Chinese clefts mainly involve two patterns, the shi…de pattern and the bare shi pattern, and the shi…de pattern can be further categorized into the V–O–de pattern and the V–O–de pattern, which are distinguished according to the relative order of the object and de. Compared to clefts in other languages, Chinese clefts are particularly special in two aspects. First, in the surface order, the cleft focus stays together with the cleft presupposition between shi and de, instead of moving to a higher position as in languages like English. Second, Chinese shi…de clefts have a heavy preference for past-tense interpretations and the V–de–O pattern cannot host tense, aspect and modal elements in its presupposition.
In the existing literature, some analyses take shi to be the central element of focus-marking, which partitions cleft sentences into the cleft focus and the cleft presupposition; while other analyses relate shi in clefts with shi in idenitificational/specificational sentences and pin down shi as a copula verb. For de, a group of studies treat it to be an optional element that serves a secondary function such as mood-marking or tense-marking; while other analyses, taking the shi…de pattern to be prototypical clefts that encode contrastiveness or exhaustivity, tend to assign de the function of focus partition and treat shi as a semantically vacuous copula verb. The TAM restriction is then explained by assigning de the syntactic position of a tense/aspect head or by ascribing such restrictions to PF-level linearization constraints and the implied default temporal interpretation of the cleft construction.
Semantically, just like English it-clefts, the existence/absence of the exhaustive effect in Chinese clefts is a much-debated issue that has generated competing views. Some studies distinguish between emphatic and exhaustive meanings, and treat exhaustivity as the defining criterion for cleft sentences in Chinese, while others hold that Chinese clefts only encode contrastiveness and do not mark exhaustivity at the level of assertion.
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Article
Chinese Cleft Sentences
Yuli Feng
Article
Phonological Variation and Change in European Portuguese and Galician
João Veloso and Xosé Luís Regueira Fernández
Portuguese and Galician are closely related languages, having shared a common medieval period known as Galician–Portuguese. While some continuities between them persist, the phonologies of contemporary Galician and Portuguese have evolved separately. Significant variation phenomena can be examined, illustrating the distinct paths of these languages: gheada, seseo, and coda-/S/ changes for Galician; trill desonorantization and the decline of unstressed vowel reduction (UVR) for Portuguese.
Gheada consists of the articulation of /ɡ/ as [h], [ħ], or [x], a change that has not yet been adequately explained. Seseo refers to a nonstandard sibilant system, which lacks the phonological opposition between /s/ and /θ/ present in the standard system. Finally, variation affecting coda-/S/ leads to its realization as a rhotic, an aspirated [h], or a palatal [ʃ]. All these phenomena in contemporary Galician are subject to geographical and social distribution and are notable for their sociolinguistic implications as well as their complexity and theoretical implications within the current phonological framework.
In Portuguese, trill desonorantization consists of the realization of the “strong rhotic” /ʀ/ as a fricative. Many variation corpora and dialectal studies suggest fricative allophones of /ʀ/ are becoming predominant. This can trigger a more drastic reorganization of the consonantal system of the language. UVR is generally seen as the most characteristic phonological feature of Portuguese. However, a closer look at recent and older words of the language suggest that its importance might be declining, since newer forms do not undergo vowel reduction as regularly as older words.
In conclusion, the phonological divergence between Portuguese and Galician is evidenced by distinct variation phenomena in each language. These variations underscore the separated evolutionary paths of these languages since their shared medieval period, reflecting broader sociolinguistic and theoretical complexities. Furthermore, such variation phenomena illuminate potential trajectories of phonological change, some of which hold significant interest within the context of Iberian and, more broadly, Romance languages.
Article
Inflection Classes in Nouns and Adjectives in the Romance Languages
Xavier Bach
The history of inflection classes in nouns and adjectives in the Romance languages involves a number of changes, which most often imply the loss of distinctions (loss of features such as case, loss of values such as the neuter gender, or loss of inflection class distinctions), but which can also imply a multiplication of new distinctions (features of predication or position, development of new inflection class distinctions based on the phonology of nouns). Class distinctions have often been said to be marked by final vowel distinctions, but it is not always so, and a number of systems present classes while having lost most final vowels.
