ABSTRACT. Across cultures, authors use a variety of linguistic strategies to evaluate the knowledge obtained, either first-hand or second-hand, and express their stance towards it. Based on a corpus of 34 linguistic research articles written in three languages – English, Serbian and German – by native speakers, the aim of this study is to investigate how authors use knowledge-evaluative stance markers across these three academic communities. The analysis focuses on two distinctive strategies of evaluation of knowledge obtained empirically or interpreted from an existing source: indetermination, i.e. evaluation and mitigation of author’s own claims, and reference, i.e. interpretation and judgement of the work and conclusions of other authors. This data-based but category-inspired analysis was conducted through MAXQDA – a software tool for qualitative and quantitative text analysis. Initially obtained results revealed notable quantitative differences in the use of these markers, as both the strategy of indetermination and of reference are used most frequently in English and least frequently in Serbian, indicating that authors writing in English, as opposed to Serbian, tend to be more tentative in both the evaluations of their obtained results, and to those of other authors. However, these differences are not so syntactically varied, as both in English and German, the authors rely on modal and epistemic expressions in both strategies; in Serbian, modal expressions are dominant in the strategy of indetermination, but qualification and comparison of previous work is at the centre of the strategy of reference. These differences are further elaborated by a qualitative analysis of contextual factors which can impact the use of these strategies to reveal significant cross-cultural implications and enhance mutual understanding in future academic discourse.

References:

1. Baratta, A. M. (2009). Revealing stance through passive voice. Journal of Pragmatics, 41, 1406–1421. 2. Markkanen, R., & Schröder, H. (Eds.). (1997). Hedging and Discourse: Approaches to the Analysis of a Pragmatic Phenomenon in Academic Texts. De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin. 3. Martín-Martín, P. (2008). The Mitigation of Scientific Claims in Research Papers: A Comparative Study. International Journal of English Studies, 8 (2), 133–152.

ABSTRACT. In sociolinguistic literature, copy-editors are considered as enforcers of a language standard (Riley, 2007, p. 235) or creators of such a standard (Joseph, 1987, p. 115). They are responsible for, among other things, ensuring that language of a text corresponds with a set of language norms. In English and American publishing houses this usually means following a style guide, selected or produced by the publishing house that employs the copy-editor (Cameron, 1995). The situation in Lithuania is different: until recently the publishing houses have been legally obliged to adhere to the norms established by the Lithuanian language commission, which has put additional pressure on copy-editors to enforce the language standard.

This has led to conflicts between copy-editors and authors, as is evident from public discourse, where authors refer to their editing experience as “fighting for my word” or compare it with censorship. Employing Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic power (1979/1984; 1991; 1996) and Michel Foucault’s theory of power/knowledge (1975/1995; 1976/1978), in this paper I will analyse why these conflicts occur and how they are mitigated or avoided in the Lithuanian field of language standardization, based on qualitative interviews with 16 authors, 21 copy-editor and 4 people who are both authors and copy-editors.

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Richard Nice, Trans.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press (Original work published in 1979).

Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and Symbolic Power (Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson, Trans.). Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1996). The Rules of Art. Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Susan Emanuel, Trans.). Stanford: Stanford University Press (Original work published in 1992).

Cameron, D. (1995). Verbal Hygiene. London: Routledge.

Foucault, M. (1978). The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction. (R. Hurley, Trans.) New York: Pantheon Books (Original work published in 1976).

Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. (A. Sheridan, Trans.) New York: Vintage (Original work published in 1975).

Joseph, J. E. (1987). Eloquence and Power: The Rise of Language Standards and Standard Languages. London: Frances Pinter.

Riley, P. (2007). Language, culture and identity. London, New York: Continuum.

ABSTRACT. Standardizing language has an impact on language usage (Milroy, 2001: 535). It also influences attitudes towards language use, including L1 users’ perception of their own language usage (Garrett, 2010). This can also be linked to the concept of linguistic insecurity (e.g. Labov, 1977), which was the impulse for the survey this poster is based on.

In Estonia, the beginning of the 20th century brought the need for standardizing the Estonian language because most Estonians spoke their local vernacular (Plado, 2022: 1092). However, since the late 1970s Standard Estonian has been in the modernization phase (cf. Ferguson, 1968) and strict standardization is not justified anymore in the 21st century. Contemporary linguists have argued that the closer the standards ‘from above’ are to actual language use, the less language users need to learn the rules by heart and then language functions more efficiently (Päll, 2019).

However, some Estonian L1 users perceive strict Standard Estonian as ‘better’ or ‘more correct’ than actual language use. This poster is based on the data from an online survey regarding L1 users’ language attitudes carried out in December 2022. There were 668 participants with an average age of 48 years. The analysis is both qualitative and quantitative. Our poster will shed light on the results analyzed quantitatively. These results can be linked to the phenomenon of linguistic insecurity.

References Ferguson, C. A. 1968. Language Development. Language Problems of Developing Nations. J. A. Fishman, C. A. Ferguson, J. Das Gupta (eds.). New York, London, Sydney, Toronto: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 27–35. Garrett, P. 2010. Attitudes to Language (Key Topics in Sociolinguistics). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Labov, W. 1977. Sociolinguistic patterns. Conduct and Communication No. 4. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. Milroy, J. 2001. Language Ideologies and the Consequences of Standardization. Journal of Sociolinguistics 5(4), 530–555. Plado, H. 2022. Rahvakeelsus XX sajandi alguskümnendite Eesti keelekorralduses. (Vaateid eesti keelekorralduse arenguloole.) Keel ja Kirjandus 12, 1075–1092. Päll, P. 2019. Pilk eesti kirjakeele korraldamise sajandile ja tänapäevale. Keel ja Kirjandus 1–2, 107−111.

ABSTRACT. After the turn of the millennium, empirical sciences attested themselves with the replication crisis. For example, Ioannidis (2005, p. 1) reported that in the medical sciences, “it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true”. Similarly, the Open Science Collaboration found that only half of the findings in psychological studies were replicated. With an increasing use of quantitative methods in linguistics, voices that address the replication crisis in this field too have gotten louder in recent years (Sönnig & Werner, 2021). For example, Kobrock and Roettger (2022) have found that independent direct replications are extremely rare (only 1 in 1600 experimental studies is directly replicated). The lack of replication in linguistics may be attributable to many different reasons such as publication bias, context-sensitivity, and the urge for originality. But most importantly: How can we overcome the replication crisis? Quintana (2021) among others has proposed a solution: letting university students contribute by way of replication. Student theses offer a particularly useful platform for replication: First, unlike senior researchers who might feel coerced to work in accordance with current publishing practices following publication and funding demands, students may be more inclined to challenge institutionalized practices. Second, since writing a thesis is a common requirement for the completion of one’s studies, doing replication provides students with a research design plan in the form of a published study. By the end of their work, a student will have the chance to submit a thesis that adheres to principles of scientific rigor and that contributes to the respective field in a meaningful way, e.g., start a discussion about non-replicated findings. Following these ideas, we present STReNeL – the Student Theses Replication Network Linguistics. Creating a collaborative network and educating fellow young researchers, we aim to achieve better and more reliable scientific advances by creating solutions to the urgent replication crisis.

References Ioannidis (2005). PLoS Medicine 2(8). Kobrock & Roettger (2022): Assessing the replication landscape in experimental linguistics. Open Science Collaboration (2015). Science. Quintana (2021). Nature Human Behaviour 5(9). Sönning & Werner (2021). Linguistics 59(5).

