The pitch contours of Mandarin two-character words are generally understood as being shaped by lexical tones on the constituent single-character words, in interaction with articulatory constraints imposed by factors such as speech rate, coarticulation with adjacent tones, segmental makeup, and predictability. This study shows that tonal realization is also partially determined by words’ meanings. We first show, on the basis of a corpus of Taiwan Mandarin spontaneous conversations, using a generalized additive regression model and focusing on the rise-fall tonal pattern, that after controlling for effects of speaker and context, word type is a stronger predictor of tonal realization than all of the previously established word-form-related predictors combined. Importantly, the addition of information about meaning in context improves prediction accuracy even further. We then proceed to show, using computational modeling with context-specific word embeddings, that token-specific pitch contours predict word type with 50% accuracy on held-out data, and that context-sensitive, token-specific embeddings can predict the shape of pitch contours with 40% accuracy. These accuracies, which are an order of magnitude above chance level, suggest that the relation between words’ pitch contours and their meanings are sufficiently strong to be potentially functional for language users. The theoretical implications of these empirical findings are discussed.

This paper provides a novel description and syntactic analysis of different types of quantifiers in Chuj, an underdocumented Mayan language. We focus on a subset of expressions that quantify over entities, and that have been noted to appear obligatorily in sentence-initial position. We argue that three types of quantifiers should be distinguished: (i) Predicative A-quantifiers, which occur sentence-initially because Chuj is a predicate-initial language; (ii) Focus D-quantifiers, which occur sentence-initially because they are lexically specified for an [A$'$] feature; and (iii) Basic D-quantifiers, which, lacking an [A$'$] feature, have no effects on the syntactic position of their host arguments. We also sketch syntactic analyses of each type of quantifier.

This study investigates how individual differences in proficiency, exposure and language attitudes influence bilingual reactive control during forced language switching in Dutch–English bilinguals. Thirty-four late bilinguals completed a picture naming task switching between Dutch (L1) and English (L2) in response to visual cues, naming cognate and noncognate words. Linear mixed-effects models indicated that bilinguals with higher L2 proficiency showed reduced asymmetric (L2 to L1) switch costs. Additionally, bilinguals who reported more positive attitudes toward their L2 showed reduced switch costs during L2 to L1 trials involving cognate transitions, although further replication is needed to test this effect among larger sample sizes and different language pairs. By combining psycholinguistic methods with a psychometrically validated sociolinguistic measure, this study illustrates how integrating cognitive and affective variables can yield more nuanced accounts of bilingual language control.

This study examines how linguistic differences between Chinese and European languages influence cognitive functions. Two experiments compared cognitive performance between Chinese and European undergraduates. Experiment 1 compared Chinese and European bilinguals (e.g., Chinese-English versus French-English) studying at an English university. Chinese bilinguals exhibited stronger executive control, inhibitory control and mental rotation, suggesting that greater linguistic distance enhances cognitive control. Experiment 2 examined native Chinese and English speakers in their respective countries, isolating language-script effects. Chinese speakers performed better in visual attention (i.e., orienting and facilitation) and mental rotation, while English speakers exhibited superior performance in auditory attention (i.e., attentional switching). These differences likely stem from language-script characteristics: logographic Chinese engages visuospatial processing, while alphabetic English reinforces auditory attention flexibility. Collectively, these findings underscore specific cognitive effects associated with linguistic distance and language script and provide comprehensive insights into how language structure modulates domain-specific cognitive adaptations.

The current study reports a first explorative analysis of f0 movements in final and non-final positions in Yali, a Trans-New Guinea language spoken in the Papuan highlands in Indonesia. The language is understudied, in particular for its prosody. The available literature hints at the existence of word-level f0 movements. However, acoustic analyses are lacking and it remains a challenge to disentangle word-level f0 movements from those at the phrase level, due to their interaction. This study analyses spontaneously produced speech acoustically for f0 in final and non-final syllables at the word and phrase level, and by means of a cluster analysis to reveal the most common f0 patterns at either prosodic level. Results provide strong support for word-final rising f0 movements that are particularly clearly realised in non-final words in the phrase. The outcomes are tentatively interpreted within their phonological context and in terms of the different levels that could be distinguished in Yali prosody.

Prior research has reported vocabulary learning benefits from reading while listening (RWL), but few testable predictions have been made regarding an underlying mechanism for benefits. In this study, reading ahead of the audio was examined as a potential source of benefits during RWL. Fifty-nine participants had their eye movements tracked during a contextualized RWL task embedded with 25 pseudowords 10 times each, followed by three learning outcome measures: form recognition, meaning recognition, and meaning recall. Results indicated that (a) reading ahead facilitated initial form decoding as indexed by gaze durations, especially during early instances; (b) it only predicted the deepest level of vocabulary knowledge tested—meaning recall. These findings indicate that reading ahead may reflect the critical alignment between auditory input, orthographic decoding, and phonological encoding processes during reading, thereby facilitating faster processing when reading ahead than not reading ahead, as well as form-meaning mapping for new words.

