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A City of Sadness (1989) is a groundbreaking Taiwan film classic directed by Hou Hsiao-Hsien. This research paper aims to comment on and contribute to academic discussions of the film by investigating the performance of Chinese poetics in Liao Ching-Song's editing. Using an inverted sequence of the February 28 Incident as an example, this paper explores the film editor's cultural discourse of Du Fu's influence on his own Qi-Yun editing method that he employed to edit the sequence. Through dialogues between the ancient and the contemporary, poetics and narratives, subjectivity and objectivity, as well as the theories of Roman Jakobson, Wai-lim Yip, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and David Bordwell, this paper provides a fresh perspective for re-examining the once harshly criticised method of cinematic ellipses in the film, reaffirming the film's aesthetic function of allowing audiences to re-access a past obliterated from modern Taiwanese history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Call a quantifier 'unrestricted' if it ranges over absolutely all objects. Arguably, unrestricted quantification is often presupposed in philosophical inquiry. However, developing a semantic theory that vindicates unrestricted quantification proves rather difficult, at least as long as we formulate our semantic theory within a classical first-order language. It has been argued that using a type theory as framework for our semantic theory provides a resolution of this problem, at least if a broadly Fregean interpretation of type theory is assumed. However, the intelligibility of this interpretation has been questioned. In this paper I introduce a type-free theory of properties that can also be used to vindicate unrestricted quantification. This alternative emerges very naturally by reflecting on the features on which the type-theoretic solution of the problem of unrestricted quantification relies. Although this alternative theory is formulated in a non-classical logic, it preserves the deductive strength of classical strict type theory in a natural way. The ideas developed in this paper make crucial use of Russell's notion of range of significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of nondeterministic typical hesitant fuzzy automata is a generalization of the fuzzy automata presented by Costa and Bedregal. This paper, presents the sufficient and necessary conditions for a typical hesitant fuzzy language to be computed by nondeterministic typical hesitant fuzzy automata. Besides, the paper introduces a new class of typical hesitant fuzzy automata with crisp transitions, and we will show that this new class is equivalent to the original class introduced by Costa and Bedregal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses error rates in the congruent attribute in texts written by students learning Slovak as a foreign language. The material, which was qualitatively analysed, comes from the pilot version of the learner corpus errkorp-pilot. The paper defines the most common types of errors in the congruent attribute and interprets the causes of their origin. The most common errors include the wrong congruence with the grammatical gender and with the case of the defining noun. Errors are usually caused by the following factors: transfer from the L1 language, excessive generalization of the rule in the target language, or insufficient knowledge of the grammatical rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with the possibility of creating a paremiological optimum for students of Czech as a foreign language. The selection of proverbs should reflect the frequency, familiarity with and use of proverbs. The study focuses on the most frequent proverbs in written Czech, using contemporary idiomatically annotated corpora. On this basis, our own minimum was created. The paper compares the results with previous studies on the paremiological minima of Czech (Schindler 1993 and Čermák 2003) and shows the intersection of all three minima. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to systematize the political practice of three initiatives related to the concept of plain language on the Latin-American legislative arena. On the one hand, I explore part of literature on legislative studies to account for one of the communicative limits faced by legislation (Xanthaki, 2010, 2019) and on the other, present the instrumental nature of plain language to overcome this limit and achieve the widest possible dissemination of legislative messages for lay audiences. The work is based on a descriptive-analytical review of three public initiatives that inhabit three Latin America countries that, in turn, have in common a collective phenomenon called «Plain Language Networks». These Networks involve the parliaments of each country, and they are implementing (or have implemented) a very similar initiative: 'Ley Fácil' (Chile), 'Ley Simple' (Argentina) and 'La ley en tu lenguaje' (Uruguay). The paper draws, methodologically, on the results of a questionnaire sent to those responsible for the three initiatives, designed to understand their implementation in greater depth. Arguably, the initiatives are aimed and are framed by principles of open parliament, institutional strengthening, transparency, trust, and citizen participatory; my argument is that Ley Fácil ('Eays Law' (Chile)), Ley Simple ('Simple Law' (Argentina)) and La Ley en tu lenguaje ('Law in your Language' (Uruguay)) are, essentially, political pedagogy tools to increase the «ability of people to (i) access and (ii) understand the laws that govern their lives» (Roznai & Mordechay, 2016). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Last year, 2022, marked the 50th anniversary of the Rescorla-Wagner learning equations – a landmark in the development of learning theory. Originally based on animal learning, the equations and error-driven learning models as a whole were rapidly adopted and applied in several areas of human psychology. While language acquisition research initially took a different path, interest in the role of error-driven learning in language is growing. With the aim of strengthening this emerging research field, sparking discussion and cross-fertilisation of ideas across linguistics, psychology and cognate fields, this Special Issue presents nine papers that address the role of error-driven learning in language. The papers investigate a wide range of subfields of linguistics, and include two review articles, in addition to computational modelling and experimental research. The collection thus serves both as an introduction for those new to the subject and as an overview for those already working in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with monitoring the extent to which the Arabic language keeps pace with the development of civilization In addition to that, it also attempts to highlight the most important mechanisms and principles that the Arabic language has in its linguistic system, which allows it to generate and produce expressive vocabulary in an easy and smooth manner. Our paper also aims to measure the extent of the effectiveness and efficiency of linguistic generation mechanisms in making the Arabic language a language that keeps pace with the development of civilization. In addition to the foregoing, our paper is based on a number of overlapping questions that we present successively as follows: • To what extent does the Arabic language keep pace with the development of the times? • What are the most prominent principles and mechanisms adopted by the Arabic language in the process of producing its expressive words? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Continued professional development (CPD) is required for updated skills and knowledge. This study evaluates the efficacy of a CPD programme for mainstream school teachers. Aims: In an 11‐week intervention programme, speech–language therapists (SLTs) presented the participating teachers with whole‐class teaching techniques aimed at creating a language and communication‐supporting classroom environment. The effects of the intervention on the language development of the students in the teachers' classes were assessed. Methods & Procedures: A total of 211 first‐ and second‐year students (Mage = 7;6, range = 6;5–8;9) underwent standardized language assessments of receptive and expressive language abilities before and after their teachers' participation in the CPD. The students were divided into intervention and delayed intervention groups to enable randomized intervention allocation. Linear mixed modelling was used to estimate the individual and interaction effects of group, time and demographic factors. Outcomes & Results: Significant effects of time, group and school, respectively, but no interaction between time and group indicates that while all students advanced between assessments, the progress was not attributable to the teachers' participation in the CPD. Conclusions & Implications: Results are discussed in light of those of recent studies of universal services to support optimal language development. WHAT THIS PAPER ADDS: What is already known on this subject: Although inconclusive, previous research indicates that intervention delivered to teachers by SLTs has the potential to improve the language abilities of the students in the teachers' classrooms. What this paper adds to existing knowledge: This study explored the language development of first‐ and second‐year mainstream school students whose teachers took part in a CPD programme aimed at establishing language and communication‐supporting teaching techniques. Results indicate that the development of the students' language abilities could not be attributed to the teachers' participation in the CPD. What are the potential or actual implications of the work?: SLTs are often asked to guide teachers and teaching staff rather than themselves conduct individual assessments and interventions. The results of this trial can be used to inform the discussion on how to prioritize between tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research question of the present paper is the following: to what degree (if any) is gender relevant as an explanatory factor in, firstly, the process of assimilation and later, the process of (re)vitalisation of indigenous and minority languages in northern Fenno-Scandia (the North Calotte)? The assimilation of the ethnic groups in question was a process initiated and lead by the authorities in the three different countries. Finland, Sweden and Norway. Nevertheless, members of the indigenous and minority groups also took part in practicing, though, not necessarily promoting, the official assimilation politics, for different reasons. (Re)vitalisation, on the other hand, was initially – and still is – mostly a process stemming from the minority groups themselves, though the authorities to a certain extent have embraced it. The paper thus addresses the question of whether gender played a role in the two different processes, assimilation and (re)vitalisation, and if that was the case, how and why. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article announces the 2011 Promising Researcher Award Competition which is open to individuals completing dissertations, theses or independent studies between December 1, 2008 and January 31, 2011 with topics relative to English teaching and language arts.

Language has a fundamentally social function. Processes of human interaction along with domain-general cognitive processes shape the structure and knowledge of language. Recent research in the cognitive sciences has demonstrated that patterns of use strongly affect how language is acquired, is used, and changes. These processes are not independent of one another but are facets of the same complex adaptive system (CAS). Language as a CAS involves the following key features: The system consists of multiple agents (the speakers in the speech community) interacting with one another. The system is adaptive; that is, speakers’ behavior is based on their past interactions, and current and past interactions together feed forward into future behavior. A speaker's behavior is the consequence of competing factors ranging from perceptual constraints to social motivations. The structures of language emerge from interrelated patterns of experience, social interaction, and cognitive mechanisms. The CAS approach reveals commonalities in many areas of language research, including first and second language acquisition, historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, language evolution, and computational modeling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This discussion attends to the way the author addresses issues of bilingualism, multiple self-states, primary nonverbal attachments, and the complexity of countertransference identifications in a treatment with several overlapping language worlds. Language or rather speech practice is considered as a carrier of object ties, as a repository of affect and unconscious meaning. I approach Hill's clinical report by thinking about how Hill situates aspects of identity within particular language worlds. Why exactly is it that language demarcates identity, the distinctions of self and other, and the positioning of identity in history so acutely? We see that language has amazing constitutive power in this case, a case where language and attachment, language and early loss, language and traumatic memory, and language and development are so intertwined. This discussion also takes on the author's use of her countertransference and her dream material illuminate conflicts and ruptures in a treatment with a French-speaking patient. Various theories of language and the philosophy of language as well as attachment theory are used to examine the dynamics and processes in Sarah Hill's case. I consider also the role of a lost language world in the analyst's early childhood may have pressed powerfully on the treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the indigenous oral life narratives. It states that a core in collaborative indigenous life writing is how spoken words are written. Equally important are the efforts to present Indigenous narratives in a visual form that will facilitate their re-speaking. According to the author, collaborative life writing, bringing spoken word to written page and setting Indigenous lives and narratives on the line, carries story forward, the same story transformed, yet working, and shaping lives in every new telling.

