Languages, Volume 7, Issue 2 (June 2022) – 85 articles

The aims of the paper are twofold. First, it provides a systematic qualitative corpus study into differences between Russian and Czech in the use of aspect in chains of single, episodic events, as well as in habitual contexts, which takes into account the role of verb class, aspectual affixes, discourse relations, and other factors contributing to the overall aspectual interpretation in a given sentence. The findings suggest that while Russian makes narrative progression and habituality visible already on the verb forms, by employing exclusively perfective and imperfective verb forms, respectively, Czech relies more heavily on the context itself and uses (im)perfective verb forms mostly to signal duration vs. change of state. The second part of the paper addresses differences in aspect use between the two languages in so-called general-factual contexts (presuppositional and existential). Against the background of the empirical findings of the corpus study, I argue against the received view that Czech makes use of imperfective verb forms to mark existential readings. The presuppositional reading of imperfective forms, which I assume to be related to the process/durative reading of imperfectives, is argued to exist in both languages. Full article

This paper investigates a pervasive phenomenon in video-mediated interaction (VMI), namely, simultaneous start-ups, which happen when two speakers produce a turn beginning in overlap. Based on the theoretical and methodological tenets of conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, the present study offers a multimodal and sequential account of how simultaneous start-ups are oriented to and solved in the context of English as an additional language (L2) tutoring. The micro- and sequential analysis of ten hours of screen-recorded video-mediated data from tutoring sessions between an experienced tutor and an advanced-level tutee reveals that the typical overlap resolution trajectory results in the tutor withdrawing from the interactional floor. The same analysis uncovered a range of resources, such as lip pressing and the verbal utterance ‘go ahead’, employed in what we call enhanced explicitness, through which the withdrawal is done. The orchestration of these resources allows the tutor to exploit the specific features of the medium to resolve simultaneous start-ups while also supporting the continuation of student talk. We maintain that this practice is used in the service of securing the learner’s interactional space, and consequently in fostering the use of the language being learned. The results of the study help advance current understandings of L2 instructors’ specialized work of managing participation and creating learning opportunities. Being one of the first studies to detail the practices involved in overlap resolution in the micro-context of simultaneous talk on Zoom-based L2 instruction, this study also makes a significant contribution to research on video-mediated instruction and video-mediated interaction more generally. Full article

In contrast to views that treat positions and standpoints as defining the scope of argumentation, our normative pragmatic approach sees positions and standpoints as interactionally emergent products of argumentative work. Here, this is shown in a detailed case study of a question-answer session in which former US President Donald J. Trump was pressed by journalists to express and defend his standpoint on the Charlottesville protests by neo-Nazis and White nationalists. Trump repeatedly evaded efforts to pin down his standpoint; however, with each of his answers to the questions, his built-up position circumscribed the range of possible standpoints he could take. To the end, he avoided backing down from any prior statement expressing his standpoint, while also preserving a degree of maneuverability regarding what his standpoint amounted to. Full article

This paper reports on a study of teachers’ engagement with their own multilingualism in a pre-service teacher education context. As linguistic diversity in society and schools around the globe is increasing, teachers are required to meet the challenges of teaching children who live with multiple languages. However, teachers are seldom required to reflect on and engage with their own multilingualism, which forms the basis of a subjective and experiential approach to educating teachers multilingually. Embedded in an arts-based visual methodology, this study used the concept of Dominant Language Constellations (DLCs) as both a theoretical underpinning and a creative qualitative tool for collecting data. It included fourteen DLC artefacts created by future teachers of English in Grades 1–7 and Grades 5–10 in northern Norway, supported by oral and written narratives. Plurisemiotic analysis of teachers’ DLC artefacts indicates that teachers ‘saw’ or perceived themselves as plurilingual individuals for the first time. Furthermore, they reflected on the classroom implications of including multilingual practices in a context of increasing linguistic diversity in Norway, through capitalizing on their own and potentially their learners’ multilingual identities. Full article

