Search

This study proposes Linguistic Inference Framing, a linguistic category approach to framing, which can be used to understand the effects of implicit inference language frames on audience perceptions. Study 1, a 2 (language inference frame: low vs. high) x 2 (replication) experiment, demonstrated that high inference language frame leads to higher attribution perceptions in a corporate crisis. Study 2, a 2 (language inference frame: low vs. high) x 3 (social identity: out-group vs. in-group vs. control) experiment in a political crisis, found main effects of high inference (vs. low) language frame and of social identity on higher attribution, future crisis occurrence and unethical perceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reference to current discourse is often cited as a definitional criterion for classifying linguistic units as metapragmatic. However, there is no consensus in research on the precise meaning and limits of this criterion. In this paper, a cognitive-linguistic perspective is adopted to address this issue by focusing on how interactants conceptualize discourse. A synthesis of Langacker's (2001)current-discourse-space model (CDS model) and the notion of pragmatic frames is used to analyze metapragmatic practices in a television discussion. The analytical annotation process shows that metapragmatic markers (MPMs) evoke specific kinds of frame structures including the instantiation of pragmatic frames. Based on the annotation of the entire transcribed discussion, it will be argued that the visualization of discourse sequences in the CDS model and the examination of the specific frame structures evoked by MPMs contribute to a better understanding of the core of metapragmaticity. The paper concludes with a pilot study that uses quantitative methods to demonstrate the analytical potential of a cognition-centered categorization of MPMs. It is shown that the use of MPMs reflects different interactional roles (i.e., host or discussant) and the conversational strategies used to shape the conceptualization of argumentative discourse to pursue specific interactional goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the use of surprise frames in judicial opinions of the HKSAR. Specifically, it examines the semantic variation of surprise frames and the discourse purposes for which they are used. In doing so, it explores the underlying interactivity of surprise frames by distinguishing between performative expressions of surprise (those that emanate from the current author's reflection) and descriptive expressions (those that report on another's sense of surprise). Recognising that legal discourse scholars often neglect lower courts, the paper contrasts opinions from three levels of court in the HKSAR. Genre and court-specific patterns emerge: a key similarity is that all three courts, performatively and descriptively, most often use the TYPICALITY frame. Key differences include a significantly greater use of the TYPICALITY frame by the appeal courts in relation to the trial courts; more qualitatively oriented analysis shows that the use of surprise frames maps onto the common law standard of review, i.e., the appeal courts largely use surprise frames to focus on legal issues. In contrast, the trial courts focus on facts and evidence. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the main findings for researchers and professionals. • Surprise frames in the majority opinions of 119 HKSAR court cases analysed. • Three levels of court are analysed. • A distinction is made between performative and descriptive frames. • All courts used the TYPICALITY frame most frequently. • Appeal courts focus on legal issues, trial courts on facts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the context of multilingualism, there has been burgeoning research interest in interlanguage varieties. This corpus‐based study investigated structural and functional variations in phrase frames (p‐frames) in argumentative writing by English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners from Arabic, German, Hindi, and Chinese language backgrounds. P‐frames, recurrent non‐contiguous co‐selection units within texts, were automatically extracted, manually filtered, and analyzed for variability, predictability, and discourse function. The results revealed learners’ shared reliance on prompt‐related p‐frames as well as potential L1 influence on specific p‐frames. German learners displayed the lowest degree of flexibility and creativity, while Hindi learners exhibited the highest. Chinese and Arabic learners demonstrated moderate levels, falling between the two extremes. Statistically significant differences in p‐frame tokens across functional categories were observed in all groups. This study contributes to a nuanced understanding of phraseological competence in EFL learners from different L1 backgrounds and holds pedagogical implications for the globalized educational landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines two mechanisms in treating Persian names in English-speaking contexts: name projection and name adoption. The article adopts Edward Said's Orientalism, noting Western-centric naming and colonial division with Western superiority. The treatment of the Oriental name will be discussed within the frame of linguistic Orientalism which refers to the portrayal or study of Eastern languages and cultures through the lens of Western superiority or exoticisation. Previously, this mindset projected the coloniser's preferred names onto the territory and individuals of the Other. Today, the name of the Other is governed as the subjects from different backgrounds are propelled to conform to the coloniser's preferences in choosing Anglo-sounding names. I will conclude that the shift from the authoritative name projection to the disciplinary name adoption manifests a Foucauldian trajectory from 'sovereign power' to modern 'disciplinary power' in taming the name of the Other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines Zellig Harris's 1946 work "From morpheme to utterance," highlighting its departure from the structuralist framework of immediate constituency. Topics discussed include Harris's rejection of traditional syntactic analysis, the introduction of substitution techniques for morpheme sequences, and the implications of his approach for contemporary grammatical theory.

