The paper investigates Polish punk and hip hop (rap) song lyrics broken down into frequency lists. In an analysis inspired by MacLaury's view of categorization, the construals of punk and hip hop worldviews are shown to vary in the distance of the observer from the world, the width of the viewing frame, as well as the granularity and density of…

This quantitative study intends to better understand the impact of the location of the first deleted word upon the estimation of text difficulty yielded by successive cloze tests based on random deletion from a single passage. The variation in sampling of language features across five cloze tests based on the same passage is random and thus not…

New research on the history of nineteenth-century Flemish migration into the North of France shows ample evidence of a complex pattern of transfer procedures taking place between the source and target cultures, both via institutions such as newspapers, magazines and associations and via practices such as popular theatre, almanacs and songs. The…

In this study, data and discourses on immigrant minority groups and languages other than Dutch at home and at school are presented in order to contextualise the status of Turkish and Moroccan communities and their languages in the Netherlands. Patterns of language use, choice and attitudes of Turkish (n = 63) and Moroccan (n = 64) youngsters in…

This dissertation explores the robust confluence of syntactic and cultural factors involved in the structure and content of chengyu. It unpacks a number of structural tendencies in the data sample, and illuminates selected underlying cultural themes. The presence of syntactic and semantic parallelism within chengyu, as an expression of the…

Real-time estimation of what we will do next is a crucial prerequisite of purposive behavior. During the planning of goal-oriented actions, for instance, the temporal and causal organization of upcoming subsequent moves needs to be predicted based on our knowledge of events. A forward computation of sequential structure is also essential for…

A comparison across spontaneous speech collected in the 1980s and the 2000s reveals a dramatic flip between the use of "said" versus "like" as enquoting devices. The greater use of "like" is reflected in a wide variety of quotation types including reported speech, thoughts, exclamations, and sounds. There is no…

Two auditory ERP studies examined the role of animacy in sentence comprehension in Mandarin Chinese by comparing active and passive sentences in simple verb-final (Experiment 1) and relative clause constructions (Experiment 2). In addition to the voice manipulation (which modulated the assignment of actor and undergoer roles to the arguments),…

The structure of /s/-initial clusters is debated in developmental phonology. Pan and Snyder (2004) took the Government Phonology (GP) framework and proposed that production of /s/-initial clusters requires the positive setting of two binary parameters [+/-Branching rhyme (BR)] and [+/-Magic empty nucleus (MEN)] and the initial /s/ is treated as a…

Drawing on Lave and Wenger's (1991) and Wenger's (1998) "communities of practice" (CoP) framework, this study explores the shared repertoire of humor practices in the creation of community within the context of a culturally diverse and multilevel adult Arabic language classroom consisting of two native speakers, five heritage language learners…

African American English (AAE) refers to the systematic, rule-governed linguistic patterns of found among African Americans. This article provides an overview of AAE. More specifically, the article enumerates the historical underpinnings associated with AAE, identifies a representative set of AAE characteristics, reviews relevant research, and…

Because many of the forms participating in inherent variability are not attested in the standard language, they are often construed as evidence of change. We test this assumption by confronting the standard, as instantiated by a unique corpus covering five centuries of French grammatical injunctions, with data on the evolution of spontaneous…

This paper argues that the concept of E-Prime (E') holds practical benefits to effective listening for students of interpersonal communication. In advancing this argument, the paper includes a concise review of relevant literature on E-Prime, defensiveness, and conflict, with particular emphasis on verbal aggression. The literature demonstrates…

Semantic accounts of verb pattern alternations often rely on observations about "verb disposition": the preference of verbs with particular lexical semantic characteristics for one of two competing constructions is taken as a clue to the semantic differences between the two constructions. For instance, it has been observed with regard to the…

To express object transfer, Cantonese-speakers use a "ditransitive" ([V-R-T] or [V-T-R] where V = Verb, T = Theme, R = Recipient), or a more complex prepositional/serial-verb (P/SV) construction. Clausal elements in Cantonese datives can be optional (resulting in "full" versus "non-full" forms) or appear in variant…