Languages

This article explores the order of possessives with respect to nouns in Megleno-Romanian, a branch of Daco-Romance, and Eolian, a variety of southern Italo-Romance. Both are in intense language contact situations, the former with the south Slavonic varieties of Bulgarian and Macedonian, the latter with the southern Italo-Romance variety of Sicilian along with southern regional Italian. In particular, we show that while superficially, both Megleno-Romanian and Eolian copied the patterns found in their respective contact languages, the situation is much more complex. Megleno-Romanian shows high noun movement with kinship terms and low noun movement with common nouns, a situation also found in south Slavonic. In the case of Eolian, younger speakers categorically lack N-to-D movement with kinship terms, reflecting the typical Sicilian pattern. In both cases, this gives rise to prenominal possessives, thus diverging from the most common position of possessives in Eastern Romance, which are generally postnominal in unmarked contexts. Ultimately, these case studies show that the position of possessives is epiphenomenal to the level of noun movement in the varieties under investigation. On this note, deeper structural borrowing concerning the nature of possessives (i.e., whether they have an adjectival or determiner value) did not emerge in our findings and is worthy of further investigation. Full article

Low transitive constructions are ubiquitous in English conversation and as such can be considered “typical” clauses. This article furthers this claim by showing that these constructions are also most frequent in a different genre: arguments between participants at organized protests. It has been argued that one reason these constructions are so frequent is that they function to display participants’ stances. Arguments are a type of interaction where stance displays abound. In fact, they are defined as sequences of utterances that display opposing stances. Thus, the study goes on to examine how the most frequent of the low transitive constructions in the data—clauses with the nonverbal predicate be—function to display opposition across utterances. Du Bois has analyzed stance as resonance across utterances, created from structural parallelism, and he argues that slight changes between linguistic forms can create differing focal points that index contrasts. This framework is used to analyze how participants use the multiple semantic functions of be clauses across interactional sequences to display and modify their stances in response to their opponent. It is suggested that the versatility and ambiguity of be clauses are especially useful in arguments where participants do not share a set of common beliefs. Full article

Since the seminal work by David Dowty, much inspired by the earlier ideas of Generative Semantics, a number of proposals have been developed accounting for the internal constitution and interpretation of accomplishment event predicates like ‘open the door’ or ‘break the window’. Current theories of accomplishment event structure vary along a number of dimensions, including the subevental makeup of accomplishments and semantic relations connecting components of a complex eventuality description. The goal of this paper is twofold. First, I take into account evidence from non-culminating readings of accomplishment predicates in Turkic languages and argue that this evidence supports the following generalizations about the structure and interpretation of accomplishments: (i) the activity subevent is to be represented independently from the change of state; (ii) different accomplishment predicates constrain the relation between subevents in different ways; (iii) accomplishments differ as to the internal constitution of the activity subevent. Second, I will suggest that restrictions on non-culminating readings observed with different types of accomplishments support a specific view of how non-culminating accomplishments are derived. I will propose that at least in languages like Turkic, a necessary condition for non-culminating predicates is as follows: the activity component of a complex eventuality description has to have temporal parts that make no substantial contribution into bringing the culmination about. What I will say about Turkic does not presuppose that all non-culmination phenomena cross-linguistically warrant a uniform analysis. Even though the Turkic pattern shows strict semantic parallelism in other languages, it is not unlikely that there is more than one way in which non-culminating accomplishments can be derived. But whether a variety of other cases discussed in the literature reduce to the same pattern is a separate empirical question I am not trying to answer. The paper is organized as follows. In Section one, I introduce relevant material from three Turkic languages, Karachay–Balkar, Chuvash, and Tuba Altai, and observe that accomplishments in these languages fall into three types. Some yield the failed attempt interpretation, others the partial success interpretation, yet others do not license non-culminating readings at all. Section two argues for a decompositional analysis of the accomplishment event structure, whereby activity and change of state subevents are kept representationally distinct. Two types of relations between these components of the accomplishment structure are identified; the failed attempt and partial success readings are reduced to the properties of these relations. Section three approaches the problem of why non-culminating interpretations are available for some but not for all accomplishments. It reviews a recent theory suggesting that the (un)availability of non-culminating readings is accounted for by the unique temporal arrangement of contextually salient subevents of the activity component, either lexically or contextually entailed. The concluding subsection of Section three presents a number of problematic cases for this view. Section four outlines an alternative to the unique temporal arrangement. It argues that non-culminating accomplishments describe a proper non-final part e of the activity component of an event description such that the distance to the culmination between the initial and final bounds of e is insignificant in the current context. This approach makes more accurate predictions about the attested distribution of non-culminating interpretations and successfully avoids the complications associated with the unique temporal arrangement hypothesis. After making the notion of distance to the culmination more formally explicit, in the concluding section I address a few related issues concerning the eventuality type of non-culminating accomplishments and their interaction with aspectual operators. Full article

