Dialectology and the Linguistic Atlas Project

This article discusses the linguistic, social, and geographic distribution of a-prefixing data in the Linguistic Atlas Project (LAP) of North America. Over 3,800 instances of the a-prefix were extracted for analysis from the LAP interview data of 1,527 speakers from across the United States, collected between 1931 and 2006. While the LAP a-prefix data do not generally deviate from patterns observed in the sociolinguistic literature, they do offer a more nuanced picture of infrequent prefixed forms, including uncommon constructions and verbs that appear as a-prefixed forms less frequently. A-prefixers in LAP tended to be White men, although it should be noted that 30–47% of the female speakers in four of the surveyed LAP projects also used this feature. The geographic distribution of the feature suggests that the a-prefix is not Southern so much as it is Eastern, with pockets of lesser and greater usage as one moves westward across the country. Additionally, the data cast the a-prefix as a rural phenomenon, rather than as a strictly Southern one, which opens the door to discussions of the feature as a means of indexing participation in (or affinity for) a rural lifestyle. Overall, this article demonstrates that LAP data are a tremendous resource and a key piece of the puzzle of understanding regional and social variation.

The sustainability of digital humanities research projects is a pressing issue for humanities computing. Currently, even well-established large digital projects like the Linguistic Atlas Project (LAP) are at future risk because funding and other resources are contingent on grant funding or faculty status of the director, neither of which will necessarily be available to maintain the project over time. The mission of the university library, however, includes archiving and dissemination, now increasingly of digital materials as well as traditional paper. Collaboration with the university library is the only realistic option for long-term sustainability of digital humanities projects in the current environment. Unlike paper collections, which only require secure storage, digital projects also require the means of adaptation to new electronic media and operating environments. Even data storage requires that materials from digital projects be included in library media refresh cycles, which will include transfer of old data to new media as technology develops. Projects like LAP should provide resources to assist the library in starting the project archive, including staff time, and funding for equipment. Project metadata must be provided and, to the extent possible, integrated with library systems and finding aids. Project staff will also need to maintain a Web presence and tools developed for the project. Such cooperation leads toward the development of a digital institutional repository, in which research results and tools may be maintained in the library, not just for the humanities but across many disciplines.

The goal of this paper is to provide a complete representation of regional linguistic variation on a global scale. To this end, the paper focuses on removing three constraints that have previously limited work within dialectology/dialectometry. First, rather than assuming a fixed and incomplete set of variants, we use Computational Construction Grammar to provide a replicable and falsifiable set of syntactic features. Second, rather than assuming a specific area of interest, we use global language mapping based on web-crawled and social media datasets to determine the selection of national varieties. Third, rather than looking at a single language in isolation, we model seven major languages together using the same methods: Arabic, English, French, German, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Results show that models for each language are able to robustly predict the region-of-origin of held-out samples better using Construction Grammars than using simpler syntactic features. These global-scale experiments are used to argue that new methods in computational sociolinguistics are able to provide more generalized models of regional variation that are essential for understanding language variation and change at scale.

The theoretical research of Japanese linguistics is diverse. However, applying such research theory to Japanese language education does not necessarily help learners’ understanding. The purpose of this research is to concretely present the problems that arise from the gap between theory and practice in Japanese language research and Japanese language education. In this study, we examine the effect of the theoretical explanation of the Japanese adnominal clause on the learners’ understanding. We selected 10 second-year university Japanese learners as research subjects. They were selected because second-year learners already learn the adnominal clause. The adnominal clause was chosen because it has a considerably simple construction to check whether the learners can comprehend the meaning from those simple constructions. Since the theoretical explanation of linguistics is difficult for learners to understand, we gave a lesson using the learners’ awareness of language called “metalanguage awareness.” By using metalanguage awareness, learners are guided to understand the meaning through the comprehension of its grammatical construction using linguistic terms both in Japanese and their native language, which is Indonesian. As a result, it was found that even though adnominal clause construction is simple, the understanding of the meaning is not that simple. The understanding of adnominal clauses depends on the understanding of more basic learning items of “particles” and “clauses”, which learners still can’t grasp. We conclude that introducing such dependency in focus on form teaching method has the advantage for the teacher to check the degree of learners’ understanding. In this study, the adnominal clause can be used to check whether learners have fully understood the concept and usage of “particles” and “clauses” in Japanese. Since both concepts are very basic, it is important to take a step back and re-explain both concepts and usage so learners can use them correctly in the future.

The binomial noun phrase, or of-binomial, is an important phenomenon in the English language. Defined as a noun phrase that contains two related nouns, linked by the preposition of, examples include a hell of a day and a beast of a storm. This pioneering book provides the first extensive study of the evaluative binominal noun phrases (EBNP) in English, exploring the syntactic rules that govern them, and the (functional) semantic and pragmatic links between the two nouns. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, corpus data, and two different theoretical approaches (Construction Grammar and Functional Discourse Grammar), it argues that the EBNP now functions as a stage in a grammaticalization path that begins with a prototypical N+PP construction, continues with the head-classifier, and ends with two new of-binominal constructions: the evaluative modifier and binominal intensifier. Comprehensive in its scope, it is essential reading for researchers in syntax, semantics, and English corpus linguistics.

