English vague language (VL), as in general noun phrases, general extenders and general verbs, is central to casual conversation. It can have discourse functions and create an informality and ...solidarity. The rationale for the study described here was a gap in the literature vis-à-vis language learner metapragmatic awareness of VL in their L1. It was hypothesised that attitudes towards VL vary from language to language.
This paper describes a comparative questionnaire study of German, Spanish and Mandarin speakers’ attitudes to VL in their languages. Subjects were invited to translate English VL to their languages and to think of other vague forms: German speakers volunteered ‘Dingsbums’ and ‘und so’; Spanish speakers suggested ‘cómo se llame’ and ‘o algo así; Mandarin speakers noted ‘na ge dong xi’.
Subjects were also asked to describe social variables, domains and functions associated with their VL: German speakers saw VL as creating closeness but many felt that it made addressors sound unreliable and mildly impolite; Spanish speakers mostly saw VL as a way of showing a relaxed, close, comfortable, friendly, but a few saw it as an sign of laziness and impoliteness; Mandarin speakers responded that VL was a marker of friendly informality and solidarity but they mostly associated it with indifference, laziness, impatience, irritation, anger, disappointment, contempt and dishonesty.
The paper concludes with suggestions of ways to incorporate tasks on VL into English language teaching classrooms, and to raise language teachers’ awareness of English L2 users’ beliefs and intercultural differences in terms of VL.
•Vague language forms, functions and variation.•Close with family and friends.•Indifference, impoliteness with strangers.
One of the most interesting phenomena observed in the Polish language today is the unquestionable, non-rigorous ability of the language to adapt to the latest social trends like the development. This ...article provides an overview of the selected most network communication’ important forms of linguistic expression of contemporary Internet Polish language in the communicative aspect. The basic formations and structures used by Internet users are characterized and the current state of the Polish language of online communication is presented, paying attention to the less and less noticeable disproportions between communication in the Internet space and traditional interpersonal communication. The excerpted forms, based on the well-known and completely new abstract units of the dictionary system, allowed a synthetic analysis of an interesting linguistic and communicative phenomenon, which is the marriage of both traditional and new-fangled structures of the Polish language with modern and flexible forms of digital network communication.
The construction of word in Arabic language had been done by the process of derivation, by looking into this process, the lexicon of Arabic language can be reached and also it can be developed by the ...period. This research will investigate the construction of Arabic derivative word in the perspective of Kufah Scholar. The data in this research was divided into certain theories and facts of language collected from the primary and secondary references. The primary reference included the main opus work from the Kufah scholars, such as: Al-Farra‟, and also some works from Al-Anbari who had been collected and noted many opinions belong to Kufah scholar during the confrontation with the Basrah scholar. An amount of the research results and some works of contemporary Arabic Grammarians had been become the secondary reference of this research. This research had been concluded that the process of derivation in Arabic word in the Kufah Scholar had many variants of patterns and the high forms. This condition was caused by the data of language which had been recognized wider range of Basrah scholar. The opinion of Kufah Scholar about the root or radical had the strong basis in the development of contemporary of linguistics, especially in the Semitic Language.
Although claims about the nature of EFL/ESL learners’ knowledge (i. e., implicit and/or explicit) are essential to many debates in foreign/second language development, few studies have sought to ...evaluate the effects of linguistic and/or contextual variables on the two knowledge types. This study, accordingly, undertook to examine the effects of different explicit and implicit types of form-focused instruction (FFI) on the acquisition of four easy and difficult forms as assessed by different implicit and explicit outcome measures. The instruments utilized to assess students’ learning were: oral elicited imitation, untimed and timed grammaticality judgment, and metalinguistic knowledge tests. A pretest and two posttests were administered to 150 novice learners immediately after FFI and again after a 4-week delay. Immediate and durable effects of FFI were found for the easy and difficult target forms on both implicit and explicit knowledge measures. Specifically, the study indicated that explicit and implicit types of FFI were significantly more beneficial for explicitly-easy and implicitly-easy language forms respectively. The findings of this study may contribute a different set of insights to our understanding of the efficacy of varying types of FFI on learners’ controlled and/or spontaneous use of easy and difficult structures at early stages of L2 development.
