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This study investigated if people are acquainted with the term 'ageism', and to what extent acquaintance with this term corresponds with reports of discrimination, due to age. The study included an online survey, answered by 1,025 Israeli respondents. The questionnaire began by asking the respondents to define 'What is ageism?' (gilanut in Hebrew) and then to mark 'If and what types of discrimination they experienced in the last year'. Subsequently, we defined and demonstrated the term ageism and asked participants to share experiences of this phenomenon; 457 (45%) participants were not familiar with the term. In the group that was unfamiliar with the term, only 46 (10%) reported that they had such experiences. In the group that was acquainted with the term, 208 (30%) reported that they had experienced ageism. In contrast, once the term, ageism, was defined and demonstrated in the survey, 638 (62%) respondents shared experiences of ageism in their lives. Of those who shared their experiences of ageism, 202 (31%) were initially unfamiliar with the term. The study's results show that there is an association between the linguistic representation of the phenomenon of ageism and reports of ageism. In the wider sense, the study shows that language and words have the power to help people understand and interpret social and human experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twentieth-century theologians advanced a consensus position that the doctrine of deification was alien to Augustine's theology—even impossible to square with his other commitments—and that even if traces of the doctrine could be detected, they were, at best, of marginal importance to his intellectual topography. This position, however, has been persuasively challenged by several investigations during the past three decades. This article builds upon these latter investigations to demonstrate how the notion of deification is prevalent throughout his corpus—whether linguistically evident by his use of technical terms such as deificare and cognates, or more often, conceptually in his reflections upon anthropology, Christology, and ecclesiology. The article concludes by noting two of Augustine's distinctive contributions to the post-Nicene development of deification—that is, an emphasis upon the sacramental and ecclesiological contours of the doctrine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender can be considered an embodied social concept encompassing biological and cultural components. In this study, we explored whether the concept of gender varies as a function of different cultural and linguistic norms by comparing communities that vary in their social treatment of gender-related issues and linguistic encoding of gender. In Study 1, Italian, Dutch, and English-speaking participants completed a free-listing task, which showed Italians and Dutch were the most distinct in their conceptualization of gender: Italian participants focused more on socio-cultural features (e.g., discrimination , politics , and power), whereas Dutch participants focused more on the corporeal sphere (e.g., hormones , breasts , and genitals). Study 2 replicated this finding focusing on Italian and Dutch and using a typicality rating task: socio-cultural and abstract features were considered as more typical of "gender" by Italian than Dutch participants. Study 3 addressed Italian and Dutch participants' explicit beliefs about gender with a questionnaire measuring essentialism and constructivism, and consolidated results from Studies 1 and 2 showing that Dutch participants endorsed more essentialist beliefs about gender than Italian participants. Consistent with socio-cultural constructivist accounts, our results provide evidence that gender is conceptualized differently by diverse groups and is adapted to specific cultural and linguistic environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How well do governments represent the societies they serve? A key aspect of this question concerns the extent to which leaders reflect the demographic features of the population they represent. To address this important issue in a systematic manner, we propose a unified approach for measuring descriptive representation. We apply this approach to newly collected data describing the ethnic, linguistic, religious, and gender identities of over fifty thousand leaders serving in 1,552 political bodies across 156 countries. Strikingly, no country represents social groups in rough proportion to their share of the population. To explain this shortfall, we focus on compositional factors—the size of political bodies as well as the number and relative size of social groups. We investigate these factors using a simple model based on random sampling and the original data described above. Our analyses demonstrate that roughly half of the variability in descriptive representation is attributable to compositional factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers a particular set of cultural and ideological discourses—police discourse about domestic violence (DV) victim/survivors—in a study about indexicality. Via the processes of indexicality, victim/survivors are consistently described and constructed as frustrations for police officers and police work. We pinpoint two sociosemantic structures that index frustration—the use of the word frustration and statements that initially show understanding for the victim/survivors' situation—and then mitigate that understanding with stories about being frustrated. In the process, we argue, DV victim/survivors become indexical forms that index the social meaning that victim/survivors are frustrating rather than compliant. Further, we show how such constructions are available for reiteration by different speakers in police discourse and different contexts. The linguistic features that signal 'frustration' thus function in police discourse as indexical features that can be accessed and animated by police officers when they describe encounters with victim/survivors and the victim/survivors themselves. (Indexicality, narrative, police discourse, domestic violence) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Pragmatic Markers and Peripheries" is a book that explores the relationship between pragmatic markers (PMs) and the left and right peripheries in language. The book includes contributions from various languages and investigates the functions and positions of PMs in different contexts. It challenges some influential theories, such as the Subjectivity Intersubjectivity Peripheries Hypothesis (SIPH) and the left-to-right movement hypothesis. The book provides empirical evidence and methodological guidance, making it a valuable resource for researchers interested in pragmatics, corpus linguistics, and interactional linguistics. However, it could benefit from more balanced representation of languages and further exploration of prosody. [Extracted from the article]

The article focuses on the intersections of Persian and Hindu cultural spheres in colonial India, highlighting how Persian literary traditions persisted even as colonial rule reshaped linguistic and religious boundaries. Topics include the publication of a Persianized Hindi work in the late 19th century, the role of Persian in shaping Hindu social reform efforts, and the evolving dynamics of Persian and Sanskrit languages amid rising religious and linguistic polarization.

