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That a certain class of verb commonly known as 'statives' is undergoing change in terms of the way in which certain verbs of this type are being used in everyday speech is nothing new to the field of linguistics. Much has been written about it, and the author of this paper alone has been preoccupied with the subject for many years now. However, notwithstanding that this change has been fairly widely documented for well over half a century, the present paper has been motivated by the desire to capture the root cause of this change in writing and to establish the linguistic conditions that have enabled it to occur. This is not so much a reductionist venture, negatively conceived, as a quest to determine the primary factors involved in what can seem at times to be a most peculiar phenomenon. The method employed to delimit these causal factors proceeds by a process of elimination, while the provision of evidence adopts the traditional, tried-and-tested method of 'observation and collection'. The stative-specific research papers that examine the current variation constituting the focus of this paper are all from the present century.

The sparse literature on the use of imperatives in research papers suggests that they are relatively common in a small number of disciplines, but rare, if used at all, in others. The present study addresses the use of imperatives in a corpus of upper-level A-graded student papers from 16 disciplines. A total of 822 papers collected within the past 5 years were analyzed for imperative use, with particular emphasis placed on the main text of papers from the five disciplines with the highest proportion of imperatives. In each of these disciplines, text-based interviews were conducted with faculty members to establish disciplinary contexts. Results show that imperatives are used frequently in physics, philosophy, economics, mechanical engineering, and linguistics, though in quite varying ways. The interview data suggest that successful and experienced student writers adopt the potentially "high risk strategy" (Hyland 2012) of initiating a sentence with an imperative for various strategic purposes that are discipline-specific. Such insights have implications for writing instructors and materials designers in both L1 and L2 contexts.

The subject at hand of this paper is intransitive prepositions, which E. Klima (1965) defined as prepositions that do not select syntactic objects. This word group comprises those linguistic units which traditional grammar used to consider as bicategorical, sometimes as adverbs, and in other instances as prepositions created through conversion. Through syntactic and lexical analysis, we intend to confirm that such words in both uses are prepositions rather than adverbs. This type of phrases that are projected only X head does not take complement semantically and structurally. From this point of view, PPs that are generated at level X [P + compl] are opposed, where the presence of a complement is mandatory. Prepositions that project a PPs component at level X have [- compl] feature and are called intransitive prepositions, while prepositions with [+ compl] feature which project a PP at level X are called transitive prepositions. This means that the intuition of an Albanian speaker for the PP component is elaborated not only within the traditional framework PP-P -- NP but also within PP-P structures. Another hypothesis of this paper is that the [- compl] feature of this type of prepositions is not an absolute feature, but rather a relative one -- which means that we do not have genuine intransitive prepositions but rather double feature prepositions [- compl, + compl] which sometimes appear as intransitive, sometimes as transitive which -- similar to transitive verbs with intransitive use -- we have called "ergative prepositions."

Adopting Hyland's (2002) framework of reporting words (RVs), the paper investigates the use of RVs in Master's theses written in English by students of two disciplines, Economics and Management and Natural Resources. The data were drawn from two sub-corpora, each consisting of 82 Literature Reviews, where other authors' research is summarised and commented on. Besides determining the most frequent communicative functions, in this paper, the RVs are further analysed in terms of the verb tense, voice, and subject-agent. The findings revealed significant differences between the two disciplines. In the former, most RVs were in the present active with named-author as the subject, conveying a neutral attitude towards the reported message and neutrally summarising previous research outcomes. Most RVs were in the past tense in the latter, reporting on past research procedures or outcomes. The findings reveal infrequent use of evaluative or critical verbs. Each discipline's predominant choice may suggest writers' lower ability to highlight the cited sources' direct relevance to their research. The study hopes to contribute to the efficacy of teaching English for Academic Purposes to non-native speakers. It has pedagogical implications for academic writing in both undergraduate and postgraduate courses at non-philological tertiary education institutions.

The purpose of this research is to support the language revitalization and reclamation of Nuu-wee-ya', a Dene language from Southern Oregon and Northern California, and to contribute to the discussions on methodological particularities of archive-based research for language revitalization. Nuu-wee-ya' is a sleeping language comprising three dialects (Tututni/Upper Coquille, Tolowa, and Galice), two of which are currently being reawakened through community efforts and philological analysis of archival materials. Native American philological analysis for language reclamation is a burgeoning field needing methodological introspection. This paper describes the semantic function of a small subsection of verbal prefixes: na-, ni-, nu-, ne-, and nv-. I also provide commentary on unique factors of language reclamation from a philological analysis. It is hoped that this work can provide information on approaches to analyzing verb semantics to further speaker-learner reclamation of a sleeping language, furthering the development of methodologies in the field of Native American philology as well as contributing to the understanding of the semantic use of verbal prefixes in Dene languages. May this work support the growth and use of Nuu-wee-ya' language and culture.te