ABSTRACT. Talysh is a language of an ethnic group that forms a significant minority in Azerbaijan. The precise number of speakers has still not been established. The transmission of linguistic knowledge and skills between successive generations is an important process for the maintenance and development of a language and culture. Detailed studies of individual families can reveal difficulties and challenges of this process (cf. Chessa, 2010). This paper reports on a multilingual family of Talysh origin in Azerbaijan, where Talysh is used by the elder and middle generation alongside Azerbaijani and/or Russian. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with family members representing four generations (1st - born between 1946 to 1964; 2nd – 1965-1980; 3rd -1981-1996; 4th – 1997-2012). In this family, transmission of Talysh was mainly interrupted after the 1990s. The participants were divided into two groups: those who know or knew the Talysh language to some extent, and those who do not. Questions discussed in the interviews include the importance of Talysh identity and the Talysh language in a person's life, preferences of language use in various situations, and motives behind language choice. Questions for each generation differed slightly. The main obstacles for maintaining Talysh as a language within the family among others were limited opportunities of communicating in the Talysh language (middle generation) and limited exposure to the language (younger generations). The results confirm findings of prior studies (e.g. Clifton 2005; 2008). In addition, the study also revealed the importance of individual factors and psychological reasons, which however were often not pronounced during the interviews but in informal conversations preceding or following the interviews. These findings may provide input for the development of further methods in family policy research as well as for language maintenance.

References: Chessa, E. (2012). Another case of language death? : The intergenerational transmission of Catalan in Alghero. Clifton, John M. (2008) Do the Talysh and Tat languages have a future in Azerbaijan?  Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session: Vol. 49, Article 2. Clifton, John M. (2005) Sociolinguistic situation of the Talysh in Azerbaijan. SIL International

ABSTRACT. In this poster we plan to report the results of our project in which we investigate how enjoyable the experience of reading literary texts translated from English into Polish is for readers with different levels of bilingual proficiency. We assume that enjoyable reading experience is fluent, i.e. does not require excessive cognitive effort and allows for narrative engagement with the text. We use a mixed-method approach: combining an eye-tracking study with short, retrospective interviews and several questionnaires — including Language History Questionnaire (Li et al. 2019) and the empathic-sensitiveness scale (Kaźmierczak et al. 2007). We invited participants who being native speakers of Polish represent three levels of proficiency in English: intermediate, advanced and advanced combined with translation training programme. All participants read 3 translated excerpts from popular literature, and a fragment originally written in Polish (ca. 400 words) on a computer screen with an eye-tracker EyeLink 1000 plus. We collected objective data concerning the fluency of reading, including gaze time, total fixation duration, and refixations (Hyona 2011; Rayner and Liversedge 2011), and inquired about their subjective assessment of the narrative engagement with all texts. We later on compared the eye-movement data using the original fragment as the baseline to judge whether the differences in reading patterns between the three groups are modulated by their level of proficiency in English – the language from which the texts were translated. The results allow us to test our prediction that participants highly proficient in English and with experience in translation will be disrupted by disfluencies in translated texts more than advanced language students and much more than students with intermediate level of English. This mixed-method approach is innovative and contributes to the under-researched area of translation reception studies.

The research reported in this poster is financed by a grant from National Science Centre Poland (UMO – 2020/39/B/HS2/00697) and Initiative of Excellence Research University study@research 049/34/UAM/0014).

ABSTRACT. Verbal irony is often described as saying the opposite of what is meant (e.g. Averbeck, 2013). It is used in around 8% of statements uttered during the conversation with friends (Gibbs, 2000). Many individual differences were linked to irony use and understanding, e.g. personality and humor-related traits (for overview see Kałowski et al., accepted for publication). However, many areas still remain understudied. For example, need for cognitive closure (Webster, Kruglanski, 1994) which is linked to information processing and others’ perspective taking. The main aim of this study is to explore the relation between need for cognitive closure, and irony use and understanding. It is conducted in two parts. First, using questionnaires: Need for Cognitive Closure Scale in Polish adaptation (NFC, Kossowska, Hanusz, Trejtowicz, 2012, Webster, Kruglanski, 1994), and Sarcasm Self-Report Scale (SSS, Ivanko, Pexman, Olineck, 2004). Second, using the NFC Scale, and authors’ tool based on short ironic vignettes. Both parts will be conducted on-line, using Qualtrics platform. Participants aged 20-60 will be recruited via social media advertisement. It is hypothesized that need for cognitive closure (especially closed-mindedness subscale) will be negatively related to verbal irony use. First part of the study was already conducted. 106 participants (66 women, 36 men, 4 non-binary) aged 20-53 (M = 27.9) took part in the study. R-Pearson correlation analysis for need for cognitive closure and self-report irony use was conducted. Correlations between predictability preference (NFC subscale) and frustration diffusion irony (SSS subscale) (R = [.07]; [.44]) and between closed-mindedness and embarrassment diffusion (SSS subscale) (R = [-.36]; [-.01]) were significant. The direction of correlation between predictability and frustration diffusion irony is contrary to expectations – self-reported irony use was higher when preference of predictability was higher. The results showed the need for further investigation in the area of relation between cognitive functioning and irony use and understanding.

ABSTRACT. The colonial presence of Spanish in Mexico has influenced the grammar of Nahuatl (Uto-Aztecan), a polysynthetic Mesoamerican language. Nahuatl today has undergone a major structural shift in expressing abstract and spatial relations, moving from incorporation and affixation to Spanish-like prepositions (Hill & Hill 2004). The use of prepositional structures in lieu of classical polysynthetic constructions is diagnostic of large-scale language change via contact, as well as the shift in dominance of Nahuatl-Spanish bilinguals from their mother tongue to Spanish. This study looks at the Nahuatl preposition tlen, whose meaning overlaps that of Spanish de. Tlen is apt to signal Possession, Material, and Source, relations formerly expressed solely through incorporation or affixation in Nahuatl (Hober 2019, Takhtaganova 2021).

(1) a. Material nopa saka-kali b. tlen sakatl nopa itsontsajka this straw-house of straw this roof ‘This house of straw’ ‘This roof is (made) of straw’

(2) a. Source/Origin San se toneljuayo tlen san se ojtli. only one root of only one path ‘A single root from a single path.’

b. Possession inin-chan tlen no-nana i-uikaljuaj 3pl.pos-house of 1sg.pos-mother 3sg.pos-relatives ‘The house of the family of my mother.’

I also argue that prefixation, incorporation, and the use of tlen are in complementary distribution determined by information structure. Tlen is used when its complement expresses new information specifically, while prefixation and incorporation express given information. Stylistic contrasts signalling dependencies offer insight to conscious changes in grammatical structures brought about by colonial language contact.

Bibliography Beller P, and Beller, R. (1979). Studies in Uto-Aztecan Grammar. In R. W. Langacker (ed.), The Summer Institute of Linguistics Publications in Linguistics 56 (2). Hober, N. (2019). On the Intrusion of the Spanish Preposition de into the Languages of Mexico. In the Journal of Language Contact, 660-706. MacSwan, J. (1997). A minimalist approach to intrasentential code switching: Spanish-Nahuatl bilingualism in Central Mexico. Ph.D. Dissertation, UCLA. Takhtaganova, N. (2021). La diachronie des adpositions nahuatls en contact avec l’espagnol. Presentation given at TOMILLA 3 at the University of Ottawa on December 04, 2021. Suárez, J. A. (2007 [1983]). The Mesoamerican Indian languages. Cambridge: Cam¬bridge University Press.

ABSTRACT. This paper discusses novel phonological generalisations from Upper Sorbian (US; Schuster-Šewc 1996), a minority Slavic language spoken in Eastern Germany. Specifically, it is shown that US obeys the Sonority Sequencing Generalisation (SSG), a constraint on syllable structure that regulates permissible syllable margins. However, there are some complications, which are amended by Final Adjunction that links SSG violators directly under the Prosodic Word. Consider the data in (1). Dots indicate syllable boundaries.

