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Feedback is important to improve writing quality; however, to provide timely and personalized feedback is a time-intensive task. Currently, most literature focuses on providing (human or machine) support on product characteristics, especially after a draft is submitted. However, this does not assist students who struggle during the writing process. Therefore, in this study, we investigate the use of keystroke analysis to predict writing quality throughout the writing process. Keystroke data were analyzed from 126 English as a second language learners performing a timed academic summarization task. Writing quality was measured using participants’ final grade. Based on previous literature, 54 keystroke features were extracted. Correlational analyses were conducted to identify the relationship between keystroke features and writing quality. Next, machine learning models (regression and classification) were used to predict final grade and classify students who might need support at several points during the writing process. The results show that, in contrast to previous work, the relationship between writing quality and keystroke data was rather limited. None of the regression models outperformed the baseline, and the classification models were only slightly better than the majority class baseline (highest AUC = 0.57). In addition, the relationship between keystroke features and writing quality changed throughout the course of the writing process. To conclude, the relationship between keystroke data and writing quality might be less clear than previously posited.

This study explores metapragmatic comments in Nigerian quasi-judicial public hearings, involving interactions between complainants, defendants and a hearing panel, with a view to investigating their forms, features, distribution and functions. The data are analysed quantitatively and qualitatively from a discourse-pragmatic framework that incorporates Verschueren’s theory of metapragmatics, Mey’s pragmatic act theory, Grice’s Cooperative Principle and conversation analysis. Four types of metapragmatic comments are used: speech act descriptions, talk regulation comments, maxim adherence/violation related comments and metalinguistic comments. Their distribution and functioning are shown to be partly predictable from properties of the speech event, while they also co-determine the nature and development of the analysed hearings.

This paper argues for revisiting the traditional adscription of ambiguous readings of personal pronouns, such as hearer-dominantweor genericyou, pluralis maiestatis and pluralis modestiae to specific genres and/or registers. Indeed, in many languages these phenomena are considered typical for a certain genre, register or discourse context. In this paper, I will argue, on the basis of quantitative data and a qualitative analysis of examples taken from different genres (including purposefully creative language use in fiction), that a more accurate account may be formulated in terms of (inter)subjective effect, viz. the attention to the (inter)locutor (among others Benveniste 1966), as a more suitable explanation for the variation of these phenomena attested in corpora.The hearer-oriented uses ofwe, for instance, are considered typical for relationships characterized by power asymmetries such as teacher-student, doctor-patient (Haverkate 1984: 87; Brown & Levinson 1987), whereas generic and speaker-referringyouhave been considered a feature of (informal) oral language than written discourse (Hidalgo Navarro 1996). Recent corpus-based analyses including quantitative and qualitative analyses, however, call for a more nuanced view (De Cock 2011 on Spanish and English; Tarenskeen 2010 on Dutch). We may, for example, find hearer-oriented or even hearer-dominant 1stperson plural forms (Have we taken our medicine?) in contexts where no power- relationship can be defined, e.g. among couples.It will be shown that these uses have different intersubjective effects, however. Their distribution is in line with overall differences as to intersubjectivity according to register and genre, beyond referential ambiguity. The concept of (inter)subjectivity then allows for a more comprehensive analysis of these phenomena and their occurrence in specific registers and genres, addressing the way in which the (inter)locutor is taken into account in each genre.

This paper investigates the morpho-phonological differences between the members of related noun-verb pairs in Catalan Sign Language. Like parallel investigations in other sign languages, our experimental work provides evidence that the major differentiating factors between related nouns and verbs materialize in the movement component of signs and non-manual markers, thus providing empirical support to the hypothesis that most of noun-verb pairs have different morpho-phonological properties. We distinguish different types of movements, which we categorize into four regular morphological subgroups. We also take into account a fifth group that shows no apparent movement distinction. Concerning non-manual markers, we provide empirical evidence that nouns are mostly produced simultaneously with mouthing, in contrast to verbs, which in a smaller proportion are produced mainly with mouth gestures. Crucially, the fifth group presents the largest ratio of mouthing for nouns and even for verbs. We address these findings within an exo-skeletal theoretical syntactic approach (Borer 2005a,b, 2013, 2014). We acknowledge the financial support for our research. M.Teresa Espinal's contribution has been made possible by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness and FEDER Funds (FFI2017-82547-P) and Generalitat de Catalunya (2017SGR634), as well as by an ICREA Academia fellowship. Josep Quer’s contribution has been made possible by the SIGN-HUB project, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 693349, the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness and FEDER Funds (FFI2015-68594-P), and the Government of the Generalitat de Catalunya (2017SGR1478).

This paper examines the question of politeness in political interviews, looking particularly at the use of loaded questions. Comparison is made between the two principal paradigms of politeness, Locher and Watts (2005) and Brown and Levinson (1987). The paper focuses on the interviewing style of Steven Sackur (HARDtalk, BBC) who employs loaded questions in his political interviews in keeping with the analysis of Walton (1991) who argues that loaded questions can function as a ‘reasonable’ means to constrain the response of an interviewee and in turn further discourse. Sackur employs loaded questions selectively to convey and reinforce a presupposition to which an interviewee is not committed. In so doing, he is able to constrain the contribution of his interviewee. Loaded questions are a linguistic means of (im)politeness used strategically by Sackur to further the discourse of his interviews.

This study investigates and compares the use of discourse markers (DMs) by native speakers and learners of English based on a corpus of adolescent intercultural exchange students. Thestudy employs a discourse analytical approach, in whichFung and Carter’s (2007)multi-category framework is appliedwith a view to examiningDMs used bya group of Taiwanese and British adolescentsin an intercultural setting.The analytical frameworkcontains four main functional categories: Interpersonal, referential, structural and cognitive DMs. Each DM was analysed qualitatively and quantitatively in order to identifythe functions it serves in its original contextandtofurther reveal the different uses of DMs between Taiwanese and British participants. The findings demonstrate that the DMs used by both groups of participants serve the fourcentral functions,andin particularTaiwanese participants display a significant use of interpersonal (e.g., yeah, oh) and structural DMs (e.g., so, okay), while British participants have a significantly higher usage of referential (e.g., coz/because, and) and cognitive DMs (e.g., like, well). The results of this study have direct pedagogical implications that can enhance the teaching of English as a Foreign Language (EFL)to better prepare learners for real life communication scenarios.

