Projecting action spaces. On the interactional relevance of cesural areas in co-enactments

This article investigates the interactional relevance of weak cesuras in multimodal transitions in enactments. Previous research has pointed out that enactments are multimodally accomplished phenomena in that they do not only consist of a quotation but usually involve changes in prosody and bodily conduct, too. Furthermore, it has been noted that an upcoming quotation may be projected in the preceding talk by phonetic cues. There is, however, little research on the precise multimodal realization of such transitions and their possible interactional relevance. Taking this as a starting point, we analyze a collection of co-enactments. Firstly, we show that quotations are projected not only by phonetic but also bodily cues, which often build up gradually in the preceding talk. These smooth transitions into enactment are analyzed as “cesural areas.” Secondly, we argue that such cesural areas and the cumulation of multimodal projections open up an opportunity space in the sense of Lerner (1991), whereby a joint enactment involving co-participants, i.e., a co-enactment, is possible. Thirdly, we show that participants jointly develop the meaning of the enactment in this space, mutually taking up and elaborating on their prior contributions. The data is taken from a corpus of collaborative storytellings in German.

Meanings and scripts in the linguistic landscape of Saint Petersburg

This article examines the linguistic component of building signs in the city center of St. Petersburg, Russia. The research is based on the analysis of an extensive database that covers 849 examples. It concludes that the Cyrillic script can be found in 84% of cases, Latin script – in 48%, and other scripts – in 4%. English is used to attract international visitors, demonstrate the authenticity of the brand, create a national flavor, hide meaning from the general public or as a part of linguistic creativity. Sometimes such language experiments break the phonetic–graphemic definitiveness of language, mixing form, and meaning. The use of the Latin script can either be targeted at those who do not know the Russian language or form a part of the language game for the Russian-speaking public.

Critical discourse analysis of BBC and CNN political news’ headlines on the Christchurch Mosque Massacre in New Zealand

This study aims at investigating the language of politics in news headlines regarding the Christchurch massacre in New Zealand from a Critical Discourse Analysis perspective to examine how power and ideology reside in texts. The data of this study consist of 39 headlines extracted from the BBC and CNN online news agencies. The data were analyzed utilizing the socio-cultural approach of Fairclough (2013). Representative examples were discussed in terms of the three stages of Fairclough’s approach. The results of the study revealed that the reporters tended to use the passive voice structure in headlines that describe the attacker in conformance with the New Zealand policy, which states that his identity should not be revealed. However, they used the active voice structure while referring to the victims, their families, and the New Zealanders at large in order to emphasize their way of dealing with the attack. In addition, the role of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in her legal capacity was highlighted by shedding light on her pronouncements to fight against terrorism. It was also found that the use of the metaphor as a figurative device entails that terrorism is a rare phenomenon in New Zealand.

OH + OKAY in informing sequences: On fuzzy boundaries in a particle combination

This study explores fuzzy boundaries, or weak cesuras, in the particle combination OH + OKAY as used in informing sequences in ordinary English talk-in-interaction. The focus is on the third position in such sequences, where OH + OKAY responds to information that has been solicited by the speaker in a prior turn. Based on a collection of approximately 45 instances of OH + OKAY in recent American English telephone and face-to-face interactions, this study adopts the methodology of Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics to examine the prosody and phonetics of OH + OKAY as a feature of turn design. It asks: (i) when does the speaker use a combination of OH and OKAY in the third position rather than a simple OH or OKAY? and (ii) to what extent does the prosodic–phonetic delivery of OH + OKAY contribute to an interpretation of what the turn is doing? The study finds that (i) OH + OKAY is used when responding to a solicited informing that not only supplies information but also accomplishes another action with consequences for the recipient and (ii) if OH + OKAY is delivered with a strong cesura between its parts, its actions are distributed in separate turn-constructional units, creating a multi-unit turn that proposes sequence closure. If the cesura in OH + OKAY is weak, the component parts are fused into a compound particle that can preface more talk by the same speaker. Weak boundaries between OH and OKAY can be exploited by participants for the purposes of turn construction and epistemic positioning.

Adolescence as a “critical period” in the heritage language use. Polish in Germany

In the article, we consider the impact of adolescence upon the usage of Polish in Polish-German bilinguals raised and living in Germany and demonstrate how adolescence surfaces as a socially based “critical period” in this usage using results from a survey and interviews conducted with 30 teenagers. In the quantitative part of the study, we seek to establish whether adolescents’ age affected the pattern and quantity of their usage of Polish in the media and contacts with age peers, whether the latter two facets of growing up with Polish were interrelated, and which other factors affected peer-relevant activities in Polish. Both age and peer contact turned out to significantly affect the use of the media in Polish, while peer contact in Polish was affected by the parental use of Polish in parent-child communication. The qualitative part presents the context and motivation for using Polish by the youths in peer-relevant activities. We integrate the results with insights provided by child development psychology from the perspective of language socialisation theory and interpret the age-related decline of interest in the Polish media as an effect of a diminishing role of parents and the increasing role of age peers as role models in personal development.