This paper provides a syntactic analysis of two types of compounds in Greek: synthetic and phrasal compounds derived from agentive nominalizations of verbal strings containing an internal argument of the verb. The analysis is couched within a ‘morphology as syntax’ account and uses independently motivated syntactic tools to show that both types of compounds are derived in syntax proper without any need for a separate morphological component. The differences in the syntactic properties of the two types of compounds are explained with reference to the ‘size’ or ‘complexity’ of the projected internal arguments, which can be either ‘roots’, in the case of synthetic compounds, or unquantized nominals projected as NumPs, which require special licensing conditions in the case of phrasal compounds. Differences in prosodic and semantic interpretation are also explained with reference to phase theory and the type/number of phase domains within the structure of the two types of compounds. Full article

We investigate the effects of the historical language contact of Modern Greek (MG) with Vlach Aromanian (VA) in bilingual speakers of three generations living in Epirus, Greece. We focus on a VA variety spoken in a specific language community, with our study constituting one of the early attempts in this field of research. (1) Background: Given that bilingualism is a dynamic process in which language domains are not uniformly affected by external (i.e., sociolinguistic) factors, the investigation of bidirectional crosslinguistic influence can shed light on the resilience of morphosyntactic and semantic feature changes. MG differs from VA in a number of morphosyntactic properties at the DP domain, namely definiteness marking, positioning the adjective and gender marking. (2) Methods: To examine the language contact effects in VA–MG bilinguals, we elicited spontaneous language production in VA and MG from speakers across three generations with different levels of proficiency in each language. (3) Results: The data analysis showed evidence of bidirectional crosslinguistic influence since (a) MG seems to affect VA in definiteness marking and adjective positioning in younger bilingual groups and (b) VA influences MG in gender marking in older bilinguals. (4) Conclusions: The present study presents original language data from VA–MG bilinguals and provides evidence of bidirectional language contact effects. Full article

This paper adopts a morphological approach to the reduplication of the past-tense augment in Cypriot Greek and explores the morphotactic constraints that apply. Phonological reduplication phenomena have been addressed in morphology by developing a framework that can account for both doubling and metathesis. This phenomenon has been a focus of discussion, but less is known about the application of this mechanism to tense prefixes, known as augments. Doubling of the augment appears in verbal complexes depending on the position of its components, what I will argue are cases that support the post-syntactic morphological doubling and metathesis analysis in Distributed Morphology. The data from this non-standard variety provide a novel analysis of augments and contribute to a better understanding of their distribution by redefining this phenomenon as morphological and supporting a unified framework for the formalism designed to account for similar post-syntactic morphological phenomena. Full article

This paper challenges the cross-linguistic validity of the tense–aspect category ‘perfect’ by investigating 15 languages from eight different families (Atayal, Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, English, German, Gitksan, Japanese, Javanese, Korean, Mandarin, Niuean, Québec French, St’át’imcets, Swahili, and Tibetan). The methodology involves using the storyboard ‘Miss Smith’s Bad Day’ to test for the availability of experiential, resultative, recent-past, and continuous readings, as well as lifetime effects, result-state cancellability, narrative progression, and compatibility with definite time adverbials. Results show that the target forms in these languages can be classified into four groups: (a) past perfectives; (b) experientials; (c) resultatives; and (d) hybrids (which allow both experiential and resultative readings). It is argued that the main division is between past perfectives, which contain a ‘pronominal’ tense, on the one hand, and the other three groups on the other, which involve existential quantification, either over times (experiential) or over events (resultative). The methodological and typological implications of the findings are discussed. The main conclusion of the study is that there is no universal category of ‘the perfect’, and that instead, researchers should focus on identifying shared semantic components of tense–aspect categories across languages. Full article

Teachers in Norway have been increasingly faced with the challenge of adapting their instruction methods to address the needs of minority-language students. The current body of research on the issue seems to indicate that multilingual practices are being introduced in Norwegian classrooms. However, they often rely on majority languages, such as English and Norwegian. Some teachers have been found to employ minority languages to support learners’ English writing in drafts. As a result, minority languages in Norwegian schools tend to be regarded as less valuable than Norwegian and English. However, more recent projects are being implemented in Norwegian schools to help teachers alter their ideologies of minority languages. This article adds to this body of research by presenting two teachers’ work with multilingual pedagogies, involving the active use of minority languages alongside Norwegian and English in student texts. The data were collected from: teacher reports, student materials, and mentorship meetings. The findings indicate that the teachers successfully implemented multilingual pedagogies by using language portraits, parallel translanguaging in multilingual posters and multimodal dictionaries, and complementary translanguaging in multilingual poetry. These multilingual practices enabled the students to showcase their linguistic identities and multilingual literacy practices. The implementation of multilingual pedagogies benefited from the long-term availability of scholarly input and guidance for teachers and the opportunity to share experiences in a professional network. Full article

