by Schegloff

Don't call them interruptions. Call them overlap or simultaneous talk.

Hitches in the turn-taking may be marked by louder speech, higher pitch, or faster speech. SOmetimes speakers let their speech be long and dran-out to wait for the end of someone's simulaneous talk.

Post-resolution hitches are common and include nervousness (repetition), pauses and drawn-out speech.

• Overlapping Talk and the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation

• Emanuel A. Schegloff
• Language in Society, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Mar., 2000), pp. 1-63
  

http://www.jstor.org/stable/4168983?seq=46&Search=yes&term=conversation&term=discourse&list=hide&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dconversation%2Bdiscourse%26x%3D0%26y%3D0%26wc%3Don&item=22&ttl=42116&returnArticleService=showArticle&resultsServiceName=doBasicResultsFromArticle

Bilingual Education

by Nessa Wolfson

1988

Many Americans do not speak English as a mother tongue. We have always been a pluralistic society. Bilingual education is a political issue.

Bilingual education was widespread in America until World War I, when English-only became a nationalistic policy point.

In 1963 middle-class Cuban refugees flooded Dade COunty, Florida. Their teachers taught them in Spanish. At Coral Way school, 50% Anglo and 50% Cuban, half the instruction was in each language. Both groups came out bilingual and biliterate. At this time the civil rights movement made being ethnic a point of pride and contributed to the political pressure to educate bilingual children fairly.

The federal govt passed laws intended to help bilingual children receive the schooling they needed. Unfortunately, the laws are vague.

There are different ideas as to what should constitute bilingual education:

1. Submersion. They should be taught only in English. They'll catch on, as "millions" of people did in the early years of teh twentieth century.
2. ESL. Instruction in English as a Second Language, although Lau v. Nichols found that ESL by itself could not be considered adequate. "Pull-out" classes stigmatize students.
3. Immersion. Early grades: target language. As fluency in English increases, instruction in mother tongue introduced. First was St. Lambert experiment in Canada: parents voluntarily pt their English-speaking children in French immersion program. Very successful. Unfortunately, doesn't work in America very well.
   
4. Transitional Bilingual Education. Instruction in the mother tongue during early years, with gradual increase of instruction in English. The hope is to "mainstream" ESL students by high school. The problem is that it's hard to find teachers who can teach in the native language of EVERY minority group. Also, some groups, like the Hmong, have no background in formal schooling.
   
5. Maintenance Bilingual Education. Purpose of bilingual education is to maintain ethnic identity, language and culture. Often inspires fear and anger in conservative people who fear minority succession.
   

While opponents of bilingual education are quite vocal, the majority of Americans support bilingual education. Opponents are usually older people.

The AIR report found that bilingual education did not change students' scores in language and math. There are numerous problems with methodology, however. Test scores themselves are not a measure of whether bilingual education lessened drop-out rates or helped students get jobs after schooling. It measures academic ability and not interpersonal language skills.

TESOL will always play an important part in bilingual education.

Review: African American English and the Composition Classroom

review by David west brown

praises the book in general, but has two caveats: register is a far more complicated issue than the authors make it out to be, and cite Hillocks and Smith 1986 as proof of that sentence-combining is useful in teaching grammar.

The book is fair and balanced, written for the layperson, and makes complex ideas accessible to teachers.

Gender and Sociolinguistic Variation

by Eckert

We cannot consider gender an independent variable, but must consider it in relation to other variations such as socioeconomic status, identity, and regional variation.

Eckert challenged Labov's generalization that women's speech is more conservative than men's by examining two groups of white teenagers at a Detroit high school. The groups were the jocks and the burnouts, who together accounted for about half the school's populations.

Eckert examined phonological variation among jock and burnout males and females. She found that there was a complex relationship between nonstandard vowels and identity, concluding that we cannot look at gender differences without examining the communities of practice in which the women and men use language.

Sex-based differences in compliment behavior

by Herbert
1990

Americans, more than other English-speaking nationalities, use compliments to negotiate social relationships; Americans are more apt to disagree or downplay a compliment than South Africans. Our compliments seem insincere to other nationalities because the compliment is not actually ABOUT the item or the wearer, but about negotiation of relationships.

American women give more compliments than American men. When men compliment men or women, the addressee is more likely to accept the compliment and say thank you. WHen women compliment women, the addressee is more likely to give some other response, like a history of the item.

Checking Theory and the Dative Subject Constructions in Japanese and Korean

hiroyuki ura

Goes over how dative constructions display subjecthood, and also how in some respects they do not seem to be subjects.

He (or she?) refers to Chomsky often. He never conclusively says whether or not dative subject constructions are really dative subjects or not.

Korean dative experiencers: The evidence for their status as surface subjects

gerdts and youn respond back to moore and perlmutter. They say that the Korean data does not yield the same result as Russian. They say that Korean datives obey all 5 tests for subjecthood.

What does it take to be a dative subject?

In response to gerdts & youn, Moore and Perlmutter said that there are two datives that linguists have been confusing: “the surface subject is the dative case” and “dative-marked nominal” that behaves like a subject but really isn’t one. They call the second type I-nominals and they fail to behave like subjects. They analyze Russian.

Korean Psych Constructions: Advancement or retreat?

Gerdts and Youn said that “Advancement—not Retreat—is the preferred analysis of Korean Psych constructions.”

Intensive and quotative all: something old, something new

by Rickford et al.

"the intensifier all is not new but has expanded in syntactic environments." quotative all is new and dates from CA in the 80s.

Intensifier all has been used since Old English, but has recently expanded its usage to before full verbs.

Rickford believed that quotative all was on the decline after peaking in the 1990s (I think he's probably wrong here).

In their corpus they found the most frequent intensifiers were: really- 52.3%, so- 18.9%, very- 9.4%, all- 7.4%, totally- 2.7%.

"intensifier all most frequently modifies present participles, PPs, and adjectives..."

Quotative all was the most frequent quotative among CA teenagers in 1990 and 1994, accounting for 45.9%. Quotative like: 17.5%. Unframed quotes: 15.9%. Say: 10.6%

All was much less likely to occur in 2005. Like: 69.3%. Say: 12%. Unframed: 10.7%. all: 4.3.%

Linguistic ruin? LOL! Instant messaging and teen language

by tagliamonte and denis in toronto

The authors studied thousands of IMs gathered from teen mentees in Toronto and analyzed quotatives, future modals, and abbreviations stereotyped as being IM language. The authors found that "Contrary to
expectation, speech has a more innovative profile in comparison to IM. The
incoming forms so, be like, and have to are all more frequent in the speech
data. At the same time, speech tends to be more vernacular, containing
higher rates of going to than will. In contrast, IM language is consistently more
varied, exhibiting a wider range of variants than speech and, in particular,
containing a higher proportion of standard forms than speech."

Haha is more commonly used than lol, despite popular perceptions.

Tagliamonte says that the "language police" are exaggerating the amount of lols and colloquialisms in IM speech and that IM speech has the same linguistic variation and change as written and spoken language.

It is a register where people can fuse formal and colloquial language and therefore is a free space, ripe for language innovation.

Dialogue introducers: the case of be + like

by Ferrera

be + like was introduced as a quotative since at least 1981. Speakers have a choice between say, go, and be like.

In Old English there was cwethen, secgan, and tellan (quoth, say, and tell). Cwethan was, at one time, used most frequently. In Beowolf say and cwethan are used interchangeably. Eventually say assumed uses that once belonged to cwethan and lost some of its uses to tell.

Ferrera gathered data from a diverse population (in terms of age, race, an gender) and documented the "evolution of the grammatical category of the quotative."

18-25 year olds of both genders use be +like. No one 40+ used it. For 40+, they only used say or go.

"functional expansion into third person"

Few rural speakers used it, but blacks and Hispanics did use it. Usage is uneven within speakers.

Usage is spreading and expanding.

Like is, like, focus

by Underhill

Like "functions with great reliability as a marker of new information and focus."

It also introduces new concepts or entities, marks focussed information, marks the focus in questions, marks the answers to questions, can be used as a hedge, sets off unusual notions (not meant to be taken seriously), sets off stereotyped expressions. It can also be sentence initial.

It could have derived from the use of like to mean for example.

MIDDLE-CLASS AFRICAN AMERICANS: REACTIONS AND ATTITUDES TOWARD AFRICAN AMERICAN ENGLISH

by rahman

Rahman asked middle-class blacks at her university to listen to audiotapes of other blacks speaking and rate them according to perceived blackness.

"Findings here show that there is a strong correlation between the dense
use of certain grammatical and phonological features of AAVE, including
intonation, and strong judgments of African American ethnicity. But the attenuation
of AAVE features and use of features associated with other groups
can reduce the salience of speech as African American. The next section
will show that while the heavy use of AAVE features leads to the belief that
a speaker is black, being identifiable as black does not equate with low
judgments of standardness. Yet, it does appear that judgments of “black” or
“white” can be closely related to judgments of standardness and to judgments
of social class and appropriateness"

Use of falsetto voice or highly contoured intonation is one marker of ethnicity. SO is use of /a/ instead of /ay/.

Black Standard English was deemed appropriate at an all-black family barbeque or at a corporate meeting, whereas SE and AAVE were each only appropriate for one.

An overview on Primary Progressive Aphasia and its variants.

amici et al.

"We present a review of the literature on Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) together with the analysis of neuropsychological and neuroradiologic profiles of 42 PPA patients. Mesulam originally defined PPA as a progressive degenerative disorder characterized by isolated language impairment for at least two years. The most common variants of PPA are: 1) Progressive nonfluent aphasia (PNFA), 2) semantic dementia (SD), 3) logopenic progressive aphasia (LPA). PNFA is characterized by labored speech, agrammatism in production, and/or comprehension. In some cases the syndrome begins with isolated deficits in speech. SD patients typically present with loss of word and object meaning and surface dyslexia. LPA patients have word-finding difficulties, syntactically simple but accurate language output and impaired sentence comprehension. The neuropsychological data demonstrated that SD patients show the most characteristic pattern of impairment, while PNFA and LPA overlap within many cognitive domains. The neuroimaging analysis showed left perisylvian region involvement. A comprehensive cognitive, neuroimaging and pathological approach is necessary to identify the clinical and pathogenetic features of different PPA variants."

