Fire could be mapped into many target domains to construct metaphors. However, it is not yet known to what extent people’s experience of real-world fire affects the diversity of fire metaphors. The present study aims to explore the derivation of fire metaphors through the ecological perspective of affordances by analysing the collocational patterns associated with both metaphorical and literal uses of ‘fire’ in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Results show that (1) metaphorical and non-metaphorical fire expressions are related to the ecological affordances of real-world fire, including ‘injury to the skin’, ‘warmth’ and ‘illumination’; (2) metaphorical fire expressions are more likely to evoke the ecological affordances and (3) ‘injury to the skin’ is more prominent than ‘warmth’ and ‘illumination’. The findings reveal that the interaction between humans and the environment is fundamental in the process of metaphorical understanding. Metaphorical uses of fire are strongly influenced by embodied interactions with the physical fire and are constrained by cognitive salience.

Bilingual experience may enhance attentional control, but little work has addressed whether monolinguals and bilinguals differ in allocating attentional resources. Focusing on speech processing, we examined listening effort via pupillometry in English monolinguals and simultaneous bilinguals, while they listened to passages in a familiar or unfamiliar language. Results demonstrated similar pupil responses across conditions in bilinguals, yet monolinguals showed significantly larger pupil size when listening to the unfamiliar language than the familiar one. Further, more English exposure (especially a longer stay in an English-speaking family) correlated with smaller pupil size in the familiar language condition. Overall, our findings suggest that bilinguals tend to exhibit greater listening effort than monolinguals, and a more cognitively demanding situation (i.e., listening to an unknown language) requires more effort in monolinguals. With this, we broadened the scope of research on bilingual cognition and demonstrated that bilingualism affects attentional resource allocation in spoken language processing.

Le présent article propose une caractérisation du phénomène linguistique de la distanciation, qui permet au locuteur de se désengager d’un premier contenu discursif, à partir de l’examen d’un certain nombre de propriétés constitutives. Nous prendrons comme témoins trois marqueurs de discours du français contemporain, formés sur le verbe dire: c’est vite dit, c’est beaucoup dire, c’est toi qui le dis. Notre conviction est que l’étude en parallèle des caractéristiques spécifiques permettant de distinguer une relation discursive, d’une part, et, de l’autre, du fonctionnement sémantico-pragmatique des marqueurs de discours, apportera un éclairage fructueux sur la question.

This longitudinal study examined the impact of L2 acquisition on the narrative development of L1-Turkish dominant children who were exposed to L2-English immersion compared to their peers who were not exposed to L2-English immersion but to L1-Turkish. The study involved 155 children, aged 5, 7, and 9 at Time 1, assessing their narrative production, linguistic complexity, and narrative comprehension over a one-year period. Children who were exposed to L2-English immersion received intensive L2-English instruction from a young age while living in an L1-Turkish dominant society. For both time points, L2-English immersion children performed better than L1-Turkish dominant children for L1 narrative production. While no overall group differences emerged in linguistic complexity, L2-English immersion children exhibited higher complexity in L1 relative to their L2 for both time points, suggesting a facilitative effect of early L2 exposure on L1 narrative structure. These findings support the idea that bilingualism may foster narrative skills. These results highlight the importance of early bilingual education, especially when both languages are equally supported, contributing to children’s overall language development.

The E(xtended) P(rojection) P(rinciple) (specifically, in its guise as a movement-triggering feature in designated syntactic heads), has been a thorn in the Minimalist side since the mid-1990s. Recently, in the context of attempts to reduce syntactic mechanisms to their minimal expression, the generative operation Merge has been defined as unordered set formation (“Simplest Merge”), and the EPP has been pronounced dead in favour of conditions over labelling which force phrasal movement in order to dissolve ‘symmetry points’. This article compares several theoretical analyses and shows that very simple cases of {XP, YP} copular constructions in Spanish satisfy all requirements for labelling without the need to resort to Internal Merge (IM). Therefore, if there is IM of a DP it must be motivated by reasons other than labelling. Once such a reason exists, the elimination of EPP on labelling grounds becomes dubious.