(1) a. do.bry ‘good’ b. kar.ta ‘card’ kra.sny ‘red’ kar.tel ‘cartel’

The words in (1a) show that US maximises onsets: sequences of VCCV are syllabified as V.CCV. This is contradicted in (1b), where r is in the coda rather than the onset: kar.ta rather than *ka.rta ‘card’. I conclude that the SSG is active in US because only the SSG can explain the lack of onset maximisation in (1b). Now consider the data in (2). The grammar has no syllabic consonants.

(2) bobr ‘beaver’, zubr ‘European bison’, wětr ‘wind’, jasotr ‘sturgeon’

The data in (2) show that the SSG is violated in US, however, only word-finally. Thus, we need to construct a grammar that respects the SSG in principle but allows for its violation word-finally. To this end, I posit the following rule.

(3) Final Adjunction: adjoin C* to Prosodic Word

The analysis of bobr ‘beaver’ runs as follows. The SSG marks the r of bobr as extrasyllabic. To save this r from deletion, Final Adjunction links it under the Prosodic Word. Thus, informally, adjunction is a way to circumvent the requirements imposed by the SSG. This paper proposes a formal analysis of the discussed generalisations couched in Optimality Theory.

REFERENCES Jocz, Lechosław. 2011. Wokalowy system hornjoserbskeje rěče přitomnosće. Szczecin: Volumina. Rubach, Jerzy. 2022. Onset conspiracy in Upper Sorbian. J. Linguistics (online): 1–45. Schuster-Šewc, Hinc. 1968. Gramatika hornjoserbskeje rěče. Bautzen: Domowina Verlag. Translated into English by Gary H. Toops as Grammar of the Upper Sorbian Language (1996). Munich: Lincom Europa.

ABSTRACT. Research on perception and production of stops, although quite popular in L2 literature, still remains rather unexplored from the perspective of third language acquisition, especially regarding the relation between the two modalities. Previous data on stop production show that learners tend to keep their language systems separate (e.g. Geiss et al. 2021), which is particularly visible in the voiceless series, whereas in perception, there is a possibility of progressive and regressive cross-linguistic interactions (e.g. Liu et al. 2019). These results, although quite telling, come from a number of different studies attesting divergent sets of languages, which in turn, might be incomparable. Thus, the current contribution aims to address this gap while examining both perception and production of stops by trilingual speakers of the same linguistic repertoire. The main objective was to trace the patterns of categorisation of both VOT perception and production and potential correlation between them. Participants included 19 learners of L1 Polish L2 English L3 Norwegian, aged 20, who had been learning their L3 for a month. The experiment consisted of two tasks – word reading and VOT continuum categorisation, that were administered in three separate language blocks. The stimulus included both voiced /bdg/ and voiceless stops /ptk/ in word-initial position in all three languages. A Linear Mixed Model was run to see the effects of language on VOT durations in production and VOT boundary location in perception. Moreover, Pearson’s corelation was conducted to investigate whether there is a link between the two modalities. Results from both perceptual and production comparisons revealed a tendency to maintain separate language patterns, mostly prominent in the voiceless series. Moreover, no correlation was found between VOT durations in production and VOT perceptual boundary location, pointing to the possible perception-production mismatch.

References:

Geiss, M., Gumbsheimer, S., Lloyd-Smith, A., Schmid, S., & Kupisch, T. (2022). Voice Onset Time in Multilingual Speakers: Italian Heritage Speakers in Germany with L3 English. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 44(2), 435-459.

Liu, Z., Gorba, C., Cebrian, J. (2019). Effects of learning an additional language on VOT perception. Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Melbourne, 260-264.

ABSTRACT. The possibility of language contact between the Brythonic people and the Anglo-Saxons during Adventus Saxonum is generally an accepted one. However, the issue which remains is the extend of it and the influence levels. This presentation shows an approach towards language contact in respect to phonology and segment acquisition, noting the importance of adopting the uniformitarian principle in historical linguistics. The trends shown by Old English and Old/Middle Welsh are compared with the expectations on learning trends of L2 acquisition of phonology based on second language acquisition models (Best 1995, Major 2001). The conclusions cannot be defined as final but as a base for further discussion and research.

Bibliography: Best, Catherine T. 1995. “A direct realist view of cross-language speech perception” in: Winifred Strange (ed.). 1995. Speech Perception and Linguistic Experience: Issues in Cross-language Research. Baltimore: York Press, p. 171-204. Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon dictionary (http://bosworth.ff.cuni.cz/) (date of access 31.01.2023) Campbell, A. 1964. Old English grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cercignani, Fausto. 1980. “Early 'umlaut' phenomena in the Germanic languages”, in: Language, Volume 56, no. 1, p. 126-136. diPaolo Healey, Antonette (ed.). 2014. The dictionary of Old English. University of Toronto. (http://www.doe.utoronto.ca) (date of access 31.01.2023) Evans, D. Simon. 1976. A grammar of Middle Welsh. Dublin: The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Filppula, Markku, Juhani Klemola and H. Paulasto. 2008. English and Celtic in contact. New York; London: Routledge. Hansen, Jette G., Mary L. Zampini (eds.). 2008. Phonology and second language acquisition. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Hogg, Richard M. (ed.) 1992. The Cambridge history of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jackson, Kenneth. 1994 (1953). Language and history in early Britain: A chronological survey of the Brittonic languages first to twelfth century A.D. Edinburgh: University Press. Major, Roy C. 2001. Foreign accent: The ontogeny and phylogeny of second language phonology. New York and London: Psychology Press. Schrijver, Peter. 1995. Studies in British Celtic historical phonology. Amsterdam; Atlanta: Rodopi. Willis, David. 2009. “Old and Middle Welsh”, in: Martin J. Ball, Nicole Müller (eds.), The Celtic languages, 2nd edition. Taylor & Francis e-Library, p. 117-160.

ABSTRACT. Psychotypology, the individual perception of distances between languages (Kellerman 1983), has been postulated as one of the factors shaping multilingual acquisition and cross-linguistic influence across various domains of language (De Angelis 2007). Previous studies within the area of phonetics and phonology suggested that psychotypology might have a considerable influence on multilingual speech production and perception (Williams and Hammarberg, Wrembel 2015). Despite its explanatory potential, psychotypology was more frequently assumed rather than quantified and correlated with phonological data.

To investigate the relationship between psychotypology and multilingual acquisition of speech, the current study adopted the latter approach. The participants were 20 adolescent emergent sequential multilinguals, native speakers of Polish, acquiring their L2 (English) and L3 (German) in the context of formal education. Their psychotypology was assessed through ViLDiM (Nelson et al. 2021). Their rhotic realisations were obtained in the delayed repetition tasks in L2 and L3 and rated by a group of trained raters in relation to target-like L2 and L3 production. The participants were tested three times throughout one school year.

The perceived language distances were correlated with the L2 and L3 rhotic production accuracy. In testing session 1, there was no statistically significant relationship between psychotypology and the accuracy of L2 and L3 rhotics, however, some meaningful interactions were observed on the individual basis. The data collected in the remaining testing sessions will be analysed and discussed in relation to testing session 1, with a focus on individual differences.

De Angelis, G. (2007). Third or additional language acquisition. Clevendon: Multilingual Matters Ltd.

Kellerman, E. (1983). Now you see it, now you don’t. In S. Gass & L. Selinker (Eds.), Language transfer in language learning. Newbury House, , 112–134.