This article seeks to advance the usage-based discourse research that investigates meanings and processes of meaning construction in interaction by elaboratingan empirically grounded interdisciplinary model. The paradigmatic and sequential analysis employed here brings together linguistic discourse analysis with an ethnomethodological perspective, and presents an innovative take on category organization in talk,explaininghow to capture knowledge resources such as asymmetrical category contrast pairs in talk. In analyzing in detail the speaker’s taxonomy constructionin a sample conversation, the papersystematicallyexploresthefollowing two topicsrelated to the speaker: what category characteristic he is orientingto as a resource for his present talkandwhat socialmeaning the speaker’s taxonomizing isconsistentlycommunicatingin the flow of talk. The proposed model captures a color binary–used to categorize people–of the ‘colored’versus the ‘white’, entailed in theexpression ‘a so-called yellowcolored people’,and reveals that the category pair is used as an organizational device in the speaker’s argument.The paper claims that taxonomy analysis in sequence is useful to examine the selected words in relation to their semiotic resources.

Departing from a short overview on pragmatic gestures specialized for the expression of refusal and negation, the article presents first results of a study on those gestures in Savosavo, a Papuan language spoken in the Solomon Islands in the Southwest Pacific. The paper focuses on two partly conventionalized gestures (sweeping and holding away) and shows that speakers of Savosavo use the gestures in a very similar way as speakers of German, English or French, for example. The article shows how a linguistic and semiotic analysis might serve to uncover proto-morpho-semantic structures in a manual mode of communication and contributes to a better understanding of the conventional nature and cross-linguistic distribution of gestures. Moreover, by examining partly conventionalized gestures in a small, little known and endangered language, it presents a particular approach to the analysis of multimodality in the field of language documentation.

The Catalan second person singular (2sg) pronoun tu (you) has acquired a wide range of pragmatic values in spoken registers that have received little or no attention from scholars in the field. The aim of the present article is to analyse a particular emerging use of the 2sg pronoun tu from a corpus-based perspective. In the light of Grammaticalisation Theory, it is argued that whereas in some contexts this pronoun maintains all or part of its referential function (e.g. as subject or as a vocative, respectively), in other contexts its use is very similar to that of an emphatic pragmatic marker. Data drawn from three spoken corpora suggest that the pronoun has consolidated this new use. Prosodic evidence is also provided to show the semantic and pragmatic changes undergone by the pronoun.

In modern Danish, the most frequently used pronoun for generic reference is man, developed from the noun man(d) ‘man’. Recently, though, the second person singular pronoun du has gained ground, in parallel to similar recent developments in other languages. A large-scale, longitudinal study of the LANCHART corpus of spoken Danish has documented a rise in the use of generic du in Copenhagen (and later in the rest of Denmark) during the period from the early 1970s, where generic du was practically non-existent, till the late 1980s where du comprised around 25% of all pronouns with generic meaning. However, recordings from the 2000s show that the use of du has peaked and is now decreasing or stabilizing at a lower level.This article focuses on intra-individual and intra-conversational variation within the LANCHART corpus with the aim of uncovering the pragmatic effect of using du instead of other generic pronouns. All passages in the recordings have been coded according to macro speech act, activity type, type of interaction and genre as well as enunciation. The results of a statistical analysis using mixed models show a number of correlations as to the use of generic du (in comparison with man), and by and large support the claim that generic du is used as a resource for construing involvement, arguably by exploiting the ambiguity of du between a generic and a specific second person meaning. These quantitative results make up the point of departure for corroborating qualitative analyses of the discourse framing of the use of generic pronouns.

The present contribution examines how interlocutors resolve reference problems concerning the second singular person (2sg) in ongoing conversation. Apart from its ‘normal’ reading as a term of address, generic and also speaker-referring uses have been documented and studied for a variety of languages. However, there are amazingly few documented cases of interlocutors who openly display having problems of disambiguation between forms of address and reference to a larger entity ‘anybody in this particular situation’. A sequential analysis shows that interlocutors tend not to ask for further specification of reference in a possibly ambiguous situation, most likely for face reasons: Instead, they tend to rely on contextualization in later conversational development and on all available conversational resources. Ambiguous reference that leads to misunderstandings only becomes a topic once serious conversational problems arise and the need for disambiguation becomes more important than interlocutors’ face needs.

Phonetic resources, like dialects and accents, are used in ethnic humour to build up a recognisable character that pokes fun at the stereotypes associated with a particular identity, sometimes with critical and political undertones. In this article, we examine the manipulation of one such resource, aspiration, used in performing and mocking one such clichéd character, called the fake Sámi. This character has a contested history in Finnish tourism and marketing practices, and is embedded in a long-standing debate about who can use emblems of Sámi identity for economic purposes. Adopting a sociophonetic language regard and folk linguistics approaches (Preston 2010; Niedzielski & Preston 2003) we explore how “fakeness” is constructed phonetically by the actors performing “Fake Sámi” in an indigenous Sámi television comedy show during a period of intense political debate in Finland over the legal definition of the category of indigenous Sámi. By analysing the use of hyperbolic aspiration of a prominent feature of Lappish Finnish dialect, the non-initial syllable /h/-sound, we show how the fakeness is performed by evoking linguistic stereotypes of a Finnish Lappish dialect and a Finnish English accent by a deliberate misuse of aspiration: aspirating when standard phonemes in speech should not be aspirated and not aspirating when phonemes should be aspirated. We argue that this kind of deliberate ambivalence and misuse of phonetic resources is a phonetic resource for reflexive postmodern identity performances.