The article focuses on the term "Persianate," which was first introduced by historian Marshall Hodgson to describe a cultural and linguistic zone spanning from the Balkans to Bengal. Topics include the historical impact of Persian as a lingua franca in Eurasia, the development of the Persianate framework as a scholarly tool, and the complex linguistic and cultural dynamics within the Persianate world.

"Corpus Pragmatic Studies on the History of Medical Discourse" is a collection of thirteen articles edited by Turo Hiltunen and Irma Taavitsainen. The book utilizes corpus linguistics methodology to explore changing communicative patterns, roles, language use, and functions in the language of medicine. Divided into two parts, the book examines discursive changes and changing functions, roles, and representations in medical discourse. The chapters cover various aspects of medical discourse in different time periods and languages, providing insights into the development of medical terminology, the construction of epistemologies, and the representation of patients and practitioners. The book is praised for its use of corpora to analyze changes in language patterns and functions in medical discourse throughout history. [Extracted from the article]

We investigate the gender gap in issue attention among members of parliament (MPs) by applying automated text analytic techniques to a novel data set on Italian parliamentary speeches over a remarkably long period (1948–2020). We detect a gendered specialization across issues that tends to disappear as women's shares in parliamentary groups increase. We then investigate whether women's access to previously male-owned issues brings with it a different agenda, operationalized as a different vocabulary. We detect a U-shaped pattern: language gender specificity is high when female MPs are tokens in parliamentary groups with a large preponderance of men; it decreases when their shares start increasing and grows again when they constitute a considerable minority. We argue that this pattern is consistent with the theory of tokenism, and it is produced by the interlinkage of commitment to shared norms and the distribution of "activation thresholds" among female MPs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has proposed that phonetic variation may index affect prior to indexing other social meanings. This study explores whether the affective indexicality of vowels identified in previous studies can also be observed among deaf or hard-of-hearing speakers, in this case, speakers of Taiwan Mandarin. The results suggest that /i/ backing is invoked to signal negative affect. This study also demonstrates how assistive devices like hearing aids and cochlear implants can be considered semiotic resources. For deaf or hard-of-hearing speakers, assistive hearing devices enter into a process of bricolage with linguistic and other symbolic resources, generating new potentials for the embodiment of affect. (Affect, iconicity, Taiwan Mandarin, embodied sociolinguistics, deafness) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The text is a review of the book "Morphosyntax: Constructions of the world's languages" by William Croft. The reviewer highlights the importance of understanding the complexity of language and the need for precise and explicit analysis. The book focuses on grammatical constructions and their realization in different languages, using a meaning-based framework. It is organized into four parts, covering constructions used in reference, modification, predication, and complex sentence constructions. The reviewer acknowledges that not all linguists may agree with the proposed analyses but emphasizes the lasting empirical generalizations presented in the book. The book also explores diachronic matters and uses non-traditional terminology. Overall, the reviewer finds the book valuable for both students and linguists. [Extracted from the article]

The article focuses on the concept of "lafz" (utterance) and its relation to language and the poetic, matter and the social, and the act it occasions. Topics include Ibn Manzụ̄r's definition of lafz as a material practice involving the expulsion of matter, al-Jāhịz's discussion of lafz as the instrument of utterance and its relation to language and sociality, and the understanding of language as a collective form of linguistic life in relation to intention and poetic practic.

The article focuses on the evolution of the Arabic word for translation, highlighting its transition from "naql" to "tarjamah" and its implications for understanding translation as both "biography" and "interpretation." Topics include the historical shifts in Arabic discourse on translation, the role of Christian and Jewish translators in shaping Arabic thought, and the complex relationship between Arabic and its linguistic and scriptural antecedents.

