Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11050099

Authors: Arash Ashrafzadeh Julian Hough Arash Eshghi

Recent research in grounded language learning has seen remarkable success due to advances in large vision and language models (VLMs). However, these models (i) are extremely costly to train and update; (ii) struggle with generalisation; and (iii) do not support continual learning. In this paper, we introduce baby-ds integrating the Dynamic Syntax (DS) framework with automated planning within the multimodal BabyAI platform as a testbed. We provide methods whereby DS lexicons are induced continually from teacher demonstrations within BabyAI. We study (i–iii) by experimenting with the compositional complexity of natural language instructions in the data to compare data efficiency, generalisation, and continual learning properties of baby-ds with a simple neural model. The results show that the baby-ds model: (i) needs much less data than the neural model to reach threshold performance; (ii) generalises much faster to more complex instructions; and (iii) is a more effective continual learner. We argue that it is the attendant linguistic bias within DS and the rich inferential power of TTR that enables (i–iii), highlighting the importance of further research on hybrid grammar–neural approaches. Finally, we discuss several important limitations of baby-ds and sketch a path forward for further DS research.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11050098

Authors: Olga Maxwell Elinor Payne Debbie Loakes Mitko Sabev

Increased global mobility has intensified contact between regional English varieties, creating new opportunities for large-scale second dialect acquisition. Australia, with its rapidly growing population due to migration, offers a particularly dynamic context for exploring such contact. This study investigates how first-generation Indian migrants in the Australian city of Melbourne perceive Australian English vowels in the lexical items dress and trap, a contrast chosen because of sound changes that are well-documented for this location. Listeners completed a vowel categorization task involving target words in non-lateral and lateral contexts. To assess contact-induced adaptation, their responses were compared with those of Australian English speakers in Australia and those of Indian English speakers in India. The results reveal that perceptual adaptation among first-generation Indian migrants in Australia is context-dependent. In the non‑lateral coda context, migrant Indian English listeners (in Australia) showed intermediate responses, between those of Australian English listeners (in Australia) and Indian English listeners (in India), indicative of a relatively ‘linear’ adaptation towards Australian English. Responses to stimuli in the lateral coda context, however, revealed a more complex picture. Australian English listeners (in Australia) and Indian English listeners (in India) responded more closely to one another than migrant Indian English listeners (in Australia), with the latter instead exhibiting a substantial degree of perceptual confusion toward the endpoint of the continuum for hell–Hal and, to a lesser extent, for shell–shall and pell–pal. These findings suggest that in the perceptual adaptation to a second dialect, the acquisition of a wider pool of phonetic variants is mediated by the acquisition of structural knowledge.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11050097

Authors: Theodora Papastefanou Theodoros Marinis

The present study aimed to investigate the performance of bilingual/biliterate children on expressive vocabulary and morpho-syntactic skills and the extent to which home literacy activities (HLA) contribute to primary school Greek–English bilingual children’s performance on reading comprehension. Forty children attending Years 1 and 3 at an English primary school in the UK were assessed in language and decoding skills. After one school year, they were assessed in oral language skills, decoding, and reading comprehension in Years 2 and 4. The children performed better on all tasks at Time 2 than at Time 1, and the older children performed better than the younger ones. Their performance was better in the English tasks than in the Greek tasks. Greek morpho-syntactic skills and HLA were significant predictors of Greek reading comprehension, suggesting that children may use their morpho-syntactic knowledge to support their reading comprehension in their heritage language. Moreover, heritage language exposure through HLA can benefit literacy of the heritage language.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11050096

Authors: Liz Smeets

A major question in L1 attrition research is whether cross-linguistic influence from a speaker’s second language onto their first constitutes only a temporary, superficial effect or whether it can also lead to a structural change, often discussed as a distinction between effects on language processing as opposed to changes to the mental representation of grammatical properties. Some have argued that L1 grammars of adult L2 speakers are entirely impervious to change, while others stated that some of the available findings can be interpreted as grammatical representations themselves being vulnerable. This paper contributes to the question of how we can distinguish between these two types of attrition. I argue that it is challenging to use behavioral differences across tasks as well as experimental results showing optionality between L1 and L2 options to distinguish between a superficial and a structural change. Instead, situations where properties of an attriter’s L1 grammar converge on the L2 constitute the clearest case of structural change as these cannot be explained as temporary effects of L2 influence. Using data from an earlier study on attrition found in Romanian native speakers living in Italy, I furthermore challenge the claim that L2 convergence only occurs in rare situations where attriters lose contact with the L1. To better understand the contexts in which attrition at the level of representation may be possible, I suggest that future studies focus on (1) a variety of linguistic properties where the L1 allows a grammatical construction or interpretation also in situations where it is not used in the L2, (2) properties where options from both the L1 and the L2 are less likely to co-exist in an attritred grammar and (3) consistently include analyses of individual response patterns.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11050095

Authors: Angeliki Efthymiou

This paper investigates two derivational suffixes of the Lesbian dialect -ˈaδa and -iˈa, focusing on their shared characteristics, historical development, and semantic range. Both suffixes display dual etymological origins, form feminine nouns, and exhibit notable polysemy. The study focuses on assessing the degree and patterns of polysemy associated with these suffixes in the Modern Lesbian dialect, with particular emphasis on their comparison to Standard Modern Greek and on cases of morphological competition. It is argued that both suffixes are closely linked to a subjectively delimited reality, as shaped by direct perception and observation in everyday life, and at the same time they function within a complex morphological ecosystem, where they display areas of both competition and functional differentiation. The suffix -ˈaδa typically refers to a property or state directly observable by the speaker, and thus to an entity defined by a dominantly noticeable characteristic. In contrast, the suffix -iˈa is considerably more polysemous than ˈaδa, conveying individualization, and forming nouns that reflect the speaker’s viewpoint while denoting entities perceived as bounded.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11050094

Authors: Debbie Loakes Kirsty McDougall Adele Gregory

A sociophonetic study of coda /t/ in Australian Englishes spoken in Warrnambool and Mildura, Victoria, Australia, is described. A total of 2112 coda /t/ tokens produced by 61 adult L1 speakers was analyzed using auditory and acoustic profiling, focusing on four social factors (location, dialect, age and gender). The corpus included 33 Aboriginal English and 28 Mainstream Australian English speakers (24 male, 37 female) who fell into roughly equal age groups of <40 and >40 years. Overall, the “canonical” (aspirated) variant [th] was most frequently observed, followed by affricate [ts] and pre-glottalized [ˀt]; these variants accounted for 79% of all tokens. As for sociophonetic patterning, the best-fitting model included all four predictors (location, dialect, age and gender), with random intercepts for speaker and word. Dialect (Aboriginal or Mainstream Australian English) and age showed the strongest sociophonetic patterning, followed by limited effects for location. Variants were subsequently grouped into three superordinate categories—“breathy”, “canonical” (aspirated) and “glottal”—and a model was created including all four predictors and all two-way interactions between them, with random intercepts for speaker and word. This model showed that linking variants with broad voice qualities highlights even stronger sociophonetic patterning in some cases and is a promising direction for future research. The study contributes findings to three under-explored areas: consonant variability in Australian Englishes, fine-grained phonetic variation in Australian Aboriginal English, and analysis of speech from non-urban locations.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11050093

Authors: Sofia Kouvava Katerina Antonopoulou Aglaia Stampoltzis Sofia Mavropoulou Eirini Patroumpa Aggelos Tzoumailis Eleni Peristeri

Background/Objectives: Narrative skills play an important role in children’s overall development from a very young age, and they are linked to social behavior, as well as several emotional and cognitive outcomes. Young autistic children often experience difficulties in their narrative skills and these difficulties may impact their social interactions. The present study reviews recent findings to detect factors influencing narrative development in autistic and non-autistic preschool children, and to identify trends or gaps in the existing literature. Following screening and eligibility assessment, 39 studies met the inclusion criteria and were included in the review. Methods: The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) guidelines were followed. Results: Non-autistic children show a clear, age-related progression in narrative skill development, moving from simple to complex structures at the level of microstructure and advanced inferential abilities at the level of macrostructure, which are strongly linked to core language and cognitive development. Conversely, autistic children primarily face challenges in narrative macrostructure and coherence, demonstrating deficits in integrating information and making inferences, which is consistent with weak central coherence in autism. Conclusions: The evidence suggests that narrative development in autism reflects qualitative differences rather than mere delay, particularly in the organization and integration of macrostructural story elements. These findings underscore the importance of interventions that move beyond surface-level linguistic skills to explicitly target global coherence, causal structuring, and inferential reasoning. Future research should further clarify developmental trajectories and the mechanisms linking narrative competence with broader social and cognitive outcomes.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11050092

Authors: Paul Roger Bassong Edmond Ossoko Luigi Rizzi

In many African languages, there exists a type of subject–object asymmetry by which subject focus must be expressed by A-bar movement to a morphologically marked left peripheral position whereas object focalisation can be expressed by movement and morphological marking in the left periphery, or in situ. In this article, we discuss and analyse this structural asymmetry in the Bantu languages Basaá and Mmaala. We argue that overt and covert movement of the focused object to Spec-FocP in the left periphery is allowed while covert movement of the subject is blocked, so that overt movement is the only possible option. Contrary to previous analyses, which attribute the obligatoriness of subject focus movement and marking to an interpretive conflict, we propose a formal characterisation of this phenomenon by which the blocking of subject focalisation in situ is deduced from criterial freezing, so that overt movement to the left periphery is the only option, through a familiar strategy of overt subject extraction.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11050091

Authors: Georgia Katsouda

Scientific etymological analysis, applicable to both standard and dialectal vocabulary/lexicon, is predicated on core methodological principles that necessitate a word’s cross-regional and diachronic examination. A fundamental principle of etymological research is that successfully identifying a word’s origin requires systematic examination and comparison of all available sources and dialectal data. The aim of this article is to address lacunae in the etymological record of the Lesbian dialect by presenting new data that either resolves longstanding uncertainties or necessitates a scholarly revision of specific word origins. The dialectal words of Lesbos and the etymologies under examination were extracted from dictionaries of the dialect of Lesbos. More specifically, fresh etymological data and new etymological proposals are presented for words from the dialectal vocabulary of Lesbos, such as ɣraɣúða ‘a kind of pot’, karnokáftis ‘stingy’, kumsú/kumpsú ‘gossiper, mocker’, lulúða ‘silly woman’, malastúfa ‘oakum’, tsiróɲ ‘fork’, fáirop ‘order to do something immediately’, psirúts ‘a traditional crème’, xaxóʎs ‘rowdy, noisy person’, and xʎimídza ‘purslane’.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11050090

Authors: Carlos I. Echeverría

The concept of verbal periphrasis has historically been a controversial one in Romance linguistics, especially in the Hispanic context, where there has been disagreement as to what multiverbal constructions should be considered periphrastic. One of the points of contention has been the class of infinitive causatives. This article revisits the controversy by focusing on Spanish “enviar/mandar a + infinitive” structures and drawing on historical corpus data. The analysis of various examples leads to the conclusion that strictly periphrastic instances of this constructional class are present across all main stages of the history of Spanish. Additionally, a series of quantitative analyses reveals what appear to be two distinct grammaticalization processes and a degrammaticalization process. These findings are discussed in connection with broader themes in the field, such as syntactic ambiguity and the concept of analyzability.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11050088

Authors: Jill C. Murray

Throughout the English-speaking world, there are numerous Greek-speaking diaspora communities whose language is simultaneously influenced by English and local varieties of Greek. This study builds on the body of knowledge in cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics to explore a case of pragmatic acquisition in a study abroad context by one member of such a community. Data were collected from a third-generation young adult Greek Australian student prior to commencement of a 6-week Greek language programme in Athens, and on three other occasions. She described her experiences and responded to a set of scenarios involving Greek requests, refusals and apologies. The responses were analysed using established frameworks and subjectively evaluated for appropriateness by a matched Greek native speaker. The student showed evidence of a shift towards documented Standard Modern Greek pragmatic norms in some but not all speech acts, and change appeared to be loosely linked to opportunities for use. There was also some evidence of reversion to diaspora variants after her return. This study contributes to our understanding of the interaction between learning outcomes, individual learner variables, prior exposure, the nature of communicative events and levels of pragmatic awareness. It is argued that Greek and diaspora contexts involve subtly distinct pragmatic varieties of Greek and that learners can benefit from explicit awareness-raising regarding the nature of these differences.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11050089

Authors: Ruben Roberto Peralta-Rivera Rafael Saldívar-Arreola

Loanword Research on Anglicisms has largely centered on lexical borrowing and phonological adaptation with comparatively limited attention to morphosyntactic integration in recipient grammars. This study examines the morphosyntactic behavior of 74 single-word Anglicisms—monosyllabic structures with monophthongal vowels—drawn from phonetically classified corpora of spontaneous Mexican Spanish produced by Spanish–English bilinguals in the Tijuana–San Diego border region. Building on prior acoustic analyses based on F1 and F2 vowel measurements, the study investigates the relationship between phonological adaptation and morphosyntactic integration. Results reveal a gradient pattern of incorporation. Anglicisms exhibiting Spanish-like phonetic properties tend to occupy canonical syntactic positions and show greater compatibility with Spanish functional morphology, whereas phonetically non-adapted forms more frequently resist morphological marking and display island-like behavior within otherwise Spanish clauses. The analysis examines distribution across nominal, adjectival, and prepositional domains and object positions to assess morphosyntactic integration degrees. The former is illustrated as follows: (1) guardo cash ([kaʃ]) por si acaso; (2) si hacen match ([mæʧ]), puede funcionar. Adopting a usage-based and contact-oriented perspective for syntactic borrowing, the study is situated within the Matrix Language Frame model and recent approaches to insertional borrowing. A central contribution lies in establishing a principled link between morphosyntactic behavior and an independently motivated phonetic classification, offering convergent evidence for the systematic integration of Anglicisms into Spanish grammar. At a broader analytical level, the study advances debates on syntactic borrowing and contact-induced change by demonstrating that Anglicisms are subject to Spanish morphosyntactic constraints rather than functioning as unconstrained lexical insertions, and by developing an interface-based account of borrowing that captures the gradient nature of grammatical incorporation in contact settings and contributes a corpus-based, empirically grounded perspective to typologies of borrowing in Spanish contact linguistics.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11050087

