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This article examines multimodal storytelling performed outside the main body text in book-length popular science. By employing a case study approach, the study examines three kinds of visually detached stories: i) fragmentary case stories of lay experience, ii) fictional stories of prehistorical lifeworld and iii) scientists’ personal stories with everyday photography. The article shows that detached stories are digressions from the locally, or also globally, dominant ways of making meaning. These digressions can be modality shifts (from verbal to multimodal) but also more complex shifts that engage with cultural boundaries of (popular) science. Furthermore, the article complements prior studies of photographic storytelling by discussing the affordances of everyday photography in public occasions. The analytic framework combines Systemic-Functional genre studies, Social Semiotic and related models of visual design as well as approaches to factuality and fictionality in Narrative Studies. The data consists of contemporary Finnish popular science books representing the natural sciences.

This paper describes and analyses two discourse particles that are found in polar questions and in some declarative structures in central Sicilian. The analysis adopts an interface approach, relying on the cartographic framework. It is proposed that each particle conveys in all its uses one and the same conventional implicature, relating to the epistemic state of one of the discourse participants. The interaction of the two particles with left-peripheral elements, in particular topics, vocatives, fronted foci, and speaker-oriented adverbs, supports the view that the speaker, the hearer, and the commitment anchor are syntactically represented in sentence structure.

This qualitative study explores how native peers as teaching assistants can support language learning in Higher Education. The data of five semi-structured group interviews of 15 teaching assistants in total were analysed thematically. The results indicate that the assistants embraced multiple roles during the programme and within the lessons. However, in the role of a peer student who collaborated on an equal level with the learners, they could best facilitate learning and communication. As native speakers, they complemented the teacher’s expertise by their regional and up-to-date cultural and linguistic knowledge. This article supports a wide view of mediation adopted by the CEFR Companion Volume and focuses on its two mediation activities. The so-called didactic triangle was used to illustrate how native peers mediated between the teacher, the student and the subject to facilitate the language learning process. The assistants acted as mediators in different ways, interculturally and pedagogically. Nevertheless, a few assistants experienced challenges when assisting at lower CEFR levels. Thus, it is essential to discuss roles and expectations as well as the process together with the teachers, the students and the assistants.

In this article, we analyse translation in the context of revitalisation from the point of view of Language Making. Both translation and revitalisation are based on the idea of languages as distinct entities, and together they are doubly inclined to draw clear-cut borders between languages. The data come from a series of translation courses targeted at speakers and learners of Karelian, a critically endangered Finnic language spoken in Finland and Russia. By analysing the reflective assignments of the translation course participants and focusing on how they report on encountering and overcoming lexical gaps, we examine a very concrete case of Language Making: the creation of new lexical items for Karelian for the purposes of a translation task. Since coining neologisms in our data is mostly based on borrowing or calquing, the data illustrate how the participants perceive language boundaries and the connections between Karelian and other languages. Contrary to what the intersection between translation and revitalisation suggests, a rather flexible view on linguistic borders is displayed. Participants fill in lexical gaps by drawing on all linguistic resources available to them: mainly Finnish and Russian, but also “international” resources and occasionally other languages or other Karelian dialects. To a lesser extent, the data also display the participants’ competing and conflicting ideologies of what is Karelian, what belongs to it and on which or whose model to base the neologisms.

It is difficult for L2 English learners in general, and especially Chinese learners of English, to form idiomatic collocations. This article presents a comparison of the use of intensifier-verb collocations in English by native speaker students and Chinese ESL learners, paying particular attention to verbs which collocate with intensifiers. The data consisted of written production from three corpora: two of these are native English corpora: the British Academic Written English (BAWE) Corpus and Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP). The third one is a recently created Chinese Learner English corpus, Ten-thousand English Compositions of Chinese Learners (TECCL). Findings suggest that Chinese learners of English produce significantly more intensifier-verb collocations than native speaker students, but that their English attests a smaller variety of intensifier-verb collocations compared with the native speakers. Moreover, Chinese learners of English use the intensifier-verb collocation types just-verb, only-verb and really-verb very frequently compared with native speaker students. As regards verb collocates, the intensifiers hardly, clearly, well, strongly and deeply collocate with semantically different verbs in native and Chinese learner English. Compared with the patterns in Chinese learner English, the intensifiers in native speaker English collocate with a more stable and restricted set of verb collocates.