A taxonomy of antonymy in Arabic: Egyptian and Saudi proverbs in comparison

This study has set out to identify, quantify, typify, and exemplify the discourse functions of canonical antonymy in Arabic paremiography by comparing two manually collected datasets from Egyptian and Saudi (Najdi) dialects. Building upon Jones’s (2002) most extensive and often-cited classification of the discourse functions of antonyms as they co-occur within syntactic frames in news discourse, the study has substantially revised this classification and developed a provisional and dynamic typology thereof. Two major textual functions are found to be quantitatively significant and qualitatively preponderant: ancillarity (wherein an A-pair of canonical antonyms project their antonymicity onto a more important B-pair) and coordination (wherein one antonym holds an inclusive or exhaustive relation to another antonym). Three new functions have been developed and added to the retrieved classification: subordination (wherein one antonym occurs in a subordinate clause while the other occurs in a main clause), case-marking (wherein two opposite cases are served by two antonyms), and replacement (wherein one antonym is substituted with another). Semicanonical and noncanonical guises of antonymy are left and recommended for future research.

Insertion of vowels in English syllabic consonantal clusters pronounced by L1 Polish speakers

The aim of this study was an attempt to verify whether Polish speakers of English insert a vowel in the word-final clusters containing a consonant and a syllabic /l/ or /n/ due to the L1–L2 transfer. L1 Polish speakers are mostly unaware of the existence of syllabic consonants; hence, they use the Polish phonotactics and articulate a vocalic sound before a final sonorant which is deprived of its syllabicity. This phenomenon was examined among L1 Polish speakers, 1-year students of English studies, and the recording sessions were repeated a year later. Since, over that time, they were instructed with regard to phonetics and phonology but also the overall practical language learning, the results demonstrated the occurrence of the phenomenon of vowel insertion on different levels of advanced command of English. If the vowels were inserted, their quality and length were monitored and analysed. With regard to the English system, pronouncing vowel /ə/ before a syllabic consonant is possible, yet not usual. That is why another aim of this study is to examine to what extent the vowels articulated by the subjects differ from the standard pronunciation of non-final /ə/. The quality differences between the vowels articulated in the words ending with /l/ and /n/ were examined as well as the potential influence from the difference between /l/ and /n/ on the occurrence of vowel reduction. Even though Polish phonotactics permit numerous consonantal combinations in all word positions, it proved to be challenging for L1 Polish speakers to pronounce word-final consonantal clusters containing both syllabic sonorants. This result carries practical implications for the teaching methodology of English phonetics.

Networks in the mind – what communities reveal about the structure of the lexicon

The mental lexicon stores words and information about words. The lexicon is seen by many researchers as a network, where lexical units are nodes and the different links between the units are connections. Based on the analysis of a word association network, in this article we show that different kinds of associative connections exist in the mental lexicon. Our analysis is based on a word association database from the agglutinative language Hungarian. We use communities – closely knit groups – of the lexicon to provide evidence for the existence and coexistence of different connections. We search for communities in the database using two different algorithms, enabling us to see the overlapping (a word belongs to multiple communities) and non-overlapping (a word belongs to only one community) community structures. Our results show that the network of the lexicon is organized by semantic, phonetic, syntactic and grammatical connections, but encyclopedic knowledge and individual experiences are also shaping the associative structure. We also show that words may be connected not just by one, but more types of connections at the same time.

A return to the past? The Spanish as the First Foreign Language policy in Trinidad and Tobago

Situated close to the coast of Venezuela, the small twin-island nation of Trinidad & Tobago is geographically South American, but culturally Caribbean. Despite colonisation by various European powers, years of British rule and the ensuing dominance of English have meant that the country’s rich ethnic and cultural heritage is currently not paralleled by equivalent linguistic diversity. Building on the country’s natural position as a bridge between the English and Spanish-speaking worlds, the government launched the Spanish as the First Foreign Language (SAFFL) policy in 2005, with the aim to enhance trade links with Latin America through increased use of Spanish in the education system, civil service, and wider society. After outlining the historical and sociocultural background underpinning the SAFFL policy, this study examines the initiative’s implementation and surveys its impact, seeking to evaluate the policy’s effectiveness as a whole.

Against the multilingual turn as paradigm replacement: Reconsidering Kubota’s charge

In her 2016 paper, entitled, The Multi-Plural Turn, Post-Colonial Theory and Neoliberal Multiculturalism: Complicities and Implications for Applied Linguistics, Kubota proposes a more critical look at neoliberal aspects of the multilingual turn in applied linguistics that, in celebrating individual difference, challenge its status as a transformative discourse. In her argument from paradigm replacement, Kubota posits that because the multilingual turn, to some extent, emerges from the principle of individual accountability in a neoliberal political economy, its discourse must be complicit with the aims of a neoliberal agenda. This paper is a reply to some of the issues she raises in that critique. My argument is two-pronged. First, I take issue with the epistemic characterization of individual accountability as the only source of multilingualism within a neoliberal discourse. Second, I challenge her rejection of a democratic cosmopolitanism as a self-determining antidote to the neoliberal ideal (c.f. Calhoun 2002). This paper concludes that an alternate epistemic source of the multilingual turn unites language speakers in more moral and less economic terms, thereby destabilizing the argument from paradigm replacement.