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Though equi-complexity of languages has long been an assumption in the study of language, recent research has argued that languages differ with regard to their morphological complexity. Some languages rely more on bound morphology to express grammatical meanings, whereas other languages rely more on lexical or word-order-based strategies. It is a moot point to what extent these differences correlate with demographic factors such as population size and language contact, and how complexity should be measured. In this study, we use information-theory, more specifically Kolmogorov Complexity, to assess morphological and word-order-based strategies and apply the procedure to three West Germanic languages, English, Dutch and German, which have been argued to form a continuum along the morphological complexity cline, plausibly due to different rates of demographic upheaval and concomitant language contact. Tracing the morphological and word-order-based complexity through time in parallel Bible translations, our results show that English is consistently less morphologically complex than its sisters, continuing on its path of morphological simplification. We see a statistically robust trade-off between morphology and word order complexity. We find support for earlier findings in the literature, with the exception of the difference between Dutch and German, which does not transpire in our results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study addresses the research gap of how being a speaker of a Slavic language influences the ability to convey tempo-aspectual meanings in Romance languages by examining personal and impersonal narratives delivered in written and spoken mode by learners of L3 Spanish and L3 Italian with L1 Slovak and L2 English. Narratives are analysed following the methods of interlanguage analysis proposed by Ellis and Barkhuizen [(2005). Analysing learner language. Oxford University Press] and Salaberry and Comajoan [(2013). Research design and methodology in studies on L2 tense and aspect. De Gruyter Mouton], such as coding for grounding, frequency analysis of tense forms and lexical aspectual classes, etc. Following the ideas presented by Bayley (2013, Data analysis: Quantitative approaches. In M. R. Salaberry & L. Comajoan (Eds.), Research design andmethodology in studies on L2 tense and aspect (pp. 357–390). De Gruyter Mouton), binomial logistic regression models were built which showed that (a) the combination of discourse grounding and lexical aspect is of predictive power regarding the appropriateness of participants' choices of morphological marking; (b) the distributional characteristics of morphological marking on telic predicates differs from activities and statives. One of the main differences compared to the results of previous studies, conducted on speakers of Germanic languages, is that the data did not provide enough evidence for morphological marking being used to convey primarily temporal distinctions (see Salaberry, 1999, The development of past tense verbal morphology in classroom L2 Spanish. Applied Linguistics, 20(2), 151–178. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/20.2.151; Wiberg, E. (1996). Reference to past events in bilingual Italian-Swedish children of school age. Linguistics, 34(5), 1087–1114. ]) and presented the marking of telic predicates in foreground with perfective morphology as consistent, disregarding the level of participants' performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the nuanced meanings of two Old English verbs related to visual perception. Topics include the distinction between agentive and experiential verbs in Old English, the rarity and poetic nature of the verbs wītan and wlātian, and the semantic relationships of these verbs to their cognates in other Germanic languages.

This paper analyses the use of verbal tense forms in Wangerooge Frisian, a West Germanic language spoken on the Wadden Sea island Wangerooge until the early twentieth century. Specifically, the use of the present, past, and perfect constructions is investigated in a corpus of texts from the nineteenth century. It is argued that the Wangerooge Frisian perfect could be used as a non-firsthand evidential strategy marking the propositional content as hearsay or inferred. While such evidential perfects are cross-linguistically well attested, they are generally thought to be uncommon in Western European languages. The Wangerooge Frisian case thus shows the value of lesser-studied vernaculars for the typology of European languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study considered the songs currently in use in Gaelic groups for 0–3 year olds in Scotland, whilst investigating how practitioners use them in the groups. In this article, I argue that Gaelic Early Years practitioners insufficiently understand the potential of song in relation to Gaelic language acquisition with young children and their families. Although it is common practice to integrate Gaelic translations of popular English children's songs into Gaelic playgroups, these songs often distort and misrepresent the Gaelic language's rhythms and grammar. With the connected aspects of phrasing, inflexion and rhythm, music and language are closely related. Shared singing activities hold great potential in advancing young children's growing linguistic skills in first and additional language acquisition. Maximising the benefit, however, requires a highly skilled, knowledgeable and responsive practitioner base and a clearly developed teaching strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a correlation between Michael Herslund's concepts of "endocentric and exocentric languages" and Per Durst-Andersen's concepts of "hearer-oriented and reality-oriented languages", correspondingly. The article argues that the Danish syntagmatic tendency to discrete expression of meanings is manifested both in verbal and nominal naming. This syntagmatic tendency is interpreted as a manifestation of an addressee-friendly naming strategy, since it allows the addressee to reconstruct the meaning by referring to a general semantic category. The sections of the article are devoted to the implications of analytic naming as a reflection of the Danish hearer-oriented communication strategy and syntagmatic tendency to discreteness, modularity and distancing in expressing complex meanings. In this regard, the following phenomena are considered: systemic analytical tendencies in the Germanic languages, manifested at different language levels; analytical tendencies in the structural and semantic organization of Danish compounds; the modular nature of Danish verbal