Sometimes it's just aphasia but aphasia and memory problems looks like dementia.

Composing Nature

Richard Johnson-Sheehan and Kristi Stewart
http://www.writinginstructor.com/johnson-sheehan

Ecocomposition is about writing about place. The writer situates herself in the place and writes about her surroundings. It is gaining momentum as environmentalism becomes more popular.

It aims to inject pathos back into FYC.

You can have students journal-write about a place, explore the metaphors we use to talk about nature and push those metaphors to their limits, and explore how the subject is in the place and the place is in the subject. Students can read John Muir and Thoreau.

FUnctional neuroimging indices of normal and atypical spoken language

by weber and gaillard
in brain, behavior, and learning

in general, studies of infant and older children's left hemispheres support the critical period hypothesis.

"Overall, evidence supports the theory that areas of language processing may be less consolidated and more bilateral in younger children"

94% of healthy right-handed adults have language in left hemisphere.

processing measures of cognitive-linguistic interactions for children with language impairment and reading disabilities

by windsor and kohnert
in brain, behavior, and learning

cognitive-linguistic processing emphasizes that lang. is part of a broader cognitive system and that processing proficiency is a better measure of capability than performance measures.

"Language performance measures are heavily experience-dependent"

the authors found tasks that seperated bilingual kids from normal readers from RD kids.

Rapid Automatic Naming tasks "tap into a common cognitive skills setthat underlies performance across languages."

these tasks de-emphasize experience.

defining and differentiating dysgraphia, dyslexia, and language learning disability within a working memory model

by virginia w. berninger
in brain, behavior, an learning in language and reading disorders

"children with dyslexia have selective impairment in phonological awareness, but those with language learning disabilities have selective impairment in phonological, morphological (especially derivational suffixes), and syntactic awareness."

"neither executive function nor working memory is ... fully modular." they interact with each other

orthographic--dysgraphia
orthographic and phonological--dyslexia
orthographic, phonological, and morphological--language learning disability

critical periods in second language learning

by john t. bruer
in brain, behavior, an learning in language and reading disorders

"There is a difference between establishing the existence of a critical period phenomenon and proviing a causal theory that might account for such a phenomenon."

maturational theories: endogenous causes for opening and closures of critical periods
learning theories: exogenous causes for at least the closures

Emergentism and language impairment in children: its all about change

by julia l. evans

in brain, behavior, an learning in language and reading disorders

"Cognitivism" uses the omputer as a metaphor for the human brain.
"Empiriciam" versus "Nativism": nurture v. nature. Combined view: "interactionist perspective"

Emergentism: the brain is a complex system that may have "radical novelty." It is a coherent integrated whole. Self-organization.


"STudies of typical and atypical lang. development are shifting away from the focus on the static, globally ordered, stage-like patterns in children's language, toward an emergentist view of language development as a flexible, transient, variable phenomenon."

Atypical neurodevelopmental variation as a basis for learning disorders

gilger & wilkins

in brain, behavior, an learning in language and reading disorders

Atypical Brain development (ABD) = genetic developmental disorders

About 10% o our population is dyslexic, and "progenitors of today's population with dslexia may have had better interpersonal skills or spatial orientation abilities that gave them some sort of procreative edge () e.g., West 1999)."

"The RD concept was created by societal demands and were it not for the written alphabet would not otherwise exist. Reading itself was not instrumental to our development and survival as a species, although correlated traits may have been..."

NOte 1: "In other linguistic populations in which written language is more phonetically consistent, such as Italian, the frequency of RD may be significantly lower."

Theories of developmental dyslexia: insights from a multiple case study of dyslexic adults

by Ramus et al.

Summary
A multiple case study was conducted in order to assess
three leading theories of developmental dyslexia: (i) the
phonological theory, (ii) the magnocellular (auditory
and visual) theory and (iii) the cerebellar theory.
Sixteen dyslexic and 16 control university students were
administered a full battery of psychometric, phonological,
auditory, visual and cerebellar tests. Individual
data reveal that all 16 dyslexics suffer from a phonological
de®cit, 10 from an auditory de®cit, four from a
motor de®cit and two from a visual magnocellular
de®cit. Results suggest that a phonological de®cit can
appear in the absence of any other sensory or motor
disorder, and is suf®cient to cause a literacy impairment,
as demonstrated by ®ve of the dyslexics. Auditory
disorders, when present, aggravate the phonological
de®cit, hence the literacy impairment. However, auditory
de®cits cannot be characterized simply as rapid
auditory processing problems, as would be predicted by
the magnocellular theory. Nor are they restricted to
speech. Contrary to the cerebellar theory, we ®nd little
support for the notion that motor impairments, when
found, have a cerebellar origin or re¯ect an automaticity
de®cit. Overall, the present data support the
phonological theory of dyslexia, while acknowledging
the presence of additional sensory and motor disorders
in certain individuals."

University students with dyslexia were compared to a control group without dyslexia. Both groups were given a variety of tasks: phonological, auditory, balance/cerebellar, language-related.

"16 dyslexics out of 16 had
poor performance in phonology, 10 in audition, four in
cerebellar function and two in magnocellular vision."

Where are the dialects of American ENglish at anyhow?

by Preston
http://americanspeech.dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/78/3/235.pdf

Preston wishes Labov, Ash and Boberg had surveyed people who live outside major cities.

He proposes that there IS a Midland, but it is very skinny and begins north of Indianapolis!

The Social Stratiication of 'r' in New York City Department Stores

by Labov
1972

Because tape-recorded interviews interferred with natural speech, Labov conducted 'rapid and anonymous observations.

He went to 3 stores--S. Klein (low status), Macy's (middle), and Saks (high status) and asked salesladies where were women's shoes to elicit the response "fourth floor." He then said "excuse me?" to elicit an emphatic pronunciation.

The results of r-fulness in al three stores were examined. ue to linguistic insecurity, the middle-class women at Macy's adopted the newly prestigious Midwestern r; the linguistically secure older women at Saks retained their r-lessness; the lower-classed women at Kelin's did not know that their r-lessness was not prestigious.

He also found differences in race, gender, and what floor of the store he was on.

EVERYONE UP HERE: ENREGISTERMENT AND IDENTITY IN MICHIGAN’S KEWEENAW PENINSULA

by Remlinger
in American Speech

People in Copper Country, above the mitten in Michigan, have a distinctive dialect which is associated with a particular set of ideals. They call themselves "Yoopers."

"The aim of this article is to demonstrate that the articulation of language,
people, and place is not only an effect of discursive practices, but also a
result of historical, economic, and ideological processes. I argue not only
that Copper Country English has become recognized as a regional dialect,
but also that certain features have become normed through discursive and
metadiscursive practices that collectively function to create and maintain the
idea of a local dialect. This awareness (re)shapes perceptions about what the
local dialect is—and is not—and affects the use of particular features and
defines beliefs about those who speak it."

"As examples of talk about
talk, shibboleths are key in enregisterment and defining local identity as they
forge links among identity, dialect, and local knowledge—knowledge based
on language awareness and use."

Dialect Features Affecting the social mobility and economic opportunities of the disadvantaged in Fort Wayne, IN

thesis
by Charles Edward Billiard

1969

p. 107 "cultivated speakers distinguished /o/ and {backwards}/c/ in such words as cot and caught...WOrking class and lower-class Latin-Americans have difficulty attaining proper distinctions in the English vowel systems, particularly in pronouncing the phonemes, /I?, /ae/, /schwa/, u/,...."

p.205 --Southern and SOuth Midland forms were less tolerated than Northern forms (greazy rejected by prestigious groups)

The North American Midland as a dialect area

by Sharon Ash
in Langauge Variation and Change in the American Midland

the Midland is a coherent dialect area, although there is considerable variation within it.

p. 55 :The Midland is a dialect region, positively defined by a variety of phonological, lexical, and syntactic features."
p.56 "...it is set apart by a anumber opf defining features, even while individual cities have their own unique character."

What is dialect?: Revisting the Midland

by Thomas E. Murray and Beth Lee Simon

in language variation and change in the American Midland

This is a wonderful summary of the Midland controversy. The authors propose that there IS a Midland on the basis of grammatical forms (because grammar is more resitant to change).

The Speech of terre haute: a hoosier dialect study

by marvin dale carmony

thesis

p. xv "This study indicates, among other things, that 1 the vocabulary of Terre Haute is essentialy Midland, witha strong admixture of Northern and North Midland words, as well as a considerable proportion of Southern words; (2) the pronunciation of Terre Haute clearly reflects the city's settlement and cultural history, the prestige dialect of today stemming from the prestigiouis and dominat Yankee elemt of yesterday, while "inferior" speech is that containing tyhe most substantial number fo South Midland features; (3) the degree of both social stratification and racial segregation is considerable, judging form the number fo lexical, phonological, morphological and syntactic features with social and racial connotations."

Positive anymore in the midwest

by thomas e. murray
in "heartland" english

negative anymore is standard english, but some dialects also accept positive anymore. positive anymore has "little or no sociolinguistic significance". "various forms of positive anymore having unequal acceptance throughout the Midwest: all forms are evidently not considered equal in the mids of all users;..."

"continues to spread outward"

Linguistic COntroversies, VBE Structures, and Midwest Attitudes

by Timothy J. Riney
in heartland english

p 85 "...VBE and vernacular Midland share a lot of common grammatical structures."
p. 85-87 differences and similarities in Midland and VBE
Waterloo is 21% black

Subjects rated standard English, black accented Eng. with historical present, and VBE on an perceived intelligence scale.

Of course, VBE was associated with less intelligence, standard with highest intelligence, and black accent in the middle.

Cerebral organization of component processes in reading

by pugh et al.

AN fMRI study found that "Orthographic processing made maximum demands on extrastriate sites, phonological processing on a number of frontal and temporal sites, and lexical-semantic processing was most strongly associated with middle and superior temporal sites." Men and women processed reading differently: "females did not show an increase in the numbers of activated pixels from the rhyme to semantic category subtractions while males did."

p9 typo? "males displayed greater activation in the LH" shouldn't it be RH?

