Synopsis: Technological advancement is reshaping the ways in which language interpreters operate. This poses existential challenges to the profession but also offers new opportunities. This books moves from the design of the computer-assisted interpreting tool SmarTerp as a case study of impact-driven interpreting technology research. It demonstrates how usability testing was used to achieve an interpreter-centred design. By contextualising the case study within the past and current developments of translation and interpreting technology research, this book seeks to inform and inspire a redefinition of the conceptualisation of interpreting technology research—not just as a tool to understand change but to drive it into a sustainable and human direction.

Synopsis: In 1991, William Croft suggested that negative existentials (typically lexical expressions that mean ‘not exist, not have’) are one possible source for negation markers and gave his hypothesis the name Negative Existential Cycle (NEC). It is a variationist model based on cross-linguistic data. For a good twenty years following its formulation, it was cited at face-value without ever having been tested by (historical)-comparative data. Over the last decade, Ljuba Veselinova has worked on testing the model in a comparative perspective, and this edited volume further expands on her work.

The collection presented here features detailed studies of several language families such as Bantu, Chadic and Indo-European. A number of articles focus on the micro-variation and attested historical developments within smaller groups and clusters such as Arabic, Mandarin and Cantonese, and Nanaic. Finally, variation and historical developments in specific languages are discussed for Ancient Hebrew, Ancient Egyptian, Moksha-Mordvin (Uralic), Bashkir (Turkic), Kalmyk (Mongolic), three Pama-Nyungan languages, O’dam (Southern Uto-Aztecan) and Tacana (Takanan, Amazonian Bolivia). The book is concluded by two chapters devoted to modeling cyclical processes in language change from different theoretical perspectives.

Key notions discussed throughout the book include affirmative and negative existential constructions, the expansion of the latter into verbal negation, and subsequently from more specific to more general markers of negation. Nominalizations as well as the uses of negative existentials as standalone negative answers figure among the most frequent pathways whereby negative existentials evolve as general negation markers. The operation of the Negative Existential Cycle appears partly genealogically conditioned, as the cycle is found to iterate regularly within some families but never starts in others, as is the case in Bantu. In addition, other special negation markers such as nominal negators are found to undergo similar processes, i.e. they expand into the verbal domain and thereby develop into more general negation markers.

The book provides rich information on a specific path of the evolution of negation, on cyclical processes in language change, and it show-cases the historical-comparative method in a modern setting.

Synopsis: The complexities of speech production, perception, and comprehension are enormous. Theoretical approaches of these complexities most recently face the challenge of accounting for findings on subphonemic differences. The aim of the present dissertation is to establish a robust foundation of findings on such subphonemic differences.

One rather popular case for differences in subphonemic detail is word-final /s/ and /z/ in English (henceforth S) as it constitutes a number of morphological functions. Using word-final S, three general issues are investigated. First, are there subphonemic durational differences between different types of word-final S? If there are such differences, how can they be accounted for? Second, can such subphonemic durational differences be perceived? Third, do such subphonemic durational differences influence the comprehension of S?

These questions are investigated by five highly controlled studies: a production task, an implementation of Linear Discriminative Learning, a same-different task, and two number-decision tasks. Using not only real words but also pseudowords as target items, potentially confounding effects of lexical storage are controlled for.

Concerning the first issue, the results show that there are indeed durational differences between different types of word-final S. Non-morphemic S is longest in duration, clitic S is shortest in duration, and plural S duration is in-between non-morphemic S and clitic S durations. It appears that the durational differences are connected to a word’s semantic activation diversity and its phonological certainty. Regarding the second issue, subphonemic durational differences in word-final S can be perceived, with higher levels of perceptibility for differences of 35 ms and higher. In regard to the third issue, subphonemic durational differences are found not to influence the speed of comprehension, but show a significant effect on the process of comprehension. The overall results give raise to a revision of various extant models of speech production, perception, and comprehension.

Synopsis: This book provides the first comprehensive grammatical description of Choguita Rarámuri, a Uto-Aztecan language spoken in the Sierra Tarahumara, a mountainous range in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua belonging to the Sierra Madre Occidental. A documentary corpus developed between 2003 and 2018 with Choguita Rarámuri language experts informs the analysis and is the source of the examples presented in this grammar. The documentary corpus, which consists of over 200 hours of recordings of elicited data, narratives, conversations, interviews, and other speech genres, is available in two archival collections housed at the Endangered Languages Archive and at UC Berkeley’s Survey of California and Other Indian Languages.