This research examines the interpersonal meaning in Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY)'s speech. This is based on the details of speech or writing to define an investigation. The object of this research is the used moods and modality types in interpersonal meaning of SBY's speech under the title "Toward Harmony among Civilizations" by Dr. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. The aims of this research are (1) to observe the mood and modality types used in SBY's speech, (2) to observe the dominant mood and modality types in SBY's speech, (3) to describe the interpersonal meaning in case of mood and modality types in SBY's speech. The main sources of data in this study are taken from the SBY's speech at the John F. Kennedy School of Government Harvard University summit on September 29th, 2009, in Boston, USA. The data then are classified and collected in tabulation. This paper is based on the discourse analysis and systemic functional linguistics approach by Halliday. The writer analyses the speech by SBY mainly from the interpersonal meaning which focuses on the mood and modality types. The results of this research are (1) there are two mood types in interpersonal meaning of SBY's speech namely indicative and imperative type, (2) the dominant mood in SBY's speech is the indicative type which is declarative with the total number of 97 clauses or around 95%, while the dominant used modality is "can". In addition, the overall dominant modality type exists in median degree modality with the total percentage 40,6%, and (3) the researcher discovers the different mood and modality that might affect the value of the speech to the audience.

This paper analyzes some of the ambiguities that arise among statements with the copular verb "is" in the mathematical language of textbooks as compared to day-to-day English language. We identify patterns in the construction and meaning of "is" statements using randomly selected examples from corpora representing the two linguistic registers. We categorize these examples according to the part of speech of the object word in the grammatical form "[subject] is [object]." In each such grammatical category, we compare the relative frequencies of the subcategories of logical relations conveyed by that construction. Within some categories we observe that the same grammatical structure alternatively conveys different logical relations and that the intended logical relation can only sometimes be inferred from the grammatical cues in the statement itself. This means that one can only interpret the intended logical relation by already knowing the relation among the semantic categories in question. Such ambiguity clearly poses a communicative challenge for teachers and students. We discuss the pedagogical significance of these patterns in mathematical language and consider the relationship between these patterns and mathematical practices.

In a recent paper [Lidz, J., Gleitman, H., & Gleitman, L. (2003). Understanding how input matters: Verb learning and the footprint of universal grammar. "Cognition," 87, 151-178], we provided cross-linguistic evidence in favor of the following linked assertions: (i) Verb argument structure is a correlate of verb meaning; (ii) However, argument structure is not directly available to learners as a cue for reconstructing verb meaning, owing to the complexity of form-meaning mappings within and across languages; (iii) A major correlate of argument-structure, namely, noun phrase number, is statistically available on the surface in all languages, and serves as a quasi-universal derivative cue to the meanings of verbs; (iv) this cue is "privileged," in the sense that it is used early and selectively by learners, despite within- and cross-language differences in its availability. Goldberg [Goldberg, A. (2004). But do we need Universal Grammar? Comment on Lidz, Gleitman and Gleitman 2003. "Cognition"] suggests that this cue is not linguistic, that it is too sicklied o'er with exceptions and provisos to be useful to learners, and that conversational conspiracies can in any case serve as the alternative theoretical framework for a theory of predicate learning, and language acquisition more generally. In the present reply, we review and further explicate our original position, to wit: A large part of any generative grammar is a formal statement of the complex alignments between predicate-argument structures and the surface forms (linear strings of words) of sentences. Because the several rules for alignment interact, the surface outcomes reveal individual systematicities only abstractly. Therefore, learning would be impossible if infants could not analyze probabilistically available patterns to recover their principled linguistic sources. This statistics-based discovery procedure is in certain relevant regards specific to language learning. Finally, we argue that while pragmatics and theory of mind properties in learner and tutor necessarily frame language acquisition, that these have not been shown--and probably cannot be shown--to be sufficient to this computational problem.

Innovative computer technology has sparked a revolutionary change in the area of language analysis. Individual researchers are increasingly likely to access huge corpora containing several hundred million words and to analyze the data using highly developed language analyzers via the Internet. Sketch Engine is one of such online language analyzers, which regards the Internet as a data source for linguistic studies. The online system allows us to analyze a wide range of Japanese texts with more than 400 million words, as well as texts in other languages. In this paper, we will examine the use of the words for family members in Japanese texts and reveal images of each member role hidden in the same.

