Linguistics Commons^™

Introduction To Discourse, Structure And Linguistic Choice By T. Price Caldwell, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

No abstract provided.

Pedagogical Approaches To The Teaching And Learning Of Formulaic Language, Ana Pellicer-Sánchez, Frank Boers

Education Publications

No abstract provided.

Detecting Clickbait: Here’S How To Do It, Christopher Brogly, Victoria Rubin

Data and Test Instruments

Automatic clickbait detection is a relatively novel task in natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML). “Clickbait” is a hyperlink created primarily to attract attention to its target content. This article introduces a binary classifier, the Language and Information Technology Research Lab (LiT.RL, pronounced “literal”) Clickbait Detector, which automatically distinguishes clickbait from nonclickbait. We used NLP and ML for 38 textual features, contrasting clickbait with “headlinese.” When tested on 11,000 hyperlinks, it achieves 94 per cent accuracy using a support vector machine. Integrated with the LiT.RL News Verification Browser, a downloadable stand-alone research tool, the Clickbait Detector user interface …

Logical Form And The Vernacular Revisited, Andrew Botterell, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

We revisit a debate initiated some fifteen years ago by Ray Elugardo and Robert Stainton about the domain of arguments. Our main result is that arguments are not exclusively sets of linguistic expressions. Instead, as we put it, some non-linguistic items have ‘logical form’. The crucial examples are arguments, both deductive and inductive, made with unembedded words and phrases.

P06. The Western Archive Of Dialects And Languages, Michael Iannozzi

Western Research Forum

Traditionally, once fieldwork in a community was complete, the researcher left, and the participants never saw what became of those recordings and digitized materials. The Western Archive of Dialects and Languages (WADL) is a new project between the author and Western Libraries to ensure that the community of research directly benefits from sharing their stories, materials, and time.

The materials, dialect, and stories are preserved in a permanent and accessible, online archive. This ensures that future generations, wherever they live, will be able to access the heritage and history their family members shared with researchers.

I have already digitized, and …

Speech Equality: A Gendered Analysis Of Children’S Television Shows, Rikki N. Bergen

Anthropology Presentations

Childhood is an exciting time and kids are just learning who they are and who they are expected to be. The role television plays in their understanding of gender, racial, cultural, economic and social identity cannot be denied and it is therefore important for scholars to examine the types of ideas that are being presented. The gendered attitudes portrayed both explicitly and implicitly in children’s television shows can have a negative effect on childhood development and a child’s perceptions of self and the world around them.

Universal Design For Belonging: Living And Working With Diverse Personal Names, Karen E. Pennesi

Anthropology Publications

There is great diversity in the names and naming practices of Canada’s population due to the multiple languages and cultures from which names and name-givers originate. While this diversity means that everyone encounters unfamiliar names, institutional agents who work with the public are continually challenged when attempting to determine a name’s correct pronunciation, spelling, structure and gender. Drawing from over a hundred interviews in London (Ontario) and Montréal (Québec), as well as other published accounts, I outline strategies used by institutional agents to manage name diversity within the constraints of their work tasks. I explain how concern with saving face …

Reduced Structure In Malagasy Headlines, Ileana Paul

French Studies Publications

This paper examines the register associated with headlines in Malagasy. While in many languages headlines appear to have reduced structure as evidenced by the absence of certain grammatical markers (determiners, copulas, tense), Malagasy headlines show a change in word order from VOS to SVO. It is argued that like English, Malagasy headlines involve a truncated syntactic structure and that the absence of certain functional projections accounts for the change in word order.

Culminating And Non-Culminating Accomplishments In Malagasy, Ileana Paul, Baholisoa Simone Ralalaoherivony, Henriëtte De Swart

French Studies Publications

Malagasy is a language with non-culminating accomplishments. There is, however, a specific prefix (maha-), which appears to entail culmination. Moreover, verbs prefixed with maha- display a range of interpretations: causative, abilitive, ‘manage to’, and unintentionality. This paper accounts for these two aspects of this prefix with a unified semantic analysis. In particular, maha- encodes double prevention, as proposed by Wolff (2007, 2014) for English predicates like enable. The double prevention configuration is associated with a circumstantial modal base, which leads to culminating readings in the past and future. As such, this paper supports a more fine-grained theory …

Book Review: Mitchell, R., Tracy-Ventura, N., & Mcmanus, K. (Eds.). (2015). Social Interaction, Identity And Language Learning During Residence Abroad., Roswita Dressler

Comparative and International Education / Éducation Comparée et Internationale

No abstract provided.

