE). In this paper, we provide novel empirical data on particle stacking in Singlish using the National Speech Corpus (NSC). A frequency analysis of particle stacks containing the Singlish particles hor, lah and meh in the NSC shows that most of the particle stacks are declarative-interrogative pairs where the first particle is used in assertions while the second particle has a backchannelling function, which is consistent with particles stacks observed in other languages. We also identify two particle stacks in Singlish – lah dey and lah sia – where the second particle does not overtly solicit the addressee's response. We propose that dey and sia, together with the backchannelling particles, form a larger class of addressee-oriented particles based on their shared function of targeting the addressee's attention. Ministry of Education (MOE) This research is supported by the Ministry of Education, Singapore, under its Academic Research Fund Tier 2 (MOE2019-T2-1-084).

From a cross-linguistic perspective, Citko and Gracanin-Yuksek (2013) argue that three approaches should be available for the coordinated wh -question (CWH): the mono-clausal approach, the bulk sharing approach, and the non-bulk sharing approach. This paper aims to reveal the nature of the CWH in Japanese, which has not received much attention in the literature, and argues that none of those approaches capture properties of CWHs in Japanese. Alternatively, a backward ellipsis approach is investigated and it is shown that the backward ellipsis approach overcomes the problems which the other approaches face. One of the arguments for the backward ellipsis approach is crucially based on the generalization that case particles cannot be stranded via scrambling. This paper also suggests that this generalization is captured in terms of labeling, adopting Saito's (2014) proposal that the function of Case in Japanese is to make a phrase invisible for labeling.

This paper provides a syntactic analysis of the indefinite plural determiner dei in Italian, also called ‘partitive article’, as in Ho visto dei ragazzi (I saw de.art boys). It argues that dei is neither parallel to the inflected preposition dei in: Ho visto alcuni dei ragazzi (I saw some of-the boys), nor to the quantifier alcuni in: Ho visto alcuni ragazzi (I saw some boys), contra previous literature. We support a simple DP-analysis which takes dei as the plural counterpart of the indefinite article un, and claim that dei-nominals do not have a QPstructure, as proposed for quantified nominals in Cardinaletti and Giusti, 1992 , Cardinaletti and Giusti, 2006 , Cardinaletti and Giusti, in press . We propose that de- is an uninflected determiner in SpecDP, which cooccurs with an overt morpheme (-i) in D, realizing Gender and Number. This accounts for the apparent morphological similarity of this concord morpheme with the definite article, without the need to attribute referential or kind-denoting interpretation to it. The paper also investigates differences and similarities between dei-nominals and bare plurals.

The semantic investigation of relative clauses with indefinite heads is comparatively scarce in the linguistic literature. This paper discusses the attachment of relative clauses to unspecific indefinites, focusing on appositive modification. We have arranged the paper in four sections: (i) we examine German and English relative clauses that appear in these surroundings, seizing Sells’ observation on the close connection between appositive relativization and the discourse phenomenon of quantificational subordination (Sells, 1985) and expanding this idea to modal subordination (Roberts, 1989); (ii) we discuss the consequences of such data on the classical dichotomy of appositive and restrictive relative clauses and update the common diagnostics used for the differentiation of the two types of relative clauses; (iii) we will provide new and controversial data in German that gives rise to a reading we classify as “hybrid”, since it satisfies diagnostics of both restrictive and appositive relative clauses; (iv) finally, we will complete the picture by the discussion of an additional type of generic appositives which also attaches to unspecific antecedents.

The primary purpose of the paper was to review several secondary sources in the field of Second Language Acquisition. Consequently, various literatures available from PubMed, Scopus, the Cochrane Library, the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), Google Scholar, reference lists, and ongoing studies were reviewed. The current research identified and analyzed psycholinguistic factors that impact second language acquisition by immigrants with special emphasis on psychological, linguistic, and social determinants. From the literature review that was conducted, it was established that several previous studies confirmed that age at migration has an inverse correlation with mastery of the second language. Also, it was found that immigrants from groups that are largely represented in the host country have a lower probability of achieving second language proficiency. Further, the linguistic distance between the native and the target language is associated with second language acquisition. Concerning social and psycholinguistic factors, a difference exists between genders in the achievement of good oral skills and family particularly matters in the assimilation into the new culture. Therefore, this review paper highlighted the need for support from the local communities, the government and the non-governmental organizations to help the immigrants effectively learn a second language.

