Languages, Volume 9, Issue 3

Mai-Ndombe is one of the southwestern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Ecologically, it can be characterised as a transition zone between a moist, broadleaf rainforest ecotone in the north and shrubland/savannah areas in the south. Ling...

This paper provides a comparative and diachronic account of reflexive morphology in the Kikongo language cluster, a genealogically closely related group of 40+ West Coastal Bantu languages. This study is based on data from 34 grammatical descriptions...

In their quest to find a suitable tone of voice in an informalizing society, many companies are confronted with the choice of using T or V pronouns in their B2C communications. This paper presents an experimental study addressing the question of whet...

Quantifier-Negation sentences such as all teachers did not use Sandy’s car are known to allow an inverse scope interpretation in English. However, there is a lack of experimental evidence to determine whether this interpretation is allowed in e...

Some languages make a distinction between formal and informal pronouns of address. When organizations communicate in such a language, they have to choose between the formal and informal form. The goal of this paper is to explore the role of the V-T d...

Misalignment between second language (L2) self-perception and actual ability is often observed among L2 learners. In order to further understand this phenomenon, the current study investigated how the roles of individual differences (IDs; especially...

The popularisation of legal knowledge is a critical issue for equal access to law and justice. Legal discourse has been justly criticised for its obscure terminology and convoluted phrasing, which notably led to the Plain Language Movement in English...

This case study examines overheard speech in a third-generation heritage Spanish Mexican family. It presents Spanish use longitudinally and describes overheard Spanish word use in interaction. Transcribed on CLAN to create a plurilingual corpus, ethn...

The Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM) proposed by Kroll and Stewart has been one of the most influential models of late multilingual language processing. While the model has provided valuable insights into language processing mechanisms, the role of c...

This study investigated the processing of lexical elements of idioms in isolation. Using visual word priming, spreading activation for idiomatically related word pairs (e.g., pop–question) was compared to that for semantically related (e.g., an...

This qualitative case study reports the impact of schooling on migrant children’s language socialization, particularly focusing on the role of language ideologies and practices within Korean schools. Despite an increasing population of migrant...

The present study investigated whether L1 and L2 Spanish speakers show sensitivity to matching/mismatching syllable structure and consonant sonority in lexical segmentation in Spanish. A total of 81 English–Spanish learners and 72 Spanish&ndash...

Russian’s six cases and multiple noun classes make case marking potentially challenging ground for heritage speakers. Indeed, morphological levelling, “probably the best-described feature of language loss”, has been substantiated. O...

Ecological models of competition have provided great explanatory power regarding synonymy in derivational morphology. Competition models of this type have certainly shown their utility, as they have demonstrated, among other things, the relevance of...

A rich tradition of studies on languages with differential object marking (DOM) is available in the literature. Languages like Spanish or Romanian are frequently cited in discussions about DOM, but Valencian is seldom mentioned in this context. This...

This study shows that the incorporation of the first-person plural pronoun a gente has not only reached the southernmost tip of the Brazilian territory, but has crossed the border and entered Uruguayan Portuguese, or varieties of Portuguese spoken in...

Most analyses of monophthong change have historically relied on static acoustic measures. It is unclear the extent to which dynamic measures can shed greater light on monophthong change than can already be captured using such static approaches. In th...

Human communication is a multimodal phenomenon that involves the combined use of verbal and non-verbal signs. It is estimated that non-verbal signs, especially paralinguistic and kinesic ones, have a significant impact on message production. Silence...

This paper addresses the crucial question of the structuring of scientific Notions for the purpose of their proper teaching/acquisition. It aims to demonstrate that non-taxonomic structures, derived from the systematic lexicographic definition of ter...

As one of the productive approaches to L2 pragmatic development, study abroad (SA) has drawn the attention of numerous researchers during the past few decades. Different factors, specifically those related to L2 learners, implicate the impact of SA o...

The fact that there are (at least) two different translations of the English preposition for used to describe duration in Portuguese, namely durante and por, shows that duration is an interesting area in the tense and aspect panorama of this language...

As with all Pano languages, Chácobo links clauses together through an elaborate system of switch reference clauses. This paper provides a detailed description of switch reference and clause linkage in Chácobo (Pano) from a typological p...

This article analyses the communicative power of eyebrows in ancient Rome within the framework of broader research into gestures from the same period. Our research uses the corpus of Latin literature to describe evidence of gestures in said texts. It...

Against the background of comparatively insufficient, expressly dedicated studies on double particle verb person nominalisations, this paper offers a qualitative, cognitive-constructionist approach to the properties of doubler-upper nominalisations o...

