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This paper deals with the distribution of agreement patterns for target adjectives or past participles in Swiss German dialects focussing on non-attributive domains. While agreement outside the nominal phrase has been lost in the development towards Standard German and in most dialects, in some Swiss German dialects certain syntactic domains still show formal agreement. Against this backdrop, two topics will be addressed in this paper. It gives an overview of the extent, function and distribution of formal agreement within the clausal domain on the basis of survey data, as far as possible. Another focus is default neuter inflection, which no longer shows canonical gender agreement with a neuter controller, but has developed a new function in the field of aspectuality.

One limitation of corpus-based research into the epicentre hypothesis is that it only provides information on structural similarity/difference of varieties but not on the role that attitudes may play in the choice of variants in a pluricentric language. In our case study on verb complementation patterns, we use simulation as a complementary methodology. We build an agent-based model for two speaker communities with English as a second language (ESL) which allows for attitudes towards American and British English to affect the choice of verb complementation. This approach enables us to gauge the likely effect that attitudes towards potential epicentres might have on the choice of variants and to predict patterns of variation we should see in language use. We provide preliminary data from the News On the Web corpus to test whether the predictions are, in fact, borne out. only published online, no volume/issue number ispartof: World Englishes vol:41 issue:3 pages:377-399 status: Published online

Pragmatics is a branch of linguistics. In a narrow sense it studies the way in which the linguistic properties of an utterance interact with its context to provide situational interpretations for the recipient of the utterance. In a wider sense, pragmatics studies all aspects of language use in an interactional and a social context. Historical pragmatics as a well-established subfield of pragmatics focuses on language use in historical contexts. This includes the study of usage patterns at particular points in the history of a given language, the study of the diachronic developments of such usage patterns and the study of the underlying principles of such developments. Work on historical pragmatics has a long history but until the mid-1990s relevant publications were rare and did not describe themselves as historical pragmatics. In the second half of the 1990s and in the early 2000s, the field quickly established itself as an important branch of pragmatics. Several factors were instrumental in this development. After the early focus of pragmatics on philosophical methods on the one hand and on spontaneous face-to-face interactions on the other, it opened its scope to a broader range of data, including written data. At the same time, the 1990s brought an increased availability of language corpora and, in particular, the availability of historical corpora. This opened up new ways of investigating language histories. In the early work of historical pragmatics, researchers regularly justified their choice of data. Plays, courtroom proceedings, and personal correspondence were considered to be particularly good, albeit imperfect, approximations to natural spoken interactions and therefore the privileged data for historical pragmatics. Today, data is no longer assessed solely in terms of its proximity to natural spoken interaction, but each type of data is considered in its own right and within its own communicative contexts. Topics of interest in historical pragmatics have always covered a broad range of pragmatic entities, including speech actions (greetings, promises, requests, apologies, and the like), discourse markers and interjections, nominal and pronominal terms of address, and issues of politeness and impoliteness. Researchers investigate such elements at specific points in time or in their diachronic developments over longer periods. And they also try to isolate general underlying principles of diachronic change that explain these developments within a larger theoretical framework.

In most natural languages, grammatical gender and number features encode semantic attributes concerning the animacy, sex, and numerosity of the referents. Albeit the likely advantage of promptly communicating about such salient attributes, inflectional systems rarely display consistently bijective correspondences between the semantic attributes and the grammatical feature values. In a study on Italian, we explored how this apparently noisy encoding depends on a trade-off between the semantic and the functional aspects of grammatical features. By means of entropy metrics, we assessed the primarily functional purpose of gender and number features in the lexicon, observing a distribution of nouns that can optimally serve agreement-based parsing and prediction of words in sentences. A novel context entropy measure, introduced in this study to assess meaning specificity, revealed a semantic underspecification in masculine and singular nouns denoting animate referents. We argue that underspecification is the hallmark of the particular type of information compression occurring in inflectional systems. In binary inflectional systems, one value specifically encodes a semantic attribute, while the other value does not encode any semantic information, and surfaces as a default for functional purposes; the encoding of two antithetic semantic attributes is less likely. By providing an information-theoretical account of the role of grammatical features based on large-scale data, we set the basis for a scientifically informed pursue of language inclusiveness.

