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This paper deals with the distribution of agreement patterns for target adjectives or past participles in Swiss German dialects focussing on non-attributive domains. While agreement outside the nominal phrase has been lost in the development towards Standard German and in most dialects, in some Swiss German dialects certain syntactic domains still show formal agreement. Against this backdrop, two topics will be addressed in this paper. It gives an overview of the extent, function and distribution of formal agreement within the clausal domain on the basis of survey data, as far as possible. Another focus is default neuter inflection, which no longer shows canonical gender agreement with a neuter controller, but has developed a new function in the field of aspectuality.

One limitation of corpus-based research into the epicentre hypothesis is that it only provides information on structural similarity/difference of varieties but not on the role that attitudes may play in the choice of variants in a pluricentric language. In our case study on verb complementation patterns, we use simulation as a complementary methodology. We build an agent-based model for two speaker communities with English as a second language (ESL) which allows for attitudes towards American and British English to affect the choice of verb complementation. This approach enables us to gauge the likely effect that attitudes towards potential epicentres might have on the choice of variants and to predict patterns of variation we should see in language use. We provide preliminary data from the News On the Web corpus to test whether the predictions are, in fact, borne out. only published online, no volume/issue number ispartof: World Englishes vol:41 issue:3 pages:377-399 status: Published online

In this paper, we focus on partitive articles (PAs), i.e., determiners which, generally, have an indefinite interpretation, and on one of their potential correlates, i.e., invariable de, in Francoprovençal, a non-standardized, highly endangered Gallo-Romance language (cf. Zulato, Kasstan & Nagy 2018), and show the fine-grained spatial distribution of these elements in the Swiss and Aosta Valley (Italy) varieties. Presenting several maps based on fieldwork data from Valais (Switzerland) and the Aosta Valley (Italy), we demonstrate that the spatial distribution of PAs and de is more complex than reported in the literature: we complement the basic subdivision of Francoprovençal into two types, Francoprovençal A and B (cf. Kristol 2014, 2016), with a more nuanced picture, in which the morphosyntactic features of PAs play a crucial role: in Francoprovençal A, the presence of PAs depends on the syntactic context whereas, in Francoprovençal B, their presence is limited mainly to two areas, in which singular and plural PAs do not occur together (one area only has singular PAs whereas the other one only has plural PAs). We also show that there is no correlation between phonologically overt plural marking on nouns and absence of PAs; however, we found a correlation between overt sigmatic number marking on nouns and absence of PAs.

This contribution focuses on the multimodal aspects of apologies. In terms of politeness and face management, apologies are ambivalent. They are redressive and indicate a concern for the hearer, but they also include a certain amount of self-blame and thus threaten the speaker’s own positive face. Narrative descriptions of apologetic gestures were retrieved from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) through the collocation profiles of apology expressions. Such gestures may occur in isolation without a spoken apology, or they may occur together with a more or less explicit apology. In many cases, the apologetic gesture helps to discursively negotiate the severity of an event that may have been perceived as an offence and the speaker’s responsibility for it.

This Element outlines current issues in the study of the pragmatics of fiction. It starts from the premise that fictional texts are complex and multi-layered communicative acts which deserve attention in pragmatic research in their own right, and it highlights the need to understand them as cultural artefacts rich in possibilities to explore pragmatic effects and pragmatic theorising. The issues covered are (1) the participation structure of fictional texts, (2) the performance aspect of fictional texts, (3) the interaction between readers and viewers and the fictional texts, as well as (4) the pragmatic effects of drawing on indexical linguistic features for evoking ideologies in characterisation. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Pragmatics is a branch of linguistics. In a narrow sense it studies the way in which the linguistic properties of an utterance interact with its context to provide situational interpretations for the recipient of the utterance. In a wider sense, pragmatics studies all aspects of language use in an interactional and a social context. Historical pragmatics as a well-established subfield of pragmatics focuses on language use in historical contexts. This includes the study of usage patterns at particular points in the history of a given language, the study of the diachronic developments of such usage patterns and the study of the underlying principles of such developments. Work on historical pragmatics has a long history but until the mid-1990s relevant publications were rare and did not describe themselves as historical pragmatics. In the second half of the 1990s and in the early 2000s, the field quickly established itself as an important branch of pragmatics. Several factors were instrumental in this development. After the early focus of pragmatics on philosophical methods on the one hand and on spontaneous face-to-face interactions on the other, it opened its scope to a broader range of data, including written data. At the same time, the 1990s brought an increased availability of language corpora and, in particular, the availability of historical corpora. This opened up new ways of investigating language histories. In the early work of historical pragmatics, researchers regularly justified their choice of data. Plays, courtroom proceedings, and personal correspondence were considered to be particularly good, albeit imperfect, approximations to natural spoken interactions and therefore the privileged data for historical pragmatics. Today, data is no longer assessed solely in terms of its proximity to natural spoken interaction, but each type of data is considered in its own right and within its own communicative contexts. Topics of interest in historical pragmatics have always covered a broad range of pragmatic entities, including speech actions (greetings, promises, requests, apologies, and the like), discourse markers and interjections, nominal and pronominal terms of address, and issues of politeness and impoliteness. Researchers investigate such elements at specific points in time or in their diachronic developments over longer periods. And they also try to isolate general underlying principles of diachronic change that explain these developments within a larger theoretical framework.