This paper applies the Autosegmental Metrical (AM) model of intonation phonology and the Spanish Tones and Break Indices (Sp_ToBI) annotation conventions to compare the intonational contours of declarative sentences in two varieties of Puerto Rican S...

Specialized languages can activate different sets of semantic features when compared to general language or express concepts through different words according to the domain. The specialized lexicon, i.e., lexical units that denote more specific conce...

There has been a recent focus in studies of English morphology on the concept of extravagance as applied to word formation, and on the interplay between extravagance and creativity. This article examines this issue, taking as a test case the phenomen...

The relative weighting of f0 and vowel reduction in English spoken word recognition at the sentence level were investigated in one two-alternative forced-choice word identification experiment. In the experiment, an H* pitch-accented or a deaccented w...

The aim of this article is to explain the syntactic competition found in the complementation of Old English Prevent verbs. The competition on argumenthood involves linked verbal predications and linked nominal predications. Evidence is gathered for c...

This study aims to establish a methodological framework for investigating deception in both spoken and written language production. A foundational premise is that the production of deceitful narratives induces a heightened cognitive load that has a d...

Despite its importance, environmental law has largely been ignored in environmental knowledge bases. This may be due to the fact that legal issues may not, strictly speaking, be considered scientific knowledge in environmental knowledge resources, wh...

This paper investigates the formation of spatial locative relativization in three African varieties of Portuguese. While research on relative constructions in Portuguese has deserved considerable attention in the literature, it tends to focus on the...

This study describes processes of language change in Angolan Portuguese focusing on the use of intensifiers. Previous studies have shown that intensifiers are a relevant category for the study of language change due to their rapid change and variable...

Quantitative data visualization is an important element of corpus linguistics, and visualization tools are commonly available in corpus management systems (CMSs) or developed for custom tasks. Nonetheless, the implementation and advancement of visual...

The growing field of family language policies (FLPs), defined as overt and explicit planning in relation to language use among family members, has garnered increasing interest. FLPs influence child–caretaker interactions and are closely linked...

Despite well-established Pasifika communities in Australia, there has been no examination of the English spoken by members of these communities in the sociolinguistic literature. Yet, research shows that Pasifika English may exhibit key differences f...

This research paper addresses the challenge of providing effective feedback on spontaneous speech produced by second language (L2) English learners. As the position of pauses and lexical stress is often considered a determinative factor for easy comp...

This study investigates the effects of gender and the learning context on learners’ perceptions of Arabic consonant contrasts. To this end, 60 intermediate Arabic learners, half of which were males and half of which were females, were recruited...

This article deals with one of the aspects involved in the compilation of a treebank of Old English within the framework of Universal Dependencies. More specifically, this study addresses the question of how to account for the remarkable degree of Ol...

One year into the job as Editor-in-Chief of Languages, I am delighted to report that the journal has received its first Journal Impact Factor (0 [...]

Streaming platforms have transformed series distribution and accessibility, with Spanish-language shows gaining immense popularity, notably “La casa de papel” (Money Heist). This series features a diverse cast of characters whose linguist...

Garden-path sentences generate processing difficulty due to a more preferred parse conflicting with incoming parsing information. A domain-general cognitive control mechanism has been argued to help identify and resolve these parsing conflicts. This...

Second-language learners often encounter communication challenges due to a foreign accent (FA) in their speech, influenced by their native language (L1). This FA can affect rhythm, intonation, stress, and the segmental domain, which consists of indiv...

Sentences are generally understood to be essential communicative units in writing that are built to express thoughts and meanings. Studying sentence production provides a valuable opportunity to shed new light on the writing process itself and on the...

We investigate utterance-final voice quality in bilinguals of English and Spanish, two languages which differ in the type of non-modal voice usually encountered at ends of utterances: American English often has phrase-final creak, whereas in Mexican...

This article addresses the issue of access to the written word for deaf people whose main language is sign language. We question the status of sentence processing in the acquisition of a written language by deaf people, visual beings par excellence....

Automatic term extraction aims at extracting terminological units from specialized corpora to assist terminographers in developing glossaries, thesauri, and termbases. Unfortunately, traditional methods often overlook the complex relation between ter...

In this paper I propose that the host of the definite suffix in Daco-Romanian languages like Modern Romanian, Old Romanian, Megleno-Romanian, Istro-Romanian, and Aromanian (DacRom) is determined at PF, as a consequence of the conditions that apply to...