Language, commodification and labour: the relevance of Marx
This article explores, through a Marxist lens, the nature and extent of language commodification in work situations from three perspectives: firstly, as a component of the commodity of labour power in the exploitative labour process; secondly, from an ideological perspective, the influence of the dominant neoliberal narrative of commodification which marketizes everything; and thirdly, the active social agent dimension of ‘language workers’ who resist, in various ways, attempts at commodification of their language. (Source: Language Sciences)
Source: Language Sciences - March 22, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Representing the cognitive construal of Chinese first-person singular reference in discourse
This study aims to explore the Chinese first-person singular reference in discourse, and exhibit the complexity of its usage. Default Semantics is applied in the construal of Chinese first-person singular reference phenomenon taken as an act of communication. After analyzing the examples elicited from the Lancaster Chinese Corpus, we find that the discourse meanings of Chinese first-person singular pronoun wǒ are not limited to self-reference, a variety of additional or non-deictic meanings are conveyed by it in different contexts, and many non-deictic expressions can also be employed to convey self-referential meanings. ...
Source: Language Sciences - March 15, 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: Available online 7 February 2018 Source:Language Sciences Author(s): Ursula Lenker This 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...
Source: Language Sciences - March 10, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Complexity reboot: A rejoinder to Parkvall, Bakker and McWhorter
Publication date: March 2018 Source:Language Sciences, Volume 66 Author(s): Umberto Ansaldo (Source: Language Sciences)
Source: Language Sciences - March 10, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Intuitions for phonological constraints in binomials: A psycholinguistic investigation
Publication date: March 2018 Source:Language Sciences, Volume 66 Author(s): Viola Green, David Birdsong Binomials (e.g., spic and span; hanky-panky) are lexicalized sequences of two or more constituents whose irreversible order is determined by semantic and phonological factors (Benor and Levy, 2006; Cooper and Ross, 1975). As an extension of early psycholinguistic work (Pinker and Birdsong, 1979) the present experimental study examines speakers' sensitivities to proposed phonological constraints on constituent ordering in binomials. Intuitions for preferred constituent order by native English and French speakers, and ...
Source: Language Sciences - February 22, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Context and Information Structure constraints on factivity: the case of know
Publication date: March 2018 Source:Language Sciences, Volume 66 Author(s): Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri, Viviana Masia Do factive-presuppositional interpretations of know emerge out of its semantic features, or are they the outcome of different structural patterns displayed by the sentence? The present work discusses the ambiguity of know and the reasons behind its fluctuating factive and non factive behavior looking at the role of Information Structure. Starting from views that account for the ambiguity of know as the result of its inherent semantic polysemy and from the role played by the context of discourse, we sugge...
Source: Language Sciences - February 19, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
(Inter)subjectification at the left and right periphery: Deriving Chinese pragmatic marker bushi from the negative copula
Publication date: March 2018 Source:Language Sciences, Volume 66 Author(s): Jiajun Chen The connection between (inter)subjectification and movement to peripheral positions of a clause is investigated using diachronic data on the Chinese pragmatic marker bushi. This pragmatic marker derived from the negative copula use of bushi in medial positions, and was recruited to serve exchange- and action-structure-related functions (including subjective and intersubjective functions) at the left and right periphery. Key factors are identified to operationalize (inter)subjectification in the expansion of functional range, based on...
Source: Language Sciences - February 5, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Discourse coherence and intersubjectivity: The development of final but in dialogues
Publication date: Available online 11 January 2018 Source:Language Sciences Author(s): Sylvie Hancil All 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 app...
Source: Language Sciences - January 13, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Meaning in a changing paradigm: the semantics of you and the pragmatics of thou
Publication date: Available online 12 January 2018 Source:Language Sciences Author(s): Anouk Buyle, Hendrik De Smet Many 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-soli...
Source: Language Sciences - January 13, 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: Available online 9 January 2018 Source:Language Sciences Author(s): Alexander Haselow This 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 ...
Source: Language Sciences - January 10, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Negotiating difference in political contexts: An exploration of Hansard
Publication date: Available online 10 January 2018 Source:Language Sciences Author(s): Dawn Archer This 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 politene...
Source: Language Sciences - January 10, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Toward a typological profile of Lingua Franca: A view from the lexicon and word formation1
Publication date: March 2018 Source:Language Sciences, Volume 66 Author(s): Natalie Operstein Although the Mediterranean contact language Lingua Franca (LF) is generally classified as a pidgin, a closer examination of the specialist literature reveals some doubts regarding this categorization. This paper approaches the classification of LF from the viewpoint of its vocabulary structure and word formation processes. The basis for the study is the lexicon of some 2000 words recorded in the anonymous didactic dictionary of 1830 that constitutes the most detailed source of information about LF. The study finds that the LF w...
Source: Language Sciences - January 6, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
If-insubordination in spoken British English: Syntactic and pragmatic properties
Publication date: March 2018 Source:Language Sciences, Volume 66 Author(s): Cristina Lastres-López This paper analyses insubordinate if-clauses in spoken British English (e.g. If you'll just come next door) as independent from full conditional clauses and indirect interrogative complement clauses, using data extracted from the British component of the International Corpus of English and the British National Corpus. The study shows that such constructions occur most frequently in conversation and that they express a wide variety of functions in discourse. The polyfunctionality of insubordinate if-clauses is presented to...
Source: Language Sciences - January 6, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Dynamic resonance and social reciprocity in language change: the case of Good morrow
This study aims at complementing the usage-based model of language change by operationalising the role of dialogic creativity as a mechanism that can be in competition with conventionalization and grammaticalization. We provide a distinctive collexeme analysis (i.e. Hilpert, 2006) focussing on the constructionalization of the dialogic pair [A: good morrow B B: (good) morrow (A)] from the 15th up to the 18th century. After reaching the highest degree of entrenchment and automatisation, the dialogic pair will show an increasing tendency to be creatively re-modelled with ad-hoc meanings during online exchanges by means of dyn...
Source: Language Sciences - January 3, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
The role of morphology in setting production biases in agreement: A cross-linguistic completion study
Publication date: March 2018 Source:Language Sciences, Volume 66 Author(s): J. Carlos Acuña-Fariña Agreement has always posed a puzzle to both linguists and psycholinguists because, both cross-linguistically and intra-linguistically, grammatical biases and processing biases exhibit a seemingly capricious mixture of form regulation and semantic interference. English in particular is famous for the latter. This work explores the thesis that agreement in production is sensitive to the size of the morphological component of every language. To be precise, the idea is that the richer the morphology of a language, the greate...
Source: Language Sciences - December 30, 2017 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
