Miniature language learning has been widely used to study the causality of language universals. However, factors that have been shown to affect language acquisition in other paradigms are understudied in miniature language learning, which calls into question results that claim to uncover universal biases. In this dissertation, I ask how the…

Languages in the Mesoamerican linguistic area have been reported to lack a dedicated means of expressing the privative meaning that encodes the absence of a participant in a situation. This micro-typological study identifies alternative strategies that the languages in this area employ to function without dedicated privative markers, namely…

At an overarching level this paper attempts to draw attention to emerging trends in the humanities where alternative ways of doing science reconfigure epistemological traditions and research methodologies, the role of intellectuals and their engagement with current conditions of the world, including ways in which scholars gazes are constituted.…

The study aims at investigating the discourse marker "hasa" 'now' in Jordanian Arabic using relevance theory. The study also examined the grammaticalization of "hasa" and how it developed to be a discourse marker. The study also explored the functions of "hasa" in Jordanian Arabic. The data, which consisted of 500…

This article combines research results centred on theory of mind (ToM) from cognitive and developmental psychology (Goldman 2006; Apperly 2010; Wilkinson and Ball 2012) with the notion of intersubjectivity in usage-based linguistics (i.a. Verhagen 2005; Nuyts 2012; Traugott 2012). It identifies some of the controversies in the literature from both…

This book contributes to understanding research approaches for studying multilingualism in the context of contemporary superdiversity, in environments that are being dramatically transformed by transnational migration and movement of peoples. It explores language in urban contexts: the city as a site for experimentation and creativity in language…

The Betawi language is one of the endangered languages that must be saved uniquely and comprehensively. The Betawi language speakers occupy a regional position in the heart of the Indonesian state capital, Jakarta and its surroundings. The challenge of pressure, intimidation, interference, influence, and the shadow of other regional languages or…

This study is the first to explore language attitudes of the endangered Faifi language in SA. Understanding these attitudes is crucial for future language revitalization efforts. Employing a conceptual framework from LA research, data were collected via an online Arabic questionnaire with a sample of 258 participants. This paper aims to explore…

Applying an approach termed "citizen sociolinguistics" offers a unique opportunity to capture a large corpus of naturally occurring language data, especially fleeting interactions. Drawing on citizen science innovations in the natural sciences, citizen sociolinguistics recruits and trains scientists to complete data-related tasks such as…

Although still disputed by some authors, complement anaphora interpretations are widely accepted today. However, they are marked and subject to strict interpretation conditions. Most commonly, monotone decreasing quantifiers facilitate a salient complement set interpretation that is suitable for subsequent anaphoric reference, whereas monotone…

This paper discussed the relationship between language, ecology, and culture, and claimed that the study of linguistic communication as pragmatics should not be confined to the traditional context, but should focus on a broader ecological environment. It analyzed the context of practical communication from the perspective of language ecology…

This paper presents the results from two studies on anaphoric reference to quantifying expressions (QEs) in Swedish, contributing to the current cross-linguistic discussion on this issue. For English it has been shown that the polarity of the QE (positive vs negative) determines the anaphoric set reference (to the referens set, REFSET, or to the…

Understanding how language is used in specific contexts and the reasons for this can be helped by examining historical change in genres. In this study focusing on business communication, texts serving the same purpose of demanding payment for a debt but separated by 4,000 years are analysed. The ancient text is a Sumerian cuneiform tablet which is…

In this response to commentators, I agree with those who suggested that the distinction between exemplar- and abstraction-based accounts is something of a false dichotomy and therefore move to an abstractions-made-of-exemplars account under which (a) we store all the exemplars that we hear (subject to attention, decay, interference, etc.) but (b)…

For more than a decade, research on heritage speakers' (HSs') mood selection has documented a high degree of variability in their interpretation and use of mood morphology in variable contexts. Most of the previous literature, however, has focused on late-acquired alternations, and often limited analyses to one form (i.e., subjunctive), making it…