"in extrastriate regions (as in the total area analysis) females fail to show patterns of increased activation for real words (semantic category-line) relative to nonwords (rhyme-line) while males do show them.

lateral extrastriate region - orthographic processing
medial extrastriate region - real words than to nonword strings of letters
frontal regions - phonological processing
temporal regions - phonological and semantic processing

phonological and semantic networks overlap spatially in women more than man

The Language of Yankee Cultural Imperialism

frazer
in in "heartland" english: variation and transition in the american midwest

p 62 IN and IL experienced tension between the N and S over political power
p 63-64 New Englanders moved entire congregations together Their culture stressed accumulation of wealth
p64-65 "want out" in a novel a Yankee schoolmistress heard this expression for the first time
p. 65 Inland N. became dialect of Midwest cities

"On Inland Northern and the Factors for Dialect Spread and Shift

donahue
in in "heartland" english: variation and transition in the american midwest

Inland Northern was once considered just a regional dialect, but is now conidered "basic and correct." "General American."

4 reasons for this:
p 52
1. industrial Great Lakes region increased in economic and social power
2. Webster's 2nd Intl Dictionary
3. NBC Pronouncing Dictionary
4. Mass media

p54 N. Inland is used by mass culture, the dialect used away form family
p56-57 people in the 30s went to movies and learned inland n. dialect. Like finishing school
p57-58 inland N. in decline and N Midland on the rise due to "collapse of the rust belt" and social factors

Two Heartland Perceptions of language variety

by Preston
in in "heartland" english: variation and transition in the american midwest

Hoosierss have linguistic insecurity from their association with the South
p46-47 insecure areas such as IN perceive themselves as "exaggerated isolation"

Problems in Midlwest English: Introduction and Overview

in "heartland" english: variation and transition in the american midwest
by Timothy C. Frazer

p2 Inland Northern sometimes mistaken as General American
p3-4 Northern-Midland boundary thru Indiana. Debate about where S. and N. boundaries are
p9 Terre Haute IN--a Hoosier apex but N regional vocab
p. 267 Where are the boundaries of the Midwest? North Central, according to Ling. Atlas

Indiana dialects in their historical setting

by Marvin Carmony

p9 south and north immigrants to IN
p11 Hoosiers are "isolated and self-sufficient"
p15 older dialectology
p18 N. and S. divided, but some words throughout IN
p19 North, South, and Midland with N.Midland and S.Midland
p26 there was a fuzzier line between dialects for freshmen in 1969
p28 southern march of northern words
p28-29 southernmost IN is seperate still
p 32-33 northern forms winning out
p38 "melk" and "manella"

Afrcan American Vernacular English in "Middletown"

by Huang

Muncie has a small African American population which must interact with whites on a daily basis.

p. 245 "this study has found linguistic convergence of Muncie AAVE with WVE phonologically in the last two decades."

p. 252 also syntactically

p. 253 "a linguistic change in which Muncie AAVE is converging with WVE both syntactically and phonologically" due to linguistic accomodation and close daily contact

contrast to Labov 1986, where in a city setting the dialects are diverging

American Dialects: a manual for actors, directors and writers

by Lewis Herman and Marguerite Shalett Herman

p. 298 the Midwestern Dialect is spoken by most in IN.
p. 299 the dialect has musical notes, lilting, cogitation

This view is corroborated by the BBC site and by the Midwestern guy in American Tongues

"a-Prefixing in Appalachian English"

by Walt Wolfram 1980

In Appalachian English. Ex: "he come a-runnin' out there and got shot"

"a-prefixing is restricted to those -ing particles that are part of the verb or its complement (i.e., the adverb); it does not occur in other types of contexts such as true gerunds."

"all a-prefixed participial forms are derived from prepositional phrases, and that a- itself comes from a preposition."

Used in continuous, unstructured activities like hunting, canning, churning, running. Not used in games or structured activities like baseball or puzzle-solvin. Not used in non-kinetic activities like dreaming.

"The Midlands: The Upper South and Lower North Dialects"

Craig M. Carver

in American Regional Dialects: A Word Geography

The Midlands do not have their own dialect, but only subdialecs of the Upper South and Lower North. Indiana is basically cut in half.

Rethinking the neurological basis of language

stowe, haverkort, zwarts

The clasical view of neurolinguistics assumed that language was localized in the left hemisphere, Broca's and Wernicke's area were the main areas involved in language, and they were only involved in language. These are incorrect.

Peterson et al. performed the first neuroimaging study of normal individuals in 1989.

In the classical view, Broca's was involved in production and Wernicke's in comprehension. Neuroimaging studies have shown that linguistic centers cannot be split up this way.

They are both necessary for normal language functioning. Both light up for semantic and syntactic tasks. Broca's area might be responsible for general working memory and storage of information. This is why Broca's aphasics have trouble with syntax and leave out function words.

It is possible that there are two functionally seperate systems in one anatomical area. Broca's area can be divided into 3 sections. It sometimes lights up when a person hears music.

The anterior temporal lobe on both the right and left sides are somehow involved in the comprehension of syntactically, lexically, or semantically ambiguous sentences.

articulatory rehearsal and error detection are utilized when the sentence is difficult or ambiguous. This lights up motor areas and the right cerebellum, which may be involved in error detection.

The superior frontal gyrus is involved in semantic evaluation.

The anterior insula is used in articulation. The "left anterior insula is important for fine motor coordination in speech."

"The posterior inferior temporal and fusiform gyrus are important for various aspects of langauge processing.

These areas are not dedicated to language, but are part of the language system.

The right frontal lobe is important for understanding metaphors, for humor comprehension, and inferring topic shifts.

The right hemisphere figures out nonliteral meanings of sentences.

"when processing demands increase, activation in the right hemisphere increases."

"Language as a complete anatomical network is not modular, relative to other cognitive functions. Component functions within the language network may be specific to language."

Appalachian English in Southern Indiana?

by Brian Jose

Montgomery (1989, 2007) proposed three standards for establishing that dialects are genetically related: historical connection, explicit quantitative description of plural verbal -s, and the plural verbal -s was compared to dialects of Appalachian English.
He also gave evidence that the patterns are not simply "universals" of english vernaculars.
Jose also investigated other aspects of the grammar.

Defining the Speech Community

Nancy C. Dorian
Chapter 2 Defining the Speech Community
1982, in Sociolinguistic Variation in Speech Communities

There is a community of fisherfolk in Scotland who are bilingual in East Sutherland Gaelic and English. According to Gumperz they would belong to two speech communities. Dorian notices that the picture is complicated by low-proficiency bilinguals identified as part of the speech community by fluent bilinguals. The low-proficiency speakers understood everything spoken in Gaelic, including jokes, but some almost never spoke in Gaelic. They also understood sociolinguistic cues that the “linguist-guest”, and fluent speaker of Gaelic, often missed. One speaker considered herself relatively fluent, but under testing, was proven to have low-proficiency; this hadn’t stopped her, her entire life, form inclusion in the Gaelic speech community.

Speech COmmunities

in An Introduction to Sociolinguistics

An Introduction to Sociolinguistics
By Ronald Wardhaugh
1998 Chapter 5 ‘Speech Comunities”
Speech communities are impossible to define precisely, but the term is still useful to sociolinguists.
The English language is spoken by variety of speech communities, and Switzerland is one speech community with multiple languages. Speech comm.. cannot be defined in linguistic terms.
Hindis separate themselves from speakers of Urdu, although it is the same lang.; most Chinese consider every other Chinese part of their community, although they may only be able to communicate by the written language.
“Each individual … is a member of many different speech communities.” People may switch back and forth between types of speech (jargon, dialect, standard, another lang.) during the course of the day or even switch while speaking an utterance.
Networks: in England, people of lower class and upper class are said to have dense multiplex networks, but middle-class people are said to have loose simplex networks.

"interpreting Words"

Chapter 5 of Images of Mind by Michael Posner, 1994

The researchers first asked subjects to perform a very simple task: looking at a cross on a computer monitor. The tasks became increasingly complex until the authors finally asked the subjects to produce words in response to a prompt. PET scans were taken during every task. The researchers identified the areas of the brain involved in looking at the simplest task; when these areas of the brain were activated during the next task, the researchers subtracted these areas from the second scans to identify the areas of the brain needed for the second task. Eventually, the researchers were able to isolate the areas of the brain used for accessing lexical meaning.

There are 2 models of how humans read; neurological and cognitive. They disagree as to whether or not our visual interpretation of the word goes through the phonetic representation before we comprehend it. The cognitive model says no, that top-down processing will recognize the word. The neurological model (Wernicke first said it) says yes.

Language processing can proceed thru many dif. areas of the brain.

A verb generation task made many different areas of the brain light up, including Broca's area.

Practicing the verb generation task changes the neural pathways required for the exercise.

Sounds of the South

in American Voices 2006
by Guy Bailey and Jan Tillery

The SOuthern accent is widely regarded as the most incorrect variety of ENglish, even among SOutherners. "Fixin' to" is a modification of the ENglish auxiliary system.

"Might could": multiple modals provide Southerners with addiitonal politeness strategies.

"useta": additional modal (useta could)

Labov 1994 'Southern SHift":

From the last quarter of the nineteenth century until the end of WW2, SAE grew and became more uniform, due to urbanization.

Y'all and fixin' to is spreading to non-Southerners.

Defining Appalachian English

by Hazen and Fluharty, 2006
in American Voices

Appalachian English is maligned and suffers prejudice.

You can hear "Needs washed," "The dogs walks," a-prefixing (from SCots-Irish to indicate an ongoing action).
Appalachian English is a number of difefrent dialects.

Monopthongization

AAVE did not monopthongize before p,t, or k, but Appalachian blacks do.

An Introduction to Midwest English

in American Voices
by Timothy C. Frazer 2006

The Midwest has many different accents; it is not homogenous Standard English. AAVE came up during the great migration, but there are differences in AAVE accents between north and south. SOutherners came to the Midwest and their descendants have a Southern accent and the perfective done.