Cet article d’introduction présente l’ambition et la contribution de ce numéro thématique consacré aux travaux sur l’im/politesse en langue française. L’article contextualise et présente cinq études empiriques qui illustrent la vitalité du champ : l’étude historique des rapports de pouvoir entre maîtres et domestiques par Paternoster, la comparaison des compliments ordinaires et médiatiques de Claudel et Moallemi, l’étude constructionnelle de l’insulte chez Van Olmen et Grass, les stratégies de critique professionnelle de Bersier et al., et enfin la comparaison de l’auto-éloge en français hexagonal et en anglais étasunien par Tobback et Moens. En faisant dialoguer ces travaux, l’introduction démontre que la gestion des faces positive et négative ne dépend pas de simples calculs stratégiques, mais de normes sociales et de genres discursifs spécifiques. Le numéro thématique dans son ensemble souligne la nécessité de prendre en compte la multimodalité, les nouveaux médias et la diversité des variétés du français à travers le monde, positionnant ce numéro thématique comme un jalon essentiel pour les futures recherches dans les domaines de l’analyse du discours et de la pragmatique du français.

Happiness is a complex concept that has been intensively researched from many perspectives, but the linguistic aspects of this phenomenon are still under-researched. Using corpus-based analysis of semantically similar words (word embedding), the author studies lexical units denoting happiness and joy in three West Slavic languages (Polish, Czech, Slovak) and compares them with the corresponding lexical units in English. The results show that despite the mutual linguistic and non-linguistic ties, the Polish, Czech and Slovak understanding of happiness exhibits not only similarities (e.g. the relationship between happiness and joy and the outward orientation of joy) but also significant differences (e.g. the different value of the component ‘luck’ in happiness, a different relationship between joy, sadness and fear, and cross-cultural differences related to religion). The results also highlight similarities and differences between West Slavic languages and English. In addition to this, the study tests the advantages and limitations of the word-embedding analysis for the analysis of concepts and their culturally specific features. The author believes that the method is useful because it offers new insights into the analysed data, but it also requires human oversight and careful interpretation.

In this article, the forms and role of compliments in French are analysed to identify preferred behaviours in two types of discourse. Forty-five instances of compliments were extracted from everyday interactions and 83 instances from television programmes (talk-shows and talent shows). The linguistic-discursive approach used provides the key to understanding these corpora, revealing processes specific to each genre. In everyday interaction, the use of situational deictics, onomatopoeia, dislocated forms, elliptical structures or the intensifier ‘too’ in its high degree value is favoured, whereas in television programmes, it is rather the high degree of axiological praise, the repetition or successive use of adverbs, or the amplification of paraverbal and extraverbal signals (emphatic intonation or detachment of syllables in certain key terms) are preferred. It shows that ordinary interactions give priority to situational anchoring and a certain spontaneity, whereas television programmes tend to intensify the expression of compliments to capture the audience’s attention by turning exchanges into a spectacle.

German features a special coordinate structure in which the second conjunct contains a subject gap, resulting in the asymmetric coordination of a verb-second clause and a verb-initial clause. In this paper, coordination with subject gaps is compared with normal phrasal coordination. Both types of coordination show asymmetries between the conjuncts, including the occupation of the clause-initial position, the omission of non-subject elements, the scope of adverbial constituents, asymmetric extraction and the events described in the conjuncts are naturally connected. Observing the similarities between them in terms of structure and interpretation, I argue that coordinate structures share a unified asymmetric syntactic structure, and coordination with a subject gap is derived from phrasal coordination with a shared subject in the sentence-initial position. The fronted non-subject constituent in the coordination with a subject gap is the result of asymmetric extraction from the first conjunct to the sentence-initial specifier position, which is licensed by its differentiated information structure.

This study tests the relative amount of cognitive effort required for Spanish language processing by L1-dominant speakers (Spanish-raised bilinguals, SRBs), heritage speakers (HSs) and late second-language learners (English-raised bilinguals, ERBs). In a dual-task study, three groups of bilingual Spanish speakers were presented concurrently with a linguistic and non-linguistic task, each at three levels of difficulty. When responding to the non-linguistic task, which required concurrently processing and encoding in memory a Spanish-language phrase, SRBs were, on average, most accurate and ERBs least accurate. This suggests a three-way difference between SRBs, HSs and ERBs in the amount of cognitive resources required for language processing in the target language, highlighting HSs’ unique developmental trajectory. Results further suggest that accuracy on the non-linguistic task was reduced for all groups when the concurrent linguistic stimulus was of higher syntactic complexity, suggesting that more complex linguistic structures require more cognitive resources regardless of language background.

Vedic meter, being quantitative, is generally assumed to ignore the language’s lexically distinctive pitch accent. Nevertheless, beyond the obvious absence of any strict requirements, possible preferential interactions between meter and accent have remained unexplored. This article presents a series of word shape- and category-controlled tests, all of which support the conventional wisdom: accent plays no systematic role in meter. (While I do discover an effect of tonal NonFinality, it is not confined to meter.) Moreover, beyond meter, I find no support for other possible roles of accent in poetry, such as responsion, formularity, clash, lapse, or strictness modulation. This work bears on poetic typology (specifically, how prosodic features interact in metrics), on the realization of the Vedic accent as tone vs. stress-and-tone, and on (mixed model and Monte Carlo) methodologies for corpus prosody.