Crosslinguistic Corpus Studies in Linguistic Typology

Corpus-based studies have become increasingly common in linguistic typology over recent years, amounting to the emergence of a new field that we call corpus-based typology. The core idea of corpus-based typology is to take languages as populations of utterances and to systematically investigate text production across languages in this sense. From a usage-based perspective, investigations of variation and preferences of use are at the core of understanding the distribution of conventionalized structures and their diachronic development across languages. Specific findings of corpus-based typological studies pertain to universals of text production, for example, in prosodic partitioning; to cognitive biases constraining diverse patterns of use, for example, in constituent order; and to correlations of diverse patterns of use with language-specific structures and conventions. We also consider remaining challenges for corpus-based typology, in particular the development of crosslinguistically more representative corpora that include spoken (or signed) texts, and its vast potential in the future.

EXPRESS: People’s Preferences for Different Types of Rational Numbers in Linguistic Contexts

Rational numbers, like fractions, decimals, and percentages, differ in the concepts they prefer to express and the entities they prefer to describe as previously reported in display-rational number notation matching tasks and in math word problem compiling contexts. On the one hand, fractions and percentages are preferentially used to express a relation between two magnitudes, while decimals are preferentially used to represent a magnitude. On the other hand, fractions and decimals tend to be used to describe discrete and continuous entities, respectively. However, it remains unclear whether these reported distinctions can extend to more general linguistic contexts. It also remains unclear which factor, the concept to be expressed (magnitudes vs. relations between magnitudes) or the entity to be described (countable vs. continuous), is more predictive of people’s preferences for rational number notations. To explore these issues, two corpus studies and a number notation preference experiment were administered. The news and conversation corpus studies detected the general pattern of conceptual distinctions across rational number notations as observed in previous studies; the number notation preference experiment found that the concept to be expressed was more predictive of people’s preferences for number notations than the entity to be described. These findings indicate that people’s biased uses of rational numbers are constrained by multiple factors, especially by the type of concepts to be expressed, and more importantly, these biases are not specific to mathematical settings but are generalizable to broader linguistic contexts.

The history of Community Interpreting studies in Japan

The study of CI in Japan began in the late 1980s, and its first researchers were law professors and attorneys who advocated human rights. They discussed the plight of non-Japanese-speaking defendants in legal settings. Subsequently, interpreters and theorists of interpretation discussed ethics, cultural issues, training and so on. Recently, however , a new wave of studies has emerged, with a greaterfocus on linguistic approaches such as discourse analysis, corpus studies etc. This paper willfirst briefly review the earlier CI research in general and thenfocus on legal interpreting, which is the most advanced and noteworthy area of CIstudies in Japan.

Growing theory for practice: empirical multimodality beyond the case study

Many studies investigating the use and effectiveness of multimodal communication are now confronting the need to engage with larger bodies of data in order to achieve more empirically robust accounts, moving beyond the earlier prevalence of small-scale ‘case studies’. In this article, I briefly characterise how recent developments in the theory of multimodality can be drawn upon to encourage and support this change in both scale and breadth. In particular, the contribution will show how refinements in the degree of formality of definitions of the core multimodal constructs of ‘semiotic mode’ and ‘materiality’ can help bridge the gap between exploratory investigations of complex multimodal practices and larger-scale corpus studies.