A study of personal names among the Bikpakpaam (the Konkomba) of Ghana: The linguistics, typology and paradigm shifts
Publication date: March 2018 Source:Language Sciences, Volume 66 Author(s): Abraham Kwesi Bisilki This paper is a contribution to the intellectual discourse on prototypical as well as emerging paradigms in African anthroponomy. It cross-sectionally examines traditional personal names among the Bikpakpaam (the Konkomba), a Gur ethnolinguistic group in northern Ghana. Situated within the general theoretical notion(s) of language-culture interface, the study adopts a mixed-method approach (using both qualitative and quantitative analyses) in describing Likpakpaln traditional personal names. Drawing on a stratified sample s...
Source: Language Sciences - December 22, 2017 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Creoles and sociolinguistic complexity: Response to Ansaldo
Publication date: Available online 20 November 2017 Source:Language Sciences Author(s): Mikael Parkvall, Peter Bakker, John H. McWhorter In an earlier article in this journal, Umberto Ansaldo states that creoles are sociolinguistically the most complex of languages, equalled only by the situation in South India. In our article we show that this claim is not supported by facts about global multilingualism, creole societies, creole language structures and theories of language contact. The vast majority of the world’s population is multilingual: the average human speaks almost two languages. Nothing in the sociolinguis...
Source: Language Sciences - December 9, 2017 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Exploring vagueness: Preposition alternation in Spanish
Publication date: March 2018 Source:Language Sciences, Volume 66 Author(s): Wojciech Lewandowski This paper aims at showing the relevance of cognitive semantics in the study of linguistic units whose conceptual import tends to be underresearched within formalist frameworks. Specifically, I focus on the alternation between the prepositions con ‘with’ and de ‘of’ in the change-of-state variant of the locative alternation (e.g., cargar el camión con/de heno, lit. load the truck with/of hay). I show that although the con- and the de-constructions share many semantic properties and they can refer to the same concept...
Source: Language Sciences - December 9, 2017 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
The grammaticalizational relation between two Modern Chinese wo xiang ‘I think’ constructions
Publication date: Available online 10 November 2017 Source:Language Sciences Author(s): Hai-Ping Long, Bernd Heine, Gui-Jun Ruan, Meng-Yue Wu The main concern of this paper is with two constructions that are based on the Modern Chinese phrase wo xiang ‘I think’. They are prosodically-dependent wo xiang that takes a question, an imperative, an exclamation or a conjectural clause (referred to as W1) and prosodically-independent wo xiang that takes a question, an imperative, an exclamation or a conjectural clause (referred to as W2). By contrasting phonetic and morphosyntactic properties of the two constructions, th...
Source: Language Sciences - November 11, 2017 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Predicting L2 vowel identification accuracy from cross-language mappings between L2 English and L1 Korean
This study also explores whether the extent to which pairs of Korean and English vowels are judged to be variants (or else an English vowel is judged to be “new”) predicts English vowel identification. Korean listeners participated in English vowel identification and cross-language mapping tasks. Results indicated that the L1 mapping model very closely predicted identification of English vowels analogous to Korean vowels (e.g., /ɛ/, /oʊ/, and /u/). This phenomenon was also observed when the listeners' goodness ratings were incorporated. However, it was found that the predictive power of the L1 mapping model for vowel...
Source: Language Sciences - November 7, 2017 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