compounds and their correlation with analytic complexes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The synergetic lexical model provides a unique framework for exploration of the interrelationships between the lexical properties of languages. Previous studies concerning several properties of this lexical model have yielded many successful fittings results, but very few studies have investigated synonymy, a major property of this model. The present study uses 825 Chinese and 848 English tokens retrieved from Chinese and English corpora, dictionaries, and thesaurus to conduct a contrastive study on the interrelations between four major properties of this lexical model: word length, word frequency, polysemy, and synonymy. The successful fittings of both languages demonstrate the cross-linguistic validity of the synergetic lexical model, though English belongs to the Germanic language family, while Chinese, a highly analytical language, is of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Moreover, our analysis of the parameters of the fitting results shows that, compared to English, Chinese possesses a greater resistance to shortening word length and a quicker response to semantic change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on English Studies in South Africa, this article considers adaptations to university teaching in a time of Covid-19 and the potential and limitations of such adaptations post Covid-19. The argument is divided into sections, "English Studies, Yesterday and Today" and "English Studies, Today and Tomorrow", together with a coda, "English, the Language of the Modern World". An African folktale, "Elephant, Chameleon, and Lizard", offers a metaphor of before, in, and beyond Covid-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pronoun-case-only (pro-case) languages in Germanic have been under-investigated, despite exhibiting theoretically significant patterns of inter- and intra-individual case variation. The goals of this paper are thus twofold. First, it establishes a pro-case typological distinction between Oblique-Form Default (OFD) as observed in Danish and English, and Subject-Form Default (SFD), as observed in Swedish. In OFD varieties, SFs (Subject Forms) occur as subjects of finite clauses, while OFs (Oblique Forms) occur elsewhere, including as predicatives and in heterogenous other syntactic environments. OFs also appear inside coordinate and other complex DPs, where sociolinguistic variation is attested. In SFD varieties, variation inside complex DPs is unattested; SFs occur as predicatives, but variable OFs express non-deictic semantics. My second aim is to demonstrate that these patterns of variation result from distinct post-syntactic mechanisms for OFD and SFD pro-case. Following Emonds, I argue that OFD pronouns are not the phonological realization of case features; instead, pro-case forms are morphosyntactic-contextual allomorphs. SFD pro-case, in contrast, is the phonological realization of dependent Oblique and Nominative features assigned by post-syntactic rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Before the late eighth century, with a few exceptions (epigraphy, the languages of the Caucasus and the North-Western Isles), little had been written in Europe in languages other than Latin, Greek and Hebrew. The long ninth century saw this monopoly of the 'three sacred languages' shaken and challenged: several vernacular languages (Celtic, Germanic and Slavonic, but also, if to a lesser extent, Romance) appeared in writing for the first time and others developed in significant ways. This paper, introducing this special issue on Vernacular Languages in the Long Ninth Century, starts with an assessment of the linguistic situation of Europe before the changes began; it goes on with a summary of the main developments known to have taken place in the long ninth century; it then addresses their possible connections and observable entanglements and identifies the conditions that allowed the emergence and the sustained flourishing of written vernaculars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although a lot of research has been done on the use of pronouns to express impersonal meaning in West Germanic languages, relatively little is known about the use of other possible impersonalization strategies. This article therefore examines the agentless passive as a possible impersonalizing strategy in Afrikaans and Dutch. On the basis of corpus data, we show that the agentless passive is a productive strategy for impersonalization in both Afrikaans and Dutch –in that it is used in the entire range of impersonal contexts. However, it is more typically employed for corporate contexts and existential contexts where the subject is vague and number-neutral. Some variation in the use of the agentless passive in different genres are also seen. On the whole, however, the agentless passives behave very similarly in the two languages as an impersonalizing strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article concentrates on the evidence for the study of Middle Dutch (MDut)-origin words in the Durham Account Rolls (DAR), a set of texts produced in Medieval Latin but deeply informed by the vernaculars (Middle English and Anglo-French). The analysis of the 47 MDut-derived lexemes present in the DAR exposes one of the intrinsic problems in the study of the mutual lexical influences between Germanic languages, which is of a typological nature: the proximity between West Germanic languages – Middle Dutch/Middle Low German and Dutch/English – and the presence of cognates and morphological and phonological similarities may obscure the etymology of words which could have potentially been borrowed or, alternatively, developed independently in English out of common Germanic roots. It also underscores how the study of MDut-origin vocabulary can advance our understanding of the lexico-semantic make-up of multilingual texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Filip Vesdin, known by his monastic name Paulinus a Sancto Bartholomaeo (1748–1806), was a Carmelite missionary stationed from 1776 to 1789 in Southwestern India. Vesdin authored an impressive opus of 32 books and smaller treatises on Brahmanic religion and customs, oriental manuscripts and antiques collections, language comparison and missionary history. This article focuses on the field of language comparison, principally on Vesdin's book De antiquitate et affinitate linguae Zendicae, Samscrdamicae, et Germanicae dissertatio (= Dissertation on the Antiquity and the Affinity of the Zend, Sanskrit, and Germanic Languages), published in Rome in 1798. In this rather short treatise (56 pages), the