Authors: Chiara Meluzzi Nicholas Nese

This study investigates the phonetic variation in Italian dental affricates, focusing on the role of lexical frequency, phonological context, geographical origin, and speech style (read speech vs. collaborative dialogue). Previous research on lexically based phonetics has emphasised the link between item frequency and phonetic realisation; in this paper, we test these premises on a class of rare and marked sounds—dental affricates. A corpus of read sentences and map-task dialogues produced by northern and southern Italian speakers was analysed acoustically with respect to voicing and duration. Results show that phonological context and geographical origin are the primary determinants of voicing, with southern speakers favouring voiced realisations and word-initial position strongly conditioning voicing patterns. Lexical frequency does not significantly predict voicing category once between-speaker and between-item variability are appropriately modelled, but it does exert a positive effect on affricate duration: higher-frequency words contain relatively longer affricates, reflecting compensatory preservation of segmental identity within otherwise reduced words. Speech style significantly affects duration, with reading favouring longer realisations. These findings reveal a dissociation between categorical and gradient levels of phonetic variation, supporting usage-based models in which lexical frequency modulates fine-grained phonetic implementation rather than determining phonological categorisation.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11050086

Authors: Abdelrahim Fathy Ismail Rabha Adnan Alqudah Rawan Abdul Mahdi Neyef Al-Saliti Alaaeldin Ahmed Hamid

Despite significant advances in AI language models, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) remains a linguistically complex domain in which apparent fluency often masks deeper grammatical instability. This study investigates recurrent grammatical error patterns in ChatGPT-generated Arabic texts, focusing on how these patterns reflect underlying morpho-syntactic challenges and the constraints of probabilistic language generation. Adopting a qualitative, pattern-oriented analytical framework, the study draws on online focus group discussions with secondary-level Arabic teachers, who served as expert linguistic evaluators. Participants collaboratively examined a set of AI-generated texts to identify and interpret systematic grammatical deviations across five key domains: agreement, inflection and case marking, sentence structure, prepositions and transitivity, and cross-linguistic influence. The findings indicate that grammatical errors in AI-generated Arabic are not random but occur as recurring, structured patterns, particularly in contexts involving long-distance dependencies and morphologically complex constructions. These patterns suggest a reliance on surface-level fluency at the expense of deeper grammatical coherence, reflecting limitations in maintaining consistent morpho-syntactic relationships. This study contributes by identifying and characterizing systematic grammatical patterns in AI-generated MSA as interpreted through expert linguistic judgment, offering a qualitative perspective that complements existing quantitative approaches and advances understanding of how large language models engage with morphologically rich languages.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11050084

Authors: Haiyan Zhu

This study investigates how Chinese learners of English express manners of motion, examining systematic features, cognitive motivations, and compensatory strategies. While Talmy’s motion events typology and Levin’s verb classification system provide important foundations, both have limitations in capturing the internal semantic granularity of manner verbs and the complexity of learner acquisition. To address this, we construct a 10-level verb typology establishing a “semantic granularity” continuum from concrete to abstract, physical to metaphorical, and lexical to grammatical. Using experimental data (N = 600) and corpus comparisons (COCA vs. learner corpus), we analyze Chinese learners’ manner expression patterns. Results reveal the following: (1) Chinese learners prioritize Path over Manner, overusing lower-level verbs (go, walk, run) while underusing higher-level and fine-grained manner verbs (stroll, scramble), which are preferred by native speakers. (2) Learners favor semi-tight or loose syntactic structures and show a preference for describing Manner precisely by adding other modifiers such as adverbials, prepositions, complements, or subordinate clauses. When it comes to precisely describing specific manners of motion, Chinese learners of English tend to use four strategies—analytic manner externalization, path salience, image-schematic transfer, and semantic simplification—whereas native English speakers typically rely on single verbs with high semantic density. These findings suggest learners’ expression of manner involves both L1 syntactic transfer and target language conceptual adaptation. The 10-level classification continuum advances the theoretical understanding of motion event lexicalization patterns, provides new perspectives for conceptual transfer research, and offer pedagogical implications for Chinese English learners’ accuracy of their expression of manner.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11050085

Authors: Rosangela Lai

This paper investigates ongoing phonological changes in Campidanese Sardinian and its morphosyntactic repercussions, focusing on the weakening of word-final codas under increasing pressure from Italian. Sardinian preserves the Latin nominal and verbal endings -s and -t, whose interaction with external sandhi processes traditionally sustains crucial distinctions of person and number. Through a comparison between a conservative variety (Tertenia) and an innovative one (Pula), the study shows that total regressive assimilation of -s and -t is becoming generalized in innovative areas, neutralizing the contrast between second- and third-person singulars. The decline of vowel epenthesis in contexts involving heterosyllabic clusters further destabilizes the system, occasionally generating ambiguity in clitic number and verbal person marking. A Strict CV analysis demonstrates that epenthesis-less outputs are structurally well-formed only if final codas are assumed to be absent at the underlying level, pointing to a deeper restructuring of phonological representations. Overall, the data document a shift from a morphologically transparent system toward one increasingly aligned with Italian phonotactics, with significant consequences for morphosyntactic disambiguation.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11050083

Authors: Andreas Wölfle Eva Knopp Helen de Hoop

Research has shown that bilinguals’ first (L1) and second language (L2) interact constantly. One well-documented case is the gender congruency effect, where grammatical gender retrieval is facilitated when a noun has the same gender in both languages. While this effect has been extensively studied in the direction of the L1 influencing the L2, less is known about how gender retrieval in the L1 is influenced by gender in the L2. The present study investigated whether exposure to L2 Dutch affects grammatical gender retrieval in L1 German among speakers who are constantly exposed to the L2. We tested 40 L1 German–L2 Dutch bilinguals living in the Netherlands and 28 L1 German monolinguals using a gender decision task in German. Stimuli included nouns with congruent and incongruent gender in the two languages, as well as cognates and non-cognates. Results revealed no evidence that L2 Dutch affected L1 German gender retrieval in bilinguals, indicating that grammatical gender in the L1 appears robust to L2 influence during online processing, even after prolonged immersion in the L2 environment.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11050082

Authors: Janel Zoske Tanja Ackermann

In this article, we address the issue of the sometimes indeterminate grammatical and functional status of vocatives and vocative-like NPs by proposing a prototype-based approach to their classification. We then explore the socio-pragmatic functions of these vocative types, adopting a variationist perspective that considers both macro- and micro-social factors to determine when the different types of vocatives occur and how they contribute to managing interpersonal relationships. This exploratory analysis is based on data from an online questionnaire featuring Discourse Completion Tasks of over 3000 participants in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The findings show that different vocative types fulfill distinct socio-pragmatic functions, ranging from signaling positive politeness to heightening the face-threatening potential of an utterance, depending on the communicative task performed. In addition, their use varies between participants, based on the speakers’ regional background, gender, age, or personality traits.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11050081

Authors: Wafaa Alshangiti

Increased experience with a second language (L2) can affect one’s speech perception and production. Some studies have suggested that experience does not affect the production of English bilabial stops by Arabic speakers. They produce the English bilabial stops /p/ and /b/ as the Arabic /b/, which differs in VOT. However, the effect of English experience on the perception of English bilabial stops remains underinvestigated. This study examines the effect of L2 immersion experience on the perception of the English stops /p/–/b/ to investigate whether the lack of /p/ in Arabic can affect the perception of the /p/–/b/ contrast and whether L2 experience shifts the category boundary toward that of native speakers. Sixtysix participants, comprising two groups of Arabic speakers with differing L2 experience and a control group of native English speakers, completed identification and discrimination tasks using the /p/–/b/ VOT continuum. The regression analysis showed that listeners with more L2 experience (i.e., ≥3 years in the UK) had a closer category boundary to that of native listeners than those with less L2 experience. However, category discrimination accuracy did not differ significantly between the Arabic groups. The results highlight the importance of L2 immersion experience in altering VOT perceptual strategies, which can help in designing future training studies that focus on VOT perception as an L2 phonetic cue.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11040080

Authors: Nikolaos Vogiatzis

The present study undertakes a comparative investigation of the dialects of Thassos and Lesbos, systematically examining both shared and distinctive linguistic features across phonology, morphology, morphosyntax, and the lexicon. Based on primary ethnographic data and contemporary linguistic methodologies, the analysis demonstrates that, although the two varieties belong to the Northeastern Aegean dialectal continuum, they display both substantial similarities and significant divergences shaped by historical and sociolinguistic factors. These differences reflect the geopolitical position of each island: Thassos emerges as a more conservative enclave due to relative isolation, whereas Lesbos functions as a site of linguistic fusion shaped by sustained contact with Asia Minor populations. The study thus underscores the importance of comparative dialectology for understanding the dynamics of insular linguistic systems within the Northeastern Greek-speaking territory.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11040079

Authors: Miriam Heila Reyes Núñez

This study examines the diachronic development of Spanish perception verbs into deverbal topic markers (DTMs), focusing on tocar (‘to touch’), e.g., en/por lo que toca a, as representative of sensory perception. While the grammaticalization of visual perception verbs into discourse markers (DMs) has been extensively documented, sensory verbs remain understudied. Drawing on data from three electronic corpora—CORDIAM, CORDE, and CORPES—this paper traces the semantic and syntactic evolution of these constructions from the 15th to the 21st century. There are three main conclusions: (a) the semantic development of tocar (‘to touch’) is driven by the interaction of metonymy and metaphor, corresponding to a process of metaphtonymy; (b) en/por lo que toca a arises through gradual grammaticalization processes, including semantic bleaching, decategorialization, increase in scope, and a positional shift toward the left periphery; (c) the corpus evidence suggests a gradual diffusion of the construction across textual genres, beginning in legal and administrative texts and later spreading to other registers.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11040078

Authors: Alexandre Rodríguez Guerra

This contribution studies the behavior of the four main general light verbs (LVs) in the history of Galician (dar, facer and haber/ter). The research is structured around the following three fundamental axes: first, we study the evolution, comparison with equivalent full verbs and the morphosyntactic behavior of 26 different LV constructions (with examples that the literature identifies with different degrees of fixation) from medieval to contemporary Galician, all of which form a corpus with 8728 occurrences. Next, we discuss the results of a survey distributed to 162 respondents, which allows an assessment of these LVs from several perspectives, especially syntactic. Finally, we offer an original proposal to measure the degree of syntactic analyzability, based on the quantified review of the various parameters analyzed (of which we also provide a scale, applied synchronically and diachronically) and the results in the specific survey question. We call it Syntactic Analyzability Index (SAI) and, thanks to this index, we obtain an objective scale that projects each example on a gradation that explains the greater or lesser distance or proximity of a construction with LV from freely combined elements or from the most fixed of phrasemes.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11040077

Authors: Pravaal Yadav Giulio Ciferri Muramatsu

This paper investigates how referentiality interacts with the syntax of Hindi–Urdu. It argues that three patterns, namely, object reduplication, association with the focus particle hī, and cross-clausal agreement, are manifestations of a single structural contrast determined by object shift. With our novel observations, we show that only objects that introduce discourse referents undergo displacement to a higher syntactic position, where they can trigger agreement or serve as associates of the focus particle hī. Reduplicated nominals, which lack referential features, must remain inside the VP and are consequently excluded from these dependencies. The analysis formalizes this correlation through a referential licensing condition that restricts movement to SpecvP to arguments bearing a referential feature [+Ref]. This condition derives the observed interactions between object shift and interpretation of the object. The resulting account integrates phenomena of agreement and focus with the semantics of specificity, offering a unified model of how referential interpretation is encoded in the clause structure of Hindi–Urdu.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11040076

Authors: Sonia López-Serrano Ariadna Sánchez-Hernández Alicia Martínez-Flor

The present study investigates the relationship between initial learner motivation, engagement, and pragmatic development within a self-access web-based instructional environment. Focused on the development of awareness and production of English email requests to faculty, the study involved 65 first-year English Studies students at a Spanish public university. Motivation was assessed qualitatively through open-ended responses which were classified as having Pragmatic orientation, Linguistic orientation, or No orientation. Engagement was captured multidimensionally via project-linked indices of behavioural, cognitive, and affective involvement. Findings reveal that initial motivation predicted greater overall engagement, including increased time invested and deeper cognitive processing. A distinct modality gap was identified: while engagement related positively to pragmatic gains, it exerted stronger effects on awareness than production. Most crucially, profile analyses revealed that sustained engagement can override initial motivational deficits. Learners who entered the module with no initial orientation but still engaged at a moderate level significantly outperformed unmotivated, disengaged peers and achieved gains comparable to those of more motivated students. These findings underscore the mediating role of engagement in pragmatic instruction and advocate for specific motivational and engagement assessments over general scales to better account for the effects of these individual differences in L2 pragmatic gains.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11040075

Authors: Nikos Liosis Dionysis Mertyris

Modern Greek was spoken along the northwestern coast of Asia Minor until the early 20th century, yet neither its precise geographical extent nor its dialectal classification is well established. This paper seeks to clarify both issues by focusing on the variety of Adramytti (Edremit). The available evidence suggests that Adramyttian, despite its close relationship to and partial origin in Modern Lesbian, was essentially a mixed variety that leveled out many characteristic Modern Lesbian features, such as the raising of unstressed mid vowels and certain morphological phenomena. Such differences can be attributed to the diverse character of the speech community that led to contact between speakers of Modern Lesbian origin and speakers of other Greek dialects. In addition to providing a grammatical description of Adramyttian, which demonstrates its mixed profile, the paper offers a tentative classification of this variety in relation to Modern Lesbian and the other insular varieties of northeastern Aegean, as well as in relation to other neighboring varieties of northwestern Asia Minor (Aeolis, Mysia, northern Ionia).