This paper deals with the use of personal pronouns (PPs) in Ancient Greek in two Aristophanes’ comedies (i.e. Lysistrata and Ecclesiazusae). The main purpose of this study is to show that Ancient Greek PPs often have a pragmatic function, in particular linked to the speaker’s communicative goals. The analysis highlights the presence of a gender-related distribution and a context-dependent use of personal pronouns. In particular, male characters prefer 1st person singular pronouns, whereas female characters use more 1st person plural pronouns with an inclusive value. Moreover, in two communicative frameworks it is possible to notice how PPs are used for their value of membership categorization. In this respect PPs can be considered possible markers of autonomía or afiliación (see Bravo 1999). Some peculiar instances of referential ambiguities concern in particular the use of 1st and 2nd person plural pronouns in both comedies.The analysis shows that use of Ancient Greek PPs varies according to gender and context. Moreover, it is clear that in both comedies this variation should be explained mainly as a pragmatic strategy of membership categorization, thus showing instances of non-prototypical uses of PPs similar to other languages (e.g. Spanish, English, Modern Greek).

The phenomenon ofmisunderstandingis a recurrent feature of everyday life – sometimes a source of frustration, sometimes a site of blame. But misunderstandings can also be seen as getting interactants out of (as well as into) trouble. For example, misunderstandings may be produced to deal with disaffiliative implications of ‘not being on the same page,’ and as such they may be deployed as a resource for avoiding trouble. This paper examines misunderstanding as a pragmatic accomplishment, focusing on the uses to which it is put in interactions as a practice for dealing with threats tointersubjectivity: the extent to which persons are aligned in terms of a current referent, activity, assessment, etc. A multimodal discourse analysis of audio and video recordings of naturally-occurring talk inspects moments in which misunderstandings are purported or displayed (rather than overtly invoked) as well as how such misunderstandings are oriented to as simply-repairable references, versus inferential matters more misaligned and potentially fraught. Rather than being a straightforward reflection of an experience of trouble with understanding, misunderstanding may also be collaboratively produced to manage practical challenges to intersubjectivity.

Following the recent development of address research in pluricentric languages (Clyne et al. 2006), the present study describes address practices in English-speaking academic settings and pursues two main objectives: (a) to provide a profile of address patterns in academic interactions in Australian English; and (b) to compare address practices in higher education across the three dominant varieties of English, namely American English, Australian English, and British English. The data on Australian English are drawn from 235 questionnaires completed by students, who reported on the address strategies adopted by students and teaching staff in classroom interactions in an Australian university. Data on American and British academic settings were retrieved from the research literature on the topic. The findings show a high degree of informality and familiarity in student-teacher relations in Australia, where reciprocal first names are the default pattern of address at all levels. By contrast, in American academia the hierarchical organization of roles and the different professional positions are foregrounded and reinforced through an asymmetrical use of titles, honorifics and first names. Finally, the British university setting displays a non-reciprocal usage of first names and titles between lecturer and students, which gradually evolves into a more generalised reciprocal use of first names, usually after extended contact and collaboration. We argue that the distinctive patterns of address observed in the three varieties of English reflect diverse social and cultural values systems at work in different speech communities.

The present study analyzes the discursive strategies of manipulation in the political genre of a discourse in Parliament with an aim to convince the audience that the Prime Minister and his party are innocent of receiving illegal cash donations from a slush fund run in the party. For that purpose, we have usedVan Dijk’s (2006)scheme of strategies of manipulation at several levels of discourse (content, lexis, topics, syntax, rhetoric, and order of discourse). Findings of the study show that the Prime Minister’s speech presents characteristics of ideological discourse, since it follows a general strategy of positive in-group and negative out-group presentation, which has an overall legitimating function. At other levels of discourse, the denial of controversial actions is made manipulative by following strategies of emphasis of our positive and their negative actions with the final aim of self-legitimating himself and his discourse. The discourse is further made manipulative by using appropriate contextual constraints and defensible semantics of representation.

The present paper analyses speech level shifts in Japanese from a different perspective. By applying Symbolic InteractionistRole Theory, speech level shifts are categorised as the linguistic realisation of aninteractional role, or ‘dissociative role’ Icall in this paper. Dissociative roles are improvised identities, which occur when the speaker perceives a psychological change in relation to the other participant in the on-going interaction. Plus-level shifts (shifts from plain to polite forms, masu/desu) are triggered when the speaker experiences cautious, attentive, thoughtful and/or grateful feelings at a certaintime of interaction, which conforms to the original nature of honorifics. This prompts a dissociative role which creates a certain psychological distance between this role and the other interactant. On the other hand, minus-level shifts (shifts from masu/desu forms to plain forms) are the implementation of the speaker’s another dissociative role, which is assimilated with the other interactant, giving rise to empathy or drawing the other into the speaker’s world. Whether plus or minus level shifts occur, the interactants’social roles, i.e.,their original roles when the situation is defined, continue to exist throughout the discourse. The interactants are fully aware of their social roles such as teacher and student, friends, family members, and senior and junior in company(= Institutional Roles in this paper). However, when an Improvised Role is created, it is forwarded to the on-going interaction and linguistically implemented as a speech level shift.This paper also clarifies that both speech level shifts and the so-called ‘conventional’honorifics are situationally determined, and that they are not separate entities but the two ends of continuum by examining the features they share from the viewpoint of ‘roles’.

The language of fashion is often set as the example of a field where the use of loanwords is common practice, but has seldom been worthy of scholarly analytical attention. At the same time, vagueness is usually regarded as an inherent characteristic in natural language, but, until recently, terminology relegated it, since the traditional approaches tended to prioritise accuracy and standardisation. With the help of a combined theoretical basis, a semantic theory and a pragmatic model, this paper brings together these two worlds in order to examine the English loanword ‘print’ in the domain of Spanish fashion, contrasting and comparing it with native near-equivalents. We conclude that the presence of this borrowed term, exclusively restricted to specialised fashion circles, cannot be motivated by its contribution to specificity, a characteristic that usually distinguishes loanwords from their semantic near-equivalents in the recipient language. The importance of ‘print’ lies in its unspecified, vague nature as a loan, which permits its adaptation to a variety of fashion contexts less appropriate for the more restricted denotation of the native terms.