This study aims to account for the variation in aspect choices in factual imperfective contexts in Polish, Czech, and Russian. A series of online questionnaires were conducted wherein the native speakers of the tested languages were asked to fill in the missing verbs for two types of existential contexts (neutral and resultative) and four types of presuppositional factual contexts (weakly and strongly resultative with a focus on the initiator or the result state of the past event). We show that neutral existential factual contexts generally elicited significantly more imperfective choices than resultative existential factual contexts. Additionally, there was a trend towards a higher usage of imperfective in weakly resultative presuppositional contexts as compared to strongly resultative presuppositional contexts, suggesting that the less emphasis is placed on the result state the more likely the choice of imperfective aspect is for the expression of the temporal indefiniteness of factual contexts. Russian showed a significantly higher proportion of imperfective uses than Polish and Czech, with Czech being intermediate. We argue that these observations result from the fact that in all types of factual contexts (both existential and presuppositional) there is an interaction between two types of TEMPORAL (IN)DEFINITENESS of the past event: (i) temporal (in)definiteness at the micro-level (first phase syntax-vP) (depending on the position of the time variable within the temporal event of the past complex event) and (ii) (in)definiteness of the past event at the macro-level (second phase syntax–AspP and TP) (related to the position of the past event relative to the utterance time). We show that both discourse-level information and verb-level information interact in determining these two types of (in)definiteness, and they do it differently in Polish, Czech, and Russian. Full article

Variation in the language experience of bilinguals has consequences for cognitive and affective processes. In the current study, we examined how bilingual experience influences the relationship between language and emotion in English among a group of Spanish–English heritage bilinguals on an emotion–memory task. Participants rated the emotionality of English taboo, negative and neutral words and then completed an unexpected recognition test. To account for language experience, data were gathered on the participants’ language dominance and proficiency. Results showed emotion–memory effects in the Spanish–English heritage bilinguals’ English (the societal language): taboo words were recognized significantly better than neutral words, while the emotionality of negative words carried over and significantly affected the recognition of preceding neutral words. Furthermore, such effects were modulated by language dominance scores with more pronounced emotion–memory effects in more English-dominant bilinguals. The findings contribute to a growing body of evidence showing that emotions are not necessarily restricted to the first acquired home language. Critically, for heritage speakers, there is often a shift in language dominance from the home language to the societal language. The present study demonstrates that the effects of emotion on memory are seen in the acquired societal language. Full article

The distinction between perfective and imperfective aspect has been identified in many languages across the world. This paper shows that even languages that do not have a dedicated perfective—imperfective distinction may endow a verbal construction that is not specifically aspectual with a perfective value. The crucial diagnostic for identifying perfectivity in a given non-aspectual construction is a difference in the temporal interpretation of clauses involving that construction, licensed by the actionality class of the main predicate: while stative verbs have a present interpretation, dynamic verbs yield a non-present (past or future) interpretation. This pattern of interaction is triggered by a phenomenon that has been referred to as the ‘present perfective paradox’, i.e., the impossibility of aligning dynamic situations with the time of speaking while at the same time conceptualizing them in their entirety. The latter type of construal is argued to be the main function of perfective aspect. The range of non-aspectual constructions with underlying perfective semantics includes ‘iamitive’ markers, an evidential, an epistemic supposition marker, a focus marker, a polar question marker, and a declarative marker. These constructions come from typologically different and genetically unrelated languages, illustrating the cross-linguistic salience of the category of perfective aspect. Full article