In this paper, we use a relatively new source of data, the Movie Corpus, to explore the common stereotype that politeness standards keep falling. In this data, which contains transcripts of movies from 1930 to 2019, we trace a range of elements that have relatively clear default politeness or impoliteness values (e.g. please, could you and a range of title nouns versus swear words). And we introduce a terminological distinction between conduct politeness and etiquette politeness. The results suggest a complex picture of some “polite” expressions that are indeed declining (e.g. title nouns, would you (please)) while others are rising (e.g. can you (please)). Many “impolite” swear words have increased considerably over the last five decades. We carefully discuss the reliability of these results, which fully depend on the composition of the corpus and its consistency over time as well as on the reliability of the chosen elements as im/politeness indicators. We compare the results for American/Canadian and for British/Irish movies (following the distinction of the Movie Corpus), and we discuss the extent to which movies can be taken as indicators of language change in general.

Un erratum d'aquest article s'ha publicat a Journal of Child Language, 2023;50(2):494. DOI: 10.1017/S0305000921000933 i també està disponible a http://hdl.handle.net/10230/56217 Over recent decades much research has analyzed the relevance of 9- to 20- month-old infants’ early imitation skills (object- and language-based imitation) for language development. Yet there have been few systematic comparisons of the joint relevance of these imitative behaviors later on in development. This correlational study investigated whether multimodal imitation (gestural, prosodic, and lexical components) and object-based imitation are related to narratives and sociopragmatics in preschoolers. Thirty-one typically developing 3- to 4-year-old children performed four tasks to assess multimodal imitation, object-based imitation, narrative abilities, and sociopragmatic abilities. Results revealed that both narrative and sociopragmatic skills were significantly related to multimodal imitation, but not to object-based imitation, indicating that preschoolers’ ability to imitate socially relevant multimodal cues is strongly related to language and sociocommunicative skills. Therefore, this evidence supports a broader conceptualization of imitation behaviors in the field of language development that systematically integrates prosodic, gestural, and verbal linguistic patterns. This study benefited from funding awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (MCIU), Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI), and Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER) (PGC2018-097007-B-100 “Multimodal Language Learning (MLL): Prosodic and Gestural Integration in Pragmatic and Phonological Development”) and by the Generalitat de Catalunya (2017 SGR_971) to the Prosodic Studies Group. Iris Hübscher was supported by a postdoctoral research fellowship by the URPP Language and Space (University of Zurich) during the preparation of this work. Mariia Pronina also acknowledges an FI grant from the Generalitat de Catalunya (ref. 2019FI_B1 00120).

Telling apart family-internal developments from contact-induced changes and socio-geographically conditioned areal trends is still one of the main challenges in tracing the development - and stability - of languages. Notably prima facie contact phenomena might turn out to have resulted from the interaction of a variety of sources upon closer inspection; assessing their interaction is a crucial requirement for comprehending the dynamics of change. Based on the example of simplification patterns in the system of short personal pronouns observed in the Balkan Slavic dialects located in the territory of North Macedonian and Greece, the present paper illustrates the necessity of identifying the multiplicity of triggers and their interaction, thereby making a case for the relevance of small-scale, transient patterns in understanding diachronic processes. In particular, it places the simplifications within the pronominal system into the larger context of differential object indexing by preverbal pronominal elements in the Balkan languages. With the loss of agreement distinctions on pronouns being characteristic for the last phase in the emergence of object indexing, both processes appear to be closely related. Obviously, in this case, the convergence of various different processes has created a favorable environment for the mutual reinforcement and stabilization of two otherwise highly volatile phenomena.

Both proper names and common nouns, when used as terms of address in Romanesco, can be preceded by the particlea(a Nando!‘Hey, Fernando!’) and undergo truncation of the poststress material ((a) dottó’!‘Hey, doc!’). The article presents a panchronic study of this construction in Romanesco, showing how and when truncation and the vocative particleafirst arose and providing a synchronic analysis of the conditions under which they occur today. Vocative truncation is widespread in Central-Southern Italo-Romance, where it obeys conditions that vary subtly across time and space and that the article will touch upon based on the studies available to date. These conditions will be described in detail for Romanesco, showing that they are hierarchically organized and involve all levels of linguistic analysis: the list includes (a) a part-of-speech condition, (b) a condition referring to the syntactic constituent, (c) a semantic/pragmatic condition, (d) one of prosodic minimality, and finally (e) one of lexical semantics, relative to the animacy/definiteness hierarchy. Also the occurrence of theaparticle is subject to conditions which are syntactic-textual, pragmatic and phonological in nature and which identify preferences rather than clear-cut (un)grammaticality, contrary to those that constrain truncation.