In most natural languages, grammatical gender and number features encode semantic attributes concerning the animacy, sex, and numerosity of the referents. Albeit the likely advantage of promptly communicating about such salient attributes, inflectional systems rarely display consistently bijective correspondences between the semantic attributes and the grammatical feature values. In a study on Italian, we explored how this apparently noisy encoding depends on a trade-off between the semantic and the functional aspects of grammatical features. By means of entropy metrics, we assessed the primarily functional purpose of gender and number features in the lexicon, observing a distribution of nouns that can optimally serve agreement-based parsing and prediction of words in sentences. A novel context entropy measure, introduced in this study to assess meaning specificity, revealed a semantic underspecification in masculine and singular nouns denoting animate referents. We argue that underspecification is the hallmark of the particular type of information compression occurring in inflectional systems. In binary inflectional systems, one value specifically encodes a semantic attribute, while the other value does not encode any semantic information, and surfaces as a default for functional purposes; the encoding of two antithetic semantic attributes is less likely. By providing an information-theoretical account of the role of grammatical features based on large-scale data, we set the basis for a scientifically informed pursue of language inclusiveness.

In this paper, we use a relatively new source of data, the Movie Corpus, to explore the common stereotype that politeness standards keep falling. In this data, which contains transcripts of movies from 1930 to 2019, we trace a range of elements that have relatively clear default politeness or impoliteness values (e.g. please, could you and a range of title nouns versus swear words). And we introduce a terminological distinction between conduct politeness and etiquette politeness. The results suggest a complex picture of some “polite” expressions that are indeed declining (e.g. title nouns, would you (please)) while others are rising (e.g. can you (please)). Many “impolite” swear words have increased considerably over the last five decades. We carefully discuss the reliability of these results, which fully depend on the composition of the corpus and its consistency over time as well as on the reliability of the chosen elements as im/politeness indicators. We compare the results for American/Canadian and for British/Irish movies (following the distinction of the Movie Corpus), and we discuss the extent to which movies can be taken as indicators of language change in general.

Un erratum d'aquest article s'ha publicat a Journal of Child Language, 2023;50(2):494. DOI: 10.1017/S0305000921000933 i també està disponible a http://hdl.handle.net/10230/56217 Over recent decades much research has analyzed the relevance of 9- to 20- month-old infants’ early imitation skills (object- and language-based imitation) for language development. Yet there have been few systematic comparisons of the joint relevance of these imitative behaviors later on in development. This correlational study investigated whether multimodal imitation (gestural, prosodic, and lexical components) and object-based imitation are related to narratives and sociopragmatics in preschoolers. Thirty-one typically developing 3- to 4-year-old children performed four tasks to assess multimodal imitation, object-based imitation, narrative abilities, and sociopragmatic abilities. Results revealed that both narrative and sociopragmatic skills were significantly related to multimodal imitation, but not to object-based imitation, indicating that preschoolers’ ability to imitate socially relevant multimodal cues is strongly related to language and sociocommunicative skills. Therefore, this evidence supports a broader conceptualization of imitation behaviors in the field of language development that systematically integrates prosodic, gestural, and verbal linguistic patterns. This study benefited from funding awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (MCIU), Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI), and Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER) (PGC2018-097007-B-100 “Multimodal Language Learning (MLL): Prosodic and Gestural Integration in Pragmatic and Phonological Development”) and by the Generalitat de Catalunya (2017 SGR_971) to the Prosodic Studies Group. Iris Hübscher was supported by a postdoctoral research fellowship by the URPP Language and Space (University of Zurich) during the preparation of this work. Mariia Pronina also acknowledges an FI grant from the Generalitat de Catalunya (ref. 2019FI_B1 00120).

