Hasil untuk "Comparative grammar"

Prosperous Nankindu, Henry Hollan Ssembatya

Through critical research methods using document analysis, this study investigated the current Language in Education Policy (LiEP) debates in Africa. There are many such debates going on across the continent, but the literature available is very thin. Three multilingual African countries, the Federal Republic of Nigeria, the Republic of Congo, and the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, were selected for the study. The study found that colonial languages are dominant and are the languages mainly used as media of instruction in schools and languages of assessment in the sampled countries. Although three countries were selected, the debates are not any different in the rest of the African countries. The findings of this research are generalisable to the situation across the entire continent, thus critical in influencing future LiEP on the content. It is imperative to note that the use of colonial languages in education should not be at the expense of African languages.

Étienne Baudel

The opposition between ‘adnominal’ (rentaikei 連体形) and ‘final’ (shūshikei 終止形) forms of verbs and adjectives is one of the most-commented features of the Hachijō language, as it is considered both a remarkable archaism and a possible argument towards its classification within the Japonic language family. This article is dedicated to a description of this opposition in Hachijō, in comparison with other Japonic languages, and especially with Eastern Old Japanese.

Olfa Ben Amor

The increasing availability of large-scale corpora and advanced data-processing tools has enhanced the analysis of phraseological units. This study investigates the phraseology of English non-finite clauses – specifically to-infinitive, -ing, and past participle clauses –headed by adjectives, adverbs, nouns, and pronouns. It explores the phraseological patterns of these structures and their semantic extensions within a specialized corpus of business English. The corpus comprises academic and journalistic registers, with the academic register including research articles from four leading journals and graduate theses from Tunisian institutions, while the news register features business articles from The Economist and Financial Times. The study identifies lexico-grammatical patterns forming various phraseologies of non-finite clauses and categorizes these patterns into semantic sets based on the degree of fixedness. Findings reveal differences in the frequency of non-finite phraseologies across the academic and news register, and similarities in the degree of fixedness and functions of the most frequent patterns. The study offers a corpus-based account of how non-finite clause constructions are used across business registers, contributing to a broader understanding of register variation, discourse organization, and phraseological conventions in business discourse.

Dorota Molin

Dorota Molin

Dorota Molin

Dorota Molin

Teresa Alegre, Katrin Herget

No campo da linguagem médica e de saúde, a designação de doenças, assim como designações anatómicas, métodos terapêuticos e aparelhos usados no tratamento de pacientes, tem sido desde sempre marcada pelo recurso a epónimos e metáforas. Diversos estudos (Montalt & González-Davies, 2007; Ferguson & Thomas, 2014, entre outros) dão conta de problemas de tradução originados pelas discrepâncias do uso destas designações num dado par de línguas. É partindo destas questões que o presente estudo se propõe analisar de forma contrastiva o uso de epónimos, metáforas e metonímias na linguagem médica no par de línguas alemão-português. O objetivo do estudo prende-se com a identificação e análise de designações eponímicas em textos de divulgação médica, através de corpora comparáveis. Numa primeira fase, procedeu-se à constituição dos corpora, constituídos por textos retirados de websites de divulgação médica, pertencentes a diversas instituições de saúde. A amostra é constituída por um total de 123 026 tokens em alemão e 150 323 tokens em português. Com base nos corpora, foram posteriormente extraídos os epónimos, de modo a proceder-se à análise e classificação, consoante as características linguísticas. A análise culminou com a comparação do recurso aos epónimos identificados em ambas as línguas. O estudo pretende contribuir para a investigação em línguas de especialidade na área da divulgação médica, bem como reunir informação relevante para a tomada de decisões tradutivas.

Shabrina Adzani Yusra

This study examines how Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde reflects Victorian anxieties surrounding misuse of scientific discoveries. The novels follow Dr. Henry Jekyll, a respected physician who creates a potion to unleash his darker self in the form of the monstrous Edward Hyde. Using a historical-biographical approach and qualitative analysis, this study draws on primary data from novels supported by secondary sources including literary criticism and journal articles. The findings reveal that Stevenson addresses Victorian fears of unchecked scientific progress through Dr. Jekyll’s experiments, the societal reactions to Mr. Hyde and the depiction of Jekyll’s hubris, which ultimately highlight the era’s concerns about the ethical limits of science.

Xavier Rull

Questions can be open-ended (waiting for an affirmative or negative answer) but they can also have a confirmatory interpretation (i.e. there is an assumption that may be confirmed). In the latter case, question tags (like oh) may appear in the questions. This paper reports all the question tags in Catalan and the precise syntactic contexts in which they occur (at the beginning or at the end; although in principle they can all occur in two syntactic contexts, not all of them appear everywhere). Special emphasis is placed on the north-western dialects.

