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The human mind has been described both as an emergent feature of dynamical neuronal networks, and as dependent on narrative structures. This chapter explores these two descriptions, and asks whether the irreducibly narrative representational techniques used both in popular science and literary fiction can accurately convey the systemic, nonconscious functions of the brainmind. Analysis of the use of narrative agency in David Eagleman’s popular-science book Incognito and Peter Watts’s science-fiction novel Blindsight suggests that, through the process of enacting a narrative representation, it might be possible for readers to gain a sense of the systemic functioning of their own brains, even when that systemic functioning is not being replicated in the representation as such.

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Publisher Copyright: © 2023 the author(s), published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston. All rights reserved. Reflexive language - the capacity of language to speak about itself - is unique to human languages; yet little is known of its use in actual dialogue. Fundamental features of language are manifest in dialogic speech and in lingua francas. Both are taken on board in this book, which radically widens our conception of reflexivity in discourse. Reflexivity, or metadiscourse, is central to successful communication. It is also vital in understanding academic argumentation, essential to academic self-understanding, and at the same time it has wide applications.

It is difficult for L2 English learners in general, and especially Chinese learners of English, to form idiomatic collocations. This article presents a comparison of the use of intensifier-verb collocations in English by native speaker students and Chinese ESL learners, paying particular attention to verbs which collocate with intensifiers. The data consisted of written production from three corpora: two of these are native English corpora: the British Academic Written English (BAWE) Corpus and Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP). The third one is a recently created Chinese Learner English corpus, Ten-thousand English Compositions of Chinese Learners (TECCL). Findings suggest that Chinese learners of English produce significantly more intensifier-verb collocations than native speaker students, but that their English attests a smaller variety of intensifier-verb collocations compared with the native speakers. Moreover, Chinese learners of English use the intensifier-verb collocation types just-verb, only-verb and really-verb very frequently compared with native speaker students. As regards verb collocates, the intensifiers hardly, clearly, well, strongly and deeply collocate with semantically different verbs in native and Chinese learner English. Compared with the patterns in Chinese learner English, the intensifiers in native speaker English collocate with a more stable and restricted set of verb collocates.

This paper reports on the outcomes of the comparative study on motivation of learners of English in further-education English Philology programme in Ukraine and Poland. The research aims to determine principle characteristics of intrinsic motivation, which is among the most effective personal management strategies and as such helps build appropriate L2 study skills. Alongside with inborn personality features, such as extraversion/introversion, such traits as conscientiousness, openness, risk-taking and self-efficacy are formed by sociocultural, and in some cases, historical factors. The students from Ukraine and Poland were chosen for the reason of similarities in historical development of the two countries, as well as relatively different ‘paths’ of development in the more recent period. Similarity and diversity factors retrieved from observation, interviews with students and answers to an open-ended questionnaire provided data which allows to determine the scale of influence of social and historical aspects on decision making and performance of the students alongside with their personal beliefs and expectations. The study also aimed to establish the connection between the systems of individual beliefs of the learners of both countries in the sphere of L2 learning. Niniejszy artykuł został poświęcony wynikom badania porównawczego motywacji osób uczących się języka angielskiego w toku dalszego kształcenia na Wydziale Filologii Angielskiej w Polsce i na Ukrainie. Celem badania jest określenie zasadniczych cech motywacji wewnętrznej, która z pewnością należy do najbardziej skutecznych osobistych strategii a dodatkowo pomaga ona rozwijać umiejętności potrzebne do opanowania języka obcego. Razem z wrodzonymi cechami osobowościowymi, takimi jak ekstrawersja lub introwersja, zdolnością do podejmowania ryzyka, samoefektywnością i innymi, takie cechy osobowości jak uczciwość, otwartość, zdolność do podejmowania ryzyka i inne, są kształtowane przez czynniki społeczno-kulturowe lub historyczne. Studenci z Polski i Ukrainy zostali wybrani ze względu na fakt, że podzielają pewne cechy historycznego rozwoju obu państw, a w pewnym momencie w historii najnowszej te drogi rozeszły się. Czynniki podobieństwa i odmienności sformułowane na podstawie danych uzyskanych z obserwacji, wywiadów, badań otwartego typu pozwoliły określić skalę wpływu aspektów społecznych i historycznych na zdolność do podejmowania decyzji oraz na inne cechy osobowościowe, a także na osobiste przekonania i oczekiwania. Moim celem jest ustalenie związku między systemami osobistych przekonań studentów obu krajów w dziedzinie nauki języka angielskiego jako języka obcego.