Nelson, C., Krzysik, I., Lewandowska, H. & Wrembel, M. (2021). “Multilingual learners’ perceptions of cross-linguistic distances: a proposal for a visual psychotypological measure”, Language Awareness 30, 2: 176-194.

Williams, S., Hammarberg, B. (1998). Language switches in L3 production: Implications for a polyglot speaking model, Applied Linguistics, 19: 295-333.

Wrembel, M. (2015). In search of a new perspective: Cross-linguistic influence in the acquisition of third language phonology. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM.

ABSTRACT. Though much attention has been devoted to employing electroencephalography (EEG) in order to examine synthesized (Arndt, 2013; Maki, 2018) and emotional speech processing (Grass, 2016), those two research questions have never been examined in one experimental setting, and have not been addressed in the bilingual context. Here, we investigate electrophysiological correlates of taboo- and neutral word processing in the first (L1) and second (L2) language presented as either natural or synthesized speech. Thirty Polish-English unbalanced bilinguals were auditorily presented with 144 words in Polish (L1) and English (L2): 72 taboo and 72 neutral words, all of which were presented twice: in the synthesized and in the natural speech. Participants performed a binary decision task, whereby they decided whether the word was presented in the natural or synthesized speech. Our preliminary data analysis based on 15 participants shows a more pronounced early posterior negativity (EPN) response to natural than synthesized speech (p = .001). This may suggest that at the stage of early lexical encoding, participants were more cognitively engaged when listening to natural compared to synthesized speech processing irrespective of the language in which the speech was presented or word status (taboo vs. neutral).

References. Arndt, J. i in. (2013). Analyzing Speech Quality Perception using Electroencephalography. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, 6(6): 721-731; Grass, A., Bayer, M., & Schacht, A. (2016). Electrophysiological Correlates of Emotional Content and Volume Level in Spoken Word Processing. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 10, 326; Maki, H. i in. (2018). Quality prediction of synthesized speech based on tensor structured EEG signals. PLoS One, 13(6): e0193521.

ABSTRACT. The present article aims to explore the potentials and the limitations of corpus-linguistics, as derived from two comprehensive corpus-based studies on Romanian literature. Albeit the focus of such a study may seem limiting, it actually reveals general conclusions and applications for all languages. Building on these considerations, the article is divided into three parts: the first part is theory-based and the other two parts present the conclusions, the methodology and the possibilities of a corpus-based study. The first study presented in this article is based on a rather abundant corpus, as shown by the data extracted from the Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel (a nearly comprehensive corpus comprising 1,227 Romanian novels published between 1845 and 1947: https://revistatransilvania.ro/mdrr/). Such an abundant corpus reveals its potentials in the various fields of study that can be and has been analyzed, such as the evolution of language in time and the particularities of language based on the origin, education and interaction between the characters. On the other hand, the limitations of such a study are related to the huge amount of time involved in the process of digitalization and annotations and the required human resource. On the contrary, the second study described in this article is based on a relatively restricted, but more specific corpus of texts, comprising all the short stories of the Four Great Romanian Classics. Based on this corpus, we have described the mechanisms of language and the phenomenon of parentheticals/ extra-sentential elements, with the help of computational linguistics. This branch of linguistics proved to be of use in the study of syntax and in times of crisis it is one of the beginning points for all kinds of discourse analysis. The findings of this article highlight the functional pluralism of corpus linguistics, which brings together numerous linguistic, psychological, social, literary, and cultural roles.

ABSTRACT. A foreign language is one of the compulsory subjects taught from the first year of primary school and English is chosen as the leading foreign language by almost 97% of students (CKE, 2021). In accordance with the assumptions of inclusive education, students with special educational needs (SEN) attend classes in mainstream schools. Hence, foreign language (L2) classrooms in Poland are usually large and mixed-ability, meaning that students with SEN often participate in lessons attended by students with higher-level language skills. In order to enable pupils with special educational needs to succeed in their education the Ministry of Education and Science provides them with numerous possible adaptations of educational requirements (MEN, 2017). The topic of teaching a foreign language to students with special educational needs is particularly important due to the growing number of students with learning difficulties, and the lack of formal support for language teachers, who are fully responsible for adjusting the teaching procedures to the needs of students with SEN. One of the methods of facilitating SEN students with effective language learning is to introduce them to autonomous work using learning strategies. The purpose of the presentation is to discuss the results of the study aimed at examining what strategies for learning foreign language grammar are used by students with special educational needs in a public primary school. It was carried out among 63 students of whom 24 were diagnosed with special educational needs. Questionnaire findings demonstrated to which extent the aforementioned students apply grammar learning strategies. The analysis of the gathered data also revealed which strategies are and which are not frequently used by students with special educational needs. The speech will close with pedagogical implications and directions for future research.

Resources: CKE, 2021. Sprawozdanie za rok 2021, Egzamin ósmoklasisty, Warszawa: Centralna Komisja Egzaminacyjna. MEN, 2017. Rozporządzenie Ministra Edukacji Narodowej z dnia 28 sierpnia 2017r. zmieniające rozporządzenie w sprawie zasad udzielania i organizacji pomocy psychologiczno-pedagogicznej w publicznych przedszkolach, szkołach i placówkach (Dz. U. poz. 1643). Warszawa: Dziennik Ustaw Rzeczpospolitej Polskiej.

ABSTRACT. Many speakers of Azerbaijani are also fluent in another language such as Russian and Turkish, which leads to frequent daily code-switching as well as on social media. However, while being an extensively studied phenomenon, code-switching has received little attention in the context of Azerbaijan, which is the topic of this paper. The following example illustrates how an Azerbaijani speaker can effortlessly produce code-switching in less than three seconds:

Utterance |девочки привет (0.5) mənim bir az başım qarışıqdır Free Translation|Hi, girls! I'm a little preoccupied. Time |00:00:00.000

Utterance |работаю поэтому girəmməmişəm (.) не отвечала Free Translation|I'm working, for this reason I haven't been able to enter. I wasn't answering. Time |00:00:02.477

The research aims to identify the types of code-switching, as categorised by Shana Poplack (1980), and find out which type is the most frequent. In addition to code-switching, several other language contact phenomena occur in the data such as borrowing, nonce borrowing, language mixing and loan translation. A further aim of this research is to distinguish code-switching from such phenomena. The Matrix Language Frame Model proposed by Carol Myers-Scotton (1992) and the borrowing dimension theory by Yaron Matras (2009) are used to differentiate code-switching from borrowing. The growing collection of empirical data consists of 93 WhatsApp voice messages gathered from 14 Azerbaijani female participants, code-switching mostly into Russian. The recordings have been transcribed, translated and annotated and the types of code-switching and other phenomena have been identified and labelled using the annotation tool ELAN. Preliminary analysis confirms the research on the matter (e.g., Gardner-Chloros, 2020) that making a distinction between code-switching and loan words is difficult as there is no reliable method.