Given the peculiarly linguistic approach that contemporary philosophers use to apply St. Thomas Aquinas's arguments on the immateriality of the human soul, this paper will present a Thomistic-inspired evaluation of whether artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) chatbots' composition and linguistic performance justify the assertion that AI/ML chatbots have immaterial souls. The first section of the paper will present a strong, but ultimately crucially flawed argument that AI/ML chatbots do have souls based on contemporary Thomistic argumentation. The second section of the paper will provide an overview of the actual computer science models that make artificial neural networks and AI/ML chatbots function, which I hope will assist other theologians and philosophers writing about technology, The third section will present some of Emily Bender's and Alexander Koller's objections to AI/ML chatbots being able to access meaning from computational linguistics. The final section will highlight the similarities of Bender's and Koller's argument to a fuller presentation of St. Thomas Aquinas's argument for the immateriality of the human soul, ultimately arguing that the current mechanisms and linguistic activity of AI/ML programming do not constitute activity sufficient to conclude that they have immaterial souls on the strength of St. Thomas's arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most studies on the acquisition of postverbal subjects (VS) in L2 Italian focus on a limited number of linguistic factors that tend to be associated with the production of VS in L1 (e.g., verb class and subject discourse status). Moreover, they analyze homogeneous groups of learners in terms of proficiency, mostly through controlled experiments. In this paper, we present a cross-sectional corpus study based on a multifactorial analysis of the L2 use of VS structures in semi-spontaneous speech. We analyze the production of VSs by learners of different levels of proficiency (A1-C2), considering linguistic factors that trigger the production of VS in L1, but have been unaccounted for in L2 studies (e.g., agentivity of the subject, syntactic configuration of the sentence, contrastive focus). We use a cumulative link mixed model to show how the features of verbs and subjects in VS structures change across proficiency levels. The results indicate learners' progressive mastery of the mechanisms of assignment of the subject function to the postverbal constituent and increasing sensitivity to contrastive focus as a feature relevant for the use of VS. Furthermore, we observe that psychological verbs associated with the use of VS are produced from the earliest stages of L2 acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the Quebec public debate concerning the N-word affair that occurred in 2020 at the University of Ottawa, this article aims to determine how the discourses of racism denial produced by members of dominant groups are maintained within the public space, despite the anti-racist critiques produced by members of dominated groups. By combining critical race theory, the theory of epistemic injustice and ignorance and the speech act theory, this article offers a critical analysis of the Quebec media discourse on the N-word affair. It thus traces the positions denouncing the use of the N-word as a racial insult and a manifestation of systemic racism and those justifying the need to protect academic freedom and freedom of expression in the face of a cancel culture threatening to censor them. The analysis of the Quebec case reveals that the public denial of racism reproduces hermeneutical injustices regarding anti-racist critiques, particularly regarding those expressed by Black communities, and this through a new linguistic mechanism that I call "illocutionary deviations." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past two decades, South Korean universities' 'top-down' implementation of English-medium instruction (EMI) policy has been critiqued for inadequately addressing the linguistic challenges students and instructors face (Kim, 2017). Research suggests that rapid implementation of such policy is primarily motivated by the pursuit of internationalisation, where global ranking takes precedence over the appropriateness of the policy (D. W. Cho, 2012) resulting in issues of injustices (Williams & Stelma, 2022). As a result, of these injustices, taking EMI courses is not a popular choice amongst South Korean higher education students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colloquial Singapore English (CSE, commonly known as Singlish) is a linguistic variety used in Singapore, a Southeast Asian nation home to three major ethnic groups: the Chinese (74.35% of the citizen and permanent resident population), the Malays (13.43%), and the Indians (9%) (Singapore Department of Statistics, 2019). It is one of the best known post-colonial varieties of English and has been documented since the emergence of the field of world Englishes (e.g., Greenbaum, 1988; Richards & Tay, 1977). Linguistically, the grammar and lexicon of CSE are systematically imported from other non-English languages used in the island nation (Leimgruber, 2011). From a creolist perspective, it can be viewed as an English-lexifier creole that contains influences from Sinitic languages such as Hokkien, Cantonese and Mandarin, as well as Malay, Tamil and other varieties in the Singapore language ecology (McWhorter, 2007; Platt, 1975). Several distinct features across various levels of language have been investigated in CSE, including phonetics (Starr & Balasubramaniam, 2019), morphosyntax (Bao, 2010; Bao & Wee, 1999), semantics (Hiramoto & Sato, 2012), and pragmatics (Hiramoto, 2012; Leimgruber, 2016; Lim, 2007). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The linguistic landscape of any country reveals a lot about the linguistic identity of its citizens, especially if it is a bottom-up linguistic landscape. In Algeria, which is a multi-cultural and multi-lingual context, the linguistic landscape witnessed a remarkable shift in linguistic preferences that is represented in bottom-up signs. This shift is characterized by the addition of a new linguistic entity, English, to the Algerian linguistic landscape. In Algerian society, it is easily observed that English is not commonly present in the top-down signs assigned by the Algerian government, which contrasts with the signs of private businesses such as fashion shops, restaurants, and coffee shops. In fact, English has been found in Algerian signs since the 1990s when foreign energy companies like British Petroleum (BP) arrived and introduced the language in the country (Euromonitor, 2012), but it has become prevalent in the bottom-up signs of private businesses, which were previously dominated by other languages, i.e., Arabic and French. For those who are unfamiliar with the Algerian context, Arabic and Berber (or Tamazight) are the official languages of the country while French and English are the foreign languages. French is the first foreign language, while English is the second foreign language. Despite this clear linguistic planning, there has been unclear planning of the linguistic landscape on the part of the Algerian government, mostly in top-down signs. For instance, the government