In this study, we investigate Hungarian Plain Language (PL) and Simple Language (SL) with the primary objective of training a machine-learning-based sentence-level PL model that flags sentences where expert intervention may be needed during PL-oriented rewriting. The analysis uses a legal-administrative PL corpus and a news-based SL corpus, currently the only publicly available high-quality Hungarian resources for PL and SL. In low-resource settings, PL data are typically scarce, so selective data augmentation is a natural candidate for improving model performance. Our aims are threefold: (i) to provide a feature-based descriptive comparison of these Text Simplification resources; (ii) to test whether selectively chosen SL sentences can augment PL training data; and (iii) to evaluate the impact of such augmentation on sentence-level PL detection. Methodologically, we extract handcrafted linguistic features spanning surface, morphosyntactic and discourse properties. We derive a PL-likeness score from logistic-regression coefficients and use it to select SL sentences most similar to PL for augmentation, followed by supervised sentence-level PL detection with XLM-RoBERTa-large. Results show clear differences between PL and SL in sentence length, lexical diversity, syntactic depth and connective use. Selective inclusion of SL sentences yields modest gains in constrained settings, whereas indiscriminate mixing reduces precision and reliability.

In a recent issue of Language (March 1998) Sarah Julianne Roberts attributed to me many claims that I never made and grossly misrepresented what I actually stated about the role of a worldwide nautical pidgin English in the formation of Hawaiian Creole English. Apart from a brief restatement (see below), everything that I wrote concerning that specific topic was contained in a single paragraph (Goodman 1985:111), which I reproduce here in its entirety (minus two nongermane footnotes):

Clark (1979), in a detailed comparative study of various forms of Pacific pidgin English utilizing much linguistic and historical documentation, has demonstrated obvious links between Hawaiian pidgin English and the others and even between these and New World creole English. Some are purely lexical (e.g., the ubiquitous savvy 'to know' and pickanniny 'child, small' as well as Hawaiian kaukau 'eat' from Chinese pidgin English chauchau, recorded as early as the late eighteenth century; Carr 1972:4), but others are structural (e.g., the use of been as a past or anterior marker, found in Hawaiian and Melanesian pidgin English and virtually all forms of Atlantic creole English). No doubt, these similarities are traceable to a worldwide nautical pidgin English, with which Hawaiians had considerable contact throughout most of the nineteenth century. Chinese pidgin English, itself evidently an outgrowth of the same nautical pidgin, had at least some direct impact on the emerging Hawaiian pidgin toward the end of the eighteenth century. Samples of the early Hawaiian pidgin are rare, but Clark (1979) has unearthed some interesting ones from Dana's (1840) Two Years Before the Mast, for example, "by-' em-by money paw-all gone; then kanaka work plenty .... We no all'e same'a' you! Suppose one got money, all got money. You-suppose one got money-lock him up in chest." It seems clear that it was out of this type of English, known as hapa haole or 'half white' (see below) that the plantation creole developed. According to W.C. Smith (1933:18): "The plantation foremen were often Hawaiians who spoke the Hawaiian-English pidgin." Thus, it is undeniable that there are historical links between Hawaiian creole English and forms of pidgins and creole English in other parts of the world, though to what extent these links explain structural similarities is a matter for further investigation.

This article examines the constraints on depictive predicates and their interpretation within the Aspectual Structure (AS) theory of the structural representation of aspect (Erteschik-Shir & Rapoport 1997). This model allows a simple expression of the relation between the depictive adjunct predicate and its host by means of a parallel-structures analysis. The depictive is contrasted with the resultative predicate and the similar but distinct modified result adjunct. AS structure type and aspectual focus account for the interpretations of the three types of secondary predicates. Their acceptability is shown to depend on interpretation rather than on grammaticality.

This article presents a linguistic analysis of a specific feature of a literary genre: the artificial punning found in the Egyptian Arabic narrative ballad (as described in Cachia 1989). A comparison of how these puns differ from regular processes in the phonology and morphology of the language reveals that this encoding by the poet-performer is very much a mirror image of regular processes. The audience's decoding of them, therefore, follows a pathway similar to regular processes. The dichotomy between the puns' linguistically based formal composition and their contextually based semantic interpretation is analyzed within a reinterpretation of a Jakobsonian structuralist framework involving a hierarchization of linguistic levels based on two factors: the degree of combinatoric freedom and the degree of semantic immediacy. This analysis reveals that the artificial punning in these ballads is actually the obverse of what one would expect to find following the definition of poetic discourse given by Roman Jakobson. This study thus shows that such artificial punning subverts normal expectations about poetic discourse and this has great implications for understanding the production and interpretation of literary word play in any tradition.

The construction as far as NP is a common topic restrictor in modern English, but its verbal coda (goes/is concerned) is often omitted. We examine potential constraints on this variation and find significant effects for syntactic, phonological, discourse mode, and social variables. The internal effects are also relevant to ‘Heavy NP Shift’ and other weight-related phenomena. Diachronic data on the as far as construction, and the evidence of synchronic age distributions and usage commentators, suggest that the verbless variant has become markedly more frequent in recent decades, allowing us a rare opportunity to study syntactic change in progress. In addition to documenting the nature of variation and change in this construction, our study has larger implications for the study of syntax and sociolinguistic variation, and demonstrates the value of integrating methods from different linguistic subfields (in this case, sociolinguistics and variation theory, historical linguistics, corpus linguistics, and syntax).