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11040074

Authors: Dorien Nieuwenhuijsen

In research on verbal periphrases, analyzability constitutes a central parameter, both for describing the grammaticalization processes to which these constructions are subject and for defining their categorical status. This paper focuses on a specific verbal periphrasis: [tardar en + infinitive]. Its historical development is examined, along with the recent emergence of a dative of interest in this construction, drawing on quantitative data from various digital corpora. The findings show that over time en became the predominant linking element between the auxiliary and the infinitive and that the order of the components of the periphrasis gradually became fixed. The data also reveal that the new pattern with the dative of interest occurs more frequently in informal written language and colloquial registers, where the object pronoun contributes to clarifying the construction’s potentially opaque meaning. We argue that grammaticalization has reduced the syntactic analyzability of the construction, whereas the incorporation of the dative of interest points to speakers’ perception of tardar as an independent verb, thereby reflecting increased analyzability. This case study illustrates that the analyzability of a construction is not necessarily unidirectional, but may fluctuate over time, shifting in different directions at distinct historical stages.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11040073

Authors: Laura Bafile

Several southern Italian dialects show a systematic alternation in the forms of the third person object clitic between proclisis and enclisis; moreover, in proclisis, the object clitic and the definite article have different forms that alternate between prevocalic and preconsonantal contexts. On the whole, the distribution of forms constitutes a varied and complex picture, which has often been treated in terms of allomorphy. In particular, this article examines the arrangement of proclitic forms in the Neapolitan variety in which the forms are distributed according to three different patterns. The article explores the possibility of analysing the alternations in purely phonological terms, using the representational tools of “floating melody”, “stress space” and “virtual geminate”. The results obtained are encouraging: while some alternations have proven to be allomorphic in nature, a unified phonological explanation has been developed for challenging issues, including the so-called “l-deletion” and the corresponding vowel lengthening.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11040072

Authors: Ronan Pereira Catarina Rosa Mariana Silva

This study investigates cross-dialectal influence in native Brazilian Portuguese (BP) immigrants in Portugal regarding the pragmatic distribution of pronominal subjects within a novel framework of second dialect acquisition and first dialect attrition, the Bidialectal Dynamics Model (BDM). Twenty-eight immigrants completed a spontaneous oral production task in both BP and European Portuguese (EP). Two control groups (24 BP speakers in Brazil and 24 EP speakers in Portugal) did the same in their respective native varieties only. All groups favored overt subjects for topic shift. For topic maintenance, BP speakers in Brazil preferred overt subjects despite omitting more pronouns in this context than in topic shift, while EP speakers strongly favored null subjects. At the group level, immigrants produced fewer null subjects than EP controls and more than BP controls, suggesting bidirectional cross-dialectal influence. At the individual level, profiles varied: most participants displayed bidirectional cross-dialectal influence, some maintained their native preferences, others used their second dialect across the board, and only a few displayed target-like behavior. Following the BDM, it is argued that this cross-dialectal influence stems from the co-activation of dialects’ overlapping grammars, particularly in the lexicon, and the different profiles observed reflect bidialectals’ diverse and dynamic environments.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11040071

Authors: Jorge Fernández Jaén

Verbs of perception show complex linguistic behavior, both grammatically and in semantic terms. Owing to their connection with perceptual processes (sight, hearing, smell…), they always operate in a heterogeneous way, since these types of verbs must code highly diverse events. In light of all the above, the specialized literature has tried to systematize the use of these verbs during the last few years, for the purpose of identifying the overall patterns which govern their utilization in natural languages. To that end, numerous authors chose to formulate dichotomous oppositions (for example, active vs passive perception), aiming to describe the syntax of verbs of perception rigorously. The aim of our paper is to critically analyze such dichotomies, which will allow us to ascertain how verbs of perception relate to grammar (type of transitivity, resultative nature of perception, aspectual typology of events, link between perception and space, etc.). This work will additionally provide evidence that, contrary to what has been argued at times, the dichotomies proposed by scholars are quite gradual or prototypical rather than rigid. In short, the aim sought with our study consists of offering an up-to-date review about a topic of great interest—namely, the methodology to analyze verbs of perception—insofar as these verbs stand out for being one of the most frequently used lexical categories in all languages around the world.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11040070

Authors: Claudia Marzi Marcello Ferro Andrea Nadalini Vito Pirrelli Maria Todorova Tsvetana Dimitrova Valentina Stefanova Hristina Kukova Svetla Koeva

Transparent orthographies, such as Bulgarian and Italian, feature highly consistent grapheme-phoneme correspondences, enabling rapid acquisition of decoding skills. Despite belonging to different language families and using distinct scripts (i.e., Cyrillic vs. Latin), these languages provide an ideal framework to investigate whether orthographic transparency can outweigh script differences in shaping reading development. We conducted a cross-sectional study with primary school children from Grades 2 to 5 in Bulgaria and Italy. Reading performance was recorded using a novel finger-tracking technique, which allows the capture of temporal dynamics of reading in a portable, low-cost, and classroom-friendly format. Measures of reading time and text comprehension accuracy were compared across grades and languages. Developmental trajectories for both speed and comprehension accuracy showed remarkable similarity across Bulgarian and Italian, with both languages exhibiting steady improvement from grade 2 to grade 5. Our cross-linguistic results showed that reading development in primary school children follows both universal and language-specific trajectories. While broad developmental trajectories were similar, cross-linguistic differences emerged in the impact of morphological complexity, pointing to both universal and language-specific mechanisms. Our findings indicate that orthographic transparency may exert a stronger influence on early reading development than script type, even across languages from different families. The study also highlights the potential of finger-tracking for large-scale literacy research. Establishing comparable developmental benchmarks in transparent orthographies may inform cross-linguistic screening tools and early interventions.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11040069

Authors: Guilherme Galhoz Maria Roque Quanzhen Zhang

This exploratory study examines the perception and production of the aspiration contrast in Mandarin voiceless retroflex affricates zh [tʂ] and ch [tʂh] by ten adult Spanish speakers (three Peruvian, seven Chilean) at Nanjing University. Participants completed a perception identification task and a production reading task using the same set of 128 syllables. Voice Onset Time (VOT) measurements from the production task were converted to binary classifications for cross-modality comparison. Perception accuracy was moderately high (zh [tʂ]: 84.43%; ch [tʂh]: 82.39%), whilst production accuracy was substantially lower (zh [tʂ]: 32.61%; ch [tʂh]: 19.15% within native VOT ranges). Participants maintained the aspiration contrast (zh [tʂ] = 58 ms, ch [tʂh] = 125 ms) but consistently underproduced VOT compared to native speakers (zh [tʂ] = 67 ms, ch [tʂh] = 164 ms). Perception patterns align with Category Goodness (CG) assimilation within PAM-L2: both Mandarin sounds map to Spanish [tʃ] but with different goodness-of-fit, enabling moderate discrimination. Production follows SLM-r predictions, with learners developing a Composite L1–L2 Category that maintains the aspiration contrast but fails to establish new phonetic categories. The small sample size (n = 10) precluded robust statistical testing of individual differences. The perception–production asymmetry supports independent modality development in L2 phonetic acquisition.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11040068

Authors: Kristine M. Yu Sameer ud Dowla Khan Megha Sundara

This study builds on a small body of work, all on Japanese, demonstrating how intonational phonology is critical for understanding prosodic modifications in infant-directed speech (IDS) relative to adult-directed speech. We performed similar analyses on simulated infant-directed speech vs. reading of a story in English and Bengali: two languages that – unlike Japanese – both have stress and do not use fundamental frequency (F0) to signal changes in word-level meaning, but that have two very different intonational grammars. These differences allowed us to disentangle previous hypotheses about intonational exaggeration in IDS being concentrated in a particular part of the melody. We tested hypotheses that state this locus of exaggeration is either at: the final position in the melody (final in the intonational phrase), the most unpredictable part of the melody, or in pragmatically informative tones. Our results support the first hypothesis. We found that the phonological choices of speakers to chunk the story into shorter, larger prosodic constituents drive intonational exaggeration in IDS. This is because the intonational phrase-final position in both languages is the site of greatest pre-boundary lengthening and F0 range expansion. We also demonstrate: (i) quantification of predictability in intonational melodies using probabilistic finite state automaton representations of intonational grammars and (ii) F0 statistical analyses that are robust and scalable to large, naturalistic IDS corpora.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11040067

Authors: Anthony Pak-Hin Kong John Nerbonne

Just as Anthony entered his second year as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Languages, he extended a warm welcome to John Nerbonne as Co-Editor-in-Chief beginning in 2026 [...]

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11040066

Authors: Marko Modiano

In this study, the role French maintains in education is assessed across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Statistics on the numbers of L1 users, those who have French as an additional language, as well as other demographic data, are used to chart trends in acquisition patterns across these three regions. The decline in the learning of traditional additional languages is juxtaposed with Englishization. What languages are utilized in school as the language of instruction, as well as what foreign languages are promoted in educational systems, has a profound impact on patterns of second-language acquisition. Here, in all three regions, English is gaining ground at the expense of other languages in primary and secondary school, as well as in higher education, and one result of this historic shift in the acquisition of additional languages is that English is now significantly reducing the importance of French in Francophone Africa.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11040065

Authors: Orsolya Bilgory-Fazakas Sharon Armon-Lotem

In a globalised and interconnected world, transnational families must navigate heritage language (HL) practices within dominant majority languages (ML), often with limited institutional support. Focusing on a small and understudied community of Hungarian-speaking transnational families in Israel, this study explores how HL development is maintained and negotiated within the framework of family language policy in a dynamic multilingual environment. Fifteen Hungarian-speaking parents from bilingual Hungarian-Hebrew families participated in semi-structured sociolinguistic interviews conducted in Hungarian. A mixed-methods approach was used to analyze the interview data. Quantitative analysis was used to identify the distribution and relative frequency of language use across families. At the same time, qualitative analyses show how parental ideologies and strategies relate to HL development. The findings show that while HL input remains central in parental speech, children frequently respond using both HL and ML, indicating a dynamic bilingual repertoire and a translanguaging orientation. Overall, HL development is negotiated, maintained through cultural and emotional ties, flexible bilingual practices and dynamic family language policies.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11040064

Authors: Hui-chi Lee

This study examines the grammaticalization of visual perception verbs in Hlai, a Kra–Dai language spoken on Hainan Island. Based on original fieldwork data, the paper identifies two core verbs of visual perception, zo33 and laai55, which differ systematically in their semantic profiles and diachronic developments. While both verbs encode basic visual perception, zo33 exhibits a broader range of activity-oriented meanings (e.g., ‘watch’, ‘read’, ‘visit’, ‘judge’) and has developed a tentative marker function. In contrast, laai55 patterns as an experience-type perception verb and has undergone a distinct grammaticalization pathway, developing into a conditional conjunction meaning ‘if’ and, in combination with negation, an ‘otherwise’ marker. Adopting a typological framework of perception verbs and a model of semantic extension, this study demonstrates that the two verbs diverge not only in aspectual type (activity vs. experience) but also in their susceptibility to functional reanalysis. A comparative analysis with Mandarin and Hainan Min suggests that the tentative use of zo33 is plausibly contact-induced, whereas the conditional development of laai55 lacks a clear parallel in the contact languages and is more likely to represent a language-internal innovation. The findings contribute to the documentation of Hlai and to cross-linguistic discussions of perception verbs, semantic change, and the typology of conditional marking.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11040063

Authors: Hiwa Asadpour Masoumeh Zarei

In this study, we investigate the formation of passive structures in Garrusi Kurdish across two datasets: experimental and narrative free speech. For our data collection, we interviewed 30 native speakers of this language variety, located in Mehraban District in Hamadan Province, Iran. For our methodology, we conducted an image-description task and a story-narration task. In the first controlled task, the speakers were asked to describe 20 event-oriented pictures prompted by questions relating to the intended construction. In the free narrative task, the speakers were asked to renarrate the film “The Pear Story.” According to our observations, the choice of voice and the use of passive structures vary depending on the context. Our investigations show that passive is a context-oriented and contact-sensitive feature in Mehraban Garrusi Kurdish. In the controlled descriptive context, where the actor was intentionally ignored, the speakers tended to use passive verbal structures, specifically the prototypical form. However, in the free narrative context, where they were allowed to freely renarrate what they observed, they tended to express active predications in the presence of the animate actor, resorting to anticausative forms with patientive subjects affected by inanimate actors. We also found that the rare emergence of the non-prototypical passive suffix, the non-passivization of certain verbal forms, and the exceptional existence of agent phrases in passive diathesis were products of contact-induced change occurring in interaction with Chaharduli Kurdish, Shahsevan Turkic, and Standard Persian.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11040062

Authors: Lu Wang

While previous studies on assessment as learning (AaL) in second language (L2) writing have mainly focused on writing teachers’ practices and perceptions of AaL, scant research has examined the relation between students’ engagement and writing performance in an AaL context. To fill the void, this study examined how students’ engagement related to their writing performance. Drawing on writing drafts, interviews, verbal reports, observation field notes, and documents, cross-case analyses of two focal students demonstrated that learner engagement in an AaL context was positively associated with improvements in writing performance. The student who demonstrated greater reciprocity in collaborating with teachers and peers in the AaL context, as well as proactivity in taking charge of her learning in L2 writing, showed greater improvements in content, organization, and language of argumentative writing.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11030061