Weakly supervised temporal language grounding (TLG) aims to locate events in untrimmed videos based on natural language queries without temporal annotations, necessitating a deep understanding of semantic context across both video and text modalities. Existing methods often focus on simple correlations between query phrases and isolated video segments, neglecting the event-oriented semantic coherence and consistency required for accurate temporal grounding. This can lead to misleading results due to partial frame correlations. To address these limitations, we propose the Event-oriented State Alignment Network (ESAN), which constructs "start–event–end" semantic state sets for both textual and video data. ESAN employs relative entropy for cross-modal alignment through knowledge distillation from pre-trained large models, thereby enhancing semantic coherence within each modality and ensuring consistency across modalities. Our approach leverages vision–language models to extract static frame semantics and large language models to capture dynamic semantic changes, facilitating a more comprehensive understanding of events. Experiments conducted on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that ESAN significantly outperforms existing methods. By reducing false high correlations and improving the overall performance, our method effectively addresses the challenges posed by previous approaches. These advancements highlight the potential of ESAN to improve the precision and reliability of temporal language grounding tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is set in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand and investigates the influence of cultural knowledge on the type of topics that speakers of New Zealand Englishes (NZEs) associate to in their narrations. A storytelling task based on picture prompts of New Zealand landscapes shows a major difference between the cultural associations of Māori and Pākehā (New Zealand European) participants. The difference can be captured in two cultural frames that underlie the preferred topics chosen by the two groups. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for defining NZEs, and they also bear ramifications for theory development in Cultural Linguistics, highlighting the nested and flexibly construable nature of cultural conceptualisations. For research on world Englishes, the study is an example of how cultural‐linguistic analyses can be extended towards larger cultural framings to explain cultural variation among speakers of Englishes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the compatibility between Data-Driven Learning (DDL) and usage-based approaches to second language acquisition (SLA). Usage-based approaches emphasize the importance of language use and its impact on language development. DDL, which utilizes language corpora to study learner input and output, aligns with usage-based SLA by exposing learners to authentic usage data and helping them derive regularities and patterns. The article suggests future research directions, including the creation of DDL materials guided by usage-based SLA principles and longitudinal studies to examine the long-term effects of DDL. The author emphasizes the importance of establishing stronger connections between DDL and SLA theory to enhance language learning outcomes. [Extracted from the article]

The launch of the FrameNet project in 1997 was both a crystallisation point of decades worth of theoretical investigations into lexical meaning by Charles J. Fillmore and colleagues, as well as the seed of an ongoing line of corpus-based and computational research that seeks to implement Fillmore's theory of Frame Semantics in a way that both provides an interesting model relevant for further theorising and also is applicable practically for semantic analysis, lexicology, and lexicography. At the occasion of FrameNet's 25th birthday, we want to introduce the project to a new generation of researchers but also take stock of, and report on, what has been achieved. We revisit the origins of the FrameNet project, assess its development and various changes in the years since it was first reported on in a special issue in the pages of this journal twenty years ago. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Arts for Linguistic & Literary Studies is the property of Thamar University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The rebranding of reggaetón towards Latin urban has been criticized for tokenizing Afro-Caribbean linguistic and cultural practices as symbolic resources recruitable by non-Caribbean artists/executives in the interest of profit. Consumers are particularly critical of an audible phonological homogeneity in the performances of ethnonationally distinct mainstream performers, framed as a form of linguistic minstrelsy popularly termed a 'Caribbean Blaccent' that facilitates capitalization on the genre's popularity by tapping into the covert prestige of distinctive phonological elements of Insular Caribbean Spanish otherwise stigmatized. This work pairs acoustic analysis with quantitative statistical modeling to compare the use of lenited coronal sibilant allophones popularly considered indexical of Hispano-Caribbean origins in the spoken and sung speech of four of the genre's top-charting female performers. A general pattern of style-shifting from interview to sung speech wherein sibilance is favored in the former and phonetic zeros in the latter is revealed. Moreover, a statistically significant increased incidence of [-] across time shows the most recent records to uniformly deploy near-categorical reduction independent of artists' sociocultural and linguistic backgrounds. The results support the enregisterment of practices popularized by the genre's San Juan-based pioneers as a stylistic resource—a reggaetón voice—for engaging the images of vernacularity sustaining and driving the contemporary, mainstream popularity of música urbana. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the non-contiguous phraseological profile of Microeconomics research articles, specifically focusing on key lexical frames within the Discussion section. Key lexical frames are non-contiguous recurrent expressions with variable slots unique to specific contexts such as genres or disciplines. The analysis is based on a corpus of Discussion sections from research articles published in four leading Microeconomics journals between 2017 and 2022. Using the KfNgram program, four-word lexical frames were identified and refined according to exclusion criteria. The resulting list of lexical frames was compared with a general corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American English, yielding 43 four-word key lexical frames unique to Microeconomics. These frames were analysed following the structural classification by Gray and Biber (2013) and the functional taxonomy by Simpson-Vlach and Ellis (2010). Structurally, most key lexical frames were found to be function word frames, while functionally, they primarily served referential functions. The findings reveal significant phraseological variation, encompassing both lexical and grammatical constructions unique to the field of Microeconomics. These insights contribute to a deeper understanding of discipline-specific academic writing and have important implications for English for Academic Purposes pedagogy. In particular, this research aims at improving the learners' part-genre awareness and competence. By identifying and analysing key lexical frames, the study provides valuable resources for enhancing the teaching of academic writing in Microeconomics, particularly for non-native English speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparing language tests and test preparation materials holds important implications for the latter's validity and reliability. However, not enough studies compare such materials across a wide range of indices. Therefore, this study investigated the text complexity of IELTS academic reading tests (IRT) and IELTS reading practice tests (IRPrT). Fine-grained quantitative analyses were undertaken to delineate measures of lexical, syntactic, and discourse complexity across a corpus of 108 IRT and 108 IRPrT published by Pearson, Macmillan, and Cengage Learning. The results suggest little difference between IRT and IRPrT at the lexical level; however, there were significant differences in some measures of syntactic and discourse level complexity. The findings bear implications for stakeholders including learners as test takers, instructors, material developers, and language testing researchers. We interpret this to mean that while IRPrT materials are lexically conducive to the practice for IRT and can provide a similar experience, the IRPrT do show some differences in the amount of subordination and idea repetition at the discourse level. Therefore, instructors and learners may seek to supplement practice with these structures when preparing for IRT, and the designers of such practice materials should consider aligning these factors in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional studies have been referring to Halliday's meta-function of language to classify the uses of "so" as a discourse marker. However, there are some overlaps in the theories that were accepted earlier. Thus, this study first seeks to explore the discourse roles of "so" in terms of where it appears (utterance-initial, -middle, and -final) in dialogues and monologues of informal English language based on the TV Corpus and AntConc tool. Second, this paper tries to explain the extended use and internal functional mapping of "so" from a logical connective to a discourse marker in spoken English by building a connection between the two uses and providing an account for its functional borrowing. The ultimate goal is to render a new perspective of presenting both the logical and the discourse functions of "so" related to the syntactical structure and pragmatic context it is in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although retelling as a technique to assess narration has been widely used, the input modality seems to impact in different ways on the elicited text, generating a debate about the biases that may appear. To contribute to this discussion, the objective of this study is to describe the development of conceptual subordination and its forms of coding in the oral stories of Spanish-speaking children as well as its relationship with the source text. The stories of 28 five-year-old Chilean school children collected through a retelling task were studied. The analysis consisted of firstly assessing the production of conceptual subordination through the identification of asymmetric links between states of affairs. Then, the encoding forms that instantiated these links were classified. Finally, indices were constructed and applied to compare the children's texts with the source text. During the comparative analysis with the input, three qualitative categories emerged: similar production, reformulation and new link. The results showed that the participants' stories present significantly less production of conceptual subordination link than the source text. However, the children were able to create new links that were not presented in the story and reformulated others, as evidence of an interpretive process that goes beyond the mere reproduction of the input in these types of tasks. Regarding the encoding forms, the results were very similar between the source text and the children's text without significant differences. Both in source texts and children's texts, the prototypical forms of Spanish dominated, allowing us to conclude a possible input bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the introduction of frame semantics in SciE-Lex, a lexical database of biomedical English, in order to establish frame-based semantic networks among the lexical units contained in the database and draw attention to the domain-specific meanings and syntactic patterns that they exhibit. Taking the general English FrameNet database as a reference and the verbs diminish, compete, and perturb as an illustration, this paper shows how modelling the syntacticosemantic properties of biomedical English results in three scenarios: (a) the general English FrameNet analysis is fully adequate for biomedical usage (b) the frame elements in the general English FrameNet do not fully characterize the semantic and syntactic properties of the lexical items in biomedical English, so an existing frame needs to be customized (c) the frame(s) evoked in general English are different, so either the customization of an existing frame or the addition of a new frame is necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces an original theoretical model for understanding how the linguistic framing of political protest messages influences how blame spreads in social media. Our model of blame retweetability posits that the way in which the basis and focus of blame are linguistically construed affects people's perception of the strength of criticism in the message and its likelihood to be reposted. Two online experiments provide empirical support for the model. We find that attacks on a person's character are perceived as more critical than blaming focused on the negative outcomes of their actions, and that negative judgements of social sanction have a greater impact than those of social esteem. The study also uncovers a "retweetability paradox"—in