Speech rhythm varies with age. In this paper, we examined the role of mean and peak syllable intensity variability in age-related rhythmic changes. Si xteen younger adults and 10 older speakers read 60 sentences in Zurich German. Results revealed that peak syllable intensity variability is significantly smaller in older compared to younger adults; there was no such effect for syllable mean intensity. Reduced fluency, changes in the biomechanical properties of articulators controlling the mouth opening cycles, and compensation strategies for subglottal pressure generation were the most plausible reasons for the obtained age-related syllable intensity variability.

Previous corpus-based research on the progressive (be +v- ing) investigated it from a diachronic point of view or from the angle of World Englishes (WEs). However, factors such as its propensity to occur with animate subjects or its preference for dynamic verbs have not been studied in relation to the choice between progressive and simple aspect. As the progressive has been extended to stative verbs, we argue that a variationist study of the construction in WEs needs to take simple vps into account systematically, too, and investigate whether there is interaction between predictor variables underlying the progressive:simple choice. We use a probabilistic grammar approach to study progressives in newspaper writing across a broad range of WEs. We apply a tree and forest analysis to gauge the relative strength of the predictor variables variety, animacy, tense/modality, verb type and voice. Our results show that the core grammar for the progressive:simple choice is shared across all Englishes. The extension of progressives to stative verbs, in particular, does not result in statistically detectable effects. We argue that they nevertheless serve to give a very ‘local’ flavour to contact varieties as they are salient against the backdrop of the core grammar.

Un lettore pone un quesito mettendo insieme alcune parole apparentemente tutte connesse: “Mi chiedo perché la parola fico/figo indicante normalmente il frutto dell’albero omonimo (e le grazie femminili se il sostantivo è al femminile […]) abbia assunto la connotazione gergal-giovanile di ‘bello, ganzo, sorprendente’. Come ci si è arrivati? E come si è arrivati ad usare la medesima parola per descrivere un/a bello/a ragazzo/a? E per quanto riguarda la parola sfiga invece?”. Su quest’ultimo termine chiedono spiegazioni anche una lettrice e un altro lettore che ipotizzano una possibile correlazione con il termine gergale fica e/o figa. Su quest’ultimo termine chiedono spiegazioni anche una lettrice (“Vorrei sapere come e da che cosa è nata la parola sfiga, se ha qualche correlazione con il termine gergale fica o figa e se è una parola maschilista”) e, con formulazione sintomaticamente diversa (che qui non riteniamo opportuno riportare per esteso), un altro lettore, il quale chiede se sia “iellato chi non dispone” liberamente del denotato del termine di cui sopra.

Phylogenetic trees are a central tool for studying language evolution and have wide implications for understanding cultural evolution as a whole. For example, they have been the basis of studies on the evolution of musical instruments, religious beliefs and political complexity. Bayesian phylogenetic methods are transparent regarding the data and assumptions underlying the inference. One of these assumptions -- that languages change independently -- is incompatible with the reality of language evolution, particularly with language contact. When speakers interact, languages frequently borrow linguistic traits from each other. Phylogenetic methods ignore this issue, which can lead to errors in the reconstruction. More importantly, they neglect the rich history of language contact. A principled way of integrating language contact in phylogenetic methods is sorely missing. We present contacTrees, a Bayesian phylogenetic model with horizontal transfer for language evolution. The model efficiently infers the phylogenetic tree of a language family and contact events between its clades. The implementation is available as a package for the phylogenetics software BEAST 2. We apply contacTrees in a simulation study and a case study on a subset of well-documented Indo-European languages. The simulation study demonstrates that contacTrees correctly reconstructs the history of a simulated language family, including simulated contact events. Moreover, it shows that ignoring contact can lead to systematic errors in the estimated tree height, rate of change and tree topology, which can be avoided with contacTrees. The case study confirms that contacTrees reconstructs known contact events in the history of Indo-European and finds known loanwords, demonstrating its practical potential. The model has a higher statistical fit to the data than a conventional phylogenetic reconstruction, and the reconstructed tree height is significantly closer to well-attested estimates. Our method closes a long-standing gap between the theoretical and empirical models of cultural evolution. The implications are especially relevant for less documented language families, where our knowledge of past contacts and linguistic borrowings is limited. Since linguistic phylogenies have become the backbone of many studies of cultural evolution, the addition of this integral piece of the puzzle is crucial in the endeavour to understand the history of human culture.