Maintaining The Japan Connection: The Impact Of Study Abroad On Japanese Language Learners’ Life Trajectories And Ongoing Interaction With Japanese Speakers, Rikki Campbell

Comparative and International Education / Éducation Comparée et Internationale

This article explores the post-study abroad life trajectories of learners of Japanese. Drawing upon data collected from eight interviewees, it presents the experiences of study abroad returnees’ ongoing engagement with Japan and Japanese speakers once they were removed from the study abroad environment. In particular, it focuses on the impact of study abroad on ongoing studies and career trajectory, and examines ongoing interaction with Japanese speakers throughout these key life stages. Through the lens of possible selves theory (Markus & Nurius, 1986), this study also examines how the informants’ ongoing engagement with the target language is reflected in …

The Post-Sojourn In Study Abroad Research—Another Frontier, John L. Plews

Comparative and International Education / Éducation Comparée et Internationale

No abstract provided.

Full-On Stating, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

What distinguishes full-on stating a proposition from merely communicating it? For instance, what distinguishes claiming/asserting/saying that one has never smoked crack cocaine from merely implying/conveying/hinting this? The enormous literature on ‘assertion’ provides many approaches to distinguishing stating from, say, asking and commanding: only the former aims at truth; only the former expresses one’s belief; etc. But this leaves my question unanswered, since in merely communicating a proposition one also aims at truth, expresses a belief, etc. My aim is not to criticize extant accounts of the state-vs.-merely-convey contrast, but rather to draw on clues from Dummett, functional linguistics and moral …

Verbing And Nouning, Grace Gomashie, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

This brief encyclopedia entry addresses three questions: What are verbing and nouning? Why are they important for language evolution? And are prescriptive grammarians right to be so unreceptive?

Cuasi Factivos, Axel Barcelo Aspeitia, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

We introduce a construction which we label 'quasi-factive'. They are heard like factives, in that we immediately take the complement to be true. Yet they aren't really factive at all. Examples include: 'It's not widely known that Marta was born in Canada' (because she was born in Uruguay); 'Don't tell anyone that Carlos will run as a candidate' (because he won't); 'Did it bother Jane that Miguel came?' (no, because Miguel didn't come). We identify sub-categories of our quasi-factives, and then tentatively explore a pragmatic explanation of how they work their magic.

Towards News Verification: Deception Detection Methods For News Discourse, Yimin Chen, Victoria L. Rubin, Niall Conroy

FIMS Presentations

News verification is a process of determining whether a particular news report is truthful or deceptive. Deliberately deceptive (fabricated) news creates false conclusions in the readers’ minds. Truthful (authentic) news matches the writer’s knowledge. How do you tell the difference between the two in an automated way? To investigate this question, we analyzed rhetorical structures, discourse constituent parts and their coherence relations in deceptive and truthful news sample from NPR’s “Bluff the Listener”. Subsequently, we applied a vector space model to cluster the news by discourse feature similarity, achieving 63% accuracy. Our predictive model is not significantly better than chance …

Brevity, By Laurence Goldstein, Monica Mcmillan, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

No abstract provided.

Philosophy Of Linguistics, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

Rather than attempting to survey the rich array of topics within Philosophy of Linguistics, this article focuses on two questions: “What kind of thing is Linguistics about?” and “What is the proper evidence-base for Linguistics?” After describing various exclusionary answers, it argues for Pluralism on both fronts: the objects of study in Linguistics are metaphysical hybrids, with physical, mental, abstract and social facets; and evidence from every domain should in principle be welcomed.

