Revisiting borders: named languages and de-colonization
Publication date: Available online 24 May 2018Source: Language SciencesAuthor(s): Mario Saraceni, Camille JacobAbstractRecent developments in sociolinguistics have been characterized by a move away from the notion of languages as discrete and separate entities. This has come within a frame of general criticism of structuralism as a theory of language fundamentally emanating from, or at least being tied to, monolingual ideologies of 19th-century European nationalism. Based on the recognition that linguistic borders are little more than political constructs, many sociolinguists prefer to describe language behavior as social ...
Source: Language Sciences - July 11, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Methodological nationalism in Linguistics
Publication date: Available online 24 May 2018Source: Language SciencesAuthor(s): Britta SchneiderAbstractIn this article, I discuss methodological nationalism as a bias that has come into being on grounds of the tendency of social sciences, including sociolinguistics and linguistics, to assume national societies to be the ‘normal’ and natural way of human beings creating belonging. After an introduction to the concept of bias, to the concept of methodological nationalism, and to the debate on language as a discursive entity, I discuss various examples from the field of sociolinguistics that display this bias. I end th...
Source: Language Sciences - July 11, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
A political economic analysis of commodified English in South Korean neoliberal labor markets
This study examines two contradictions inherent in using English tests for employment by Marx’s political economy. English proficiency is quantified by the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC), mandatory for more than 90% of job posts in Korea. Based on the interviews with jobseekers and human resource managers, the paper reports two contradictions of the TOEIC: first, while the jobseekers perceived the score is inessential, they said the exceptionally high score is required; second, while TOEIC scores are meant to reflect English competence, they do not reflect the competence. These two contradictions...
Source: Language Sciences - July 11, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Fetishism and the language commodity: a materialist critique
Publication date: Available online 12 June 2018Source: Language SciencesAuthor(s): William Simpson, John P. O'ReganAbstractOver the past 10 years, an emerging body of research in applied linguistics and linguistic anthropology has made the argument that recent global political-economic developments have led to the commodification of language. In focusing on how language is seen as a tradeable commodity, the process of commodification is portrayed as a principally discursive event, where value and commodity status are attributed to languages. However, the notion of both value and of commodities themselves as discursive matt...
Source: Language Sciences - July 11, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Marxism, early Soviet sociolinguistics, and Gramsci's linguistic ideas
Publication date: Available online 15 June 2018Source: Language SciencesAuthor(s): Alessandro CarlucciAbstractIn the last few decades, the relationship between linguistics and Marxism has given rise to an important debate among experts on the Italian political thinker and leader Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937). The paper summarises this debate in connection with recent research on Gramsci's intellectual biography, starting from his university training in historical linguistics as well as other sources for his early views on language (Section 2). Section 3 focuses on his subsequent encounter with sociological and applied ling...
Source: Language Sciences - July 11, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Biases we live by: Anglocentrism in linguistics and cognitive sciences
Publication date: Available online 18 June 2018Source: Language SciencesAuthor(s): Carsten LevisenAbstractThis paper explores “Anglocentrism” as a bias in contemporary linguistics and cognitive sciences. Anglo concepts dominate international discourse on language and cognition, but the influence that this Anglocentric metalinguistic discourse has on global knowledge production, research methods, and the theoretical framing of research questions is rarely debated. Three case studies on heavily “Anglicised” discursive domains are provided: (i) “the mind” – and the Anglicisation of global discourse of human pers...
Source: Language Sciences - July 11, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Motion verbs in Modern Standard Arabic and their implications for Talmy's lexicalization patterns
Publication date: Available online 25 June 2018Source: Language SciencesAuthor(s): Bandar Alhamdan, Oudah Alenazi, Zouheir A. MaalejAbstractTalmy's typology of motion events in world languages as verb-framed (V-framed) and satellite-framed (S-framed) languages focuses on the expression of Path and Manner either in the verb or in a satellite to it. However insightful and interesting this typology is, it has too restrictive a scope to account for the role of other conceptual components such as Figure, Ground, and Cause in the overall motion event. The current article brings evidence from Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) to bear ...