Telling apart family-internal developments from contact-induced changes and socio-geographically conditioned areal trends is still one of the main challenges in tracing the development - and stability - of languages. Notably prima facie contact phenomena might turn out to have resulted from the interaction of a variety of sources upon closer inspection; assessing their interaction is a crucial requirement for comprehending the dynamics of change. Based on the example of simplification patterns in the system of short personal pronouns observed in the Balkan Slavic dialects located in the territory of North Macedonian and Greece, the present paper illustrates the necessity of identifying the multiplicity of triggers and their interaction, thereby making a case for the relevance of small-scale, transient patterns in understanding diachronic processes. In particular, it places the simplifications within the pronominal system into the larger context of differential object indexing by preverbal pronominal elements in the Balkan languages. With the loss of agreement distinctions on pronouns being characteristic for the last phase in the emergence of object indexing, both processes appear to be closely related. Obviously, in this case, the convergence of various different processes has created a favorable environment for the mutual reinforcement and stabilization of two otherwise highly volatile phenomena.

Different methods to acquire a language can contribute differently to learning success. In the present study we tested the success of L2 stress contrasts acquisition, when ab initio learners were taught or not about the theoretic nature of L2 stress contrasts. In two 4-hour perceptual training methods, French-speaking listeners received either (a) explicit instructions about Spanish stress patterns and perception activities commonly used in L2 pronunciation courses or (b) no explicit instructions and a unique perception activity, a shape/word matching task. Results showed that French-speaking listeners improved their ability to identify and discriminate stress contrasts in Spanish after training. However, there was no significant difference between explicit and non-explicit training nor was there an effect on stress processing under different phonetic variability conditions. This suggests that in L2 stress acquisition, non-explicit training may benefit ab initio learners as much as explicit instruction and activities used in L2 pronunciation courses.

Both proper names and common nouns, when used as terms of address in Romanesco, can be preceded by the particlea(a Nando!‘Hey, Fernando!’) and undergo truncation of the poststress material ((a) dottó’!‘Hey, doc!’). The article presents a panchronic study of this construction in Romanesco, showing how and when truncation and the vocative particleafirst arose and providing a synchronic analysis of the conditions under which they occur today. Vocative truncation is widespread in Central-Southern Italo-Romance, where it obeys conditions that vary subtly across time and space and that the article will touch upon based on the studies available to date. These conditions will be described in detail for Romanesco, showing that they are hierarchically organized and involve all levels of linguistic analysis: the list includes (a) a part-of-speech condition, (b) a condition referring to the syntactic constituent, (c) a semantic/pragmatic condition, (d) one of prosodic minimality, and finally (e) one of lexical semantics, relative to the animacy/definiteness hierarchy. Also the occurrence of theaparticle is subject to conditions which are syntactic-textual, pragmatic and phonological in nature and which identify preferences rather than clear-cut (un)grammaticality, contrary to those that constrain truncation.

A corpus-based method for assessing a range of dialect-standard variation is presented for identifying samples exhibiting the highest prevalence of dialect features. This method provides insight into areal and inter-speaker variation and allows the extraction of maximally non-standard manifestations of the dialect, which may then be sampled and used for the study of language change and variation. The focus is on a non-standard Torlak variety, which has undergone considerable change under the influence of standard Serbian. The degree of variation is assessed by measuring the frequencies of five distinguishing linguistic features: accent position, dative reflexivesi, auxiliary omission in the compound perfect, the post-positive article, and analytic case marking in the indirect object and possessive. Locations subject to the greatest and least influence of the standard are revealed using hierarchical clustering. A positive correlation between the frequencies of occurrence reveals which non-standard feature is the best predictor of the others.