Choguita Rarámuri is a highly synthetic, agglutinating language with a complex morphological system. It displays many of the recurrent structural features documented across Uto-Aztecan, including a predominance of suffixation, head-marking, and patterns of noun-incorporation and compounding (Sapir 1921; Whorf 1935; Haugen 2008b). Other features of typological and theoretical interest include a complex word prosodic system, a wide range of morphologically conditioned phonological processes, and patterns of variable affix order and multiple exponence. Choguita Rarámuri is also of great comparative/historical importance: while several analytical works of Uto-Aztecan languages of Northern Mexico have been produced in the last years (Guerrero Valenzuela 2006, García Salido 2014, Reyes Taboada 2014, Morales Moreno 2016, Villalpando Quiñonez 2019, inter alia), many varieties still lack comprehensive linguistic description and documentation.

Synopsis: This volume provides a collection of research reports on multilingualism and language contact ranging from Romance, to Germanic, Greco and Slavic languages in situations of contact and diaspora. Most of the contributions are empirically-oriented studies presenting first-hand data based on original fieldwork, and a few focus directly on the methodological issues in such research. Owing to the multifaceted nature of contact and diaspora phenomena (e.g. the intrinsic transnational essence of contact and diaspora, and the associated interplay between majority and minoritized languages and multilingual practices in different contact settings, contact-induced language change, and issues relating to convergence) the disciplinary scope is broad, and includes ethnography, qualitative and quantitative sociolinguistics, formal linguistics, descriptive linguistics, contact linguistics, historical linguistics, and language acquisition. Case studies are drawn from Italo-Romance varieties in the Americas, Spanish-Nahuatl contact, Castellano Andino, Greko/Griko in Southern Italy, Yiddish in Anglophone communities, Frisian in the Netherlands, Wymysiöryś in Poland, Sorbian in Germany, and Pomeranian and Zeelandic Flemish in Brazil.

Sinopse: A Linguística Clínica reúne profissionais, investigadores e estudantes de diferentes graus académicos cujo foco de trabalho é a exploração da ponte entre a Linguística e a Fonoaudiologia (na tradição brasileira) ou a Terapia da Fala (na tradição portuguesa). Tem como objetivos centrais a construção de conhecimento sobre a natureza dos desempenhos linguísticos atípicos e a preocupação constante em tornar os processos de avaliação e de intervenção em contexto clínico cada vez mais rigorosos e eficazes.

O presente volume destina-se a quem estuda ou investiga aspetos relacionados com desempenhos linguísticos atípicos em países lusófonos, nomeadamente a estudantes e docentes de cursos de graduação e pós-graduação nas áreas da Terapia da Fala/ Fonoaudiologia, da Linguística, da Psicologia e da Educação.

Os capítulos que integram a presente publicação estão organizados em quatro blocos temáticos. O bloco inicial tem como objetivo central fornecer uma perspetiva histórica dos estudos em Fonologia Clínica e em Sintaxe Clínica. O segundo centra-se em aspetos fonológicos e sua relação com a dimensão fonética da língua. O terceiro bloco integra capítulos que exploram o módulo gramatical da sintaxe, a interface gramática-pragmática e o discurso. O último bloco reúne um conjunto de investigações sobre populações específicas.

Synopsis: Velar Fronting (VF) is the name for any synchronic or diachronic phonological process shifting the velar place of articulation to the palatal region of the vocal tract. A well-known case of VF in Standard German is the rule specifying that the fricative [x] assimilates to [ç] after front segments. VF also refers to the change from velar sounds like [ɣ k g ŋ] to palatals ([ʝ c ɟ ɲ]). The book provides a thorough investigation of VF in German dialects: Data are drawn from over 300 original sources for varieties that are (or were) spoken in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and other countries.