Previous studies have found that but and so occur frequently in native and non-native English speakers’ speech and that they are easy to acquire by non-native English speakers. The current study compared ideational and pragmatic functions of but and so by native and non-native speakers of English. Data for the study were gathered using individual sociolinguistic interviews with five native English speakers and ten L1 Chinese speakers. The results suggest that even though the Chinese speakers of English acquired the ideational functions of but and so as well as the native English speakers, they underused the pragmatic functions of them. The findings indicate that there is still a gap between native and non-native English speakers in communicative competence in the use of but and so. The present study also suggests that speakers’ L1 (Mandarin Chinese) and overall oral proficiency in oral discourse affect their use of but and so.

This study deals with the use of expository questions as discourse strategy in Zhuangzi (4th c. B.C.), a foundational text of Daoism. We treat this particular type of non-information-seeking questions (e.g. “Why? Because…”) as a manifestation of conversational monologues, which are themselves fictive kinds of interactions between the original writer and subsequent reader(s) (Pascual 2002, 2014). We further analyze expository questions as constructions of intersubjectivity (cf. Verhagen 2005, 2008), involving a viewpoint blend (Dancygier and Sweetser 2012), integrating the perspectives of the writer, the assumed readers and the discourse characters. We hope to show that–counter to what is commonly assumed in discourse studies–conversationalization is not restricted to modern institutional discourse (Fairclough 1994) or spoken informal speech (Streeck 2002).

International audience; The aim of this article is to complement and refine Ellen Prince's well-known taxonomy of given/new information (Prince 1981, 1992), which distinguishes between discourse-related and assumed familiarity-related newness/givenness. What we suggest is that a new category should be added to the existing hearer new, hearer old, and inferrable information categories, so as to include cases where the informational status of an entity or a propositional content cannot be determined with certainty. We call this new category 'the (hearer) indeterminables', and we justify its existence through a case study on non-restrictive, relevance oriented constructions (appositive relative clauses, non-restrictive pre-modifiers, apposition). We also argue that it is possible for speakers/writers to simulate informational statuses for politeness considerations, and that such simulation should be included in the definition of assumed familiarity.

A survey of the field of Interlanguage Pragmatics (ILP) shows that the Discourse Completion Test (DCT)2, also referred to as a ‘discourse completion task’ or a ‘production questionnaire’, has been the most frequently used instrument to evaluate second/foreign language learners’ ability to perform speech acts in a target language, despite the harsh criticism leveled against its low construct validity and its failure to represent the features of authentic discourse. Interestingly, focusing on the statement of objectives of a number of ILP studies using DCTs, one can notice that such studies rarely refer to the DCT as a language test. In addition, an overview of the DCT design process as described in several ILP studies shows that ever since its adaptation for the study of pragmatic ability (Blum-Kulka, 1982), there has been a tendency to use or adapt one of the existing DCT versions used in previous studies based on the argument of comparability of results. While a number of ILP researchers tried to improve the design of the DCT by the inclusion of rejoinders or by enhancing the prompt material (e.g. Billmyer and Varghese, 2000), few attempts have been made to reconsider the DCT development process. McNamara and Roever (2006: 253) urge for the need for “more research on testing of sociopragmatic knowledge and design of discourse completion tests for testing purposes.”The present paper starts with an overview of the literature about DCTs with special reference to the cognitive validity of the instrument and to previous studies dealing with DCT structure and content. Then, with reference to research in the fields of language testing and psychometrics, it shows that, whether used for research or instructional purposes, the DCT shares several qualities with language tests. As such, it is argued that the DCT should be treated as a language test and not as a questionnaire and should, thus, undergo a rigorous developmental process. Based on recent models of language test construction, the paper concludes with an overview of the stages of DCT development.

In a sentence where the disjunction huo ‘or’ appears under the negation mei ‘no’ (e.g.: Ta mei chi qingjiao huo qiezi. ‘He did not eat green peppers or eggplants.’), the sentence is globally ambiguous between the conjunctive interpretation and the disjunctive interpretation. The primary goal of this study is to investigate if there is a default meaning for simple negative statements containing huo ‘or’. Data collected from the self-paced region-by-region reading experiment indicated that the participants consistently preferred the conjunctive interpretation. Additionally, in the conjunction-biased condition where the sentences turned out to favor the disjunctive interpretations at the end, there was reading time penalty at the last region of the sentences and participants spent significantly longer time judging the appropriateness of those sentences. Contrary to Jing’s (2008) assertion that both disjunction and conjunction readings are equally prominent in an out-of-the-blue context, the results from the quantitative data revealed that the conjunction reading is the default meaning for simple negative statements containing huo ‘or’. The findings of the current experiment provide essential implications to the study of child language acquisition. Specifically, we argue that understanding the adults’ linguistic patterns is a prerequisite to the study of children’s language acquisition patterns.

Recurrent word sequences, referred to as “lexical bundles”, may be structurally incomplete, but they serve important communicative functions. Despite the essential roles of lexical bundles in discourse, many methodological issues have been raised in the process of identifying lexical bundles, which is generally frequency-based. The present study identifies three-word and four-word bundles in Chinese conversation and news, and efforts are made to respond to methodological challenges encountered in previous studies. We employ a more sensitive dispersion measure, DP, and an internal association measure, G, which help filter out high-frequency word sequences with no identifiable function and reduce the workload of further manual interventions. An exploratory data analysis is then conducted to compare the distributional patterns of lexical bundles in Chinese conversation and news. In Chinese, both the type number and the density of lexical bundles are higher in conversation than in news. This appears to be a strong cross-linguistic tendency that reflects the real-time pressure speakers face in spontaneous speech. The exploratory data analysis also shows that the elements in Chinese bundles are closely associated with each other. This suggests that lexical bundles are useful phrasal units in Chinese discourse, and thus invites further investigations of how lexical bundles are used in Chinese.

