Profiling verb complementation constructions across New Englishes

2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra C. Deshors ◽  
Stefan Th. Gries
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Observational Data ◽  
Random Forests ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
American English ◽  
Analytical Tool ◽  
Regression Analyses ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Matrix Verb

In this paper, we explore verb complementation patterns with to and ing in native English (British and American English) as compared to three Asian Englishes (Hong Kong, Indian, and Singaporean English). Based on data from the International Corpus of English annotated for variables describing the matrix verb and the complement, we run two random forests analyses to determine where the Asian Englishes have developed complementation preferences different from the two native speaker varieties. We find not only a variety of differences between the Asian and the native Englishes, but also that the Asian Englishes are more similar (i.e. ‘better predicted by’) the American English data. Further, as the first study of its kind to extend the MuPDAR approach from the now frequent regression analyses to random forests analysis, this study adds a potentially useful analytical tool to the often messy and skewed observational data corpus linguists need to deal with.

The into-causative construction in English: a construction-based perspective

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
JONG-BOK KIM ◽  
MARK A. DAVIES
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Past Research ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Causative Construction ◽  
Matrix Verb

The so-called into-causative construction, involving the pattern ‘V NP into V-ing’, raises intriguing questions in terms of lexical creativity as well as variation. This article, based on nearly 20,000 tokens from more than 1.3 billion words of text, from both British and American English, carries out a comprehensive corpus-based investigation of the construction. The article supports past research on certain types of variation in the use of the construction in British and American English, but sheds new light on how these may relate to diachronic shifts as well as to synchronic variation. The article also sketches a construction-based analysis to account for the grammatical properties of the into-causative construction. In particular, it shows that the construction, as an extension of the caused-motion construction, shares grammatical properties with its family constructions including the resultative and way constructions, but is distinctive from these in several respects. By allowing close interactions between the matrix verb and the grammatical constructions, the constructional view can also account for innovative uses of the construction.

English language schooling, linguistic realities, and the native speaker of English in Hong Kong

Multilingua ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jette G. Hansen Edwards
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
English Language ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
Native Language ◽  
Educational Background ◽  
Government School ◽  
The Impact ◽  
At Home

AbstractThe study employs a case study approach to examine the impact of educational backgrounds on nine Hong Kong tertiary students’ English and Cantonese language practices and identifications as native speakers of English and Cantonese. The study employed both survey and interview data to probe the participants’ English and Cantonese language use at home, school, and with peers/friends. Leung, Harris, and Rampton’s (1997, The idealized native speaker, reified ethnicities, and classroom realities.TESOL Quarterly 31(3). 543–560) framework of language affiliation, language expertise, and inheritance was used to examine the construction of a native language identity in a multilingual setting. The study found that educational background – and particularly international school experience in contrast to local government school education – had an impact on the participants’ English language usage at home and with peers, and also affected their language expertise in Cantonese. English language use at school also impacted their identifications as native speakers of both Cantonese and English, with Cantonese being viewed largely as native language based on inheritance while English was being defined as native based on their language expertise, affiliation and use, particularly in contrast to their expertise in, affiliation with, and use of Cantonese.

scholarly journals Orientations towards English among English-medium Instruction Students

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Karakaş
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Language Ideologies ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
American English ◽  
Main Body ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
British English ◽  
Spoken English ◽  
English Medium Instruction

Abstract Based on the empirical data of my PhD research, this paper analyses the perceptions of 351 undergraduate students enrolled at English-medium universities towards English in terms of the language ideology framework. The students were purposively sampled from three programs at three Turkish universities. The data were drawn from student opinion surveys and semi-structured interviews. The findings paint a blurry picture, with a strong tendency among most students to view their English use as having the characteristics of dominant native varieties of English (American English & British English), and with a high percentage of students’ acceptance of the distinctiveness of their English without referring to any standard variety. The findings also show that many students’ orientations to English are formed by two dominant language ideologies: standard English ideology and native speaker English ideology. It was also found that a large number of students did not strictly stick to either of these ideologies, particularly in their orientation to spoken English, due, as argued in the main body, to their experiences on language use that have made them aware of the demographics of diverse English users and of the diverse ways of using English.