The Logogenesis Of Writing To Learn: A Systemic Functional Perspective., Perry Klein, Len Unsworth

Education Publications

Writing to learn has become an important practice in science education. How is scientific knowledge constructed during writing? To investigate this question, we examined the process through which four university students constructed written explanations of either projectile motion or buoyancy. The analysis, informed by systemic functional linguistics, focused on the mapping of semantic elements to grammatical choices, and the way in which this mapping unfolded throughout the course of each text. The texts began largely congruently; grammar mapped closely to experience. Gradually, each text shifted toward greater use of grammatical metaphor. Nominalization allowed propositions and sequences of events to serve …

Revisiting Pragmatic Abilities In Autism Spectrum Disorder, Jessica De Villiers, Brooke Myers, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

In a 2007 paper, we argued that speakers with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) exhibit pragmatic abilities which are surprising given the usual understanding of communication in that group. That is, it is commonly reported that people diagnosed with an ASD have trouble with metaphor, irony, conversational implicature and other non-literal language. This is not a matter of trouble with knowledge and application of rules of grammar. The difficulties lie, rather, in successful communicative interaction. Though we did find pragmatic errors within literal talk, the transcribed conversations we studied showed many, many successes. A second paper reinforced our finding of a …

La Psicología De La Justificación, Angeles Erana, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

This essay considers the connections between, on the one hand, two kinds of justification, namely pragmatic and alethic, and on the other hand two cognitive systems, S1 and S2.

Herder And Pragmatics, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

No abstract provided.

Effect Of Dialect On Identification And Severity Of Speech Impairment In Indigenous Australian Children, Bethany J. Toohill, Sharynne Mcleod, Jane Mccormack

Aboriginal Policy Research Consortium International (APRCi)

This study investigated the effect of dialectal difference on identification and rating of severity of speech impairment in children from Indigenous Australian backgrounds. The speech of 15 Indigenous Australian children identified by their parents/caregivers and teachers as having ‘difficulty talking and making speech sounds’ was assessed using the Diagnostic Evaluation of Articulation and Phonology. Fourteen children were identified with speech impairment on the Diagnostic Evaluation of Articulation and Phonology using Standard Australian English (AusE) as the target pronunciation; whereas 13 were identified using Australian Aboriginal English (AAE) as the target. There was a statistically significant decrease in seven children’s severity …

Introduction To The Semantics-Pragmatics Boundary In Philosophy, Maite Ezdurdia, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

An introductory survey of the nature and importance of the semantics-pragmatics boundary.

In Defense Of Public Languages, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

My modest aim in this note is to sketch three interrelated critiques of public languages, and to respond to them. All allegedly support the same conclusion: that, insofar as they even exist, the study of public languages is not a viable scientific project. (Related critiques of semantics, understood as involving word-world relations, will be touched on as well.)

Cultural Brokering And Bicultural Identity: An Exploratory Study, Jorida Cila, Richard Lalonde, Zohrah Haqanee

Western Migration Conference Series

Abstract: Cultural brokering refers to a process where individuals mediate between two parties that are experiencing some type of cultural misunderstanding. Our exploratory study indicates that cultural brokering is a diverse experience that spans the boundaries of one’s family and includes various norms, values and traditions.

Sociolinguistics Barriers: Constructing And Reproducing Temporary Migrants' Social Inequalities, Maria Eugenia De Luna Villalón

Western Migration Conference Series

This study explores the sociolinguistic barriers that Mexican Agricultural Temporary Workers (MATW) experience during their temporary stays in Canada. Following an ethnographic approach, some of the findings were that the sociolinguistic barriers lead to sociolinguistic dependency, increasing and perpetuating human and social inequalities of the MATW.

The Challenge Of Successful Integration For Francophone Immigrants Within Minority Communities, Suzanne N. Huot, Belinda Dodson, Debbie Rudman

Western Migration Conference Series

A critical ethnography was undertaken to explore the integration experiences of French-speaking newcomers from visible minority groups residing with the London, Ontario Francophone minority community. Findings highlight a complex negotiation process involving learning the tacit social norms characterizing the host society.

The Role Of Psychology In The Philosophy Of Language, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

Are psychological facts relevant to philosophy of language; and, in particular, does scientific psychology have a legitimate role to play? For example, is it methodologically permissible for philosophers of language to rely upon evidence from neurological development, experiments about processing, brain scans, clinical case histories, longitudinal studies, questionnaires, etc.? If so, why? These two questions are the focus of this survey. I address them in two stages. Psychology may seem obviously relevant. I thus begin by introducing arguments against relevance, to motivate the discussion. I will urge that these ultimately fail, and that the appearance of relevance should be taken …

Pragmatic Impairments, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

This review essay addresses the question, "What, properly speaking, is a pragmatic impairment?" Drawing on work from two recent books, it presents three possible answers, and evaluates them.