uses monolingual and bilingual signs that disregard English in the majority of signs. The monolingual signs are either Arabic or French. Berber is used in monolingual signs only in cities of Berber ethnicity. On the other hand, the bilingual signs are mostly written in Arabic and French or Arabic and Berber, the latter signs being found only in Berber-ethnicity cities such as Bejaia, Khenchela, Batna, and Tizi Ouzou. Overall, the government and Algerian citizens have rather different linguistic landscape practices since Algerians opt for integrating English, the language of globalization, presenting it in different bottom-up signs alongside other languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among various types of nominal phrases, the appositive construction has long been a relatively under-researched subject in the literature of Chinese linguistics. This paper centers on the use of the appositive construction [P(ronoun)-Num(eral)-Cl(assifier)-Nominal Phrase (NP)] in Mandarin Chinese. Upon revealing a series of asymmetries in syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, this paper proposes an attributional versus identificational distinction for Chinese appositives. Specifically, for the attributional case, the apposition (i.e. [Num-Cl-NP]) is property-denoting and serves to rationalize the speaker's evaluation about the referent denoted by the anchor (i.e. the P); for the identificational case, the apposition is individual-denoting and serves to facilitate referent identification of the anchor by picking out an identifiable quantified set of discourse referents from the given context. To formally capture this distinction, this paper develops a dichotomous analysis for the syntax of Chinese appositives. The non-unified treatment not only offers an effective explanation for the asymmetries exhibited by the appositives under different cases, but also contributes to a better understanding of Chinese appositives in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Chapter 1, "The structuralist ascendancy in American linguistics", Newmeyer considers how structuralism of a particular kind came to dominate American linguistics. The most interesting in my view is Chapter 6, 'The European reception of early transformational generative grammar', which sketches the very different ways in which generative grammar was received in the various countries of Europe. Newmeyer turns to generative grammar in Chapter 4, 'Early transformational generative grammar: Some controversial issues'. This book is concerned with the evolution of American linguistics from the foundation of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) in 1924 until the 1960s. [Extracted from the article]

The mental lexicon offers a window into the configuration of conceptual domains such as space and time, which has been labeled as concrete the former and abstract the latter in the current embodiment approach to cognition. Space has a phonological and semantic value in sign languages, but not in spoken languages. Additionally, the representation of time by spatial means is robust in oral and sign languages. This research asks if Deaf signers and hearing nonsigners have the same conceptual organization of those domains. In their respective languages, sixty-two participants made a repeated free word association task. These results showed that the studied populations have a little overlap in the associates evocated for each clue. The analysis of the preferences of the semantic relations of the pairs clue-associate showed a greater tendency of the Deaf signers to establish thematic relations. In contrast, the hearing participants indicated a bias toward taxonomic relations. The results suggest that the abstractness or concreteness of concepts may be modulated by factors associated with linguistic modalities. However, in this compared free association norms factors related to the language deprivation of Deaf, the asymmetries in the cross-modal language contact and cross-modal borrowing were not exhaustively controlled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China English or Chinese English? To my mind, the time is ripe for Chinese English to be adopted as the preferred term, or banner, for characterizing the variety of English of a country which has the largest number of users and learners of English in the world. There are sound linguistic and sociolinguistic reasons for this important terminological choice and decision. There is little research on the naming of the multiplicity of Englishes to date. After discussing the theoretical underpinnings of the acts of naming, Seargeant (2010) provides a taxonomy consisting of six clusters of name labels categorized by function (e.g., ESL, EFL, EAL, EIL, ELF), community (e.g., native vs. non-native varieties; immigrant Englishes), history (e.g., indigenized varieties; language-shift Englishes), ecology (e.g., three concentric circles of world Englishes; new Englishes), and structures (e.g., pidgin English, creolized English). The sixth category, which he calls multiplex, is much broader in scope, featuring English as a link language between specific groups transnationally (e.g., World English). After conducting a meta-analysis of 100 research articles written in Chinese by mainland authors between 1980 and 2013, Xu (2017) found that compared with Chinglish and Chinese English, China English is preferred by the majority, but there are signs that change is in the offing: Although the term China English has dominated the literature on Chinese English research in the past three and a half decades, there has been an increasing awareness and a change of attitude towards Chinese variety of English, and people start disassociating Chinese English with Chinglish. The current literature points to the direction that Chinese English should be used as a term to refer to the Chinese variety of English on a par with other members of World Englishes. (Xu, 2017: 241; cf. Xu, He & Deterding, 2017) Linguistically, for a name label with the structural pattern 'xxx English', there is a fine semantic distinction between a premodifying noun (e.g., China English, Singapore English) versus its adjectivized form (e.g., Chinese English, Singaporean English). Let us first examine the semantics of the 'N1 + N2' noun phrase (NP). The premodifying N1, a common noun or possessive noun, typically gives the meaning 'a type of' N2. Just as a music therapy is a type of therapy while therapy music is a type of music, a summer school takes place only in summer while a girls' school is for girls only. There is no shortage of contact varieties of English named after the 'N1 + N2' pattern. For instance, for hundreds of years the governance and presence of British colonizers in the Indian subcontinent resulted in the spread of English demarcated along vocational lines, such as Butler English, Kitchen English (domestic helpers), and Babu English (used by babus, especially lower-level officials and clerks [McArthur, 2002: 317]). Likewise, in West Africa, sustained contact between English-speaking colonizers and the peoples of Liberia, notably the Kru and Mande, gave rise to Settler English (McArthur, 2002: 272) and Soldier English (McArthur, 2002: 276). In Japan, frequent contact between US forces of occupation and local people after the