Human perception relies on chunking up an incoming information stream into smaller units to make sense of it. Evidence of chunking has been found across different domains, including visual events, music, and dance movement. It is largely uncontested that language processing must also proceed in smaller chunks of some kind. What these online chunks consist in is much less understood. In this paper, we propose that cognitively relevant chunks can be identified by crowdsourcing listener perceptions of chunk boundaries in real-time speech, even if the listeners are non-native speakers of the language. We present a paradigm in which experiment participants simultaneously listen to short extracts of authentic speech and mark chunk boundaries using a custom-built tablet application. We then test the internal validity of the method by measuring the extent to which fluent L2 listeners agree on chunk boundaries. To do this, we use three datasets collected within the paradigm and a suite of different statistical methods. The external validity of the method is studied in a separate paper and is briefly discussed at the end.

Chunking language has been proposed to be vital for comprehension enabling the extraction of meaning from a continuous stream of speech. However, neurocognitive mechanisms of chunking are poorly understood. The present study investigated neural correlates of chunk boundaries intuitively identified by listeners in natural speech drawn from linguistic corpora using magneto-and electroencephalography (MEEG). In a behavioral experiment, subjects marked chunk boundaries in the excerpts intuitively, which revealed highly consistent chunk boundary markings across the subjects. We next recorded brain activity to investigate whether chunk boundaries with high and medium agreement rates elicit distinct evoked responses compared to non-boundaries. Pauses placed at chunk boundaries elicited a closure positive shift with the sources over bilateral auditory cortices. In contrast, pauses placed within a chunk were perceived as interruptions and elicited a biphasic emitted potential with sources located in the bilateral primary and non-primary auditory areas with right-hemispheric dominance, and in the right inferior frontal cortex. Furthermore, pauses placed at stronger boundaries elicited earlier and more prominent activation over the left hemisphere suggesting that brain responses to chunk boundaries of natural speech can be modulated by the relative strength of different linguistic cues, such as syntactic structure and prosody.