Of Scots-Irish descent, people in Midwest with Southern accents will sometimes say "The baby wants fed" or "the car wants washed"

Low back vowel merger (dawn and Don are homophones) is observed in eastern Ohio.

The Northern dialect (elite and authoritative for dictionaries) is also spoken in the Midwest. This dialect is changing and undergoing a vowel shift: low central vowels are moving forward.

Upper Midwest will have "Canadian raising", syntactic changing ("I'm going Detroit. You want to go with?"), and words form recent SCandinavian migrations.

SPanish loanwords are on the rise in the Midwest.

Communicative Competence and Rules of Speaking

in Perspectives: Sociolinguistics and TESOL
by Nessa Wolfson

Problems in analyzing sociolinguistic rules.

Most ethnographic have been conducted on homogenous, traditional societies. The US is more diverse so it is more challenging, but there are similarities. Many books do not clearly distinguish between language and culture. "Language is an aspect of culture" -Goodenough

Knowledge about sociolinguistic rules are below the level of consciousness and native speaker intuition about sociolinguistic rules are often wrong. Bloom and Gumperz (1972) found out that in a small Norwegian town, the locals thought they spoke their dialect mroe often than they really did. Labov found that speakers reported the form they were targeting instead of the form they actually spoke.

Brouwer et al. (1979) thought that Dutch people would have gendered forms of language--they did, but what form they used depended on the sex of the addressee, not the speaker. Intuition is just unreliable, but usually speakers don't believe this.

Godfrey 1980 analyzed advanced ELL tense-changing "errors"--however, these "errors" mirrored NES historical present tense.

Pica (1983) found that textbooks don't tecah the actual rules of articles a and the.

Communicative competence should be taught to ELLs, but this instruction should not be based on NS intuition.

After Hymes introduced the idea of communicative competence, it began to be misapplied in ESL classrooms. Some teachers interpreted grammatical competence as seperate from cc instead of an aspect of it.

Canale and Swain in 1980 clarified the idea of c.c. 3 components: grammatical, sociolinguistic, and strategic c. Sociolinguistic competence has 2 components: discourse and sociocultural.

TESOL looked to the field of sociolinguistics for answers, but there were none. Sociolinguistics had to begin by defining, What is a speech community? Within one language there can be many speech communities with different rules for speaking. Defining the rules for speaking in English is useless, if you do not define the particular speech community. Neustopny observed that people who speak different languages (like Czech and Hungarian) can hold similar speaking rules.

It becomes almost impossible to identify subgroups.

Prediction of children's reading skills using behavioral, functional, and structural neuroimaging measures

by Hoeft et al. 2007 in Behavioral Neuroscience


Neuroimaging methods combined with behavioral tests predicts children's future reading skills better than either method in isolation.

What Should Colleges Teach?

by Stanley Fish 2009 http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/what-should-colleges-teach/?incamp=article_popular

FYC courses should focus on writing, not on content.

American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) grades colleges on what is taught in Core courses. SCience should be taught by scientists and not philosophers, for example. Composition courses must focus on grammar, style, and argument and not on unrelated content.

There are other ways of teaching literature and history, but only one way to teach writing.

Devoid of Content

by Stanley Fish 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/31/opinion/31fish.html?_r=1

FYC teachers shouldn't teach content. They should teach form. He has his FYC students create an imaginary language not at all based on English. In order to do that they must learn the grammatical relationships of semantic categories.

Article and Response

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3429903.stm

This article was about the country Mauritania. Traditionally, they would force-feed girls to make them fatter. Being fat was seen as beautiful, rich, and taken care of. Men wrote poems about how beautiful fat women, as big as ships, were.

The writer of the article went to a "fat farm" in Mauritania where the owner of the farm force feeds seven-year-old girls. She said that they always cry, but she didn't think force-feeding girls was cruel. She thought it was good so that they could get a husband. She also said that she had seen girls that were ten years old give birth.

* * * * *

It hard to support cultural relativism (the idea that no culture is good or bad, just difefrent) when I read about such unbelievable cruelty to children. Force feeding them and then marrying them off seems unimaginably cruel.

The Bilingual Brain: What is Right and What is Left?

by Jyotsna Vaid. Chapter 6 in the 2008 book: An Introduction to Bilingualism

http://books.google.com/books?id=87snuOaE7DwC&pg=PA129&lpg=PA129&dq=bilingualism+brain+mapping&source=bl&ots=zw8VnSFYRn&sig=csX6fsI5nqrvM14F7qM0FOLn0bY&hl=en&ei=wRteSszjOI7SMonw6L8C&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1

There is no consensus.

High spatial resolution is crucial in bilingual neuroimaging studies.

Mechelli et al 2004: bilinguals had greater grey matter density than monolinguals.

The bilingual brain: Cerebral representation of languages

Franco Fabbro 2001

"When a second language is learned formally and mainly used
at school, it apparently tends to be more widely represented in the cerebral cortex
than the first language, whereas if it is acquired informally, as usually happens with
the first language, it is more likely to involve subcortical structures (basal ganglia
and cerebellum) (cf. Paradis, 1994; Fabbro & Paradis, 1995; Fabbro et al., 1997;
Fabbro, 2000)."

Right hemisphere is associated with pragmatics (Chantraine et al 1998)

L2 language processes (phonology, morphology, syntax) are not in the right hemisphere (Paradis 1994, 1998)

Klein et al. 1995 performed the first neuroimaging study on bilinguals

Translation and comprehension are subserved by different processes.

Changes in aphasic discourse after contrasting treatments for anomia

del toro and altmann, raymer, leon, blonder, and rothi

This paper introduces new discourse concept: Utterance with New Information (UNI)

Researchers interviewed aphasic subjects, hired transcriptionist to transcribe, gave treatment, then gave another interview and transcribed. They counted instances of nouns, verbs, etc. and were unable to say that treatment led to better utterances.

But they were able to find greater quality of discourse after treatment.

"These findings demonstrate that discourse analysis can be a viable adjunct for assessing word retrieval treatment outcomes, especially given that improving discourse is the ultimate goal of aphasia treatment."

Retention and Writing Instruction: Implications for Access and Pedagogy

Pegeen Reichert Powell

Composition instructors should pay attention to the discourse at their institution about retention.

It has been shown (by Astin using CIRP data) that retention rates can be predicted by the characteristics of teh students the institution allows in. Unfortunately, raw retention rates are used to rank colleges without taking student characteristics into account.

"...Eleanor Agnew and
Margaret McLaughlin, who demonstrate how a writing program’s own assess-
ment practices can prevent students from graduating: their study of the results
of placement and exit exams revealed that the presence of features of African
American Vernacular English led to an alarmingly higher rate of failure (90)."

These black students have already accessed the gate, but the assessment policies and prejudices keep them from graduating.

Access and retention will become even more important as the economy worsens.

How to do things with words and gestures in comics

Ofer Fein and Asa Kasher

Abstract

In an attempt to explore the relationships between words and gestures in comics, the terms ‘gesticulary’, ‘ingesticulatory’ and ‘pergesticulary act’ are proposed and employed. A study is reported, in which frequent gestures from Asterix books were investigated. Ten gestures were used in the first part of the study together with their accompanied utterances in the comics, in order to examine the gesture-utterance connection. In the second part of the study, 26 subjects were presented with those gestures, along with corresponding photographed gestures. They were asked to propose utterances for the gestures and to ascribe possible meanings to them. We conclude from the results that the meaning of a gesture lies in the ingesticularly act, independently of the exact propositional content. We also argue that people have a firm comprehension of comics gestures, and that those gestures are understood to mean the same as similar ‘real life’ gestures.

the gesture of hands outspread and elbows close to the body (that I would say meant "I don't know") is labeled as meaning "an explanation" or "dismissal of responsibility"; it was called an ambiguous gesture. The gesture of palm up towards the addressee that I think means wait can mean "Request to Wait" or "disapproval."

From Front Porch to Back Seat

Beth L. Bailey

In the 19th century, men came to "call" on women. WOmen were in control of who could come in and visit; it was in the "woman's sphere"; and a man could come to call with no money in their pockets.

However, people in the city often had no parlors for callers. They, often poor and lower-class, went out on "dates" to the movies, to dance halls, or to restuarants, where no "respectable" woman was allowed to go. This moved the courtship into the man's "sphere." He took economic responsibility to pay for things, and often the economic exchange was understood to be for sexual favors. This change gave the power of courtship to men.

The rise of cars was coincidental, but gave young people a lot of freedom.

Contrary to popular belief, in the 19th century women had a great deal of power over whom they chose to allow to court them.

Neural Substrates of Language Acquisition

Patricia Kuhl and Maritza Rivera-Gaxiola

Neuroimaging is being used with infants. "The goal on experiments on infants has been to determine whether the initial state and the learning mechanisms are speech specific and species specific."

"The combination of computational and social abilities may be exclusive to humans (Kuhl 2007)."

"The studies suggest that exposure to language in the first year of life begins to set the neural architecture in a way that vaults the infant forward in the acquisition of language."

EEG/ERP is inexpensive, noiseless, "excellent temporal resolution"

At birth infants are capable of distinguishing between all phonemes that are possible in human languages, but with exposure to the native language, infants learn to "tune out" the phonemes that are not distinguished in their native language.

"By the end of the first year, the infant brain is no longer universally prepared for all languages, but instead primed to acquire the language(s) to which the infant brain has been exposed."

So adults truly cannot learn a second language the same way infants learn their first.

In a study (Kuhl et al 2003), a group of infants exposed to a live person speaking Mandarin were able to distinguish Mandarin sounds, while groups exposed to television and audio Mandarin tested the same as groups that were never exposed to Mandarin at all. So social interaction is very important to infant language acquisition. This could be due to the ways humans learned language for centuries--we could be evolutionary accustomed NOT to learn language from computers.

"A sudden increase in vocabulary typically occurs between 18 and 24 months of age--a "vocabulary explosion" (Granger & Brent 2004, Fernald et al. 2006)--but word learning begins much earlier. Infants show recognition of their own name at four and a half months (Mandel et al. 1995)." p. 520

"new words may be encoded in the same neural regions as previously learned words."

