There is an ongoing debate whether phenomena of disfluency (such as filled pauses) are produced communicatively. Clark and Fox Tree ("Cognition" 84(1):73-111, 2002) propose that filled pauses are words, and that different forms signal different lengths of delay. This paper evaluates this Filler-As-Words hypothesis by analyzing the…

Presents an analysis of the two passive (or passive-like) constructions in Singapore English which exhibit substrate influence from Malay and Chinese. The paper shows that while substrate languages contribute to the grammar of Singapore English, the continued prestige of standard English exerts normative pressure and mitigates the effect of…

Uses a detailed analysis of a single grammatical problem to present the principal commitments and mechanisms of a grammatical theory that assigns a central role to the notion of grammatical construction. The grammatical phenomenon used to introduce construction grammar is the construction that licenses the surprising syntactic and semantic…

Proposes that the distinction between syntactic and nonsyntactic use of reflexives is not necessarily one of lexical ambiguity, positing one type of referentially dependent element (reflexives) which have two options for being related to their antecedents (syntactic binding and discourse conference). The paper focuses on Chinese reflexive ziji and…

The sophistication of research, the acceptance of diversity, and the potential applications of research in the field of linguistics are on the rise. (MSE)

A linguistic survey indicates that despite variations by region and social group, the French spoken by Saskatchewan francophones preserves traces of the history of the language, including anglicisms and older French expressions not much in use today. (MSE)

Examines the behavior of the morpheme, um, in Toba Batak and Tagalog, which alternates as a prefix or an infix, arguing that the variation is conditioned by constraints on consonant clusters. Three patterns of variation that occur with um are described, noting that the stages involved in changing from infixed to prefixed positions over time are…

Introduces an issue dedicated to examining the concept of norms in translation studies (based on a 1998 seminar on translation and norms), providing an overview of the concept of norms, linguistic norms in translation studies, norms and conventions in text-linguistic approaches, the concept of equivalence, and translational norms. (SM)

Discusses main ideas of papers presented that reflect the new directions explored in the field of Chinese linguistics. Current areas of study include tonal distinctions in dialect studies, contrastive analysis of Taiwanese and standard Chinese verb phrase structures, and the application of old Chinese morphological grammar to characteristics of…

A comparison of the error profiles of monolingual (child L1) learners of Dutch, Moroccan children (child L2) and Moroccan adults (adult L2) learning Dutch as their L2 shows that participants in all groups massively overgeneralize [-neuter] articles to [+neuter] contexts. In all groups, the reverse gender mistake infrequently occurs. Gender…

Characterizes the situation regarding the Gaelic language in Great Britain today, and sketches, by means of examples, some characteristic differences between Gaelic and English, pointing out also certain peculiarities in the field of area studies. (IFS/WGA)

Accessibility is one of the most important challenges at the intersection of linguistic and psycholinguistic studies of text and discourse processing. Linguists have shown how linguistic indicators of referential coherence show a systematic pattern: Longer linguistic forms (like full lexical NPs) tend to be used when referents are relatively low…

Examines the field of Spanish linguistics over 100 years, subdividing Spanish linguistics into several subdisciplines: historical grammar, descriptive phonetics, Spanish phonology, contrastive structures, descriptive grammar, Spanish syntax, specific Spanish dialectology, Spanish in Africa and Asia, sociolinguistics of Spanish-speaking societies,…

Describes the highlights of the activities and papers presented at the conference including the following: an analysis of Chinese data processing systems and Chinese sentences, natural language processing, language lesson authoring systems, character recognition, and character input. Future work in the field may include studies on Chinese…

Reports that thousands of the world's languages face extinction and that linguists are racing to preserve at least some of them. (MM)