Source: Language Sciences - July 11, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
SenseDisclosure: A new procedure for dealing with problematically ambiguous terms in cross-disciplinary communication
Publication date: Available online 28 June 2018Source: Language SciencesAuthor(s): Julie MennesAbstractCommunication in cross-disciplinary (and thus in inter-, multi- and transdisciplinary) projects is frequently challenged by problematically ambiguous terms (henceforth ‘PATs’), i.e. terms that have multiple meanings and for which it is not always clear what meaning is used, thereby generating communication problems. The reason why communication in cross-disciplinary projects is so sensitive to PATs, is that they often involve disciplines that share one or more terms, yet attribute different meanings to them in an impl...
Source: Language Sciences - July 11, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Editorial Board
Publication date: July 2018Source: Language Sciences, Volume 68Author(s): (Source: Language Sciences)
Source: Language Sciences - July 11, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Negotiating difference in political contexts: An exploration of Hansard
Publication date: July 2018Source: Language Sciences, Volume 68Author(s): Dawn ArcherAbstractThis paper explores the language of MPs and Peers, when negotiating their differences in times past. Specifically, I draw upon Historic Hansard data (1803–2005) representative of the two Houses (Commons and Lords), paying particular attention to exchanges involving expressive politeness features (deferential terms, polite preludes, etc.). I demonstrate how such features enabled parliamentarians to “do” deference and respect, but sometimes at a surface level only. For example, utterances containing expressive politeness featur...
Source: Language Sciences - July 11, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Meaning in a changing paradigm: the semantics of you and the pragmatics of thou
Publication date: July 2018Source: Language Sciences, Volume 68Author(s): Anouk Buyle, Hendrik De SmetAbstractMany European languages have two pronouns for singular address. For such languages, Brown and Gilman (1960) propose a model that can explain pronominal choice, arguing that the pronouns allow speakers to construe the speaker-hearer relation with respect to two major social dimensions–power and solidarity. Pronominal choice then functions as a major resource for realizing social deixis in dialogic interaction. However, discussions of the Modern English thou/you contrast have criticized the power-and-solidarity mod...
Source: Language Sciences - July 11, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
‘There's an issue there …’: Signalling functions of discourse-deictic there in the history of English
Publication date: July 2018Source: Language Sciences, Volume 68Author(s): Ursula LenkerAbstractThis paper sketches the use of simple discourse-deictic there in the history of English and shows that – in contrast to the frequent and varied employment of discourse-deictic there in there-compounds such as therein, thereby or textual therefore in written genres – simple there was only rarely and restrictedly used with discourse-deictic reference until the 19th century. In Present-Day English, discourse-deictic there, as in you are wrong there, is almost exclusively found in face-to-face interaction of a particular type, wh...
Source: Language Sciences - July 11, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Discourse coherence and intersubjectivity: The development of final but in dialogues
Publication date: July 2018Source: Language Sciences, Volume 68Author(s): Sylvie HancilAbstractAll the studies on final particles in non-Asian languages systematically propose a synchronic view of the constructions under consideration. This paper closes the gap by offering a diachronic analysis of final but in dialogues in a corpus of Northern English over a sixty-year period. Relying on Schiffrin's (1987) planes of discourse and Hasselgård's (2006) definition of a modal particle, it is shown that final but has semantic–pragmatic properties of both a discourse marker and a modal particle. A socio-linguistic approach com...
Source: Language Sciences - July 11, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Language change from a psycholinguistic perspective: The long-term effects of frequency on language processing
Publication date: July 2018Source: Language Sciences, Volume 68Author(s): Alexander HaselowAbstractThis paper demonstrates how psycholinguistics is, or can be, relevant for historical linguistics, giving center stage to frequency in dialogic uses of language as a key factor in language change. Frequency of co-occurrence of linguistic forms in linear strings leads to linguistic ‘compression’, a cognitive process by which the forms involved undergo an increase in the degree of their mutual association and come to be processed under a new, holistic meaning and thus by fewer bits of information than the originally composit...
Source: Language Sciences - July 11, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Rethinking language change from a dialogic perspective
Publication date: July 2018Source: Language Sciences, Volume 68Author(s): Alexander Haselow, Sylvie Hancil (Source: Language Sciences)
Source: Language Sciences - July 11, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