""Newborns tested by Imada et ak showed no activation in motor speech areas for any signals, whereas auditory areas responded robustly to all signals, suggesting that perception-action linkages for speech develop by three months of age as infants produce vowel-like sounds."

"Studies across languages showed that by one year of age infants do not accept mispronunciations of common words, words in stressed syllables, or monosyllabic words, indicating that their representations of these words are well-specified by that age." references omitted

Researchers are "strongly interested" in which comes first: phonemes or words, or if learning is bidirectional.

Data on bilingual infants has conflicting results.

Some believe that it may take bilingual infants longer to accumulate a normal vocabulary in their native languages because of decreased input. There have not been many studies on bilingual infants.

Un nase or una nase? What gender marking within switched DPs reveals about the architecture of the bilingual language faculty

Katja Francesca Cantone and Natascha Muller

MacSwan (1999,2000) postulated that the grammars of each language in a bilingual mind are differentiated.

The authors examined the speech of bilingual German and Italian children from ages 1-5. In this paper, the children's DPs (determiner phrases?) were examined, particularly when the children used a noun from one language in an utterance that was primarily in the other language. Genders were sometimes switched along with the noun. The authors propose that this means that "gender is an abstract lexical feature of nouns which is stored in the lexicon and thus reject the view that gender is a functional head in syntax."

MacSwan (1999, 2000) argued that bilinguals have 2 seperate lexicons but "one and the same Computational System"

"it is not the noun endings -o and -a which carry gender"

They say that in one phase of growth, bilingual children mix up gendres between the two semi-autonomous systems.

Second language research using magnetoencephalography: a review

schmidt and roberts

This article first touts MEG as a very useful tool in studying SLA and neurolinguistics, then summarizes previous SLA MEG studies.

MEG is the magnetic version of EEg. Subjects are more comfortable doing an MEG than other neuroimaging devices. But it is expensive and subjects must stay very still.


Phiko and others (2001;2002) found that the L2 is processed more like the L3 than the L1 in early bilinguals.

Zhang and others (2001; 2005) found that Japanese can detect the difference in /r/ and /l/ when there is no vowel afterwards. This suggests "backward masking."


The MEG was used with Japanese and German speakers to determine that both groups recognized kanji "holistically, rather than piecemeal."


Ihara and Kakigi found that Koreans process Hangul and Kana in different parts of their brains.

Phonology can also be studied with the MEG. Differences in pitch changes resulting in changed meaning of words can be taught to SLL. French and Spanish speakers show different areas of the brain allotted to vowels because French has 7 more vowels than Spanish.

Bialystok et al 2005 examined whether bilinguals perform better than monolinguals at the Simon task. The two groups had speedy responses when different areas of the brain were activated. Bilinguals were fast when the "cingulate and superior and inferior frontal regions" and slower with the "right visual cortex." Monolinguals were fast with the "left middle frontal activation" and slow with the "right motor cortex."

Valaki et al (2004) found that Mandarin speakers' brains were less strongly lateralized.

Bilingual and Monolingual Brains Compared:

Bilingual and Monolingual Brains Compared: A
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Investigation
of Syntactic Processing and a Possible ‘‘ Neural
Signature’’ of Bilingualism

Ioulia Kovelman1,2, Stephanie A. Baker1, and Laura-Ann Petitto

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 2008

"Eleven Spanish-English right-handed bilinguals...and 10 English right-handed monolinguals" were asked to judge the plausibility of sentences containing relative clauses while in the fmri. OS and SO sentences were both used. Bilinguals judged twice as many sentences as monolinguals. Results indicate that bilinguals have differentiated language systems and use more left brain gray matter than monolinguals.

Because English is an analytic language and Spanish is syntactic, there was no difference in brain functioning when bilinguals were judging OS and SO in Spanish; English monolinguals showed more activity when processing SO ("difficult") than OS ("easy").

A Neurolinguistic Theory of Bilingualism: Neuroimaging studies of the Bilingual Brain

Michael Paradis

Chapter 6

Neuroimaging studies have neglected to replicate other studies; therefore, all findings from this field are not proved.

Surely the left-brain is associated with most aspects of language and the right brain kicks in when pragmatics is needed to understand--usually, when the L2 left-brain knowledge is insufficient.

Also, declarative and procedural memory is surely processed in different areas. If the left brain is damaged in early life, the right brain will take on language-learning tasks.

"...a natural (ecological) task such as the comprehension of a short story..."

Don't use single-word recognition, because this is not "language."

"The majority of studies to date (28) have used single words as stimuli (173)."

Paradis looks for converging evidence in the truly linguistic (e.g. ecological) tasks from published studies: procedural memory for language = perisylvian area

"declarative memory and hence metalinguistic knowledge"= parahippocampal gyri, mesial temporal lobes, anterior cingulate

pragmatics=areas of the right hemisphere

Paradis 2000a: "Comprehension is easier than production"

It is almost impossible to fully control for all areas of processing the task. :-(

I think my dissertation should test and retest and retest subjects to ensure validity.

The Language of Love: the Semantics of Passion in Conversational English

Zoltan Kovecses

The metaphors we use in everyday English to talk about relationships reveal that we imagine love as a journey, the heart as a container, etc.

The Unity Metaphor: "We Are One" reveals that we imagine there is only 1 person out there for us. No other will do. I think this is a cause of depression after a relationship ends.

Love is spoken of as loss of control or insanity.

There is an ideal model (love at first sight, passion never wanes) and a typical model ("Fiery Passions Turn Into Warm Affection").

Nonprototypical cases include the metaphor of Love as a Game.

Christian Fundamentalism and Prominent Sociopolitical Values among College Students in a South-Korean University

http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2007/2007-25.html

Eun Jung Oh, Stacy L. Bliss, and Robert L. Williams

The authors gave about 200 South Korean students a survey to see if their sociopolitical beliefs and religious affiliations had any correlation with American sociopolitical and religious beliefs, specifically that fundamentalist Christians are less tolerant of dissent than other religions and more nationalistic.

The students were Protestant, Catholic, Buddhist, and agnostic/atheist.

Protestant students in South Korea do not exhibit the same blind patriotism and disrespect for civil liberties as American fundamentalists. Dr. Seig: We worship different gods! Christianity in the two countries are not the same Christianity.

"One possibility strongly suggested by the comparison of the Korean sample with the previously studied American sample is that Christian fundamentalism may be associated with a different worldview in South Korea than in the U.S. It appears that Christian fundamentalism has become less negatively linked to such notions as respect for civil liberties and tolerance of dissent in South Korea than in the U.S. Thus, there appears to be less tension between Christian fundamentalism and democratic principles (e.g., respect for civil liberties and tolerance of dissent) in South Korea than in the U.S. 35"

"The current findings suggest that South-Korean Christians may be less inclined to use their Christian beliefs to restrict the personal and legal rights of individuals within a society than appears to be the case for American Christians having a fundamentalist perspective."

Words in Context: A Japanese perspective on language and culture

takao suzuki

The book includes an contrastive lexical study of the English lip and the Japanese kuchibiru: In Japanese, you cannot say "hair grew on her lip" because kuchibiru does not encompass the skin above the lip. Lip does not equal kuchibiru.

He discusses covert and overt culture: rice is eaten in both Japan and Italy, but it holds a different place in both places. Its cultural role differs, though the substance is almost the same.

Suzuki discusses how unwanted dogs are killed by their English masters, but the Japanese usually abandon them. He attributes this to differing ideas of man's control over nature. He says the English control their dogs utterly, up to and including their lives. He says the Japanese do not think they control dogs at all.

Kinship terms and self- and other- referents in Japanese are also discussed. He says that Indo-European languages are self-oriented: I am me no matter the circumstance. Japanese (and, I think, other honorific languages) is other-oriented: the speaker cannot express his views unless he can locate the other in a social hierarchy. He says that the Japanese are not accomplished lanaguge-learners because of this other-orientation. It makes them loathe to express their opinions without knowing the addressee's opinion.

He builds up to this argument using the facts that kinship terms are used fictively (calling a stranger "Uncle" or "Big Brother" AND a wife calling her husband "Father") in ways not possible in English. Personal pronouns are generally avoided.

"man does not use words to describe things which exist in the objective world; rather words, which reflect a particular view of the world or a specific way of dissecting, make us feel as though objects with such characteristics and properties actually exist." 54

Beyond Multiculturalism: A Two-Way Transformation

bharati mukherjee

She was raised a Bengali Brahmin. Sent to the US to study writing, she impulsively married a Canadian. 14 years later, she chose to become an American because she was disgusted by the hypocrisy of the Canadian "mosaic" idea of multiculturalism.

She chooses not to hyphenate herself because, it seems, she feels anger towards Indo-Americans who do so and seem to care more about their previous homelands than about America. She despises those who live here yet denounce America's ideology. She believes forgetting the past is a natural growing process.

Yet, she still denounces "otherization" and violence towards the Other.

Reinventing "America": Call for a New National Identity

Elizabeth Martinez

She argues that white America has an origin myth that Whites settled America for the good of all conquered peoples, glossing flippantly over the genocide of the Native Americans and the antagonism of Mexico for territorial gains. She hopes America can rewrite its national identity, recognizing the many contributions of non-White peoples.

Institutionalizing Our Demise: America vs. Multiculturalism

Roger Kimball

Immediately after September 11, the country became very patriotic, but it soon faded.

Kimball argues that multiculturalism will be the demise of America. He believes the WASP ideology is fundamentally American and immigrant culture is not. He applauds immigrants who "melt" and forget their countries of origin.

"Every time you call directory assistance or some large corporation and are told, "Press One for English" and "Para espanol oprime el numero dos" it is another small setback for American identity."

He hates bilingual education, saying that it sets students up to be second-class citizens.

Kimball says America is essentially religious and Western Europe is "godless."

America was "founded on four things: ethnicity, race, ideology, and culture."

He equates multiculturalism with terrorism.