In this study, we examined whether the convergence in interlocutors’ vowel acoustics leads to decreasing discriminability between interlocutors’ voices. Ten pairs of Grison and Zürich German speakers produced lexical items before and after dialogue interactions with evidence of vowel convergence in post-dialogue productions. In Experiment 1, native and non-native Swiss German listeners discriminated pairs of speakers whose speech was obtained pre- and post-dialogue. Results showed that listeners’ sensitivity (A’) was higher for native than non-native listeners, but comparable for pre- and post-dialogue recordings. The observed negative correlation between voice discrimination and the acoustic distance in formant space was mainly driven by a single speaker pair. In Experiment 2, the speaker recognition performance of an i-vector-based software was compared in pre- and post-dialogue speech. Results revealed no difference in the system performance between the two conditions. The findings suggest that vowel convergence does not compromise voice discriminability under the given experimental conditions.

Human voices are individual and humans have elaborate skills in recognizing speakers by their voice, phenomena that are deeply rooted in the evolution of human behavior. To date, the mechanisms of speaker recognition are not well understood because of the high variability of the acoustic cues to a speaker’s identity. We wondered what role the speaker plays in making his/her voice more or less well recognizable. While it is evident from the literature that humans can control vocal properties to enhance their intelligibility, it is unclear whether speakers can and/or do control vocal characteristics to be better recognizable and whether such control mechanisms play a role in the communication process. In this paper, we reviewed results from the literature supporting the view that speaker idiosyncratic information is dynamic and that humans have the ability to control how well they can be recognized. We suggest possible experimental setups by which the control over identity in voice can be tested and present pilot acoustic characteristics of speech that was produced to be either targeted at being (a) intelligible (clear speech) and (b) suitable for person recognition (identity marked speech). Results revealed that there is reason to believe that speakers apply different mechanisms when making their individuality identifiable as opposed to making their speech better understood. We discuss predictions that a control of recognizability and intelligibility has within major theories of speech perception.

This paper reports on the results of a research investigating whether rhythmic features, in terms of segmental timing properties, are object of speaker’s adjustments after the exposure to a conversational partner. In the context of dialects in contact, this is crucial to understand whether rhythmic attributes may bring about language variation and change. In the context of human-machine interactions, this can benefit the design of spoken dialogues systems to achieve human-likeness. To study rhythmic accommodation, we selected a corpus of pre- and post-dialogue recordings, performed by 18 speakers of Grison and Zurich German (henceforth GRG and ZHG), two Swiss German dialects characterised by noticeable segmental and supra-segmental differences. To quantify rhythmic convergence, we designed three measures based on the segmental timing differences between the two dialects. We compared the Euclidean distances in the three measures between GRG and ZHG speakers in a pair before and after two interactions. Results reveal that dyads members do not significantly shift the production of segmental timing features after the dialogues. Neither linguistic nor social factors can account for the observed accommodation pattern. Cross-dialectal segmental timing differences, captured by the three ratio measures, may be either robust against the influence of interlocutors’ acoustic behaviour or too subtle to be perceived or retained after interactions., Este artículo presenta los resultados de una investigación que examina si los rasgos rítmicos vinculados con las características temporales segmentales sufren adaptaciones por parte del locutor después de cierta exposición con un interlocutor. En un contexto de dialectos en contacto, es importante comprender la aportación del estudio de las propiedades rítmicas al campo de la variación y cambio de lengua. En un contexto de interacción persona-ordenador, esto puede beneficiar el diseño de sistemas de diálogos que logren un habla casi nativa. Para estudiar la acomodación rítmica, se seleccionó un corpus de grabaciones recopiladas antes y después de un diálogo entre 18 pares de locutores de alemán del cantón de Grisón y de alemán de Zúrich (de ahora en adelante, GRG y ZHG), dos dialectos suizo-alemanes que se caracterizan por sus diferencias segmentales y suprasegmentales. Para cuantificar la convergencia rítmica, se usaron tres medidas basadas en las diferencias temporales segmentales entre los dos dialectos. Se comparó la distancia euclidiana para las tres medidas entre locutores GRG y ZHG antes y después de dos interacciones. Los resultados revelan que los miembros del par no cambian significativamente la producción de sus características rítmicas temporales después del diálogo. Ningún factor lingüístico o social permite explicar el patrón de acomodación que se observa. Las diferencias rítmicas temporales inter-dialectos, que se capturan con las tres medidas, son o demasiado robustas contra la influencia del comportamiento rítmico de los interlocutores, o demasiado sutiles para ser percibidas o recordadas después de las interacciones.