Research on heritage languages (HLs) has expanded considerably within the last 10 years worldwide. Despite the large waves of migration from Greece to other countries in Europe, the Americas, and Australia within the 20th century, research on Greek as an HL is still in its infancy. The present paper focuses on Greek as an HL in Germany. It starts with demographic information on the basis of official census data about the number of Greeks with a migration background who currently live in Germany. Then, it thematically presents 18 published studies to date that report on how Greek develops as an HL in children and adults in Germany and the acquisition of phonetics/phonology, morphosyntax, syntactic complexity, and narrative production. Several studies address the role of internal and external factors, the role of literacy, and the role of language proficiency and language dominance, as well as the effects of cross-linguistic influence between German and Greek. The paper concludes with a critical discussion of the literature and a reflection about open questions and directions for future research. Full article

Previous studies have shown that language learners’ auditory word recognition behavior provides evidence for independent contributions of perceptual and phonolexical representations, and learners’ patterns of auditory word recognition have been characterized as resulting from “fuzziness” or “imprecision” associated with these representations. More recently, it has been argued that representational “fuzziness” may in fact take various forms (e.g., neutralized, precise, ambiguous). The purpose of the present study is to further build on this line of work by elaborating additional logically possible scenarios by crossing larger sets of logically possible types of perceptual and phonolexical representational precision/imprecision, as an exercise in exploring the empirical and theoretical implications of our characterizations of representational fuzziness in language learners. We collect new empirical data for the purpose of demonstrating how we might evaluate auditory word recognition performance relative to this fuller set of predicted scenarios. We computed the set of hypothesized scenarios by crossing possible perceptual and lexical representations. We crossed four possible perceptual representations (NeutralizedC + NeutralizedV, NeutralizedC + PreciseV, PreciseC + NeutralizedV, or PreciseC + PreciseV) and six possible phonolexical representations (Neutralized, Ambiguous, Not X, Precise, Fuzzy Word, or Word Length), for a total of 24 scenarios, each accompanied by a set of predictions with respect to accuracy on an auditory word–picture matching test. We interpret the group and individual performance relative to these scenarios with the ultimate aim of better understanding the implications of our assumptions about the nature of perceptual and phonolexical representations relative to observed patterns of learner behavior. Our hope is that in computing this factorial typology of logically possible scenarios and demonstrating a starting point for how we might empirically evaluate its predictions, we set the stage for future research to refine the hypothesis space through empirical studies of auditory word processing in language learners. Full article

Rapid automatized naming (RAN) tasks have been used to assess word retrieval speed and reading speed. However, measures of reading rate may be affected by structural differences between languages. This study was designed to measure talking speed differences in the utterances of a group of speakers whose first language (L1) was Arabic and second language (L2) was English. Three hypotheses were tested: the language structure differences would result in L2 productions with slower utterance rates; the L2 speaking rate would be characterized by greater utterance interruptions than the L1; and the articulation rate would more accurately indicate the naming speeds of the participants. Twenty Arabic- and English-speaking young adults completed RAN tasks for number and object naming in both languages. Utterance rate, speaking rate, and articulation rate were measured. The participants exhibited similar utterance durations in the two languages and utterance rate in words per second, but faster utterance rates in Arabic when measuring the utterance rate in syllables per second. They exhibited more pauses and longer pauses during the English productions, particularly for the object naming. Finally, the speaking rate in syllables per second and articulation rate in syllables per second were equivalent as utterance rates. Full article