This paper investigates metaphor in Hakka proverbs by examining a corpus of 933 couplets based on a refined analytic framework from Lakoff & Turner (1989). For the source domain, the being of the state of affairs and the rhetorical relations of the two chunks are identified. For the target domain, the projected theme and the connotative tendency are examined. The results show that source domains significantly correlate with the rhetorical relations and target domains, respectively. Four metaphorical mapping mechanisms based on the generic is specific metaphor are proposed for the operation of the global construal. A mirror image mapping is demonstrated: whole-for-part metonymy in the source domain and part-for-whole metonymy in the target domain. Both the evoked knowledge schemas, encompassing real-life Hakka folk experiences, and the projected themes, including family values, individual characters, and evaluations or standards of life, are found to be culturally constrained. A coalescence of linguistic, cultural, and affective forces is claimed to represent the metaphors in Hakka proverbs. The study contributes to a better understanding of metaphors in proverbs by establishing a solid ground from their linguistic and cultural features, and to expanding the conceptual metaphor theory by building the conceptual universality with specific cultural information.

The present study examines the diachronic development of the Japanese discourse marker dakara ‘so’ from the perspective of grammaticalization with a special focus on the role of discursive strategy in its semantic-pragmatic meaning change. Stemming from the adverbial phrase soredakara ‘because it is so’, dakara originally emerged as a causal connective that introduces a consequence. Subsequently, it gained several non-causal uses, i.e. the point-making use that refers back to what has been said or inferable in the discourse to stress the point that the speaker has been trying to make, the point-clarification use that points out that the preceding interlocutor’s statements need more elaboration, and the point-denying use that indicates the speaker’s opposition to the interlocutor’s claim. Among the new non-causal uses, it is found that the point-making use emerged from the retrospective use of causality as a result of employing the discourse strategy of justification in argumentative discourse, while the point-clarification and the point-denying uses arose due to its use as a device for delaying disagreement. It is argued that these new uses developed because the expression was repeatedly used for these two discourse strategies and over time the readings associated with these contexts became conventionalized and turned into the expression’s encoded meaning. This low-level generalization seems to better explain the process of grammaticalization than the high-level generalization of (inter)subjectivity for the developments of dakara.

This study analyzed the uses and functions of speech levels and speech level shifts in natural conversations between two unacquainted males. Similarities and differences between Japanese and Korean languages have been investigated. For the Japanese language, speech levels do not clearly reflect the hierarchical relationships based on the interlocutors’ age by utilizing “non-marked utterance (NM)” This finding implies that modern Japanese people tend to avoid the use of honorifics which clearly indicates the hierarchical relationships between speakers at the sentence level. On the other hand, speech level shifts reflect hierarchical relationships between speakers, which means that Japanese seem to conform to normative language use at the discourse level. For the Korean language, both speech levels and speech level shifts clearly reflect the hierarchical relationships based on the interlocutors’ age. This result suggests that Korean have a strong tendency to preserve the normative honorific usage of polite forms according to age difference both at the sentence level and at the discourse level. These results suggest that speech levels, considered to be socio-pragmatically obligatory, have a strategic-use aspect for both languages, including the use of “non-marked utterances” and that of downshifts. It was also discovered that Japanese tend to use speech levels more strategically than Korean. Consequently, Japanese uses honorifics strategically in order to evade hierarchical relationships based on age, whereas Koreans tend to conform to social norms that derive from tenets of Confucianism, a philosophy emphasizing politeness toward older people; such practice encourages younger people to use polite forms to their elders.

抽象 河北邢臺話的動後時體詞「了1」有兩個語音形式：強變體「咾 [lau]」和弱變體「囒 [læ͊]」，二者在很大程度上是條件變體。經考察，漢語「了1」的使用受制於謂語的整體屬性（現實性狀況、話語地位）和謂語的構件屬性（賓語類型、動詞類型）兩大類語法因素，而邢臺話「了1」兩變體的分佈同樣受制於這些因素：謂語的整體屬性決定「了1」兩變體分佈的基本格局，謂語的構件屬性決定既定的「咾」或「囒」可換為另一變體的特殊情況。各項語法因素制約「了1」變體的作用強度存在一個優先等級「現實性狀況＞話語地位＞賓語類型＞動詞類型」。最重要的是，「了1」兩變體的分佈呈現出一個顯著的態勢：某語法環境中「了1」的句法自由度越高，則越排斥強變體「咾」、越接受弱變體「囒」。由此可對其他方言「了1」變體的分佈態勢提出多項理論預測，該現象也反映出北方漢語的「了1」是一個複雜的語法異質語素。本文「了1」的語法分析範式應有助於深入發掘漢語方言「了1」語素的事實，並推進對多項理論問題的認識。

Fake attributives in Chinese are the result of the interaction between syntax and prosody. For syntactic reasons, certain objects of complex verbal constructions and verbal quantifiers cannot be realized in situ; but they can be spelled out in some roundabout ways, one of which is to form fake attributives through de-insertion. In the forming process of fake attributives, the clitic de plays an important role, and de-insertion is frequently resorted to in facilitating the correspondence between the phonological structure and the syntactic structure, with the aim of ensuring meaning conveyance. It is concluded that fake attributives are initiated, to some extent, by mismatches between syntactic and phonological structure and derived when de is inserted to enhance their correspondence.