Authors: Adrian Leemann Simon Kistler Fabian Tomaschek

Moving beyond traditional sociodemographic models, this study investigates the psychometric drivers of lexical change. Using Swiss German as a case study, we compare historical data from the Sprachatlas der deutschen Schweiz (1939–1958) with a recent large-scale app-based survey (N = 1013) to quantify trajectories over the past century. We identify four distinct mechanisms: exogenous convergence (Schmetterling), endo-normative leveling (Rande), endogenous innovation and divergence (schlittschuhlaufen), and diachronic persistence (Stäge). For the locally rooted speakers in our dataset, structural analysis indicates that traditional variables carry less weight than expected. While age remains the primary vertical predictor, psychological factors outperform traditional variables (e.g., gender, social networks) in this environment of ubiquitous exposure. Multivariate models demonstrate that lexical choices are strongly influenced by individual disposition: traits such as agreeableness accelerate the adoption of supraregional forms, whereas a strong local identity functions as a “brake” against standardization. Ultimately, while macro-factors create the pressure for change, individual micro-factors determine whether it takes hold. A speaker’s attitude acts as a “filter” and their personality as a “gate,” deciding whether they accept or resist new forms. These findings challenge purely structural accounts, suggesting that for these locally rooter speakers, even without high physical mobility, lexical change is shaped by a psychometric architecture.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11030060

Authors: Silvia Tort-Ranson Aarnes Gudmestad

The current investigation, couched within variationist sociolinguistics, has the purpose of advancing knowledge of regional variation in mood use (the subjunctive and indicative contrast) in Spanish. Prior cross-dialectal research has reported that mood use in Spanish varies geographically. To contribute to the understanding of mood variation in Spanish, this study explored a range of sociolinguistic independent variables across three Spanish-speaking regions. The participant pool (N = 107) consisted of Spanish speakers residing in three metropolitan areas (Rosario, Argentina; Barcelona, Spain; and Seville, Spain). The analysis substantiated evidence of geographical variation in the frequency of use of verbal moods, the governors (e.g., preferir que ‘to prefer that’) that exhibited categorical and variable use, and the influence of time reference on mood use. These results provide additional insights into the presence of regional variation in mood use and reinforce the value of cross-dialectal analyses with the same type of data and mood-use contexts.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11030059

Authors: Abdulrahman Almalki Alaina Smith Idoia Elola Heather Kaplan

Heritage speakers’ language acquisition is a complex process that is affected by linguistic, social, cultural, and affective factors. Studies on heritage speakers (HSs) have primarily focused on challenges HSs face in the classroom and scarcely investigated these challenges outside of instructional settings. This study addresses this gap by exploring the lived experiences of two young adult Spanish HSs outside of educational settings through a series of interviews to create personal narratives of their HL and experiences. Through Narrative Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (NIPA), three main themes emerged from these narratives: (1) Spanish heritage language (HL) knowledge and language use, (2) emotional factors that hinder language knowledge and language use, and (3) self-positioning towards SHL and culture. The findings indicated that the participants’ experiences with their Spanish heritage language (SHL) were profoundly impacted by the nature of language input they received, hostile environments, and negative interactions with members of their communities, which led to emotional distress and communicative avoidance. This situated study also offers potential conceptual and community-based implications for the Spanish HSs.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11030058

Authors: S. Rajamathangi Anita Auer Gurujegan Murugesan

Since the mid-1980s, many Tamils left their homeland because of the civil war in Sri Lanka (1983–2009) and for other reasons and settled in different countries. More than 40,000 Tamil migrants have come to Switzerland since then, and Tamil is spoken as a heritage language by second- and third-generation speakers who were born and raised in Switzerland. Within this context, it is the aim of the current study to shed light on the difference between Tamil spoken in the first generation (migrant language) and the second generation (heritage language) in the Swiss German and Swiss French parts of Switzerland. We therefore study Tamil, which is part of the Dravidian language family, in different majority language contexts, i.e., a Germanic language and a Romance language, respectively. While some research on Tamil in a diaspora setting already exists on migrated Tamil communities in Lancaster, California (US), East London (UK) and Toronto (Canada), the focus on Switzerland and contact with German and French has not previously been investigated. The data under investigation, which stems from 20 speakers in total (i.e., 5 first-generation and 5 second-generation speakers from the Swiss German and the Swiss French parts respectively), was collected in 2024 by way of a semi-structured interview based on a sociolinguistic questionnaire and a linguistic test. The data serves as the basis for the intergenerational and typological comparison. The analysis reveals systematic intergenerational differences across several morphosyntactic domains, including agreement, negation pattern, case marking, and subject pro-drop. While first-generation speakers retain greater access to dialect-specific and register-sensitive patterns, second-generation speakers show increased reliance on discourse-pragmatic cues and reduced sensitivity to morphologically encoded distinctions. These findings highlight the role of register, input conditions, and discourse context in shaping heritage Tamil across generations in Switzerland.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11030057

Authors: Aroldo Leal de Andrade Glayson Martins Oliveira

This paper investigates the diachronic development of the sequence assim que (lit. ‘such that’) in the history of Portuguese, with a comparative perspective on the parallel construction así que in Spanish. A corpus-based approach was employed, analyzing approximately 1800 tokens from the Corpus do Português: Historical Genres, spanning eight centuries of written European Portuguese. The results show that assim que remained highly analyzable until the end of the Old Portuguese period, with the adverb assim often followed by a complement or result clause. The grammaticalization of assim que appears to have evolved partly independently from standalone assim. While Portuguese and Spanish share many uses of the construction, modern European Portuguese has diverged, with assim que losing its status as a discourse marker. This change is best explained by the frequent use of cleft constructions (e.g., foi assim que), which reanalyzed que as a subordinating connector, undoing the earlier single-unit interpretation. These findings suggest that even deeply entrenched grammaticalization processes may undergo retraction when the semantic analyzability of component elements allows it.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11030056

Authors: Alfred Lameli Matthias Hahn

This study reconstructs the geography of meaning of the German perception verb schmecken on the basis of 30 major dialect dictionaries, treating them as a distributed semantic corpus and coding attestations as binary variables reflecting the presence or absence of semantic options. Combining a construal-based framework with spatial modeling, the analysis shows that the polysemy of schmecken is structured by three mutually reinforcing forces: embodied sensory organization, construal-based perspectivization, and regionally patterned areal dynamics. The gustatory–olfactory axis forms the semantic core of the verb, from which tactile, visual, affective, and epistemic extensions emerge. These extensions align with systematic pathways constrained by agentive, experiential, emissive, and evaluative construals, demonstrating that semantic extension is channeled through specific construal modes—notably emissive and agentive—rather than determined by sensory modality alone. A detailed areal analysis reveals a pronounced north–south divide. While Low German dialects conform to the cross-linguistically more common tendency to avoid colexifying taste and smekk—itself the outcome of historical change rather than uninterrupted differentiation—Upper German varieties preserve a typologically rare gustatory–olfactory cluster and exhibit the richest range of cross-modal and abstract extensions. The resulting semantic graph formalizes how regional varieties activate different subsets of a lexeme’s semantic potential and demonstrates that semantic networks themselves display spatial organization. The study thus provides an empirically grounded reconstruction of a German geography of meaning and illustrates how dialect data illuminate the interplay between embodied cognition, construal-based lexical architecture, and areal dynamics.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11030055

Authors: Jordi Ginebra Serrabou

This study aims, first, to contribute to our understanding of the regularities of light verb constructions (LVCs) by identifying syntactic–semantic patterns and, secondly, to provide data and reflections on how syntactic analyzability and semantic compositionality interact to shape the diachronic evolution of LVCs. To this end, the paper analyzes and describes, through corpus research, a subset of LVCs from Old Catalan—psych LVC or those denoting emotional states—and compares them with those from Contemporary Catalan. The main contrast between Old Catalan and Contemporary Catalan in this domain is that Contemporary Catalan tends to place the Experiencer in non-localist positions. Localist metaphors no longer structure the form–meaning pairing of Catalan psych LVCs. Once these metaphorical extensions no longer link P(sych)LVCs to their dominating construction, what remains can be described as a situation of vacuous analyzability: linguistic chains that are syntactically analyzable but lack semantic pairing.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11030053

Authors: Yuhan Zhang Huiping Wei

This study investigated family language policies (FLP) in the current context of the Macao Special Administrative Region (Macao SAR). It explored family language ideologies, management strategies, and intergenerational practices through questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, and participant observations. The findings indicate that Macao permanent residents’ families take Cantonese Chinese as the primary medium of communication and cultural identity. Simultaneously, Mandarin and English are often valued for their roles in academic and professional advancement. Portuguese exhibits a trend of marginalization, despite remaining one of the official languages of the Macao SAR. As for other dialects, they may be used in family conversations but are not considered important languages. Beyond this hierarchy of language values, the researchers also revealed that the FLP of Macao’s permanent residents’ families tends to be driven by both experience and foresight, enabling family members to engage in effective consultation on language choice and language learning. Regarding language practice, children’s multilingual fluency is significantly better than that of their parents. The dominant family language tendency does not influence the consensus of multilingualism and allows code-mixing to appear in conversations. In this article, FLP in Macao families is found to be shaped by both experiential knowledge and future-oriented practical considerations, while also reflecting parents’ affective concerns and responses to broader structural pressures. All these factors together form a decision-making system. In this system, both emotion and reason play their roles simultaneously. If a hierarchical distinction must be made, the rational recognition of the diverse characteristics of the linguistic environment and the dominant status of the main language will be primary.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11030054

Authors: Andrea Miglietta Eva-Maria Remberger

In (colloquial) Italian, the fixed expression mi sa functions as an evidential/epistemic marker, requiring the dative 1SG clitic experiencer and the 3SG default form of the verb sapere. Mi sa diachronically develops from the verb for taste/smell, sapere, which is still productive in contemporary Italian, and the structure that it projects. This comprises an obligatory PP introduced by di encoding the type/quality of taste/smell (often metaphorically extended); a subject expressing the perceived entity; and an optional dative experiencer. We systematically analyzed data from the KIParla corpus, comparing the distribution of mi sa to the distribution of one of the most frequent Italian epistemic verb forms, namely, credo ‘I believe’. This study aimed to establish how the original perceptual meaning of mi sa influences its epistemic meaning. The results suggest that the persistence of the original object-oriented perception verb makes mi sa more likely to appear in particular contexts, i.e., events/situations that are known by the speaker through an inferential-like process. Furthermore, mi sa can only rarely be uttered out of the blue and seems to need a situative context (a stage), often containing an explicit QUD.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11030052

Authors: Karolina Zuchewicz

This article focuses on the realization of incrementality in Polish verbal and nominal constructions. The object of investigation is clause-embedding reveal-type concepts like ‘prove’, ‘reveal’, or ‘show’. In Slavic languages, incremental relations have traditionally been examined in direct relation to (im)perfectivity, with imperfective verbs enforcing partial affectedness of events and objects, and perfective verbs enforcing their total affectedness. In the present paper, I take a closer look at the incremental output within the reveal-type concept. I investigate whether an incremental event comes with a fixed incremental path that remains intact independently of any morphological or syntactic modifications. My research question is: Is an incremental feature specified in the lexicon as is the aspectual value ‘(im)perfective’, or does it rather arise compositionally? To answer this question, I analyze the impact of the dative argument and the nominalization on the incremental output of clause-embedding reveal-type predicates. I demonstrate that incremental meanings are affected by the properties of an entire construction. Based on that, I propose to distinguish between two types of incrementality: the non-modifiable (im)perfectivity-dependent partial and total integration requirement, and the compositional incrementality that arises as an interplay between lexical semantics, argument structure, and the morphological shape of the respective lexeme.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11030051

Authors: Claudia Matachana López

This qualitative study examines the language ideologies surrounding code-switching and Puerto Rican Spanish among Puerto Rican bilingual speakers in Massachusetts, focusing on how these ideologies interact with identity construction in the diaspora. Participants in this study commonly described their own language use as Spanglish, emphasizing both its practical role in everyday communication and its significance as a marker of cultural and linguistic identity. Drawing on data collected through sociolinguistic interviews and focus groups, this research explores how participants perceive code-switching not only as a communicative strategy but also as a meaningful expression of Puerto Rican identity. Although negative ideologies persist–framing code-switching as linguistic inadequacy–this study centers on how speakers actively negotiate and redefine these views within their communities. Puerto Rican Spanish, shaped by historical contact with English and sociopolitical ties to the U.S., offers a unique lens through which to explore these dynamics. The findings also suggest that media representations, particularly through music genres such as reggaetón, contribute to shaping and reflecting language ideologies. By centering on speakers’ voices, this paper contributes to understanding how language ideologies form and are shaped by bilingual practices, and how code-switching functions as a form of linguistic citizenship in the Puerto Rican diaspora.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11030050

Authors: Tiffany Judy Eloi Puig-Mayenco

This study examines offline acceptance and online processing of Differential Object Marking (DOM) in the Spanish of Catalan–Spanish bilinguals in Catalonia. Both languages evidence DOM, though prescriptive grammars claim only partial overlap. Empirical research on Catalan DOM within these bilinguals reveals differences in distribution. Based on these factors, along with sustained bilingualism at the community and individual levels, more optionality was predicted for the distribution of Spanish DOM. Results from an offline scalar Acceptability Judgment Task and a Self-Paced Reading Task reveal three important findings. First, each task revealed distinct distributions. Participants aligned more with prescriptive grammars for DOs that are high on the animacy and definiteness scales in the offline task and were more tolerant of greater variability with the same DOs in the online task, possibly indicating weakening of the obligatory DOM constraint in these contexts. Second, geographic area modulated acceptance of the absence of DOM with animate DOs, suggesting microvariation. Third, unmarked inanimate DOs were preferred across both tasks. Overall, the results are interpreted as revealing divergence from prescriptive descriptions of Peninsular Spanish DOM system.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11030049