Understanding the activities and preferences of visitors is crucial for managing protected areas and planning conservation strategies. Conservation culturomics promotes the use of user-generated online content in conservation science. Geotagged social media content is a unique source of in situ information on human presence and activities in nature. Photographs posted on social media platforms are a promising source of information, but analyzing large volumes of photographs manually remains laborious. We examined the application of state-of-the-art computer-vision methods to studying human-nature interactions. We used semantic clustering, scene classification, and object detection to automatically analyze photographs taken in Finnish national parks by domestic and international visitors. Our results showed that human-nature interactions can be extracted from user-generated photographs with computer vision. The different methods complemented each other by revealing broad visual themes related to level of the data set, landscape photogeneity, and human activities. Geotagged photographs revealed distinct regional profiles for national parks (e.g., preferences in landscapes and activities), which are potentially useful in park management. Photographic content differed between domestic and international visitors, which indicates differences in activities and preferences. Information extracted automatically from photographs can help identify preferences among diverse visitor groups, which can be used to create profiles of national parks for conservation marketing and to support conservation strategies that rely on public acceptance. The application of computer-vision methods to automatic content analysis of photographs should be explored further in conservation culturomics, particularly in combination with rich metadata available on social media platforms.Exploración de las Interacciones Humano-Naturaleza en los Parques Nacionales por Medio de Fotografías en Redes Sociales y Visión por Computadora Resumen La comprensión de las actividades y preferencias de los visitantes es crucial para el manejo de las áreas protegidas y la planeación de las estrategias de conservación. La culturomia de la conservación promueve el uso del contenido en línea generado por usuarios en las ciencias de la conservación. El contenido de redes sociales etiquetado geográficamente es una fuente única de información in situ sobre la presencia humana y sus actividades en la naturaleza. Las fotografías publicadas en las redes sociales son una fuente prometedora de información, aunque el análisis manual de grandes volúmenes de fotografías sigue siendo laborioso. Evaluamos la aplicación de algunos métodos de punta de visión por computadora para estudiar las interacciones humano-naturaleza. Usamos agrupaciones semánticas, clasificación de escenas y detección de objetos para analizar automáticamente las fotografías tomadas por visitantes domésticos e internacionales dentro de los parques nacionales finlandeses. Nuestros resultados mostraron que las interacciones humano-naturaleza pueden extraerse de fotografías generadas por usuarios mediante la visión por computadora. Los diferentes métodos se complementaron unos a otros al revelar temas visuales generalizados relacionados con el nivel del conjunto de datos, fotogeneidad del paisaje y las actividades humanas. Las fotografías geoetiquetadas revelaron unos perfiles regionales distintos para los parques nacionales (p. ej.: preferencias en los paisajes y las actividades), que son potencialmente útiles para el manejo de los parques. El contenido fotográfico difirió entre los visitantes domésticos y los internacionales, lo cual indica diferencias en sus actividades y preferencias. La información extraída automáticamente de las fotografías puede ayudar a identificar las preferencias entre los grupos diversos de visitantes, lo cual puede usarse para crear un perfil de cada parque nacional para su uso en el mercadeo de la conservación y para apoyar a las estrategias de conservación que dependen de la aceptación pública. La aplicación de los métodos de visión por computadora al análisis automático de contenido de las fotografías debería explorarse mucho más en la culturomia de la conservación, particularmente en combinación con la riqueza de metadatos disponibles en las plataformas sociales.了解游客的活动及喜好对保护区管理和保护策略的制定至关重要。保护文化组学提倡在保护科学中使用用户生成发布的在线内容, 而有地理标签的社交媒体内容正是人们在自然中出现和活动的现场信息的独特来源。虽然发布在社交媒体平台上的照片是潜在的信息来源, 但人工分析大量照片仍十分费力。本研究探索了最先进的计算机视觉方法在研究人与自然互动方面的应用。我们使用语义聚类、情景分类和目标检测等方法对国内外游客在芬兰国家公园拍摄的照片进行了自动分析, 结果表明可以用计算机视觉从用户生成发布的照片中提取人与自然的互动信息。不同方法通过揭示与数据集水平、景观摄影效果和人类活动相关的广泛的视觉主题而相互补充。带有地理标记的照片展示了国家公园不同区域的情况 (如人们对景观和活动的偏好), 这可以用于国家公园的管理。国内外游客摄影内容的差异也体现了他们活动内容和喜好的差异。从照片中自动提取的信息可以帮助确定不同游客群体的偏好, 这可以用来构建国家公园的资料以用于保护宣传, 还可以支持依赖于公众接受的保护策略。我们认为, 保护文化组学应进一步探索计算机视觉方法在自动分析照片内容中的应用, 特别是与社交媒体平台上丰富的元数据相结合。 [翻译: 胡怡思; 审校: 聂永刚].

While intensifiers are primarily associated with informal spoken registers, they serve important interpersonal functions also in more formal registers like academic prose. The use of intensifiers in scientific writing has accordingly been explored in Present-Day English, and previous studies have also investigated diachronic changes in this register in Middle and Early Modern English. However, the Late Modern English period remains largely unexplored, despite the fact that at least in medical writing it represents an important transition period both intellectually and textually. To follow up on the trends and developments established in previous work, this paper explores the patterns of intensification in eighteenth century medical writing using Late Modern English Medical Texts (LMEMT; Taavitsainen et al. 2019), which contains a large collection of texts representing different areas of medicine. While the intensifiers that are selected for study are ubiquitous in the data, their frequency varies considerably between individual texts, and this variation is often linked to the characteristics of individual sub-registers. At the same time, the use of intensifiers in this period is characterized by stability rather than dramatic change, despite ongoing changes in the sociocultural context of medicine. Along with providing a detailed investigation of the frequency of the main intensifiers in different categories of medical writing of the period, the analysis describes their co-selection patterns with particular adjectives.