Second World War popularized a patois called Bamboo English (McArthur, 2002: 370), while the creolized variety used by Aboriginals in Australia was self-mockingly labeled Blackfella English (McArthur, 2002: 386). Interestingly, some varieties whose labels are derived from the names of islands or peninsulas simply have the words 'island' or 'peninsula' truncated (e.g., Bequia English spoken on the Bequia Island in the Caribbean [Williams et al., 2015]; Samaná English, spoken by a black community in the Samaná Peninsula of the Dominican Republic [McArthur, 2002: 240–241]). This seems to be a rather productive naming pattern of new Englishes spoken by inhabitants living on islands, seaports, or other seaborne territories; no attempt is made to adapt an adjectivized form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The English language freely borrows words from many languages; this is a process which has been well documented by several studies, particularly in the field of contact linguistics. However, an investigation into the massive influence that the widespread, popular, and global use of the Internet has had on the development of language calls for consistent and frequent empirical enquiry. The rapid growth in the number and diversity of Internet users from various cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and the increasing popularity and influence of Asian cultures and languages on the English language, is currently occurring at an unprecedented level. This study employs several data collection methods to demonstrate the arbitrary transnational journey of a few selected culinary terms that showcase the flexible adaptation and creation processes through which these new additions to the English language have passed. We do this by using two common culinary terms, both of which have been adapted to describe Asian dishes, as an example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the morphosyntax of adjectival concord in case and number and subject-verb person agreement by monolingual and bilingual speakers of Russian. The main focus of the study is on the potential factors that may trigger divergence between Heritage Language (HL) speakers and those speakers who are dominant in that language, be they monolingual or bilingual. We considered the effects of cross-linguistic influence; limited input (as indexed by Age of Onset of Bilingualism, AOB), and working-memory limitations. An auditory offline grammaticality judgment task was performed by 119 adult participants split into four groups: (1) Monolingual Russian-speaking controls (MonoControl), (2) Immigrant Controls, that is, Russian-Hebrew bilinguals with AOB after the age of 13 (IMMControl); (3) bilinguals with AOB between 5–13 (BL-Late); and (4) bilinguals with AOB before the age of 5 (BL-Early). The latter group represents HL speakers. We did not find effects of cross-linguistic influence or extra memory load; at the same time, the effects of AOB were robust. Additionally, HL speakers (BL-Early group) differed from the other groups in poor performance on adjectival concord, but patterned with the others on person agreement, which indicates that the feature [person] is more robust than other agreement/concord features in HL grammars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study examines the effects of the frequency of phoneme, syllable, and word units in the Granada corpus of Spanish phonological speech errors. We computed several measures of phoneme and syllable frequency and selected the most sensitive ones, along with word (lexeme) frequency to compare the frequencies of source, target, and error units at the phoneme, syllable, and word levels. Results showed that phoneme targets have equivalent frequency to matched controls, whereas source phonemes are lower in frequency than chance (the Weak Source effect) and target phonemes (the Davideffect). Target, source, and error syllables and words also were of lower frequency than chance, and error words (when they occur) were lowest in frequency. Contrary to most current theories, which focus on faulty processing of the target units, present results suggest that faulty processing of the source units (phonemes, syllables, and words) is an important factor contributing to phonological speech errors. Low-frequency words and syllables have more difficulty ensuring that their phonemes, especially those of low frequency, are output only in their correct locations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sixth chapter, "A register variation perspective on varieties of English" (pp. 143-78), by Stella Neumann and Stefan Evert, adopts a multidimensional approach to identify dimensions of register variation across national varieties of English. In terms of registers, formality is a better predictor than mode, the degree of inter-register variation is more salient in some national varieties than in others, and linguistic choices in a specific register are marginally related to regional variation. Chapter 7, "Register and modification in the noun phrase" (pp. 179-208), by Yolande Botha and Maryka van Zyl, examines the extent to which pre- and post-modifiers in the noun phrase distinguish among registers. [Extracted from the article]

Linguistic ontologists and antilinguistic, 'serious' ontologists both accept the inference from 'Fido is a dog' to 'Fido has the property of being a dog' but disagree about its ontological consequences. In arguing that we are committed to properties on the basis of these transformations, linguistic ontologists employ a neo-Fregean meta-ontological principle, on which the function of singular terms is to refer. To reject this, serious ontologists must defend an alternative. This paper defends an alternative on which the function of singular terms is not generally to refer and on which they are generally ontologically noncommittal. This is the best way to reject linguistic, 'easy' arguments for the existence of properties. The account recommends neutralism about quantification (drawing on Barcan Marcus and Meinongianism), coherently bringing together two important yet uncombined meta-ontological movements. Moreover, it employs Ramseyan insights about the transformations to provide a nonreductionist, non-error-theoretic redundancy approach to explicit talk about properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen an increased interest in the study of heritage language bilinguals. However, much of the research on heritage bilingualism is fraught with deficit framing. In this article, we demonstrate how many of the assumptions that underlie this growing field of research and the way that heritage speakers are positioned as research subjects reveal ideologies that center and value monolingualism and whiteness. We problematize a number of ways in which these ideologies commonly show up in the frameworks and methodologies used in psycholinguistics to study this population. We advocate for frameworks such as usage-based linguistics and multicompetence that center the multidimensional experiences of bilinguals and embrace nuance and complexity. We call on the research community to examine their research designs and theories to dismantle the systems that maintain heritage bilingualism at the margins of bilingualism research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on