The article analyses the loss of agreement between the dative clitic and its plural nominal referent in indirect object clitic-doubling in Spanish spoken in Galicia. On the basis of the previously defended hypothesis that number disagreement makes part of a grammaticalisation process whereby the clitic becomes a case affix, the paper examines some internal factors which lack consensus in previous studies, such as the relation between (in)transitivity and position of the clitic or animacity of nominal referents of the IO, and other external factors. Data analysis reveals that the percentage of disagreement in this area is much higher than in other Spanish speaking areas. This fact might be a consequence of language contact with Galician, a language where number inflection in the dative clitic is neutralised. To verify this hypothesis, the paper explores the relation between the number of occurrences of disagreement and the level of bilingualism of the speakers.

Our study maps the practices of managing Latin in English texts from over a thousand years. Mediation is a communicative activity which involves explaining the content of a conversation or text to another person. In contexts of multilingual writing, this is typically self-mediation, which a writer may perform by complementing code-switches with intratextual translations in the text. The data for the study are drawn from corpora of English historical texts, dictionaries and manuscripts, and mediation is analyzed in terms of support, intratextual translation and flagging. The findings show that while cognitive support helps a reader understand all of the content of the text, intratextual translation may also have relational functions, where the reader is expected to understand both languages used, as when code-switching and translation are a vehicle for humor. Intratextual translation can also be used to add credibility to the writer’s argument or to link it to a broader discussion on the topic. Mediation is also facilitated by flagging code-switching and intratextual translation metalinguistically or visually. Support is needed for Latin as a language which has always been part of relatively few English-speakers’ repertoire, but these strategies are expected to apply to other language pairs as well.

High self-efficacy beliefs and effective self-regulatory strategies are increasingly important in academic settings, and especially in developing academic writing skills. This article deals with how students develop academic writing skills in two different pedagogical settings (as autonomous learners and in a traditional learning environment), and how this is associated with the students’ self-regulatory strategies and self-efficacy beliefs. In the study, self-regulatory skills referred to the ability to take charge of, manage and organize the learning process, while self-efficacy beliefs were defined as the strength of students’ confidence to accomplish an extensive task and sense of succeeding. The method was quantitative, including some qualitative elements, and data was elicited through a survey answered by 150 students, after they had attended courses in academic writing. The survey consisted of 1 open-ended question and 16 multiple-choice questions (a five-point Likert scale). The data was analyzed using SPSS. The results show that self-regulatory skills and self-efficacy beliefs have a greater impact on learning academic writing skills in traditional learning settings than in learning settings where the students are supposed to work more independently, and where teacher support is not available to the same extent.

While evidential categories have similar meanings and uses cross-linguistically, the names given to the categories tend to vary. This article surveys the terms for evidentials used in descriptive grammars of 51 languages that have at least three evidential categories. Comparing terms to find common terminological tendencies can provide useful insights into the descriptions of categories. There is great deal of term synonymy and term polysemy, but each evidential category has its typical terms that are semantically motivated. The term synonymy is the result of emphasizing different semantic aspects of the evidential categories, which leads to variable term choices. There is terminological overlap between categories involving sensory perception (i.e. visual, direct, and nonvisual sensory evidentials), inference, and second-hand information, which suggests that they may not always be considered sufficiently conceptually distinct to merit unique terms, especially when the terms for inferential and assumptive evidentials are frequently created from the same words. The variation of the terminology is also connected to how the understanding of evidentiality and relationship to other adjacent categories has developed.

This paper examines music instrument teachers’ instructive use of noun metaphors and metonymies of behaviors related to the playing and handling of a musical instrument. Drawing on 10 video-recorded 30–40 min-long instrument lessons as data, and conversation analysis as a method, the paper examines the temporal location of these figurative turns (i.e., instruction turns including a noun metaphor or metonymy) within the instructional activities and in relation to the student’s behaviors. At the beginning of a new instructional sequence, a figurative turn allows the teacher to test and monitor the level of student’s knowledge, while the student orients to a need to demonstrate that knowledge. Figurative turns also enable the teacher to initiate correction in complex movement sequences, its organization as a series of metaphors or metonymies enabling an easy return to an earlier point in a sequence. Furthermore, the flexibility of metaphors and metonymies as interactional resources is evidenced by the ease by which a figurative instruction turn may be transformed into an affirmative evaluation of student conduct. The paper thus suggests that instructing body knowledge through metaphors and metonymies has significant pedagogical advantages, also providing a detailed account for why and how this is the case.

