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This article is an analysis of linguistic survey data representing German dialects in Switzerland in 1933/34 based on the so-called Wenker sentences. The data are impressionistic in terms of applied phonetic transcriptions, which were produced by non-specialists using the Latin alphabet. Due to the lack of pre-defined standardization, the phonetic transcriptions are very heterogeneous. From a technical perspective, this leads to very noisy data, which is why the validity of the Wenker data in general and the Swiss Wenker data in particular has been questioned. Using methods from computational linguistics, we compare, for the first time, Wenker data with linguistic data collected at virtually the same time by linguistics professionals. Direct comparison with a sample from the published atlas of German-speaking Switzerland (SDS) reveals that despite the noisiness of the data, they nevertheless provide reliable information, e.g., in terms of the spatial structuring of Swiss dialects. The study is thus a successful pilot for other corpus-based studies dealing with unstructured Wenker data in other regions.

'Il volume raccoglie quaranta saggi offerti a Franco Fanciullo da colleghi e amici in occasione del suo settantesimo compleanno. Contributi di: Maria Giovanna Arcamone, Francesco Avolio, Marina Benedetti, Maria Patrizia Bologna, Rosario Coluccia, Carlo Consani, Franco Crevatin, Pierluigi Cuzzolin, Alessandro De Angelis, Nicola De Blasi, Paolo Di Giovine, Pietro Umberto Dini, Lorenzo Filipponio, Renato Gendre, Mariafrancesca Giuliani, Cristina Guardiano, Giuseppe Longobardi, Melita Stavrou, Paola Crisma, Romano Lazzeroni, Adam Ledgeway, Norma Schifano, Michele Loporcaro, Giovanni Lupinu, Martin Maiden, Io Manolessou, Angela Ralli, Carla Marcato, Issam Marjani, Giovanna Marotta, Filippo Motta, Maria Napoli, Alberto Nocentini, Andrea Nuti, Giulio Paulis, Paolo Poccetti, Stella Retali-Medori, Domenica Romagno, Francesco Rovai, Giovanni Ruffino, Andrea Scala, Domenico Silvestri, Giuseppina Silvestri, Rosanna Sornicola, Fiorenzo Toso. (...)'.

At the heart of this special issue are partitive elements (i. e., partitive articles, partitive pronouns, and partitive case markers) which can express different “shades” of partitivity, namely true partitivity, pseudopartitivity, or indefiniteness, that is, the absence of a part-whole relation in the meaning, in contrast to (pseudo)partitivity. Since these partitive elements express (at least) two such notions, as they can be truly partitive but often are not, the questions around partitivity are complex, interrelated and challenging. This special issue, with a strong and wide crosslinguistic (typological) coverage, deals with two overarching topics: first, the geographical distribution of partitive elements and the identification of potential instances of language contact, and, second, sometimes in combination with the first topic, the formal description and explanation of different partitive constructions.

Although Swiss dialects of German are widely used in everyday communication, automatic processing of Swiss German is still a considerable challenge due to the fact that it is mostly a spoken variety and that it is subject to considerable regional variation. This paper presents the ArchiMob corpus, a freely available general-purpose corpus of transcribed spoken Swiss German based on oral history interviews. The corpus is a result of a long design process, intensive manual work and specially adapted computational processing. We first present the modalities of access of the corpus for dialectological, historical and computational research. We then describe how the documents were transcribed, segmented and aligned with the sound source, and summarise a series of experiments that have led to automatically annotated normalisation and part-of-speech tagging layers. Finally, we present several case studies to stimulate the use of the corpus for dialectological research.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This paper develops a new theoretical framework to describe the long diachrony of speech acts. Such an undertaking requires a careful reconsideration of some of the basic properties of the nature of speech acts. It requires a clear differentiation between the functional profile, or illocutionary potential, of a speech act, the range of expressions that are typically used to perform it, and the metacommunicative expressions that are used to talk about it. It also requires a clear understanding of the integrity of the speech act in order to make it comparable across different time periods. It is suggested that the diachronic development of speech acts is both a gradual process with limited short-term effects that – over a long period – lead to more substantial differences and a process of attenuation, i.e. a progressive weakening of its illocutionary force. As an example, this paper traces the long diachrony of apologies in the history of the English language, from Old English up to Present-day English. Apologies originate in Old English penitential acts and confessions to God which in the course of time underwent a process of attenuation that first turned them into secularized appeals to a human addressee for forgiveness, subsequently to expressions of regret and eventually to speech acts that are often no more than a token acknowledgement of some minor infraction. The final section gives an outline of how this new theoretical framework of speech act attenuation can be applied to other speech acts, such as promises and greetings.

In this article we venture to elucidate the origin of the Albanian subjunctive markertë-. We contend that this marker is historically linked to a morphosyntactic device which is traditionally described as linking article and which licenses nominal syntactic units as constituents of larger syntactic units. Based on the observation that there is a substantial distributional, functional and semantic overlap between nonfinite verbal forms marked withtë-and finite subjunctive predicates, we propose that the subjunctive marker spread across host classes from nominals to nonfinite predicates and to finite subjunctive predicates. The spread into the finite verbal domain is areally fostered, while the licensing device itself is an independent Albanian development that possibly picks up a vertical, Indo-European signal.

