One major feature of conversation is that people take turns to speak. Based on audio and video recordings of naturally-occurring Mandarin conversation, this book explores the role of syntax, prosody, ...body movements as well as their interplay in turn organization in the temporal unfolding of action and interaction. Adopting the methodology of interactional linguistics, this book offers a fine-grained analysis of the three multimodal resources and the sequential environments in which they appear. It demonstrates that syntax, prosody and body movements not only converge but also diverge in projecting possible turn completion. As one of the few systematic studies of multimodality in Mandarin interaction, this book will be of interest to researchers in Chinese linguistics, interactional linguistics, conversation analysis, and multimodal analysis.
Arabic dialects also called colloquial Arabic or vernaculars are spoken varieties of Standard Arabic. These dialects have mixed form with many variations due to the influence of ancient local tongues ...and other languages like European ones. Many of these dialects are mutually incomprehensible. Arabic dialects were not written until recently and were used only in a speech form. Nowadays, with the advent of the internet and mobile telephony technologies, these dialects are increasingly used in a written form. Indeed, this kind of communication brought everyday conversations to a written format. This allows Arab people to use their dialects, which are their actual native languages for expressing their opinion on social media, for chatting, texting, etc. This growing use opens new research direction for Arabic natural language processing (NLP). We focus, in this paper, on machine translation in the context of Arabic dialects. We provide a survey of recent research in this area. We report for each study a detailed description of the adopted approach and we give its most relevant contribution.
This book is the first on Cantonese that deals with the grammaticalization phenomenon systematically. Focusing on a group of twelve directional particles, this book tracks their grammaticalization ...pathways from full-fledged directional verbs, to directional particles.
This book examines the acquisition of L2 Mandarin prosody, a less explored area in SLA. While acknowledging that tone acquisition is one of the most important aspects in acquiring L2 Mandarin ...phonology, the books demonstrates that phrase- and utterance-level prosody is equally important. Specifically, this book discusses the acquisition of Mandarin lexical tones and utterance-level prosody, the interaction of tones and intonation, the acquisition of Tone 3 sandhis, the temporal differences between L1 and L2 Mandarin discourse, and the relationship between intelligibility, comprehensibility and foreign accent perception in L2 Chinese. In addition, a whole chapter is exclusively devoted to the pedagogy of L2 Mandarin prosody. Studies in this book further our understanding of speech prosody in L1 and L2 and showcase the interesting interaction of phonetics, phonology, and pedagogy in SLA. This book will be of great interest to SLA researchers and graduate students, applied linguists, Chinese linguists, and Chinese practitioners.
The Politics of Written Language in the Arab World asks how the central sociolinguistic notions of language ideology and diglossia are affected by the rapidly increasing amount of writing in the ...Arabic vernacular. Readership: Readers interested in the Arabic language situation, language ideology, diglossia, and emerging writing practices
China is very rich in language resources, and Mandarin is undoubtedly its most prestigious and well-known representative. Unfortunately, most of these languages remain understudied or even unstudied. ...Such is the case of Yichun Gan.Written in the style of a reference grammar, this book sets out to give a comprehensive and systematic description of Yichun grammar, with the aim of increasing readers' knowledge about Chinese languages other than Mandarin. In addition to common categories like nouns, verbs, adjectives and prepositions, the volume attempts to cover as many grammatical categories and constructions as possible, including the Sinitic-specific categories such as classifiers, the aspect system, postpositions and the object-marking BA constructions.To highlight its uniqueness, the book adopts a comparative perspective to contrast many features of Yichun Gan with Mandarin and other Sinitic languages. Our study shows that Yichun Gan possesses both Northern and Southern Chinese traits in many constructions, which supports its status as a transitional language.It will be of interest to linguists who wish to learn more about East Asian languages, and more specifically Sinitic languages.
The study tested phonological awareness in a cross-sectional sample of 200 Arabic-speaking 2nd, 4th, 6th, 8th, and 10th graders from low and mid-high Socio-Economic Status (SES). Participants were ...native speakers of a local dialect of Palestinian Arabic spoken in the north of Israel. Twelve phonological awareness tasks were administered: six of them included stimuli that have an identical form in Standard Arabic and in the spoken dialect (hereafter, SpA words; e.g., /
sɑʒɑd/
‘knelt’) and six used StA words with a unique form different from the one used in the dialect (hereafter, StA words; e.g., /
ʔɑχɑð
/ ‘took’). Three tasks (blending, segmentation, deletion) were developed for each set of words to test syllable awareness and three additional ones to test phoneme awareness. Repeated measure ANOVAs showed a cross-sectional growth in syllable and phoneme awareness across grades, as well as significant differences between children from low versus mid-high SES. The results also showed a consistent effect of phonological distance on phonological awareness across all tasks and in both groups with awareness of SpA words higher than StA words. At the same time, the impact of phonological distance was more prominent in children from low SES as against mid-high SES, in phoneme awareness as against syllable awareness, and in segmentation and deletion tasks as against blending tasks. The results underscore the roles of item-based properties of phonological distance and phonological-unit size, as well as the role of participant-based characteristics of SES in phonological awareness in Arabic diglossia.
This chapter discusses the material presented in this book organized around the various themes announced in the Introduction, and it addresses questions and comments pertinent to the issues related ...to these themes. The first theme to be addressed is the question of the similarity between the subsystems of functional categories between the three creoles. The second theme relates to the processes at work in the formation of the functional categories of these three creoles. Relabeling, grammaticalization and leveling will be discussed in turn. A discussion of phenomena, such as restructuring and extension, resulting from some process(es) follows. Finally, a discussion on multifunctionality in creoles and the issue of polysemy versus monosemy ends the chapter.
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