most important part consists of three word-lists where a large number of words from Avestan, Sanskrit and Germanic languages are compared in order to prove that these languages are related. The paper presents Vesdin's three word-lists together with a description and evaluation of his views on the relationships between these languages in order to highlight his significance in the history of comparative and historical linguistics. The paper also provides new insights into the relationship of De antiquitate to Vesdin's later proto-linguistic treatise, De Latini sermonis origine (1802). Abbreviations Av.: Avestan; Guj.: Gujaratī; IIr.: Indo-Iranian; Lat.: Latin; Malab.: Malabaricum (Vesdin's term for Malayāḷam); Malay.: Malayāḷam; MHG: Middle High Germa; NHG: New High German; NP: New Persian; OAv.: Old Avestan; OFris.: Old Frisian; OHG: Old High German; OSax.: Old Saxon; Pahl.: Pahlavi; PG: Proto Germanic; PIE: Proto Indo-European; Skt.: Sanskrit; YAv.: Young Avestan [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the findings from a survey of academics responsible for undergraduate programmes in English and examines the extent to which they were aware of recent reform of A level English and had made, or are making, changes to their courses as a result. Our findings demonstrate that relatively low numbers felt that they had a strong awareness of changes to post 16 curricula and most of the respondents indicated that they had not made and were not making any changes in direct response to the changes at A level to better support transition. The findings raise a number of questions regarding universities' involvement in and knowledge of A level reform, the various ways that schools, colleges and universities can work together to develop effective transition for students, and how government, exam regulators and awarding bodies might best develop effective channels of communication to enable cross-phase dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2012, I have been using home-made poetry to supplement my teaching of trust law. My experience illustrates how English - in this case poetry - can enhance teaching in other fields. Poetry can capture complex concepts in understandable and memorable ways, provide the human context behind abstract principles and increase authenticity in the classroom. The piece includes original teacher and student-written poems, and student feedback on the use of poetry in the classroom. Home-made poetry leverages English's power of narrative, imagination and language and can enrich any academic field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research has focused on English as the medium of instruction (EMI) classes as a means of increasing language competency and motivation. However, studies have yet to examine the use of students' given names by instructors in EMI classes in Korea. This manuscript investigated EMI classes taught by foreign faculty across several academic fields to learn about student attitudes towards the use of their given name in class and if instructors' knowledge and use of students' given names influence student engagement and satisfaction in order to better EMI teaching and learning environments. Students' perception of encouragement, satisfaction with lecturer care, use of their given name, and English skills were all significant when students believe instructors learn and then use their given name in class. On the whole, use of students' given names was highly valued by students in EMI classes. Results, pedagogical implications, and suggestions for follow-up studies are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brian O'Nolan wrote in English and Gaelic under different pseudonyms, Flann O'Brien for his English novels and Myles na gCopaleen for his work in Gaelic. While O'Brien is considered a master of Postmodernist literature, the work written under the Gaelic pen name, eminently satiric, remained that of an obscure author in a minority language. It was just one more authorial identity among many created by O'Nolan. This complexity of authorial personae did not get through the translations into Spanish until O'Brien was characterised as a great canonical English-language author. I apply Casanova's model of translation as unequal exchange to describe how the literary capital of O'Brien brought attention to his Gaelic-language counterpart and helped to consecrate him when translated into Spanish. To that end, I compare the paratextual material in the first edition (with no introduction) and the second edition (on a literary collection with an informative introduction and laudatory paratexts by reputed authors) of the same translation of An Béal Bocht to show how the characterisation of O'Brien as a great English-language writer in the period between one edition and the other allowed the translator to introduce na gCopaleen and Gaelic to the Spanish readership in the second edition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spread of English as a language of international communication has led to a variety of approaches within various schools of thought. However, one of the areas in which the influence of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) is particularly significant, and nevertheless under-researched, is professional translation and interpreting. The impact of ELF on translation is manifold, particularly due to the hybridity of source texts. Furthermore, the supposedly simplified nature and universality of ELF as a code intended to facilitate communication - and translation - ties in with discourses encouraging the use of online translation tools and non-professional translation. Drawing on ELF studies and Translation Studies, I argue for a conceptualization of ELF as being marked by an intrinsic translation process related to the fluidity of languages. The translational character of ELF is testified to by the hybridity of texts produced by international organizations and written by non-native speakers of English, which are inevitably affected by the languages and cultures of their authors. Furthermore, I will show how views about the universality and transparency of a lingua franca cannot be separated from its translation, concluding that translators, translation scholars and international institutions have a responsibility to reveal ELF's translational nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses, issues associated with linguistic phenomena of bat and chauve-sourisin chiroptera in English and French. It is noted that the wide variety of orthographical forms in Anglo-French is worth noting and characterization of the bat as a flutterer, as well as a mouse, is widespread in the Germanic languages.