This paper investigates the grammatical properties of wh-in situ constructions in Kavalan and Amis, two Austronesian languages in Taiwan. In Kavalan, wh-phrases cannot stay in situ in the absolutive subject position, except for mayni ‘which’. However, all Amis wh-phrases, regardless of their case marking or grammatical function, can stay in situ. The paper discusses the implications of the wh-in situ patterns in the two languages for two different analyses proposed to account for Austronesian wh-in situ constructions: the semantic/pragmatic approach and the formal-marking approach. The absolutive subject in Kavalan is assigned a definite interpretation and exhibits topic properties. A non-D-linked wh-phrase is inherently non-topical and thus cannot occupy the absolutive subject position. In contrast, the Amis absolutive subject is not always associated with a definite interpretation. A wh-phrase in Amis can thus stay in situ in the subject position without inducing any semantic incongruence. The formal-marking approach captures the empirical pattern of Amis wh-in situ but fails to explain the Kavalan pattern, whereas the semantic/pragmatic approach is both theoretically and typologically a more promising analysis of wh-in situ in Austronesian languages.

Persian is a language with several types of vowel harmony. This paper applies Optimality Theory (henceforth OT) to analyze this phonological process which includes various types of regressive and progressive vowel harmony in different words and expressions, as well as translaryngeal harmony and parasitism. It offers various examples whose trigger or target does not exist in the underlying representation and is therefore created in an intermediate representation. It discusses how backness harmony feeds height harmony in English loanwords. It also discusses blockers and exceptionality. The latter is analyzed using Pater's Lexically Specific Constraint Theory. It also addresses two cases of opacity in feeding and counterfeeding interactions. The main contribution of this paper is that it presents a set of empirical data on Persian vowel harmony and OT analyses which are of general theoretical interest.

In this paper we examine people's tendency to accept false universal statements such as all storks fly to Africa or all lions have manes as true even though they know such statements are false. Similar outcome studies have sparked two different explanations for this puzzle: the generic overgeneralization effect (Leslie et al., 2011) and the quantifier domain restriction (Lazaridou-Chatzigoga et al., 2019). Following the modified research design by Lazaridou-Chatzigoga et al. (2019), our study aimed to maximally restrict the reported tendency among native Polish speakers by making them adopt an analytical mode of thinking. Contrary to the view held by Lazaridou-Chatzigoga et al., we assumed that the type of context has an impact on the acceptance rates of false universal statements. By controlling three types of contexts: natural, kind-driven/gender-driven, and exception-driven, we showed that this tendency can be attenuated but not eliminated. The paper concludes with a discussion of the assumptions held by two groups of researchers and argues that the generic overgeneralization effect is the only coherent explanation developed so far

This paper examines the metaphorical conceptualisations relating to corruption in China English and explores the role of culture in shaping these conceptualisations, from the perspective of Cultural Linguistics. Following a corpus-assisted cultural and discursive approach to the data of China media English between 2013 and 2018, this study finds 15 instantiations of metaphorical conceptualisations, which are subsumed under three higher-level conceptual metaphors: CORRUPTION AS HARMS TO HUMAN LIFE, ANTI-CORRUPTION AS SECURING HUMAN SURVIVAL and THE RULING PARTY AS A BENEVOLENT AND EXEMPLARY PERSON ELIMINATING THESE HARMS. These metaphorical constructions appear to be closely associated with cultural schemas CORRUPTION IS DEVIATION FROM VIRTUE, VIRTUE IS THE ESSENCE OF HUMAN LIFE and RULERS SHALL BE VIRTUE EXEMPLARS AND EXERCISE BENEVOLENT GOVERNANCE, which derive from Confucian teachings and dominant ideologies of modern China. Several cultural image schemas are also encoded in this study's data and have provided context for the metaphorical conceptualisations of corruption. The above cultural constructs mark the uniqueness of China English in lexical, conceptual and cultural aspects. They also serve the ideological purpose of building a positive image for the ruling party. This paper calls for more awareness and exploration of the cultural conceptualisations present in China English.