The term “Discernment” was originally coined back in the 1980s, where it was first used as an approximate translation of the Japanese term wakimae but later used independently in other contexts and cultures. In this paper, we re-assess its value as an analytical tool for two remote cultures and languages with a severely fragmented and limited textual heritage; Late Egyptian and Old English. In spite of their obvious differences, they have in common that their societies were strictly hierarchically ordered. Power was a fixed factor and not negotiable, and thus social movement was generally not possible. Our argumentation is based on a careful study of the Late Ramesside Letters, a corpus of personal communication written in Late Egyptian (c. 1099‒1069BCE), and on a range of different constructions (directives, terms of address) in Old English. In these contexts, the concept of Discernment turns out to be a very useful analytical tool to describe the relationship dynamics in strictly hierarchical societies. It describes (linguistic) behaviour which is socially and situationally adequate and quasi mandatory, and which closely indexes the social relationship between speaker and addressee, as well as the social and linguistic context within which the exchange takes place. Keywords: Politeness, Discernment, Late Egyptian, Old English, Late Ramesside Letters

Despite the evidence that infants are sensitive to facial cues and prosody for the detection of emotion, we have contradictory evidence regarding the use of these cues by older preschool and school children when inferring both emotional and politeness stance. This study assessed preschool aged children’s sensitivity to intonational and facial cues signalling a speaker’s polite stance in requestive speech acts with controlled lexical and contextual materials. Thirty-six 3-year-old American English-speaking children performed a forced-choice decision task which investigated whether children at this age use pitch and/or facial cues to infer a speaker’s affective stance in either audio-only, visual-only or audio-visual presentation modalities, when lexical cues are controlled for. Results showed that (a) children at three years can infer a speaker’s polite stance equally well in all three conditions (audio-only, visual-only and audio-visual) and thereby (b) unlike previous research, in the present task both intonation and facial cues are equally strong cues in children’s understanding of a speaker’s polite stance in requestive speech acts. The authors discuss especially the implications of this early use of intonation to detect politeness, relating it to other previous research on children’s ability to infer meaning from pitch.

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

Children achieve their first language milestones initially in gesture and prosody before they do so in speech. However, little is known about the potential precursor role of those features later in...

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

Acoustic measures of speech rhythm based on the durational characteristics of consonantal and vocalic intervals (henceforth C- or V-intervals) as well as syllabic intensity reveal between-speaker variability. The evidence obtained so far is based on speakers of stressed-timed languages, which are assumed to have complex consonant clusters and a higher degree of vowel reduction. Speakers of stressed-timed languages might operate their articulatory organs in different ways due to the syllable complexity and vowel reduction. Complex consonant clusters are released differently, and vowel reduction tends to be produced more or less strongly depending on speakers. When a language lacks such features, it is possible that rhythmic variation between its speakers decreases. In the present study, we aimed at exploring between- and within-speaker rhythmic variability in Persian, an Indo-European language categorised as syllable-timed. Acoustic correlates of speech rhythm (%V, ?V[ln], ?C[ln], n-PVI-V) and articulation rate were obtained from two Persian corpora with different sources of within-speaker variability. In the first corpus, the source of within-speaker variability mainly comes from non-contemporaneous recording sessions, and in the second corpus, from different speech rates. Results revealed that there were significant differences between speakers in all investigated speech rhythm measures in Persian and %V best discriminated between speakers. This reveals that the lack of typical stress-time features does not affect between-speaker variability in speech rhythm.

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

Listeners are able to quite accurately distinguish between different dialects of their native language, but little is known about the process of dialect identification and the phonetic cues listeners use to identify someone’s regional origin. This study examines how different segments, acoustic between-dialect distance, and the listeners’ knowledge about a dialect contribute to this process. Native speakers of Grison and Zurich German were asked to categorise isolated words spoken by eight speakers of Grison and eight speakers of Zurich German. Stimuli contained either none, one, or two segmental cues to regional origin. The presence of one dialect-specific segment was enough to allow for an identification rate well above chance. Sensitivity measures and analysis of reaction time showed that the two dialect groups largely relied on the same segmental cues. Acoustic distance to the other dialect, quantified as Euclidean distance in the F1 × F2 vowel space, generally facilitated dialect identification, but interacted with native speakers’ knowledge about the dialects: in segments which listeners explicitly associated with one of the two dialects, acoustic distance facilitated dialect recognition to a larger extent than in segments in which listeners were not aware of dialectal variation. The results suggest that, depending on the listener’s prior knowledge about a dialect, acoustic variation is weighted differently. Further analysis showed that Zurich listeners were more sensitive to the dialect differences, responded faster, and presented a more marked own-dialect response bias than Grison listeners. These findings are in line with the status of Grison German as a marked dialect and Zurich German as a neutral dialect, and suggest that, depending on their own dialect’s status, listeners used different decision strategies.