Background: Questionnaires are widely used to assess the mental health status of refugees, whereas their construct validity largely remains unexplored. Objective: This study examined the construct validity of two widely-used instruments for the assessment of PTSD symptoms (Harvard Trauma Questionnaire [HTQ]; 16 items) and symptoms of anxiety and depression (Hopkins Symptom Check list-25 [HSCL-25]; 25 items) among Dutch and refugee patients with different linguistic backgrounds. Method: We applied exploratory factor analyses and measurement invariance analyses to test construct validity.Participants (n =1 256) were divided into five linguistic groups defined by language family, including four non-western linguistic groups (Indo-Iranian [n = 262], Niger-Congo [n = 134], Semitic [n = 288], and South Slavic languages [n = 199]) and one western linguistic group (Germanic languages; Dutch [n = 373]). Results: Exploratory factor analysis yielded a 3-factor structure of the HTQ and a 2-factor structure of the HSCL-25. Measurement invariance 20 analyses on the HTQ showed strong measurement invariance across the groups of refugee patients. However, Dutch patients reported milder symptom severity on most items of the HTQ. Measurement invariance analyses on the HSCL-25 (not conducted in Dutch patients) indicated partial strong measurement invariance across refugee patients. Conclusion: We conclude that mental health constructs measured by the HTQ and the HSCL25 25 are to a large extent interpreted in a similar way by refugee patients. This indicates that these instruments can be applied in non-western refugee patient populations, and that local idioms of distress and inherent response patterns may not play a major role when applying the HTQ and the HSCL-25 in these populations. Yet, whereas meaningful comparisons of observed PTSD and depression scores between groups of refugee patients with different non30 western linguistic background are feasible, comparisons between patients with a western and non-western linguistic background, as well as comparisons of anxiety scores, are likely to be biased. Future studies need to establish whether the commonly used cut-off scores of both questionnaires apply for refugee patients with non-western linguistic backgrounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the linking relative (or connectivewhich) in the spontaneous conversation of Australian English. Using a combination of survey and corpus data, two distinct discourse functions are identified: resumptive topic marker and focus. Survey data from 170 linguistics students at an Australian university indicate a strong preference for the resumptive topic marker function: I argue that this is due to the parallel between discourse function and the structure of the standard relative clause. UWA corpus data suggest that the connectivewhichis used solely to create textual cohesion in Australian English, while anecdotal examples from American English podcasts, blogs and the animated TV showArcherhint at the possibility of this becoming an expressive resource for speakers in the future. Thus it appears the Australian English use of the connectivewhichis situated on the textual level of Traugott’s cline: propositional > textual > expressive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bilingual students comprise a substantial and growing proportion of U.S. school enrollment and often experience unsatisfactory school outcomes attributed to limited opportunities to learn. Bilingual consultants have the unique opportunity to shape school psychological services and general education supports for all bilingual students by working with monolingual professionals and stakeholders to improve the instructional and mental health services provided to bilingual students, particularly English language learners. In this article, we provide a framework for integrated individual and systemic bilingual school consultation that extends existing consultation models. Specifically, we (a) compare the proposed framework to existing consultation models, (b) identify core competencies for bilingual consultants, (c) describe how the bilingual consultant can contribute to multitier systems of support responsive to the needs of all students, and (d) offer a case study of implementation of the framework. Implications for professional development and research are addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate about whether and how reflection should/can be assessed has so far yielded inconclusive findings. This paper intends to revisit and further this controversial issue within a specific disciplinary context: the assessment of reflection in English enhancement courses within a second-language environment. Students across majors taking the language enhancement courses in question are often required to provide written or verbal evidence to demonstrate their abilities to reflect, and in turn enhance their linguistic repertoires. However, a potential problem arises when the assessment of ‘reflection’ at times may become the assessment of learners’ English language proficiency, thus casting doubts about the validity and reliability of incorporating reflection as an assessment tool in our context. Drawing on analyses of seven English enhancement courses with a reflection component, and semi-structured interviews with 22 faculty members who had had the experience of assessing reflection, and/or developing assessment criteria for evaluating the quality of students’ reflection, their perceptions of assessing reflection fairly and the challenges encountered during the assessment process were brought to the surface. A holistic framework is proposed to address the challenges encountered, particularly with respect to the differences in emphasis that faculty members place on content vs. language. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The present study examines how gender is represented in the visuals (or illustrations) of two English Language textbook series used in most primary schools in Hong Kong. Instead of conducting frequency counts of the occurrence of male and female characters in illustrations, or the spheres of activities they engaged in as in many previous textbook studies, this study involves qualitative analyses of how visualised male and female characters are represented in the selected illustrations of the analysed textbook series, particularly but not exclusively, in terms of their hair length and clothing. The results show that representations of females were more often portrayed having long hair rather than short hair and wearing dresses rather than trousers in both line drawings and photographs. For the colour of clothing, although blue and pink are generally considered ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ colours, respectively, less than half and only a small percentage of the human males and females were portrayed wearing blue and pink, respectively. For non-human characters, again, colour is not always a reliable cue to their sex. Yet, they can be recognised as males and females by the generally accepted ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ colour and clothing items. Hence, while binary notions of gender often remained intact in their normative forms there were also other forms of representation which challenged them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Neoliberal transformation of self, learning, and teaching constructs individuals as bundles of skills (or human capital) and subordinates learning to skill production characterized by an ethic of entrepreneurial self-management [Urciuoli, Bonnie. 2010. “Neoliberal Education: Preparing the Student for the New Workplace.” InEthnographies of Neoliberalism, edited by Carol Greenhouse, 162–176. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press]. As such, language in the neoliberal discourse is constructed as a set of flexible skills, acquired by the entrepreneurial self in the market [Park, Joseph Sung-Yul. 2010. “Naturalization of Competence and the Neoliberal Subject: Success Stories of English Language Learning in the Korean Conservative Press.”Journal of Linguistic Anthropology20 (1): 22–38; “The Promise of English: Linguistic Capital and the Neoliberal Worker in the South Korean Job Market.”International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism14 (4): 443–455]. This paper examines ways in which English language education is restructured to fit such neoliberal imaginary through the case of the South Koreanjogi yuhak(pre-college-aged study abroad) industry. The analyses highlight ways in which the language learning industry not only interplays with but also actively shapes the ideologies of neoliberalism, by developing and selling packaged products that make the projects of self-management seem more achievable and desirable. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications of the Korean case for the study of language and social inequality in education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Language occupies a crucial position in neoliberalism, due to the reimagination of language as commodified skill. This paper studies the role of language ideology in this transformation by identifying a particular ideology that facilitates this process, namely the ideology which views language as pure potential. Neoliberalism treats language as a neutral and abstract tool for communication that can convey information in a transparent, unadulterated way. Under this view, language is a pure medium of potentiality, which can realize any communicative goal that the speaker may want to achieve – thus in turn, a key for unlocking the hidden potential of the individual. For instance, a global language such as English supposedly allows its speaker to move beyond the constraints of her culture and community, reaching many people and traversing multiple markets, no longer stifled by the boundaries imposed by essentialized identity. By obscuring the embeddedness of language in social context, this ideology rationalizes endless investment in language learning, representing the language learner as a responsible neoliberal subject engaging in perpetual self-development. As an illustration of this process, this paper outlines how the ideology of language as pure potential contributes to the hegemonic status of English in South Korea's neoliberal transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study examines whether native and non-native speakers faced with unfamiliar formulaic expressions use the same tactics for working out what they mean. The test items needed to be semantically opaque, used in an authentic context and unknown to all participants. Ten obsolete expressions were selected from the historical novels of Georgette Heyer. First-language English speakers and UK-resident classroom-taught learners of English as a foreign language were individually presented with the expressions in their original context, and asked to work out what they meant. Analysis of their comments revealed that the native speakers deployed significantly more context and analogy. The non-native speakers were much more likely than native speakers to refer to individual unknown words. Whilst it seems that first-language users take a more holistic approach to linguistic input than classroom-taught second-language learners do, the findings may suggest that learners adopt increasingly ‘nativelike’ strategies as proficiency increases. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The probability of textual vocabulary is defined as the combined probabilities of the individual lemmas occurring in a text, which sum to 1 in the text but normally less than 1 in another different text. If the text is expanded the probability of the original textual vocabulary would be smaller than 1 in the expanded text. However, the present study reveals that as the text expands continually, instead of monotonically decreasing, the probability of the original textual vocabulary quickly reaches a point from which it stabilizes despite further expansion of the text. In addition, the probability of the textual vocabulary of a text occurring in other texts is not affected by the length of the texts in which they occur. Mathematical models are formulated capturing the distribution of the probability of textual vocabulary in the English language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides a conceptual review of the Duolingo English Test (DET) and its possible consequences to university admissions. Topics discussed include an overview of DET's creation, the uses of DET, and the tasks of DET including vocabulary, listening and transcription, sentence completion and speaking.

