Second language (L2) pronunciation research has measured speech comprehensibility by asking listeners to assess L2 learners’ speaking performance with rating scales. While some studies have provided validity evidence for these rating scales, few studies have examined the extent to which those scales effectively distinguish among L2 speakers. To fill this gap, the present study examines the 9-point scale used in Saito et al. (2020: Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 40, 9–25.) and the 100-point scale in Huensch and Nagle (2023: Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 45(2), 571–585.) from a Rasch measurement perspective and showcases post hoc score category collapsing as a potential countermeasure against suboptimal rating scale functioning. Findings suggested that different score categories represented the same ability level and were therefore interchangeable. Collapsing these score categories yielded shorter but more functional scales without compromising the psychometric qualities of the original scales. These findings suggest that researchers need to empirically refine their scale lengths rather than uncritically following their conventional measurement practices.

Most theories of sentence structure acknowledge predicates, yet what one understands a predicate to be can vary significantly from one theory to the next, and from one grammarian to the next. This article surveys how the predicate notion is understood in semantics, syntax, and grammar studies quite generally. It scrutinizes the various predicate concepts, and then argues in favor of one particular understanding of predicates in syntax, one that is especially congruent with a dependency grammar (DG) approach to sentence structures. Predicates are catenae, the catena being a concrete unit of syntactic analysis. The catena-based approach to predicates is motivated in three areas: in terms of the synthetic vs. analytic realizations of meaning, in terms of entailment patterns, and in terms of pronoun resolution. The catena-based approach makes insightful generalizations in these areas possible.

The ending speech in Aesopic fables, where stories conclude with direct utterances from characters, is not merely a didactic tool but a crucial narrative device constructing hermeneutic complexity. This study systematically examines the narrative function of ending speech through computational analysis of 600 Aesopic fables from Laura Gibbs’ edition. We quantitatively analyzed the complex relationships between ending speech, story content, explicit morals and speaker identity using natural language processing techniques. The analysis reveals three key findings. First, the average similarity of ending speeches (0.1820) is significantly lower than that of stories (0.3578), confirming that ending speech forms a unique semantic domain rather than serving as a simple summary of the narrative. Latent Dirichlet allocation analysis also shows that ending speeches are differentiated into 13 topics, displaying a more complex structure than stories (seven topics). Second, we found that ending speech constitutes a distinct narrative domain from epimythium, with an overwhelming ratio of their relationships being either independent (76.8%) or tensional (21.4%). This indicates that the ending speech is a narrative device that amplifies interpretive complexity, often clashing with the epimythium rather than reinforcing it. Third, 249 different ending speech speakers each represent unique voices and perspectives, with the frequency of utterances – fox (34 times), lion (19 times) and wolf (18 times) – demonstrating a value system in Aesopic fables where wisdom is prioritized over physical strength. These findings indicate that the ending speech establishes complex and sometimes tensional relationships with both story and epimythium, thereby transforming fables into “open work” that can be newly interpreted. This study provides empirical evidence for understanding Aesopic fables not as simple didactic tales but as complex narratives with structural features supporting polyphonic interpretation, demonstrating the potential of computational narratology.

This study proposes a new qualitative method in historical pragmatics to extract politeness formulae for master-servant directives from nineteenth-century French advice literature. Whereas traditional politeness models study strategic face-saving, this study investigates non-strategic, routinized or conventionalized politeness by mapping explicit linguistic instructions in historical prescriptive metasources. Because etiquette and conduct books targeted middle-class households – typically defined as having at least one live-in servant – they routinely discussed interactions with servants. The self-built corpus comprises 43 sources: etiquette and conduct manuals, alongside servant manuals. Through close reading I manually extract politeness formulae, which are compiled into a formulary. Historians underline servants’ harsh conditions and social erasure, typically mirrored by bare imperatives. Advice on a kind prosody is widespread, but politeness formulae (e.g. voulez-vous? – je vous prie) only emerge in the 1870s, when the crisis of domestic service begins. This shift suggests that domestic service was increasingly viewed in transactional rather than purely hierarchical terms. Despite these changes, master-servant, servant-master and peer directives remain rigidly compartmentalized. The article addresses a notable gap in French historical im/politeness studies by showing how politeness formulae in prescriptive discourse reveal the persistence of caste-like social structures in nineteenth-century French domestic service.

Some of the most fundamental questions in linguistic theory concern grammatical architecture. Focusing on morphosyntax specifically, how many components are ‘morphosyntactic’ phenomena distributed over, and how do they divide up their labor? Answers differ: some versions of Distributed Morphology posit a rich postsyntactic morphological component, whereas Morphology-as-Syntax approaches sharply reduce its role. Against that backdrop, this article investigates theme vowels, which are often analyzed as purely morphological (nonsyntactic). A diagnostic is introduced for their derivational origin, based on the narrow-syntactic phenomenon of lexical selection (L-selection): if a theme vowel is L-selected (to the exclusion of others) by a higher head, it must be in the narrow syntax; otherwise, the test is inconclusive. The former situation obtains in Latin: in synthetic causatives, fac- ‘make’ can be immediately preceded by -ē/-e but no other theme vowel. An analysis is developed on which theme vowels are syntactic and hence L-selectable. Alternative analyses on which theme vowels realize dissociated nodes added postsyntactically fail empirically or become notational variants of the syntactic analysis, since they must give theme vowels narrow-syntactic featural ‘precursors’. Theme vowels, then, are syntactic, introduced by (External) Merge. Insofar as dissociated-node insertion can be replaced with Merge, suspicious theoretical duplications are avoided, in line with minimalist goals.