Opportunities and challenges in the analysis of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN)

The development of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) has no doubt contributed to prompting a renewed interest in children’s narratives. This carefully controlled test of narrative abilities elicits a rich set of measures spanning multiple linguistic domains and their interaction, including lexis, morphosyntax, discourse-pragmatics, as well as various aspects of narrative structure, communicative competence, and language use (such as code-switching). It is particularly well suited to the study of discourse cohesion, referential adequacy and informativeness, and of course to the study of narrative structure and richness, and the acquisition of a more formal or literary register. In this commentary article, I reflect on the five empirical papers included in the special issue. I focus on methodological challenges for the analysis of narratives and identify outstanding questions.

Pragmatic Utterance Effect of the Medical Discourse Subject in Public Education Challenge

The paper actualizes the problem of discourse pragmatics. The authors provide the detailed description of the communicative techniques for enhancing the pragmatic utterance effect of the medical discourse subject in the open communication situation. The study is based on the texts of conference reports and interviews of representatives of the medical and scientific elite who have addressed the topic of a new coronavirus infection pandemic in 2020-2021 and those are solving the task of the public education in the area. Based on this analysis the authors provide a system of speech tactics that ensure the solution of this problem, and linguistic techniques for their implementation, which together form the pragmatic effect of the statements of the subject of medical discourse.

Continuity and Variation in Germanic and Romance

This volume offers a range of synchronic and diachronic case studies in comparative Germanic and Romance morphosyntax. These two language families, spoken by over a billion people today, have been of central importance throughout the development linguistics, yet many significant questions about the relationship between the two families remain. Following an introduction that sets out the methodological, empirical, and theoretical background to the book, the volume is divided into three parts which deal with the morphosyntax of subjects and the inflectional layer inversion, discourse pragmatics, and the left periphery, and continuity and variation beyond the clause. The approaches used by the authors of individual chapters are diverse, making use of the latest digitized corpora and presenting a mixture of well-known and understudied data from standard and non-standard Germanic and Romance languages. Many of the chapters challenge received wisdom about the relationship between these two important language families. This volume will be an indispensable tool to researchers and students in Germanic and Romance linguistics, historical linguistics, grammatical theory, and language relationships.

Referentiality of event in postmodern fictional discourse: pragmatics and semantics

The article is devoted to the study of postmodern fictional discourse referentialism in terms of pragmatics and semantics. Postmodern fictional discourse eliminates the oppositions of different narrative perspectives, which entails a non-distinction of the author’s narrative and the characters’ speech. The relevance of the article arises from the need to identify the communicative parameters of the creator of fictional discourse and its recipient from the standpoint of the cognitive and discursive linguistic paradigm, but it should be noted that both sides of fictional communication are free in the choice and interpretation of language elements outside the fixed conventional meanings. This feature of fictional discourse results in a set of conventions adopted by both sides of aesthetic communication. Metaphorically polysemantic images, which conflict with the definitions of formal logic and affirm the variability of the world and consciousness, are characteristic of postmodern fictional discourse. Pastiche, irony, collage, allusions, citations, direct derivations have significant pragmatic potential. The aim of the article is to identify and describe the pragmatic and semantic features of structuring the referentiality of an event in postmodern fictional discourse on the material of Sasha Sokolov’s novel “School for Fools”. The semantic space of the novel creates the dialogicity of the characters’ consciousness, pragmatically marked by dialogization of speech, which emphasizes the recipient’s attention to the imaginary event. The text fragments become independent discursive phenomena, thus contributing to the perception of the novel as a complex of macrocontexts. Markers of narrative polyphony, as well as intertextuality and precedent phenomena serve as pragmatic markers of the special referentiality of an event in S. Sokolov’s novel.

De vrouw in het Friese lexicon

Abstract1 This article discusses the semantic field in Frisian that is covered by the Dutch word vrouw and the German word Frau in the senses of 'woman' and 'wife'. Data are drawn mainly from the Nederlandse Volksverhalenbank, a large online collection of orally transmitted folk tales. The Frisian cognate frou has retained the semantic feature of respectability. This created semantic space for other lexical items, mainly frommes(ke) and minske. These forms were paradigmatically supported by the suppletive plural froulju. Furthermore, discourse pragmatics in Frisian demands for the transmission of more detailed information about the stages of life people are in than is required in Dutch and German. This demand also influences the lexical choices made by Frisian speakers and has led to the lexicalisation of terms for men and women of different age groups. In the sense of 'wife', frou is in competition with wiif.

Hur ser tysk L2-produktion ut hos svenska, kinesiska och vitryska avancerade inlärare?

This paper investigates first language (L1) influence on the acquisition of syntax and discourse pragmatics in a second language (L2) in essays written by advanced learners of German from Sweden, China and Belarus (the KobaltDaF Corpus). The control corpus consists of essays written by native German speakers. The study focuses on the clause-initial preverbal position of V2 declaratives, the so-called prefield (Vorfeld) and the Vor-Vorfeld. The results show that the language-specific information structural patterns that exist in the L1 have an impact on the L2. The forms and frequencies of prefield constituent types differ substantially from the target language, indicating transfer in a domain other than pure syntax. The learners start their sentences in a nonnative way. Even though Swedish and German are closely related languages, the results show, contrary to what is expected, that Chinese learners produce patterns that are more targetlike. In addition, implications of these findings for language teaching are discussed.

Prosodic effects on L2 grammars

This paper provides an overview of the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis (PTH), which accounts for certain difficulties that learners experience with L2 morphosyntax. We focus on inflection and articles, which have often been accounted for through defective syntactic representations or problems with the interface between morphology and syntax (inflection) and between semantics or discourse/pragmatics and syntax (articles). We argue that some problems in these domains reflect transfer of L1 prosodic constraints: certain forms cannot be prosodically represented as target-like and hence are omitted or mispronounced. We trace how the PTH has developed over time, from its initial instantiation as involving permanent L1 transfer, to currently, where L1 representations are seen as adaptable to the needs of the L2, and new representations can in fact be acquired. We provide an overview of work conducted in this framework and discuss how the theory has been extended beyond production to encompass comprehension and processing.