In this paper, we explore the rate of language change in the history of English. Our main focus is on detecting periods of accelerated change in Middle English (1150–1500), but we also compare the Middle English data with the Early Modern period (1500–1700) in order to establish a longer diachrony for the pace at which English has changed over time. Our study is based on a meta-analysis of existing corpus research, which is made available through a new linguistic resource, the Language Change Database (LCD). By aggregating the rates of 44 individual changes, we provide a critical assessment of how well the theory of punctuated equilibria (Dixon, Robert M. W. 1997. The rise and fall of languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) fits with our results. More specifically, by comparing the rate of language change with major language-external events, such as the Norman Conquest and the Black Death, we provide the first corpus-based meta-analysis of whether these events, which had significant societal consequences, also had an impact on the rate of language change. Our results indicate that major changes in the rate of linguistic change in the late medieval period could indeed be connected to the social and cultural after-effects of the Norman Conquest. We also make a methodological contribution to the field of English historical linguistics: by re-using data from existing research, linguists can start to ask new, fundamental questions about the ways in which language change progresses.

This paper brings together typological and sociolinguistic approaches to language variation. Its main aim is to evaluate the relative effect of language internal and external factors on the number of cases in the world’s languages. I model word order as a language internal predictor; it is well-known that, for instance, languages with verb-final word order (that is, languages in which both nominal arguments precede the main lexical verb) tend to develop complex case systems more often than languages with SVO word order do. I model population size and the proportion of second language speakers in the speech community as sociolinguistic predictors; these factors have been suggested recently to influence the distribution of the number of cases in the world’s languages. Modelling the data with generalized linear mixed effects modelling suggests an interaction between the number of cases, word order, and the proportion of second language speakers on the one hand, and between the number of cases, word order, and population size, on the other. This kind of complex interactions have not been previously reported in typological research wherefore they call for more complex explanations than previously suggested for cross-linguistic variation.

Over the past decades, Finland has become more international, and the need for academic and professional language skills has increased and shifted towards productive skills. In this paper, I shall provide an overview of this development as seen through course catalogues from four decades, and compare it with real student needs, strengths and weaknesses. The material consists of course descriptions from the 1970s to the present, which are used to trace the evolution and development of English courses taught at the University of Helsinki Language Centre. These were contrasted with 365 CEFR self-assessments my students completed at the beginning of their faculty-specific English courses (English Academic and Professional Skills) and another data set consisting of 20 interviews of graduates who have used languages professionally. The results show that the language courses have been developed so that they focus more on productive skills, which the students find demanding but essential for coping academically and professionally. For new teachers developing their English courses, this paper provides a context to be considered in the development process.

This article deals with a learning environment survey conducted among University of Helsinki students and language teachers in the university’s Language Centre (LC). The survey was designed to acquire information for the development of a practical strategy for the digitalization of language learning and teaching by the local LC. The article presents the central results of the survey by systematically comparing the student (N=219) and teacher (N=39) data, and it also considers more general implications. The investigated areas include attitudes towards and experiences of out-of-classroom (language) learning environments in general and digital environments in particular. Special attention was in the possible differences and similarities of the response groups’ views and experiences in order to point out possible gaps as specific challenges within the local context. One of the most central findings is that while there may be challenges, particularly in designing pedagogy for online environments, no huge generational gaps exist in attitudes towards online tools.

Non

Research into orthography in the history of English is not a simple venture. The history of English spelling is primarily based on printed texts, which fail to capture the range of variation inherent in the language; many manuscript phenomena are simply not found in printed texts. Manuscript-based corpora would be the ideal research data, but as this is resource-intensive, linguists use editions that have been produced by non-linguists. Many editions claim to retain original spellings, but in practice text is always normalized at the graph level and possibly more so. This does not preclude using such a corpus for orthographical research, but there has been no systematic way to determine the philological reliability of an edited text. In this paper we present a typological methodology we are developing for the evaluation of orthographical quality of edition-based corpora, with the aim of making the best use of bad data in the context of editions and manuscript practices. As a case study, we apply this methodology to the Early Modern and Late Modern English sections of the Corpus of Early English Correspondence.

This article discusses how victims of infanticide were portrayed in the Proceedings of the Old Bailey in 1674–1775. More specifically, the study focuses on the use of lexical NPs as subtle foregrounding devices in the trial accounts. It is argued that the use of a prosodically prominent lexical NP in a place where a topical and a highly accessible referent could naturally be expressed by an unstressed pronoun may not be emotionally or attitudinally neutral; rather, I will argue that by repeatedly using lexical NPs, the trial participants were able to express sympathy and solidarity to the victims in a very subtle way by making the referent more discourse-prominent and emphasising the victims’ young age by using head nouns like child and infant. The data will mainly be discussed from a diachronic perspective, and the results show that as most women convicted of infanticide in the eighteenth century were acquitted, the frequency of lexical NPs used in reference to the deceased children increased. The overuse of lexical NPs is particularly prominent in the trials where the woman was found guilty of the crime, suggesting a possible connection between the degree of violence used in the murder and the kinds of NPs the trial participants used to refer to the deceased children as subtle indications of sympathy.