In this paper, some mysteries and asymmetries of the Chinese potential de construction are investigated. It is shown that a morphosytnactic approach is conducive to accounting for these puzzles. First we explore the possibility of taking de and its negative counterpart -bude as functional heads (cf. Tsai 2001; T. Wu 2004). It is proposed that bude could be a functional head with the negative potential (i.e. impossible/impermissible) meaning. This could be evidenced by both empirical data and theoretical deduction. It is argued that bu in V-bu-R, which is distinct from the normal pre-verbal negative morpheme bu, is actually bude. This helps to explain why the negative potential meaning is involved in V-bu-R. Meanwhile, V-de/bude and V-de/bu-R are both assumed to be formed through Morphological Merger (cf. Marantz 1988; Embick & Noyer 2001, 2007, etc.). Meanwhile, we have discussed some asymmetries observed between V-de/bude and V-de/bu-R and some paradigmatic asymmetries between potential V-de construction and its negative potential V-bude construction. It is assumed that these syntactic asymmetries may be due to some morphological operations related to de and bude.

It is controversial whether a classifier (C) or measure word (M) in Chinese forms a constituent first with Num (numeral) or N in a [Num C/M N] phrase. This paper reviews evidence for the [Num C/M] constituency from modern Chinese and then provides evidence from historical and typological perspectives. Under the [Num C/M] constituency, not only the C/M word orders attested in Chinese history, but also all those attested elsewhere, can be straightforwardly accounted for by the head parameter, while such simplicity is unattainable under the [C/M N] constituency. In addition, fresh evidence is obtained from the internal word order within a complex numeral; e.g. san-shi ‘30’ is base-final, with n (3) and base (10) entering into a multiplicative function, 3×10. The same multiplicative function exists between Num and C/M, e.g. san-duo hua ‘3 C flower’ = 3×1 flower, and san-da hua ‘3 dozen flower’ = 3×12 flower. C/M and bases are thus unified as multiplicands, an insight further supported by the consistent correlation between the base-final order and the C/M-final order throughout the history of Chinese. A closer examination of the 103 classifier languages in Greenberg (1990[1978]) further reveals that, among the 52 languages whose numeral systems and C/M word orders can be obtained, the synchronization between the numeral base and C/M is nearly universal. The base-C/M unification as multiplicands and base-C/M synchronization in word order strongly suggest that Num and C/M form a single constituent.

The current article offers a comparative account of the address system of two dialects of Arabic, Najdi and Tunisian Arabic. Capitalizing on the theory of Idealized Cognitive Model, the article defends the view that the two systems display Idealized models, which are central to the system, and non-Idealized models, which are peripheral to it. Najdi Arabic includes Idealized terms such as first names, teknonyms, and kinship terms while non-Idealized models include a battery of terms of address. Tunisian Arabic Idealized models hinge on Si/Lalla + first names, first names, and kinship terms while non-Idealized models make use of endeared first names, kinship terms, and diminished kinship terms. The two systems are shown to differ at the level of types of encounter (including formality, closeness, and deference), availability of address options, social horizontality-verticality, and use of metaphor and metonymy.

This paper is a study of how deaf children in Hong Kong acquire Chinese relative clauses. The relative clause is reported to be a difficult structure for deaf children (Friedmann & Szterman 2006). While it may be true for postnominal relative clauses, it is unclear whether prenominal relative clauses are equally difficult for deaf children. This paper explores this question by examining deaf children’s comprehension and production of Chinese relative clauses via an elicited production task, a picture selection task and a dots-connecting task, which are all presented in written format. In addition to deaf children, typically developing Cantonese children and Cantonese adults with high Chinese proficiency are also recruited for comparison. The results show that deaf children fall behind typically developing Cantonese children in production. But deaf children with higher Chinese proficiency can perform similarly with typically developing Cantonese children. The error types and the types of non-RC responses produced by deaf children are also present in the data of typically developing Cantonese children, suggesting that deaf children do not undergo a different pathway in the development of relative clauses. While typically developing Cantonese children demonstrate non-significant subject advantage in production but object advantage in comprehension, deaf children do not demonstrate subject-object asymmetry in production and object advantage in comprehension.

The word ‘maternal grandmother’ presents irregular modern forms in Tai languages. It is ta:jB1 in most Northern Tai (NT) varieties, ta:jA1 in most Central Tai (CT) varieties, na:jA2 in most Southwestern Tai (SWT) varieties, and ja:jA2 in Standard Thai. Li (1971) reconstructs the proto-form of this word as *na:jA , positing that the later forms changed by analogy with semantically similar words. This paper discusses two alternative hypotheses *ta:jA and *ta:jB , and argues that the proto-form was *ta:jB . The analysis indicates that the sound changes of this word in Tai languages are caused by the “contamination” in kinship terms with paired semantic contents in CT/SWT, and by dissimilation from the otherwise homophonous word ‘to die’ in SWT. As a result, the proto-form of ‘maternal grandmother’ *ta:jB is preserved in the vast majority of NT and a cluster of CT. In most CT/SWT the original *B tone changed to *A tone, and then in SWT the initial *t- underwent further change to *n- in order to avoid homophony with the taboo word ‘to die’. This issue of homophony arose only in this branch due to the merger of *t- and *tr- (or *p.t-). This proto-form *ta:jB is supported by historical evidence and other non-Tai languages in the Daic family. Other exceptional irregularities in some CT languages are also discussed as they are crucial to the determination of the *ta:jB hypothesis. Analogous examples from several Tai varieties also support the occurrence of aberrant development due to taboo avoidance.

The main aim of this study is to reconsider Tomioka’s (2007) pragmatic account of the lf-intervention effects (IE), and to claim that Polarity Sensitive Items (psis) are genuine syntactic interveners. I will examine the parallelism among psis in IE configurations, which is distinct from other interveners, and further claim that the study of IE should not be monolithic, but hybrid: Syntactic lf-interveners (psis), blocking scopal interactions/Pragmatic interveners, causing illegal information structures. The predictions will be borne out that psis actually cause IE in other contexts as well, which pragmatic accounts cannot explain (Funakoshi & Takahashi 2014). Such hybrid perspectives bring back enormous findings on IE (e.g. lf wh-movement) to the field of syntax, without relegating all of them to pragmatics.

