The article explores the prosodic and kinesic aspects of three different ish constructions using corpus data from the multimodal NewsScape Library of International Television News. The results reveal that bound -ish with ‘approximate’ meaning is longer in duration, higher in pitch, and shows more pitch variability than bound -ish with ‘properties’ meaning. Free Ish is also longer in duration and shows more pitch variability but is also prosodically set apart from its linguistic environment. Furthermore, the different ish constructions prove to be associated with different sets of kinesic features, although none of these reaches a significant level in the statistical model. It will be argued that the prosodic aspects mirror the constructional status of ish, whereas the kinesic aspects may be used to support their different functions.

How people communicate about motion events and how this is shaped by language typology are mostly studied with a focus on linguistic encoding in speech. Yet, human communication typically involves an interactional exchange of multimodal signals, such as hand gestures that have different affordances for representing event components. Here, we review recent empirical evidence on multimodal encoding of motion in speech and gesture to gain a deeper understanding of whether and how language typology shapes linguistic expressions in different modalities, and how this changes across different sensory modalities of input and interacts with other aspects of cognition. Empirical evidence strongly suggests that Talmy’s typology of event integration predicts multimodal event descriptions in speech and gesture and visual attention to event components prior to producing these descriptions. Furthermore, variability within the event itself, such as type and modality of stimuli, may override the influence of language typology, especially for expression of manner.

Philosophers and linguists currently lack the means to reliably identify evaluative concepts and measure their evaluative intensity. Using a corpus-based approach, we present a new method to distinguish evaluatively thick and thin adjectives like ‘courageous’ and ‘awful’ from descriptive adjectives like ‘narrow,’ and from value-associated adjectives like ‘sunny.’ Our study suggests that the modifiers ‘truly’ and ‘really’ frequently highlight the evaluative dimension of thick and thin adjectives, allowing for them to be uniquely classified. Based on these results, we believe our operationalization may pave the way for a more quantitative approach to the study of thick and thin concepts.

This study explores the relationship between executive functioning (EF) and degree of bilingualism in a sample (N = 79) of 5- to 7-year-old monolingual and bilingual children. The bilingual group included children who are fully fluent in two languages (balanced bilinguals) and children who are still learning their second language (dual-language learners (DLLs). In general, findings revealed mixed associations between bilingualism and EF. There were no language group differences for one type of simple inhibitory control (i.e., go or no-go task). However, a bilingual advantage was demonstrated for another type of simple inhibitory control (the Head–Toes–Knees–Shoulders task), for complex inhibitory control (i.e., the Simon effect), and for cognitive flexibility (Dimensional Change Card Sort). Effects were found when DLLs and balanced bilinguals were analyzed separately, and the latter two effects were found when both types of bilinguals were compared to monolinguals. The findings contribute to the growing literature examining a possible bilingual effect in early childhood.

The present study investigates cross-linguistic differences in the description of motion events using Holistic Spatial Semantics (HSS) as a theoretical framework. In this study, six short video stimuli featuring various motion situations were used to elicit narratives from 35 speakers of French and 29 speakers of Swedish. The proportions of semantic category Path linguistically expressed did not vary significantly between the groups. However, the French narratives had significantly less Manner and Direction expression. Furthermore, they included significantly more unbounded non-translocative events compared to the Swedish narratives. Partly, this was due to the tendency within the Swedish group to construe situations as bounded events that were clearly shown as unbounded in the stimuli. There was also a tendency within the French group to distribute the information about the same situation over two clauses. These findings lend further support to the relevance of distinguishing between the Path and Direction categories, as well as other key features of the HSS framework, such as the distinction between non-verbal motion situations and their linguistic construals.

This paper presents a usage-based method for investigating metaphor acquisition in the speech of children aged two and above. The method draws on the strengths of the established tools for metaphor identification such as Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP), and Metaphor Identification Procedure VU University Amsterdam (MIP-VU), and adapts them for coding and analysing metaphors in the corpora of naturalistic interactions between children and their primary caregivers, such as those stored online in the CHILDES TalkBank. First, we discuss the premises underlying our methodological framework and provide a coding manual for working with child language. Second, we explain how to approach the challenges of coding transcripts of child speech and demonstrate how we reached high inter-annotator reliability scores of 0.97. We then show how the coding scheme works with a sample corpus of a child recorded between the ages of 2;0–3;1. To illustrate how the scheme can be applied to the study of metaphor acquisition, we analyse the coded metaphors for input–output frequencies. It is argued that our method can offer a unique lens for exploring metaphor production in very young children and it can help us to understand how children come to express their very first figurative meanings.