multilingual speakers is often compared to monolingual baselines which are commonly treated as if they were homogeneous across speakers. Despite recent research showing that this homogeneity does not hold, these practices reproduce native-speakerism and monolingualism. Heritage language research, which established itself in the past two decades, is no exemption. Focusing on three predefined linguistic groups, namely Turkish speakers which are framed as monolingual in Turkey as well as two heritage bilingually framed groups in Germany and the USA, we ask: (1) Do heritage speakers of Turkish produce more discourse and fluency markers (FMs) than monolingual speakers? (2) Are the groups homogeneous, or is there wide variation between speakers across groups? We focus on the variation between and within groups using Bayesian Linear Regression with a multilevel model for speakers and heritage groups. Our findings confirm that the use of discourse and FMs is largely defined through individual variation, and not through the belonging to a certain speaker group. By focusing on variation across groups rather than between groups, our study design supports the growing body of literature that questions common heritage language research practices of today and shows alternative paths to understanding heritage grammars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the time since the term "intersectionality" was first introduced by Kimberlé Crenshaw, the term has gained a measure of widespread, even viral popularity. Increasingly, psycholinguists are citing this concept to promote work which more fully engages with the consequences of human diversity for language processing. This piece discusses the ways in which "intersectionality" has thus far been engaged by the field of psycholinguistics. I argue that the common usage of the term "intersectionality" is notably out of step with the tradition of Black feminist scholarship from which it derives. Originally defined as an analytical framework for examining the effect of interlocking oppressions in erasing the distinctive experiences of multiply marginalized people, intersectionality should not be invoked without any serious and specific discussion of oppressive systems or erasure. To achieve a more just and equitable applied psycholinguistics and authentically promote intersectional approaches to understanding language behavior, intersectionality must be taken as a framework primarily engaging with effects of structural violence. The article concludes with some guidelines for readers to assist in distinguishing "intersectional" claims which perform erasure from those which reflect the original and intended anti-misogynoir applications of the theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

White monolingual Anglo-American values permeate language acquisition research, which extends into public health and educational policies. "Quality of language" in parent-child interactions is often called upon to explain weaknesses in the language development of children who are racialized, experiencing poverty, or bilingual. Indeed, many early intervention approaches build on this premise by aiming to improve the "quality of language" used by parents. We aimed to understand the conceptualizations of "quality of language" in studies of parent-child interaction through the critical lens of Community Cultural Wealth Theory and perspectives from development research across cultures. We completed a Systematic Concept Analysis of articles published from 2010 to 2022 and focused on parent-child interactions in the home environment. Our search identified 972 articles and 78 met the inclusion criteria, but only 45 papers provided a definition. These definitions covered eight conceptualizations but only three were previously described. We also found inequity in the use of this terminology, which focused on children who were bilingual, had disability, or experiencing poverty. Informed by a critical lens, we recommend the use of four new terms to encompass "quality of language." We also recommend refraining from using this term as it is value-laden, poorly defined, and diminishes culturally sustaining language transmission practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on second language (L2) acquisition in the generative tradition (GenSLA) addresses the nature of interlanguage competence, examining the roles of Universal Grammar, the mother tongue and the input in shaping the acquisition, representation and use of second languages. This field is sometimes dismissed by applied linguists as irrelevant because it does not provide direct applications for language teaching. However, the assumption that theories must have applications involves a fundamental misconception: linguistic theories explore the nature of grammar; GenSLA theories explore the nature of language learning. No such theory entails that language must be taught in a particular way. Nevertheless, potential applications can be identified: examples are presented that describe aspects of language that do not need to be taught, properties that might benefit from instruction, and cases where textbooks provide inadequate information. I argue that linguistic theory and GenSLA theory have more to offer in terms of considering what aspects of language might or might not be taught rather than how languages should be taught. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities are the natural homes for linguistic and cultural diversity. Valletta, Malta's capital city and the smallest city in the European Union, is no different. When its foundation stone was laid in 1566 by Grandmaster Jean Parisot de Vallette, it was given the formal title of Humillima Civitas Valettae , but 'there is little that is humble about the appearance of Valletta, that city "built by gentlemen for gentlemen"' (Luke, 1968: 65). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: The analysis of conservation narratives primarily resides in the methods and techniques of social sciences, focusing mainly on uncovering advocacy versus critical lines of thought in the complex mosaic of arguments around institutional actors and the public. Researchers have previously proposed an archetypal scheme in which the core conservation narratives and their conceptual interrelations are classified. This report explores the feasibility of coupling such a traditional method with techniques emanating from quantitative linguistics, network analysis and bibliometry. The neologic metaphor of the Anthropause is purposely added to long-established narratives to examine its potential effects on the conservation narratives landscape. The results show that this metaphor reorganizes the mentally constructed connections between flag narratives and symbolic lexical units. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights how signed languages, being spatial and visual, have contributed unique insights into human language fundamentals, visual expression, and neural language bases across linguistic levels. It also emphasizes that interpreting involving signed languages offers valuable perspectives on language modeling, discussion, and perception. It delves into the evolving attitudes within the interpreting profession, focusing on the complex elements of communication and interaction.