In four experiments we explored processes underlying L2 gender retrieval. We focused on L1 interference and on the influence of the L2 nouns termination. In Experiments 1 and 2 we tried to manipulate the intensity of L1 interference. We found that L2 speakers cannot eliminate or substantially reduce the interlingual interference neither when they know the response language long in advance in a situation in which code-switching is required (Experiment 1), nor when they are close to the monolingual mode (Experiment 2). Experiments 3 and 4 yielded evidence that gender typicality of the L2 nouns termination also exerts an influence on L2 processing, both in production and comprehension. L2 gender thus does not seem to be stored as a fixed feature as it is assumed for L1. Rather, our data support the assumption that it is computed anew each time when needed for processing. Further implications for modeling are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This selection unpacks scientific prose and claim substantiation for Nobel Prize winner, Stan Prusiner, in the transmissible spongiform encephlopathies field (i.e., mad cow disease). Applying linguistic strategies such as M. A. K. Halliday's"favorite clause type,"the author examines argumentative strategies in dense scientific prose both in bold and cautious rhetorical styles and invented lexical changes in new scientific development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fact that early lexical and grammatical acquisition are strongly correlated has been cited as evidence against the view that the language faculty is composed of dissociable and autonomous modules ( ). However, previous studies have not yet eliminated the possibility that lexical–grammar associations may be attributable to language-general individual differences (e.g. children who are good at learning words are good at learning grammar). Parent report assessments of toddlers who are simultaneously learning English and Spanish (n  = 113) allow an examination of the specificity of lexical–grammar relationships while holding child factors constant. Within-language vocabulary–grammar associations were stronger than cross-language relationships, even after controlling for age, proportion of language exposure, general language skill and reporter bias. Similar patterns were found based on naturalistic language samples (n  = 22), ruling out a methodological artifact. These results are consistent with the view that grammar learning is specifically tied to lexical progress in a given language and provide further support for strong lexical–grammatical continuity early in acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Machine translation for low-resource languages poses significant challenges, primarily due to the limited availability of data. In recent years, unsupervised learning has emerged as a promising approach to overcome this issue by aiming to learn translations between languages without depending on parallel data. A wide range of methods have been proposed in the literature to address this complex problem. This paper presents an in-depth investigation of semi-supervised neural machine translation specifically focusing on translating Arabic dialects, particularly Egyptian, to Modern Standard Arabic. The study employs two distinct datasets: one parallel dataset containing aligned sentences in both dialects, and a monolingual dataset where the source dialect is not directly connected to the target language in the training data. Three different translation systems are explored in this study. The first is an attention-based sequence-to-sequence model that benefits from the shared vocabulary between the Egyptian dialect and Modern Arabic to learn word embeddings. The second is an unsupervised transformer model that depends solely on monolingual data, without any parallel data. The third system starts with the parallel dataset for an initial supervised learning phase and then incorporates the monolingual data during the training process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews 26 reports into deaths and serious abuse of children in families who were subject to the No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF) rule. Our analysis illustrates vulnerabilities caused by exclusionary policies, exacerbating social deprivation and isolation experienced by the children and families and making it more difficult for professionals to respond in ways which safeguarded children's welfare. Drawing upon a social model for protecting children that requires recognition of the social determinants of harm and the economic, social and cultural barriers faced by families, we examine the experiences of children and families with NRPF who were the subject of a serious case review, and the responses of agencies responsible for safeguarding child welfare. We conclude with recommendations for practices aimed at promoting the rights and well‐being of children and families subject to NRPF rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how three cognitive and perceptual cues, vocal iconicity, resemblance-based mappings between form and meaning, and segment position and lexical stress, interact to affect word formation and language processing. The study combines an analysis of the word-internal positions that iconic segments occur in based on data from 245 language families with an experimental study in which participants representing more than 30 languages rated iconic and non-iconic pseudowords. The pseudowords were designed to systematically vary segment and stress placement across syllables. The results for study 1 indicate that segments used iconically appear approximately 0.26 segment positions closer toward the beginning of words compared to non-iconic segments. In study 2, it was found that iconic segments occurring in stressed syllables and non-iconic segments occurring in the second syllable were rated as significantly more fitting. These findings suggest that the interplay between vocal iconicity and prominence effects increases the predictive function of iconic segments by foregrounding sounds, which intrinsically carry semantic information. Consequently, these results contribute to the understanding of the widespread occurrence of vocal iconicity in human languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online activities have spiked due to the COVID-19 pandemic, including language learning activities. As the world is aging, this affects senior citizens too. Yet, few studies have been conducted studying online (language) learning in this age-group. Moreover, no concrete pointers exist on how to go about such an online language learning course. This paper examines what should be considered when designing and implementing online language learning courses for seniors. To that end we present data from 73 senior language learners from two independent language learning contexts: the Netherlands and Scotland. The data were collected between May 2020 and August 2021. Data includes spoken and written samples from lessons, focus groups, interviews and questionnaires. Given the qualitative nature of the data and the aim of identifying patterns of meaning across the respective datasets, a reflexive thematic analysis (TA) approach was adopted. We employed an inductive approach to coding, using both semantic (explicit or overt) and latent (implicit, underlying) coding frameworks, in order to inform two overarching themes: "Navigating the digital highway" and "Camera ready for new friends." We discuss these themes and their sub-themes and arrive at concrete recommendations for the third-age language learning classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The two aims of this study were to: 1) identify the 100 most impactful contributors to English-language gerontological journals, and 2) map their respective disciplinary affiliations to help illuminate the perspectives shaping gerontological discourse. Toward that end, we conducted a secondary data analysis of a publicly available database of the world's leading scientists. After extracting all scientists in the gerontological category, we rank ordered them according to a composite measure of scholarly impact that controls for self-citations and author order while also calculating other bibliometric statistics. Disciplinary affiliations were assigned based upon the Classification of Instructional Programs codes developed by the National Center for Education Statistics at the United States Department of Education. The results reveal the mean contributor to the gerontological literature published 241.15 (SD = 203.95) papers and – after correcting for self-citations – had an h-index of 50.05 (SD = 25.00), and an hm-index 23.67 (SD = 7.50). A diverse array of professional affiliations characterized the contributors with a plurality being located in the health professions category, followed by the biological and biomedical science, and social sciences categories. The