Speech rhythm varies with age. In this paper, we examined the role of mean and peak syllable intensity variability in age-related rhythmic changes. Si xteen younger adults and 10 older speakers read 60 sentences in Zurich German. Results revealed that peak syllable intensity variability is significantly smaller in older compared to younger adults; there was no such effect for syllable mean intensity. Reduced fluency, changes in the biomechanical properties of articulators controlling the mouth opening cycles, and compensation strategies for subglottal pressure generation were the most plausible reasons for the obtained age-related syllable intensity variability.

Phylogenetic trees are a central tool for studying language evolution and have wide implications for understanding cultural evolution as a whole. For example, they have been the basis of studies on the evolution of musical instruments, religious beliefs and political complexity. Bayesian phylogenetic methods are transparent regarding the data and assumptions underlying the inference. One of these assumptions -- that languages change independently -- is incompatible with the reality of language evolution, particularly with language contact. When speakers interact, languages frequently borrow linguistic traits from each other. Phylogenetic methods ignore this issue, which can lead to errors in the reconstruction. More importantly, they neglect the rich history of language contact. A principled way of integrating language contact in phylogenetic methods is sorely missing. We present contacTrees, a Bayesian phylogenetic model with horizontal transfer for language evolution. The model efficiently infers the phylogenetic tree of a language family and contact events between its clades. The implementation is available as a package for the phylogenetics software BEAST 2. We apply contacTrees in a simulation study and a case study on a subset of well-documented Indo-European languages. The simulation study demonstrates that contacTrees correctly reconstructs the history of a simulated language family, including simulated contact events. Moreover, it shows that ignoring contact can lead to systematic errors in the estimated tree height, rate of change and tree topology, which can be avoided with contacTrees. The case study confirms that contacTrees reconstructs known contact events in the history of Indo-European and finds known loanwords, demonstrating its practical potential. The model has a higher statistical fit to the data than a conventional phylogenetic reconstruction, and the reconstructed tree height is significantly closer to well-attested estimates. Our method closes a long-standing gap between the theoretical and empirical models of cultural evolution. The implications are especially relevant for less documented language families, where our knowledge of past contacts and linguistic borrowings is limited. Since linguistic phylogenies have become the backbone of many studies of cultural evolution, the addition of this integral piece of the puzzle is crucial in the endeavour to understand the history of human culture.

This chapter elaborates on two case studies in structural variation to illustrate how the comparison of closely-related grammatical systems fuels research questions on general theoretical issues. Our first case study regards subject clitics in central Romance dialects. Subject clitics have been studied extensively in the past decades, but they still raise several questions concerning the nature of null subject languages. Analogously, there is a huge literature on the selection of perfective auxiliaries – the second case history in our chapter – and, as in the case of subject clitics, lesser-known non-standard dialects display a kaleidoscope of auxiliation options, whose rationalization poses fascinating analytical challenges and yields insights into basic issues of linguistic theory. The core question raised by our case studies regards the modelling of linguistic diversity: do the above phenomena result from a finite set of discrete parameters or emerge from random language-specific options? We argue that the otherwise ‘hyperastronomical’ number of possible grammars is aptly constrained by syntactic factors, although inflectional morphology – which syntax cannot control entirely – may have a role in the realization of specific auxiliary or subject clitic forms in each dialect and for each person.

In Albanian, the application of a preverbal accusative index, also known as clitic doubling, may appear not only with nominal but also with clausal arguments, a hitherto little-discussed phenomenon. The occurrence of the preverbal object index is at least partly conditional on readiness for individuation of the complement clause and on its information status. Individuation and information status are also involved in the indexing of accusative nominal arguments, which testifies to a system in Albanian that operates across structurally different complement types, treating them alike. The analysis presented in this chapter contributes to more general discussions concerning the syntactic properties of complements.

In this study, we examined whether the convergence in interlocutors’ vowel acoustics leads to decreasing discriminability between interlocutors’ voices. Ten pairs of Grison and Zürich German speakers produced lexical items before and after dialogue interactions with evidence of vowel convergence in post-dialogue productions. In Experiment 1, native and non-native Swiss German listeners discriminated pairs of speakers whose speech was obtained pre- and post-dialogue. Results showed that listeners’ sensitivity (A’) was higher for native than non-native listeners, but comparable for pre- and post-dialogue recordings. The observed negative correlation between voice discrimination and the acoustic distance in formant space was mainly driven by a single speaker pair. In Experiment 2, the speaker recognition performance of an i-vector-based software was compared in pre- and post-dialogue speech. Results revealed no difference in the system performance between the two conditions. The findings suggest that vowel convergence does not compromise voice discriminability under the given experimental conditions.