The article emphasizes the vital role of translation in preserving and disseminating literature across time and mediums. It argues for an approach called "extreme translation," which asserts that all translations, regardless of their accuracy or source, hold interpretive value. It provides six lessons from the English translations of a twelfth-century French text, illustrating how extreme translation can shed light on textual transmission, power structures, canons, and linguistic norms.

This essay examines connections between the materiality of language and the impulse to translate through the hybrid series Cuadernos de lengua y literatura (2000-- ; Language and Literature Notebooks) by the Argentine writer Mario Ortiz. These books confront historical trauma through a study of materials and processes that generate language in their author's domestic environment. I read Ortiz to argue that a task of translation consists of tracing how words function through ways in which their original meaning breaks down. Their function is revealed through the tasks the translator carries out to create the new linguistic object of the translated text. This essay revisits a key image from Walter Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator," the broken vessel, through broken vessels in Ortiz's work, as well as recent materially focused translation scholarship. I conclude that the material specificity of language intervenes in the lives of readers, writers, and translators to respond to grief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the development of feminist translation and feminist translation studies during the 1980s, highlighting key figures and the shift from viewing translation as reproduction to deliberate rewriting with cultural, linguistic, and ideological differences. It discusses the challenges and critiques within feminist translation studies, including postcolonial concerns and the impact of pluralized genders, and queer theory.

Psycholinguistic research on pragmatics in the neurotypical population has increasingly framed pragmatic competence and related cognitive skills in terms of individual differences, co-constructed discourse, and meaning negotiation. However, research on pragmatics in the Autism Spectrum has risen from a wide and biased view of autistic communication as fundamentally compromised and autistic pragmatic abilities as impaired. Mostly due to the impactful theory of a deficit in Theory of Mind, early research on autistic communication presumed a unitary pragmatic impairment, only to find that several pragmatic abilities seem to be "preserved." However, the interpretation of these findings usually takes an ableist turn, as most studies subsequently suggest that surface-level performance should not be interpreted as competence, but rather as a result of "compensatory" strategies. The raising number of contributions from autistic academics and participatory research enriched the field with new perspectives focusing on differences rather than impairments and drawing hypotheses on communication difficulties between neurotypes rather than within a specific neurotype. However, such contributions are hardly ever cited in the most prominent works. In conclusion, the field would benefit from a higher level of citation of autistic-led research and from an epistemological perspective shift within the mostly neurotypical academic community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little is known about how nonnative speakers process novel language patterns in the input they encounter. The present study examines whether nonnatives develop a sensitivity to novel binomials and their ordering preference from context. Thirty-nine nonnative speakers of English (L1 Arabic) read three short stories seeded with existing binomials (black and white) and novel ones (bags and coats) while their eye movements were monitored. The existing binomials appeared once in their forward (conventional) form and once in their reversed form. The novel binomials appeared in their experimentally defined forward form in different frequency conditions (two vs. four encounters) and once in the reversed form. Results showed no advantage for existing binomials over their reversed forms. For the novel binomials, the nonnative speakers read subsequent encounters significantly faster than initial ones for both frequency conditions. More importantly, the final reversed form also led to faster reading, suggesting that L2 speakers process the reversed form of a novel binomial as another encounter, ignoring the established order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a 2018 referendum, the Irish public voted to lift the Irish state's near-total constitutional ban on abortion, bucking a recent global trend towards restrictions on reproductive rights. While abortion rights have long been a major concern of Irish feminists, appeals to national identity have often been viewed with suspicion by the women's rights movement in Ireland due to the historic role of national identity construction in perpetuating gender-based inequalities. This article explores the way(s) in which discourses of Irish identity and gender were mediated by the use of Irish in the linguistic landscape (LL) at the time of the vote. Proposing a modified version of Du Bois' (2007) stance triangle, I argue that signs use Irish as both a means of stancetaking and as an object of stance in itself, thus effectively taking a stance on both the referendum and on Irish national identity, indexed by the language. (Stancetaking, Irish (language), national identity, gender, abortion, Eighth Amendment) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we investigate social meaning