Internally-headed and doubly-headed relatives in Japanese -- How are they related to each other?

Grosu & Hoshi (2019:20), in their rejoinder to Kitagawa (2019), propose that apparent violations of island constraints in the so-called internally-headed relative clauses are accounted for by considering them as reduced doubly-headed relative clauses. This paper shows that this claim by Grosu and Hoshi is not empirically sustainable, and further that it misses the discourse function of doubly-headed relative clauses. A discussion of gapless light-headed externally-headed relative clauses is also presented so as to identify how this construction type interrelates with internally-headed relative clauses and doubly-headed relative clauses.

Interdiscourse as Inherent Characteristic of Institutional Discourse (on the Example of Educational Discourse)

The article is devoted to the types of interaction of educational discourse with other types of institutional communication: political, economic and medical. The author studies how fragments of discourse function and form semantic potential in official styles of speech where interdiscourse is traditional and describes forms of discourse genre interference caused by global events of 2020: coronavirus epidemic, presidential election in the USA and others. In the article educational discourse is understood in its broad sense which allows to examine the periphery of discourse practice where communication of individuals of equal status and variety of functional styles are natural. The process of interference is studied on micro and meso levels of discourse where certain lexico-sematic fields, key-words, clichs which characterize professional genres of communication serve as markers of interdiscourse and on macro level where historical and social context is considered to define functional styles. Methods of descriptive, discourse and contextual analyses are implemented. The author draws the conclusion that on all levels of institutional interaction the elements of educational discourse are semiotic components of communication, can serve as means of representation of political, economic or medical discourse practice, have pragmatic potential and can be used in argumentative or informative speech strategies the choice of which depends on the type of discourse. On macro level elements of educational discourse often extend beyond specific concepts limited to professional subjects and the discourse itself becomes a part of a bigger subordinating discourse formation.

The Role of Prosodic Factors in Determining The Meaning of The Text

Intonation is a very complex language unit. It has many functions, and these functions are performed by different phonetic events: 1. A phonetic event that performs the attitude function. This function reflects attitude, emotion, and different phonetic events. For example, depending on the context of the speech and the current situation of the speaker, you can use falling intonation, rising intonation, falling-rising intonation, rising-falling tones. 2. A phonetic event that performs an accentual function. This term is used in connection with an accent. Some phonetics also use stress instead of accent. In this function, the emphasis falls on the last lexical word, and the phonetic event of accentuation and clarification of intonation is performed. 3. A phonetic event that performs a grammatical function. In this function, tone boundaries are defined by intonation. With the help of this phonetic phenomenon, the listener can better recognize the grammar and syntactic structure of what is being said. 4. A phonetic event that performs a discourse function. The main task of this phonetic event is to convey to the listener what "new" information is. An eye-catching tonic accent is placed on the appropriate syllable of a particular sound.

Reconsidering the shi…(de) construction in spoken Mandarin

This paper revisits the use of the shi…de construction, based on the analysis of structures with predicative adjectives in a 500,000-character corpus of spoken Mandarin assembled from transcripts of a popular Chinese chat show. Overall, de was omitted more than 40% of the time with a predicative adjective, a significantly higher rate than that found in previous studies. The data reveal a number of factors that may all play a role in determining the likelihood of de omission or retention: the time dependency of the adjective, the particular intensifier chosen to modify the adjective, the discourse function of the utterance and the presence of certain markers of epistemic modality. The findings also lend support to the hypothesis that shi is grammaticalizing to a bound morpheme in some so-called ‘conventionalised forms’ involving epistemic and evidentiality markers.

PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE: PRAGMATIC PRESUPPOSITION IN MOTIVATIONAL SPEECH WITHIN DISCOURSE AND ITS RELEVANCE OF MOTIVATION IN TEACHING LEARNING PROCESS TO REACH GOALS