The article explores the visible, semiotic use of languages in two schoolscapes on the Arctic borderland and how these schoolscapes stimulate the learning of languages and cultures. The schools are situated in a historically multilingual area with several languages present. However, since the 17th century, the area has undergone Swedification, resulting in the current situation where all languages other than Swedish are endangered minority languages. The schoolscapes were studied through visual ethnography, and 229 photographs were analysed by qualitative content analysis. The results show that in one school in the middle of Sápmi, the Sámi languages were almost entirely excluded, despite their relevance and importance in maintaining bilingualism. Conversely, in a school where some pupils were from the Finnish side of the national border, the Finnish language was present in the form of various subject-relevant books. However, in both schools, all formal information is given to pupils in Swedish, with only a few exceptions permitted by the school management. Overall, the visual use of semiotic language is mainly teacher-produced, and the pupils’ opportunities to use the schoolscape as an affordance for active bilingualism through social participation are minimal. Full article

Heritage language (HL) research has investigated adults and children, while adolescents have garnered far less attention, despite adolescence being a crucial time in the development of idiolects and identities, and, hence, also for language maintenance. This study describes HL usage among Estonian-Swedish bilingual teenagers. Data were collected from 21 first- and second-generation Estonian heritage speakers (aged 12–17). Non-standard usage occurred in our corpus at low rates but was found across most speakers in certain areas of morphosyntax. We describe which factors drive such non-standard usage based on the example of two structures with more frequent non-standard occurrence: (1) object marking and (2) experiencer constructions with the verb meeldima ‘to like/please’. Around 6% of objects were marked in divergent ways. Speakers employed two strategies for marking non-standard objects: case omission (i.e., using nominative and/or unmarked forms) and substitution (i.e., using non-target-like marking). Non-standard forms occurred in 11% of experiencer constructions. Speakers diverged more with marking the nominative Stimulus than the dative-like Experiencer, although both occurred in standard and non-standard forms. The reported usage patterns can be explained through the combined effect of cross-linguistic influence, simplification, and input frequency. We also tested the relation between non-standard usage and the speaker’s sociolinguistic background, with mixed results. Considering the limited size and scope of the corpus, overall, the reported divergent usage patterns evidence the role of linguistic input and cross-linguistic effects. Full article

Previous studies have shown that the uni-conditional marker if can be interpreted biconditionally in some contexts. Similarly, the biconditional marker unless may receive a biconditional interpretation in positive quantificational contexts (e.g., every) and a uni-conditional reading in negative quantificational contexts (e.g., no). However, exceptive accounts expect unless to yield a biconditional meaning in all contexts. Our aim in this preliminary study is to provide experimental evidence about how children interpret these conditional connectives. A recent study conducted with adult Turkish speakers found that unless was not semantically biconditional in either positive quantificational contexts or negative quantificational contexts (Evcen et al. 2019). We used a similar paradigm with a child-friendly adaptation to test how if (-sA), if not (değilse), and unless (-mAdIkçA) would behave with 5-year-old children acquiring Turkish. Our preliminary results indicate that children, unlike adults, disregard the antecedent hosting the conditional connective but focus only on the consequent hosting the quantifier structure. We argue this may be related to the higher syntactic and semantic complexity in these structures incurring heavy working memory demands. Full article

We present acoustic and articulatory data from an experiment designed to test the phonetic variability of rhotics in Brazilian Portuguese, focusing on the São Paulo variety. Ultrasound tongue imaging was used to examine the realisation of rhotics in a range of phonological environments. Our analysis reveals that word-initial and intervocalic fricatives are acoustically and articulatorily distinct for most speakers. We attribute a tendency for utterance-initial fricatives to display longer duration, less voicing, and greater tongue-dorsum displacement than word-medial intervocalic counterparts to phonetic enhancement at the site of a major prosodic boundary. Similarly, rhotic taps in utterance-final position show a tendency for devoicing and frication (aspiration or assibilation) speaker-dependently. By comparison, word-medial pre-consonantal and intervocalic taps are characterised by shorter durations and greater voicing: hence, a pattern of phonetic reduction in prosodically weaker environments. We relate our findings to theoretical debates around the phonological status of rhotics in Portuguese. Whilst not providing conclusive proof in favour of any one particular approach, our results highlight the need to recognise the reality of prosodically driven strengthening in developing a full account of rhotic variation in the variety. Full article