This is a review of an interesting new book on emotions, How Emotions Are Made in Talk, edited by Jessica S. Robles and Ann Weatherall in 2021. It was published on Linguist List on 18 May 2022. Non

In the Nordic countries, widespread proficiency in English is positioned as a positive and even critical component of overall global competitiveness and competence. Indeed, maps illustrating who speaks the “best” English in Europe show a swath across the Nordic countries, and the number of people in the Nordic countries claiming proficiency in English is only a few percentage points below those in places such as the UK and Ireland. At the same time, the Nordic countries are routinely listed as the “happiest,” the most egalitarian, the most classless, least corrupt, and an epicenter for so-called “tender values.” In recent years, there has been a spate of publications highlighting how Nordic exceptionalism carries with it some unfortunate downsides, including the possibility for people to ignore or fail to acknowledge issues such as racism, sexism, and other social inequalities because of the affordance: “But our society is equal.” There is a parallel in the use of English. The entrenched notion that “everyone is good at English” overlooks that certain segments of the population—such as the elderly, immigrants and rural inhabitants—do not have the same level of access to the symbolic capital represented through facility in English. In this sense, the use of English presents social/class-based barriers that the national languages do not. This article offers a critique of the social realities relating to the use of English in the Nordic Countries within the context of the social welfare system and “Nordic exceptionalism,” focusing mostly on Finland. Making use of examples of discourse in newspapers, previous research and language policy documents, the chapter highlights how aspects of the use of English in Finland parallel other potentially hyped yet unequitable social issues.

Phoenix Alexander is the Science Fiction Collections Librarian at the University of Liverpool, Special Collections and Archives.

“Democratization” and “gender-neutrality” are two concepts commonly used in recent studies on language variation. While both concepts link linguistic phenomena to sociocultural changes, the extent to which they overlap and/or interact has not been studied in detail. In particular, not much is known about how linguistic changes related to democratization and gender-neutrality spread across registers or varieties of English, as well as whether speakers are aware of the changes that are taking place. In this paper we review the main theoretical issues regarding these concepts and relate them to the main findings in the articles in this issue, all of which study lexical and grammatical variation from a corpus-based perspective. Taken together, they help unveil some of the conscious and unconscious mechanisms that operate at the interface between democratization and gender-neutrality.

This article explicates the eighteenth-century English concept of “chastity” through analyzing the noun chastity, the adjective chaste and the adverb chastely in the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts 3.1. Nine prominent characteristics of “chastity” are examined to arrive at an explication of “sexual chastity”. Firstly, chastity was considered (1) a virtue. Secondly, it often meant (2) virginity or complete abstinence from sex. However, it also referred to (3) marital love. Eighteenth-century authors were more prone to discuss (4) women’s than men’s chastity. Metaphorically, chastity was considered a (5) valuable commodity, and it was discussed in terms of (6) attack and defence, and of (7) purity. Chastity was supposed to characterize a person’s (8) acts, behaviour, and comportment. The understanding of these characteristics had (9) religious underpinnings.

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This paper investigates the use and functions of lexical cohesion within and across modes as well as levels of interaction on a YouTube channel, arguing that lexical cohesion contributes to coherence by establishing links between the video, the comments and sources elsewhere on the internet in a cross-modal and intertextual manner. The analysis focuses on one video and its comments section, investigating the use of cohesion in maintaining coherence and unity across a lengthy YouTube interaction initiated by the video and continued in the comments. Cohesive ties are examined with regard to their functions in the process of meaning-making in this mediated and multimodal context. The results reveal that the use of cohesive ties is extensive within and across modes and levels of interaction. Chains of cohesion are created within the comments, with cross-modal links to the video. Despite the complex multimodality of YouTube and the fragmentation of the comments as many participants post short comments one after another, the YouTube interaction is shown to be coherent. (c) 2021 The Author. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Twenty-first-century fiction continues to examine the ontological instabilities of postmodernism. But even as they hold on to the idea of multiple realities, these works also aim to change the tone with which that idea is represented. This article analyzes Catherynne M. Valente's Radiance (2015), a novel which thematizes the unstable ontologies that Brian McHale describes through the metaphor of flickering. By adding embodied and communicative dimensions to the postmodernist imaginary, Valente's novel rethinks what the metaphor of flickering could mean and what effects ontological groundlessness can have on readers. The article connects these literary phenomena to the theories of enactive cognition, and suggests that enactive theory, just like Valente's reinterpretation of postmodern flickering, provides a sense of the world having strange agency as well as lacking proper solidity. Thus contemplating our perception of reality is eerie in the sense proposed by Mark Fisher, a term that provides a new grip on the experience of unstable ontology.