This paper aims to demonstrate the reliability of morphosyntactic versus morphophonological features in the acquisition of L2 gender of inanimate nouns across languages. Based on Anna Kibort study “Towards a typology of grammatical features”(2010), the current research proposes that the presence of a gendered determiner is more reliable than gendered noun-final morphemes in the process of adjective agreement within the Determiner Phrase (DP) across two gender transparency system languages. To test this hypothesis, the current research compares English second-language (L2) learners of Hebrew and Spanish. Both languages have a binary gender system for nouns; however, Hebrew lacks a determiner with gender value, but provides a plural ending morpheme that encodes both number and gender. In contrast, Spanish has a gendered article that facilitates gender acquisition, but lacks a plural ending morpheme that indicates gender. Thirty-two L1 English–L2 Spanish learners and thirty-two L1 English–L2 Hebrew learners with different proficiency levels completed an adjective-agreement forced-choice task and an adjective-agreement elicited-production task—in their respective target languages. The tasks contained Spanish opaque plural nouns and Hebrew plural transparent nouns, highlighting the role of the determiner in Spanish and the role of transparency plural-ending morphemes in Hebrew. The results revealed that Spanish L2 learners performed better on the tasks than L2 Hebrew learners, offering evidence for the relevance of syntactic agreement knowledge over phonological cues in gender acquisition. Full article

Language teachers struggle to shift from monolingual ideologies and pedagogical practices, as advocated for in the promotion of multilingualism and inclusive pedagogy. Additionally, the role of English as a multilingua franca pushes English teachers to rethink their beliefs about the language and its use. Even when positive about multilingualism, teachers are often uncertain of how to address the complexities of multilingual ideals due to varying contextual factors and a lack of practical knowledge and skills. This study reports on English teachers’ (N = 110) language beliefs and self-reported practices in linguistically diverse classrooms in Norway based on an online survey. We applied factor analysis to investigate if any demographic factors influenced the results. A complexity paradox emerged in which the teachers’ acceptance of multilingual ideals was contradicted by their beliefs and teaching practices, which reflected monolingual ideologies. Teacher age, learner age group, and teacher gender were important factors in the respondents’ beliefs. The discussion suggests why various factors may influence teachers and explores the complexity of their multifaceted ecologies. We conclude with recommendations for practitioners and researchers. Full article

Communicative expertise in the host society’s dominant language is central to newcomers’ socio-professional integration. To date, SLA research has largely ignored laypeople’s perspectives about Lx communicative expertise, though they are the ultimate judges of real-life interactional success. Sociolinguistic studies have shown that laypeople may base their judgments of Lx speech not only on linguistic criteria, but also on extralinguistic factors such as gender and language background. To document laypeople perspectives, we investigated the professional characteristics attributed to four ethnolinguistic groups of French Lx economic immigrants (Spanish, Chinese, English and Farsi) who were nearing completion of the government-funded French language training program in Quebec City, Canada. We asked L1 naïve listeners (N = 49) to evaluate spontaneous speech excerpts, similar in terms of content and speech qualities, produced by a man and a woman from each target group. After they listened to each audio excerpt, we asked listeners to select the characteristics they associated with that person from a list of the most frequent professional qualities found in job advertisements. Data analysis showed that few Lx users were perceived as having strong communication skills in French. Logistic regression revealed no significant relationships between language group, gender, communicative effectiveness, and professional characteristics. However, there were significant associations between communicative effectiveness with the following characteristics: can work independently, can relate to others, is dynamic, has a sense of initiative, and shows leadership skills. Full article

Oral argumentation skills have become a ‘hot topic’ within pragmatic language acquisition research as well as didactical research. In this study, we first discuss characteristics specific to oral argumentation which, compared to written argumentation, has its own mediality and therefore specific requirements. To reconstruct different levels of oral argumentation skills of school children in grades 2, 4 and 6, we collected a corpus of 180 peer discussions without adult supervision and analyzed them based on conversation analysis. In our case study we compare two conversations in terms of different modalizations and epistemic stances in positionings and justifications and briefly show how the use of modalizations can shape both the character as well as the argumentative structure of a conversation. We argue that process-related and stylistic conversational aspects beyond structural aspects in a narrow sense shape oral argumentation to a high degree and therefore belong to the core aspects of oral argumentation skills. Full article