This research was taken from online media in the form of a speech on a YouTube channel called the English Speeches Channel featuring an inspiring woman named Muniba Mazari Baloch. She is a Pakistani artist, model, activist, motivational speaker, singer, social reformer, and television host. Her motivational speech is titled we all are Perfectly Imperfect. This research accompaniment three research questions by analyzing the types of presuppositions contained in Muniba Mazari's speech and determining the type of presupposition in his speech that comes up with the confession discourse function, then knowing how far her confessions influences her audiencess through what he delivers. The research method used in this research is descriptive qualitative by analyzing several utterances in her speech, through two approaches of theory pragmatic presupposition and confessional discourse analysis. The results showed that Muniba Mazari used all types of pragmatic presuppositions (Existential, Factive, Non-Factive, Lexical, Structural, and Counterfactual). Through this type of presupposition, Muniba Mazari also brings out the function of confessional discourse. The function of confessional discourse contained in her speech is a therapeutic, didactic, and interrogatory function. During the research, researchers found the main threat from the combination of these two theories is the strength of Motivational Assertion. The main threat that became the main idea as the direction of Muniba Mazari's speech in motivating her audiences. Then, this main thread also asserts how powerful Muniba Mazari's speech was. In this context, the results bring about optimism, achievable objectives, passion, and confidence. Finally, Muniba Mazari's speech entitled We Are Perfectly Imperfect which contains many moral messages can be said to be a motivational speech. It can be manifested in learning-teaching process. The result of combining these two theories produces the main thread that can be applied by several teachers in motivating their students in the learning-teaching process.

Necessity, Norm and Missing Knowledge

This study examines modal verbs in German press coverage of COVID-19 during the first phase of the pandemic. The data basis is an 18-million-word corpus of newspaper articles. For analysis, a sample is drawn from the total number of modal verbs in the corpus and these are categorised according to their discourse function. The corresponding annotated data are analysed quantitatively and qualitatively. For this purpose, the study draws back to Kratzer’s concept of conversational backgrounds. It turns out that in addition to normative speech backgrounds, goal formulations can be found above all. Normative backgrounds are evoked, on the one hand, to address official rules and their effects and, on the other hand in appeals and demands, to refer to social norms that are assumed as common ground. The fact that teleological backgrounds play a relatively large role indicates that the normalisation perspective is of great importance as a regulative in the crisis discourse. More positive than negative determining factors are indicated and uncertainty markings occur comparatively rarely. This points to successful crisis communication in this discourse phase.

Specification predication: Unexpectedness and cleft constructions in Tagalog

English exhibits a large number of cleft constructions. Out of these constructions, the English it-cleft construction, which may express more than one information-structural packaging (Declerck 1988), is often taken to translate syntactically rather different constructions in other languages. In this paper, I will explore the morphosyntactic make-up and functional range of a construction in Tagalog that is often equated with, or translated by, but vastly more frequent, than the English it-cleft in our corpus. In a first step, the notion of cleft construction will be reviewed and critically investigated with respect to how appropriate it is for a language like Tagalog. In a second step, the discourse function of the ang-inversion construction in contrast to the English cleft constructions is explored on the basis of examples taken from the Tagalog version of the trilogy The Hunger Games Trilogy (Collins, 2008-2010; translated into Tagalog by Janis de los Reyes, 2012). A crucial goal is to gain a better understanding of those cases, in which the Tagalog ang-construction is used, but the English cleft construction is ruled out or at least dispreferred.

Sentence-Final Particles in Chinese

Chinese has a rich system of Sentence-Final Particles (SFPs). Traditional grammar and descriptive linguistic studies attempt to capture the precise semantic interpretation and the discourse function of each particle. Much work related to this aspect tries to find out what the core semantic interpretation of a given SFP is, how the diverse interpretations of a given SFP are developed from its core interpretation, and in what context the use of a given SFP is licit. Linguists from different disciplines have made important observations and offered various explanations. On the other hand, diachronic studies trace the origin and the evolution of each SFP, which helps understand the core semantics of SFPs in modern Chinese. Studies on different Chinese dialects also help the understanding of the meaning and the function of SFPs from a comparative perspective. Under the generative framework, SFPs are analyzed as complementizers, which are located in the peripheral domain. Both traditional grammarians and generative syntacticians are interested in patterns like the rigid order that necessarily shows whenever SFPs co-occur. They attempt to establish the hierarchical order of SFPs and identify the general principle that regulates such an order. Recent studies show that such an order is regulated by a discourse constraint related to subjectivity, according to which the higher a functional projection is located, the more directly it is for such a projection to be linked to the speaker’s attitude, the more subjective the interpretation of such a projection becomes, and the less likely it is for such a projection to be embedded. This constraint offers an explanation to the question of why only some SFPs can appear in embedded clauses whereas the others demonstrate root properties. Syntacticians are also interested in the question of how to derive the final order of SFPs. Two analyses are available: disjunction analysis and complement-to-specifier raising analysis. A more recent finding is that under the minimalist framework, each SFP heads a phase and bears an EPP feature. Complement-to-specifier raising is required as a last resort to satisfy the Extended Projection Principle (EPP). The complement of an SFP is moved to the phase edge to postpone the transfer of the phrases that are embedded within the complement, which allows these phrases to be extracted later.