This article introduces AI2D-RST, a multimodal corpus of 1000 English-language diagrams that represent topics in primary school natural sciences, such as food webs, life cycles, moon phases and human physiology. The corpus is based on the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence Diagrams (AI2D) dataset, a collection of diagrams with crowd-sourced descriptions, which was originally developed to support research on automatic diagram understanding and visual question answering. Building on the segmentation of diagram layouts in AI2D, the AI2D-RST corpus presents a new multi-layer annotation schema that provides a rich description of their multimodal structure. Annotated by trained experts, the layers describe (1) the grouping of diagram elements into perceptual units, (2) the connections set up by diagrammatic elements such as arrows and lines, and (3) the discourse relations between diagram elements, which are described using Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). Each annotation layer in AI2D-RST is represented using a graph. The corpus is freely available for research and teaching., Comment: 24 pages; revised version submitted to Language Resources & Evaluation

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Empirical work on English historical corpus linguistics is plentiful but fragmented, and some of it is hard to come by. This paper proposes a solution for making it more accessible and reusable for meta-analysis. We present an online Language Change Database (LCD), which provides comparative, real-time baseline data from earlier corpus-based studies. LCD entries summarize the findings and include numerical data from the articles. We discuss the LCD from the perspective of database design and linked data management. Furthermore, we illustrate the reuse of LCD data through a meta-analysis of the history of English connectives. For this purpose, we have developed an application called the LCD Aggregated Data Analysis workbench (LADA). We show how researchers can use LADA to filter, refine and visualize LCD data. Thus we are paving the way for a future where both research results and research data are regularly available for verification, validation and re-use.

This paper describes ongoing work towards a rich analysis of the social contexts of neologism use in historical corpora, in particular the Corpora of Early English Correspondence, with research questions concerning the innovators, meanings and diffusion of neologisms. To enable this kind of study, we are developing new processes, tools and ways of combining data from different sources, including the Oxford English Dictionary, the Historical Thesaurus, and contemporary published texts. Comparing neologism candidates across these sources is complicated by the large amount of spelling variation. To make the issues tractable, we start from case studies of individual suffixes (-ity, -er) and people (Thomas Twining). By developing tools aiding these studies, we build toward more general analyses. Our aim is to develop an open-source environment where information on neologism candidates is gathered from a variety of algorithms and sources, pooled, and presented to a human evaluator for verification and exploration.

This article examines the subjective aesthetic criteria used to assess two Finnish translations of Hamlet, one by Eeva-Liisa Manner (1981) and the other by Matti Rossi (2013), both accomplished translators for the stage. A survey consisting of one general question (“Briefly describe your idea of how Shakespeare translation should sound in Finnish, and what you think are the qualities of a good Shakespeare translation”) and five text extracts was distributed on paper and electronically, generating 50 responses. For the extracts, respondents were asked whether one or the other translation most closely dorresponded to their idea of what a Shakespeare translation should sound like and why, along with questions on whether they would prefer to see or read one or the other. The results show that there are no strong shared expectancy norms in Finland regarding Shakespeare translation. Manner was generally felt to be more concise and poetic, while Rossi was praised for his exquisite use of modern Finnish. Respondents agreed that rhythm was an important criterion, but disagreed on what sorts of rhythms they preferred. Translation of the “to be or not to be” speech raised the most passions, with many strongly preferring Manner’s more traditional translation. The results suggest that Shakespeare scholars would do well to take variations in expectancy norms into account when assessing and analysing Shakespeare in translation.

