Language forecasting, i.e., predicting the future state of a language, has long been regarded with a fair amount of skepticism. This is partly due to language change often being considered sudden, random, unpredictable, and viewed as the result of complex interacting factors that are not well understood (e.g., Keller 1994:72; Bauer 1994:25; Labov…

The system of second person singular forms of address (2PS) in Medellín, Colombia is tripartite consisting of "tú, vos," and "usted," while also including the existence of a dual "usted." The current study compares usage of the intimate "usted" versus the distant "usted" with data from an oral…

We introduce the Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe (CSYE), an Open Access digital language archive based on several hundred testimony interviews with Holocaust survivors from the USC Shoah Foundation. The testimonies are a uniquely rich source of information on all aspects of European Yiddish: its regional dialects, grammatical structures,…

Background: Research on the grammatical characteristics of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) across languages has challenged accounts about the nature of DLD. Studies of the characteristics of DLD in different languages can reveal which components of DLD emerge irrespective of language and which components are language specific.…

This article sheds light on the linguistic and extralinguistic conditions that determine the likelihood of L1 grammatical attrition in late sequential bilinguals. We explore whether aspectual interpretations associated with the present tense may be a vulnerable area for the native grammar of 30 late Spanish-English bilinguals who have settled in…

We provide an account of the developmental trajectory of Emirati Arabic negation particles. We treat the non-verbal predicate negator (NVPN) "mub" as a negative copula, in contrast to the verbal predicate negator (VPN) "maa," which encodes sentential negation in verbal and existential contexts. The analysis is supported by…

This study examines the comprehension of verbal passives by children acquiring European Portuguese, in particular with respect to the predictions of the Universal Phase Requirement (UPR) and the Universal Freezing Hypothesis (UFH) regarding children's performance with different types of predicates. Both hypotheses entail the prediction that…

While synonymy has been extensively studied, few studies have examined the ditransitive construction of synonyms across English varieties. Informed by construction grammar viewing pattern-meaning combinations as constructions and using a 1.9-billion-word corpus of texts from 20 countries, this article analyzes four different ways of expressing…

In the age when environmental sustainability is among the chief concerns and goals of communities around the world, a number of linguistic studies have been conducted to illuminate the roles of language in protection and destruction of ecological systems. Most of the studies, however, focus on written and/or formal discourses. The present study…

Linguistic plurality is a situation in which a speech community speaks more than one language. It is a complex sociolinguistic phenomenon that helps explain the complexity of human nature. Human beings cannot exist in isolation and are therefore inclined towards interaction and transaction. The need and desire to interact leads to language…

Children's acquisition of directional verbs in sign languages has received a lot of attention, but less is known about the sociocultural process of using these verbs, especially in the context of emerging sign languages in diverse language ecologies. Directional verbs are a common grammatical phenomenon of many sign languages in which some verbs…

This study investigates the subject-verb (SV) concord of nouns with Latin plural endings in Philippine English. Despite the seemingly straightforward nature of SV agreement, it poses challenges for first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) English learners. Data from the GloWbe and NOW corpora were analyzed to identify the nouns' SV concord…

This study aims at investigating how loanwords from Japanese and Korean are used in informal written Cantonese media discourse, including print and social media. Data from these media were collected from designated websites for 15?min every other day over a two-week period. The results show that loanwords from Korean, being written in a…

Feature-based approaches to acquisition principally focus on second language (L2) learners' ability to perceive non-native consonants when the features required are either contrastively present or entirely absent from the first language (L1) grammar. As features may function contrastively or allophonically in the consonant and/or vowel systems of…

The article focuses on a current issue in modern linguistics: linguistic consciousness. Linguistic consciousness refers to the outcomes of mental activity, perception and assimilation of information verbalized by means of the national language. Theoretical issues with the functioning of the term of "linguistic consciousness" in…