The purpose of this contribution is a comparative analysis of different “partitive markers” in the noun phrase of several Germanic varieties, with a special focus on areally peripheral non-standard or less standardized West Germanic varieties. Starting with the use of genitive case for the marking of partitive functions in various syntactic contexts in the older stages of German, we then take a closer look at those varieties for which the survival of at least some genitive forms and functions related to partitive meanings is reported in modern times. This is true for some Highest Alemannic dialects in Switzerland (Henzen 1932, 122–124; Szadrowsky 1937, 1940) and for Letzebuergesch, both the dialects and the Koine (Dohmer 2017).1 We would like to emphasize, however, that for Highest Alemannic recent data are lacking completely. While there is some recent research on the more widely existing pronominal remnants of partitive genitive forms (see Strobel 2017), there is in general much less information concerning the expression of partitivity within the noun phrase (see Glaser 1992, 1993; Grestenberger 2015)

Digital pragmatics is part of the rich field of digital humanities. While the term digital humanities refers to the entire field of studies that combines computing with the various disciplines of the humanities, the term digital pragmatics refers to the combination of computing with pragmatics, the field of studies that investigates the use of language in all its complexities in actual social and interactional contexts. We will focus on how empirical studies on digital data have changed and are changing this research field, and how its new resources have contributed to our understanding of topics like interpersonal relational work and politeness. We will provide the background of the digital revolution in pragmatics which can be located in the last decade of the twentieth century through the first decade of the twenty-first century when digital corpora became more widely accessible. Section 3 on critical issues will deal, in particular, with the key challenges faced in digital pragmatics, i.e. the traceability of pragmatic (functional) entities through specific (formal) search patterns. We will then proceed to give an overview of current research efforts in this field, starting from the microlevel of individual expressions to utterances, phrases and collocations, to larger units like speech acts, and proceeding all the way to the macrolevel of genres as meaning-making cultural forms. We shall discuss some of the pertinent methodological issues in searching big data for pragmatic units and provide a case study of the expressive speech act of thanking.

One result of colonial and post-colonial migration is the development of large diaspora communities. The Indian diaspora is currently one of the largest world-wide. Over 20 million people of Indian...

For second-generation members of a diaspora community, ethnic and cultural affiliation are less straightforward than for the first generation. We compare information on identity construction in London's Indian Diaspora with the participants’ linguistic integration into the host community. Our study is novel and exploratory in that it combines quantitative, variationist methodology with a qualitative approach. We employ two standard sociolinguistic instruments to model subjects’ ethnic identity: a questionnaire and sociolinguistic interviews with a focus on discursive identity construction. In a second step we investigate possible connections between morphosyntactic variation and ethnic identity in language use data from three different communicative contexts. The results show that, while interview data on ethnic identity are amenable to quantification, clear correlations between the resulting identity scores and vernacular morphosyntactic features are difficult to find. In particular, patterns of style-shifting between the different communicative contexts are not as expected.