results reveal that gerontology is home to some of the world's leading scientists. Leveraging their expertise can help advance the field's collective knowledge development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The most common approach to understanding the semantics of the concept of pain is third-person thought experiments. By contrast, the most frequent and most relevant uses of the folk concept of pain are from a first-person perspective in conversational settings. In this paper, we use a set of linguistic tools to systematically explore the semantics of what people communicate when reporting pain from a first-person perspective. Our results suggest that only a pluralistic view can do justice to the way we talk about pain from a first-person perspective: The semantic content of the folk concept of pain consists of information about both an unpleasant feeling and a disruptive bodily state. Pain linguistics thus provides new insights into ordinary pain language and poses an interesting challenge to the dominant unitary views of pain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The phenomena of globalisation and the increase in the number of communication tools have led to a significant boom in the use of multimedia resources in foreign language teaching and learning. Since success in learning a foreign language is linked to the assessment of the learning environment and since multimedia resources certainly change the learning environment, the integration of multimedia and ICT tools into teaching and learning should have an impact on motivation and, consequently, on learning success. Furthermore, in the context of pedagogical innovations, learning should be achieved by all participants in the educational relationship. In this sense, this study aims to meet the need to analyse the use of multimedia resources in the context of educational innovation through learning assessment. This paper is a field study. The mixed-methods research is based on the collection and analysis of data from various scientific sources, questionnaires of students studying English at the higher education institution of Ukraine “National University “Zaporizhzhia Polytechnic” and observation of their activity and performance. The purpose of the study is to establish the connection between the use of multimedia resources and increasing students' motivation in learning foreign languages, to test the teachers' perception of the student's role in learning a foreign language in a higher education institution, as well as the learning outcomes achieved by the same subjects after the introduction of a pedagogical innovation using multimedia resources. The results show that the perception of learning, interest, and satisfaction differ depending on the gender of students. The use of multimedia materials in accordance with the teaching-learning method affects the perception of the respective roles between the teacher and the student. Changes in student roles are accompanied by changes in teacher roles. The change in the roles of students is accompanied by some resistance from some of them. The main result achieved by students is related to the development of autonomy and has little to do with learning the subject as such. The research shows that the recommended approach did not lead to a significant improvement in the quality of learning and the level of mastery of the discipline by students compared to their school achievements. However, the results clearly demonstrate the growth of motivation and development of independence among students, their active participation in group work. That is why the introduction of multimedia innovations has a really positive effect on motivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In language emergence, neural agents acquire communication skills by interacting with one another and the environment. Through these interactions, agents learn to connect or ground their observations to the messages they utter, forming a shared consensus about the meaning of the messages. Such connections form what we refer to as a grounding map. However, these maps can often be complicated, unstructured, and contain redundant connections. In this paper, we introduce two novel functional pressures, modeled as differentiable auxiliary losses, to simplify and structure the grounding maps. The first pressure enforces compositionality via topological similarity, which has been previously discussed but has not been modeled or utilized as a differentiable auxiliary loss. The second functional pressure, which is conceptually novel, imposes sparsity in the grounding map by pruning weaker connections while strengthening the stronger ones. We conduct experiments in multiple value-attribute environments with varying communication channels. Our methods achieve improved out-of-domain regularization and rapid convergence over baseline approaches. Furthermore, introduced functional pressures are robust to the changes in experimental conditions and able to operate with minimum training data. We note that functional pressures cause simpler and more structured emergent languages showing distinct characteristics depending on the functional pressure employed. Enhancing grounding map sparsity yields the best performance and the languages with the most compressible grammar. In summary, our novel functional pressures, focusing on compositionality and sparse groundings, expedite the development of simpler, more structured languages while enhancing their generalization capabilities. Exploring alternative types of functional pressures and combining them in agent training may be beneficial in the ongoing quest for improved emergent languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the influence of gestures on foreign language (FL) vocabulary learning. In this work, we first address the state of the art in the field and then delve into the research conducted in our lab (three experiments already published) in order to finally offer a unified theoretical interpretation of the role of gestures in FL vocabulary learning. In Experiments 1 and 2, we examined the impact of gestures on noun and verb learning. The results revealed that participants exhibited better learning outcomes when FL words were accompanied by congruent gestures compared to those from the no-gesture condition. Conversely, when meaningless or incongruent gestures were presented alongside new FL words, gestures had a detrimental effect on the learning process. Secondly, we addressed the question of whether or not individuals need to physically perform the gestures themselves to observe the effects of gestures on vocabulary learning (Experiment 3). Results indicated that congruent gestures improved FL word recall when learners only observed the instructor's gestures ("see" group) and when they mimicked them ("do" group). Importantly, the adverse effect associated with incongruent gestures was reduced in the "do" compared to that in the "see" experimental group. These findings suggest that iconic gestures can serve as an effective tool for learning vocabulary in an FL, particularly when the gestures align with the meaning of the words. Furthermore, the active performance of gestures helps counteract the negative effects associated with inconsistencies between gestures and word meanings. Consequently, if a choice must be made, an FL learning strategy in which learners acquire words while making gestures congruent with their meaning would be highly desirable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Divergence and diversity at the level of phonology and lexicon in many of the Austronesian languages of Borneo are widely recognized and well studied. However, the source of this divergence is debated. In this paper, lexical items in the languages of Borneo which lack secure Austronesian etymologies are