Authors: Angeliki Tzanne

Digital communication has been discussed as the locus of impoliteness and conflict par excellence. The aim of this paper is to examine impoliteness in a context of digital communication, that of food blogs, where impoliteness seems to be rather rare. The dataset consists of 2660 comments from 11 Greek food blogs. The data are analysed with the aid of strategies proposed in impoliteness research. The study aims to examine the frequency of offensive behaviour and to identify the issues that may trigger it. Furthermore, it purports to delve into the types and strategies of impoliteness used, and into interactants’ responses to offence. Data analysis showed that impolite behaviour is rare in this specific context and that it is triggered by issues related to features of good recipes and healthy eating practices, among others. It was also found that offence is usually mitigated through politeness strategies. Finally, several cases of offence were found to be disregarded by interactants, while others were resolved amicably. A tendency emerges in Greek food blogs towards the avoidance of impoliteness and the cultivation of relationships of closeness and solidarity.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11030048

Authors: Ifigeneia Dosi Zoe Gavriilidou

This study investigates grammatical aspect in Greek and English oral narratives produced by Greek heritage speakers in the United States, examining aspectual marking across the bilingual repertoire, patterns of cross-linguistic alignment, and morphological restructuring. Using 31 narratives from the Greek Heritage Language Corpus, the analysis addressed (a) the role of background variables, (b) default aspectual preferences, (c) cross-linguistic alignment between Greek and English, and (d) morphological variation relative to baseline Greek. Quantitative results revealed a strong preference for the perfective aspect in both Greek and English, suggesting that past-time reference is typically conceptualized as completed or bounded. Education was the only factor associated with aspectual choice, with more educated speakers producing more progressive forms in English; no effects emerged for age group, generational status, schooling context, or years of schooling in Greek. Qualitative findings identified a limited number of systematic morphological simplification and analogical leveling patterns, including overregularization, and occasional periphrastic forms consistent with restructuring and possible cross-linguistic alignment. The results indicate that heritage speakers maintain the core distinction between perfective and imperfective aspect, despite favoring perfective forms across both languages. Meanwhile, they show emerging tendencies toward more transparent and analytic realizations, although such patterns remain quantitatively marginal in the present dataset. Overall, the findings support the view that heritage grammars are systematic, adaptive, and resilient linguistic systems.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11030047

Authors: Jana Pflaeging Erik Schleef

Sociolinguistic competence (SC) has been recognised as essential for Communicative Language Teaching since the 1970s and features prominently in policy documents like the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). Research demonstrates that explicit, systematic instruction effectively develops learners’ SC. While the academic case for SC in language teaching remains strong, we identify significant weaknesses and barriers to its implementation in contemporary EFL teacher education. These challenges span three key domains: integration into secondary-school and higher-education curricula, teacher cognition, and classroom practice—specifically how and how often SC is taught in EFL contexts across different regions and schools. While our findings have relevance for EFL contexts globally, we use Austria as a case study to illustrate these challenges and opportunities. Based on a review of existing theoretical, methodological, and empirical work, we formulate five critical research questions across these three domains. We conclude that comprehensive mixed-methods research triangulating curriculum, teacher cognition, and classroom practice is essential for transforming SC from a curricular ideal into classroom reality, equipping learners with communicative skills required for navigating increasingly diverse linguistic landscapes.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11030046

Authors: Xingcheng Wang Helen Zhao

This study investigates how second language (L2) learners acquire morphologically complex English words, focusing on affixal neutrality—whether suffixes preserve the phonological form and semantic transparency of the base (e.g., -ness in happiness) or trigger phonological/orthographic changes (e.g., -ity in activity). Drawing on linguistic theories of morphological decomposition and lexical representation, we examine how this property influences different dimensions of derivational knowledge. Fifty-four Mandarin-speaking secondary school EFL learners completed three receptive tasks targeting relational knowledge (morphological relatedness), syntactic knowledge (category awareness), and distributional knowledge (contextual appropriateness). Lexical items varied in affixal neutrality, and participants’ accuracy and response times were analysed across three L2 proficiency levels. Affixal neutrality significantly affected performance in the relational knowledge task, with neutral suffixes facilitating accuracy and faster responses. Effects were attenuated in syntactic and distributional tasks, suggesting domain-specific sensitivity to neutrality. L2 Proficiency was associated with higher accuracy across all three domains but did not substantially affect processing speed. These findings highlight the selective role of a theoretically motivated morphological property in L2 lexical acquisition and show how linguistic concepts such as affixal neutrality can form the basis of targeted hypotheses, bridging theoretical linguistics and empirical research in second language learning.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11030045

Authors: Yanmei Dai Cong Wang

Amidst global concerns for linguistic diversity, this systematic review synthesizes six decades (1965–2025) of research on Tanka, a critically endangered language spoken by the boat people along Southeast China. Analyzing 42 studies identified through the PRISMA framework, the review reveals significant sociolinguistic and epistemological imbalances. Research output disproportionately focuses on phonetics and phonology (50%), while neglecting grammar, lexicon, and sociolinguistic vitality. Linguistically, Tanka demonstrates substantial contact-induced convergence with Cantonese or Pinghua within multilingual ecologies; nevertheless, it retains distinctive phonological shifts, a unique maritime lexicon, and grammatical innovations, reflecting both regional alignment and endogenous community practices. Its heterogeneous genetic affiliation highlights local sociohistorical contact dynamics. Rapid intergenerational language shift is documented across communities, driven by intersecting pressures, including state-led urbanization, Mandarin-centric education policies, demographic shifts, occupational change, and enduring social stigmatization. Therefore, community attitudes often prioritize socio-economic mobility through dominant languages over heritage maintenance. Persistent gaps include limited syntactic and discourse analysis, minimal use of quantitative and computational methods (e.g., AI-assisted documentation), insufficient geographic coverage, and a lack of longitudinal shift studies. The field thus urgently requires enhanced international engagement via English publications and a decisive shift towards collaborative, community-centered revitalization frameworks that address power asymmetries and harness cultural resilience.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11030044

Authors: Ludovico Franco Federico Schirato

This study examines the structure and use of Axial Parts and Relational Nouns in Italian from both a syntactic and diachronic perspective. In the first part, we argue that these elements function as nouns and establish an elementary predicate relation of inclusion with an adjacent noun. This relation can be analyzed in terms of Ground and Figure: the Axial Part acts as a possessum of the Ground linked, in turn, to a nominal phrase functioning as possessor/Figure. The interpretation of Axial Parts depends on the context, and while the predicative relation is marked by an adpositional relator, its lexical shape varies, precluding a fixed argumental or complemental relation. This Double-Relator Model contrasts with hierarchical functional projections in the PP structure. The second part supports this view with data from early Italian texts. Focusing on common nouns (e.g., front, head, foot, etc.) used as Relational Nouns or Axial Parts, we show that the Double-Relator Model captures the variability in terms of phonological realization and grammatical function of Old Italian complex PPs, at the same time making it possible to clearly analyze each component of these structures from the syntactic point of view.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11030043

Authors: Xiaotong Xi Peng Li

This narrative review synthesizes 24 empirical studies on the role of four types of pedagogical gestures (beat, durational, pitch, and articulatory) in second language (L2) phonetic training since 2010. We reviewed studies involving training interventions to assess the efficacy, mediating factors, and robustness of multimodal training. The findings confirm that gestural training is a powerful tool, yielding the most robust positive effects for L2 speech production and the acquisition of suprasegmental features. Crucially, the effectiveness is highly dependent on gesture-sound consistency and visual saliency of the target phonetic/prosodic feature. However, results are mixed regarding perceptual learning and the generalization of gains to untrained items or novel contexts. While the literature supports the value of gestural training, there are gaps in determining the optimal training paradigm (observing gestures vs. performing gestures), accounting for individual learner differences, and establishing long-term retention and ecological validity. Future research should incorporate longitudinal designs and neurophysiological methods to fully illuminate the cognitive mechanisms that drive the body–mind link in L2 speech acquisition.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11030042

Authors: Muhammad Alasmari Rashad Ahmed Amna Shamim Nief Aied Al-Gamdi

This study investigates the family language policies (FLPs) of two North Indian Muslim families residing in Saudi Arabia, focusing on how they navigate multilingualism to balance cultural heritage, religious practices, and sociolinguistic adaptation. Using Spolsky’s FLP framework and a qualitative case study approach, the research examines the dynamic roles of Urdu, Arabic, and English in these households. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with mothers and children to explore language ideologies, practices, and management strategies. The findings reveal that Urdu serves as a cornerstone of cultural identity, while Arabic is pivotal for religious education and social integration. English plays a supplementary role as a tool for academic and professional aspirations. Despite shared goals, the families adopt distinct approaches: one emphasizes heritage preservation and liturgical Arabic, while the other integrates Arabic more comprehensively alongside Urdu. These insights contribute to FLP scholarship by highlighting the intersection of language, faith, and identity in transnational families in non-western context, offering practical implications for educators and policymakers working with multilingual communities.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11030041

Authors: Xinyi Zeng Jidong Guo

Reporting verbs are commonly employed in academic writing, yet second language learners often encounter uncertainties regarding their appropriate usage during the writing process. This corpus-based study investigated the use of reporting verbs in Chinese MA theses in linguistics and international linguistics journal articles. It focused on the semantic categories of reporting verbs, the source types and the subject types of reporting clauses, as well as the interrelationships among these elements. The results showed the following: (1) regarding the semantic categories of reporting verbs, authors of MA theses tended to use SHOW verbs, whereas authors of journal articles were likely to employ ARGUE verbs; (2) in terms of reporting sources, while both groups of authors most frequently used textual references, authors of MA theses showed a secondary preference for uncited generalizations, whereas authors of journal articles more often employed self-sourced reporting; (3) when using reporting verbs, both groups of authors employed non-human subjects most frequently, followed by human and it subjects; (4) the usage of reporting verbs by two groups of authors revealed close interrelationships among the semantic categories of reporting verbs as well as the source types and the subject types of reporting clauses. Implications for L2 learners’ academic writing and EAP teachers’ instruction were also discussed.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11030040

Authors: Leonardo Maria Savoia Benedetta Baldi

In this article, we analyze the order verb-(clitic) subject that characterizes Rhaeto-Romance languages in V2 and interrogative contexts. In these varieties, the subject is necessarily realized by lexical or pronominal elements in preverbal position, except in inversion contexts. Some of these varieties have subject clitics (SCls) that display a distribution similar to that of full pronouns. Furthermore, in some, subject-verb inversion involves the enclisis of SCls on the verb. Enclitics are distributionally different from proclitics and are characterized by distinct paradigms, which show specialized properties somewhat comparable to inflections. We will study subject syntax in inversion contexts within the Phase framework, where enclitics will be viewed as the result of syntactic Merge and of amalgamation with the verb stem in INFL. A crucial topic is the relationship between functional morphemes and spelling domains.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11030039

Authors: Renata Enghels Mariia Baltais

This article investigates how cognitive and grammatical mechanisms shape variable singular–plural agreement in Spanish perception–verb constructions, a domain where speakers alternate between agreement with the postverbal NP2 and agreement with the infinitival complement. Building on usage-based and cognitive linguistics approaches, this study examines whether factors related to perceptual modality and conceptual salience underlie these alternations. A corpus analysis of pronominal infinitive constructions with ver and oír reveals divergent patterns across modalities, with visual perception favoring plural agreement and auditory perception favoring singular agreement. To evaluate whether these tendencies reflect deeper linguistic preferences, an acceptability-rating task systematically manipulated modality, agreement, and animacy. The results show no overall interaction between modality and agreement, but they identify a robust effect of animacy: sentences with human referents received higher ratings than those with inanimate referents. Moreover, animacy modulated the influence of modality and agreement in opposite directions, suggesting that speakers’ evaluations are sensitive to the ontological nature of the perceived stimulus. Together, the findings show that agreement variation reflects flexible conceptual construal and that corpus and experimental evidence offer complementary insights into the interface between morphosyntax, perception and salience in Spanish.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11030038

Authors: Ludovico Franco Paolo Lorusso

This paper proposes a unified analysis of reduplication as the lexical spell-out of a relational part–whole/inclusion predicate (⊆) in morphosyntax. Adopting the framework of Manzini and colleagues, we argue that reduplicative morphology—across diverse languages and domains—encodes a subset relation, whereby an event, individual, or property is interpreted as included in a larger set or continuum of similar instances. We bring evidence from a range of typologically diverse languages (Tagalog, Bikol, Malay, Fulfulde, Italian, and sign languages) to show that reduplication correlates with non-maximality: plural number (members of a set), distributivity (individuals/events taken one by one), iterative aspect (sub-events in a larger event), and evaluative attenuation or intensification (a degree as part of a scale). The analysis is developed in a formal syntactic representation where reduplication is triggered by an elementary inclusion operator (⊆) at the X or XP level. We show that a single semantic primitive (⊆) can account for the varied meanings of reduplication in nominal, verbal, and adjectival domains. We discuss the implications of this unified approach, suggesting that reduplication is not a mere iconic or phonological process, but rather the surface reflex of a fundamental grammatical operation of inclusion.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11030037