Studies of copular forms are extremely relevant to issues in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics. Psychologists have recently argued that the most distinctive aspect of human language is its combinatorial nature (e.g., Gentner, 2003; Spelke, 2003). They argue that this linguistic component might be what separates human from animal cognition. As combinatorial elements, copular forms have no equal. However, as the quote from Bertrand Russell implies, copular forms are multi-dimensional and complex. A full understanding of their use, linguistic variation, acquisition, and relation to cognition is a formidable task. While other papers in this special-issue volume of "Bilingualism: Language and Cognition" will address the different syntactic and semantic functions carried by these forms, in this commentary, I will focus on the relation between the acquisition of copular forms and cognitive development, or more specifically on the development of categorization.

Focuses on how the foreign language instructors' understanding of the historical development of forms and systematic language patterns enhances classroom presentations by transforming lists of irregularities and exceptions into coherent groups of related elements. Discusses examples of structures traditionally presented in lists or tables and gives alternative presentations. (28 references) (CK)

Any person who has taught Spanish as a second language or who has interacted with a non-native speaker of Spanish can easily tell that mastering the correct use of the copulas "ser" and "estar" is very difficult in both spoken and written production. But L2 learners are not alone. The Spanish copulas also present difficulty and frustration for L2 instructors of Spanish, since most pedagogical explanations of the uses of "ser" and "estar" provided in textbooks are incomplete and inaccurate. However, the acquisition of copular constructions has not received the attention it deserves in the acquisition literature, making a special issue of "Bilingualism: Language and Cognition" dedicated to this topic particularly welcome. A reason for the scarcity of research in this area may be related to both the linguistic complexity of Spanish "ser" and "estar" and the inadequacy of many available theoretical treatments to explain their complementary distribution. Although constructions with "ser" and "estar" are highly frequent in the input, they are grammatically quite intricate, straddling between the levels of morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Accordingly, Bruhn de Garavito and Valenzuela correctly frame their study within the current debate on interface vulnerability in language development in general, and in adult L2 acquisition in particular (Sorace, 2004; White, in press). In a nutshell, grammatical areas which require the integration of different levels of linguistic knowledge (e.g., syntax-discourse, syntax-morphology, morphology-semantics, etc.) for processing, production, or interpretation, show developmental delays and instability in monolingual and bilingual acquisition. In the case of monolingual acquisition, instability or non-target-like behavior is temporary, but in L2 grammars, instability can persist up to very advanced levels of proficiency, eventually leading to fossilization.

The general aim of this article is to discuss the application of Usage-Based Linguistics (UBL) to an investigation of developmental issues in second language acquisition (SLA). Particularly, the aim is to discuss the relevance for SLA of the UBL suggestion that language learning is item-based, going from formulas via low-scope patterns to fully abstract constructions. This paper examines how well this suggested path of acquisition serves "as a default in guiding the investigation of the ways in which exemplars and their type and token frequencies determine the second language acquisition of structure" (N. Ellis 2002: 170). As such, it builds on and further discusses the findings in Bardovi-Harlig (2002) and Eskildsen and Cadierno (2007). The empirical point of departure is longitudinal oral second language classroom interaction and the focal point is the use of "can" by one student in the class in question. The data reveal the formulas, here operationalized as recurring multiword expressions, to be situated in recurring usage events, suggesting the need for a fine-tuning of the UBL theory for the purposes of SLA research towards a more locally contextualized theory of language acquisition and use. The data also suggest that semi-fixed linguistic patterns, here operationalized as utterance schemas, deserve a prominent place in L2 developmental research.

This paper reports a corpus-based genre analysis of the structural and linguistic evolution of medical research articles (RAs) written in English. Towards that end, we analyzed the frequency of occurrence of the 11 moves identified by Nwogu (1997), of the three most frequently used verb tenses (simple past, simple present and present perfect) and of the first person pronouns in 25 RAs published between 1985 and 1989 (Corpus A), on the one hand, and 25 RAs published between 2000 and 2004 (Corpus B), on the other. The results obtained were compared by means of Chi-square test or Mann-Whitney U test with those reported in previous research. Our findings indicated that Moves 1 and 6 changed from "optional" to "obligatory" (c.f. Nwogu, 1997) whereas Move 9 switched from "obligatory" to "optional". Move 8 remained an "optional" move, though significant difference was found in its frequency of occurrence between the two corpora (p = 0.015). Regarding verb tenses, we found that the frequency of the simple past significantly increased in Move 3 (p = 0.001) as well as that of the simple present in Move 10 (p = 0.004). The frequency of the present perfect significantly decreased in both Move 3 (p = 0.001) and Move 10 (p = 0.001). Regarding the first person pronoun, we found significant inter-corpus differences in the total number of the plural form of the first person pronoun and its related cases (p = 0.001) and in their frequency of occurrence in the Methods, Results, and Discussion sections (respectively, p = 0.001). These findings are discussed in light of the evolution of medical science and attitude changes of medical RA writers. (Contains 5 tables.)