contrast to earlier studies, we find that blame messages that are perceived as more critical are not more likely to be reposted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Embedded questions (EQs) are islands for filler–gap dependency formation in English, but not in Norwegian. Kush and Dahl (2022) found that first language (L1) Norwegian participants often accepted filler–gap dependencies into EQs in second language (L2) English, and proposed that this reflected persistent transfer from Norwegian of the functional structure that licenses such filler–gap dependencies. However, their results do not conclusively establish that the judgment patterns were specific to transfer from L1 Norwegian and not a general L2 effect. To address this issue, we conducted elicited production tasks comparing how L1 Norwegian and L1 Swedish speakers complete dependencies into declarative complement clauses and EQs both in their native languages and L2 English. Despite its similarity to Norwegian, Swedish prohibits the filler–gap dependency into EQs that Norwegian allows. We expected participants to complete dependencies that they considered grammatical with gaps and to avoid gaps where they considered them ungrammatical. Our results clearly indicate transfer: L1 Norwegian participants overwhelmingly used gaps when completing dependencies into EQs in both L1 and L2, whereas Swedish participants almost never used gaps in either language. We interpret our results as support for models that allow transfer of functional heads and their associated features from L1 to L2, and suggest that such transfer persists when the L2 input does not provide relevant evidence for restructuring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates feature acquisition and feature reassembly associated with Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD). The article compares the acquisition of CLLD in second language (L2) Italian to L2 Romanian to examine effects of first language (L1) transfer, construction frequency and the type of interface involved (external vs. internal interface) within the same syntactic construction. The results from an acceptability judgment task and a written elicitation task show that while English near-native speakers of Italian/Romanian acquired the L2 constraints on CLLD, which is [+anaphor] for Italian and [+specific] for Romanian, data from both Romanian L2 learners of Italian and Italian L2 learners of Romanian showed persistent L1 transfer effects. Target-like acquisition for these groups requires both grammatical expansion and retraction; Romanian CLLD requires the addition of an L1-unavailable [+specific] feature and the loss of a [+anaphor] feature, while Italian CLLD requires the addition of an L1-unavailable [+anaphor] and the loss of a [+specific] feature. The reported findings extend evidence in favour of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis to the syntax–discourse interface, as reassembly of interpretational features associated with CLLD proved more difficult than feature acquisition. While learners at the near-native levels were able to broaden the contexts that allow a clitic in the L2 (grammatical expansion), L1 preemption difficulties were attested as well. This was the case regardless of the frequency of the relevant construction in the input and the type of L2 feature that needed to be added/removed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many issues face construction grammar today. I start with the role of usage in construction grammar, and trace the changes in the usage-based model from mental storage to social interaction to evolution of populations of speakers and utterances. Just as speech communities and linguistic categories can be described as evolving populations, so can the construction grammar community and the theoretical concepts and formalisms that have evolved in it. Meaning remains the most challenging question for the future. Meaning is human experience, incredibly rich, and I suggest that construction grammar move away from mental representations to radical embodiment (existential phenomenology). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does the future hold for Construction Grammar? What are the most promising future avenues for research on constructions? This paper addresses the development of Construction Grammar as a theory of language through the perspective of six recent PhD dissertations that explore constructional meaning, the architecture of the constructional network, and the role of language change in a constructional theory of language. The goal of this paper is to establish connections between these ideas, and to spell out how different questions concerning Frame Semantics, distributional semantic methods, priming, nodes and connections, individual differences, and constructional change all contribute to a picture that is bigger than the sum of its parts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the evolution and current state of Construction Grammar (C×G) since its inception in the 1980s at UC Berkeley. It has expanded to various languages and research areas, including computational linguistics, language pedagogy, and psycholinguistics. The article highlights the diverse constructionist approaches within C×G and presents insights from leading researchers in the field. The text also delves into the results of an online questionnaire among construction grammarians, showcasing varying opinions on key aspects of C×G. Additionally, it provides a summary of the papers in the theme issue, offering different perspectives on the future of Construction Grammar. [Extracted from the article]

Commonsense knowledge is a broad and challenging area of research which investigates our understanding of the world as well as human assumptions about reality. Deriving directly from the subjective perception of the external world, it is intrinsically intertwined with embodied cognition. Commonsense reasoning is linked to human sense-making, pattern recognition and knowledge framing abilities. This work presents a new resource that formalizes the cognitive theory of image schemas. Image schemas are dynamic conceptual building blocks originating from our sensorimotor interactions with the physical world, and enable our sense-making cognitive activity to assign coherence and structure to entities, events and situations we experience everyday. ImageSchemaNet is an ontology that aligns pre-existing resources, such as FrameNet, VerbNet, WordNet and MetaNet from the Framester hub, to image schema theory. This article describes an empirical application of ImageSchemaNet, combined with semantic parsers, on the task of annotating natural language sentences with image