References: Matras, Y. (2009). Language contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Myers-Scotton, C. (1992). Comparing codeswitching and borrowing. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 13(1-2), 19-39. Poplack, S. (1980). Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in Spanish Y TERMINO EN ESPAÑOL: toward a typology of code-switching1. , 18(7-8), 581-618. Gardner-Chloros, P. (2020). Contact and Code-Switching. In The Handbook of Language Contact (pp. 181–199). John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

ABSTRACT. Besides being an extremely useful tool for communication, language also shapes our social world: it defines our socio-cultural identity and modulates social cognition. Language affects how we perceive others and how we divide them into social categories. Often, the language-driven social biases are due to accent; dozens of studies from a variety of linguistic backgrounds have found that talkers with foreign or non-local accents may be perceived as less competent, less trustworthy, or less friendly, regardless of the talker's actual competence or characteristics (e.g. Hosoda & Stone Romero, 2010, JMP, pp. 113–132), and the bias against talkers with non-native or unfamiliar accents starts to occur early in infancy (Kinzler et al. 2007, PNAS, pp. 2577–2580). These language-based biases against non-nativeness in speech cause various socio-cultural stereotypes towards accented talkers that vary across different language communities (resulting in some accents being more acceptable or prestigious than others). In this talk, we will first review how language-based social stereotypes develop in early childhood, and will show how multilingualism and exposure to other languages or language varieties can mitigate or reinforce these attitudes (Paquette-Smith et al., 2019, DevPsy, pp. 809–822; Byers-Heinlein et al., 2017, DevSci, 10.1111/desc.12392). Then we will present two experimental studies within the Czech-speaking community that examined (1) the relationship between regional accent and friendship preferences in children acquiring two distinct varieties of Czech (Kikoťová et al., 2022, under review), (2) the relationship between foreign accent and friendship preferences in monolingual and bilingual children (Jarůšková, 2022, unpublished Masters' thesis). The talk will conclude with a discussion on how to possibly address socio-cognitive attitudes towards foreigners in Czech society: to date linguistically and culturally a rather homogenous setting in comparison to the U.S. or Canada where most previous studies were conducted. We will also discuss the possible means that could help counteract negative stereotyping towards talkers with varying language and cultural backgrounds.

ABSTRACT. The variety of English spoken in New Haven, Connecticut, represents a unique accent within the Southwestern New England, henceforth SWNE, dialect region. The city is located along Long Island Sound in the south-central part of the state, approximately eighty miles northeast of New York City. The U.S. Census Bureau (2022) indicates that New Haven has a population of over 135,000 residents, whilst the Greater New Haven area includes communities as far north as Meriden, Connecticut. The city has experienced only limited interest from linguistic researchers and the treatment of New Haven English in previous studies is inconclusive and varied. Kurath (1939) documents variation within SWNE without identifying a New Haven core, Labov et al. (2006) utilize the city as representative of the wider region with few distinguishing characteristics, and Gargano (2011) refers to it as a separate dialect despite very limited research. This case study in sociolinguistics investigates the aforementioned linguistic community as a direct response to the authors of the most significant project conducted in contemporary North American dialect geography, i.e. the Atlas of North American English, who call for localized studies in order to better document regional variation (Labov et al., 2006). The author conducted fieldwork in New Haven in early 2023 utilizing a specialized dialect questionnaire to interview city natives and record their vernacular speech. The design of the fieldwork interview derives from the results of the author’s previous research projects as well as the most important linguistic variables of the Northeast as presented by other authorities (cf. Boberg, 2001; Labov et al., 2006; Stanford, 2019). Analysis derives from both regional American and traditional New England variables, including: rhoticity; the LOT-THOUGHT merger of the low-back vowels [ɒ] and [ɔː]; the FATHER-BOTHER merger of [ɑː] and [ɒ]; the MARY-MERRY-MARRY merger of [eɪ], [ɛ], and [æ] before [ɹ]; remnants of the BATH-TRAP split of [ɑː] and [æ]; as well as phonetic and lexical variables. Results indicate the continued presence of traditional New Haven variables even as the local variety undergoes rapid internal linguistic change and younger generations move towards a SWNE standard form.

ABSTRACT. The world has seen many crises that have heavily influenced not only individuals but the world as a whole over the last couple of years: climate crisis, Covid19-crisis, Russia-Ukraine-War.

Many of these crises have had tremendous effects especially on smaller social or marginalized groups, small language communities or minoritized languages. In our ever-connected world, the linguistic ecologies on the planet have become more interdependent on each other too. Therefore, within the last couple of years and decades, we have seen plenty of languages disappear from the face of the earth. As the threat of extinction is becoming more apparent to many speech communities as the years pass by, language activism has gotten more protuberant. Language activism is visible in the media all around the world and has become a crucial element in political campaigning, like in Brazil, the US, or New Zealand. The UN has proclaimed the decade of indigenous languages and followed the demands of countless indigenous and minoritized speech communities to call for action.

It is only now that these language activist movements are starting to gather interest by linguists from all around the world. Thus, the academic discourse on language activism is starting to augment coming from critical sociolinguistics, feminist linguistics, queer linguistics, and postcolonial language studies. First general attempts to describe language activism have been developed by Combs and Penfield (2012), Florey et al. (2009), and Korne (2021).

This talk highlights the importance of the multi-faceted approaches to decolonizing language and the academic field of linguistics by presenting a combination of activism studies and linguistics were the common goal is not only the advocacy of the established linguistic academic world for a decolonization of language studies but also the turning of imperialist constructs brought to the global south during the colonial, imperial and present times into an equity of Centre and Periphery (Phillipson, 1992). Therefore, a fundamental change of the views on activism needs to be provoked and incorporated into any linguistic field for a humanitarian aspect within linguistics, linguistic research, and linguistic fieldwork.

ABSTRACT. The aim of the presentation is to familiarise the audience with the topic of an in-progress doctoral study. The research concentrates on approaching Formula One from the perspective of linguistics. It is a highly innovative project – this area has been so far significantly under-researched, with one publication on the subject concerning structures and functions of Formula One radio communication (Tyrkko and Limatius 2019). Radio messages are data in this study as well and are obtained from the official Formula One streaming platform. The collected material will be subjected to a pragmatic analysis with particular emphasis on theories of politeness (Lakoff 1973; Brown and Levinson 1987; Kadar 2013) and, to a lesser extent, impoliteness (Culpeper, Bousfield and Wichmann 2003). The focal point of the study are Formula One drivers and their during race conversations with race engineers. The aim of the research is to examine the interlocutors' messages to each other in terms of which politeness and impoliteness strategies have been used. It is assumed that the results will reveal a preference for the chosen communication strategies, which may be related to the specific conditions in which the discussions take place.

REFERENCES: Brown, Penelope and Stephen C. Levinson. Politeness: some universals in language usage. Cambridge University Press, 1987. Culpeper, Jonathan, Derek Bousfield and Anne Wichmann. 2003. “Impoliteness revisited: With special reference to dynamic and prosodic aspects”, Journal of Pragmatics 35: 1545-79. Kadar, Daniel Z. and Michael Haugh. 2013. Understanding Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lakoff, Robin Tolmach. 1973. “The logic of politeness: Or minding your p’s and q’s”, in: Claudia Corum, T. Cedric Smith-Stark and Ann Weiser (eds.), Papers from the ninth regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society, 292-305. Tyrkkö, Jukka and Hanna Limatius. 2019. ”When Did I Do Dangerous Driving Then?”: Structures and Functions of Formula One Race Radio Messages, in: Corpus Approaches to the Language of Sports: Texts, Media, Modalities. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 117–145.

ABSTRACT. We aim to analyse crisis communication (Huang, 2020; Sassen, 2005) in Romania in the beginning of 2017, when the Government approved an Emergency Ordinance amending the Criminal Code and the Criminal Procedure Code (OUG 13/2017). The ordinance stated that civil servants who knowingly violate the law and commit abuse of office will no longer be criminally liable for their act if the damage caused is worth less than 200,000 lei (approx. 40,000 EUR). Liviu Dragnea, leader of one of the main political parties, was accused of inciting to abuse of office for the amount of 106,000 lei. The ordinance would have allowed Dragnea to be declared not guilty in the case already pending and he could have run for Prime minister. This situation has outraged the entire country, people organizing protests to stop the inclusion of this amendment in the Criminal Code. The analysis focuses on the linguistic dimension of this crisis, on the basis of the speeches of the politicians involved and the slogans created by the protesters (e.g., "Like thieves in the night" was the main slogan since the ordinance was adopted at 9 p.m.). The selected corpus also contains press releases and articles from the Romanian press, the mass media offering the population daily updates on what was happening in Bucharest. This study will historically contextualize one of the critical situations in Romania and will highlight the main discursive actions and reactions. The analysis will be carried out from a rhetorical-pragmatic (Gheorghiu, 2018; Adi, Lilleker, 2017) point of view with insights from morpho-syntax and use of vocabulary. Preliminary results show that, at a lexical level, protesters used rhyming words, but also elliptical constructions that are analysed as a particular type of verbal silence. At the same time, we identified metaphors from the area of death or justice that are intertwined with different cultural and political references. The analysis will also highlight the pronominal game as well as the discursive strategies of augmentation or diminution.