This qualitative and quantitative study examines how taboo language is rendered in non-professional subtitling (NPS), how viewers react to the renderings, and how the interactions between danmu and general comments’ contributors affect the translation activities and language changes. The study draws on a parallel corpus consisting of taboo language and its translations from 18 of the most-viewed and commented upon subtitled videos on the popular video-sharing platform, Bilibili.com. Danmu comments and general comments related to the renderings of taboo language are also collected and studied. When analyzing translation activities in an NPS setting, the study adopts and modifies some mainstream subtitling strategies and techniques proposed by. The study finds that various creative approaches are adopted, such as lexical recreation and substitution by euphemism. While the strength of the taboo language is reduced in more than half of the instances, in an unexpected 17.2% of cases the effects are enlarged. The study concludes that a virtuous, collaborative mechanism for potential translation problems and language learning is formed by providing positive, neutral, and critical feedback in the comments. In addition to linguistic knowledge and cultural background, viewers also share knowledge beyond the scope of translation. Full article

At a language’s inception, what determines which elements are taken up to build a grammar? How is the initial raw material reshaped through intergenerational language learning? We approached this question by focusing on the emergence of non-manual wh-question markers in Nicaraguan Sign Language (LSN), a young sign language. We asked whether the seeds of non-manual markers originate in the facial gestures of the hearing Nicaraguan community, and we explored the iterated process by which a form becomes selected and then systematized through generational transmission. We identified six non-manual facial and body movements produced with questions by 34 deaf LSN signers, representing three sequential age cohorts of learners, and compared them to those produced by 16 non-signing Spanish speakers. We examined the frequency and duration of each non-manual, and its temporal overlap with a question word. One non-manual, the brow furrow, was overwhelmingly represented among LSN signers, despite appearing rarely among non-signers and not being initially favored in duration or temporal overlap. With the second and third cohorts, the brow furrow emerges as a frequent and systematic marker. With each cycle of child learners, variable input was transformed into a more constrained set of grammatical forms. Full article

This article draws from a longitudinal case study of trainee (the term used in official documentation related to Initial Teacher Training (ITT) in England and with some reservations throughout this paper) and early-career teachers (ECT) of mathematics. The sample represents migrant teachers that the Immigration Act of 2020 seeks to attract to the UK to address national shortages identified by the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC). The analysis examines how multimodal semiotic repertoires of language, bodies and pedagogical practices are entangled in classroom encounters. It shows how the ideology of Standard English can create an uncomfortable sense of different deficits amongst multilingual professionals and evidences how these can be addressed through a model of authority in which teachers get the right mix of mathematical subject knowledge (epistemic authority), the use of school practices and expectations (practical authority), and individual biography (personal authority). It uses translanguaging spaces to examine how teachers use communicative repertoires to orchestrate semiotic resources and manage their identity positions in ways that promote intercultural competencies during the daily encounters of teachers and their pupils. Full article

Usage-based approaches have become increasingly important in research on language acquisition and recently also in bilingual first language acquisition. Lexically specific patterns, such as What’s this? and frame-and-slot patterns, such as [I want X] play an important role in language acquisition scenarios. The ubiquity of such conventionalized chunks and frame-and-slot patterns supports the idea that children construct their early utterances out of concrete pieces they have heard and stored before. To investigate the emergence of patterns in children’s speech the traceback method has been developed, which accounts for the composition of utterances by relying on previously acquired material. Recently, the traceback method has also been applied to code-mixed utterances in bilingual children testing the assumption that bilingual utterances are structured around a frame-and-slot pattern in which the open slot is filled by (a) word(s) from the other language, e.g., [where is X] as in where is das feuer ‘where is the fire’. In this paper we want to present how the empirical use of the traceback method, and the general adoption of a usage-based theoretical perspective, can shed new lights on the study of bilingual phenomena, such as code-mixing. Full article