Article
Intervention Effects in Mandarin Chinese
Haoze Li
Intervention effects (IEs) refer to the phenomenon where an interrogative wh-expression cannot follow a quantifier or a focus expression. IEs are commonly found in wh-in-situ languages because it is more likely for in-situ wh-expressions to follow quantifiers or focus expressions. Since wh-in-situ in Mandarin Chinese (Mandarin, for short) has been subject to extensive research, it has played an important role in providing the empirical foundation for the research on IEs, based on which different approaches have been pursued. These approaches debate whether the nature of IEs is syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic. They also shed light on related linguistic issues, such as locality conditions, interactions of focus and wh-expressions, and information structure. The present article surveys the empirical and theoretical landscape of IEs in Mandarin, with the goals of providing references and directions for future research.
Article
Metrolingualism
Emi Otsuji and Alastair Pennycook
Metrolingualism is a term used to describe relations between language and the city. By focusing on everyday, grassroots, multilingual language use in urban workplaces (rather than top-down approaches to ethnolinguistic groups), it explores the ways in which people from varied backgrounds engage in a range of interactions using multiple semiotic and linguistic resources come together at different times and places in the city. In line with other critical poststructuralist approaches to language, metrolingualism challenges common language ideologies around multilingualism, questioning enumerable and separable languages in favor of an understanding of repertoires and resources. The focus through linguistic ethnography on the dynamic integration of diverse linguistic and other semiotic resources in the city has led to an emphasis on spatial repertoires and semiotic assemblages to draw attention to the interactions among language, space, place, and objects as part of a critical sociolinguistics of diversity.
Article
Modern Urban Multiethnolects of Germanic Languages
Pia Quist
Modern Urban Multiethnolects of Germanic languages refer to diverse ways of speaking Germanic languages in multilingual environments, typically found in major cities like Berlin, Utrecht, and Oslo. While European cities have historically been multilingual, post–World War II immigration has created new linguistic contact zones, providing the context for the emergence of novel speech practices, particularly among young people. Researchers have investigated these practices and identified several linguistically characteristic features. Notably, some of these features exhibit parallels across Germanic-speaking countries. For instance, research has documented systematic variation in the syntactic verb second constraint (V2), variation in the use of grammatical gender marking, the use of loanwords from languages such as Turkish and Arabic, and not least nonstandard ways of pronouncing the local languages including both supra-segmental (such as tone, stress pattern, and intonation) and segmental phonological features. While some studies on multiethnolects have focused on documenting such grammatical and phonetic features, other studies have explored socio-pragmatic functions and social practices associated with the emergence of multiethnolects. Different scholarly approaches intersect, with some studies combining perspectives in both structural and social practices. Other studies again have examined the extent to which the new multiethnolectal ways of speaking correlate with local dialect variation. In some urban areas, speakers integrate features from both multiethnolects and local dialects. In other contexts, multiethnolects remain distinct, resisting assimilation into existing dialect variation. Altogether, the broad range of studies, and their different approaches and foci, not only underscores the complexity of multiethnolectal variation, but also the fact that multiethnolects are by nature highly dynamic and fluid.
Article
Neoclassical Compounding in the Romance Languages
Fabio Montermini
The label “neoclassical compounds” (NC) encompasses a set of phenomena found in, but not limited to, Romance languages. They can be roughly characterized as the emergence, in the lexicon of a language, of lexical units totally or partially made up of elements borrowed from ancient (classical) languages, namely Greek and Latin, and constructed by means of processes not (or not necessarily) corresponding to the “canonical” morphological processes at work in the language in question. Historically, the existence of NC in Romance languages is linked, on the one side, to the role played by Latin, and partly Greek, in the intellectual history of Europe; and, on the other side, to the various waves of relatinization Romance languages were subject to at different times, with two major turning points, in the 15th and 16th centuries, with the revival of classical authors advocated by Humanism and the Renaissance, and from the 18th century onward, with the development and democratization of scientific and technical knowledge. Progressively, NC have served as models for the emergence of productive word formation patterns which are, today, perfectly integrated into the derivational systems of Romance languages. However, rather than constituting a clearly delimited and homogeneous class, the label NC encompasses a constellation of phenomena sharing some characteristics that can globally be attributed to their common origin in the lexicon of neoclassical descent that has been transferred to Romance languages across the centuries.
Article
Theoretical Issues in Planning the Articulation of Spoken Utterances
Alice Turk
Theories of speech articulation planning must account for the coordinated movements of speech articulators that produce contrastive lexical items, as well as the ways these vary systematically in different contexts both within and across utterances. The systematic phonetic variability of phonologically equivalent forms relates to many factors including adjacent segmental context, rate and style of speech, local contextual factors, such as position in prosodic structure. This variability has been proposed to contribute to the transmission of meaning and to communicative efficiency.