VF differs geographically along three parameters: (A) triggers, (B) targets, and (C) outputs. VF triggers (=A) are typically defined according to vowel height: In some systems VF is induced only by high front vowels, in others by high and mid front vowels, and in yet others by high, mid, and low front vowels. Some varieties treat consonants ([r l n]) as triggers, while others do not. VF can be nonassimilatory, in which case the rule applies even in the context of back segments. In many varieties of German, VF targets (=B) consist of the two fricatives [x ɣ], but in other dialects the targets comprise [x] but not [ɣ]. In some places, VF affects not only [x ɣ], but also velar stops and the velar nasal. The output of VF (=C) is typically palatal [ç] (given the input [x]), but in many other places it is the alveolopalatal [ɕ].

A major theme is the way in which VF interacts with synchronic and diachronic changes creating or eliminating structures which can potentially undergo it or trigger it. In many dialects the relationship between velars ([x]) and palatals ([ҫ]) is transparent because velars only occur in the back vowel context and palatals only when adjacent to front sounds. In that type of system, independent processes can either feed VF (by creating additional structures which the latter can undergo), or they can bleed it (by eliminating potential structures to which VF could apply).

In other dialects, VF is opaque. In one opaque system, both velars ([x]) and palatals ([ҫ]) surface in the context of front segments. Thus, in addition to expected front vowel plus palatal sequences ([…iç…]), there are also unexpected ones consisting of front vowel plus velar ([…ix…]). In a second type of opaque system, velars and palatals are found in the context of back segments; hence, expected sequences such as […iç…] occur in addition to unexpected ones like […ɑç…].

Synopsis: In most grammatical models, hierarchical structuring and dependencies are considered as central features of grammatical structures, an idea which is usually captured by the notion of “head” or “headedness”. While in most models, this notion is more or less taken for granted, there is still much disagreement as to the precise properties of grammatical heads and the theoretical implications that arise of these properties. Moreover, there are quite a few linguistic structures that pose considerable challenges to the notion of “headedness”. Linking to the seminal discussions led in Zwicky (1985) and Corbett, Fraser, & Mc-Glashan (1993), this volume intends to look more closely upon phenomena that are considered problematic for an analysis in terms of grammatical heads. The aim of this book is to approach the concept of “headedness” from its margins. Thus, central questions of the volume relate to the nature of heads and the distinction between headed and non-headed structures, to the process of gaining and losing head status, and to the thought-provoking question as to whether grammar theory could do without heads at all. The contributions in this volume provide new empirical findings bearing on phenomena that challenge the conception of grammatical heads and/or discuss the notion of head/headedness and its consequences for grammatical theory in a more abstract way. The collected papers view the topic from diverse theoretical perspectives (among others HPSG, Generative Syntax, Optimality Theory) and different empirical angles, covering typological and corpus-linguistic accounts, with a focus on data from German.

Synopsis:

This book offers a comparative perspective on the structural and interpretive properties of root-clause complementizers in Ibero-Romance. The driving question the author seeks to answer is where the boundaries between syntax and pragmatics lie in these languages. Contrary to most previous work on these phenomena, the author argues in favor of a relatively strict distribution of labor between the two components of grammar. The first part of the book is devoted to root complementizers with a reportative interpretation. The second part deals with root complementizers and commitment attribution. Finally, the last part presents the results of empirical studies on the topic.

Synopsis:

This book introduces formal grammar theories that play a role in current linguistic theorizing (Phrase Structure Grammar, Transformational Grammar/Government & Binding, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Head-​Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Construction Grammar, Tree Adjoining Grammar). The key assumptions are explained and it is shown how the respective theory treats arguments and adjuncts, the active/passive alternation, local reorderings, verb placement, and fronting of constituents over long distances. The analyses are explained with German as the object language.

The second part of the book compares these approaches with respect to their predictions regarding language acquisition and psycholinguistic plausibility. The nativism hypothesis, which assumes that humans posses genetically determined innate language-specific knowledge, is critically examined and alternative models of language acquisition are discussed. The second part then addresses controversial issues of current theory building such as the question of flat or binary branching structures being more appropriate, the question whether constructions should be treated on the phrasal or the lexical level, and the question whether abstract, non-visible entities should play a role in syntactic analyses. It is shown that the analyses suggested in the respective frameworks are often translatable into each other. The book closes with a chapter showing how properties common to all languages or to certain classes of languages can be captured.