schemas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Lingüística y Literatura is the property of Universidad de Antioquia, Facultad de Comunicaciones and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Introduction: Syntactic awareness is the ability to monitor and manipulate word order within sentences. It is unclear whether children with dyslexia have syntactic awareness problems, as there are mixed results in the literature. Dyslexia is typically classified with very poor word and nonword reading and phonological processing problems are often observed in this population. It is conceivable that a phonological deficit could strain memory when performing oral syntactic awareness tasks. Here we examine if syntactic awareness problems are observed in children with dyslexia once phonological processing and memory skills are controlled. Methods: Real and nonword reading efficiency tests determined reading level. Children with dyslexia (n = 25) were compared to typically developing children (n = 24) matched for age (M = 8;8) and nonverbal abilities. Syntactic awareness was measured with an oral word order correction task (e.g., Is baking Lisa and her son in his room sleeps). Tests of phonological awareness, phonological memory, and verbal working memory were also administered and served as controls. Results: The dyslexic group performed worse than typically developing readers on syntactic awareness and this group difference persisted once phonological memory and verbal working memory were controlled. However, after controlling for phonological awareness skills, there were no group differences on the syntactic awareness test. Discussion: The results suggest that phonological awareness problems in particular might be responsible for syntactic awareness difficulties in dyslexia and future studies should control for this. The results are discussed within theoretical frameworks on the nature of oral language deficits in dyslexia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The hypothesis that all languages are equally complex often invokes a trade-off principle, according to which if a language is more complex in one particular domain, it will be simpler in another different domain. In this paper, we use data from WALS to test the existence of a trade-off between two specific domains: morphology and syntax. Contrary to widespread views, we did not find a negative correlation between these two language domains, but in fact a positive correlation. At the same time, this positive correlation seems to be driven by some language families, and it disappears when one considers purely morphological and purely syntactic features only. We discuss these findings in relation to ongoing research about language complexity, and in particular, the effects of factors external to language on linguistic structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated how heritage Spanish-English bilinguals integrate their cue hierarchies to process simple sentences in both Spanish and English. Sentence interpretation is achieved by weighing the various cues that are present in the sentence against that language's cue hierarchy. The Unified Competition Model (UCM) suggests that bilinguals show a variety of patterns in sentence interpretation strategies depending on language proficiency. Previous research on heritage Spanish-English bilinguals and late bilinguals has demonstrated differences in cue utilization and sentence interpretation compared to monolinguals. However, good-enough processing suggests that when a sentence does not meet certain heuristics, like the first-noun agent heuristic, a semantic representation of the sentence will be processed instead of a syntactic one. Even with reliable sentential-level cues such as word order, a plausible semantic representation of the sentence is favored. This is especially the case with inanimate-inanimate (IA-IA) sentences, like in the present study, in which there is less reversibility of thematic roles without competing with semantic plausibility. For this study, participants (n = 32) read a total of 80 inanimate sentences in English and Spanish with subject-verb-object and object-verb-subject (OVS) word orders, indicated the subject of the sentences, and completed language proficiency and dominance tasks. When reading Spanish sentences, participants read the OVS word order faster. English proficiency was a significant predictor of sentence reading time and choice selection time but did not predict word choice. The results suggest that IA-IA sentences pose challenges for cue utilization and thematic role assignment due to semantic limitations. This study found that participantsmay prioritize semantic plausibility over syntactic representations in sentence processing, supporting a good-enough processing model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering the increasing application of task-based frameworks to second language (L2) writing research, there has been a pressing need to examine TBLT views on the interactions between task conceptualization, task performance, and L2 writing outcomes. To address this need, the present study was designed to explore the synergistic effects of task complexity and task repetition on different facets of syntactic complexity as a key construct of proficiency and development in L2 writing. In doing so, 96 ESL learners performed written argumentative task versions with varying cognitive complexity in a counterbalanced fashion and then complete a task difficulty questionnaire. Afterward, they repeated the tasks in the opposite order at a one-week interval. The essays were analyzed using fine-grained syntactic complexity measures (reported by Lu's L2 syntactic complexity analyzer, 2010). Linear mixed-effects models indicated significant main effects of task complexity and task repetition on different facets of syntactic complexity with robust effect sizes. However, no significant interaction effect between task complexity and task repetition was observed. These findings provide a reliable and accurate understanding of how syntactic complexity plays a role in the current accounts of connections between task features, implementation variables, and L2 writing task performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies on prosodic disambiguation have found Chinese EFL learners capable of using prosodic cues for both boundary marking and focus encoding in English, but somewhat differently from native English speakers. No clear understanding has yet been obtained about their overall use of prosodic strategies in speech production for disambiguation. In this study, we conducted a contextualized production task followed by perception judgments and acoustic analyses to investigate their prosodic disambiguation, with