Authors: Jacopo Garzonio Emanuela Sanfelici

This paper investigates the syntax and diachrony of Italian causal clauses introduced by perché, siccome, and poiché. Although often treated as near-synonyms in Contemporary Italian, these subordinators differ systematically in their syntactic distribution, interpretive properties, and diachronic development. We show that perché introduces central adverbial clauses, merged within the vP/TP domain, whereas siccome and poiché introduce peripheral adverbial clauses, merged in the left periphery. This structural split correlates with a cluster of diagnostics: only perché-clauses can occur within the scope of matrix focus, negation, or epistemic operators, and only they can function as fragment answers. Conversely, siccome- and poiché-clauses consistently outscope matrix operators and encode non-at-issue content. A diachronic study reveals that the internal and external syntax of causal clauses introduced by each subordinator has remained stable from Old Italian to the present. However, siccome- and poiché-clauses display different semantics, as they derive from non-causal constructions (they originate from comparative and temporal clauses, respectively). We argue that the contrasting behaviors follow from the structural composition of the subordinators.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11030036

Authors: Tania Stortini

This study investigates how argument structure interacts with Information Structure (IS) in Dative Experiencer (DE) psych-verbs of the piacere/gustar type in Italian and Spanish. These verbs display non-canonical mapping between thematic and grammatical roles, in which the Experiencer surfaces as a dative object and the Theme as the subject. Through a semi-spontaneous production experiment based on the Question with a Delayed Answer (QDA) methodology, the study elicited natural utterances to investigate how speakers encode Information Focus (IF) on the Theme. The results show a consistent pattern across the two languages, with a strong preference for postverbal realizations of the Theme and frequent overt expression of the Experiencer, interpreted as a Familiar Topic. Preliminary prosodic data further support this interpretation, showing that the Experiencer bears a low tonal contour typical of given material, whereas the postverbal subject has included in the prosodic boundary of the sentence. Taken together, these findings suggest that DE psych-verbs encode a grammar-internal mechanism that links thematic and informational hierarchies, where morphosyntactic structure, case, position and prosody jointly contribute to the interpretability of discourse relations.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11030035

Authors: Alvaro David Monterroza-Rios Olga Anatolyevna Novikova Juan Fernando Gomez-Paniagua

This article argues that learning a foreign language cannot be understood solely as the acquisition of internal grammatical or lexical rules, but rather as a form of action situated and corporeally embodied in a social, material, and cultural environment from which new linguistic skills emerge. Hence, we propose to describe foreign language learning under an ecological–enactive approach to cognition, that is, a coordination of two simultaneous multilevel processes: (i) at the subpersonal level, as the coordination of sensorimotor loops that adjust phonation, prosody, and auditory discrimination, and (ii) at the personal level, as the organism–environment coupling led by sociomaterial affordances that guide linguistic exploration. We conclude that active and immersive methodologies are more effective because they synchronize sensorimotor plasticity with the detection of affordances, enabling linguistic competence to emerge as a progressive self-organization of the agent–world system.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11030034

Authors: Saira Zahid Ho-Young Lee Muhammad Asim Mahmood

This study examines the distribution and acoustic characteristics of filled pauses (FPs) in Urdu, a language underrepresented in disfluency research. Drawing on a spontaneous speech dataset from 18 female speakers, the analysis considers the types of FPs, their immediate segmental context, and their utterance position. The analysis also evaluates the effects of segmental context and utterance position on acoustic measures of FPs. Results show a dominant use of vocalic FPs. Moreover, FPs observe systematic contextual patterns and cluster in specific utterance positions. Acoustically, vowel-only and vowel–nasal FPs differ in duration and vowel height (F1). For vowel-only FPs, utterance position significantly conditions duration and prosodic properties (F0, intensity), whereas segmental context does not show any effects. Taken together, the findings demonstrate a language-specific organization of FPs in Urdu. This study offers a detailed phonetic account of Urdu FPs to date and highlights the importance of language-sensitive disfluency modeling in speech technology applications.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11030033

Authors: Petr Biskup

This article concerns the morpheme a in Czech. It occurs in nominals, conjunctions, and various verbal predicates. In contrast to the common practice of treating such a exponents as independent, accidentally homophonous elements, it is argued that some of these as can be treated as one item. What the syncretic as have in common is pluralizing semantics. Thus, the article proposes that verbal number (specifically, plurality) is related to nominal number and conjunctions. The article addresses the questions of how the multifunctionality of morphemes—such as the Czech a—can be analyzed and which tools of lexical–realizational approaches to morphology are most suitable for the analysis. In addition to the plural interpretation, a brings about changes in the argument structure of verbal predicates and fulfills several functions in the nominal and conjunction domains. The analysis is couched in the Distributed Morphology framework. However, contrary to expectations, the multifunctional a is not treated as an underspecified marker. It is analyzed as an overspecified marker that can realize (i.e., span) several syntactic heads: the pluralization head with the pluralization operator, the voice head, plus some other heads present in verbs and nominals. It is argued that the best option for deriving the multifunctional property of a is to assume the superset principle and pre-linearization spanning.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11020032

Authors: Yingsheng Liu

This study examines a theoretically revealing subtype of interrogatives in Chinese that are formulated with the first person singular pronoun wo ‘I’ as subject, termed first person formulated interrogatives. Unlike most interrogatives that are conventionally answer-seeking, first person interrogatives in Chinese are found to serve a dual function, operating either as answer-seeking or as non-answer-seeking actions. This duality raises a fundamental question for action ascription: how do participants interpret such grammatically underspecified interrogatives and respond accordingly? Drawing on 116 instances from a large corpus of Chinese telephone conversations, this study identifies the crucial role of interrogative markers and recipient-addressed terms in action ascription. Further analyses show that these two sets of morphosyntactic resources function by signaling the epistemic relationship between speakers and recipients as well as the recipient’s relevance to the matter at hand. Interrogative designs that imply low epistemic stance of speaker and high relevance of recipients are commonly treated by recipients as answer-seeking, whereas those that imply high epistemic stance of speakers are commonly treated by recipients as non-answer-seeking. These findings advance our understanding of the importance of optional, redundant linguistic resources in action ascription, highlighting that social action is not structurally pre-given but interactionally achieved through cumulative turn-design practices.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11020031

Authors: Fariha Yasmeen Yap Ngee Thai Zalina Mohammad Kasim Vahid Nimehchisalem

Interpreting event completion is a core difficulty in second language acquisition, as it underpins temporal reference and communication. This study investigates how L1 Urdu Pakistani learners of English acquire telicity, a semantic property that distinguishes completed and ongoing events. The analysis centers on bounded and unbounded object noun phrases (NPs) in marking telic/atelic events within accomplishment predicates. In English, telicity is compositionally encoded through verb types, object NPs, and temporal adverbials, whereas Urdu relies on aspectual morphology, creating challenges for learners in mapping event completion. The study is framed within the Full Transfer Full Access (FTFA) model and the Interpretability Hypothesis (IH). Data were collected through an Acceptability Judgment Task (AJT) administered to Pakistani ESL learners at elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels, alongside a native English control group. Results support the FTFA model, revealing a significant developmental trajectory where accuracy in distinguishing telic/atelic contrasts increases with proficiency. At the elementary level, an L1-based accuracy gradient emerged across NP types, reflecting the transfer of Urdu nominal underspecification. While advanced learners demonstrated successful restructuring in bounded contexts, partial support for the IH was found in atelic contexts. Continued divergence from native judgements in unbounded NP conditions highlights a persistent mapping deficit at the syntax–semantics interface. The study advances second language event semantics, emphasizing the role of object structure and cross-linguistic influence in the acquisition of L2 event boundaries.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11020030

Authors: Alessandra Rossetti Luuk Van Waes

The ability to revise texts to meet the needs and expectations of the target audience requires sustained and deliberate practice. Revision becomes more complex when working on somebody’s else text and in a second language. Against this background, we conducted an exploratory and descriptive case study qualitatively shedding light on the characteristics of the processes and the products of revision. We collected data from three graduate students revising a business text in English (their second language) and from an experienced writer/editor, native English speaker, revising the same text in his first language. Using keystroke logging, screen recording, and text analysis, we observed an alternation between revision and rewriting, as well as a combination of expert features (e.g., inclusion of reader-oriented explanations) and less expert features (e.g., fewer rounds of revision) among graduate students. There were also differences between the students and the expert in the way in which they spatially organised their tasks. We interpreted these results within the context of cognitive and sociocultural models of writing, and especially the notion of agency.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11020029

Authors: Gabriel Dan Barbulet Andra Iulia Ursa

This study examines how international students learning Romanian interpret and apply the Cooperative Principle in everyday and academic interaction. The research is grounded in the observation that pragmatic competence often develops unevenly in second-language learning, particularly in multilingual environments where learners rely on norms carried over from their first language. To investigate these dynamics, a small spoken and written corpus was compiled from classroom activities, recorded peer interactions, and informal conversations with students enrolled in Romanian language courses. The data were annotated for instances of maxim observance, weakening, and flouting, as well as for implicatures that required contextual inference. The analysis shows recurring patterns of pragmatic transfer, especially in the interpretation of relevance and quantity, and highlights areas where learners systematically misinterpret or underproduce implicatures. Several examples also reveal successful adaptation to Romanian communicative expectations, suggesting that exposure to diverse interactional settings supports the refinement of pragmatic cues. The findings contribute to a clearer understanding of how the Cooperative Principle operates in cross-cultural learning contexts and point to practical implications for teaching Romanian as a foreign language.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11020028

Authors: Nobu Goto

This paper develops a mechanism of PF-deletion within a probe–goal system that incorporates C-to-T feature inheritance. I propose that the phase head C enters the derivation not only with an edge feature (EF) and agree (φ-)features but also with a delete-feature, which licenses the deletion of an element at PF (PF-deletion). When C-to-T feature inheritance applies, the target of PF-deletion is determined through φ-probing from T; when it does not, it is determined through EF-probing from C. By linking PF-deletion to phase-internal probing, this approach dispenses with pro, traditionally assumed to exist in the lexicon of null subject languages such as Italian, as a theoretical primitive. Crucially, it offers a unified account of the distribution of null arguments in both Italian (a pro-drop language) and German (a topic-drop language), two language types that have traditionally resisted unified analysis under the principles-and-parameters approach. In addition to the synchronic study of the distribution of null arguments, I further argue that diachronic evidence from old languages such as Old French and Old English lends additional support to the proposal, and conclude that whether C-to-T inheritance applies or not is a crucial factor in explaining crosslinguistic variation in null argument phenomena.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11020027

Authors: Jason Kandybowicz

I argue that definite relative clauses, despite their stable strong island status cross-linguistically, lack island status in Adara. The structure is neither selective nor weak, but rather completely permeable, allowing the free extraction of both arguments and adjuncts. In support of the claim that A-bar movement may escape relative clause domains in Adara, I adduce evidence from crossover effects, reconstruction effects, and quantifier float. In addition, I show that relative clause-internal material may probe upwards and outwards, triggering long-distance agreement of relativized verbs with clause-external subjects in a way that is not possible with true island structures in the language.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11020026

Authors: Abdulazeez Jaradat Dina Mahmoud Hammouri Muneir Gwasmeh Ahmad S. Haider

Languages vary in expressing reflexivity and reciprocity. In some languages, reflexive and reciprocal constructions are formally identical, while in some other languages, they are distinct. The third group comprises languages that have non-reflexive and reflexive–reciprocal (REF-REC) constructions. This paper investigates marking reflexivity and reciprocity in Standard Arabic and Jordanian Arabic. It demonstrates that these two varieties possess a non-reflexive reciprocal category and a REF-REC category, placing them within the third group. However, these varieties are peculiar in terms of having three possible interpretations of a sentence embedding this category: only reflexive, only reciprocal, and simultaneously both. This peculiar case has been interpreted as a case of sentential vagueness: each of the two markers in the target varieties has a univocal meaning, and the range of possible sentential interpretations arises from contextual clues. From a cross-linguistic perspective, this paper also identifies a novel source of reflexive marking: the nominal ħaal in Jordanian Arabic. This nominal, which primitively means ‘(personal) state’, is the conceptual strategy for reflexivity in this variety.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11020025

Authors: Vladislav Maraev Arash Eshghi Chiara Mazzocconi Christine Howes

In dialogue, laughter is a frequent non-verbal signal that can precede, follow, or overlap its antecedent—the laughable. Furthermore, the time alignment between the laughter and the laughable is dependent on who produces the laughable, whether laughter overlaps or not with speech and the communicative act performed. Laughter can interrupt either one’s own or one’s conversational partners’ utterances and, like other well-studied features of dialogue such as repair and split utterances, this interruption does not necessarily occur at phrase boundaries. Similarly, much like repair and other feedback like backchannels, laughters can be categorised as forward-looking or backward-looking. Given these parallels, we propose an analysis of how laughter can be processed and integrated using a Dynamic Syntax (DS) model, which already has well-motivated accounts of repair, split utterances, and feedback. We present a corpus study of laughter in dialogue, as well as a model using Dynamic Syntax and Theory of Types with Records (DS-TTR). Analogously to pronouns and ellipsis, our approach uses underspecification to account for laughter types that are different in processing terms as anaphoric or cataphoric, and demonstrates how laughter is processed incrementally as an utterance unfolds. Our analysis covers ≈87% of the annotated corpus data.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11020024

Authors: Triantafyllia I. Vlachou Maria Kambanaros Arhonto Terzi Voula C. Georgopoulos

Animation has been used to assess speech, language, and communication skills in children. We aimed to map and synthesize relevant research addressing how and when animation is used for assessment purposes in speech–language pathology practice. Four databases were searched, yielding 18 studies that met the inclusion criteria. Data was extracted on study design, objectives, participant characteristics, results, assessment areas, purposes of animation use, underlying theoretical and research bases, and technical features. Theoretical grounding for children’s perception of animation was not evident in the studies, while several studies showed research foundations for its use in speech–language pathology assessment. Various animations were used for diverse purposes and research goals, primarily involving typically developing children and fewer clinical samples. All studies focused on language assessment. The diversity in animation research precludes conclusions regarding best practices in use of animation in speech–language pathology assessment. An initial evidence base was established, documenting research approaches, the effects of animation on language and cognition, observed behaviors, the performance of clinical samples, and psychometric properties of the assessment tools. Limitations, knowledge gaps, and future research are discussed.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11020023