Negative existentials containing empty NPs are understood colloquially as representing how things stand in the world. Moreover, utterances of such sentences seem to express propositions or thoughts that are informative and true. Standard static semantic theories cannot provide a straightforward account of these intuitive phenomena. In such frameworks, sentences with empty NPs are considered as being unable to express truth-evaluable contents. This paper investigates two alternative theories of negative existentials. A common feature of these theories is that they adopt a dynamic approach to meaning. I will argue that neither of these alternatives provides a reassuring solution to the apparent truth-conditional problem generated by the utterances of negative existentials.

Totemo in contemporary Japanese is a degree adverb (intensifier). Previous studies have reported that totemo derived from the adverb totemo kakutemo, which means ‘either way’ (and hence is a bipolar item) in classical Japanese. These studies also reported that totemo became a negative polarity item (an adverb modifying words for negative evaluation), but then shifted to a positive polarity item (an adverb modifying words for positive evaluation), and that counter-expectation factors played an important role in this shift. It is reported that the ‘say’-derived complementizer develops into a hearsay evidential marker, counter-expectation marker, and in some cases an intensifier (e.g. Wang et al. 2003) in some languages. Tote in classical Japanese is known as a ‘say’-derived complementizer, but it does not grammaticalize into an intensifier. This study maintains that the intensifier totemo also derived from the verb ‘say’ and the entire process of grammaticalization of totemo may be chronologized as follows: concessive use of quotative > concessive use of hearsay evidential > counter-expectation marker > intensifier. Thus, this study reveals the language-specific development of grammaticalization of the intensifier totemo. We also reveal that a reanalysis of the concessive subordinator and the elision of the complement clause preceding totemo as a sentence initial counter-expectation marker further gave rise to the sentence-medial parenthetical phrase (intensifier) totemo.

Beginning with publications in the early 1980s there have been attempts to use syntactic data to determine the highest-order subgroups of Austronesian. These efforts fall into two categories: those which claim that the voice affixes of Philippine-type languages originally had exclusively nominalizing functions, and those which claim that the affixes themselves were innovated after the separation of Rukai from the ancestor of all other Austronesian languages. Although these ideas lay dormant for some years, recently both have been revived in renewed efforts to show that the Austronesian family tree is not ‘rake-like’ in its highest nodes, but shows extensive embedding of subgroups that can be justified by successive layers of syntactic innovations. This paper questions the methodological soundness of both types of arguments on the grounds that they appeal to negative evidence, and logically any such appeal can do no better than reach an inference of indeterminate status rather than the positive conclusions that have been proposed.

English Profile (EP) is an ongoing empirical exploration of learner English initiated by Cambridge University Press and Cambridge English, among others. EP aims to create a set of empirically-based descriptions of language competencies for English. ‘Reference Level Descriptors’ already exist as part of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) but are intuitively derived and not designed for one specific language. The English Grammar Profile (EGP, www.englishprofile.org/english-grammar-profile) is a sub-project of EP which aims to profile learner competence in grammar. This paper details the rationale for the study and the methodology that was developed to investigate the Cambridge Learner Corpus to arrive at over 1,200 grammatical competence statements. Key findings which link to existing corpus-based second language acquisition work are also presented.

The Kenyah languages of central Borneo form a distinct unit within the North Sarawak group of Austronesian languages. In northern Sarawak there is a well-defined contrast between types that have been called ‘Highland Kenyah’ and ‘Lowland Kenyah’. A key difference between these sets of closely-related languages is the reflexes of Proto-North Sarawak/Proto-Kenyah *b, *d, *j, *g and *bh, *dh, *jh, *gh, which are distinguished (usually as b, d, j, g vs. p, t, c, k) in Highland Kenyah, but show a complex set of innovations in some varieties of Lowland Kenyah. The most striking of these changes in the dialect spoken by the Lebu’ Vu’ Kenyah at Long Sela’an and Long Ikang, and the Long Tikan Kenyah at Long San, is the shift of voiced aspirates to phonetic implosives that were generalized to the reflexes of *b, *d, *j, *g as final syllable onsets, leading to merger of the two series. Because it was conditioned, this merger produced complementation between [b]/[ɓ], [ɟ]/[ʄ], and [g]/[ɠ] (*d lenited before implosion was generalized, preventing merger). Most remarkably, the reduction of Proto-Kenyah nasal-obstruent clusters in these dialects has begun to produce new instances of [ɟ] and [g], but not [b] and [d], creating contrastive implosives only at palatal and velar positions, a reversal of the distributional preference commonly associated with implosive stops in cross-linguistic perspective.

The present study provides an overview of the quotative utterances made with itta (past form of iu ‘to say’) and itte ita (the combination of iu and the past form of the -te iru construction) in naturally occurring conversations in Japanese. The examination of approximately 13 hours of conversations shows that itta is used in 91.1% of first-person quotations (‘I said that…’). In second-person (‘you said that…’) and third-person (‘he/she said that…’) quotations, itte ita is used in 90.0%, and 77.3% of the cases, respectively. The present study argues that the high percentage of itte ita for second- and third-person quotative utterances is due to the fact that the -te iru construction, which is included in itte ita, is used as an evidential marker. The present study also analyzes the deviant cases from the dominant pattern (i.e. using itta for third-person utterances), and demonstrates how -te iru’s evidential function is utilized manipulatively in conversation.

This paper aims to investigate both Fagerli’s (2001) proposal that in serializing languages benefactive and malefactive constructions often involve the morpheme denoting ‘give’, and Radetzky & Smith’s (2010) proposal that East and South Asian languages often involve different morphemes or structures in expressing benefaction or malefaction. Checking the proposals against benefactive and malefactive constructions in Taiwan Southern Min (TSM) which involve optional benefactee and malefactee, this paper shows that both proposals find only partial support from TSM data. TSM uses the morpheme denoting ‘give’, i.e. hoo, in the malefactive construction involving optional malefactee, but not the benefactive construction involving optional benefactee, which involves the use of ka. Moreover, ka can also be used for introducing the malefactive. Even though the hoo malefactive construction and the ka benefactive construction have different structures, the constructions involving ka, no matter whether denoting benefaction or malefaction, have the same syntactic structure.