native English speakers as the contrast group. We considered three types of prosodic cues (duration, pitch, and intensity), and examined ambiguities in both syntactic structure and information structure. We found that Chinese EFL learners did alter their prosodic cues to disambiguate two readings, but differently from native English speakers in both cue number and cue combination. Specifically, they used a narrower range of cues and provided insufficient prosodic information, consequently leading to poor perception by native listeners. Our findings argue for prosodic disambiguation training in foreign language teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the extent to which second language (L2) learners' syntactic prediction resembles or differs from native speakers' and the role of L2 proficiency in this process. An experimental group of 135 Chinese learners of English and a control group of 58 English native speakers participated in a phrase-by-phrase self-paced reading task where the experimental sentences were contrastive in whether the DP disjunction was preceded by either or not. To ensure that the participants had sufficient knowledge about the target stimuli, they were asked to additionally judge the acceptability of the experimental sentences. The results showed that like native speakers, L2 learners read the critical region consisting of "or" and a DP disjunct faster when it was preceded by either compared to when either was absent. In addition, this effect of the presence versus absence of either spilled over to the post-critical region. Moreover, L2 proficiency was not found to robustly modulate this process. It is concluded that L2 learners, like native speakers, can make predictions at the level of syntax. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Semantic frames are formal structures describing situations, actions or events, e.g., Commerce buy, Kidnapping, or Exchange. Each frame provides a set of frame elements or semantic roles corresponding to participants of the situation and lexical units (LUs)—words and phrases that can evoke this particular frame in texts. For example, for the frame Kidnapping, two key roles are Perpetrator and the Victim, and this frame can be evoked with lexical units abduct, kidnap, or snatcher. While formally sound, the scarce availability of semantic frame resources and their limited lexical coverage hinders the wider adoption of frame semantics across languages and domains. To tackle this problem, firstly, we propose a method that takes as input a few frame-annotated sentences and generates alternative lexical realizations of lexical units and semantic roles matching the original frame definition. Secondly, we show that the obtained synthetically generated semantic frame annotated examples help to improve the quality of frame-semantic parsing. To evaluate our proposed approach, we decompose our work into two parts. In the first part of text augmentation for LUs and roles, we experiment with various types of models such as distributional thesauri, non-contextualized word embeddings (word2vec, fastText, GloVe), and Transformer-based contextualized models, such as BERT or XLNet. We perform the intrinsic evaluation of these induced lexical substitutes using FrameNet gold annotations. Models based on Transformers show overall superior performance, however, they do not always outperform simpler models (based on static embeddings) unless information about the target word is suitably injected. However, we observe that non-contextualized models also show comparable performance on the task of LU expansion. We also show that combining substitutes of individual models can significantly improve the quality of final substitutes. Because intrinsic evaluation scores are highly dependent on the gold dataset and the frame preservation, and cannot be ensured by an automatic evaluation mechanism because of the incompleteness of gold datasets, we also carried out experiments with manual evaluation on sample datasets to further analyze the usefulness of our approach. The results show that the manual evaluation framework significantly outperforms automatic evaluation for lexical substitution. For extrinsic evaluation, the second part of this work assesses the utility of these lexical substitutes for the improvement of frame-semantic parsing. We took a small set of frame-annotated sentences and augmented them by replacing corresponding target words with their closest substitutes, obtained from best-performing models. Our extensive experiments on the original and augmented set of annotations with two semantic parsers show that our method is effective for improving the downstream parsing task by training set augmentation, as well as for quickly building FrameNet-like resources for new languages or subject domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the relationship between language and event cognition? Past work has suggested that linguistic/aspectual distinctions encoding the internal temporal profile of events map onto nonlinguistic event representations. Here, we use a novel visual detection task to directly test the hypothesis that processing telic versus atelic sentences (e.g., "Ebony folded a napkin in 10 seconds" vs. "Ebony did some folding for 10 seconds") can influence whether the very same visual event is processed as containing distinct temporal stages including a well‐defined endpoint or lacking such structure, respectively. In two experiments, we show that processing (a)telicity in language shifts how people later construe the temporal structure of identical visual stimuli. We conclude that event construals are malleable representations that can align with the linguistic framing of events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studii de Ştiintă şi Cultură is the property of Studii de Stiinta si Cultura and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this paper, we present data from an elicitation study and a corpus study that support the observation that the Yucatec Maya progressive aspect auxiliary táan is replaced by the habitual auxiliary k in sentences with contrastively focused fronted objects. Focus has been extensively studied in Yucatec, yet the incompatibility of object fronting and progressive aspect in Yucatec Maya remains understudied. Both our experimental results and our corpus study point in the direction that this incompatibility may very well be categorical. Theoretically, we take a progressive reading to be derived from an imperfectivity operator in combination with a singular operator, and we propose that this singular operator implicates the negation of event plurality, leading to an exhaustive interpretation which ranks below corrective focus on a contrastive