Authors: Gabriel Antunes de Araujo Guilherme Mendes

Papiamentu is a creole language lexified by Portuguese and Spanish. In addition to its Iberian foundational lexicon, it has been influenced by Dutch and English. This study analyzes hybrid compound formation in Classical Papiamentu (CP) and Modern Papiamentu (MP), with a focus on the distribution of etymological sources and morphosyntactic structure. A corpus of 100 hybrid compounds is analyzed according to the etymology of internal components, the distribution of components within the structure of the compound, and their internal grammatical structure. While CP compounds are predominantly headed by Iberian etyma, MP compounds show increased Dutch and English lexical influence, while retaining syntactic properties drawn from Iberian lexifiers, such as a prevalence of prepositional compounds linked by the grammaticalized particle di. This study sheds light on the complex processes of language contact, morphosyntactic formation, and lexical innovation by examining how lexical loanwords from distinct donor languages interact in compound formation across two historical stages. It contributes to the broader understanding of morphosyntactic hybridity and the role of compounding in creole lexical development.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11020022

Authors: Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou

The role of metapragmatics in maintaining interactional coherence and achieving intersubjectivity has been variously underscored in the last three decades. In particular, raising metapragmatic awareness has become increasingly salient in research on intercultural communication and foreign/second language teaching. However, the topic has not been hitherto discussed in connection with heritage languages, and this is a gap that the present paper aims to fill. Based on interviews with Greek Melburnians who belong (in triads or dyads) to the same family but to different generations, a typology of metapragmatic awareness indicators encountered in the data is presented. Quantitative examination of one type of indicators—those oriented towards the addressee—indicates a decrease in their use across three generations. Similarly, examination of the variants of second-person pronouns and/or verb endings (the T/V distinction) brought to the fore alternations in the T and V forms, indicative of linguistic insecurity, as well as an increasing preference for the informal variants across three generations. The qualitative analysis of extracts from the interviews shed further light on the insecurity regarding the T/V distinction. Overall, the results point to changes in the communicative style of Greek Melburnians, namely away from positive politeness features (typical of the Greek society) towards English interactional norms, and the fostering of a hybrid communicative style—in alignment with their hybrid identities. It is suggested that politeness issues be integrated into the teaching of Greek as a heritage language.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11020021

Authors: Enrique Pato

This paper, positioned within the study of immigrant language varieties in Canada, examines mismo si (‘even if’), an understudied grammatical feature of Spanish in contact with French in Montreal. The phenomenon is analyzed cross-linguistically and within the theoretical framework of Distributed Morphology, approaching it from two complementary perspectives: (1) a sociolinguistic analysis of Spanish-French bilinguals in Montreal, and (2) a formal investigation of its structural properties. Mismo si, equivalent to Standard Spanish aunque and incluso si (‘even though’), is a lexical transfer from the French conjunction même si and conveys a concessive meaning. The evidence shows that this structure constitutes a distinctive linguistic adaptation to the bilingual sociolinguistic environment of Montreal. The article is organized in two sections: the first presents a qualitative and quantitative analysis of mismo si occurrences in the COLEM corpus (Corpus Oral de la Lengua Española en Montreal), while the second offers a formal examination of this contact-induced structure.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11020020

Authors: Luciano Romito Elvira Graziano

This study analyses the variety of the language used in textbooks for teaching Italian as a second/foreign language. These books use a language much closer to written than to spoken Italian and do not consider its varieties, providing examples and exercises with a “neutral” standard that speakers rarely use in everyday speech. The aim of this study is to provide a critical review of pronunciation sections in current L2 Italian textbooks, in the light of a renewed and growing interest in the study of the Italian language, not only by students with a migrant background in Italy, but also by second and third-generation emigrants who want to learn Italian to recover their roots. Thirty-two Italian textbooks were examined, considering some geolinguistic variables. The general tendency seems to be the introduction of some neo-standard Italian features. As far as the phonetic–phonological level is concerned, this is probably still insufficient because of the complexity of the Italian linguistic repertoire. Our analysis further suggests the inadequacy of notions such as (neo-)standard Italian for teaching purposes in the linguistic space of global Italian.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11010019

Authors: Stathis Selimis Evgenia Vassilaki

The study investigated the developmental trajectory of the speech act of request among L1 Greek-speaking children spanning the preschool and primary school years (ages 4–11), aiming to address the scarcity of pragmatic research within this age range in Greek. Seventy-three children participated in an experimental task that elicited oral requests based on scenarios systematically manipulating addressee status/familiarity and the cost of the requested action. Responses were analysed via a bottom-up coding method, which showed that three quarters of all utterances adhered to four highly conventionalised, interrogative request constructions: (i) Can-you V-SUBJUNCTIVE?, (ii) Will-you V?, (iii) Can-I V-SUBJUNCTIVE?, and (iv) V-PRESENT-YOU?. Notably, the direct Imperative mood was marginal even among the youngest participants. Results indicate a statistically significant variation in the distribution of these dominant patterns across age groups. Increasing age correlates with greater sensitivity to sociocultural parameters of communication, specifically the imposition/cost and the addressee’s face needs. This is further evidenced by a more elaborated repertoire of modifiers and supportive moves. We conclude that requestive behaviour progresses developmentally from largely underspecified directive forms toward a repertoire of more complex and contextually specified constructions, thereby providing empirical support for usage-based accounts of language acquisition.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11010018

Authors: Angeliki Alvanoudi

This study examines the functions of the vocative-based marker moré in contexts of disagreement in Greek conversation, drawing on interactional linguistics. The analysis of audio-recorded informal face-to-face conversations and telephone calls from the Corpus of Spoken Greek shows that, in such contexts, moré functions as an interpersonal marker, signaling solidarity and friendliness and thereby mitigating the potential face threat posed by disagreement. It also functions as a cognitive marker, conveying counterexpectation to the addressee. The study compares moré with its grammaticalized form, vre. Both moré and vre appear in contexts of ‘friendly’ disagreement with similar discourse functions. However, unlike vre, moré occurs in a broader range of disagreement types from the most to the least face-aggravating, including challenges, contradictions and counterclaims, and it also appears in contexts of impoliteness. This suggests that the two forms have different affordances, with vre displaying a higher level of solidarity than more.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11010017

Authors: Junyan Guo

The advent of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has ushered in a transformative wave within the field of language education. However, the applications of GenAI are primarily in language teaching and learning, with assessment receiving much less attention. Drawing on task characteristics identified from a corpus of authentic prior tests, this study investigated the capacity of GenAI tools to develop a short College English Test-Band 4 (CET-4) listening test and examined the degree to which its content, concurrent, and face validity corresponded to those of an authentic, human-generated counterpart. The findings indicated that the GenAI-created test aligned well with the task characteristics of the target test domain, supporting its content validity, whereas sufficient robust evidence to substantiate its concurrent or face validity was limited. Overall, GenAI has demonstrated potential in developing listening tests; however, further optimization is needed to enhance their validity. Implications for language teaching, learning and assessment are therefore discussed.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11010016

Authors: Ricardo Maldonado Juliana De la Mora

In the pragmaticalization of ya ves que… ‘you see that…’, the perceptual basis of the verb becomes diluted, keeping its deictic profile. Most of its pragmatic values extend to non-perceptual phenomena, implying shared knowledge. Further extensions involve bleaching the concrete referent into abstract shared information in the form of (i) first and second-hand evidentials: shared and alien facts presented as familiar; (ii) mitigators: small appeal to shared information; (iii) miratives missing crucial information; and (iv) a continuity discourse marker where shared information is not relevant. Based on spontaneous oral data from Mexican Spanish, we propose that intersubjectivity prevails given its common ground deictic schema, allowing for assumed information to become diluted into a fictive common space where the speaker assumes the existence of notions the speaker may not always have. Diachronic data support the analysis: data from the 16th–17th century from Spain show the prevalence of testimonial references with no presence of shared knowledge; from the 19th century onward, shared knowledge becomes crucial, and it is not until current informal Mexican Spanish that even referential and shared knowledge may be diluted, and the assessment is validated by incorporating the hearer into the speaker’s mental space.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11010015

Authors: Elizaveta Galperina Olga Kruchinina Polina Boichenkova Alexander Kornev

Background/Objectives: The first step in learning an alphabetic writing system is to establish letter–sound associations. This process is more difficult for children with dyslexia (DYS) than for typically developing (TD) children. Cerebral mechanisms underlying these associations are not fully understood and are expected to change during the training course. This study aimed to identify the neurophysiological correlates and developmental changes of visual letter processing in children with DYS compared to TD children, using event-related potentials (ERPs) during a letter/non-letter classification task. Methods: A total of 71 Russian-speaking children aged 7–11 years participated in the study, including 38 with dyslexia and 33 TD children. The participants were divided into younger (7–8 y.o.) and older (9–11 y.o.) subgroups. EEG recordings were taken while participants classified letters and non-letter characters. We analyzed ERP components (N/P150, N170, P260, P300, N320, and P600) in left-hemisphere regions of interest related to reading: the ventral occipito-temporal cortex (VWFA ROI) and the inferior frontal cortex (frontal ROI). Results: Behavioral differences, specifically lower accuracy in children with dyslexia, were observed only in the younger subgroup. ERP analysis indicated that both groups displayed common stimulus effects, such as a larger N170 for letters in younger children. However, their developmental trajectories diverged. The DYS group showed an age-related increase in the amplitude of early components (N/P150 in VWFA ROI), which contrasts with the typical decrease observed in TD children. In contrast, the late P600 component in the frontal ROI revealed an age-related decrease in the DYS group, along with overall reduced amplitudes compared to their TD peers. Additionally, the N320 component differentiated stimuli exclusively in the DYS group. Conclusions: The data obtained in this study confirmed that the mechanisms of letter recognition in children with dyslexia differ in some ways from those of their TD peers. This atypical developmental pattern involves a failure to efficiently specialize early visual processing, as evidenced by the increasing N/P150. Additionally, there is a progressive reduction in the cognitive resources available for higher-order reanalysis and control, indicated by the decreasing frontal P600. This disruption in neural specialization and automation ultimately hinders the development of fluent reading.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11010014

Authors: Trang Phan

This paper offers the first long-range account of the grammaticalization of the Vietnamese perception verb thấy ‘see’ from the 13th to the mid-20th century. Using a balanced diachronic corpus of ten representative texts (1345 tokens), we combine frequency profiling with constructional analysis to trace thấy’s shift from a literal visual predicate to a high-frequency resource for epistemic stance, evidentiality, evaluation, and discourse management. The results reveal a robust progression aligned with the sensory hierarchy and canonical event-schema pathways: early literal uses and multimodal bundling (13–14th c.) provide bridging contexts; the 15th century introduces raising (thấy + VP/Adj) and clausal complementation (thấy (rằng/là) + CP); the 16–17th centuries expand resultative perception complexes (e.g., xem/chiêm bao/nghe + thấy) and reportative frames; the 18th century brings evaluative and speaker-anchored uses (chúng tôi thấy); the 19–20th centuries stabilize discourse-pivot (thấy… thì…), epistemic (thấy cần phải…), and exclamative/affective (thấy ghét) readings. We argue that Vietnamese clause-linking options and optional complementizers facilitate constructionalization via loose complementation and subjectification, while retaining perceptual residues that motivate evidential and interactional meanings. The study contributes: (i) a comprehensive diachrony of thấy; (ii) diagnostics separating perceptual, experiential, propositional, and discourse layers; and (iii) a case study bearing on the relationship between grammaticalization and constructional change in an isolating language.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11010011

Authors: Yoshiki Fujiwara

This paper investigates the nature of adjunct-inclusive interpretations in Japanese, which has long been debated in the literature. Previous studies have disagreed on whether these interpretations arise from V-stranding VP-ellipsis or adjunct ellipsis. This study argues that adjunct-inclusive interpretations fall into two distinct types: one semantically encoded and structurally represented, and another pragmatically inferred, depending on context beyond sentence structure. Using anaphoric expressions and negation as diagnostics, this study shows that adjunct-inclusive interpretations involving (i) omission of both adjunct and object in transitive sentences and (ii) adjunct omission in intransitive sentences are syntactically represented, supporting the existence of V-stranding VP-ellipsis. By contrast, adjunct-inclusive interpretations where only the adjunct is omitted and the object is contrastively focused are derived from pragmatic inference via free pragmatic enrichment, rather than from syntactic structure. These findings provide empirical and theoretical support for the view that Japanese does not allow syntactic adjunct ellipsis but does allow V-stranding VP-ellipsis. More broadly, this study contributes to the understanding of the syntax–pragmatics interface in ellipsis, showing that not all implicit interpretations reflect syntactic structure and highlighting the importance of carefully distinguishing between semantic and pragmatic sources in analyzing ellipsis phenomena.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11010013

Authors: Chantal Melis María Isabel Jiménez Martínez Milagros Alfonso Vega

The focus in this corpus-based study is on a set of Spanish constructions formed with the verb of visual perception, ver ‘to See’, and a predicate adjective or participle. In addition to a clearly recognizable transitive schema, the set includes various instances featuring a reflexive clitic pronoun coreferential with the subject, some of which have been argued to evidence the grammaticalization of lexical ver into a univerbated semicopular verb (pronominal verse), meaning little more than ‘be’ in some examples, and proximate to the intransitive sense of English look in other cases. We trace the evolution of these constructions in data spanning the history of the Spanish language, from its recorded beginnings to the present. We establish the need to distinguish two constructional sources of change, namely, an old middle-reflexive and a younger reflexive passive. We draw attention to the “renewal” of the Latin deponent videri ‘appear, look, seem’, which can be said to have taken place in Spanish as a product of the passive-derived process of grammaticalization undergone by ver. And throughout the paper we address problems of analyzability, attributable to the superficially identical strings of words that characterize the constructional patterns with a reflexive morpheme.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11010012