Previous corpus-based research on the progressive (be +v- ing) investigated it from a diachronic point of view or from the angle of World Englishes (WEs). However, factors such as its propensity to occur with animate subjects or its preference for dynamic verbs have not been studied in relation to the choice between progressive and simple aspect. As the progressive has been extended to stative verbs, we argue that a variationist study of the construction in WEs needs to take simple vps into account systematically, too, and investigate whether there is interaction between predictor variables underlying the progressive:simple choice. We use a probabilistic grammar approach to study progressives in newspaper writing across a broad range of WEs. We apply a tree and forest analysis to gauge the relative strength of the predictor variables variety, animacy, tense/modality, verb type and voice. Our results show that the core grammar for the progressive:simple choice is shared across all Englishes. The extension of progressives to stative verbs, in particular, does not result in statistically detectable effects. We argue that they nevertheless serve to give a very ‘local’ flavour to contact varieties as they are salient against the backdrop of the core grammar.

Un lettore pone un quesito mettendo insieme alcune parole apparentemente tutte connesse: “Mi chiedo perché la parola fico/figo indicante normalmente il frutto dell’albero omonimo (e le grazie femminili se il sostantivo è al femminile […]) abbia assunto la connotazione gergal-giovanile di ‘bello, ganzo, sorprendente’. Come ci si è arrivati? E come si è arrivati ad usare la medesima parola per descrivere un/a bello/a ragazzo/a? E per quanto riguarda la parola sfiga invece?”. Su quest’ultimo termine chiedono spiegazioni anche una lettrice e un altro lettore che ipotizzano una possibile correlazione con il termine gergale fica e/o figa. Su quest’ultimo termine chiedono spiegazioni anche una lettrice (“Vorrei sapere come e da che cosa è nata la parola sfiga, se ha qualche correlazione con il termine gergale fica o figa e se è una parola maschilista”) e, con formulazione sintomaticamente diversa (che qui non riteniamo opportuno riportare per esteso), un altro lettore, il quale chiede se sia “iellato chi non dispone” liberamente del denotato del termine di cui sopra.

Human voices are individual and humans have elaborate skills in recognizing speakers by their voice, phenomena that are deeply rooted in the evolution of human behavior. To date, the mechanisms of speaker recognition are not well understood because of the high variability of the acoustic cues to a speaker’s identity. We wondered what role the speaker plays in making his/her voice more or less well recognizable. While it is evident from the literature that humans can control vocal properties to enhance their intelligibility, it is unclear whether speakers can and/or do control vocal characteristics to be better recognizable and whether such control mechanisms play a role in the communication process. In this paper, we reviewed results from the literature supporting the view that speaker idiosyncratic information is dynamic and that humans have the ability to control how well they can be recognized. We suggest possible experimental setups by which the control over identity in voice can be tested and present pilot acoustic characteristics of speech that was produced to be either targeted at being (a) intelligible (clear speech) and (b) suitable for person recognition (identity marked speech). Results revealed that there is reason to believe that speakers apply different mechanisms when making their individuality identifiable as opposed to making their speech better understood. We discuss predictions that a control of recognizability and intelligibility has within major theories of speech perception.

The widely cited frequency code hypothesis attempts to explain a diverse range of communicative phenomena through the acoustic projection of body size. The set of phenomena includes size sound symbolism (using /i/ to signal smallness in words such asteeny), intonational phonology (using rising contours to signal questions) and the indexing of social relations via vocal modulation, such as lowering one's voice pitch to signal dominance. Among other things, the frequency code is commonly interpreted to suggest that polite speech should be universally signalled via high pitch owing to the association of high pitch with small size and submissiveness. We present a cross-cultural meta-analysis of polite speech of 101 speakers from seven different languages. While we find evidence for cross-cultural variation, voice pitch is on average lower when speakers speak politely, contrary to what the frequency code predicts. We interpret our findings in the light of the fact that pitch has a multiplicity of possible communicative meanings. Cultural and contextual variation determines which specific meanings become manifest in a specific interactional context. We use the evidence from our meta-analysis to propose an updated view of the frequency code hypothesis that is based on the existence of many-to-many mappings between speech acoustics and communicative interpretations.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part I)’.