I discuss language forms as the primary means that language communities provide to enable public language use. As such, they are adapted to public use most notably in being linguistically significant ...vocal tract actions, not the categories in the mind as proposed in phonological theories. Their primary function is to serve as vehicles for production of syntactically structured sequences of words. However, more than that, phonological actions themselves do work in public language use. In particular, they foster interpersonal coordination in social activities. An intriguing property of language forms that likely reflects their emergence in social communicative activities is that phonological forms that should be meaningless (in order to serve their role in the openness of language at the level of the lexicon) are not wholly meaningless. In fact, the form-meaning “rift” is bridged bidirectionally: The smallest language forms are meaningful, and the meanings of lexical language forms generally inhere, in part, in their embodiment by understanders.
•Primitive language forms are vocal tract action adapted to their public use.•They are vehicles for public language use that have roles, e.g., in coordination.•The form-meaning rift implied by the foregoing discussion is only approximate.•“Meaningless” language forms have some meaning.•In turn, meanings of forms emerge from their “lineages” of public use.
This paper presents the results from a linguistically-oriented discourse-completion questionnaire administered in Nikkei-Brazilian (Japanese Brazilian) communities, examining in particular: (1) the ...use of polite language forms, (2) terms used to address one’s spouse, as well as (3) the social characteristics and cultural backgrounds of the informants (e.g., age, sex, generation, nationality, place of birth, place of residence, whether they have lived in the Colonia (i.e., rural communities originally established as exclusively Japanese settlements), where their parents come from, education, and their first language). In this paper, I argue that the use of polite language forms in Nikkei-Brazilian Japanese reflects the different social histories that the two groups identified in this study have been through. The first group consists of those who have experience of Colonia society, whose characteristic use of polite language forms includes: (a) traditional Japanese spousal address terms, such as otoo-san or otoo-chan (father) when the wife addresses her spouse, and okaa-san or okaa-chan (mother) when the husband addresses his spouse; (b) the Western Japanese dialectal polite suffixes -reru/-rareru; and (c) exalting and humbling polite language forms which indicate the relative social positions of the addressees. The second group consists of those who reside in urban areas without experience of life in the Colonia, whose characteristic use of polite language forms includes: (a) Brazilian Portuguese spousal address terms; (b) the use of polite language forms which show the speaker’s friendliness and distance-reducing; and (c) a greater use of standard polite language forms, namely -desu, -masu.
El valencià/català parlat a l’àrea oriental dels municipis murcians de Favanella, Iecla i Jumella, com a minoria lingüística incontestable en el si de la Regió de Múrcia (i a la vegada l’expressió ...més petita de totes les que componen el domini lingüístic català), és la que menys protecció i reconeixement rep, en tots els ordres imaginables. Un possible intent de capgirament de la situació seria el que podria fer l’Administració regional murciana en virtut de l’establert en l’article 3.3 de la Constitució, i d’una lectura finalista de l’Estatut d’autonomia de la Regió de Múrcia i de la pròpia legislació autonòmica murciana (en matèria de patrimoni cultural; de mitjans de comunicació audiovisual; educativa; toponímica i, inclús, de caire honorífic i simbòlic), que conté els vímets jurídics per a protegir i reconèixer el català que s’hi parla, almenys com a peculiaritat cultural. I més encara si es vincula aquest enclavament, geogràficament murcià –el territori conegut com el Carxe- però vinculat culturalment i perifèricament a allò valencià, amb el que suposa la normativa internacional a nivell europeu relativa a les llengües regionals o minoritàries. Tanmateix, pel que ha ocorregut fins al dia, l’eventual actuació de l’Administració regional murciana en pro del valencià a terres murcianes resulta molt improbable, just pel fet paral·lel que tampoc no protegeix el patrimoni lingüístic dialectal murcià pròpiament dit. En qualsevol cas, aquesta expressió lingüística catalana a i del Carxe, en situació de molt seriós i greu camí de minorització i desaparició, té l’avantatge de poder rebre, com a única protecció alternativa i efectiva, el que puga fer la veïna Administració valenciana, com a realitat immediata i transfronterera.