The contrast between languages such as Italian that allow subjects of tensed sentences to be null (i.e., pro-drop languages) and those like French that do not (i.e., non-pro-drop languages) is a classic issue for comparative syntactic research. Nevertheless, while several studies have been dedicated to pro-drop languages, distinguishing across different types, subject omission in non-pro-drop languages is generally misjudged as a marginal or substandard phenomenon. However, a more careful examination reveals that the occurrence of Null Subjects (NSs) in non-pro-drop languages is associated with distinct semantic and discourse imports. Based on a systematic corpus analysis, this work will confirm that NSs do occur in Colloquial French, especially in the case of expletive subjects. Furthermore, evidence will be provided for a crucial connection between subject omission, expletive types, and the morpho-syntactic categories of person/number for argument pronouns. This pilot work can thus open new perspectives for future research. Full article

Despite the growing interest in the study of intonation in bilingual regions in France, the case of Basque French remains under-investigated. Previous research on yes-no questions in standard French has shown that rising contours are the prototypical realization, while bilingual varieties in contact with Corsican or Occitan also seem to allow falling intonation to different extents. To investigate the case of Basque French, data from 11 Basque-French bilinguals from Labourd were considered. Participants completed a contextualized reading task and the Bilingual Language Profile questionnaire, which was used to examine their linguistic profile and language dominance. The results showed that rising intonation predominated (90%), presenting two main realizations: A low rise (L+H* H%) and a high rise ((¡)H* H%). Falling contours, in turn, appeared in only 10% of the data. In a preliminary consideration of these results by language dominance group, low rising contours were found to be more common among Basque-dominant participants, while falling ones appeared more often among French-dominant participants. While surprising, this result could, at least partly, stem from the participants’ personal experiences with bilingualism and their contact with other varieties of Basque. We thus conclude that, for the most part, Basque Labourdin French resembles standard French intonation. The higher prevalence of falling intonation among French-dominant speakers, however, calls for future research. Full article

Children born preterm are at an elevated risk of language delays compared to children born full-term. However, there is a dearth of research investigating language outcomes in premature children exposed to more than one language. There is also limited empirical evidence linking the quantity and quality of parent input and language outcomes in premature children and the strength of these relationships in bilingual contexts remains unknown. Therefore, the current study examined language skills, parent input, conversational turns, and their associations at 16 months to 36 months in monolingual and bilingual children born preterm. Nine English-speaking monolingual parent–child dyads, and nine Spanish–English bilingual parent–child dyads participated in parent–child interactions that occurred over time in play-based contexts. Results revealed that preterm monolingual and bilingual children exhibited similar language abilities at all time points assessed. While both monolingual and bilingual dyads engaged in a comparable number of conversational turns at 16 m, monolingual mothers produced more words than bilingual mothers during play. Significant associations were observed between children’s vocabulary skills and their ability to combine words within and across most time points. Notably, relationships between parental input, conversational turns, and language skills were limited to a significant association between conversational turns at 16 m and vocabulary skills at 24 m. Together, findings indicate that bilingual children born preterm acquire language on the same timeline as monolingual children born preterm. While it is crucial that the current work be replicated in larger samples of children born preterm, the current work is the first to compare relationships between children’s language outcomes and the quantity and quality of parental input in monolingual and bilingual contexts. Full article

Adult readers’ cognitive effort during text processing is often associated with their reading comprehension, learning ability, and achievement scores. The aim of this review is to examine and analyze the current literature on the use of eye tracking technology as a tool for assessing text comprehension. A systematic review was conducted and, after the final screening, 13 articles were analyzed that fell into three main areas: (a) eye movements during reading in print and digital media, (b) eye tracking in text comprehension with perspective effects, and (c) eye tracking in text comprehension with instructional strategy effects. The findings of this review showed that during reading, the amount of cognitive effort invested in text processing, whether induced by the text, the task, or the readers themselves, is usually reflected in longer total fixation times, both as a result of higher fixation frequencies and longer fixation durations. Full article

