The Organization of Personal Pronouns in Sentence Structure Construction of Makassarese Language

Makassarese language belongs to the Austronesian language family, currently spoken as a mother language by a group of people in South Sulawesi province, eastern Indonesia. This research focuses on personal pronoun organization in the sentence construction of the Makassarese language. The form, position, and function of personal pronouns in the language sentences are explained. It used ‘simak’ (to-observe) method in form of a conversational involved-observation technique including recording and note-taking in collecting data. The data sources were oral data and text data. The oral data were taken from five informants selected purposively. The text data were taken from the folklore script of South Sulawesi written in the Makassarese language. The data were presented descriptively and analyzed by using the distributional method. The findings show two forms of personal pronouns used dominantly in constructing sentences: free personal pronoun and bound personal pronoun (clitic). Position of the free personal pronoun is in front of, in the middle of, and at the end of a sentence. The clitic is in front of and at the end of the verb. In addition, there is also clitic attached at the end of the noun that serves as possessive. The sentence starting with a free personal pronoun forms the pattern of SV (subject-verb) or SVO (subject-verb-object) and the sentence starting with clitic-attached verb forms the pattern of VS (verb-subject) or VSO (verb-subject-object). The basic structure of the Makassarese sentence is VS or VSO. The derivative structure is SV or SVO with other varieties.

Teaching Writing Through Content: Six Instructional Activities to Improve Students’ Sentence-Level Writing Skills

Writing is a complex activity requiring a wide range of skills. Sentence construction, a foundational writing skill, is necessary for paragraph and composition writing. Unfortunately, many current approaches to teaching writing place a priority on the product—focusing on teaching the process of writing lengthy pieces rather than providing explicit instruction in the development of singular, well-constructed sentences. Many students with learning disabilities struggle with proficient sentence construction and acquiring content-area knowledge. Teaching sentence-level writing through content can aid in remediating sentence-level writing deficits while helping students build content-area knowledge. A framework for embedding writing across the curriculum and six sentence-level instructional activities are described.

Investigating Gaps in Police Narratives

Report writing is a major form of communication in the law enforcement; hence, professional writing skills are mandatory among the police. Though empirical studies suggest that police officers are confronted with inadequate report writing skills, little is known about how the report writing difficulties of the police manifest in their written narratives. Hence, using qualitative inquiry, this study analyzed, described, and interpreted the gaps or errors in written police narratives. One hundred twenty (120) police blotter narratives written by police investigators in three municipal police stations were analyzed to look into errors in grammar, mechanics, and lexis. Findings revealed that grammatical gaps are composed of errors on sentence construction, verb usage, connective, pronoun, plural noun, and preposition; mechanical gaps include errors on punctuation, capitalization, and spelling; and lexical gaps are inappropriate word choice and improper word form. These findings offer manifold academic and professional intervention ideas that would help address the report writing issues among the police.

The Language Development Process of Bilingual Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: An investigation into Gender Linguistic Differences

This paper is a descriptive correlational study that investigated the gender differences in the language development process among a group of 215 male and female bilingual children with autism spectrum disorder. A valid and reliable questionnaire was adopted and deployed to accomplish the study’s objective. The caregivers of these autistic children were requested to complete and submit the questionnaire. Data analysis was made possible with the help of different statistical software tools. The study concluded that gender did significantly impact the participants’ performance in four different linguistic domains: Listening, vocabulary, verbal grammar and sentence construction, and questions formulation. Females were found to have an upper edge over their male counterparts in these domains. Only one non-significant difference was observed in the listening comprehension domain, where both genders were found to experience the same level of difficulty. The limitations and recommendations of this study have been presented here as well.

Prepositional Phrases in English as Phases of the Weak Kind

A phase is an instance of derivation or “spell out’’ of a chunk or whole of a sentence construction. It is standardly assumed that only complementizer phrases and little v(erb) phrases are phases, and tense and verb phrases are not phases. Other categories such as determiner phrases and applicative phrases have been tested positive for phases. However, no claim is made about the status of prepositional phrases as phases. This paper investigated whether prepositional phrases in English can have the status of a phase as defined in phase theory. It was hypothesised that prepositional phrases are phases of the ‘weak’ kind. To determine the phase status of prepositional phrases, the method of standard phase diagnostics tests such as computational complexity, phonological independence, semantic independence, and case checking, and theta completeness were used. It was found out that computational complexity is not a valid test to test prepositional phrases for phasehood. While prepositional phrases bear very strong evidence to be labelled phases with respect to phonological independence, PPs fail to be phases in the case of semantic independence, and case checking and theta completeness. Given these findings, it was concluded that prepositional phrases in English are phases of the ‘weak’ kind. A sample of sentence constructions in English selected by the author and borrowed from the existing literature were used for the tests to draw conclusions. The study is expected to help better understand and analyze the cognitive processes involved in the acquisition and production of the English language specifically and any language in general.

The Correlation Between Performances Among Lexical-Related Tasks and The Performance in The Sentence Construction Task

This study employed a quantitative correlational design to explore the correlation between the students' performances among lexical-related tasks and how these tasks affect the performance in a sentence construction task. Using IBM SPSS Statistics Version 22’s Pearson Partial Correlation Test, this study calculated participants' performance in primary lexical attributes by recognizing the following aspects of lexical knowledge: pronunciation patterns, morphological structures, syntactic properties, semantic characteristics such as abstract and interconnectedness, and a complete sentence construction in a strict naturalistic classroom setting. The test results showed that the participants made 297.05 seconds on average for 42 correct responses in Lexical Decision Task, 5.88 seconds per picture projected on the screen in Picture-Naming Task, 8.33 seconds for each word in Semantic Judgment Task, and 30.17 seconds on average to complete a sentence. These results concluded that the participants' performance in identifying strings of letters does not correlate significantly with their performance in understanding how a particular word functions grammatically within a sentence. In terms of the level of automaticity, the participants’ performance exceeded the average performance. The findings suggested that their performance in understanding primary lexical attributes in single lexicons does not facilitate their understanding of semantic characteristics. Henceforth, the students’ lexical knowledge does not yet construct an integrated linguistic representation in the target language acquisition. The study confirmed previous evidence that stated that a better performance in lexical-related tasks significantly impacted sentence processing and construction skill.