Consensus on the extent to which cross-linguistic differences affect event cognition is currently absent. This is partly because cognitive influences of language have rarely been examined within speakers of different languages in tasks that manipulate the level of visual processing. This study presents a novel combination of a high-level approach upregulating the involvement of language, namely self-paced sentence-video verification, and a low-level visual detection method without language use, namely breaking continuous flash suppression (b-CFS) (Yang et al., 2014). The results point to cross-linguistic effects on event cognition by revealing variations in visual processing patterns of manner and path by English versus Mandarin Chinese speakers. Language specificity was found on both levels of processing. An asymmetry in response speed across tasks highlights an important difference between facilitation of detecting contrasts when recruitment of verbal labels is automatic, versus facilitation of verifying correspondences when labels are overt.

We investigated how deictic shifts and memory representation influence production difficulties in reported speech. In Experiment 1, participants read short stories, including a conversation between two protagonists. Participants then recalled the last sentence from the conversation in either direct or indirect speech. When participants had verbatim memory of the to-be-reported utterance, direct speech production was faster than indirect speech if indirect speech production required a deictic shift. If participants had verbatim memory and indirect speech production did not require a deictic shift, direct and indirect speech’s speech latencies were similar. In Experiment 2, we investigated the production difficulties of reported speech when verbatim memory was unavailable to participants. First, participants read short stories. Next, half of the participants completed an intervening task, whereas the other half did not. Last, participants undertook a sentence completion task by filling in a missing word in direct or indirect speech. When participants did not have verbatim memory of to-be-reported utterances, direct speech production was faster than indirect speech if a deictic shift was needed to produce direct speech. These results suggest that production difficulties in reported speech depend on how to-be-reported utterances are represented in memory and whether deictic shifts are required.

How the time reference of a sentence is processed based on the grammatical marking of the verb has already been explored in several languages with grammatical tense and aspect. It can also be grammatically expressed according to the reality status of the event (whether the event exists in time, realis mood, or not, irrealis). This study reports results from an acceptability judgment experiment in Paiwan, a Formosan language which exhibits a realis-perfective/irrealis distinction. By placing realis-perfective and irrealis markers after deictic past or future time adverbs and manipulating the grammaticality of the sentences, we asked which temporal concord violation (i.e., realis-perfective or irrealis) was harder to detect. The temporal concord violation of the realis-perfective marker induced greater processing difficulties (interactions between time reference and mood marking revealed lower accuracy rates and longer reaction time), but not the irrealis marker, in line with previous hypotheses. These processing difficulties may be partly due to the Paiwan realis mood marker which also encodes perfective aspect meaning. The reanalysis of the design of previous studies indicates that the interaction with perfective aspect also led to additional processing cost, suggesting that perfective aspect marking plays a crucial role in the processing of time reference.

Talmy’s (1991; 2000a; 2000b) influential work on motion events provides a strong two-way typology that can examine and account for the typology of a language, but this framework is basically synchronic. It may not be equally valid to explain language change. In this paper, we apply the event integration theory and its latest development, The Macro-event Hypothesis (Li, 2020, 2023), to account for the development of the causative verb 使-shǐ-make (SHI for short) in Chinese. This study reveals that, firstly, the multi-functional behavior of SHI represents a typical case of grammaticalization, with a full verb acquiring the role of conjunction and expressing abstract meanings. Secondly, the semantic division of the causative and non-causative uses of SHI in Contemporary Chinese is the most clear-cut. Thirdly, causative SHI shows a greater level of semantic bleaching, and the construction profiles a single causal activity and has a higher degree of event integration when compared to its lexical verbal use. The constructional grammaticalization of SHI confirms that event integration is key to its development. This study verifies The Macro-event Hypothesis of a continuum of grammaticalization in language and uncovers the process of semantic gradation that takes place in Chinese.

This paper examines the influence of cultural display rules on how high-status individuals, such as political leaders, publicly express anger. Specifically, it focuses on Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has been the Turkish leader since 2003. The study aims to understand the extent to which Erdoğan’s expression of anger is influenced by cultural display rules, the religious context stemming from his conservative electoral support, and his position as a long-term populist political leader. Using extended conceptual metaphor theory (ECMT) supported by corpus-assisted discourse analysis, the paper seeks to identify the contextual factors that shape anger expressions (both direct and metaphorical) in the political discourse of a populist leader in a collectivist culture. By comparing the conceptualization of ascribed anger and inscribed anger expressions, the analysis reveals that Erdoğan’s discourse presents two distinct scenarios for expressing anger toward ‘us’ and ‘others’. Additionally, it demonstrates how anger is strategically employed in culture-specific ways to navigate the challenges posed by conflicting contextual factors.