We study the frequency distributions and correlations of the word lengths of 10 European languages. Our findings indicate that (a) the word-length distribution of short words quantified by the mean value and the entropy distinguishes the Uralic (Finnish) corpus from the others, (b) the tails at long words, manifested in the high-order moments of the distributions, differentiate the Germanic languages (except for English) from the Romanic languages and Greek and (c) the correlations between nearby word lengths measured by the comparison of the real entropies with those of the shuffled texts are found to be smaller in the case of Germanic and Finnish languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the effects of the use of scaffolds in written classroom assessments through the voices of both native English speakers and English language learners from two middle schools. Students responded to assessment tasks in writing, by speaking aloud using think aloud protocols, and by reflecting in a post-assessment interview. The classroom assessment tasks were designed to engage students in scientific sense making and multifaceted language use, as recommended by the Next Generation Science Standards. Data analyses showed that both groups benefitted from the use of scaffolds. The findings revealed specific ways that modifications were supportive in helping students to comprehend, visualize and organize thinking, and elicit responses. This study offers a model for both sensitizing teachers and strengthening their strategies for scaffolding assessments equitably. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I would first like to show what the problems are with the etymology of the Germanic athel words, then how the words of the athel family thrive and decline in Old and Middle English, and how another family of words takes over all their functions, and finally how the model of change taught by this case applies to the obscure origin of the athel family itself. I have written on athel (<+aþal-) before. Here I would like to present an account that is more succinct and adds details of a model that makes the central etymology, which some may think far-fetched, appear rather ordinary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a study of the Icelandic landscape concept, and its meaning and embedded connotations. The present-day understanding of the concept provides the point of departure to some of the oldest preserved examples of the term. The analysis thus centres upon the sagas of Icelanders that were written in the Middle Ages. The paper reveals that in the 14th century the concept referred to morphological qualities of land, and was often associated with an aesthetic appreciation thereof. The meaning of landscape as natural scenery has been explained as the outcome of artistic articulations of social relations in the wake of the Renaissance and Romanticism. Such accounts, however, do not explain the aesthetic connotations associated with the Icelandic landscape concept in the Middle Ages, described in this article. The results of the study thus indicate that there may be more to the landscape concept within the cultural domain defined by the Germanic languages than hitherto revealed, particularly in terms of aesthetic experiences of the natural environment. Subsequently, this article emphasises the importance of identifying the culturally embedded meaning of landscape as a concept in the Icelandic context, for successful implementation of the concept in planning practices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As in other Germanic languages, Old English non-dependent clauses are usually verb-second. Even though considerably less common, verb-initial constructions are also witnessed in Old English prose. This study is therefore devoted to these non-dependent verb-initial constructions in Old English in order to: a) determine the statistics of the construction across some Old English prose compositions; b) examine the kind of verbs favoured in these positions; and c) analyse the contexts in which this construction is likely to occur. The approach stems from Ohkado's study of these clause-types in the first series of Ælfric's Catholic Homilies, stating that their function may ultimately depend on authorial preferences. In our case, the source of evidence has been extracted from a selection of The Toronto Complete Corpus of Old English. Accordingly, complete pieces have been investigated to conclude whether the use of V1 is consistent in Old English prose or, on the contrary, it is a matter of the writer's idiolect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper intends not only to place English language teaching in Kenya within a specific historical context, but also to consider how it operates alongside the many other languages used in the day-to-day experiences of a secondary school community. Any consideration of the use of English in Kenya must take into account the legacy of language policies adopted by both colonial and independent administrations in the country. Use is made in this respect of the growing body of research and theory which focuses on language policy in post-colonial and neo-colonial settings. Therefore, an evaluation of the intentions and impact of these policies on attitudes towards language use is included in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the possibility of omitting relativizer in certain syntactic situations. It looks at the use of English zero relativizer that occurs in identical rules in most languages of North Germanic origin such as Swedish or the Romance language or Germanic. It explores the hypothesis that zero relativizer is frequently used in English texts that are produced by Dutch learners than in texts from Swedish learners. Parts of the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) were used for the research in which English argumentative texts produced by Dutch and Swedish learners were examined for relative constructions and shows that the hypothesis was wrong. It also notes that zero construction in English is less formal than those with an explicit relative marker.