This paper analyses the positioning of dialogically alternative voices in Khorchin Mongolian conversations, drawing on the engagement system developed within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The paper shows how the analyses of dialogic positioning resources in conversation need to take into account the spatial-temporal complementarity. Along the temporal dimension, utterances retrospectively engage with prior viewpoints or prospectively anticipate dialogic alternatives. Along the spatial dimension, utterances either contract or expand the dialogic space. It is observed that the resources are used strategically by the interlocutors to negotiate information and evaluations. The paper offers a model for exploring the linguistic resources for dialogic positioning in conversational interaction.

This paper compares the range of alternating constructions to convey the notion of uncontrolledness in narratives of accidental events told by native and non-native speakers of Spanish. The paper addresses the question of whether or not these speaker groups convey an accidental event differently. Using a meaning-focused production task, natural-like oral narratives of accidental events were elicited from a group of 45 English-speaking learners of Spanish at advanced instructional levels and 45 Colombian monolingual Spanish speakers. Constructions conveying uncontrolled events in finite clauses across the whole stories were contrasted. Special attention was paid to constructions with se conveying accidentality in which syntactic features such as agreement, word order, and null subjects were analyzed. The results of the study show that native Spanish speakers use significantly more constructions with se conveying accidentality than non-native speakers, especially in the story climax. A form-focused acceptability judgment task was carried out to address metalinguistic knowledge and compare its results with those from the production task, which arguably reflects a greater use of procedural-communicative knowledge. The paper gives evidence of a different performance of native and non-native speakers of Spanish in production and acceptability tasks.

This paper explores the theoretical and analytical advantages of conceptualizing hashtag activism as a collective pragmatic act. After analyzing a corpus of hashtag activism, the paper identifies two types of micro acts, constituting the pragmatic act of hashtagged political tweeting: communing affiliation round sociopolitical values, and legitimizing the sociopolitical claims associated with the hashtags. The communing act is performed by a hashtag associating attitudes with an idea representing the sociopolitical claim of the campaign. The content of the political tweet, on the other hand, provides an opportunity for the tweeters to legitimize their views and attitudes in relation to the topic of the hashtag via a deontic or epistemic legitimizing act. Tweeting under a hashtag carrying a sociopolitical claim allows meaning to be negotiated collaboratively by a group of politically active agents sharing common values. This turns any cluster of hashtagged political tweets into a macro collective act performed by a collectivity of actors. Such a conceptualization provides a collective perspective to Pragmatic Act Theory and explains how political engagement can be reinvigorated by the users’ sense of agency in networked spaces.

This paper contributes to the development of pragmatic research into norms by revisiting the concept of ‘norm’ beyond how it has been conventionally interpreted in the field, and by also proposing a metapragmatic approach which can be adopted to provide evidence of the operation of norm over and above what has previously been discussed. Regarding the first of these objectives, while pragmatics has studied descriptive norms in detail by focusing on what is usually done or avoided in a particular context, little attention has been paid to injunctive norms that embody what is approved/disapproved of in a particular situation. The current study fills this knowledge gap by examining the relationship between the valenced evaluations of perceived inappropriate behaviour and the injunctive norms behind these evaluations. As to its second – methodological – goal, this paper proposes an approach which explores critical incidents that are pragmatically ambiguous and non-routine, and in which descriptive norms are, consequently, much less important than their injunctive counterparts. The approach being proposed observes the ways in which an injunctive norm is ‘talked into being’ by a cluster of metapragmatic reflections. The examination of injunctive norms is not only relevant to pragmatics, but also to the recent body of research dedicated to morality in language use, because it reveals that even those contexts that are pragmatically ambiguous are governed by a moral order of things. It is also relevant to previous research on face and offence-taking because perceived inappropriateness in sensitive settings can trigger strong feelings. As a case study, the paper investigates a dataset of 120 critical incidents of workplace dismissal which was obtained from online sources.

This paper aims to provide a comprehensive description of the negation system of Tujia, an endangered Sino-Tibetan language spoken in south-central China. There are five negators, which display a mixed pre-head and post-head word order. Simple verb negation is usually post-head, but in existential constructions the negator precedes the verb, while in imperative constructions negation can either follow or precede the head. We argue that there is only one original negator, and the other forms result from the fusion of the negator with adjacent elements, such as the existential verb or aspect particles. Our analysis shows that, diachronically, the negator in Tujia has been realigned from pre-head to post-head. This paper contributes to the typology of negation in Tibeto-Burman languages, as well as the cross-linguistic development of negation.