Authors: Despoina Tosounidou Marina Terkourafi

While Greek EFL learners’ pragmatic competence has been frequently investigated, few studies have focused on Greek EFL teachers’ pragmatic knowledge. Complementing these earlier studies based on semi-structured interviews, we employed an extended online questionnaire and discourse completion tasks (DCTs) to explore the pragmatic competence of 72 Greek EFL teachers. Pragmatic comprehension was evaluated using scenarios that required participants to assess speech acts, while their ability to produce pragmatically appropriate responses was also assessed. Likert-scale items explored teachers’ perceptions about L2 instruction and their own abilities in this regard. Findings suggest that Greek EFL teachers possess an above average level of pragmatic competence, which nevertheless has not led to them systematically integrating L2 pragmatics instruction in their classrooms. Additional qualitative data collected through semi-structured interviews suggest that teachers’ lack of integration of explicit pragmatics instruction is not due to their not recognizing its importance, but rather to feeling inadequately prepared to implement this, which in turn points to the lack of emphasis on L2 pragmatics in teacher education programs. We catalog the most significant challenges in incorporating L2 pragmatics instruction in Greek EFL classrooms in terms of teacher and learner factors, as well as the Greek EFL context itself.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11010010

Authors: Miwa Isobe Reiko Okabe

The present study investigates Japanese-speaking children’s interpretation of verb-echo answers (VEAs) to yes/no questions. Previous syntactic research suggests that VEAs are derived via ellipsis, with Japanese VEAs specifically analyzed as being derived by TP ellipsis involving verb movement. This study assumes that parameter settings for pro-drop and verb movement are prerequisites, and that the knowledge of both the possibility of VEAs being answers to questions with existential indefinite subjects and the possibility of the adverb-inclusive interpretation are required for acquiring Japanese VEAs. We conducted a series of three experiments with 4- to 6-year-olds acquiring Japanese to test whether they have knowledge of these factors relevant to Japanese VEAs. The results of the experiments indicate that most children correctly assigned adult-like interpretations to VEAs for questions involving existential indefinite subjects and adverbs. These findings support the hypothesis that children’s VEAs in Japanese are derived through verb movement and TP ellipsis, and suggest that parameters for pro-drop and verb movement, together with evidence regarding the possibility of VEAs to questions with existential indefinite subjects and the possibility of the adverb-inclusive reading, may determine the adult-like interpretation of Japanese VEAs.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11010009

Authors: Pavel Ozerov Maria Khachaturyan

This study, based on naturalistic discourse in Mano and on both morphosyntactic and prosodic characteristics, analyses the Mano constructions formed with the marker lɛ́, including the identifying construction, referent introduction, focus, relativization, and hanging topic. While the identifying construction can be treated as a separate predication, and lɛ́ within it as a predicator, in all the other constructions lɛ́ does not have a predicative function. For Mano lɛ́, we suggest an invariant function instead, that of attention shift. Depending on both the structural and the pragmatic grounds, attention shift can be interpreted as having a predicative or a non-predicative function. We finally suggest that mapping recurrent constructions on interactants’ actions requires no definition of the notion of “clausehood”: NP-based constructions can be deployed for performing a communicatively self-sufficient action of an attention shift. This would present them as “clausal” in a speech-act-based analysis, and non-clausal from the perspective that defines clauses as subject–predicate structures—but this question does not arise in our approach that links syntactic structures to communicative action. The analysis is nested in the approach to polysemy as a “family of constructions” and to information structure as diverse interpretive effects, rather than a closed set of discrete universal categories.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11010008

Authors: Virginia Hill Monica Alexandrina Irimia

This paper revisits the diachronic changes to Romanian DOM by focusing on the emergence of the DOM particle pe: the prenominal preposition pe is shown to undergo loss of analyzability when (i) the adjacent noun phrase is the direct object of the verb; and (ii) pe-DP falls under a certain pragmatic treatment. In other contexts, pe continues as a preposition. Loss of analyzability entails modification of the feature bundle associated with pe, as well as chunking and sensitivity of pe-noun phrases to discourse related priming factors. Briefly, the chunk consisting of two segments (i.e., prepositional phrase and nominal phrase: PP > DP) is gradually reduced to one segment (i.e., DP). This transition is context dependent; that is, it intensifies when the DPs receive a reading that involves discourse salience and animacy. The loss of analyzability regarding the properties of pe and the structural consequences it implied provide the basis for assessing the advent of animacy and definiteness/specificity as priming factors for DOM in Modern Romanian.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11010007

Authors: Javier Cañas Maria Andria María-Luz Celaya

This study explores how Spanish/Catalan bilinguals acquire requests in Greek as a Foreign Language (FL), focusing on the role of proficiency in different communicative contexts. Fifty-four learners of Greek from different proficiency levels and fifty-three native Greek speakers participated in this study. Data was collected via role plays featuring varied social parameters (+/−Power, +/−Social Distance, +/−Imposition). Retrospective verbal reports were also employed to gain insights into learners’ use of requests, providing an overall view of their self-perceptions and pragmatic concerns across different proficiency levels. The findings revealed differences between native and non-native speakers in request types and the number of modifications, highlighting that increased proficiency does not necessarily result in target-like pragmatic performance. Additionally, social parameters clearly influenced learners’ requesting behavior, although their ability to interpret and appropriately respond to these variables developed inconsistently across different contexts and proficiency levels. Ultimately, the findings of this study may contribute to a better understanding of L2 pragmatic development in Greek as an FL and, in turn, inform pedagogical practices aimed at enhancing learners’ pragmatic competence.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11010006

Authors: Sarah van Eyndhoven

This contribution explores transgenerational language change in a historical migrant community by qualitatively examining the correspondence of first- and second-generation Scottish immigrants coming to New Zealand in the nineteenth century. Taking a microsocial approach, the letters of a migrant family and one other migrant are explored for language maintenance and shift, to identify whether Scots language features were lost altogether or continued to be utilised for specific social, personal and stylistic goals, despite the English-dominant space that the migrants operated in. In tandem, the adoption of early New Zealand English (NZE) and te reo Māori lexis is analysed, to identify differences in usage patterns that might point to different degrees of integration and mobility. Finally, inter-writer and inter-generational differences are examined in relation to the mobility and social networks of the correspondents, to consider how this might contribute to any variation observed. For the investigation, manuscript letters were digitised, and relevant features identified, extracted and discursively analysed. Results show the continuation of heritage features through a combination of style-oriented goals and learned letter-writing practices, while the adoption of new lexis is shown to occur within specific semantic domains that reflect the social mobility of the migrants. However, language maintenance and shift are not uniform between the writers, elucidating the highly variable experiences of migrants, even within the same family. Rather, contact-induced language changes are sensitive to minute differences across individuals, underpinning the value of nuanced explorations of historical migration and language change.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11010005

Authors: Hana Filip

This paper advances two main theses: The first overarching thesis is that the Slavic perfective/imperfective distinction is predominantly of a lexical-derivational nature. Among the categories of the tense–modality–aspect (TMA) system, Slavic aspect systems represent marginal categories, rather than core ones, which are realized by means of inflectional morphology. The second, and related, thesis concerns the status of Slavic verb prefixes in Slavic aspect systems, given that prefixed verbs constitute the bulk of their perfective verbs. I will provide some arguments, also defended elsewhere, that Slavic verb prefixes are not perfective markers, e.g., do not spell out a functional head/feature in the dedicated aspect structure, as is often assumed in syntactic theories of aspect, and neither do they carry a uniform semantic function for the interpretation of perfective aspect. Instead, Slavic verb prefixes are best treated as separate from perfectivity, on both formal and semantic grounds. This separation, however, does not mean that the two are unrelated. Here, the semantics of perfectivity is represented by means of the maximalization operator (maxe). The most fundamental requirement for its application, and for any maximalization operator for that matter, is that it respect some ordering criterion. It is the role of Slavic verb prefixes to contribute to its specification. They do so by virtue of having common uses/meanings that can be analyzed as extensive or intensive measure functions or vague quantifiers over arguments of verbs to which they are attached. Such meanings are reducible to a uniform scalar-based representation, from which the requisite ordering criterion can be extracted.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11010004

Authors: Joseph Garcia Khaled Al Masaeed

Morocco has recently been cited by the Institute of International Education as a leading destination for Arabic study abroad. However, research has shown that ideologies of language purism and unintelligibility position Eastern varieties of Arabic as more prestigious than Western. Yet, how these beliefs affect learners studying abroad remains an understudied topic, with few studies specifically investigating learners going to Morocco. This study utilizes language learning questionnaires and one-on-one interviews to explore learner beliefs about varieties of Arabic, with particular focus on Moroccan Arabic. Specifically, it looks at four advanced L2 Arabic learners who just started their one-year-long study abroad sojourn in Morocco. Findings show that due to negative stereotypes and misconceptions from native speakers, instructors, and colleagues, learners reported not wanting to learn Darija, the Moroccan variety of Arabic, before studying abroad. However, due to the immediate need of studying and living in Morocco, participants gained interest in Darija and started challenging stereotypes and misconceptions related to this variety of Arabic. These findings highlight the impact of standard language ideology and prestige on learners’ beliefs about what language varieties to study, and how these beliefs may change once learners prepare to and go abroad. Findings from this study support pedagogical and research suggestions to prepare learners for the sociolinguistic realities of the Arabic-speaking world, including critical awareness of ideologies and developing agency in dialect choice.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11010003

Authors: Nuola Yan Sumittra Suraratdecha Chingduang Yurayong

This study examines lexical and syntactic convergence between Dai Lue and Chinese in the multilingual environment of Sipsongpanna, employing an apparent-time approach across three generational cohorts (N = 90, balanced gender). Through mixed-methods analysis (structured questionnaires and semi-structured interviews), significant diachronic variation was observed. Younger speakers exhibited pronounced convergence, adopting Chinese-derived syntactic patterns (e.g., prenominal quantifiers and preverbal adjunct phrases) and borrowing Chinese lexical elements (e.g., an adverb sɛn55 ‘first’ ← Chinese 先 xiān, and a superlative marker tsui35 ‘most/best’ ← Chinese 最 zuì). Middle-aged speakers use transitional hybrid structures, while older speakers more consistently maintain native Dai Lue features. The results conform with Labov’s age-grading model in contact linguistics and refine Thomason’s borrowing hierarchy by revealing two factors: First, the prestige of the Chinese language drives convergence among youth. Second, syntactic compatibility with Chinese is mediated not merely by language structure, but by discourse-pragmatic needs, functional load redistribution, and the social indexicality of borrowed structures. This underscores the interplay between sociolinguistic motivations and structural-adaptive constraints in language change. The findings provide critical insights into language contact mechanisms among ethnic minorities of China, with implications for sociolinguistic theory, language revitalization efforts, and bilingual education policy implementation in linguistically diverse communities.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11010002

Authors: Clara Pinto

In Contemporary Portuguese, jamais ‘never’ is a negative indefinite that encodes temporal semantics and belongs to the set of strong Negative Polarity Items, being able to express negation on its own, in preverbal position. However, it originates from the merger of two non-negative Latin adverbs—iam ‘now/already’ and magis ‘more’—starting as a construction and later becoming an independent lexical unit, with different features. Data from the 13th century onwards shows that, in early attestations, jamais still preserved some level of internal syntactic analyzability, with the possibility of inverse word order and interpolation. The meaning of the construction could be obtained through the sum of its parts, but its occurrence in negative and modal contexts shows that its interpretation became context-sensitive. This independence was eventually lost, with the emergence of an intrinsic negative reading, favoured in negative contexts through the combination of inchoative and comparative strategies in no-longer expressions.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11010001

Authors: Iván Andreu Rascón

This study examined how variability in phonetic training input (high vs. low) influences the perception and acquisition of Spanish stop consonants by English-speaking beginners. A total of 128 participants completed 20 online identification sessions targeting /p, t, k, b, d, g/. In the high-variability condition (HVPT), learners heard tokens from six speakers, and in the low-variability condition (LVPT), all input came from a single speaker. Training followed an interleaved-talker design with immediate feedback, and perceptual learning was evaluated using a Bayesian hierarchical logistic regression analysis. Results showed improvement across sessions for both groups, with identification accuracy reaching ceiling by the end of the training sessions. Differences between HVPT and LVPT were small: LVPT showed steeper categorization trajectories in some cases due to slightly lower baselines, but neither condition yielded a measurable advantage. The pattern observed suggests that for boundary-shift contrasts such as Spanish stops, perceptual improvements are driven primarily by input quantity rather than variability. This interpretation aligns with input-based models of L2 speech learning (SLM-r, L2LP) and underscores the role of repeated exposure in restructuring phonological categories.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages10120305

Authors: Svetlozara Leseva Ivelina Stoyanova

This article presents ongoing work on the aspectual properties of verb predicates, in particular, the classes of activities and accomplishments. Herein, we focus on incremental theme predicates, starting with consumption verbs as one of the representative subclasses of incremental accomplishments. We explore, in detail, the semantic, referential, quantisation and morphosyntactic properties of incremental Themes and their realisation in Bulgarian. The analysis is based on original empirical data and enabled us to identify the common features shared with widely studied languages such as English and Russian, as well as to establish language-specific features typical for Bulgarian. We hope that our findings may contribute to the study of aspectual classes in a cross-linguistic perspective.