Drawing on the concept of language socialization, this study investigates ways in which parents and grandparents of three-generational Korean-American households socialize children into certain cultural values through the use of a particular linguistic feature in Korean: the verb suffix "-ta". All six participating families had at least one child between the ages of two and four, spoke Korean as the mother tongue, and had at least one grandparent who regularly interacted with the child. Approximately 70 hours of family interactions were video-recorded and 202 utterances ending with "-ta" were examined. An analysis of the "-ta" utterances reveals that this linguistic marker is used mostly by Korean adults to compliment children's desirable behavior or accomplishments as well as to criticize their undesirable behavior. In addition, "-ta" is used by parents and grandparents to warn children of the consequences of their actions. Although the children were observed using "-ta" sometimes, their relatively restricted usage of this linguistic marker was confined to complimenting their own work rather than evaluating their parents' or grandparents' actions, thus reinforcing culturally asymmetrical power relationships between members of different generations in Korean-American families. This paper argues that learning the socially appropriate uses of linguistic markers in Korean such as "-ta" is made possible largely through sustained intergenerational interaction in informal family situations. The findings suggest the importance of intergenerational socialization in the transmission of heritage languages. (Contains 4 tables and 5 notes.)

Most linguistic studies of subject-verb agreement have thus far attempted to account for this phenomenon in terms of either syntax or semantics. Kim (2004) [Kim, J., 2004. Hybrid agreement in English. Linguistics 42 (6), 1105-1128] proposes a "hybrid analysis", which allows for a morphosyntactic agreement and a semantic agreement within the same sentence. In this paper we propose that conceptual-functional views of language may provide a powerful and complementary approach to the "hybrid analysis" approach. Drawing on data from subject-verb agreement in Persian, we show how the choice between plural and singular verb endings may reflect a speaker's construal of an event. In particular it appears that the construal resolution/level of schematicity has a bearing on subject-verb agreement patterns. It is argued that linguistic devices that are often described as "optional" in descriptive grammars may in fact be motivated and sensitive to conceptualisation of experience. (Contains 7 figures and 4 tables.)

This paper explores how children use two possible solutions to the verb-mapping problem: attention to perceptually salient actions and attention to social and linguistic information (speaker cues). Twenty-two-month-olds attached a verb to one of two actions when perceptual cues (presence/absence of a result) coincided with speaker cues but not when these cues were placed into conflict (Experiment 1), and not when both possible referent actions were perceptually salient (Experiment 2). By 34 months, children were able to override perceptual cues to learn the name of an action that was not perceptually salient (Experiment 3). Results demonstrate an early reliance on perceptual information for verb mapping and an emerging tendency to weight speaker information more heavily over developmental time.

This section consists of six essays dealing with: (1) current trends in French linguistics; (2) French possessive pronouns; (3) contemporary French novelists; (4) "happiness" in France; (5) the Belgian playwright Michel Ghelderode; and (6) the pedagogical use of popular songs. (AM)

Uses the example of the teaching of the Chinese negative form "bu" to demonstrate the need for cooperation between linguists, researchers, and Chinese language teachers. (AM)

Tense is traditionally assumed to express temporal relations between the time of the event and the moment of speech, whereas aspect expresses various views on one and the same event. In Klein (), it was argued that the intuitions which underlie this viewing metaphor can be made precise by a time-relational analysis as well. In his article 'Aspect vs. relative tense: the case reopened', Jürgen Bohnemeyer challenges one important point of this analysis, the equation of aspect and relative tense in the English perfect and in temporal forms of few other languages. In the present comment, it is argued that this is indeed a simplification, which does not speak, however, against a time-relational analysis of aspect in general. The main lines of such an analysis for the English perfect are sketched. It is shown that it naturally accounts for differences between the simple past and the present perfect, as well as for the oddity of constructions such as Einstein has visited Princeton or Ira has left yesterday at five. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The Leteh (South Guan: Kwa) GIVE-verb nὲ occurs in various syntactic contexts in Leteh discourse. This paper conducts a synchronic analysis of its multiple occurrences, using grammaticalization theory as its analytic basis (Hopper and Traugott 2003). The morpheme occurs in five different syntactic environments as: the main verb of an unmarked clause; a causative verb in a serial verb construction; a benefactive verb in a benefactive/goal serial verb construction; a complementizer of a complement clause, and a resultative marker in a cause-effect serial verb construction. The paper demonstrates that in each of the environments, the morpheme acquires a different meaning and function whilst maintaining its form. Data for the study are sourced from a database of Leteh wordlists, folktales and elicitations from language speakers. The paper contributes to literature on the linguistics of the GIVE-verb in African and Kwa languages specifically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]