Synopsis:

This volume explores and addresses questions related to equitable access for assessment. It seeks to initiate a conversation among scholars about inclusive practices in language assessments. Whether the student is a second language learner, a heritage language learner, a multilingual language speaker, a community member, the authors in the present volume provide examples of assessment that do not follow a single universal or standardized design but an applicable one based on the needs and context of a given community. The contributors in this volume are scholars from different disciplines and contexts in Higher Education. They have created and proposed multiple lower-stakes assignments and accommodated learning by being flexible and open without assuming that learners know how to do specific tasks. Each chapter provides different examples on Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) assessment practices based on observation, examination, and integrative notions of diverse language scenarios. It may be of interest to researchers and practitioners in the fields of curriculum and instruction, language learning, and applied linguistics as well as those in the field of language teaching in general. Thus this volume broadens the scope of research in the area of multilingual assessment.

This grammar offers a grammatical description of the Ngòló variety of Gyeli, an endangered Bantu (A80) language spoken by 4,000-5,000 "Pygmy" hunter-gatherers in southern Cameroon. It represents one of the most comprehensive descriptions of a northwestern Bantu language.

The grammatical description, which is couched in a form-to-function approach, covers all levels of language, ranging from Gyeli phonology to its information structure and complex clauses.

It draws on nineteen months of fieldwork carried out as part of the "Bagyeli/Bakola" DoBeS (Documentation of Endangered Languages) project between 2010 and 2014. The resulting multimodal corpus from that project, which includes texts of diverse genres such as traditional stories, narratives, multi-party conversations and dialogues, procedural texts, and songs, provides the empirical basis for the grammatical description. The documentary text collection, supplemented by data from elicitation work, questionnaires, and experiments, are accessible in the Bagyeli/Bakola collection of The Language Archive. With additional ethnographic, sociolinguistic, diachronic, and comparative remarks, the grammar may appeal to a wider audience in general linguistics, typology, Bantu studies, and anthropology.

In 2019, the grammar received the Pāṇini Award by the Association for Linguistic Typology.

The notion of formulaicity has received increasing attention in disciplines and areas as diverse as linguistics, literary studies, art theory and art history. In recent years, linguistic studies of formulaicity have been flourishing and the very notion of formulaicity has been approached from various methodological and theoretical perspectives and with various purposes in mind. The linguistic approach to formulaicity is still in a state of rapid development and the objective of the current volume is to present the current explorations in the field. Papers collected in the volume make numerous suggestions for further development of the field and they are arranged into three complementary parts. The first part, with three chapters, presents new theoretical and methodological insights as well as their practical application in the development of custom-designed software tools for identification and exploration of formulaic language in texts. Two papers in the second part explore formulaic language in the context of language learning. Finally, the third part, with three chapters, showcases descriptive research on formulaic language conducted primarily from the perspectives of corpus linguistics and translation studies. The volume will be of interest to anyone involved in the study of formulaic language either from a theoretical or a practical perspective.

The purpose of this book is to showcase a diverse set of directions in empirical research on mediated discourse, reflecting on the state-of-the-art and the increasing intersection between Corpus-based Interpreting Studies (CBIS) and Corpus-based Translation Studies (CBTS). Undeniably, data from the European Parliament (EP) offer a great opportunity for such research. Not only does the institution provide a sizeable sample of oral debates held at the EP together with their simultaneous interpretations into all languages of the European Union. It also makes available written verbatim reports of the original speeches, which used to be translated. From a methodological perspective, EP materials thus guarantee a great degree of homogeneity, which is particularly valuable in corpus studies, where data comparability is frequently a challenge.

In this volume, progress is visible in both CBIS and CBTS. In interpreting, it manifests itself notably in the availability of comprehensive transcription, annotation and alignment systems. In translation, datasets are becoming substantially richer in metadata, which allow for increasingly refined multi-factorial analysis. At the crossroads between the two fields, intermodal investigations bring to the fore what these mediation modes have in common and how they differ. The volume is thus aimed in particular at Interpreting and Translation scholars looking for new descriptive insights and methodological approaches in the investigation of mediated discourse, but it may be also of interest for (corpus) linguists analysing parliamentary discourse in general.