This paper presents results from two experiments on the L2 acquisition of wh-features and relevant constraints (Superiority and Subjacency) by L1 Sinhala–L2 English speakers. Our results from a Truth Value Judgment Task and a Grammaticality Judgment Task with 31 English native controls and 38 Sinhala/English bilinguals show that the advanced adult L2 speakers of English we tested have successfully acquired the uninterpretable wh-Q feature and relevant movement constraints in English, despite the lack of overt wh-movement in L1-Sinhala. These results raise questions for Representational Deficit Accounts of second language acquisition and offer evidence that (i) uninterpretable syntactic features are not necessarily subject to an early critical period and (ii) uninterpretable features not instantiated in learners’ L1 can be available for L2 syntactic computation. We take our results as evidence for full access by L2 learners to syntactic properties that are not instantiated in their L1, but that remain accessible due to a cognitive capacity for language (i.e., knowledge of Universal Grammar) independently of the L1. Full article

This study explored the patterns and predictors of aspect marker acquisition of Chinese preschoolers speaking Mandarin Chinese as their first language (L1). Based on a corpus drawn from 157 preschoolers from Beijing, China, this study set out to explore (1) the developmental pattern of aspect marker acquisition; (2) the interactional pattern between grammatical aspect markers and lexical aspects; (3) the production of temporal adverbs with aspect markers; and (4) the predictors of aspect marker acquisition. The main research findings included the following: (1) the Jonckheere–Terpstra test revealed an age-related increase in children’s production of aspect markers, and in particular, there was a significant increase in grammatical aspect markers and lexical aspect subclasses from age 4;6 (Year; Month) onwards; (2) the Friedman’s ANOVAs indicated that -LE was frequently used in combination with most of the lexical aspect subclasses, among them the achievement was the most frequently co-occurring subclass, while the activities came second; (3) a series of Chi-square tests showed that using temporal adverbs in combination with aspect markers became increasingly common among older children; (4) the hierarchical regression analysis identified children’s preschooling experience as a significant predictor of their early aspectual development, after controlling for the other variables. Full article

This contribution bridges three fields—pragmatics, argumentation, and law. Arguments can be seen as the verbal formulation of inferences that articulate justificatory relationships, meaning that behind every argument is at least one argumentative inference. As an argumentative activity and verbal practice, legal discourse has gaps to be filled by pragmatic inference. Neo- and post-Gricean frameworks can thus tentatively be used for its analysis. Based on these frameworks, this contribution asks whether argumentation in the interpretation of statutory law is the same as in international law. More precisely, it looks at judges’ legal interpretations, which function as justifying arguments because they are constrained by rules/canons of interpretation. It is shown that neither a pragma-dialectical hierarchy of statutory canons nor a hierarchy of related presumptions carries over to international law where there is no such hierarchy. Full article

With the boom in Indo-European (IE) studies among linguists from the early 20th century, toponymic studies on European place names have been largely based on the Proto-Indo-European (PIE). However, historical and archaeological records of non-IE groups, such as the Nuragic civilization of Sardinia, have presented the possibility of pre-IE/non-IE (Paleo-Sardinian) linguistic stratum influences on certain toponyms in Sardinia, Italy. This article aims to present a meta-study on existing toponymic reconstructions theorized by scholars, while offering a fresh perspective by employing methods of historical phonetic chains and sequences analysis to identify toponyms of interest. Analysis showed that certain Sardinian toponyms contain striking phonetic sequences that are uncharacteristic of PIE, such as *s(a)rd-, *kar-, *-ini, *-ài/*-éi, *#[θ]-. Overall conclusions appear to display the merits of (1) PIE and (2) pre-IE/ non-IE theories. Both provide plausible toponymic reconstructions. (1) The accuracy of IE theories is brought into question, as they appear to rely heavily on phonetic links to existing PIE roots, sometimes with a lack of consideration for other contextual or hydro-geo-morphological factors. (2) Conversely, pre-IE/non-IE theories are found to be highly speculative due to the lack of historical data, and knowledge, about the Paleo-Sardinian language. Full article

The present paper addresses the categorial content of affixes forming a set of denominal adjectives in Italian, arguing that they are substantially the derivational counterpart of oblique case/adpositions. Specifically, we argue that they act as elementary relators, following Manzini and Franco, who characterized oblique cases and prepositions as general relators expressing the relations is-included (⊆)/includes (⊇), or, in other words, their content is what Belvin and den Dikken dubbed “zonal inclusion”. Full article