The Culture of Empowerment: Driving and Sustaining Change

Mary Theresa Seig

Conner Prairie wanted to enhance their visitors' experience so they worked on empowering their "front line staff workers." Staff workers collaboratively created solutions that were their own.

Seig used the "Fly on the Wall" method to collect data and used discourse analysis to show that the "monologue culture" at Conner Prairie was not meeting the visitors' needs. Management worked on changing the culture of Conner Prairie from the top-down and creating solutions from the bottom-up.

Ways with words: language, life, and work in communities and classrooms

shirley brice heath

A smallish town in the Piedmont area has 3 populations Heath studies: the townspeople, Tracton, and Roadville. The townspeople are administrators of the schools. Their home culture recognizes how reading and writing are integral to success. They write to remember things and read for pleasure. Their children are surrounded by literacy and literate adults who use literacy in their daily lives.

Roadville is a poor white area. Most of the adults work at the mill. They read to their children before school begins, but show little interest in their children's schoolwork once they reach second grade. At that point, school and home life diverge. Adults read sometimes, but base most of their important decisions on word-of-mouth.

Tracton is a poor black neighborhood. Babies are held continuously. Their 1st words are not an occasion for celebration. They are not asked questions where the addressers already know the answer. People do not read for pleasure.

Once in school, the townspeople's children excel. Tracton children rarely succeed. Roadville children do well until about middle school, when they turn their attention to starting their own families.

Decoding Antiquity: Eight scripts that still can't be read

in New Scientist

Andrew Robinson

There are approximately 8 lost langauges that scientists are trying to decipher. One of them is rongo-rongo, a written langauge on Easter Island. In order to read rongo-rongo, you begin at the lower left corner, read a line, then rotate the stone 90 degrees.

The article also discussed Etruscan, which is written right to left and based on the Greek alphabet.

The language of the Indus Civilization usually only includes about 5 characters. The longest inscription is 20 characters.

The New World has at least 3 fascinating languages that have not yet been deciphered.

The Black Pharoahs of Egypt had their own as-yet undeciphered script.

contrastive rhetoric studies in applied linguistics

ulla connor

"Three approaches concerning tranfer have dominated: contrastive analysis; error analysis; and its later development, an analysis of the transitional system called 'interlanguage'."

"Non-Anglo-American English as in international language encourages tolerance for nonnative norms of English."

"English readers expect and require landmarks of coherence and unity as they read. The writer needs to provide transitional statements. In Japanese, on the other hand, trasnsitions may be lacking. The reader is expected to piece sections together to make a coherent text."

"In addition to emphasizing the personal growth and integration inherent in such self-evaluation, social constructionist theory in L1 composition has allied itself with an anti-authoritarian ideology."

"...critical pedagogy...has not been embraced by ESL teachers and researchers..."

The role of repetition in Arabic argumentative discourse

adnan j.r. al-jubouri

"the different types of formal devices that Arabic employs for expressing repetition and achieving rhetorical effect."

"Repetition in Arabic discourse...is realized at several levels...the morphological level, the word level, and the 'chunk' level."

"k-t-b has to do with writing"

"Notice that the repetition of a morphological pattern creates repetition on the phonological level if said aloud, which intensifies the effect of repetition."

"English discourse rules, codified in rhetoric textbooks under 'variety in word choice', encourage writers to avoid repetition of this sort. The converse is true in Arabic."

"They occur in English in a number of frozen, or semi-frozen idiomatic expressions, particularly in legal English where they are known as 'doublets'.

"The consttuents in the word strings of this group are antonyms or near-antonyms. This is an old rhetorical device in Arabic and has been used for centuries in poetry as well as in prose."

"When reiterated through an argument they tend to create an immediate emotional impact."

"Parallelism is a rhetorical as well as text-building device."

"The tendency towards forceful assertion also explains what, in the eye of a Western recipient, appears to be a florid and verbose style of argumentative discourse. Brevity will simply fail to convey the required effect."

"Expository paragraph structure in Slavic and Romance languages"

paul neubauer and elizabeth riddle

Kaplan claimed that English is more linear and contains fewer digressions than Slavic or Romance texts.

This study found that "the Romance and Slavic paragraphs in our sample exhibited no more digression than the English paragraphs. Furthermore, in none of the cases does this data support a claim that digressiveness is typical of expository prose paragraphs in that language."


Kaplan's doodles should not be repeated by other researchers as "gospel."

linguistic rituals for thanking in japanese: balancing obligations

jun ohashi

"The data of this investigation are naturally ocurring telephone conversations which took place in the Japanese enf-of-year gift-giving seaosn, seibo."

"This study reveals that conversational participants cooperate to achieve a mutual pragmatic goal of 'debt-credit equilibrium'."

"o-rei does not free the debtor form debt."

"the mutual and reciprocal aspects need to be taken into account."

"The norm of reciprocity--the social obligation to reciprocate benefits to one another--is claimed to be universal (Goulder, 1960)..."

"THe social goal of reciprocity is not debtless or creditless state in social relationship, but the continuation of the relationship."

rei can mean politness/social hierarchy or a bow

"'the giver and the thanker collabortate in the development of a successful thanking episode' (Eisenstein and Bodman, 1993: 74)"

"were also told that any conversations they had reservations about presenting to the researcher should be erased....The transcripts ...are simplified and modified for the purpose of this study."

"A(11) can be interpreted as a topic change to end an o-rei. This exmaple is unique because the beneficiary changed the topic. In other xamples it was always the benefactor who changed the topic."

"benefactive verbs emphasises imbalance and 'ie ie' denigrates it."

"...'thanking' and 'apologizing' are hardly distinguishable in Japanese; they are closely related in the indebtedness the speaker feels towards the interlocutor."

speakers repeat "'No, not at all'."

"It is often the case that doomo is used alone, that is, the later parts are unsaid. The frequent se of doomo supports the view that Japanese native speakers may not be conscious of distinguishing the speech act of thanking and apology in particular contexts where the speaker needs to express indebtedness."

"Imbalance is overtly acknowledged by beneficiary and the imbalance is dneied by benefactor."

"Such a sudden topic change, which is initiated by the benefactor, is observed frequently in the data."

"Working on the debt-credit equilibrium emerged clearly as a common practice outside a family circle."

'The more intimate the interlocutors were, the more a 'complimenting-gladness' pair tended to emerge. This is clearly a norm for intimate situations."

"Both ends of the continuum of social distance tend to have predictable sequences; the minimum end tends to be complimenting-gladness', while the maximum end tends to be 'thanking, apology, debt-sensitive speech formula, and/or a benefactive verb-denial."

"Working on debt-credit equilibrium is observed as a default except for conversations between family members."

"Overlaps:
When conversationsl participants work together on debt-crdit equilibrium, overlapping speech frequently ocurred. In otehr words, as soon as the beneficiary indicates his/her pragmatic intention of compensating debt, even partially with thanking apology, debt-sensitive formulae or a benefactive verb, the benefactor counteracts with a 'dneial'. A 'denial' serves the pragmatic function of de-burdening the beneficiary, thus, it often overlaps, or at least is latched with the beneficiary's attempt to work on o-rei. This conversational overlap or harmony is also evidence that mutual work on the debt-credit equilibrium is in operation. If I use the notion of face, as a motivational drive, derived from Goffman (1967:5): "the positive value a person effetively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact", the state of being in debt without an acknowldgment is dishonorable, and for the benefactor, claiming that s/he is a creditor is seen as arrogant and a social disgrace. 'Dnial', as an expected follow up of beneficiary's acknowledgement of benefit/debt, may in fact care for both beneficiary's and benefactor's face."

"This supports Apte's description of thanking (verbalization of gratitude) in Marathi and Hindi, that is "verbalization of gratitude indicates a distant relationship" (Apte, 1974:75), and thus it should be avoided among family members."

sociolinguistic competence in the complimenting act of native chinese and american english speakers: a mirror of cultural value

ming-chung yu

"The present study examines sociolinguistic features of a particular speech act, paying compliments, by comparing and contrasting native CHinese and native American speakers' performances...this apper aims at illuminating the fact that, in cross-cultural communication, foreign langauge speakers have to pay close attention to sociolinguistic rules of the target language in addition to structure and discourse rules to meet the needs of linguistic accuracy and fluency."

"Complimenting is chosen in that this speech act, while seemingly common and simple at first glance, is often considered so complex as to cause a great deal of troble in intercultural encounters (e.g., Wolfson, 1989)."

"The issue of universality versus culture-speciicity in speech act studies is still hotly debated."

"It has been argued that the main function of compliments is to establish solidarity between speaker and addressee (e.g., Herbert, 1989;...)"

"...people frequently offer praise to reinforce or encourage the desired behavior in specific situations, such as teaching and learning. Another possible function compliments may serve is to strengthen or replace other speech acts like aplogizing, greeting, reprimanding, or thanking, or to soften acts such as criticism, or even to serve as acts like sarcasm or a conversation opener 9Wolfson, 1983, pp. 86-93)."

"American compliments serve to negotiate social solidarity, South African praise functions non-negotiatively, probably as a way to affirm such solidarity." (Herbert and Stright, 1989)

"complimenting can also be seen as...action that attends to the addressee's positive face by including him or her in the group...complimenting itself can also be deemed as a face-threatening act." both "positive politness device as well as face-threatening act"

"each field worker was asked to note as soon and as accurately as possible the exact compliment exchange and relevant contextual information he or she observed in his or her everyday life right after each exchange had taken place."

"two-year data collecting period" "audio-tape the observed spoken exchanges."

"In the Chinese data, 356 participants produced 410 compliments, while in the Americna ENglish data, 636 participants produced 789 compliments."

"Direct compliments, which refers to remarks including linguistic forms that dircetly and unambiguously frame these comments as compliments, such as, "Isn't the food great!"

"Indirect compliments, which refers to remarks which would be seen as compliments by the addressee, althought he positive semantic carrier generally assoicated with complimenting is missing at the level of the linguistic form...."Wow, I hope I'll have a coat like this.""

"(a) that complimenting frequency is much lower for CHinese speakers than for English speakers, (b) that direct complimenting was the most often adopted strategy for both speaker groups, and (c) that CHinese speakers used indirect compliments proportionately more than Americans did."