ABSTRACT. As annual reports play a crucial role in a company’s communication with its clients and shareholders, they have to display optimism while not diminishing the corporation’s credibility. This is particularly essential for financial institutions always aiming to project security and dependability – especially in times of crisis – resulting in the question of “How do annual reports of financial institutions attempt to fulfill their persuasive purpose while not jeopardizing their presupposed credibility?”.

After relying on previous research to identify features associated with emphasizing credibility and facilitating persuasion, a mixed-methods approach was applied to the analysis of annual reports from 2021 of financial institutions across four global regions (i.e., the EU, the Asia-Pacific region, Latin America, Southern Africa). Following a quantitative analysis concerned with first-person pronouns, the passive voice, and determining a possible overuse of semantic domains associated with evaluatives, intensifiers, and lexemes denoting strength, the qualitative analysis classified a portion of occurrences of first-person pronouns and passive voice per data set according to process types. Additionally, a multimodal analysis based on Forceville’s (2014) adaptation of the Relevance Theory determined common themes and implications of images included at the beginning of annual reports.

The analysis revealed that annual reports of financial institutions across different regions, and, specifically, messages by or in the name of the corporation’s leadership, likely rely on a core set of strategies to fulfill their persuasive purpose and emphasize their presupposed credibility. However, the extent to which the different features are used may vary, demonstrating that some institutions prefer a more objective tone compared to others facilitating a more personal tone. This could be influenced by factors such as the linguacultural backgrounds of the different creators of annual reports and the corporate culture in addition to the geographical region of the institution.

References: Forceville, C. (2014). Relevance theory as model for analysing visual and multimodal communication. In D. Machin (Ed.), Visual communication (4th ed.) (pp. 51-70). De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110255492.51 Kaltenecker, S. K. (2022). Balancing credibility and persuasion: A genre analysis of annual reports of financial institutions across different regions (Master’s thesis, University of Vienna). U:theses. https://utheses.univie.ac.at/detail/65425

ABSTRACT. Irony poisoning (IP), understood as a style in which the ironic character of an utterance is lost because the surrounding discourse is dominated by detachment and irony, is a linguistic phenomenon accused of exacerbating extremist views (e.g. On Being Diagnosed with Irony Poisoning, 2019). However, despite linguistic research into the IP style in popular culture (Tobin, 2021) and anthropological studies of 4chan culture (e.g. Crawford et al., 2021), no linguistic account of irony has yet been applied to describing the emergence of IP style on 4chan or, broadly, in the so-called alt-right culture. This project provides a rationale for the emergence of the phenomenon by presenting a qualitative analysis couched within the relevance-theoretic framework (Sperber & Wilson, 1986). IP style is hypothesised to be a marker of in-group status and a natural development within the constraints of the social media user interface and the principles of relevance. The analysis is supported by quotes from Twitter, Instagram, and 4chan/pol/ board that constitute a corpus created between 2020-2022. Results show that irony is used to establish in-group status within a community and also serves as a shibboleth outside a community. This effect can be explained by the non-propositional effects of ironic utterances (e.g. Wharton & Strey 2019).

Crawford, B., Keen, F., & Suarez-Tangil, G. (2021). Memes, Radicalisation, and the Promotion of Violence on Chan Sites. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 15, 982–991. https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/18121 On being diagnosed with irony poisoning. (2019, March 6). Diggit Magazine. https://www.diggitmagazine.com/column/being-diagnosed-irony-poisoning Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1986). Relevance : communication and cognition. Blackwell Publishing. Tobin, V. (2021). Where irony goes: routinization and the collapse of viewpoint configurations. Chinese Semiotic Studies, 17(2), 199–227. https://doi.org/10.1515/css-2021-0011 Wharton, T. & Strey, C. (2019). Slave of the Passions: Making Emotions Relevant [Review of Slave of the Passions: Making Emotions Relevant]. In Relevance: Pragmatics and Interpretation. Cambridge University Press.

ABSTRACT. Partitive nouns tend to develop into vague quantifiers, and then into degree adverbs (Traugott 2008). However, while this grammaticalization path has already received a fair amount of scholarly attention in English (Brems 2011; De Clerck & Brems 2016), the emergence of degree modifier uses of Swedish nominal quantifiers remains an empirically unexplored territory. Based on random samples consisting of up to 250 relevant attestations per item (of which a maximum of 125 include instances representative of the verbal domain, and a maximum of 125 involve instances representative of the adjectival domain) extracted from selected Språkbanken corpora, this paper aims to partially fill in the aforementioned gap by providing a synchronic analysis of the syntactic expansion of nine such quantifiers, namely droppe ‘drop’, nypa ‘pinch’, smula ‘crumb’, hop ‘heap’, hopar ‘heaps’, hög ‘pile’, högar ‘piles’, massa ‘mass’, and massor ‘masses’, whose empirical tokens have been classified into six categories: verbal inherent modification, verbal extent modification, ambiguous, object-pronominal, adjectival modification of positives, and adjectival modification of comparatives. The results demonstrate that in the verbal domain, most of the forms reveal a preference for pronominal uses (e.g. kosta en massa 'cost a lot'), whereas in the adjectival domain, a majority of the items exhibit a propensity to combine with the comparative forms of adjectives/adverbs, both of which environments may be seen as bridging contexts in the emergence of full-blown degree modifier uses. Additionally, there exists a strong positive correlation between the items’ respective degrees of grammaticalization in the quantifier function and their extents of adverbialization, operationalized as proportionate frequencies of pertinent attestations in corpus samples.

Brems, L. (2011). The Layering of Size Noun and Type Noun Constructions in English. Berlin/Boston: Mouton de Gruyter. De Clerck, B. & Brems, L. (2016). Size nouns matter: A closer look at mass(es) of and extended uses of SNs. Language Sciences 53, 160–176. Traugott, E. C. (2008). Grammaticalization, constructions and the incremental development of language: Suggestions from the development of degree modifiers in English. In R. Eckardt et al. (eds.). Variation, Selection, Development – Probing the Evolutionary Model of Language Change (pp. 219–250). Berlin/New York: De Gruyter Mouton.

ABSTRACT. Many researchers have recently become interested in the representation of syntactic constructions in the mind of bilingual speakers. Aiming to determine whether formally equivalent structures have separate (e.g., de Bot, 1992) or shared (Hartsuiker et al., 2004) mental representations, they have primarily used the cross-linguistic syntactic priming paradigm. It is based on the tendency to produce a given syntactic construction in language A, having been previously exposed to its formally equivalent version in language B. While the majority of experimental studies have addressed dative constructions (e.g., Loebell and Bock, 2003) and voice (e.g., Hartsuiker et al, 2004), there exists no research on ‘grammatical tenses’. Therefore, the present study aimed to fill this research gap, by focusing on the English present perfect and the French passé composé, both formed by an auxiliary verb followed by a past participle. Forty French-speaking advanced learners of L2 English participated in the experiment. Having read for comprehension a sentence in French, they were required to produce orally their own sentence in English using two key words (e.g., to watch, movie). It was hypothesised that they would create more present perfect sentences after a passé composé than after a passé simple prime, formally corresponding to past simple. However, there were no statistically significant differences as a function of the prime sentence. Thus, it appears that syntactically less salient information is immune to priming effects. Alternatively, as the participants produced few present perfect sentences overall, they might have subconsciously avoided them for the benefit of easier options, for fear of making a mistake (e.g., Bartning, 1997).