抽象 本文通過語法問卷和長篇語料收集到的材料，以甘洛縣則拉鄉爾蘇話為例，對爾蘇語體貌系統的主要表達手段及其之間的關係進行了探討。本文確定了爾蘇語體系統的核心部分（即完整體與非完整體的對立）以詞彙和派生手段（動詞和動詞前綴）構成。本文指出爾蘇語較次要體的類型（如經驗體等）依靠語法形式手段（體貌標記）表達。本文發現爾蘇語大多數體標記兼表體與示證的意義。最後，本文分別介紹了體貌系統的主要表達手段和相關語料依據。

Japanese wh-expressions appear in various kinds of operator-variable structures, including wh-questions and sentences with universal and existential quantification. The nature of the operator-variable relation is determined by an associated particle, such as the question marker ka or the universal particle mo. Given this, it has been widely assumed since Kuroda (1965) that the wh-expressions are to be interpreted as variables bound by those quantificational particles. This paper argues against this prevailing view by proposing that these wh-expressions are operators with unspecified quantificational force. Building on an insight by Nishigauchi (1990), I argue that they must covertly move to positions that allow them to probe particles and to acquire specific quantificational forces from them. I demonstrate that this analysis captures the main properties of Japanese wh-expressions as well as the differences between them and their Chinese counterparts. Huang (1982) proposed a covert movement analysis for argument wh-phrases in Chinese, which was extended to Japanese, for example, in Lasnik & Saito (1984) and Richards (2001). But Tsai (1999) has convincingly shown that they are subject to unselective binding and are interpreted in situ as variables. If the analysis for Japanese in this paper is correct, it shows that Huang’s approach can be – and should be – maintained for wh-phrases in Japanese with some refinements.

抽象 本文檢視漢語母語者、西班牙語母語者漢語初級及中高級學習者在理解具有不同生命性對比的名詞組之下的漢語主動賓句以及主題句時所採用的模式。結果發現在主動賓句方面，三組均將第一個名詞組當成施事、第二個名詞組當成受事（即 NVN 捷思法），而名詞生命性的對比影響不大。至於主題句的理解，漢語母語人士及中高級的學習者隨機猜測其中一個名詞組作為施事，而初級的學習者則多運用 NVN 捷思法處理之。這三組漢語使用者的理解模式，符應了語法優先假說：運用語法結構進行語句理解，雖然名詞組生命性的對比影響了主題句的理解，但其影響力未大過語法結構。

This study aims to investigate the rhetorical genre components and the pragmatic evaluation options used to articulate the communicative function of ArBR genre, and find out how these generic and evaluation options contrast with those reported in other languages and cultures. To this end, a corpus of 50 book reviews written by 50 Arab reviewers was collected and analyzed within the rhetorical components developed and applied by Motta-Roth (1998) to English book reviews. The present study drew on Hyland (2000), Gea Valor (2000–2001), Moreno and Suárez (2008a) and Alcaraz-Ariza (2010) in order to examine how the qualities of ArBRs are evaluated and in which terms (i.e., criticism or praise). The results indicated that the Arab reviewers employed additional sub-moves that have not been used by other researchers. Unlike English book reviewers, Arab reviewers try to avoid criticism. Instead, they usually devote most of their book reviews to describe and summarize uncritically although critical appraisal is supposed to be the backbone of this genre. These purposive generic component preferences and evaluation tendencies can be explained with reference to the goal of the academic community and the writing culture that constrain Arab reviewers' academic behavior. I hope that the results of this study will provide graduate students and novice researchers with further awareness of the acceptable generic strategies, the linguistic choices and pragmatic evaluative options that can be used to write an evaluation of a piece of research.

This paper investigates the sluicing-like constructions (SLCs) in Isbukun Bunun, a language which always places its wh-words at the left-peripheral position, and it is argued that genuine sluicing is not available in this language. The evidence in favor of the pseudo-sluicing analysis draws on the behavior of how-phrases, the failure of implicit discourse anaphoric arguments and the absence of sloppy identity reading in Isbukun SLCs. These properties are otherwise hard to accommodate in a movement and deletion approach but rather follow from the view that SLCs in Isbukun Bunun are derived from independent syntactic operations including pro-drop.

This paper argues that fragment question (FQ) in Mandarin Chinese is derived from topic movement and TP deletion, contributing to the growing body of evidence that sentence fragments are syntactically full clauses (Merchant 2004). Structurally, an FQ consists of a topic-like constituent followed by a particle ne, which functions as a topic marker and as a constituent question particle simultaneously. The fragment is argued to move to the SpecTopP rather than SpecFocP (Wei 2013), because FQ exhibits topic properties and respects island effects such as the complex NP island and the adjunct island. However, it is insensitive to islands such as the sentential subject island and left branch condition. We propose that the absence of island effect can be attributed to the pied-piping of the entire topic-like island to the SpecTopP. In addition, the proposed analysis not only captures the ineligible FQs caused by intervention effect within the passive structures but also the eligible FQs induced by preposition drop in the language.

Due to their largely non-routinized forms and their not being retrievable in computerised corpus searches, refusals have hitherto not been examined from a diachronic perspective. The present paper presents an inventory of refusal strategies in Early Modern English drama texts. Five comedies from two periods (1560–1599 and 1720–1760), respectively, taken from the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 (Kytö and Culpeper 2006) were examined manually and analysed qualitatively and quantitatively. The analysis lead to an alternative classification of refusals which differs considerably from the frequently used taxonomy by Beebe, Takahashi, and Uliss-Weltz (1990). The proposed classification takes into account three levels of analysis: the propositional content of the utterance, the functional super-strategy, and the speaker’s stance. The development of refusal within the period under investigation partially matches findings regarding related speech acts that show a development towards increased indirectness (Culpeper and Demmen 2011, Pakkala-Weckström 2008, Del Lungo Camiciotti 2008).