Direct: CHinese: 334. American: 719
Indirect: CHinese: 76. 18.5% Americans: 70 8.9%

"there were more Chinese speakers than expected who complimented indircetly, and fewer American English speakers who did so."

"there seem to be conceptual differences of directness/indirectmess between Chinese and English speakers."

"many Chinese speakers believe that the Chinese tend to consider these strategies equally direct when presented as single utterances."

Chinese compliments: "You must have put a lot of thought into it. That's a very clever idea." To Yuanyuan, the first part seems indirect and the second part seems direct. "You smell great. What kind of perfume are you wearing?" small talk and compliments overlap. The second sentence of the 2nd example here, "when ocurring on its own, can be considered a core compliment."

"...for native CHinese speakers, supportive moves and/or small talk are likely to be found before the core request in seemingly high imposition situations, whereas for American English speakers, they usually occur after the core request (Yu 1999b)."

Chinese: "Hi, I stood in line right behind you, so I got a chance to see you play. Do you often come here? Maybe we cna practice together some day. I think you play pretty well." long
American: "Nice shot! Wanna play together sometime?" short

"whereas the complimenting utterances of Americans were mostly so straightforward that few supportive moves or little small talk were used, Chinese speakers employed such moves or talk much more frequently so that many of their complimenting sequences tended to be longer, as we can see above in Examples (9) and (10). In practice, native CHinese speakers' use of small talk and/or supportive moves has to do with a socio-cultural convention that embraces a communicative style valuing reciprocal face work very highly."

"the use of linguistic devices that serve functions like supportive moves or small talk plays a very important role in CHinese politeness behavior and face concerns."

"compliments have been found to occur in a much wider variety of speech situations in AMerican culture than in other cultures (e.g. Wolfson, 1989."


this is unusual for the Chinese; they usually won't say this to a stranger: "Hi, we were just sitting near each other. By the way, I think you look great in this dress."
B: "So so!" A normal response
A: Do you come here often? How do you like the food here?"
B: Just so so!
A: Maybe we can get together again."
B: We'll see. I've been very busy recently. We'll probably meet again at school." this means I don't want to see you again. An exmaple that complimenting a stranger doesn't work with the CHinese

"In these two exchanges, compliments appear to function primarily as a conversation opener for the speaker to try to establish some rapport with the addressee."

"Not only is this behavior generally considered inappropriate, but also the addressee may think that the speaker is in effect contriving something."


"Given that the Chinese tend to offer fewer compliments in everyday discoursal activities than Americans, the question arises whether the Chinese have less of a need to establish solidarity than native ENglish speakers."

American-democratic
South AFrican-elitist
"...comliments in American culture function primarily as a vehicle to negotiate solidarity between speaker and hearer, wheeas compliments in South Afrucan society serve mainly as an instrument to show the speaker's admiration."

"Oliver (1971) argued that Chinese society traditionally legitimizes a hierarchical class structure that places a high value on subordination to and respect for authorities."

"
Therefore, compliments in CHinese culture, like those in South African society, may be primarily used to display the speaker's positive assessment of some object or concern relevant to the addressee instead of offering solidarity." Compliemts in South African and CHinese cultures "may serve a more restricted set of functions and are thus more limited in discourse."

"cultural norms play an important role in determining language behavior."

"In Chinese culture, the speaker is generally expected to employ compliments as assertions of admiration."

"In American culture, however, it is common practice for the speaker to employ compliments to establish solidarity or rapport."

"...compliments could also serve to replace other speech acts such as aplogizing, greeting, or thanking, and so forth, and both speaker groups employed compliments this way."

"compliments in AMericna ENglish mostly fall into two main categories: (a) appearance and/or possessions; and (b) ability and/or performance."

"The Chinese speakers' tendency to compliment on ability and/or performance can be accounted for by the fact that the Chinese traditionally tend to emphasize the virtues and qualities of individuals, and thus do not regard good looks or possessions as having great social value (Yang, 1987)."

"First...the act of explicitly admiring a person's appearance and/or possessions will usually be regarded as uncultivated...Second, physicla appearnce in Chinese socio-cultural contexts traidtionally has a sexual implication, and is, therefore, seen as taboo in social intercation.

"...newness is very highly valued in American society. Thus, offering a compliment is appropriate whenever an acquaintance is seen with something new (Wolfson, 1989)."

Recipient is higher in status: Chinese: 4.9%. American 15%

"For both speaker groups, the great majority of compliments occur in interactions between people of equal status."

"...Chinese socio-cultural convention...legitimizes a vertical class structure following Confucian political philosophy that places special emphasis on respect for and subordination to the authorities."

..."in American culture...the asymmetric power relations in conversational dyads are often not recognized."

"...where status is concerned, there were more compliments downwards than upwards for Chinese speakers, whereas there were more compliments upwards than downwards for Chinese speakers."

"for both speech groups, the great majority of compliments occur in interactions between interlocutors who are casual friends, co-workers, non-intimates, and acquaintances rather than intimates or total strangers."

In CHinese culture, complimenting a close friend or intimate is considered distancing.

Recipient is a close friend or intimate: Chinese 7.8% American 16.4%

"social distance appears to be seen as an easily surmountable boundary to everyday interactions in American culture, while in CHinese culture, a vertical social class structure is still observed."



"this Chinese word, due to its stronger semantic force, is employed in indirect requesting more often than in complimenting; in contrast, "like" in ENglish, due to its stronger complimentary force, is used in complimenting much more frequently than in requesting."

politeness ideology in Spanish colloquial conversation: the case of advice

nieves hernandez-flores

"...politeness is based on a social ideology, i.e. on a set of ideas about behaviour which are shared by a community...the members of this community have to follow the rules in order to continue their membership in the group."

"the social ideology arising in European SPanish colloquial conversation."


autonomy: "the fact of perceiving, and to be perceived by people, as someone with his/her own surroundings inside the group."
affiliation: "the fact of perceiving, and to be perceived by people, as an integrated part of the group."

"what the categories of autonomy and affiliation aim at in terms of behaviour is open to cultural interpretation."

in Spanish groups:
self-affirmation: (Thuren 1988): "It is important to express your opinions forcefully and persuasively; one should be able to persuade through showing the invinsible structure and logic of one's opinions and also demonstrating their emotional charge, because what is emotionally strong carries its own logic."
confianza: (Thuren) "closeness or a sense of deep familiarity"

"the face want of self-affirmation (the desire to be seen by others as someone with good social qualities) does not refer to the fact of being or not being unimpeded in one's actions, as negative face does, but to the wish of standing out form the group...With regard to confianze (sense of deep familiarity), this notion does not refer to the wish of being appreciated and approved of (positive face) but to the wish of achieving closeness..."

"advice would be understood as a speaker's imposition on the hearer's freedom of decision and action."

note 8: "Also in American English, by using Brown and Levinson's features for face, Decapua and Huber display that unsolicited advice shows people's enagagement in related stories or descriptions arising in daily conversation and this is not seen as a threat in many situations...advice has other functions...to establish or maintain rapport."

"she plays down her task by using a diminutive in the adjective (tranquilita)"

"advice arises without a demand deom th addressee, it presents clear assertions and it is rejected by the hearer."

a cross-cultural comparison of apologies by native speakers of American English and jordanian arabic

rula fahmi bataineh, ruba fahmi bataineh

"This study investigates the apology strategies used by the speakers of American English and Jordanian Arabic...there were more differences between Jordanian male and female resondents than between American male and female respondents, which may be attributed to the fact that there is a greater similarity between how boys and girls are raised in the US than between how they are raised in Jordan."

apologies

survey taken by undergraduates

"Westerners concentrate more on culpability and Easterners on consequences."

"only Jordanians used strategies such as praising God for what happened, attacking the victim, minimizing the degree of offense, and interjection."

Strategies differed, but not that much.

developing awareness of crosscultural pragmatics: the case of american/german sociable interaction

catherine evans davies

"...this article draws teachers' attention to three interrelated aspects of conversational style which are important in initial crosscultural encounters between Americans and Germans."

criticizes the natural approach

"The argument is made that language teachers should give pragmatic competence/awareness the highest priority in the classroom, form the beginning of language study."

3 points:

1. "we need to organize teaching around speech activities as discourse rather than around isolated speech acts."
2. "we need to develop in learners the ability to looks for patterns, through discourse analysis and a certain critical distance, rather than 'facts' or 'rules' about language and culture."
3. "we need to present cultural themes (e.g., the public versus the private self: what is the boundary betwen an acceptable and unacceptable degree of self-disclosure in small talk?) as opportunities to explore diversity within the home and target cultures."

"Too often we also find an avoidance of cultural generalizations."

"...compared to German strategies, American conversationalist style (in particular with reference to the experience of university students engaged in crosscultural conversations) 'is weighted toward deference strategies' (Byrnes 1986)...Such a conversational style in fact allows the individualism which Americans favor ideologically, in that respect for the individuality of others protects one's own by maintaining reciprocal respect."

Byrned characterizes "conversational style among German univeristy students not in terms of solidarity or deference politeness strategies, but rather as placing greater emphasis on the 'information-conveying function of language, as compared with the social bonding function' (1986). She suggests further that this emphasis leads naturally to more dircet strategies."

Example in which a roommate stains another roommate's blouse. "Germans were much more willing to pass judgment on the violators, exercising a more overt social control function than English speakers."

"An alternative explanation might be that Germans have more of a sense of homogeneity with a shared set of norms which they can enforce, whereas Americans are more aware of their heterogeneity."

"...among Americans the average 'social distance' between different individuals seems to be smaller than among Germans, but only in regard to the peripheral regions."

(1) SMALL TALK
"The existence of the expression 'small talk' in English suggests that it is a cultural category; in contrast, German simply describes the practice as ...(unconstrained, unrestricted, easy interaction).

"Germans seemed to have obligatory opening and closing rituals for public encounters, with nothing in between; whereas Americans seemed to have more flexible (and sometimes optional) openings and closings, with the focus on the sociable interaction in the middle."

"It is easy to envision the difficulties of an Americna trying to develop small talk along American cultural lines."