As a defining model, the concept of Discourse Traditions (DTs) has been well received in the field of linguistic variation and change within contemporary Romance studies. However, it has received scant attention so far beyond these fields, e. g. in Germanic linguistics or in linguistics in general, particularly in the field of formulaic language studies. Since the 1960s, formulaic language research has spanned phraseology, spoken language research/interactional linguistics, text and discourse studies and Construction Grammar, to name just a few. Concepts developed in these areas enable an exchange of ideas, but this dialogue has not yet, to my knowledge, commenced. The present chapter is an initial attempt to establish analytically the common aspects and the differences between the concept of DTs and formulaic language. It focuses on the question whether it is possible and - most importantly - theoretically beneficial to regard these two concepts as related and how the differences between them, if any, can be mediated. Section 1 gives a brief outline of the main features of the concept of DTs (for further discussion see the contributions in Part I of this Manual). Hence, the following section 1 is restricted to those aspects that appear to provide a particularly promising connecting link to the concept of formulaic language. This latter concept is the focus of section 2. The selection of research directions presented in 2.1-2.4 is guided by their comparability with the concept of DTs. Section 3 sums up the findings.

Este texto apresenta um estudo acerca da variação lexical na Região Sudeste do Brasil com vistas a discutir a distribuição diatópica dos designativos que recobrem o conceito para a “raiz branca por dentro, coberta por uma casca marrom, que se cozinha para comer”, questão 50 do Questionário Semântico-Lexical do Projeto Atlas linguístico do Brasil. Os dados são apresentados em gráficos, tabelas e cartas linguísticas perfazendo um total de 316 informantes distribuídos entre 79 municípios (37 paulistas, 23 mineiros, 17 fluminenses e 5 capixabas). O estudo traz comentários geolinguísticos dos informantes e evidencia a consciência deles no que tange à variação diatópica do Português Brasileiro. A distribuição dos itens revela duas áreas lexicais no território, uma de ocorrência de aipim e outra da variante mandioca, que permitem o traçado de linhas de isoléxicas e heteroléxicas na área investigada.

This paper introduces Chinese synthetic verbs and analyses their contributions to debates in manner/result complementarity studies and cognitive typology studies. Chinese synthetic verbs simultaneously express manner information and path/result information, but encode them into separate root slots under Beavers and Koontz-Garboden’s (2012. Manner and result in the roots of verbal meaning. Linguistic Inquiry 43(3). 331–369) scopal modifier test, so they differ from English “manner+result verbs” and further challenge the manner/result complementarity hypothesis. Synthetic verbs followed by redundant path/result verbs constitute double-framing structures that twice encode the framing information, and the non-motion case, i.e., the “synthetic verb+result verb” structure, supplements Croft et al.’s (2010. Revising Talmy’s typological classification of complex event constructions. In Hans C. Boas (ed.), Contrastive studies in construction grammar, vol. 10, 201–235. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company) classification that only includes the motion case, so that Chinese synthetic verbs complement the discussion on double-framing structures. This paper thereby further falsifies the manner/result complementarity hypothesis and provides an overall illustration of the double-framing structure in cognitive typology. This paper also illustrates the diachronic changes of manner, which might be universal and await further investigation.

This article provides an overview of the relationship between studies of syntactic variation in dialects of English and theoretical accounts of language structure. In the first section of the article, we provide a discussion of the place of syntactic variation within various subdisciplines of linguistic enquiry: we address issues such as I- and E-language, the place of Standard English in linguistic theory, and interfaces between traditional dialectology, variationist sociolinguistics, and theoretical linguistics. These interfaces suggest the need for a clarification of the nature and status of the (morpho)syntactic variable, which we provide in section 3; and in section 4, we examine the way in which (morpho)syntactic variation is treated within a number of theoretical models – for instance, Principles and Parameters theory, HPSG, OT, and cognitive linguistics (including Word Grammar and Construction Grammar) – all of which feature in the other articles in this special issue.

Japanese ranks as the ninth most widely spoken language of the world with more than 127 million speakers in the island state of Japan. Its genetic relation has been a topic of heated discussion, but Altaic and Austronesian languages appear to have contributed to the early formation of this language. Japanese has a long written tradition, which goes back to texts from the eighth century CE. The modern writing system employs a mixture of Chinese characters and two sets of syllabary indigenously developed based on the Chinese characters. This book consists of sixteen chapters covering the phonology, morphology, writing system, tense and aspect systems, basic argument structure, grammatical constructions, and discourse and pragmatic phenomena of Japanese. It provides researchers with a useful typological reference and students of Japanese with a theory-neutral introduction to current linguistic research issues.