Markedness, operator movement and discourse effects in the acquisition of purpose clause constructions in a second language

1997 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-33
Author(s):  
Malcolm A. Finney
Keyword(s):  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
L2 Acquisition ◽  
Additional Hypothesis ◽  
Late Emergence ◽  
Initial Learning ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Prepositional Object ◽  
L1 Acquisition ◽  
Matrix Verb ◽  
Operator Movement

This article appraises the effects of gap position and discourse information in the acquisition of purpose clause constructions (PCs) by adult Francophones learning English as L2. L1 acquisition studies reveal children having little difficulty interpreting a PC with a subject gap only (SPC) while a PC with an object gap (OPC) has been problematic to interpret. This may be the result of the number of syntactic operations–including operator movement–involved in its derivation plus lexically specified restrictions on the matrix verb. There are grounds for hypothesizing a late emergence of OPCs in English for French speakers. They are not allowed in French and, in addition to lexical restrictions associated with the choice of matrix verb, are marked semantically and typologically; an OPC with a prepositional object gap is additionally syntactically marked. This may thus result in the late acquisition of OPCs relative to SPCs. An additional hypothesis addresses whether L2 learners are adept at using discourse clues to interpret syntactic structure. Results indicate initial difficulty interpreting only PCs with prepositional object gaps, providing support for the hypothesis that syntactically (structurally) marked constructions may create initial learning difficulty in L2 acquisition.

Language Experience and Subjective Word Familiarity on the Multimodal Perception of Non-Native Speakers’ Vowels

2021 ◽  
pp. 002383092199872
Author(s):  
Solène Inceoglu
Keyword(s):  
English Learners ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
American English ◽  
Vocabulary Knowledge ◽  
Language Experience ◽  
Monosyllabic Words ◽  
Word Familiarity ◽  
Multimodal Perception

The present study investigated native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers’ perception of the French vowels /ɔ̃, ɑ̃, ɛ̃, o/. Thirty-four American-English learners of French and 33 native speakers of Parisian French were asked to identify 60 monosyllabic words produced by a native speaker in three modalities of presentation: auditory-only (A-only); audiovisual (AV); and visual-only (V-only). The L2 participants also completed a vocabulary knowledge test of the words presented in the perception experiment that aimed to explore whether subjective word familiarity affected speech perception. Results showed that overall performance was better in the AV and A-only conditions for the two groups with the pattern of confusion differing across modalities. The lack of audiovisual benefit was not due to the vowel contrasts being not visually salient enough, as shown by the native group’s performance in the V-only modality, but to the L2 group’s weaker sensitivity to visual information. Additionally, a significant relationship was found between subjective word familiarity and AV and A-only (but not V-only) perception of non-native contrasts.

Action and agency in complex sentences from present-day Romanian

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (62) (1) ◽  
pp. 39-56
Author(s):  
Alice BODOC
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Qualitative And Quantitative ◽  
Complex Sentences ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Quantitative Analyses ◽  
Adverbial Clause ◽  
Linguistic Phenomenon ◽  
Matrix Verb

Starting from Alanen’s remark that “actions (exercises of capacities) are found throughout the natural world; and so is agency” (2018, 2), the present paper aims at describing the influence of these two fundamental concepts – action and agency – on the structure of Romanian complex sentences. More precisely, I am interested in providing evidence of a linguistic phenomenon that has received far less attention in the literature, i.e. the semantic restrictions imposed by the matrix verb over the embedded adverbial clause. As concerns the methodology, both qualitative and quantitative analyses will be conducted on an extensive online Romanian corpus (CoRoLa), and will be based on the semantic typologies of the verb included in some of the reference Romanian grammars (GALR 2008, 326; GBLR 2010, 279). One of the most important results of the analysis was the phenomenon of agentivity