Writing skills deficiency in English for specific purposes (Esp): English for computer science

English for Specific Purposes (ESP) taught at Higher Education Institution (HEI) is a kind of course for students majoring other than English. The descriptive research conducted in one of HEI in Pekanbaru, Riau, involved 65 students majoring in Computer Science of that institution. The data gathered by observation and interviews. This research aimed to find out what were the causes of students' weaknesses in English writing skills, for those were the primary problem that they have compared to other English skills. It was revealed those students had 1) low competence in General English (GE) based on CEFR, 2) had a problem with writing, even in their first language, 3) tendency in taking advantage of Google Translate without further checking, 4) lack of knowledge on lexical choice, sentence construction and the structure of writing, 5) limited practicing time and opportunity.

FEAR RHETORIC IN THE ONLINE NEWS DISCOURSE ON THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC IN TEUN VAN DIJK’S CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

The news media, once thought to be only as a tool of information delivery, has subtly shifted its roles as an agent of (de)constructing thoughts, introducing, or denoting fear especially in appalling news. This raises a question whether the news on the COVID-19 pandemic is only for transmitting news updates on the pandemic condition or agenda-driven. However, research tapping into the imbued messages in language complexity in this context seems minimal. This study aims to uncover the language elements that sign fear in a news text. This research focuses on how fear is imbued in three online English-language newspaper articles in Indonesia published by the Jakarta Post, thereby the rhetoric of fear. The three articles discussed the spread of COVID-19 in Indonesia. In this study, CDA is devised to reveal the traces of fear-embedded language choices found in the three online newspaper articles. Researchers used the critical analysis discourse model of Teun A. Van Dijk (1993) and the three elements of discourse (1993): micro, macro, and superstructure. Findings indicated that there were common uses of euphemism, dysphemism, and orthophemism to refine the language being conveyed. This study classified euphemism into five objectives: (1) evasive maneuver to prevent mass panic; (2) speech refinement to soften offence, insults, and/ or other language expressions that may result to humiliation; (3) diplomacy tool; (4) language replacement for taboo or vulgar language choices or those endowed with negative connotation (5) tool for satire, sarcasm and subtle criticism. This study also revealed some linguistic decisions, such as lexicon choices and strategies on sentence construction, subtly evident not only to impose fear, but at the same time to dispose it. Researchers hope that this study may assist the readers in pinpointing subtleties in author’s tone and tendency.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE CITY LINGUISTIC ENVIRONMENT ON THE SPEECH OF PROVINCIAL STUDENTS (BY THE LETTERS OF STUDENT FROM VELIKY USTYUG M. B. VASILYEVA)

The material for this article is the letters and diaries of a student of the Philological Faculty of the Leningrad State Pedagogical Institute named after A. I. Herzen (1945-1949), addressed to her mother in Veliky Ustyug, Vologda region. Some elements of dialect speech found in these documents are of scientific interest. The aim of the research is to study the linguistic dynamics of letters that has developed under the influence of the linguistic environment of Leningrad. The analysis revealed that 1) the most frequent in the texts are lexical dialectisms; 2) morphological deviations from the literary norm can be regarded as vernaculars; 3) syntactic dialectal features are reflected in the specific models of sentence construction and non-traditional principles of connecting homogeneous sentence members. The letters of 1945-49 reveal the dynamics of their author's speech, which demonstrates a gradual assimilation of the literary norm. In the diaries, the literary norm of speech is formed earlier. This indicates that the texts of the letters are oriented to the addressee, who is a speaker of urban half-dialect, and the texts of the diaries - to the person who knows literary speech.

Syntactic Issues of the Dialect of Rohovec and Its Surrounding Area

In Albanian dialectology, research in the field of syntax is scarce. The authors of ADGJSH (Dialectological Atlas of the Albanian language) had researched the fields: phonetics, morphology, lexicon, but had left out syntactic issues. The purpose of this paper is to review syntactic issues from the dialect of the Rahovec area. The study was conducted in the municipality of Rahovec, with special emphasis on the dialect of Ratkoc, Krushe and Rahovec. The issues that have been elaborated within this research are the syntactic constructions: the noun “people” (njerëzia), the preposition” “in”(në) and “above”(mbi), the particle “with”(me), the preposition” “of/ by”(prej), the preposition “from”(nga), the preposition “in”(n), the preposition“ through ” / beyond ”(tej/përtej), the short form“ me ”(më), the conjunction“ how ”or“ how much ”, the semi-auxiliary verb“ start, begin and catch”, the verbs“ have and to be”, the conjunctions“ just, or, otherwise, or ... or". The results also show that in many cases interrogative sentences are used without the presence of the adjunct of place and in many cases, we use foreign words and distortions in sentence construction. Based on the results, we can say that the dialect of Rahovec is quite rich in syntactic constructions. Prospective researchers may have issues that have never been addressed before in this region. Received: 2 February 2021 / Accepted: 29 March 2021 / Published: 10 May 2021