the object of study. Some of these words show potential semantic and phonological matches with Austroasiatic forms, suggesting a possible early period of in situ contact between Austronesian speakers and speakers of Mon-Khmer languages on the island of Borneo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The process of associating words with their relevant parts of speech is known as part-of-speech (POS) tagging. It takes a substantial amount of well-organized data or corpora and significant target language research to obtain good performance for a tagger. Mizo is a language that needs more research attention in computational linguistics due to its under-resourced nature. The limited availability of corpora and relevant literature adds complexity to the task of assigning POS labels to Mizo text. This paper explores two methods to potentially improve the Hidden Markov Model (HMM)-based POS tagger for the Mizo language. The proposed taggers are compared with the baseline HMM tagger and the N-gram taggers on the designed Mizo corpus, which consists of 72,077 manually tagged tokens. The experimental results proved that the two proposed taggers enhanced the HMM-based Mizo POS tagger, achieving 81.52% and 84.29% accuracy, respectively. Moreover, a comprehensive analysis of the performance of the suggested hybrid tagger was conducted, yielding a weighted average precision, recall, and F1-score of 83.09%, 77.88%, and 79.64% respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To date, cerebellar contribution to language is well established via clinical and neuroimaging studies. However, the particular functional role of the cerebellum in language remains to be clarified. In this study, we present the first systematic review of the diverse language symptoms in spoken language after cerebellar lesion that were reported in case studies for the last 30 years (18 clinical cases from 13 papers), and meta-analysis using cluster analysis with bootstrap and symptom co-occurrence analysis. Seven clusters of patients with similar language symptoms after cerebellar lesions were found. Co-occurrence analysis revealed pairs of symptoms that tend to be comorbid. Our results imply that the "linguistic cerebellum" has a multiform contribution to language function. The most possible mechanism of such contribution is the cerebellar reciprocal connectivity with supratentorial brain regions, where the cerebellar level of the language network has a general modulation function and the supratentorial level is more functionally specified. Based on cerebellar connectivity with supratentorial components of the language network, the "linguistic cerebellum" might be further functionally segregated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cyprus is an island in the Mediterranean Sea where English has the status of the most popular and important foreign language (Tsiplakou, 2009; Fotiou, 2015) and the majority of its inhabitants are literate in English. While a former British colony, it is generally absent from discussions of places where English has had some special relevance due to historical, political, social and economic reasons. For example, while other small countries with a history of British rule, such as Malta and Seychelles, are part of Crystal's (2003: 62–5) list of English speakers in territories where English has had special relevance, Cyprus is absent from that list. This paper aims to fill this gap in the literature by providing an overview of the use of English in various domains, i.e. workplace, education, linguistic landscape, the media, and communication between Greek Cypriots, along with a brief historical background. The latter aims to illustrate how Cyprus was different from many British colonies and how this has affected the status of this language in this setting both now and during the colonization period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article maps the linguistic views on the common language users as non-experts in the field of linguistics and their ability to think reflectively and rationally about issues related to language. An overview of attitudes towards non-linguists is presented against the background of the development of linguistics, ranging from a structural understanding of language with an emphasis on standard language cultivation and linguistic prescription, through a sociolinguistic approach that emphasizes the role of the language user as a creator of the linguistic norm and its variation, to the view of folk linguistics and citizen linguistics, which examine how ordinary people in various forms of public communication present their opinions, beliefs, as well as their myths and ideologies about language. At the same time, the paper argues for the view that some folk knowledge and beliefs about language are not only incorrect or inaccurate, but, on the contrary, that they provide valuable information for linguistics about the background of language behaviour and language change. The material was drawn from the databases of Slovak linguistic journals and the specialized corpus of the journal Slovenská reč. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Education is key to the structural integration of immigrants and their children. While research indicates that educational inequalities by migration background are a serious issue, relatively little is known about when, how and why they develop. The current paper adds to the literature by investigating to what extent achievement gaps by migration background develop during the primary school period. Drawing on data from a national longitudinal study of children in Ireland (N = 7577) and using structural equation modelling, it presents a path model of host language achievement. The results indicate that a large part of the disadvantages in English language achievement by migration background during primary school could be attributed to achievement gaps that already existed before school. Moreover, given earlier achievement, the effect of having a migration background was often insignificant or even positive, suggesting that disparities remain relatively stable or even decrease during the period of formal schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is the fourth of a series of narrative reviews to critically rethink underexplored concepts in oral health research. The series commenced with an initial commissioned framework of Inclusion Oral Health, which spawned further exploration into the social forces that undergird social exclusion and othering. The second review challenged unidimensional interpretations of the causes of inequality by bringing intersectionality theory to oral health. The third exposed how language, specifically labels, can perpetuate and (re)produce vulnerability by eclipsing the agency and power of vulnerabilised populations. In this fourth review, we revisit othering, depicted in the concept of stigma. We specifically define and conceptualize oral health‐related stigma, bringing together prior work on stigma to advance the robustness and utility of this theory for oral health research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the guidance of Ideological Square Model, this paper conducts a critical metaphor analysis of the metaphor shifts in translating the Communist Party of China's centenary speech. The results demonstrate that (1) six types of metaphors are identified in the ST and while all the types are kept, shifts do occur in the TT; (2) cultural considerations and linguistic representations engendering the metaphor shifts are subjugated to and mediated by the ideological kernel of presenting a desired CPC Self-image; (3) the Chinese traditional philosophy of He (harmony) is a feasible complement to the Ideological Square Model in making sense of particular metaphor shifts in translating Chinese political discourse