focus scale. This means that, in a sentence with object focus fronting, the use of the marked auxiliary táan (as opposed to the more general k) would trigger two contrastive foci, which would be an unlikely and probably dispreferred speech act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the issue of how nominal countability is grammatically encoded and how the counting function is realized in classifier languages by investigating classifier phrases in Donglan Zhuang, a Tai-Kadai language. According to the prevailing individuation account, classifiers are required to individuate nouns, which can then be counted by numerals. Under this approach, countability and counting are conflated. Donglan Zhuang has two syntactically distinct types of classifiers, namely, numeral classifiers CLnum and noun classifiers CLnom. CLnum performs the counting/measuring function, comparable to the cardinality function proposed in Scontras (The semantics of measurement, Harvard University, Cambridge, 2014), and CLnom encodes syntactic countability by singling out sortal nouns from the mass domain, whereby sortal nouns are, meanwhile, turned into (taxonomic) kind terms. Noun classifiers in Donglan Zhuang pose a challenge to Chierchia's (Nat Lang Semant 6(4):339–405, 1998) "bare argument hypothesis" and suggest that bare nouns in classifier languages are not uniform with respect to the [±argument] parametric setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores a restriction on non-local binding in Vietnamese—the blocking effect—including a systematic comparison with its Mandarin Chinese counterpart. Our finding is that the blocking effect in Vietnamese appeared to be rather different from that in Mandarin but, in fact, employs essentially the same syntactic mechanism. While binding of Mandarin ziji is governed by a [+participant] feature, binding of the Vietnamese anaphor mình is governed by a [+author] feature. Together with the assumption of the presence of a silent performative frame, this derives that binding of Vietnamese mình yields what one may call an Author effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study an extension of first-degree entailment (FDE) by Dunn and Belnap with a non-contingency operator |$\blacktriangle \phi $| which is construed as ' |$\phi $| has the same value in all accessible states' or 'all sources give the same information on the truth value of |$\phi $| '. We equip this logic dubbed |$\textbf {K}^\blacktriangle _{\textbf {FDE}}$| with frame semantics and show how the bi-valued models can be interpreted as interconnected networks of Belnapian databases with the |$\blacktriangle $| operator modelling search for inconsistencies in the provided information. We construct an analytic cut system for the logic and show its soundness and completeness. We prove that |$\blacktriangle $| is not definable via the necessity modality |$\Box $| of |$\textbf {K}_{\textbf{FDE}}$|⁠. Furthermore, we prove that in contrast to the classical non-contingency logic, reflexive, |$\textbf {S4}$| and |$\textbf {S5}$| (among others) frames are definable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the representation of the Russia–Ukraine conflict by two state-owned Russian news media and two state-owned Ukrainian news media, namely Izvestia, Russia Today, Ukrinform and Dzerkalo Tyzhnia. The aim of this investigation is to determine the ideologies embedded in the news reports and discourse structures, and strategies deployed in portraying the conflict actors and their actions. Van Dijk's socio-cognitive model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (see Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach, 1998; New(s) racism: A discourse analytical approach, 2000; and Politics, ideology, and discourse, 2006) and Martin and White's Appraisal Framework of attitude and graduation (see The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English, 2005) served as the theoretical frameworks. Using Critical Discourse Analysis as the analytical framework, the study examines how attitudinal and evaluative language use are employed to enact ideologies and to portray biased presentations of conflict actors. The findings reveal that the media reports of the Russia–Ukraine conflict are laden with militarism and nationalism. Discourse structures and strategies of emotive verbs, evaluative adjectives, positive self-presentation, negative other-presentation, national self-glorification, actor description, comparison and number games are powerful tools for enacting ideologies. The media representation of the Russia–Ukraine conflict lacked conflict resolution embedded linguistic frames and is rather distorted, stereotypic and conflict-inciting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Handbook of Cognitive Semantics, edited by Li, Thomas Fuyin, is a comprehensive reference work that explores the field of cognitive semantics. It covers a wide range of topics, including conceptual semantics, embodied semantics, metaphor and metonymy, spatial-temporal cognition, and more. The handbook features contributions from both established researchers and emerging scholars, providing diverse perspectives and expertise. While the breadth of coverage is impressive, some areas may be addressed only superficially, and certain topics may receive more attention than others. Overall, the handbook is a valuable resource for scholars and students interested in cognitive semantics. [Extracted from the article]

Despite much research on the media coverage of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), the specific language and ideological underpinnings used in this discourse have received little attention. This study compares the discourse surrounding the GERD construction in Egyptian and Ethiopian news sources to identify variations in word choice and underlying biases. Using critical discourse analysis (CDA), the study analyzes two online English news corpora, totalling over a million words across 2655 articles. The analysis involves identifying statistically salient keywords in each corpus and examining their context through a contrastive collocation analysis. The study investigates the data in light of Fairclough's three-dimensional framework, which considers the text, discourse practice, and social practice, and applies van Dijk's concept of the ideological square to explore patterns of self-positive and other-negative representation. The findings reveal distinct patterns of bias in the news coverage from both countries. Egyptian news outlets often frame the GERD project as a source of crisis, depicting Ethiopia as violating international law and exacerbating political tensions. In contrast, Ethiopian news sources tend to portray Egypt as dismissive of