The General classifier 个 [ge] is normally located between a numeral and a noun. In a post-verbal position, ge is found to be used in some unusual positions, e.g. in compound verbs or between the verb and an adjective. Ge in this [V ge X] pattern has attracted much attention in Chinese linguistic research (Zhang, 2003; Lu, 1984; Biq, 2004). Most of the research focuses on the properties of ge, but the discussion about the [V ge X] pattern as a whole is limited. The main task of this research is to argue that the post-verbal ge and its context form a construction with a telic and bounded aspectual meaning within the framework of Construction Grammar. In addition, the omission of numeral - [yi] (one) in post-verbal NPs triggers the emergence of this construction.

Aim. To study and analyze dissertation activity in linguistics in the USSR and Russia from the late of 20 th century to the first quarter of 21 st century. To identify main trends in linguistic research, priorities, and prospects. Methodology. The main research methods include corpus-based, bibliometric, and quantitative analysis. These methods were applied to data from dissercat.com and a corpus of dissertation topics from several universities across the country, providing generalized analytical insights into the research potential of contemporary linguistic studies. Results. The comparative analysis revealed trends in topic selection, highlighted the issue of declining theoretical significance of Cand. Sci. theses and outlined prospects for the development of theoretical and applied linguistics. Research implications. The key findings of the analysis of recent research in linguistics are significant for understanding and addressing related challenges in the broader outline of the humanities.

To evaluate contemporary sex-specific differences in upper tract urothelial carcinoma (UTUC) by reviewing diagnostic considerations, clinicopathologic features, oncologic outcomes, environmental exposures, and regional variation in UTUC by sex. Although some contemporary studies implicate sex-based differences in UTUC, the literature concerning the effect of sex on clinicopathologic features and oncologic outcomes in UTUC reveals mixed findings. Factors accounting for the time to diagnosis in UTUC seem to differ between men and women. The epidemiology and outcomes of UTUC are largely influenced by geographic variation in the disease, which may be due to differences in exposure to environmental risk factors. Sex-based variations and potential differences in disease biology remain to be elucidated. A global consensus on the effect of sex on clinicopathologic characteristics and oncologic outcomes in UTUC has not been established definitively. Review of this topic does, however, shed light on important considerations given differences in the time to diagnosis, risk factors, and regional variation by sex. Further studies evaluating genetic, anatomic, physiologic, and socioeconomic differences between men and women with UTUC may provide further insight into understanding the effect of sex in UTUC.

This chapter discusses the role played by corpus linguistics in contemporary translation studies in past decades. We will begin with an introduction to the fundamental reformative influence of corpus linguistics upon the methodologies of the contemporary linguistic research, which is then followed by a more detailed description of the most frequently used types of corpora, particularly multilingual corpora, in contrastive linguistic research and translation studies. We will also introduce a growing paradigm of research by exploring the latest developments in corpus-based translation studies.

من خلال هذا المقال المعنون بـ "بعض المعيقات الإبستمولوجية للثقافة العربية في مواجهة الدرس اللساني المعاصر"، يتم التركيز على التحديات التي تواجه الطّلبة في ميدان اللغويات عند تناولهم تحصيل المعرفة المتعلّقة بالدراسات اللغوية المعاصرة ضمن إطار الثقافة العربية. نتناول في مرحلة أولى بُعْد خصائص وقيم الثقافة العربية استنادا إلى دراسات سابقة تعود للباحث محمد عابد الجابري، ثم في مرحلة ثانية نستعرض بُعْد خصائص الممارسة العلمية اللغوية المعاصرة من خلال عرض مختلف النظريات اللسانية المعاصرة. بالنّظر إلى البعدين المذكورين، نتناول بعض الصعوبات الإبستمولوجية المعاشة ميدانيا والتي نُؤَوِّلُ مَرَدَّها إلى الثقافة العربية أو لطبيعة النّظام التعليمي أو هما معا. وبعد طرح كلّ صعوبة، نشير لاختلاف النظريات والمناهج التي تستخدم في الدراسات الغربية مقارنة بالمنهج الذي يستخدمه ذوو الخلفية العربية. من ثم، يناقش المقال كيف يمكن أن تؤثر هذه المعيقات على فهم وتحليل الظواهر اللغوية في الثقافة العربية، موضحًا أنه قد يكون من الصعب العثور على توازن بين الحفاظ على تقاليد ومفاهيم الثقافة العربية وبين الاستفادة من النظريات والتقنيات الحديثة في ميدان اللغويات في المحيط الجامعي كما هو اليوم بالمجال الجغرافي العربي. وفي ختام المقال، نشدد على ضرورة التفكير في طرق جديدة لدمج الدراسات اللغوية المعاصرة في الثقافة العربية، من خلال التركيز على البحث المشترك والتعاون بين الباحثين من مختلف التوجّهات والخلفيات، لتحقيق تقدم مستمر في هذا الميدان الهام والمتجدد بشكل مستمر. هذا المقال، بالتالي، يمثل دعوة لتبني توجّه منفتح في الدّرس اللغوي، مع التأكيد على أهمية التحليل النقدي للمفاهيم والمناهج الحالية، والسعي نحو تطوير مناهج تعليمية وأساليب جديدة تتناسب مع الخصوصية الثقافية للمجتمع العربي.