into a foreign language. The study observes that Chinese political translation is often institutional translation. It is argued that metaphor shifts, in this translation context, are ideologically motivated, culturally mediated, and linguistically configured collective endeavours. Chinese political translation, as compared to the traditional view of translation as an ST-bound transference, is an ideologically determined, source-philosophy-channelled, and image-building-oriented verbal activity that conforms to China's national interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From January 2017 until January 2020, the Stormont assembly in Northern Ireland was suspended, with the Irish language being cited as the main stumbling block to the restoration of government. The continued debate around the necessity of an Irish Language Act (ILA) for Northern Ireland is bound up with more general divisions in society surrounding national identity, and as such, it divided political parties and the nationalist and unionist communities from which they draw their support. Through the analysis of ethnographic interviews conducted in various language learning centres across Belfast, I explore how this debate around legislating for the language impacted on the engagement of learners with the language in the city. By considering the role played by the media in the engagement of interview participants with the Irish language in Belfast, I aim to examine how the policy delay and political discourse affects those engaging with the language. This paper aims to address changing attitudes to the Irish language in Belfast in a period of political crisis, and what it means for those who use the language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the metaliterary statements that pervade the oeuvre of Ennodius of Pavia (a.d. 474–521) in order to reconstruct his underlying conception of language: its nature, power, function, limitations, and dangers. This new perspective provides a more nuanced insight into the paradoxical poetics of the author as well as his final renunciation to literature after his appointment as bishop of Pavia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Undocumented monolingual Spanish-speaking immigrants are one of the most vulnerable and marginalized groups to experience intimate partner violence (IPV) in the United States. This paper explores the barriers that prevent IPV disclosure in healthcare settings. Qualitative interviews (n = 14) were conducted with previously undocumented Spanish-speaking legal clients of a community domestic violence agency. The major barriers expressed by the interviewees regarding IPV screening and disclosure include limited opportunities for IPV screening, misinformation about legal rights from abusers, fear of deportation and separation from children, and lack of knowledge about resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Older carers or 'care partners' of older people experiencing care needs often provide essential support, at times while neglecting their own health and well‐being. This is an increasingly frequent scenario due to both demographic changes and policy shifts towards ageing in place. Multiple community stakeholders within the care and support ecosystem hold valuable expertise about the needs of older care partners, and the programme and policy responses that may better support their health and well‐being. The aim of this study was to identify the perspectives of stakeholders obtained through the codesign phase of a multicomponent research project investigating new models of care and support for older care partners suitable for the Australian context. Methods: Principles of codesign were used to engage a purposeful sample of older care partners, health professionals, researchers, policy makers and health service administrators. Participants took part in a series of three codesign workshops conducted remotely via video conferencing. The workshops were supported with briefing material and generated consensus‐based summaries, arriving at a preferred service model. Findings: This paper reports the research design and structure of the codesign panels, the range of findings identified as important to support the health and well‐being of older carers of older people, and the resulting service model principles. The codesigned and preferred model of care is currently being prepared for implementation and evaluation in Australia. Public Contribution: This study was conducted using codesign methodology, whereby stakeholders including older care partners and others involved in supporting older carers, were integrally involved with design, development, results and conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: For peer assessment, reliability (i.e., consistency in ratings across peers) and validity (i.e., consistency of peer ratings with instructors or experts) are frequently examined in the research literature to address a central concern of instructors and students. Although the average levels are generally promising, both reliability and validity can vary substantially from context to context. Meta‐analyses have identified a few moderators that are related to peer assessment reliability/validity, but they have lacked statistical power to systematically investigate many moderators or disentangle correlated moderators. Objectives: The current study fills this gap by addressing what variables influence peer assessment reliability/validity using a large‐scale, cross‐context dataset from a shared online peer assessment platform. Methods: Using multi‐level structural equation models, we examined three categories of variables: (1) variables related to the context of peer assessment; (2) variables related to the peer assessment task itself; and (3) variables related to rating rubrics of peer assessment. Results and Conclusions: We found that the extent to which assessment documents varied in quality on the given rubric played a central role in mediating the effect from different predictors to peer assessment reliability/validity. Other variables that are significantly associated with reliability and validity included: Education Level, Language, Discipline, Average Ability of Peer Raters, Draft Number, Assignment Number, Class Size, Average Number of Raters, and Length of Rubric Description. The results provide information to guide practitioners on how to improve reliability and validity of peer assessments. Lay Description: What is already known about this topic: The reliability and validity of peer assessment have been found to be, on average, at or above acceptable levels.Inter‐rater reliabilities, in particular, were reported to be medium to high in different online peer assessment studies in both K‐12 and higher education settings.Correlations between peer ratings and expert ratings were reported to be medium to high in different studies. What this paper adds: Document Quality Variability (DQV) is the degree to which submitted documents varied in quality on the given rubric dimension versus being all of roughly similar quality.DQV strongly predicts peer assessment reliability and validity.Class Size, Average Number of Raters, and Length of Rubric Descriptions are associated with reliability directly.Average Number of Raters and Assignment Number predict validity directly.Average Ability of Peer Raters, Draft Number, and Assignment Number predict validity indirectly through DQV. Implications for practice and/or policy: To increase IRR and validity of ratings, instructors can include more students with different proficiency levels in the subject area in peer assessment.Instructors should avoid using rubric scales that will mainly have students cluster at the top (or bottom) of the scale.The appropriate number of peer raters usually lies within 3‐to‐5 raters per document.Instructors should use peer assessment activities primarily for first drafts rather than for second or later drafts of an assignment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we study the behaviour of conjugacy languages in virtual graph products, extending results by Ciobanu et al. [13]. We focus primarily on virtual graph products in the form of a semi-direct product. First, we study the behaviour of twisted conjugacy representatives in right-angled Artin and Coxeter groups. We prove regularity of the conjugacy geodesic language for virtual graph products in certain cases, and highlight properties of the spherical conjugacy language, depending on the automorphism and ordering on the generating set. Finally, we give a criterion for when the spherical conjugacy language is not unambiguous context-free for virtual graph products. We can extend this further in the case of virtual RAAGs, to show the spherical conjugacy language is not context-free. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the first study to use longitudinal population register data to illustrate that marital stability may relate to the adoption of the spouse's language. The paper draws on theories of boundary shifting and boundary crossing to examine two main ancestral groups in Finland, Finnish speakers and Swedish speakers, between whom intermarriage is common. Administrative changes in how the question about language/ethnicity was registered between the censuses of 1975 and 1980 make it possible to distinguish between persons who are concordant or discordant on the main language used and ethnic affiliation. Using data on the entire married population, and adjusting for several individuals and couple characteristics, we estimate the couples' divorce risk as a function of language convergence with Cox regressions. Discordance in terms of adopting the Finnish language used by the partner is associated with a higher divorce risk, as compared with couples who are exogamous in terms of both language use and ethnic affiliation. Adopting the Swedish language, on the other hand, is associated with a slightly reduced divorce risk. Thus, these data provide some evidence that marital stability may relate to language convergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a pilot study aimed at investigating the comprehension of pantomimic stories and its possible cognitive underpinnings in typically developing children. A group of twenty-two Italian-speaking children aged between 8.02 and 10.11 years were included in the study. Participants watched short videos in which professional actors performed pantomime narratives; then answered a comprehension question and retold the stories. Analyses revealed positive correlations between the comprehension of pantomimes and age, theory of mind, and working memory. The implications of these results for a narrative model of language origin are discussed against the background of an eco-evo-devo perspective. • The study explores the comprehension of pantomimic stories and its cognitive underpinnings in children. • They watched pantomime narratives; then they answered a comprehension question and retold the stories. • Correlations between story comprehension and age, theory of mind, and working memory emerged. • Results are discussed against the background of a narrative model of language origin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to analyse a set of macrosintactic elements in the speech of the football players of two Spanish teams: Real Betis Balompié and Sevilla Fútbol Club, in order to determine how they speak about victories and defeats. To make it possible, the Pragmatics linguistics model of Fuentes Rodríguez is used as a analytical tool. The results show that argumentative operators are the most common elements of speech, specially intensifiers, as it occurs in the case of other argumentative markers. Moreover, modal operators, the second group in frequency, reveal that the football players prefer to mitigate their assertions. Finally, in the case of enunciative operators, despite their low frequency, those that characterize their speech as honest are used. We suggest that football players' speech are mostly persuasive, although they do not present their assertions as a doubtless, something that has to do with the polemic context of football as a mass entertainment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prevention of abusive content in social media platforms has received a lot of attention in recent years. The problem is still a challenge due to the nuances present in the content posted and the tactics of users to pass through the abusive detection algorithms employed by the social media giants. This paper presents a robust deep learning model that takes the advantage of both character and word representations, to address the challenges associated with the text content of a social media post for detecting abusive content. The proposed model uses character CNN to capture morphological information and learns the important features to distinguish abusive content with the help of an Attention-based Bi-LSTM network. In addition, it uses the pooling layer to avoid spatial translations. We confined our model to only the text content of the social media posts due to the limitations of collecting user characteristics for existing datasets and to honour the privacy concerns of users. Our model is dataset agnostic, as revealed by the empirical results on the data sets of multiple social media platforms. It outperformed all previous methods for abusive language detection with text-only features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims: To identify the barriers and facilitators to healthcare for people without documentation status. Design: We conducted a systematic integrative literature review following the Whittemore and Knafl methodology. Methods: Literature search was conducted to identify studies addressing barriers or facilitators to healthcare for people without documentation status in the United States between 2012 and 2022. Studies were critiqued for quality, with results analysed thematically using the social‐ecological model. Data Sources: Searches were conducted in PubMed, PAIS, Web of Science, CINAHL and Psych Info in October 2022. Results: The review incorporated 30 studies (19 qualitative and 11 quantitative). People without documentation status encountered numerous healthcare barriers such as intrapersonal (lack of financial resources and health insurance, fear), interpersonal (language and cultural discrepancies, discrimination), community (bureaucratic requirements, anti‐immigrant rhetoric) and policy‐related barriers. Conversely, linguistically and culturally competent care, empathetic and representative staff, health navigators, safety‐net clinics and supportive federal policies emerged as key facilitators. Conclusion: These findings illuminate the complex healthcare disparities experienced by people without documentation status and underscore facilitators enhancing care accessibility. Future research is needed to explore interventions to increase access to care for this population. Impact: This paper provides a comprehensive examination of the complex barriers and facilitators to healthcare for people without documentation status in the United States. The findings support the value of universal healthcare access, a priority of the World Health Organization, and can inform healthcare policies and practices worldwide. Reporting Method: The review was reported following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta‐Analyses framework. Patient or Public Contribution: No patient or public contribution was needed. Trial and Protocol Registration: The study protocol was registered with the PROSPERO database (registration number: CRD42022366289). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Arabic is recognised as diglossic; one manifestation of diglossia is the co‐existence of two varieties of the language used in different social settings: standard (or literary) Arabic (StA) and spoken Arabic (SpA). The study investigated the impact of lexical–phonological distance in Arabic (identical, cognate, unique, which are different types of words) on reading accuracy and fluency across grade levels. Methods: The participants were 180 native Arabic‐speaking children first and second graders. Participants were asked to read three‐word lists comprising words of three different lexical distance from spoken Arabic (identical, cognates and unique) and three text selections representing similar lexical distance (mostly identical, mostly cognates and mostly unique). Results: The findings showed a main effect of the word and text lexical distance fluency and accuracy reading scores. There was also a main effect of grade level on both scores. In addition, a significant interaction between the word and type words text lexical distance and grade level was found. The results revealed a more significant gap between the identical and the other two lexical distance categories (cognates and unique) in the second grade than in the first grade. Similarly, a more significant disparity was observed between the mostly identical type words and mostly cognate type word texts compared to unique type word texts in the second grade than in the first grade. Conclusions: The results highlight the importance of StA knowledge and the centrality of diglossia lexical–phonological distance categories in reading, especially the contribution of reading StA words to text reading. The higher performance levels when reading identical compared to unique and cognate words and texts are discussed in light of the theoretical approaches to diglossic lexical–phonological distance. The results point to the centrality of diglossia lexical–phonological distance categories in reading. Highlights: What is already known about this topic: The Arabic language may challenge children's linguistic abilities.The linguistic distance in diglossic Arabic was found to impact the acquisition of linguistic skills in StA. Diglossia is the discrepancy between the spoken Arabic form and standard Arabic form, which are used in different social settings.Diglossia affects word reading development. What this paper adds: It highlights the gap between the identical and the other two lexical distance categories (cognates and unique) in the second grade than in the first grade. It also reveals the disparity between the mostly identical type words and mostly cognate type words texts compared to unique type words texts in the second grade than in the first grade.It highlights the impact of Arabic diglossia, specially relating to specific text types and word types (identical, cognates and unique) and its impact on reading. Implications for theory, policy or practice: The study highlights the importance of diglossic lexical–phonological distance in understanding the reading process in Arabic.Future work may want to examine whether promoting the lexical phonological representations of StA words helps learning to read in Arabic. This may include exposing children to standard Arabic words, such as cognate and unique words, from the early stages of reading development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zambia is home to a complex set of language practices, which involve languages being used in different ways across social contexts. Historically written communication has typically been associated with English with African languages mainly associated with used spoken contexts. Recently, however, there has been a shift in this pattern with African languages being used more frequently in and across the linguistic landscape of Zambia in public writing [Banda, F., and H. Jimaima. 2017. "Linguistic Landscapes and the Sociolinguistics of Language Vitality in Multilingual Contexts of Zambia." Multilingua 36 (5): 595–625; Simungala, G. 2020. "The Linguistic Landscape of the University of Zambia: A Social Semiotic Perspective." Unpublished MA Thesis, University of Zambia; Simungala, G., and H. Jimaima. 2020. "Multilingual Realities of Language Contact at the University of Zambia." Journal of African and Asian Studies, 1–14]. In this paper, we add to the growing body of work within linguistic landscape research that draws on a translanguaging perspective to understand the ways in which language is used as a resource for meaning making in the social world [Wei, Li. 2011. "Moment Analysis and Translanguaging Space: Discursive Construction of Identities by Multilingual Chinese Youth in Britain." Journal of Pragmatics 43 (5): 1222–1235; Wei, Li. 2018. "Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of Language." Applied Linguistics 39 (1): 9–30; García, O., and T. Kleyn. 2016. Translanguaging with Multilingual Students: Learning from Classroom Moments. Routledge; MacSwan, J. 2017. "A Multilingual Perspective on Translanguaging." American Educational Research Journal 54 (1): 167–201; Jaspers, J. 2018. "The Transformative Limits of Translanguaging." Language & Communication 58: 1–10]. More specifically, we adopt the concept of translanguaging spaces [Wei, Li. 2011. "Moment Analysis and Translanguaging Space: Discursive Construction of Identities by Multilingual Chinese Youth in Britain." Journal of Pragmatics 43 (5): 1222–1235; Wei, Li. 2018. "Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of Language." Applied Linguistics 39 (1): 9–30; Reilly, C. 2021. 3 Malawian Universities as Translanguaging Spaces. In English-Medium Instruction and Translanguaging, 29–42. Multilingual Matters] to explore the ways in which language is used in billboards and advertising spaces and propose that important shifts in language uses are observable. We discuss the changing status and uses of local African languages and why this is important in understanding language use in post-colonial contexts such as Zambia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the evolution of grammaticalized evidentiality in the Moldavian dialect of Hungarian. It documents how the suffix -a/e, originally the marker of narrative past, became a rare, elevated marker of past tense highlighting significant past events; how it assumed a mirative overtone; and how the features ʻwitnessedʼ and ʻimmediate pastʼ, often present in mirative utterances, became inherent parts of its meaning. This grammaticalization path has resulted in an evidential system with typologically unique features. It is a two-term system based on the opposition of direct evidentiality and no evidentiality – violating the alleged universal that if a language has grammaticalized direct evidentiality, it has also grammaticalized indirect evidentiality. Mirative meaning is expressed by the same -a/e suffix that also encodes direct evidentiality – whereas it is claimed to be the extension of inferred evidentiality elsewhere. The unique properties of Moldavian Hungarian evidentiality are derived from the historical evolution of the -a/e suffix. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is the first survey of verbal affixes encoding the day period ('at night','in the morning' etc.) or the yearly seasons ('in winter' etc.) when the action takes place. It introduces the term 'periodic tense' to refer to this comparative concept, explores the attested paradigms, their interactions with other verbal categories (including the more usual deictic tense), and investigates their diachronic origins. It shows that periodic tense markers are not restricted to incorporated nouns of time period but constitute a highly grammaticalized verbal category in some languages, which can redundantly co-occur with free adverbs or nouns indicating time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]