Descriptive and Theoretical Approaches to African Linguistics contains a selection of revised and peer-reviewed papers from the 49th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, held at Michigan State University in 2018. The contributions from both students and more senior scholars, based in North America, Africa and other parts of the world, provide a glimpse of the breadth and quality of current research in African linguistics from both descriptive and theoretical perspectives. Fields of interest range from phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics to sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, discourse analysis, language documentation, computational linguistics and beyond. The articles reflect both the typological and genetic diversity of languages in Africa and the wide range of research areas covered by presenters at ACAL conferences.

Tungusic is a small family of languages, many of which are endangered. It encompasses approximately twenty languages located in Siberia and northern China. These languages are distributed over an enormous area that ranges from the Yenisey River and Xinjiang in the west to the Kamchatka Peninsula and Sakhalin in the east. They extend as far north as the Taimyr Peninsula and, for a brief period, could even be found in parts of Central and Southern China.

This book is an attempt to bring researchers from different backgrounds together to provide an open-access publication in English that is freely available to all scholars in the field. The contributions cover all branches of Tungusic and a wide range of linguistic features. Topics include synchronic descriptions, typological comparisons, dialectology, language contact, and diachronic reconstruction. Some of the contributions are based on first-hand data collected during fieldwork, in some cases from the last speakers of a given language.

This book brings together papers that discuss social and structural aspects of language contact and language change.

Several papers look at the relevance of historical documents to determine the linguistic nature of early contact varieties, while others investigate the specific processes of contact-induced change that were involved in the emergence and development of these languages. A third set of papers look at how new datasets and greater sensitivity to social issues can help to (re)assess persistent theoretical and empirical questions as well as help to open up new avenues of research. In particular they highlight the heterogeneity of contemporary language practices and attitudes often obscured in sociolinguistic research.

The contributions all focus on language variation and change but investigate it from a variety of disciplinary and empirical perspectives and cover a range of linguistic contexts.

Examining the general impact of the Controlled Languages rules in the context of Machine Translation has been an area of research for many years. The present study focuses on the following question: How do the Controlled Language (CL) rules impact the Machine Translation (MT) output individually? Analyzing a German corpus-based test suite of technical texts that have been translated into English by different MT systems, the study endeavors to answer this question at different levels: the general impact of CL rules (rule- and system-independent), their impact at rule level (system-independent), their impact at system level (rule-independent), and at rule and system level. The results of five MT systems (a rule-based system, a statistical system, two differently constructed hybrid systems, and a neural system) are analyzed and contrasted. For this, a mixed-methods triangulation approach that includes error annotation, human evaluation, and automatic evaluation was applied. The data were analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively based on the following parameters: number and type of MT errors, style and content quality, and scores from two automatic evaluation metrics. In line with many studies, the results show a general positive impact of the applied CL rules on the MT output. However, at rule level, only four rules proved to have positive effects on all parameters; three rules had negative effects on the parameters; and two rules did not show any significant impact. At rule and system level, the rules affected the MT systems differently, as expected. Some rules that had a positive impact on earlier MT approaches did not show the same impact on the neural MT approach. Furthermore, the neural MT delivered distinctly better results than earlier MT approaches, namely the highest error-free, style and content quality rates both before and after the rules application, which indicates that the neural MT offers a promising solution that no longer requires CL rules for improving the MT output, what in turn allows for a more natural style.

Conçu comme une introduction générale à la syntaxe, cet ouvrage présente les notions de base nécessaires à une étude de la combinaison des unités lexicales et grammaticales au sein d’un énoncé. Sans se placer dans un cadre préconçu, l’ouvrage étudie les différentes possibilités pour la représentation des structures syntaxiques, en fonction des principes généraux et des critères particuliers retenus.

Élaboré avec l’objectif de fournir une base pour l’enseignement de la syntaxe à l’université, cet ouvrage souhaite montrer qu’on peut dégager de manière méthodique les propriétés des langues et mettre de l’ordre dans la forêt vierge que constitue chaque langue. Il est divisé en trois parties : comment élaborer le modèle d’une langue, comment déterminer les unités de base de la langue en fonction de leur sens, forme et combinatoire, comment définir et représenter les différents modes d’organisation des unités. Cette dernière partie présente une abondance de diagrammes syntaxiques de diverses natures.

L’ouvrage est découpé en de petites sections, alternant le contenu principal avec des éclairages, des notes historiques, des élaborations plus formelles, des exemples linguistiques dans diverses langues, des propositions de lectures additionnelles et des exercices avec des éléments de correction.