This paper examines how signers make lists. One way is to use the fingers on the signer’s nondominant hand to enumerate items on a list. The signer points to these list-fingers with the dominant hand. Previous analyses considered lists to be nondominant, one-handed signs, and thus were called list buoys because the nondominant hand often remains in place during the production of the list. The pointing hand was largely ignored as a nonlinguistic gesture. We take a constructional approach based on Cognitive Grammar. In our approach, we analyze lists as a type of pointing construction consisting of two meaningful components: a pointing device (the pointing hand) used to direct attention; and a Place, also consisting of form and a meaning. Using data from Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) and Finland–Swedish Sign Language (FinSSL), we examine the semantic role of each component, showing how the nondominant list-fingers identify and track discourse referents, and how the pointing hand is used to create higher-order entities by grouping list-fingers. We also examine the integration of list constructions and their components with other conventional constructions.

Adjectives that are used to describe sensory experiences are often used to express more than one modality. The adjective sweet, for instance, may primarily be associated with taste (i.e., taste is the dominant modality of sweet), but it can also be used for smell, sound or sight, and possibly even for touch. It has also been shown that some sensory modalities combine more easily than others. Many adjectives that are used to describe taste, for instance, can also be used for smell, but, less likely, for sound. These associations between sensory modalities as they are expressed in language are the topic of this study. We looked at the distribution of the combinations of dominant modalities in pairs of antonymic sensory adjectives (e.g., sweet–sour), and how the dominant modality of the adjectives in these pairs differed from that of the adjectives in isolation. In our dataset, there was a sizeable number of pairs consisting of adjectives with differing dominant modalities. Within those pairs, we observed that adjectives with the dominant modality sight can also be used for touch and vice versa. Similarly, adjectives with the dominant modality of smell can also be used for taste and vice versa. Finally, adjectives with the dominant modalities sight and touch can both also be used for hearing and for taste, but not the other way around. These results contribute to our understanding of how language is used to describe sensory experiences, and, with that, how sensory experiences may be shaped by the words that we use to describe them.

Homophony avoidance has often been claimed to be a mechanism of language change. We investigate this mechanism in Dutch by applying two strands of research – corpus studies and experimental data – to find support for claims based on earlier historical observations. Throughout the history of Dutch, homophony avoidance has been named as the cause of language change or inhibition of change on several occasions. We build on these historical observations with an experimental study and a corpus study on a synchronic Dutch alternation, where avoidance of homophony between present and past tense can appear. Plurals of verbs with a stem ending in a dental show homophony with the present when they are used in the preterite (compare zetten ‘put’ pst-pl with zetten ‘put’ prs-pl). This homophony can be avoided by using the perfectum (hebben gezet ‘have put’). A wug-style experiment shows that verbs with dental stem are indeed used significantly more in the perfectum in the plural than in the singular, while verbs without dental stem do not show this difference. A corpus study on Dutch further corroborates these results. Combined, these studies make a strong case for homophony avoidance as a plausible mechanism of language change.

Abstraction processes involve two variables that are often confused with one another: concreteness (banana versus belief) and specificity (chair versus furniture or Buddhism versus religion). Researchers are investigating the relationship between them, but many questions remain open, such as: What type of semantics characterizes words with varying degrees of concreteness and specificity? We tackle this topic through an in-depth semantic analysis of 1049 Italian words for which human-generated concreteness and specificity ratings are available. Our findings show that (as expected) the semantics of concrete and abstract concepts differs, but most interestingly when specificity is considered, the variance in concreteness ratings explained by semantic types increases substantially, suggesting the need to carefully control word specificity in future research. For instance, mathematical concepts (phase) are on average abstract and generic, while behavioral qualities (arrogant) are on average abstract but specific. Moreover, through cluster analyses based on concreteness and specificity ratings, we observe the bottom-up emergence of four subgroups of semantically coherent words. Overall, this study provides empirical evidence and theoretical insight into the interplay of concreteness and specificity in shaping semantic categorization.