Yusuf Al Arief

Humor is widely recognized as an effective method for promoting language acquisition and enhancing language skills. Using humor in language training can help students feel more at ease, reduce tension, and encourage good emotions, all of which have a favorable effect on their motivation and engagement. In language-learning environments, linguistic jokes are one sort of humor that has not been well investigated. This study uses descriptive qualitative methodologies to investigate the advantages of linguistic jokes in the English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom. Data were gathered for the study from interviews, focus groups, and classroom observations involving EFL students. The results show that language learners gain from using linguistic jokes in EFL classes in several ways, including greater motivation, increased engagement, improved communication skills, and decreased anxiety. The study also emphasizes how humour can improve the learning environment by encouraging greater participation and a sense of belonging among students. The qualitative data show that learners have good attitudes toward using humour in language acquisition, which lends credence to these findings. The study proposes that EFL teachers utilize humour as a teaching method to facilitate language learning and develop language skills. It also finds that including linguistic jokes in EFL classrooms can benefit language learners in various ways.

Martin Haspelmath

This paper discusses the widely held idea that the building blocks of languages (features, categories, and architectures) are part of an innate blueprint for Human Language, and notes that if one allows for convergent cultural evolution of grammatical structures, then much of the motivation for it disappears. I start by observing that human linguisticality (=the biological capacity for language) is uncontroversial, and that confusing terminology (“language faculty,” “universal grammar”) has often clouded the substantive issues in the past. I argue that like musicality and other biological capacities, linguisticality is best studied in a broadly comparative perspective. Comparing languages like other aspects of culture means that the comparisons are of the Greenbergian type, but many linguists have presupposed that the comparisons should be done as in chemistry, with the presupposition that the innate building blocks are also the material that individual grammars are made of. In actual fact, the structural uniqueness of languages (in lexicon, phonology, and morphosyntax) leads us to prefer a Greenbergian approach to comparison, which is also more in line with the Minimalist idea that there are very few domain-specific elements of the biological capacity for language.

S. K. Watson, Judith M Burkart, S. Schapiro et al.

Artificial grammar experiments show that marmosets and chimpanzees can process nonadjacent decencies, a key feature of human language. The ability to track syntactic relationships between words, particularly over distances (“nonadjacent dependencies”), is a critical faculty underpinning human language, although its evolutionary origins remain poorly understood. While some monkey species are reported to process auditory nonadjacent dependencies, comparative data from apes are missing, complicating inferences regarding shared ancestry. Here, we examined nonadjacent dependency processing in common marmosets, chimpanzees, and humans using “artificial grammars”: strings of arbitrary acoustic stimuli composed of adjacent (nonhumans) or nonadjacent (all species) dependencies. Individuals from each species (i) generalized the grammars to novel stimuli and (ii) detected grammatical violations, indicating that they processed the dependencies between constituent elements. Furthermore, there was no difference between marmosets and chimpanzees in their sensitivity to nonadjacent dependencies. These notable similarities between monkeys, apes, and humans indicate that nonadjacent dependency processing, a crucial cognitive facilitator of language, is an ancestral trait that evolved at least ~40 million years before language itself.

Sylvia Edith Sandoval, María Cristina Inda

<p>El presente trabajo comunica uno de los temas trabajados en el proyecto de investigación sobre las prácticas de maternaje de las Madres Cuidadoras de la Cultura Qom,específicamente sobre <em>Cona</em> -Juego del Hilo Sin Fin-. En las culturas por lo general el juego ocupa un lugar importante, tanto como la necesidad lúdica propia de Homo ludens (J.Huizinga: 1938) como de la función social que cumple. En las prácticas de maternaje de las MCCQ el juego es imprescindible para el desarrollo de destrezas en las/os niñas/os qom: adiestrarse a trepar árboles, correr, esconderse, imitar a los animales, silbar, gruñir, mimetizarse, entre otras habilidades que les permiten convivir en el ambiente natural a la vez que desarrollar la identidad cultural mediada por la lengua materna y la pertenencia al territorio. <em>Cona</em> -Juego del Hilo Sin Fin- como prefieren traducirlo las MCCQ comparte como juego que es, la infinita posibilidad de representar el mundo de la vida y las cosas que lo habitan. En el presente trabajo analizaremos y reflexionaremos en clave interdisciplinar sobre algunos atributos de Cona vinculados al trabajo de memoria y su relación con la historia, como su aporte a la etnobiología. Hay que mencionar que las características que adquiere Cona provienen de un análisis compartido sostenido en un marco de referencia de diálogo entre culturas y contextualizado en perspectiva intercultural, necesaria para la formación de grado en contextos sociales con pueblos indígenas.</p>

Giulia A. Disanto

Recensione del libro The Desert in Modern Literature and Philosophy. Wasteland Aesthetics di Aidan Tynan.

