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.