This study investigates the use of metaphor in the dissociative disorder depersonalization/derealization – the feeling of unreality or detachment from the senses or surrounding events. While the debilitating experience of depersonalization/derealization is prevalent, it is also under-acknowledged, such that it is often expressed through metaphor, with more typical metaphor described in diagnostic criteria. Using naturally occurring text from two prominent English language depersonalization/derealization support fora, in the current study a systematic survey is made of metaphor to communicate the experience of depersonalization/derealization in context. It is concluded that metaphor described in the formal diagnostic criteria for depersonalization/derealization does not completely represent metaphor use in the contexts investigated. A summary is made of metaphor for the experiences of depersonalization, and derealization, and depersonalization/derealization more generally, across both the contexts investigated, that may support vital understanding and diagnosis of this debilitating, under-recognized experience, across a wider demographic.

Recent years have seen a heightened interest in the interface between language use and cognition in language learners. In this study, we investigate this interface further by conducting a rating task experiment on the intuitions of 25 native speakers and 101 low–intermediate to advanced learners of English as a Foreign Language regarding the acceptability of the genitive variants (the beauty of nature/nature’s beauty) in different contexts. These ratings were then compared against existing corpus-based statistical models that predict which variant is most likely in spoken language use with two mixed-effects linear regression models. The first model focused on the animacy of the possessor in particular, which has been found to have a different effect on native speakers and EFL learners in language use, whereas the second model tested how the ratings relate to the predictions as a whole. Results show that there is a larger discrepancy between language use and intuitions of low-proficiency learners compared to native speakers, which is partially because animate, collective, and inanimate possessors affect the intuitions and the language use of learners differently.

Gender can be considered an embodied social concept encompassing biological and cultural components. In this study, we explored whether the concept of gender varies as a function of different cultural and linguistic norms by comparing communities that vary in their social treatment of gender-related issues and linguistic encoding of gender. In Study 1, Italian, Dutch, and English-speaking participants completed a free-listing task, which showed Italians and Dutch were the most distinct in their conceptualization of gender: Italian participants focused more on socio-cultural features (e.g., discrimination, politics, and power), whereas Dutch participants focused more on the corporeal sphere (e.g., hormones, breasts, and genitals). Study 2 replicated this finding focusing on Italian and Dutch and using a typicality rating task: socio-cultural and abstract features were considered as more typical of “gender” by Italian than Dutch participants. Study 3 addressed Italian and Dutch participants’ explicit beliefs about gender with a questionnaire measuring essentialism and constructivism, and consolidated results from Studies 1 and 2 showing that Dutch participants endorsed more essentialist beliefs about gender than Italian participants. Consistent with socio-cultural constructivist accounts, our results provide evidence that gender is conceptualized differently by diverse groups and is adapted to specific cultural and linguistic environments.

While studies have shown the importance of listener feedback in dialogue, we still know little about the factors that impact its quality. Feedback can indicate either that the addressee is aligning with the speaker (i.e. ‘positive’ feedback) or that there is some communicative trouble (i.e. ‘negative’ feedback). This study provides an in-depth account of listener feedback in task-oriented dialogue (a director–matcher game), where positive and negative feedback is produced, thus expressing both alignment and misalignment. By manipulating the listener’s cognitive load through a secondary mental task, we measure the effect of divided attention on the quantity and quality of feedback. Our quantitative analysis shows that performance and feedback quantity remain stable across cognitive load conditions, but that the timing and novelty of feedback vary: turns are produced after longer pauses when attention is divided between two speech-focused tasks, and they are more economical (i.e. include more other-repetitions) when unrelated words need to be retained in memory. These findings confirm that cognitive load impacts the quality of listener feedback. Finally, we found that positive feedback is more often generic and shorter than negative feedback and that its proportion increases over time.

Backchannels (BCs; listener signals such as ‘mmhm’ or ‘okay’) are a ubiquitous and essential feature of spoken interaction. They are used by listeners predominantly to support the ongoing turn of their interlocutor and to signal understanding and agreement. Listeners seem to be highly sensitive to the exact realisations of BCs and to judge deviations from typical forms as negative. Very little is known about the use of BCs by speakers diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In dialogue recordings of 28 German adults in two groups of disposition-matched dyads (i.e., both interlocutors were either autistic or non-autistic), we found that the ASD group was characterised by (1) a lower rate of BCs per minute (particularly in the early stages of conversation), (2) less diversity in the lexical realisation of BCs and (3) a less diverse and flexible mapping of different intonation contours to different BC types. We interpret these results as reflecting more general characteristics of autistic as compared to non-autistic individuals, namely different strategies in signalling attention towards an interlocutor and less flexible behaviour in social interaction.