This paper discusses the role of interactional and cognitive mechanisms in the emergence of (proto)linguistic structures and the evolution of (proto)language(s). Both the social, interactive nature of human communication and the interactional timescale have received increasing attention in investigations of how structure emerges in language. This has also led to an increasing focus on the mechanisms involved in the dialogic co-construction of structure and meaning in interaction. These include ad hoc constructionalization, interactive alignment, conceptual pacts, reuse and modification, and local forms of entrenchment, routinisation and schematisation. Interactional and cognitive mechanisms like these do not only play a crucial role in the emergence of structure in modern languages. They can also help explain how the first (proto)constructions came into being in hominin interaction. Frequently re-occuring, temporary, local (proto)construc- tions acquired increasing degrees of entrenchment, which led to their subsequent diffusion throughout hominin communities. They were then subject to processes of conventionalisation and cumulative cultural evolution. This process is hypothesised to eventually have led to the gradual transition from protolanguage to language

Sluicing in Korean allows to unexpress clausal material, but the unexpressed, elided material needs to be recovered in a proper way. The recovering process makes use of either syntactic or semantic identity or parallelism between the elided expression and its antecedent. The paper discusses two different types of sluicing (merger and sprouting) in Korean and offers an account of sluicing in the matrix as well as in the embedded clause, based on the framework of construction-based HPSG and an independently motivated theory of dialogue context. In particular, the paper offers a direct interpretation approach couched upon this framework that can account for the recovering process, while avoiding pitfalls that affect both syntactically based and semantically based accounts.

The paper aims to enrich the database of independent time-related morphology on nouns and contribute to the discussion of its categorization by examining the so-called predestinative forms in Tundra Nenets (Uralic). The basic semantic contribution predestinatives make consists in providing temporal information relevant for the interpretation of possessive NPs: they specify the relation between the time at which the possessive predicate is true of the possessor and the possessed noun, and the time at which the whole NP is true. However, some properties of predestinatives are not easily accounted for by the nominal tense analysis; rather it would be more appropriate to analyze them as nominal mood, in particular, subjunctive or embedded irrealis. The paper concludes that Tundra Nenets presents rather clear evidence for a TAM category on nouns, but whether it is tense or mood ultimately depends on whether nominal tense is defined as a category that affects the time at which the whole NP is true or the time at which the predicate embedded within the NP is true.

The present Special Issue presents a selection of papers resulting from the workshop “Heritage languages: language contact-change-maintenance and loss in the wave of new migration landscapes” which was held at the University of Wuppertal, Germany, in October 2012. Combining empirical research and theoretical discussion, the papers significantly contribute to the ongoing debate and process of theorizing in heritage language (HL) acquisition of the last decade, since they offer further possibilities to narrow down constellations and types of phenomena where the hotly debated issue of incomplete acquisition, i.e., the idea of a language acquisition process in childhood which, most likely due to insufficient input, does not lead to a fully developed system of the L1, may indeed occur. By studying a variety of language combinations, most of which have thus far been the subject of relatively little research, namely Portuguese/German, Spanish/German, Italian/German, French/German, French/Italian, French/Spanish, Italian/English, Cantonese/English, Russian/English and Greek/Swedish, it becomes possible to achieve a better basis in order to study some of the issues identified by Benmamoun et al. (2013b)

Although the interrelation of tone and segmental quality is typologically unusual, cases of vowel-tone interaction have been reported in the literature. The present paper argues that tone can interact directly with vowel quality without mediating factors such as syllable structure or duration. The basic assumption is that tonally prominent units co-occur with prominent segments. In terms of Optimality Theory, this generalisation is expressed by the family of markedness constraints *H/≤a, which are derived by harmonic alignment of two natural linguistic scales, the tonal scale and the sonority scale. The proposed constraints are used in the analysis of vowel neutralisations found in immediately pretonic positions in the Moscow variety of Standard Russian. A characteristic trait of standard Russian is that it exhibits two-pattern vowel reduction: moderate reduction is found in immediately pretonic positions, while extreme reduction is found in atonic positions. Previous accounts have suggested that different degrees of reduction are due to iambic foot structure. This paper argues that such an approach is flawed and develops an OT analysis, which is based on the insight originally expressed by Bethin (2006) that vocalic neutralisations are driven by the High tone spread from the stressed syllable.