References: Bartning, I. (1997). L’apprenant dit avancé et son acquisition d’une langue étrangère. Acquisition et interaction en langue étrangère, 9, 9–50. De Bot, K. (1992). A bilingual production model: Levelt’s ‘Speaking’ model adapted. Applied Linguistics, 13, 1–24. Hartsuiker, R., Pickering, M., & Veltkamp, E. (2004). Is syntax separate or shared between languages? Cross-linguistic syntactic priming in Spanish–English bilinguals. Psychological Science, 15, 409–414. Loebell, H. & Bock, K. (2003). Structural priming across languages. Linguistics, 41, 791–824.

ABSTRACT. In Romance languages, the sequence of tenses rule applies to subjunctive complements but no to subordinate indicative clauses. Nevertheless, the association between the subjunctive mood and the sequence of tenses appears only to pertain to this language group as there is no temporal agreement between the matrix verb and the subjunctive complement in Bulgarian, Polish or English. However, what seems to unify all these diverse languages are the types of verbs that trigger the subjunctive mood. Therefore, the question is whether the temporal defectiveness of subjunctive clauses could be explained by some inherent properties of the subjunctive mood, or whether it stems from the type of predicate that selects for this mood. Several attempts (e.g., Giorgi and Pianesi, 1997; Quer, 2007) have been made to distinguish between the mood or the matrix verb regarding the temporal restrictions observed in these clauses, but the discussion has been inconclusive. It comes as no surprise, considering that much of the discussion is centered on Romance languages, which in the majority of cases obligatorily select either indicative or subjunctive complements. Consequently, it is not possible to determine whether these moods would behave differently concerning their temporal properties when appearing after the same predicate as only one of them can appear in the given context. However, the English subjunctive may appear interchangeably with the indicative, especially in British English. Therefore, the aim of this ongoing study is to investigate whether there is a correlation between the occurrence of present tense in subordinate clauses and matrix past volitional verbs in this variety of English, which are the most prototypical of subjunctive triggering predicates. This analysis uses the British section of the GloWbe Corpus (Davies, 2013), which includes Internet data from the years 2012-2013.

References

Davies, M. (2013). Corpus of Global Web-Based English: 1.9 billion words from speakers in 20 countries (GloWbE). https://corpus.byu.edu/glowbe/.

Giorgi, A., Pianesi, F (1997). Tense and Aspect. From Semantics to Morphosyntax. New York: Oxford University Press.

Quer, J. (2009). Twists of mood: The distribution and interpretation of indicative and subjunctive. Lingua, 119(12), 1779–1787. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2008.12.003.

ABSTRACT. The study shows that locative inversion in Mandarin Chinese is influenced by Newness, Definiteness and Heaviness, each with varying weights of influence. Locative inversion, characterized by a preposed locative and a postposed NP that functions as the subject in the canonical sentence, has been documented in various languages, including English, Bantu languages, and Chinese. Consider Chinese sentences:

a. 主席团坐在台上. locative non-inversed (non-LI): NP+V+LocPs Zhuxituan zuo zai tai-shang. presidium sit at platform-on ‘The presidium was sitting on the platform.’ b. 台上坐着主席团. locative inversed (LI): LocPs+V+NP Tai-shang zuo-ZHE zhuxituan. platform-on sit-IMPERF presidium ‘On the platform was sitting the presidium.’

Previous studies on locative inversion rely heavily on a pure syntactic treatment such as the transformational approach and lexicalism analysis (Hoekstra 1988, Zhang 2020, Nakajima 2001). However, they fail to describe the full range of locative inversion by ignoring multiple constraints, including semantics, information structure, definiteness, etc. This study is a preliminary attempt to address this problem with Mandarin Chinese as a case study. To investigate the effect of non-syntactic factors in the choice between LI and non-LI, we design a 2x2x2 experiment with Newness (new/given), Definiteness (indefinite/definite) and Heaviness (longer/shorter) as independent factors. The resulting 8 conditions are placed in a way as to assume that Newness is more important than Definiteness and Heaviness in a sequence. For each condition, texts are presented in which LI and non-LI variant are embedded. Participants are asked to (i)choose the variant that sounds more natural and (ii)rate the naturalness of the two variants on a scale from 0 to 100. 96 native Mandarin Chinese-speaking informants have participated in the experiment, which was run and distributed with the online experiment generator Labvanced. The statistical analysis shows that the acceptability of LI decreases steadily from conditions that favor more LI construction to conditions that favor more non-LI construction, confirming the relative importance of factors postulated: Newness>Definiteness>Heaviness. This study adds to the growing body of empirical studies showing that central informational factors impact the selection of argument alternation pairs, e.g., dative and genitive alternation.

ABSTRACT. Agrammatism, the main symptom of non-fluent aphasia, can be defined as a breakdown of one’s morphological and syntactic linguistic abilities. How can the impairment be explained? Grodzinsky and Friedmann (1997) developed a theory within the formal framework, which explains language deficits in agrammatic speech as a result of the inability to project the higher nodes of the syntactic tree. The inability to project higher nodes stems from a pruning occurring in a syntactic tree. The level of pruning - and resulting underspecification of nodes above the pruning – depends on the severity of aphasia. Their theory, Tree-Pruning Hypothesis (TPH), was already tested on multiple languages, e.g. in Hebrew (Grodzinsky & Friedmann, 1997), Spanish, Catalan, and Basque (Martínez Ferreiro, 2009), German and Italian (Fyndanis et al., 2022), and even Hagiwara speaks of a breakdown in functional categories in Japanish non-fluent aphasics (1995), and thus expects a problem in syntactic tree-projection. Therefore, this theory provides a highly plausible explanation for the language deficits occurring in agrammatism. In Czech however, there is no existing research which would use (or test) this particular theory to account for the frequently-occurring phenomena in agrammatism, such as the simplification of syntactic structures, or substitution of bound morphemes (Kemmerer, 2015). The proposed presentation shows part of my ongoing PhD research, in which I would like to test the validity of TPH for speech production in Czech non-fluent mild aphasia. In order to test for this hypothesis, we had to develop visual elicitation material, which is the focus of this presentation, namely its creation and the validation process. The elicitation material focuses on the following structures: present tense agreement, present tense negation, past tense agreement, wh-questions, yes/no questions, and relative clauses. The aforementioned structures are expected to occupy different positions in a Czech syntactic tree, therefore, we expect some of them to be intact, namely those occupying the lower nodes, whereas the higher ones are expected to be impaired.

ABSTRACT. Written and spoken academic discourses differ in a number of ways including the distributional pattern of metadiscourse features. This is what can shape and direct the interaction between the writer/ speaker and reader/ listener. This corpus-based study was an attempt to quantitatively and qualitatively unearth the distributional pattern of metadiscourse features in spoken and written academic discourse as well as revealing the interaction between written and spoken language. For the purpose, two corpora of The British Academic Written English Corpus and British Academic Spoken English Corpus were deployed. Then, Hyland’s taxonomy of metadiscourse features was used to categorize metadiscourse features. The quantitative analysis explicated that while the written corpus was more interactive oriented, the spoken corpus had inclination towards the interactional category of metadiscourse features. The qualitative analysis of the concordance lines demonstrated that academic conventions and styles differed in spoken and written English and that writer/ speaker and reader/ listener was inherently a dynamic phenomenon not static. The results of this research are hoped to have implications for researchers in discourse studies, genre analysis, academic spoken and written language as well as contrastive analysis.