Theories proposed to account for speech articulation behaviors differ in many key respects. Theoretical controversies relate to the nature of phonological representations used to distinguish words in the mental lexicon, as well as the processing components, representations, and mechanisms involved in planning and producing speech.
One of the most fundamental theoretical distinctions relates to assumptions about the spatiotemporal vs. symbolic nature of phonological representations. Distinctions in system architecture, including the number and type of processing components, derive from these assumptions. Other differences among theories relate to assumptions about the nature of speech production goals, movement targets, timekeeping mechanisms, dynamic parametric models of movement, movement coordination, the separate vs. integrated representation for spatial and temporal characteristics of movement, as well as proposed mechanisms to account for systematic phonetic variability in different contexts (coupled oscillators, optimization-based, vs. dynamic field theory approaches).
Article
Chinese Character Processing
Xufeng Duan and Zhenguang G. Cai
Chinese characters, as the basic units of the Chinese writing system, encapsulate a deep orthography that requires complex cognitive processing during recognition, naming, and handwriting. Recognition of these characters involves decoding both phonological and orthographic elements, where phonological information plays a crucial role early in the process, despite the inconsistency in orthography-to-phonology conversion. Research suggests that both holistic and sublexical processing strategies are employed, with the effectiveness of each strategy varying based on individual differences and the specific characteristics of the character, such as frequency and structure. Naming a Chinese character extends beyond recognition, necessitating the retrieval and articulation of its phonology. This process is influenced by lexical variables like frequency, age of acquisition, and semantic ambiguity, reflecting the intricate relationship between semantic and phonological information in character naming. The complexity of the Chinese orthography, lacking consistent phoneme–grapheme correspondences, necessitates additional cognitive efforts in naming, particularly for characters with ambiguous semantics or inconsistent phonology. Finally, handwriting Chinese characters involves a combination of central and peripheral processes. The central processes focus on accessing the orthographic makeup of a character, including radicals and strokes, based on phonological and/or semantic input. These orthographic components are stored in working memory and retrieved to create motor plans for the actual act of handwriting, which takes place during the peripheral processes. Various lexical and individual factors can influence these processes. In summary, understanding Chinese character processing illuminates the cognitive complexities of reading and writing in logographic systems, underscoring the interplay between phonological, orthographic, and semantic information. Future research is poised to explore the nuanced dynamics of these processes, especially in the context of evolving digital literacy practices.
Article
English
Bernd Kortmann
English is by far the most widely spoken Germanic language, with approximately 400 million native speakers, another 500 million L2 speakers, and at least a billion of moderately competent speakers of English as a Foreign Language. In close to 60 countries, English enjoys official status or is one of the native languages. With several fully codified standard varieties used in different nation-states, English also qualifies as the most pluricentric of the Germanic languages. British and American English are still the most powerful norm-providing Standard Englishes worldwide and the leading target models in the international classroom of English as a second or foreign language. Many of the changes in their grammars in the course of the 20th century happened independently of each other. In American English, such changes typically started earlier, spread faster, and affected more words or structures compared with British English.
English is the most innovative of all Germanic languages when looking at its evolution since early medieval times, closely followed by the Mainland Scandinavian languages. Despite the fact that English and German both belong to the West Germanic branch, it is between these two languages that the greatest Germanic-internal typological distance holds, with German being placed at the pole of the structurally most conservative West Germanic language and (along with Icelandic) of all Germanic languages. English is highly analytic and exhibits many properties typically found in SVO languages, whereas German is still highly synthetic and shows many more typical properties of an SOV language.
Mobility, migration, and language and dialect contact have played crucial roles in the history and development of English right from inception in the early Middle Ages. The extent to which the multiple language contact situations in the history of English have shaped the language, especially its grammar, is still a matter of debate. What is a fact is that the major typological changes of the English language away from the highly synthetic language type of Old Germanic happened exactly in the late Old English and, above all, the Middle English periods. Early Modern English was primarily a period of standardization, the Great Vowel Shift, and a heavy extension of the vocabulary because of its massive borrowing from Latin and French. The main characteristics of Late Modern English are continuity, stability, and norm-oriented codification of the English language via dictionaries and grammars. Both modern periods, especially the 18th and the 19th centuries, saw the global spread of English in the wake of colonial expansion, laying the foundations to English becoming a true world language with many varieties in different parts of the world.