Ethiopia's development rights and as monopolizing the Nile's resources. These discursive strategies reflect a broader trend of media bias, where lexical choices and framing techniques align with national interests and diplomatic stances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study investigates the interplay between strategic goals and calculative practices, specifically Customer Profitability Analysis (CPA). Drawing on practice-based theories, the research aims to understand how managers strategize with CPA, including the balancing of financial and strategic objectives and the interplay of institutionalized practices with individual practitioners' actions. Design: The study uses a qualitative, revelatory, and exploratory case study approach at the sub-organizational level in a manufacturing company. The researchers compare CPA practices across six departments, guided by a phenomenological research design. Data collection methods include informal conversations, qualitative observations, written documentation, numerical evidence from the accounting system, and interviews. Findings: The study offers four novel findings to the field. First, it highlights how managers employ procedural and interactive strategizing to reframe CPA practices. The sophistication of CPA practices increases with unevenly distributed customer volume, high customer-specific, controllable overhead, customer-to-customer interaction, and service complexity. Conversely, the sophistication of cost-focused CPA practices tends to decrease with diverse strategic goals. Additionally, CPA become more effective through the utilization of non-financial information, employee empowerment, localization, and strategic alignment. Second, CPA can be adapted through integrative strategizing where managers avoid using it as a financial benchmark for strategic initiatives. Third, accountants actively seek intermediary roles to incorporate arguments from strategy and marketing to balance strategic objectives–contrary to their portrayal as myopic guardians of profitability. Fourth, the localization of CPA practices to front-line employees compensates for a lack of sophisticated CPA practices. Future research: Future research should, investigate the adaptation of calculative practices in different cultures, and industries. Exploring additional contextual factors such as uncertainty, management characteristics, and linguistic framing of practices would be beneficial. Examining the interactions in utilizing CPA practices between front-line staff and customers would shed light on their effectiveness. Lastly, investigating the role of consultants in diffusing such practices would offer valuable perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simultaneous interpreting represents a challenge for interpreters working between typologically distinct languages, like the English-Arabic language pair. The present study is conducted to explore transfers in passive voice verbs between English as the source language and Arabic as the target language in a corpus of an interpreted English speech and its corresponding Arabic counterpart. A mixed qualitative and quantitative approach is adopted in the present study to identify recurrences of passive voice verbs and to explore the ways of rendering them into Arabic. Translation shifts are identified according to Catford’s (1965) approach. The findings of the present study reveal that nearly half of the passive voice verbs found in the source text are rendered using active voice verbs in the target text. The findings also reveal that there are four other ways of rendering passive voice verbs, including using a noun phrase, omitting a part of a sentence or a sentence as a whole, using a noun, or maintaining the passive voice form of the source verb in the target sentence. The present study contributes to promoting practices that enrich the field of English-Arabic simultaneous interpreting. It also contributes to enriching the research domain with its findings that hold special significance as the passive voice verbs constitute a divergence point between the two languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When building frames are subjected to lateral deflections due to earthquake loads, the resulting oscillatory movement can induce a wide range of responses in building occupants. Hence, lateral stiffness is a major consideration in the design of multi-story structures. Fortifying reinforced concrete frame structures against lateral forces can be achieved by strategically positioning shear walls. Shear walls are structural members used to resist lateral forces and gravity loads. The position and type of shear wall have a significant effect on the overall behaviour of the building structure. For effective application of the building frame, it is necessary to locate the shear wall in an ideal place and select the most suitable type. This article examines the response of buildings with different types of shear walls. Four different models are subjected to earthquake loads. In this study, a G+20 story RC Frame building was analysed using different positions of shear walls. The analysis was conducted according to the ASCE-07 2010 code using the time history analysis method in the ETABS software. The main parameters compared in this study are story displacement, base shear, story drift, and fundamental period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Asset tokenization, a financial practice that generates tokens based on distributed ledger technologies such as blockchain, is a representational practice in which token issuers establish artificially devised sign relationships between tokens and assets, despite some issues and complexities of blockchain. Human confidence in this practice is critical for its successful implementation. This article suggests that human confidence in blockchain is supported and circulated by the doxa of blockchain, which the article frames as a linguistic phenomenon where people talk more about how to use a given object than about the object itself. By paying attention to the artificially devised sign relations between tokens and assets and confident stance-taking toward blockchain by users, the article argues that a linguistic approach is necessary to understand how human confidence makes asset tokenization happen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of CIRCULO de Linguistica Aplicada a la Comunicacion is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Dirasat: Educational Sciences is the property of University of Jordan and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Iberica is the property of Asociacion Europea de Lenguas para Fines Especificos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)