Variability in the second language (L2) referential choice could be due to lower language proficiency in the L2 or cross-linguistic influence. We compare the L2 English referential choices of bilinguals of typologically different languages (Spanish and English, null subject and non-null subject) to those of bilinguals of typologically similar languages (Dutch and English, both non-null subject and both using pronouns similarly in the target context). Bilinguals’ performance was further compared to that of a group of functional monolingual English speakers. Both bilingual groups were highly proficient, to explore whether high proficiency would attenuate differences with monolinguals. Participants completed a picture-description task eliciting references to antecedents in two-character contexts. Performance was comparable among all three groups in all conditions—evidence that cross-linguistic influence did not play a role for bilingual referential choices. These results thus show that highly proficient bilinguals of both typologically different and similar languages can perform comparably to monolinguals.

The role of morphology in complex word acquisition was examined in Chinese (L1)–English (L2) bilinguals. Participants learned words consisting of two novel constituents, by pairing them with pictures. Items either belonged to large (torbnel, torbilm, torbla, torbiph) or small morphological families (torbilm, torbla). After training, participants completed recognition and spelling tasks with novel words that either included or excluded a trained morpheme. Results revealed robust stem-training effects, showing that items including a trained constituent were harder to reject and easier to spell than items including two untrained constituents. There was also a significant effect of morphological family size, with greater training effects for items belonging to large than small families. Effect sizes were overall smaller in L2 than in L1. These findings point to the important role of morphological structure in L2 word acquisition and suggest that large morphological family-clusters lead to better learning outcomes.

This study investigates whether the second language (L2) development of d/Deaf and hard of hearing (d/DHH) learners in comparison to the L2 development of hearing learners, based on the processability theory (PT) developed by Pienemann (1998, 2005) in the field of second language acquisition (SLA). Thirty-eight d/DHH and 32 hearing secondary school learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) completed a series of speaking tasks designed to elicit specific morphosyntactic structures that, according to PT, align with L2 developmental stages. Implicational scaling revealed that although d/DHH learners followed a similar developmental sequence to their peers, they displayed a noticeable delay. They also appeared to require additional time and practice to fully produce the entire target structures after reaching certain developmental stages. The results provide stronger empirical evidence for d/DHH learners’ L2 development, supporting the qualitative similarity hypothesis in the field of special education, which posits that despite quantitative delays, d/DHH learners exhibit qualitatively similar L2 development to their hearing peers.

French diachrony offers two textbook examples for negation studies: the evolution of ne…pas illustrating the Jespersen’s Cycle (Dahl, 1979) and the evolution of polarity-neutral items into negative indefinites (NIs), sometimes termed the Quantifier Cycle (Willis et al., 2013) and often exemplified by personne.

However, a significant disparity exists between the detailed research on ne…pas and the vagueness surrounding personne’s as NI origins. While its medieval origin is accepted, the dating of first attestations and definitive grammaticalization varies (Déprez, 2011; Vachon, 2012; GGHF, 2020), and predominant noun use and data scarcity hinder firm conclusions (Déprez, 2011; Larrivée & Kallel, 2020). Consequently, assumptions about personne’s development as an NI rely heavily on parallels with rien and aucun, lacking support from quantified data.

Through a corpus study of personne in Medieval and early Pre-Classical French (9th–16th centuries), focusing on its evolution into an NI, this article reveals a unique trajectory for personne, further demonstrating the variety characterizing the macro-construction of French NIs (Hansen in GGHF, 2020). Methodologically, the communicative immediacy-distance theory (Koch & Oësterreicher, 1985) and the “represented speech” perspective (Marchello-Nizia, 2012) prove relevant for tracing innovation in written diachronic corpora.