I review evidence of three kinds relating to leakages in modularity within language domains and between linguistic and nonlinguistic action. One kind of evidence shows that the form-meaning “rift” in ...language that enables the important principle of duality of patterning and the particulate principle of self-diversifying systems is bridged in many ways. Segmental language forms have iconic meanings, and form-meaning correlations of other kinds emerge cross linguistically. A second kind of evidence occurs in parallel transmission of linguistic prosodic information with iconic and emotional information conveyed suprasegmentally. The final kind of evidence shows the integrality of linguistic and nonlinguistic action (deictic points, speech-accompanying gestures, head motions, facial expressions, etc) in conveying communicative information in public language use. I suggest that these violations of modularity within language and between linguistic and nonlinguistic action reflect the dynamic effects of sets of competing and cooperating constraints including, among others, parity and learnability of language forms that shape communicative actions in social activity.
In die Kurrikulum- en assesseringsbeleidsverklaring (KABV) van die intermediêre (graad 4–6) en senior (graad 7–9) fases word aangetoon dat leerders tydens die produsering van skryfstukke ...verbindingswoorde moet gebruik om kohesiewe tekste te skep, soos herhaling, sinonieme en antonieme. Wanneer hierdie taalvorme gebruik word om kohesiekettings te skep, dui die gebruik daarvan op die realisering van leksikale kohesie. Ons wou ondersoek instel na die verskillende taalvorme wat op skoolvlak deur leerders in Afrikaanse tekste gebruik word om leksikale kohesie te realiseer, omdat die realisering van leksikale kohesie nog nie in die skryfwerk van moedertaalsprekers van Afrikaans ondersoek is nie, hoewel dit implisiet as ’n doelwit in die KABV gestel word. In hierdie navorsingsartikel is ’n korpusgebaseerde ondersoek onderneem om Afrikaanssprekende graad 6- en graad 9-leerders se selfstandige gebruik van taalvorme vir die realisering van leksikale kohesie te bepaal. Een graad 6-korpus (20 723 woorde) en een graad 9-korpus (22 171 woorde) is ontleed. Uit die ontleding het dit geblyk dat die betrokke graad 6- en graad 9-deelnemers die volgende taalvorme vir die realisering van leksikale kohesie gebruik het: (i) herhaling, (ii) sinonieme en naby-sinonieme, (iii) antonieme, (iv) superordinate, hiponieme, gekoördineerde lede in geordende en ongeordende reekse en epiteta (d.i. insluiting), (v) afgeleide vorme en die herhaling daarvan, sowel as (vi) afwisselende naamwoordstukke. Die bydrae van hierdie artikel is ’n samevatting van verskillende taalvorme waardeur leksikale kohesie gerealiseer word, gemeet aan leerderkorpora. Die bevindings van hierdie studie kan deur Afrikaansonderwysers in die klaskamer gebruik word om leiding te gee oor hoe verbindingswoorde (soos in die KABV gemeld) gebruik kan word om opeenvolgende stukke taal in skryfwerk sintakties te laat saamhang en sinvol by mekaar te laat inskakel.The realisation of lexical cohesion: A corpus linguistic study of Afrikaans-speaking grade 6 and grade 9 learners’ writingA text can be defined as a piece of language use which is experienced and accepted as a communicative unit on syntactical, semantical and pragmatical foundations. What is meant by this is that any text is understandable because it has a unique linguistic (syntactic, morphological and lexical) structure; it is intelligible, seeing as it has a set meaning; and it is explainable for the fact that it can be placed in the context in which it is used. Another characteristic by which a text can be identified is the presence of texture. Texture is acquired when a text functions as a unit with regard to its surroundings. Cohesive markers are used to accomplish this unit and consequently ensure texture.
Speech Production Fowler, Carol A
The Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics,
08/2007
Book Chapter
A theory of speech production provides an account of the means by which a planned sequence of language forms is implemented as vocal tract activity that gives rise to an audible, intelligible ...acoustic speech signal. Such an account must address several issues. Two central issues are considered in this article. One issue concerns the nature of language forms that ostensibly compose plans for utterances. Because of their role in making linguistic messages public, a straightforward idea is that language forms are themselves the public behaviors in which members of a language community engage when talking. By most accounts, however, the relation of phonological segments to actions of the vocal tract is not one of identity. Rather, phonological segments are mental categories with featural attributes. Another issue concerns what, at various levels of description, the talker aims to achieve. This article focuses on speech production, and considers language forms and plans for speaking, along with speakers' goals as acoustic targets or vocal tract gestures, the DIVA theory of speech production, the task dynamic model, coarticulation, and prosody.
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