Bader Markus

In German, a verb selected by another verb normally precedes the selecting verb. Modal verbs in the perfect tense provide an exception to this generalization because they require the perfective auxiliary to occur in cluster-initial position according to prescriptive grammars. Bader and Schmid (2009b) have shown, however, that native speakers accept the auxiliary in all positions except the cluster-final one. Experimental results as well as corpus data indicate that verb cluster serialization is a case of free variation. I discuss how this variation can be accounted for, focusing on two mismatches between acceptability and frequency: First, slight acceptability advantages can turn into strong frequency advantages. Second, syntactic variants with basically zero frequency can still vary substantially in acceptability. These mismatches remain unaccounted for if acceptability is related to frequency on the level of whole sentence structures, as in Stochastic OT (Boersma and Hayes2001). However, when the acceptability-frequency relationship is modeled on the level of individual weighted constraints, using harmony as link (see Pater2009, for different harmony based frameworks), the two mismatches follow given appropriate linking assumptions.

Pei-Jung Kuo

In this paper, I focus on disyllabic post-nominal locatives in Mandarin Chinese. In the literature, disyllabic post-nominal locatives have traditionally been considered nouns. Recent proposals, however, have offered different analyses. In Wu (2015), the typical disyllabic post-nominal locative falls somewhere between an adposition and a noun. Djamouri/Paul/Whitman (2013) and Paul (2015) discuss some new disyllabic post-nominal locatives and propose that they are postpositions. In contrast to these analyses, I argue that the commonly analyzed disyllabic post-nominal locatives are indeed nouns, and that so too is one subtype of the locatives recently proposed to be postpositions. I further examine this subtype and discuss its unique behavior. Finally, a diachronic study of disyllabic post-nominal locatives indicates that they may not share the same analysis as mono-syllabic post-nominal locatives.

Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, E. Teich

Abstract We present a model of the linguistic development of scientific English from the mid-seventeenth to the late-nineteenth century, a period that witnessed significant political and social changes, including the evolution of modern science. There is a wealth of descriptive accounts of scientific English, both from a synchronic and a diachronic perspective, but only few attempts at a unified explanation of its evolution. The explanation we offer here is a communicative one: while external pressures (specialization, diversification) push for an increase in expressivity, communicative concerns pull toward convergence on particular options (conventionalization). What emerges over time is a code which is optimized for written, specialist communication, relying on specific linguistic means to modulate information content. As we show, this is achieved by the systematic interplay between lexis and grammar. The corpora we employ are the Royal Society Corpus (RSC) and for comparative purposes, the Corpus of Late Modern English (CLMET). We build various diachronic, computational n-gram language models of these corpora and then apply formal measures of information content (here: relative entropy and surprisal) to detect the linguistic features significantly contributing to diachronic change, estimate the (changing) level of information of features and capture the time course of change.

مریم صانعی مقدم, رضا غفار ثمر, رامین اکبری

این پژوهش به بررسی تعداد و انواع استعاره و همچنین شناسایی استعاره­های کلیدی درمقالات نویسندگان غیربومی ­زبان ­انگلیسی و مقایسۀ آن با مقالات سخن­گویان بومی می­پردازد. پیکرۀ پژوهش حاضر، شامل 50 مقالۀ پزشکی است. برای توصیف تعداد و انواع استعاره، بخشی از پیکرِۀ اصلی به عنوان نمونه با استفاده از روش استعاره­یابی در متن بررسی شد. برای شناسایی استعاره های کلیدی از نرم افزار  Wmatrix در کنار روش استعاره­یابی در متن استفاده شد. بررسی داده­ها نشان داد که در متون نویسندگان غیر بومی، همانند متون نویسندگان بومی، تعداد بالایی استعاره به­ویژه استعارۀ غیرمستقیم وجود داشت. نتایج همچنین نشان داد که هر دو گروه فزونتر و آگاهانه از استعاره های "زبان" بهره برده بودند، اما در نگارش نویسندگان بومی، استعاره­های کلیدی متنوع­تری همچون استعاره­ها­ی "اشیا" و "قدرت و نظم بخشی" مشاهده شد.

Ewa Urbaniak

El objetivo del presente estudio consiste en examinar la motivación icónica de la reduplicación léxica en español. Como la reduplicación en distintas lenguas está asociada al fenómeno de la iconicidad, el presente artículo pretende averiguar si un tipo específico de las construcciones reduplicadas, basadas en la repetición de una unidad léxica, también puede considerarse icónico. Tras esbozar diferentes metodologías dedicadas al análisis de la iconicidad, se examina hasta qué punto la reduplicación léxica en español forma parte del conjunto de los mecanismos de motivación icónica. The aim of the present study is to examine the iconic motivation of the lexical reduplication in Spanish. As the reduplication in different languages is associated with the iconicity phenomena, the present article tries to find out if a specific type of reduplicated constructions, based on the repetition of some lexical units, can also be considered iconic. After outlining different methodologies related to the analysis of iconicity, it is examined to what extent does the lexical reduplication in Spanish form part of the mechanisms that present iconic motivation.