In this paper, I first review previous research on the topic of safetalk. I then apply some of the insights derived from this discussion to a case study of the Luxembourgish primary school system. The study uses both ethnographic and discourse analysis, and focuses in particular on the role of French language varieties in a system that forces large numbers of romanophone students to go through a German-language literacy programme. The picture that emerges reveals what changes would be needed to break through restrictive safetalk practices and enable more effective and more equitable learning. However, it is argued that the difficulties of implementing such changes are compounded by a number of language ideologies that underpin both preschool and primary school education in Luxembourg. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the use of the modal adverbs allicht 'most probably, of course, at least' and wellicht 'perhaps, possibly'. Their use in Belgian Dutch differs from the Dutch spoken in the Netherlands. The article then investigates what two leading lexical works, namely the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche taal (WNT) (de Vries, te Winkel et al., 1882-2001) and the Groot woordenboek der Nederlandse taal (Van Dale, 1914 and later), write about both words, and how allicht and wellicht are used in the metalanguage of these lexical works. The inventory shows a disparate description of allicht and wellicht. In the section which follows we try to determine which degree of probability is indicated by means of allicht and wellicht in Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch and to contrast these results with the results of a small survey on the interpretation of allicht and wellicht in spoken Dutch. The main conclusions are then presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Homophony is ubiquitous across languages. It is an important source of ambiguity which is a distinctive feature of human language. There have, however, been few quantitative investigations on questions such as “Do languages have similar degrees of homophony?”, “Can the degree of homophony in a language be predictable?” We report a preliminary attempt to answer these questions. We measure the degree of homophony of two sets of languages, one including twenty Chinese dialects and the other including three Germanic languages. It is found that there exists a strong correlation between the degree of homophony and the number of occurring syllable types (which can be taken as an estimation of the size of the phonological resource of a language), or the number of monosyllabic words in the lexicon. Furthermore, the distributional properties of homophony reflect some self-organization characteristics of language as a system, as illustrated by two pieces of evidence: the first is the correlation between the degree of homophony and the degree of disyllabification in Chinese dialects, and the second is the observation from some languages that pairs of words tend to exist in different grammatical classes, suggesting that language self-organizes in a way to decrease the chances of ambiguity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In its issue of December 2001, The Economist , a prestigious and widely read international journal, published an article on the triumph of English as a world language. A number of the points made reappear in this paper in a different form, some being weighted differently. While I fully concur with the points made and the arguments presented, in particular with the conclusion, namely that the triumph of English is a dubious one, I take the thinking further and commit myself to a prognosis and a position that The Economist does not venture to take. Before presenting and defending them, I briefly depict the spread of English, describe the negative response to it and discuss whether the fears expressed are fully justified or not. In so doing I pave the way for the two key questions that are often raised: (1) will the world eventually become virtually monolingual, and (2) even if this were the case, would it be such a major disaster if a large proportion of the world's languages did die? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immigrants arriving in a new country typically have varying ideas about the relative status of their native language and the language of the receiving society, and some have strategies for dealing with maintenance and shift. In all cases there are differences between the immigrants' language experiences in the two countries. This paper reports on a study which investigated what it is that Afrikaans speakers who have immigrated to New Zealand miss about speaking Afrikaans post-immigration; that is, the focus is on the participants' emotional responses to diminished exposure to and opportunities for using Afrikaans and the possible consequences of these circumstances, or what the researchers have termed ‘linguistic longing’. The study also explores the strategies implemented by the participants to deal with this longing. The findings indicate that most of the participants claim to miss a variety of linguistic aspects previously available to them in their home country, that some of them consciously implement maintenance strategies in order to fill this gap, but that inevitably signs of linguistic longing are signs of language loss/shift. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rather than originating in the post-1945 period, the Americanisation of the German language represents the post-war transformation of a gradual anglicisation of German which began in the 18th century with the expansion of English industry and trade. The influence of American English on German began after World War I, and intensified under the specific political and societal conditions prevailing in Germany after 1945. The Americanisation of the German language cannot therefore be reduced to the general phenomenon of westernisation that has affected all Eurasian countries (and national languages) since World War II. Rather, it is a development that has its roots in German-American relations of the decade between 1945 and 1955. This decade saw not only the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany, but also intensive debate among German intellectuals and the political elite about Germany's past, present and future, and about German guilt and identity. This article analyses the Americanisation of the German language as an aspect of this German guilt discourse and as an integral part of the (re-)establishment of German identity. Methodologically the article is related to a linguistically orientated history of mentalitès. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the paper, we examine whether and the extent to which CALL grammar instruction contributes to improving learners' performance and confidence in positioning adverbs in an English sentence. Over a two-week period two groups of ESL learners were exposed to six hours of grammar instruction. One group had teacher-fronted instruction while the other was exposed to CALL software. Both groups completed identical tasks in terms of format, instruction, task features, content and feedback. The groups were given a pretest, an immediate posttest, and a delayed posttest. Results showed a significant improvement on the intuition task and a significant confidence improvement on both intuition and production tasks for the computer group. The in-class and the control group showed no significant gains. It is hypothesized that frequency of exposure and practice accounted for the difference between the in-class and the computer group. It is also recognized that students' control of learning, availability of immediate feedback, and non-existence of negative psychological effect that can follow face-to-face negative feedback also contributed to the difference that was found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With its focus on simplification universals, developmental orders, teachability, and functional-grammatical bases for acquisition, the well-known research on German (L2) language acquisition has contributed much to SLA research in general. At the same time, sociolinguistic investigations focus squarely on the difficult social conditions that accompany non-native language acquisition in Germany. In keeping with emerging approaches in SLA in general, German language acquisition (GLA) research requires a more holistic focus if we hope to account for individual experience as well as universal influences on attainment. This broad survey of the research highlights several significant factors in L2 German: (1) informal contact with native speakers, offering personal, interactive practice; (2) formal instruction, representing targeted practice focused on linguistic accuracy and complexity; and (3) affective orientations, particularly identity and affiliation, as reflections of learner engagement in the process. These aspects of learner experience appear relevant across an array of theoretical and empirical perspectives. I therefore argue that cognitive models of GLA fail to adequately account for the constraints on both input and contact experienced by most non-native acquirers of German, and that only a purposeful integration of methodologies can capture the complex relationships between cognitive, social and psychological factors inherent in the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ninth chapter of Constantine Porphyrogenitus' "De administrando imperio" (DAI) was composed in circa 944. For some 300 years several distinguished scholars in the fields of Slavonic and Scandinavian languages have laboured over the interpretation of the names of the rapids in this chapter. In the 1940s, when two Scandinavian Slavicists, A. Karigren and K.O. Falk, published extensive studies devoted exclusively to the names of the Dnieper rapids, this discussion was given a new lease. Regarding earlier literature the author refer to Falk 1951, and to the comprehensive commentary and bibliography on DAI published by D. Obolensky in 1962.

Presents an article about reminiscences Columbia's German Department. Experiences about studying Germanic languages; Information on anti-Semitic literary works; Details on the German classes.

The focus of my analysis is the so-called existential construction. The languages examined are English, Swedish and Icelandic. The present article assumes the perspective of Ronald W. Langacker's cognitive grammar as the theoretical background. First of all, the assumption is that the unstressed, initial pronoun there, or its Scandinavian equivalents, are semantically definable as abstract-setting subjects of their respective sentences, with, possibly, the exception of Icelandic það. Secondly, the conceptualization of the existential scenes in the three languages is a dynamic process in each case. The dynamicity of the semantics of existential scenes is the result of assuming two planes, the actual and a virtual one, and establishing correspondences between them. The actual plane reflects our direct apprehension of reality. A virtual plane consists in the dynamic re-assignment of roles to the actual elements introduced by means of the virtual abstract-setting subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reexamines J.H. Gorrell's (1895) definition of "cweðan" as a verb which introduces indirect discourse in the subjunctive mood, by studying the mood of indirect speech in all the examples of "cweðan" in the DOE corpus. The proportion of the moods in indirect speech; A chief factor in the high frequency of Latin indicative forms; More.