Academic writing in the second half of the twentieth century witnesses a notable decrease in be-passives in British and American English (AmE). This trend is more advanced in the soft than in the hard sciences; with the exception of AmE, moreover, regional variation is not highly significant. This paper aims to discover whether the use of passives is conditioned by the same factors across seven different varieties of English (both as a first and as an institutionalized second language). For this purpose, we automatically retrieve central be-passives and active transitives from syntactically annotated International Corpus of English corpora and code for factors that are likely to play a role in the choice between active and passive (such as the semantics of the participant roles or the length of the constituents). Our results show that, while the same factors predict the choice of a passive over an active verb phrase across first- and second-language varieties, subtle differences are found in the effect size that some factors (animacy, givenness and length of passive subject) have, notably in Hong Kong and Philippine English. Some (but not all) of these find an explanation in substrate influence.

There are various situations in our daily lives in which we share sensory perceptions in interaction, but research on how exactly we do this is relatively scarce and has often focused primarily on the visual and auditory channels. In this paper, we suggest an approach based on the methods of multimodal conversation analysis which also considers other perceptual fields, especially touch. By means of an example from an interaction between two visitors of a science centre and the way they handle an exhibit, we illustrate how one can approach the analysis of the techniques participants use to make their sensory perceptions available to their interactive partners. We will focus on one such technique, namely the vocal depiction of tactile perceptions.

This paper examines voice alternation, that is, variation between the active and passive voice in academic Englishes. The focus is on differences regarding degrees of author involvement. A previous study on the use of be-passives in fifteen varieties of academic English (Hundt, Schneider & Seoane 2016) found voice alternation to be very similar in both contact and native (ENL) varieties of English, with only American English showing a pronounced tendency towards a more frequent use of actives. A more fine-grained analysis, however, revealed highly significant interdisciplinary variation: whereas in the hard sciences the default option to express a transitive event is the passive voice, in the soft sciences, preference is often given to the active. In this paper we do not compare varieties of English but concentrate on ENL data from the entire academic sections of ICE corpora (International Corpus of English) as a whole in order to uncover the functional role of actives and passives across disciplinary areas with regard to authorial presence. The results indicate that the differences attested do not correlate with differences in authorial involvement (We discovered this versus This was discovered) since texts remain equally impersonal. Other factors, such as the increasing informalization observed in various genres, will have to be contemplated in any comprehensive study of the rhetoric of science.

The first two paragraphs deal with the question of how the term dialogue is to be understood and how the terms dialogue and monologue are related. Then arguments for and against the assumption that written communication is a kind of interaction are discussed. Paragraph 4 points out the typical features of written interaction, using the example of WhatsApp – an internet-based instant messaging service which can be installed on a smartphone. In this context the following questions are discussed: how are the characteristics of such dialogues to be described? What distinguishes them from spoken dialogues? And why – compared to text messaging via mobile phones – do they constitute a new kind of dialogue? Paragraph 5 deals with Linell’s (1998) concept of dialogism and investigates in what ways this concept is applicable to written interaction. Finally it is shown that not only spoken but also written dialogues may be described in the context of interactional linguistics and other well established research contexts. However, new descriptive methods are needed to do justice to the specific features of written interaction.

Speech rhythm varies noticeably from language to language, and within the same language as a function of numerous linguistic, prosodic and speaker-dependent factors, among which is the speaker’s age. Cross-sectional studies comparing the acoustic characteristics of young and old voices have documented that healthy aging affects speech rhythm variability. This kind of studies, however, presents one fundamental limitation: They group together people with different life experiences, healthy conditions and aging rate. This makes it very difficult to disentangle the effect of aging from that of other factors when interpreting the rhythmic differences between younger and older adults. In the present paper, we overcame such difficulty by tracing rhythmic variability within one single individual longitudinally. We examined 5 public talks held by Noam Chomsky, from when he was 40 to when he was 89. Within-speaker rhythmic variability was quantified through a variety of rate measures (segment/consonant and vowel rate) and rhythmic metrics (%V, %Vn, nPVI-V, n-PVI-C). The results showed that physiological aging affected speech rate measures, but not the durational characteristics of vocalic and consonantal intervals. More longitudinal data from numerous speakers of the same language are necessary to identify generalizable patterns in age-related rhythmic variability. Las propiedades rítmicas de un lenguaje varían enormemente entre variedades, así como dentro de una misma variedad en función de numerosos factores lingüísticos, prosódicos y factores dependientes del hablante, entre los cuales se encuentra la edad. Estudios transversales que comparan las características acústicas de voces jóvenes y de avanzada edad han documentado asimismo el efecto de la edad del locutor sobre la variabilidad rítmica del habla. Este tipo de estudios, sin embargo, presentan una limitación fundamental al agrupar personas con diferentes experiencias vitales, estados de salud y ritmo de envejecimiento. De esta forma, discernir el efecto del envejecimiento de aquel producido por otros factores, a la hora de interpretar las diferencias rítmicas entre adultos más jóvenes y mayores, resulta considerablemente más difícil. En el presente artículo, superamos dicha dificultad al hacer un seguimiento longitudinal de la variabilidad rítmica de la voz de un único individuo. Hemos examinado 5 charlas públicas de Noam Chomsky, realizadas entre sus 40 y 89 años. La variabilidad rítmica intra-hablante fue cuantificada mediante una variedad de medidas de la velocidad de elocución (segmentales / índices consonánticos y vocálicos) y métricas rítmicas (%V, %Vn, nPVI-V, n-PVI-C). Los resultados muestran que el envejecimiento fisiológico afecta a las medidas de la velocidad de elocución, pero no a las características duracionales de los intervalos vocálicos y consonánticos. Más datos longitudinales procedentes de numerosos hablantes de la misma lengua son necesarios para identificar patrones generales respecto a la variabilidad rítmica relacionada con el envejecimiento.

Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Spanish has been studied under various aspects: Spanish as a typical DOM language in typology, Spanish as the most salient Romance DOM language, Spanish and its diachronic evolution and diatopic variation. The present paper discusses different accounts that were given in the literature for the emergence and tendencies of DOM in Spanish. It tries to show that there is, apart from all the semantic and syntactic factors traditionally discussed, an overall basic value of DOM in Spanish which can be extracted analysing those cases where the presence or absence of DOM establishes an obvious opposition in meaning. It is claimed that the contemporary system emerged in Early Modern Spanish and that it seems rather stable in the Spanish speaking world. Furthermore, as a contemporary tendency within this system there seems to be an increase of DOM in cases where marking is facultative, with regional differences within the Spanish speaking world.

In this paper, we examine the diffusion of a syntactic change in a specialised text type in different World Englishes – in particular, the use of be-passives in academic discourse in nine contact varieties of English and six English as a Native Language (ENL) varieties. The Zürich-parsed International Corpus of English (ICE) makes it possible to retrieve automatically, for the first time, the two variants in the envelope of variation: active transitive constructions and be-passives. We apply regression analysis in order to gauge the effect of potential external factors that play a role in the choice between them: regional variety (with potential influence from the substrate in the contact varieties) and academic sub-discipline. The use of the passive has undergone change in the twentieth century (see, for example, Leech et al., 2009 ). As a necessary backdrop for variation found in the ICE corpora, we therefore use historical data from the extended Brown family of corpora, which have also been parsed at the University of Zürich. The results of our analysis show that regional variety is less important than academic sub-discipline: with the sole exception of American English, be-passives are about equally frequent in both ENL and contact varieties; moreover, they are distributed similarly across all varieties according to academic sub-discipline (humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and technology).

Children might combine gesture and prosody to express a pragmatic meaning such as a request, information focus, uncertainty or politeness, before they can convey these meanings in speech. However, little is known about the developmental trajectories of gestural and prosodic patterns and how they relate to a child’s growing understanding and propositional use of these sociopragmatic meanings. Do gesture and prosody act as sister systems in pragmatic development? Do children acquire these components of language before they are able to express themselves through spoken language, thus acting as forerunners in children’s pragmatic development? This review article assesses empirical evidence that demonstrates that gesture and prosody act as intimately related systems and, importantly, pave the way for pragmatic acquisition at different developmental stages. The review goes on to explore how the integration of gesture and prosody with semantics and syntax can impact language acquisition and how multimodal interventions can be used effectively in educational settings. Our review findings support the importance of simultaneously assessing both the prosodic and the gestural components of language in the fields of language development, language learning, and language intervention. This article is partly based on, and was inspired by, the results of research funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Grant No. FFI2015-66533-P “Intonational and gestural meaning in language” and Grant No. PGC2018-097007-B-I00 “Multimodal Language Learning”) and a grant awarded by the Generalitat de Catalunya (Grant No. 2017SGR-925) to the Prosodic Studies Group.