as a determinant of linguistic diffusion by confronting laboratory and corpus data of Citétaal, a multi-ethnolect that has spread across Flanders. In a speaker evaluation experiment, we found that Citétaal was upgraded on 'streetwise dynamism', even by respondents unfamiliar with its migrant origin. From this, we conclude that it is Citétaal's third-order indexicality, pruned of ethnic associations, which carries the diffusion. To determine the relative importance of streetwise cool vis-à-vis other predictors, we studied the diffusion across Twitter of the principal Citétaal shibboleth (/s/ palatalisation). As a production proxy for streetwise cool, we included expressive compensation strategies such as lengthening (verrry), which turned out to be among the main predictors of the Citétaal form. We argue that social meaning is a major change determinant, and that Twitter is the optimum source to track both a diffusion and the factors, including social meaning, which drive it. (Rapid linguistic diffusion, social meaning, streetwise prestige, speaker evaluation experiment, corpus linguistics, Twitter) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary digital media is characterized by a cultural logic of participation that encourages sharing, confession, phatic communication, and an emphasis on the visual. In this techno-cultural milieu, self-presentation has become a key mode of communication, and has enabled ordinary individuals to attain a measure of celebrity status. A key component of being a microcelebrity entails developing a consistent persona that is recognizable and unique. How such persona can be studied from the sociolinguistic perspective of stance and style is the focus of this article. We combined corpus linguistic and qualitative discourse analytic methods to examine a small corpus of videos produced by Chinese online celebrity, Papi Jiang. The article presents key lexico-grammatical, discourse-level, and non-linguistic resources that are analyzed as stance markers that together contribute to Papi's intense, critical-satirical performative style. The significance of the findings is discussed in relation to performance, performativity, and critique in digital media. (Persona, microcelebrity, style, performance, stance) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigates current proposals that priming is a mechanism of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in bilinguals by aiming to boost CLI through priming. In two cross-linguistic structural priming experiments with less-proficient adolescent (Study 1) and more highly proficient adult German-English learners (Study 2), we assess whether structural priming enhances CLI for well-formed, dispreferred, and ungrammatical structures. L2 learners in both studies showed CLI in their production, in particular for structures with word order overlap. They also exhibited short-term cross-linguistic priming of grammatical L1-L2 word orders in L2 English, which extended to longer-term priming among the more highly proficient learners in Study 2. However, there was no evidence that cross-linguistic priming increased the use of dispreferred or ungrammatical L1-based word orders in L2 English in either study. Rather, the overall production of these word orders decreased. Together, these results suggest that, while cross-linguistic priming leads learners to increase the use of shared, grammatical L1-L2 word orders, it leads to the inhibition of non-shared ungrammatical structures in L2 production. We conclude that priming has asymmetrical effects on CLI of grammatical and ungrammatical L1-based structures in the L2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critics across the political spectrum have worried that ordinary uses of words like 'racist', 'sexist', and 'homophobic' are becoming conceptually inflated, meaning that these expressions are getting used so widely that they lose their nuance and, thereby, their moral force. However, the charge of conceptual inflation as well as responses to it are standardly made without any systematic investigation of how 'racist' and other expressions condemning oppression are actually used in ordinary language. Once we examine large linguistic corpora to see how these expressions are actually used, we find that English speakers have a rich linguistic repertoire for qualifying the degree to which and dimensions along which something is racist, sexist, homophobic, and so on. These facts about ordinary usage undermine the charge of conceptual inflation. Without awareness of facts about ordinary usage, theorists risk making linguistic prescriptions that are unnecessary or counterproductive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thomas contends that 'Bloomfieldian formalism...had a major impact on linguistics in the first half of the twentieth-century America' (22), and Chomsky's formalism dominated the second half. In her content-filled 118 pages of Formalism and Functionalism in Linguistics, Margaret Thomas provides a lucid, comprehensive and balanced history of a complex subject in contemporary linguistics. In the first chapter, 'Defining "formalism" and "functionalism"', Thomas prepares the reader for the difficulty of working with these terms that do not have either-or boundaries; instead, she compares it to political discourse, in which terms such as "liberal" or "conservative" are subject to varying viewpoints. In Chapter 2, "Background to the current debate", Thomas offers a brief history of the concepts of formalism and functionalism, claiming that 'Remarkably, there has been little reflection on whether the comparison between formalism and functionalism has much of a past' (15). [Extracted from the article]