A different perspective on embedded Verb Second

2020 ◽  
pp. 297-322
Author(s):  
Rebecca Woods
Keyword(s):  
Speech Act ◽  
Illocutionary Force ◽  
Verb Second ◽  
Verb Movement ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Embedded Clause ◽  
Matrix Verb

This chapter compares embedded verb movement phenomena in English with embedded Verb Second clauses in German and Swedish. Close examination of the syntactic—but more particularly the semantic and pragmatic—properties of these phenomena reveals striking similarities, and the claim is made that these phenomena exhibit independent illocutionary force in the sense that the perspective holder for the embedded proposition or question is disambiguated—a departure from the claim that embedded verb movement structures are asserted (cf. Julien 2015 and Chapter 11 of this volume). It is proposed, following recent innovations in speech act syntax (Wiltschko and Heim 2016; Woods 2016) that these structures are dependent, as the ‘embedded’ clause contains less structure than full a root clause, yet is still structurally larger than a typical embedded clause. However, they are not selected and are instead in an apposition relation with a (usually covert) nominal complement to the matrix verb.

scholarly journals Cognitive, Emotive, and Cognitive-Behavioral Correlates of Suicidal Ideation among Chinese Adolescents in Hong Kong

2010 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 366-379 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sylvia Y.C.L. Kwok ◽  
Daniel T. L. Shek
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Social Skills ◽  
Problem Solving ◽  
Suicidal Ideation ◽  
Social Problem ◽  
Emotional Competence ◽  
Social Problem Solving ◽  
Cognitive Behavioral ◽  
Regression Analyses ◽  
Standard Regression

Utilizing Daniel Goleman's theory of emotional competence, Beck's cognitive theory, and Rudd's cognitive-behavioral theory of suicidality, the relationships between hopelessness (cognitive component), social problem solving (cognitive-behavioral component), emotional competence (emotive component), and adolescent suicidal ideation were examined. Based on the responses of 5,557 Secondary 1 to Secondary 4 students from 42 secondary schools in Hong Kong, results showed that suicidal ideation was positively related to adolescent hopelessness, but negatively related to emotional competence and social problem solving. While standard regression analyses showed that all the above variables were significant predictors of suicidal ideation, hierarchical regression analyses showed that hopelessness was the most important predictor of suicidal ideation, followed by social problem solving and emotional competence. Further regression analyses found that all four subscales of emotional competence, i.e., empathy, social skills, self-management of emotions, and utilization of emotions, were important predictors of male adolescent suicidal ideation. However, the subscale of social skills was not a significant predictor of female adolescent suicidal ideation. Standard regression analysis also revealed that all three subscales of social problem solving, i.e., negative problem orientation, rational problem solving, and impulsiveness/carelessness style, were important predictors of suicidal ideation. Theoretical and practice implications of the findings are discussed.

scholarly journals The Hong Kong/AAO/Strasbourg Hα (HASH) Planetary Nebula Database

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (S323) ◽  
pp. 327-328
Author(s):  
Ivan S. Bojičić ◽  
Quentin A. Parker ◽  
David J. Frew
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Observational Data ◽  
Planetary Nebula ◽  
Scattered Data ◽  
Easy Access ◽  
Online Research ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Main Motivation ◽  
Research Platform ◽  
Imaging And Spectroscopy

AbstractThe Hong Kong/AAO/Strasbourg Hα (HASH) planetary nebula database is an online research platform providing free and easy access to the largest and most comprehensive catalogue of known Galactic PNe and a repository of observational data (imaging and spectroscopy) for these and related astronomical objects. The main motivation for creating this system is resolving some of long standing problems in the field e.g. problems with mimics and dubious and/or misidentifications, errors in observational data and consolidation of the widely scattered data-sets. This facility allows researchers quick and easy access to the archived and new observational data and creating and sharing of non-redundant PN samples and catalogues.

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