(1) Background: The article addresses the issue of geospatial dynamics of Lithuanian–Slavic ethnolinguistic boundaries in Southeastern Lithuania (SEL) that were influenced by long-term Lithuanian–Slavic linguistic competition. The aim of the study was to reconstruct the Lithuanian–Slavic ethnolinguistic boundaries and reveal the intensive contact zones in the late 19th century based on published data. Additionally, the study aimed to assess the geospatial changes in the ethnolinguistic situation in the research area during the period 1890–2021. (2) Methods: The ESRI ArcGIS technology geoprocessing tools were applied for boundary reconstruction and geospatial change detection. Cartographic materials, statistical data, and national census information were utilized in the process. (3) Results: The gained results provided a better understanding of Lithuanian–Slavic ethnolinguistic dynamics over space and time in the research area. The study reveals that the ethnolinguistic boundary in the Vilnius–Trakai urbanized area shifted in favor of the Lithuanian language, suggesting its potential influence on the metropolitan suburbs in the future. However, insufficient social infrastructure and weak economic development in rural settlements have led to a negative migration balance, a low birth rate, and rapid population aging. These challenges might have a negative effect on the future survival of the Lithuanian language in the multilingual rural area of SEL, especially considering the recent geopolitical realia in the region. (4) Conclusions: The study anticipates an increase in the influence of the Lithuanian language in the Vilnius–Trakai metropolitan area at the expense of further decline in the rural Lithuanian-speaking population in the next decade. Full article

In this paper, we examine a small set of motion verbs in Turkish bearing the so-called ‘reciprocal’ suffix -(I)ş: kaç-ış- ‘flee in all directions’ (cf. kaç- ‘flee’), koş-uş- ‘run helter-skelter’ (cf. koş- ‘run’), uç-uş- ‘fly helter-skelter’ (cf. uç- ‘fly’). It has previously been claimed that these are collective or sociative verbs entailing a low elaboration of events and/or plural participants. We show that these -(I)ş-marked verbs, in fact, require a higher degree of individuation of events than do their unmarked counterparts. Furthermore, we show that a stipulation directly associating the suffix with a requirement for a plural subject is both unnecessary and inadequate. Instead, we propose that the pluractional under investigation manipulates the denoted events’ spatial and temporal properties in such a way that the predicate can only be felicitously used if it combines with a plural external argument. Full article

In this work, we analyze the narrow focus strategies in the written Italian of university students. Although prosodic prominence is a characterizing feature of focus—functionally more important than morphosyntactic marking, according to some authors—we assume that prosody is essential for language comprehension and hence, in the written modality, focus prosody is assigned by the reader on the basis of the morphosyntactic cues that mark focus. The data on which we base our analysis are selected from two existing corpora, containing more formal and less formal monological texts produced by students attending university throughout Italy. The investigation brings to light a similar pattern, as well as some differences, between the two sub-corpora examined. Besides a widespread use of focus particles, and the virtual absence of the O(S)V strategy, we noticed many instances of focalization inside the copular domain, particularly in the more formal sub-corpus. This pattern is discussed in relation to some of the relevant literature and the nature of the texts examined. Full article

Arabic phonotactics significantly differ from English phonotactics in that they usually follow a framework that forbids the presence of consonant clusters in syllabic onsets. This study examines the relationship between Arabic-speaking EFL learners’ spelling accuracy and pronunciation, concentrating on the difficulties caused by consonant clusters in initial and final positions. A mixed-methods approach was employed, involving audio recordings to assess pronunciation accuracy and a spelling test to evaluate spelling performance. According to the results, words with initial consonant clusters (clusters at the beginning of a syllable, or onset) are harder to pronounce and spell than words with final consonant clusters (clusters that follow the vowel). Initial consonant clusters are considered to demand a quick transition in consonants at the start of a syllable, requiring more exact articulation. On the other hand, final clusters allow for a more progressive and straightforward articulation by involving a consonant transition following the initial vowel sound. Additionally, epenthesis may be used as a method to break up consonant clusters in L1 phonological interference, which is consistent with Arabic phonotactic patterns. Full article

This study investigates clitic use in adult heritage speakers (HL speakers) of Spanish, with French as their dominant language. We conducted an exploratory case study using spontaneous production data from HL speakers of Spanish and first-generation Spanish immigrants living in Montreal, Canada. Data were collected through two guided production tasks, one oral and one written, to account for task-induced performance variations. Our analysis focused on clitic production, omission, function, optionality, and grammaticality. The findings reveal both similarities and differences compared to monolingual native Spanish speakers, highlighting a broad range of clitic structures produced by all participants and a potential tendency among HL speakers to favour fixed choices in optional structures. This study provides valuable insights into the production patterns of clitics in adult HL speakers of Spanish with French as their dominant language, contributing to our understanding of bilingual grammar. Full article