"Germans in the US often misunderstand small talk to be the initiation of a 'close friendship' and can feel set up for a disappointment."

(2) JOKING
"...for Germans, joking is private behavior, whereas for Americans it is public as well as private...English speakers (and Austrian German speakers) have a more creative and lighthearted attitude and less prescriptive approach to language than Germans do."

"Germans tend to judge Americans negatively on the basis of what was seen to be their excessive joking; they were assumed to be 'frivolous' and 'not serious enough.'"

"human beings are not cultural robots."

aspects of polite behaviour in French and Syrian service encounters: a data-based comparative study

veronique traverso
2006

conversational routine: highly predictable expressions in specific social situations

ritual acts (related to sociology): "conventionalised act through which an individual portrays his respect and regard for some object of ultimate value." (Goffman)

The script in the service encounter:

• opening sequence of the encounter
• sequence including the request
• (payment sequence)
• leave-taking sequence

To what extent are encounters determined by cultural norms? How far away could one stray form those norms?

Syrian: "may it be blessed" can be used in many situations

"In the Syrian corpus, the request is routinized through the use of even fewer formulas, including indirect devices:
'Is there?' 'have you got?'"

"at your service, willingly (lit. 'on my eye,' 'on my eye and on my head')"

theories of identity and the analysis of face

helen spencer-oatey

"I propose that in cognitive terms, face and identity are similar in that both relate to the notion of 'self'-image..., and both comprise multiple self-aspects or attributes. However, face is only associated with attributes that are affectively sensitive to the claimant. It is associated with positively evaluated attributes that the claimant wants others to acknowledge..., and with negatively evaluated attributes that the claimant wants others NOT to ascribe to him/her."

A Hungarian student called Spencer-Oatey a kind old lady, hurting her face. She didn't want to be considered old.

A British businessman gave a welcome speech but didn't allow the Chinese to make a return speech, insulting them.

At a meeting, each British person introduced himself. Then it was the Chinese's turn. They spoke together, then allowed the delegation leader to introduce all of them. The interpreter interrupted and insisted they follow the British lead. "...the Chinese visitors were not used to introducing themselves and were expecting the delegation leader both to handle all the introductions and to give a return speech. Their acceptance of business meeting conventions, as well as their belief in hierarchical differentiation (cf. Pan 2000) significantly influenced how they interpreted and reacted to the British chairman's behavior."


"...important insights into why people experience certain ocurrences as face threatening can be gained by considering their underlying conceptions of sociality rights--obligations. Such considerations may also help us anticipate people's face sensitivities and thereby help us to manage them more effectively."

data collection in pragmatics research

gabriele kasper

How you collect data depends on what you are studying.

"Depending on the research purpose, it may take an unreasonable amount of data to obtain sufficient quantities of the pragmatic feature under study--for instance, of a particular speech act."

Online: authentic discourse, elicited conversation, role-play, multiple choice, think-aloud protocols

Offline: production questionnaire, multiple choice, scales, interview, diary

power pragmatics in asian languages

jyh wee sew

quote Power in Language by Ng and Bradoc, 1993: "facts and logic alone are often insufficient for persuasion. Facts and logic--the prescribed basis of persuasion--must be adapted to the situation, and it is language and language style that will bear the burden of this mission."

quotes Robin Lakoff, 1990: "we are always involved in persuasion...If we succeed, we have power."

Hong 1985: "...since the addressee is supposed to anticipate your needs, if you mention them to him, it will embarrass him."

Sew: "Therefore, indirectness is understood as a style of formulating speech acts, which has an inherent pragmatic role."

In a Tamil family, "The wife in the family usually addressed the husband 'father of X: X being the eldest son/daughter' whereas the husband called his wife by her name." Not true now.

"Some explicator markers (V2), for instance, convey contempt" in Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam and Kurukh.

Indirectness is tied to face-saving. Can be tied to powerlessness, but not necessarily.

complexity in isolating languages: lexical elaboration versus grammatical economy

elizabeth m. riddle

"I argue that although isolating Asian languages such as Hmong, Mandarin Chinese, and Thai may be economical in terms of inflection, they exhibit significantly more complex lexical patterns of particular types than more synthetic lanaguges such as Polish and English in like contexts."

non-inflecting languages have lots of complexity in other ways.

linguistic typology and sinospheric languages

elizabeth riddle and herbert stahlke

Why are West African and SE Asian languages so similar?

Overspecifying languages: subordination, polysyllabic words, derivational affixes, high degree of inflection

Underspecifying languages: juxtaposition, monosyllabic words, compounding, no inflection, verb classes blend together

language typology and language transfer

william e. rutherford
1983

ESL students trying to make topic-comment constructions:

"1a. These ways almost can classify two types.

3. A man choose a wife is a man's business [level 3]

5. Choosing a husband or wife in my country is quite an interesting thing [level 5]"

Rutherford found that Mandarin L1 students produced 10% topic-comment constructions, which supports what Li & Thompson argued for Chinese.

Topic-Comment:
10a. "In my country man and woman chooses husband or wife 0 is very simple [level 3]"

Uses "this as subject:
10b. "Choose a good husband or wife, this is very important problem for everybody [level 4]"

The way an English speaker would mark a subject:
10c"...choosinga husband or a wife is one of the essentials of life [level 5]"

13a1. "The streat of in the United States have a many many road..
2. In my country hasn't army, navy, and air force.

b1. Japan, just like other countries, we have distinctive history."

Subject and Topic: A New Typology of Language

charles n. li and sandra a. thompson
1975

subject-prominent lanaguges: English
Topic-Prominent Languages: Chinese
Subject-Prominent and Topic-Prominent Langauges: Japanese, Korean
Neither Subject nor Topic Prominent Languages: Tagalog

Mandarin (TP):
"here very hot
'It is hot in here.'

possible this-CLASS war will soon end aspect
'It is possible that this war will soon end.'"

double subject constructions:
Japanese:
"fish-TOPIC red snapper SUBJ delicious
'Fish (topic), red snapper is delicious

Korean:
airplane-top. 747-subj. big-stative
'Airplanes (topic), the 747 is big.'

Mandarin:
that tree leaves big
'That tree (topic) the leaves are big.'"

some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements

joseph h. greenberg, 1963

"Appendix III
Universals Restated
1. In declarative sentences with nominal subject and object, the dominant order is almost always one in which the subject precedes the object.
2. In languages with prepositions, the genitive almost always follows the governing noun, while in languages with postpositions it almost always precedes. [English is an exception. French holds to the rule.]
3. Languages with dominant VSO order are always prepositional.
4. With overwhelmingly greater than chance frequency, languages with normal SOV order are postpositional.

7. If in a language with dominant SOV order there is no alternative basic order, or only OSV as the alternative, then all adverbial modifiers of the verb likewise precede the verb. (This is the "rigid" subtype of III."

29. If a language has inflection, it always has derivation.
30. If the verb has categories of person-numer or if it has categories of gender, it always has tense-mode categories.

32. Whenever the verb agrees with a nominal subject or nominal object in gender, it also agrees in number.

34. No language has a trial number unless it has a dual. No language has a dual unless it has a plural."

the relevance of complement choice: a corpus study of 'believe'

"...the 'to-/that' complement alternation is sensitive to whether the writer intends the reader to focus on the implications of the proposition expressed by the embedded clause, or on the those of the proposition expressed by the sentence as a whole."

Dr. Riddle said this is wrong: "...the use of the infinitive complement is not unconstrained: on the one hand, it can only be used with stative verbs or those marked for perfective aspect; on the other, it is limited to formal, generally written, genres."

Predictions:
"As Noel found, 'believe' complements which introduce information new to the discourse should be more common in a sample of 'believe(s) that X is/are' cases than in a sample of 'believe(s) X to be' cases."
"There should be a higher incidence of behaviour/reaction-explaining cases in a 'believe(s) X to be' sample, for the reasons explained above."

He didn't find a big difefrence.

clause combining across languages: a corpus-based study of english-french translation shifts

christelle cosme.

This study uses bilingual corpora to test “the claim that English shows a strong preference for coordination while French makes more extensive use of subordination” (71). The results support this claim.
This article has two primary goals: “(a) gain more insight into the contrast between English and French in terms of clause-combining; (b) shed more light on clause combining in general – and, more particularly, on the relationship between coordination and subordination” (72). The article also has two secondary goals: (a) demonstrate how “corpus linguistics can serve the needs of syntactic cross-linguistic research” and (b) encourage language teachers to introduce translation corpora as a teaching tool (95-99).

Syntactical Background Information
There are three types of interclausal relations (73-74).
Juxtaposition He ate too much for dinner; he was ill the next day. Parataxis: establishes equivalent relation between clauses
Coordination He ate too much for dinner and (he) was ill the next day. Parataxis
Subordination Because he ate too much for dinner, he was ill the next day. Hypotaxis: establishes hierarchical relation between clauses

“No clear borderline seems to exist between coordination and subordination.”
The claim is that English prefers coordination, while French prefers subordination (76, example 8).

Methodology

Cosme used both monolingual and translation corpora for this study, analyzing two registers: fiction and journalese (78-79).


Monolingual corpus results

“Interclausal and is significantly more frequent than interclausal et” in fiction; this difference is not observed in journalese (80-81).

French is more apt to coordinate full clauses than English, which is more likely to coordinate predicates by ellipting the subject in the second clause (82).

Coordinating conjunctions convey two separate meanings: the static meaning (pure addition) or dynamic meaning (temporal sequence or consequence). In journalese, French tends to use et to convey a static meaning more often than English, which tends to use and to convey a dynamic meaning (83-84).


Translation corpus results

“It is more common for inter-clausal and to be translated by something else other than inter-clausal et ( . . .) than vice-versa” (84). This occurs in both fiction and journalese (85).

In the majority of examples, translators have the option of either coordinating or subordinating: the change is not obligatory (86).

Translations from English to French shift to subordinating structures by use of the following:
• Participle clause (28.3%)
• Purpose clause
• Relative clause (23.9%)
French-to-English translations display the following shift strategies:
• Participle clause (41.2%)