Diglossia in Arabic differs from bilingualism in functional differentiation and mode of acquisition of the two registers used by all speakers raised in an Arabic-speaking environment. The ‘low’ (L) regional spoken dialect is acquired naturally and used in daily life, but the ‘high’ (H) variety, Modern Standard Arabic, is learned and used in formal settings. Register variation between the two ends of this H–L continuum is ubiquitous in everyday interaction, such that authors have proposed distinct intermediate register levels, despite evidence of mixing of H and L features, within and between utterances, at all linguistic levels. The role of sentence prosody in register variation in Arabic is uninvestigated to date. The present study examines three variables (F0 variation, intonational choices and post-lexical utterance-final laryngealization) in 400+ turns at talk produced by one speaker of San’ani Arabic in a 20 min sociolinguistic interview, coded for register on three levels: formal (fusħa), ‘middle’ (wusṭaː) and dialect (ʕaːmijja). The results reveal a picture of key shared features across all register levels, alongside distinct properties which serve to differentiate the registers at each end of the continuum, at least some of which appear to be under the speaker’s control. Full article

It has been noted that examples with extractions out of relative clauses that have been attested in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are judged to be unacceptable in Icelandic and Faroese. We hypothesize that this may reflect whether or not speakers tend to prepose unstressed object pronouns as a way of establishing a coherent discourse. In this article we investigate to what extent pronoun preposing is used in Swedish, Icelandic and Faroese and whether there is any correlation with the acceptabilty of extractions from relative clauses. We show that Icelandic speakers use pronoun preposing to a very limited extent whereas Faroese speakers often prepose the VP or sentential anaphor tað. In both languages extraction from relative clauses is mainly judged to be unacceptable, with Faroese speakers being somewhat more accepting of extraction from presentational relatives. A crucial factor seems to be whether preposing is associated with a marked, contrastive interpretation or not. Full article

In Catalan, -isme ‘-ism’, -itis, and -metre ‘-meter’ create new words that do not follow the WFRs described in grammar books and dictionaries. As a result, these lexical innovations, such as panxacontentisme (panxacontent ‘carefree’ + -ism ‘-ism’), titulitis (títol ‘certificate’ + ‘-itis’), and emocionòmetre (emoció ‘emotion’ + -metre ‘-meter’), tend to be considered transgressive. The main aim of this paper is to provide a close review of grammar books and dictionaries among other sources to compare the rules described in the literature and the data provided by the bank of neologisms of the Observatori de Neologia. Since language changes and variations are inherent phenomena of any living language, the deviation experienced by these bound morphemes could be conceived as an example of linguistic change and not only as a one-time transgression. In addition, in order to check whether these linguistic changes are specific to the Catalan language, I reviewed some English, French, and Spanish literature. Finally, a set of diachronic corpora, that covers the time span from the 11th century until the present day, is used to study the first examples of these phenomena in the Catalan language. The results point out that in Catalan, these changes can be traced back to the second half of the 19th century or the beginning of the 20th century, and that they cannot be considered language-specific, since they affect the different languages under study. Full article

In 2017, Quebec’s Auditor General reported several major issues regarding government-funded French as a second language (FSL) courses, especially those intended for adult students with limited or interrupted formal education (SLIFE). To this day, no official framework or program exists for this specific population, a situation that the government of Quebec wishes to resolve. Our research team was thereby mandated by the Ministry of Immigration to conduct a large-scale multilingual study with the objective of gaining a better understanding of the realities and needs of the various stakeholders involved in low-literate FSL classes. We met 42 teachers, 24 French learning center directors, and 10 pedagogical advisors in individual interviews; we also led 107 group interviews with SLIFE in 26 languages, allowing us to meet 464 adult SLIFE enrolled in low-literate FSL classes from 11 regions of the province of Quebec, most of them being refugees. This article reports on the decision-making process in which we engaged to overcome the ethical and methodological challenges we faced at various stages of the data collection with SLIFE participants: recruitment, informed consent, confidentiality, interview protocol design, instrument piloting, data collection, and data translation and transcription. To make informed decisions, we had to turn to literature outside SLA (i.e., refugee research and translation/interpreting literature) for guidance. In this article we discuss the limitations and contributions of our research to guide researchers who will conduct studies with similar non-academic samples/populations. Full article