ABSTRACT. Over the past few decades, and especially in the past years due to the pandemic, there was an upsurge of the use of Internet-based communication in human life. A large portion of human interaction has become computer-based. Online discussion on all sorts of relevant topics have become an important platform for negotiation and renegotiation of attitudes and opinions as well as the vehicle of change. Although there is a long tradition of evaluative language reflection in the Croatian language, little research has been done at the level of online-based discourse about language. Accordingly, the paper explores how computer-mediated communication shapes the discussions on the purity and appropriateness of language within the Croatian context. More precisely, it looks at the effects of the Internet on language and communication, on interpersonal relations, and on group dynamics as well as the formation of social interaction and identities and ideologies in online discussion fora, in this case, particularly linguistic identities and ideologies. The research uses state-of-the-art approach at the intersection between Computer-mediated Discourse Analysis and Framing Analysis to show how the largely under-investigated language of Croatian computer-mediated communication can, through patterns of use and highlighting form identities and function ideologically.

References

Androutsopoulos, J. (2006). Introduction: Sociolinguistics and computer-mediated communication. In: Journal of Sociolinguistics 10 (4), 419-438.

Crystal, D. (2001). Language and the Internet. Cambridge, U.K., Cambridge University Press.

Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing Discourse. Textual analysis for social research. London and New York: Routledge.

Herring, S.C. (2002). Computer-mediated communication on the Internet. In: B. Cronin (ed.). The Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (pp. 109-168). Medford, NJ: Information Today Inc./American Society for Information Science and Technology, 109-168.

Herring, S.C. (2004). Computer-mediated discourse analysis: An approach to researching online communities. In: S.A. Barab, R.Kling and J.H.Grey (eds.). Designing for Virtual Communities in the Service of Learning. Cambridge, U.K. and New York, Cambridge University Press, 338-376.

Marcoccia, M. (2004). Online polylogues: Conversation structure and participation framework in internet newsgroups. Journal of Pragmatics 36: 115-145.

Wodak, R. (2007). Language and ideology – language in ideology. In: Journal of language and Politics 6:1, John Benjamins Publishing Company

ABSTRACT. The increasing ethnic diversity in Western societies has led to growing interest in the study of implicit biases, open-mindedness, and the expression of controversial views both online and offline (Brown & Davis, 2019). However, research on Polish participants in this domain is scarce. The present study is a pilot research for a PhD project aimed to examine age and gender differences in the ability to argue for and against controversial positions. A diverse sample of 50 participants (split equally between genders with the age span of 18 to 70) was randomly selected and asked to respond to 12 prompts on controversial topics, such as the legalization of homosexual marriages in Poland. The questionnaire was filled anonymously in order to assure the participants that none of their opinions (or lack thereof) would in any way be used to judge them or that it could be linked to them personally. The intention behind adopting this open-ended model of data collection, as opposed to scale-based models typically applied in similar research (Arguedas et al. 2022), was to preclude the possibility of self-serving bias, whereby an individual would intentionally demarcate themselves as possessing greater openness and tolerance than they actually display in real life. The results showed that neither gender was able to formulate robust arguments for the opposing positions, but the under-30 cohort produced a greater number of arguments for the positions they supported. Most importantly, and contrary to expectations, the obtained results indicate that the capacity to formulate numerous valid arguments decreases with age substantially. These findings lead to important implications for understanding argumentation skills and the effect of age on argument quantity, as well as indirect implications for the study of open-mindedness. References: Arguedas, A. R., Robertson, C. T., Fletcher, R., & Nielsen, R. K. (2022). Echo chambers, filter bubbles, and polarization: a literature review. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford. Brown, J., & Davis, M. (2019). Implicit bias and gender disparities in debates. Journal of Social Psychology, 123-130.

ABSTRACT. The presented project observes a current crisis regarding censorship on the social media micro-blogging platform Twitter, stemming from its purchase by Elon Musk finalized on the 28th of October 2022 (Zahn, 2022). The issues arising on the platform gave rise not only to a lot of outrage, but also to new opportunities to study creative use of multimodal elements and their reception. This project analyzes two posts made by Elon Musk with multimodal elements (namely memes) from the perspective of poster representation and reception. The first post dates to before Musk’s ownership of Twitter while the second was made after. The study employs both quantitative and qualitative research methods of multimodal discourse analysis to uncover the findings. The qualitative analysis of the two posts is based on contextual elements, concepts such as humor, multimodality, celebrity identity online and power, or Van Dijk’s ideological square (1998). The study uses Wiggins’s elaborated model of meme dimensions (2019), based on Limor Shifman’s introduced dimensions of form, content and stance (2013), to observe the elements contributing to Musk’s representation via memes both before and after the ownership of Twitter. The qualitative analysis, which considers 150 responses from each post, then demonstrates how Musk’s representation was received by the wider audience based on lexical and contextual cues, with the employment of a custom classification of the dataset, among other including positive responses, negative ones and ones that refer to Musk’s wealth and business ventures. The quantitative study provides a point of comparison for the reception of the personage both before and after the censorship crisis. The study shows whether and how the rise of censorship on the platform affected communication, specifically in regards to the person considered responsible for it.

Reference list: Dijk, T. V. A. (1998). Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach (1st ed.). SAGE Publications Ltd. Shifman, L. (2013). Memes in Digital Culture (MIT Press Essential Knowledge series). Cambridge, MA. The MIT Press. Wiggins, B. E. (2019). The Discursive Power of Memes in Digital Culture [E-book]. Taylor & Francis. Zahn, M. (2022, November 12). A timeline of Elon Musk’s tumultuous Twitter acquisition. ABC News.

ABSTRACT. Linguistic landscape is an area of study devoted to the analysis of languages and texts visible in the urban landscape (Landry & Bourhis, 1997; Backhaus, 2007; Ben Rafael & Ben Rafael, 2019). More recently the focus has moved to mobile signs and the language of dissent as expressed in demonstration placards (Rubdy & Ben Said, 2015) This presentation analyses the temporary linguistic landscape of women’s protests in Poland against a further tightening of the abortion law. I examine a corpus of 323 monomodal and multimodal signs, both in English and Polish, which were collected from a series of women’s protests of October-March 2020-2021. The aim of this paper is to analyse the use of Polish and English with respect to intertextuality, humour, expression of emotions. The data for the study were collected from sources such as internet archives, social media, TV materials, news services and other online media. The analysis was conducted within Discourse Historical Approach (Reisigl & Wodak, 2009). Results show how the younger/digital generation dominated the semiotics of the signs and found their own generation-specific means of expressing political dissent through intertextual and multilingual references to video games, memes, and films, which may have been unintelligible to older participants or audiences. In this way, in a debate where the two opposing sides were conflicted about the fundamental issue of women’s right to their own bodies, the protesters went beyond reiterating political arguments and conveyed their creativity and emotions. As a result, they have legitimised the expression of women’s anger over the appropriation of their bodies in the public sphere.

Selected references

Backhaus, P. (2007). Linguistic landscapes: A comparative study of urban multilingualism in Tokyo. Multilingual Matters. Ben Rafael, E., & Ben Rafael, M. (2019). Multiple globalizations: Linguistic landscapes in world-cities. Brill. Reisigl, M., & Wodak, R. (2009). The discourse-historical approach (DHA). In R. Wodak, & M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods for Critical Discourse Analysis (pp. 87–121). Sage (2nd revised edition).