This chapter posits the schizoid nondroid as a figurative concept connecting developments in environmental technologies, posthuman traumatic materialism, and contemporary surveillance capitalism. Schizoid nondroids are shown to consists of cognitive assemblages wielding surveillance capitalist powers, restricting cognizers’ freedom of participation and harboring the potential for trauma as bodies and networked technologies become intertwined. Through the analysis of two contemporary novels, Dave Egger’s dystopian satire The Circle (2013) and Malka Older’s science-fiction novel Infomocracy (2016), schizoid nondroids are revealed to extract data, labor, and compliance from their constituents in order to drive profits and make leaving the exploitative assemblages impossible. These fictions of surveillance capitalism are revealed to offer a fruitful starting point for considering the interfacing of bodies and technology, a central feature of the contemporary condition of living with environmental technologies.

International audience; Understanding compositional practices is a major goal of musicology and music theory. Compositional practices have been traditionally viewed as disembodied and idiosyncratic. This view makes it hard to integrate musical creativity into our understanding of the general cognitive processes underlying meaning construction. To overcome this unnecessary isolation of musical composition from cognitive science, in this conceptual analysis, we approach compositional processes with the analytic tools of blending theory, material anchoring, and enaction. Our case study is Iannis Xenakis’ use of sieves for distributing rhythmic patterns in Psappha . Though disregarded in previous accounts, the timeline and the gearwheel provide crucial conceptual templates for anchoring Xenakis’ idea of time for this score. This case study of conceptual integration templates for temporal representation seeks to gain insight into musical creativity, embodiment, and blending, especially into how virtual interactions with material structures facilitate the construction of complex meanings.

The material for this paper comes from Finnish people who wrote about their experiences of the music of digital games. We collected 184 texts, all but one written in Finnish. There is relatively little code-switching into English at the clause level, but the vocabulary of the texts is influenced by English on a continuum from clearly English words such as comfy to established loanwords such as uniikki (‘unique’). We will consider how the influence of the English language used both in the games and in discussions about them characterizes the vocabulary of these texts and how the English language enables the authors to enter the game world. peerReviewed

Special issue, Challenges of Combining Structured and Unstructured Data in Corpus Development, ed. by Tanja Säily & Jukka Tyrkkö. This paper discusses the process of part-of-speech tagging the Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension (CEECE), as well as the end result. The process involved normalisation of historical spelling variation, conversion from a legacy format into TEI-XML, and finally, tokenisation and tagging by the CLAWS software. At each stage, we had to face and work around problems such as whether to retain original spelling variants in corpus markup, how to implement overlapping hierarchies in XML, and how to calculate the accuracy of tagging in a way that acknowledges errors in tokenisation. The final tagged corpus is estimated to have an accuracy of 94.5 per cent (in the C7 tagset), which is circa two percentage points (pp) lower than that of present-day corpora but respectable for Late Modern English. The most accurate tag groups include pronouns and numerals, whereas adjectives and adverbs are among the least accurate. Normalisation increased the overall accuracy of tagging by circa 3.7pp. The combination of POS tagging and social metadata will make the corpus attractive to linguists interested in the interplay between language-internal and -external factors affecting variation and change.

In their target article, Charity Hudley, Mallinson, and Bucholtz (2020) have raised several issues and suggestions relating to improving racial equality within the scientific field of linguistics. While accepting the general premises of the authors' original article, this response piece offers reasons and suggestions for expanding the scope of the authors' original aims to apply to a broader, global audience. Four main issues are raised as justification and also as measures for expanding the call to action. These are: (i) the fact that the Linguistic Society of America is the flagship linguistics organization not just for US linguists, but for linguists throughout the world; (ii) the global influence and, in association, the responsibility placed on US and North American linguists to serve as trailblazers in our field; (iii) the applicability of the authors' suggestions within different academic settings, and what can be learned from cross-fertilization of ideas across different communities; and (iv) the critical role of English as a vehicle for spreading not only knowledge about linguistics, but also harmful ideologies about race, class, and ethnicity.