‘Landscape’ and ‘ritual’ have been largely discussed in the social and human sciences, although their inter-relatedness has gained little scholarly attention. Drawing on earlier studies of ritual and landscape, as well as the authors′ own ethnographic works, ‘ritual landscape’ is suggested here as a useful analytical tool with which to understand how landscapes are produced, and how they, in their turn, produce certain types of being. ‘Ritual landscape’ recognises different modalities of agency, power-relation, knowledge, emotion, and movement. The article shows how the subjectivity of other-than-human beings such as ancestors, earth formations, land, animals, plants and, in general, materiality of ritual contexts, shape landscapes. We argue that ways of perceiving landscape includes a number of material and immaterial aspects indicated by ways of moving through landscapes and interacting with different human and non-human subjects that come to inhabit the world, creating relations and producing agentive ensembles and complexes.

This article analyses how caregivers use affective touch as a resource to facilitate interaction. Through touch, caregivers construct positive socio-emotional relationships with their residents. The analysis of micro-level interaction is based on an interactional sociolinguistic framework, and reveals how caregivers display affection and intimacy while assisting the residents in everyday situations in a care home. All of the examples involve touching a person’s shoulder, stroking or giving half-embraces, typical resources used to construct affiliation between caregivers and residents. This article illustrates how affective touch facilitates interaction by regulating participation and calming down residents, by mitigating the controlling aspect of caring, and by fostering a positive interpersonal relationship. The care situations presented in this article contain crucial pauses within talk that are used to construct a peaceful atmosphere. During these crucial moments, embodied action effectively indicates an orientation to listening and establishes a presence to accomplish the actions in that situational talk. This analysis contributes to the studies on embodied interaction and on interpersonal relationships in care for older adults. I would like to thank Camilla Lindholm, an anonymous reviewer as well as Maria Frick and Hanna Lappalainen for valuable comments on the earlier versions of this article.

Non

This paper sets as its aim to show that ELF research is not uniform in its fundamental theoretical assumptions. While one wing of ELF scholars follows a classical Saussurean tradition with its notions oflangueandparole, the other is distinctly usage-based. This is not presented as a problem but rather as a matter to be taken into consideration because the views are not easily reconcilable, if at all. Naturally, this divergence of view is clearly visible in data analysis and leads to different interpretations of the underlying processes. I will illustrate my point by the case of phraseological patterning. It is well-known that multi-word units occurring in ELF use are not quite the same as in standard varieties. In SLA the discrepancies are traditionally labelled as errors, a stance ELF researchers do not generally agree with since the conflicting usages do not seem to lose their communicative successfulness. The question at which ELF researchers look differently is whether not quite nativelike phraseological patterning in ELF is a result of analytic or holistic – although fuzzy – processing, in other words, creation or approximation. The answer to this question has profound implications for our understanding of second language processing.

This article provides a new reading of a notarial signature in papyrus BGU III 997, a copy of an agoranomic sale from the Ptolemaic period. The signature was not transcribed in the original edition since only traces of it survive and the papyrus seems blank and intact at that place. A closer examination reveals that only the upper layer of the papyrus has been peeled off. How, when, and why the alteration took place, remains unsolved.

Dative shift is a two-fold process that affects both the morphological coding and the order of T and R arguments of a three-participant construction, as in the teacher gave a book to the student vs. the teacher gave the student a book. Across languages, dative shift tends to express similar functions including differences in animacy, definiteness, semantic role of arguments, affectedness of recipient and permanence of transfer. This is understandable, since dative shift increases the formal transitivity of the affected clauses, and all the expressed functions are somehow related to transitivity. The goal of this paper is to study whether, and to what extent, mere changes in word order suffice to express the functions of dative shift. The examined language is Finnish, which suits very well for this purpose due to its relatively free word order and inherently different coding of Theme and Recipient. It can be hypothesized that mere word order changes readily express features related to definiteness and animacy, while they are less capable of expressing features such as affectedness of the recipient.

Late Modern English Medical Texts 1700-1800 : A corpus for analysing eighteenth-century medical English