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This paper explores multilingual language contact in seemingly unrelated settings: translation and English as a lingua franca, also touching on learner language. By delving into similar processes in these settings at three levels – the macro level of a language as a whole, the intermediate level of social interaction, and the micro level of cognition – it argues that translation and ELF are sites of multilingual contact resulting in a degree of hybridization in the languages involved, and thereby important drivers of language change. It is suggested that macro-level similarities in translation and ELF, such as the relative overrepresentation of high-frequency items and structures and untypical multi-word combinations ensue from interactional and cognitive processes where one fundamental mechanism is priming. Translations engage in cross-linguistic textual priming, while users of ELF interact with other ‘similects’ in complex second-order language contact. Both can contribute crucially to understanding processes of change and contact-induced variation.

In this paper, we explore the rate of language change in the history of English. Our main focus is on detecting periods of accelerated change in Middle English (1150–1500), but we also compare the Middle English data with the Early Modern period (1500–1700) in order to establish a longer diachrony for the pace at which English has changed over time. Our study is based on a meta-analysis of existing corpus research, which is made available through a new linguistic resource, the Language Change Database (LCD). By aggregating the rates of 44 individual changes, we provide a critical assessment of how well the theory of punctuated equilibria (Dixon, Robert M. W. 1997. The rise and fall of languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) fits with our results. More specifically, by comparing the rate of language change with major language-external events, such as the Norman Conquest and the Black Death, we provide the first corpus-based meta-analysis of whether these events, which had significant societal consequences, also had an impact on the rate of language change. Our results indicate that major changes in the rate of linguistic change in the late medieval period could indeed be connected to the social and cultural after-effects of the Norman Conquest. We also make a methodological contribution to the field of English historical linguistics: by re-using data from existing research, linguists can start to ask new, fundamental questions about the ways in which language change progresses.

Parks and other green spaces are an important part of sustainable, healthy and socially equal urban environment. Urban planning and green space management benefit from information about green space use and values, but such data are often scarce and laborious to collect. Temporally dynamic geographic information generated by different mobile devices and social media platforms are a promising source of data for studying green spaces. User-generated data have, however, platform specific characteristics that limit their potential use. In this article, we compare the ability of different user-generated data sets to provide information on where, when and how people use and value urban green spaces. We compare four types of data: social media, sports tracking, mobile phone operator and public participation geographic information systems (PPGIS) data in a case study from Helsinki, Finland. Our results show that user-generated geographic information sources provide useful insights about being in, moving through and perceiving urban green spaces, as long as evident limitations and sample biases are acknowledged. Social media data highlight patterns of leisure time activities and allow further content analysis. Sports tracking data and mobile phone data capture green space use at different times of the day, including commuting through the parks. PPGIS studies allow asking specific questions from active participants, but might be limited in spatial and temporal extent. Combining information from multiple user-generated data sets complements traditional data sources and provides a more comprehensive understanding of green space use and preferences.

The term democratization has been used in recent linguistic research to describe how specific linguistic changes can be linked to changes in sociocultural norms. This broad definition, however, does not fully capture the essence of this phenomenon or explain how it differs from other processes of language change. Other key issues in this area of research include what the cause-effect relationship is between linguistic change and social change, and how empirical corpus linguistic studies can contribute to current knowledge. In this opening contribution to the special issue New perspectives on democratization: Evidence from English(es), we address some of these key issues by reviewing previous synchronic and diachronic work studies on democratization in different varieties of English, and introduce new studies that take evidence from different linguistic corpora. By placing the linguistic changes into their specific socio-historical contexts, these studies yield interesting results, showing that variationist linguistic methodology may significantly contribute to disentangling the complex relationship between language change and social and societal changes. (C) 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd.

This issue of the Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics aims to contribute to our understanding of language change in real time by presenting a group of articles particularly focused on social and sociocultural factors underlying language diversification and change. By analysing data from a varied set of languages, including Greek, English, and the Finnic and Mongolic language families, and mainly focussing their investigation on the Middle Ages, the authors connect various social and cultural factors with the specific topic of the issue, the rate of linguistic change. The sociolinguistic themes addressed include community and population size, conflict and conquest, migration and mobility, bi- and multilingualism, diglossia and standardization. In this introduction, the field of comparative historical sociolinguistics is considered a cross-disciplinary enterprise with a sociolinguistic agenda at the crossroads of contact linguistics, historical comparative linguistics and linguistic typology.