A comparison of L2 and L1 speakers’ production of adverb positions in the Cardiff variety of Welsh

The grammaticality of adverb positions varies by language. Consequently, L2 and L1 speakers may differ from each other in their acquisition of adverb positions. Given that L2 Welsh speakers outnumber L1 Welsh speakers in Wales, differences in acquisition may change which adverb positions occur in contemporary Welsh. This study compares which adverb positions L2 and L1 speakers produce in the spoken data from Cardiff in the CorCenCC corpus (Knight et al., 2020) in order to identify any differences in acquisition. Comparisons of L2 and L1 English speakers find that L2 speakers consistently acquire novel adverb positions yet they frequently use ungrammatical adverb positions. They also do not acquire additional constraints on adverb positions. This study largely reinforces these findings. First, L2 Welsh speakers produce every adverb position that L1 speakers produce. Secondly, although the definiteness constraint that Borsley et al. (2009: 50) describe is not productive in the sample of Cardiff Welsh speakers, L1 speakers exhibit a heaviness constraint on V-Adv-O that L2 speakers do not. Therefore, L1 transfer neither inhibits the acquisition of adverb positions nor facilitates the acquisition of additional constraints. However, unlike L2 English speakers, L2 Welsh speakers do not produce ungrammatical adverb positions. This likely derives from the lack of transferable adverb positions between Welsh and English rather than a lack of transfer. Therefore, this sample of Cardiff Welsh reinforces the crosslinguistic consistency of L2 speakers’ acquisition of adverb positions. It also suggests that L2 Welsh speakers most likely diverge from L1 speakers in the contexts in which they use adverb positions rather than the adverb positions that they use.

The L3 acquisition of English tense-aspect system by Uygur speakers with L2 Mandarin Chinese

This paper examines the role of Lexical Aspect Hypothesis (LAH) and linguistic typological similarity in the L3 acquisition of English tense and aspect among Uygur speakers with L2 Mandarin Chinese (Chinese hereafter). LAH asserts that the emerging verbal inflections at the early stage of language acquisition primarily function as markers of the lexical aspect and thus predicts universality for acquisition of tense and aspect. However, with an assumption of language transfer, the typological closer relationship of Uygur with English in terms of the tense and aspect system was expected to trigger L1 transfer in L3 acquisition. The study analyzed the English tense and aspect forms used by the participants (N = 25) for verbs of four distinct lexical aspects (50 target items) in contexts of past. The result shows that the lexical aspect influences the appropriate use of past tense—past tense marker aligned with telic predicates (achievements and accomplishments), -ing with activities (for inappropriate uses), and nonpast with states (for inappropriate uses), and the influence is observed at each proficiency level. The results show little evidence for language transfer in the acquisition of the English past tense, either from L1 Uygur or L2 Chinese; instead, the data suggest that L3 acquisition of tense and aspect is more subject to acquisitional universality (LAH)

A dialogic view on construal: A study on the instantiations of wh-interrogative words in wh-dialogues

As the basic notion in cognitive grammar, construal is expounded from various aspects in terms of different conversational purposes in linguistic communication. Based on the well-discussed dimensions of construal from Langacker’s view, this study investigates the dimensions of construal from a dialogic view, particularly in cases of English wh-dialogues, with the aim of deciphering how the dialogic focus, the wh-word positioned at the head of the wh-question, is cognitively grounded in the answer. According to the ways that such wh-words are grounded, the dynamic adjustment of dialogic focuses in wh-dialogues is then examined, hopefully to shed some light on the interpretation of the utterance meaning from a dialogic view

The developmental trajectory of mandarin Chinese-speaking children’s pure metonymy comprehension ability

This empirical study investigates Chinese children’s developmental trajectory of pure metonymy comprehension. In the light of the experiment design in Jiang’s (2019) and Köder and Falkum’s (2020) studies, the present study, adopting a quantitative approach, employed a modified behavioral experiment and an eye-tracking experiment. Drawing on the experimental data, the study finds that: a) children’s metonymy comprehension performance showed a tendency towards the U-shape in the behavioral experiment tasks; b) children’s target (metonymy) fixation proportion, however, developed with age in the eye-tracking tasks; c) children’s metonymy comprehension not only developed with age but also showed different features in different difficulty levels of metonymies. Thus, this study explains the U-shape by arguing that age-4 and -5 children’s pure metonymy comprehension ability can be masked not only by a literal preference reported in Köder and Falkum’s (2020) study but also by the high randomness of task results of the age-3 participants and the high level of difficulty of culture-related metonymies. Moreover, the study also argues that year six is a crucial stage for children’s metonymy comprehension development, which provides implications for children’s early figurative language education

Regional Differences and Influencing Factors of Psychological Integration of Urban Floating Population in China

Based on the dynamic monitoring survey data of floating population in 2017, this paper analyzes the regional differences and influencing factors of psychological integration of urban floating population in China. The results show that: (1) The psychological integration of floating population is at a high level; (2) there are significant regional differences in the psychological integration of floating population. The psychological integration of Southeast coastal and a few Western cities is lower than the national average level, and the psychological integration of Northeast, Shandong, Sichuan and Chongqing is higher than the national average level; (3) the psychological integration of floating population has spatial agglomeration effect. In addition to Sichuan and Chongqing, hot spots are concentrated in the North and cold spots are concentrated in the Southeast. (4) Factors like owning real estate, employer status and high education level accelerate the psychological integration of floating population; the increase of income is not conducive to psychological integration, which is related to the sense of relative deprivation; participation in the “new rural cooperative medical system” has a restrictive effect on the psychological integration of floating population; The equalization of temporary residence permit/residence permit and basic public services is an important way to realize psychological integration. The rapid development of urban economy is conducive to the psychological integration of floating population. Inter provincial mobility has an inhibitory effect, and the effects of economic development level, family size and local residence time are not significant

A semantic contrastive study of Chinese and English verb “跑/run” from the perspective of cognitive semantics

Based on corpus data, this paper finds that the semantics of “跑/run” have similarities, which lie in the consistency of the central meanings and common usages. The differences are: 1) the meanings of “run” are significantly more than those of “跑”, resulting in a great divergence in the numbers of meanings; 2) compared with “跑”, the implications of “run” display a higher level of specificity. On the basis of cognitive theories, the paper has yielded the following findings. The semantic overlaps of “跑/run” root in their identical prototypical meanings. The semantic differences are generated by the following factors: 1) the image-schema distribution of “run” is wider with more abstract representations than that of “跑”, due to which many unique semantic items come into being; 2) semantic systems of “跑/run” adopt different metaphorical methods, contributing to more comprehensive cognitive domains of the semantic mapping and closer semantic interrelations of “run” than those of “跑”

The Poverty Alleviation Effect of Public Services and Social Development Opportunities

After 2020, the strategic focus of rural poverty reduction will shift from absolute poverty to relative poverty. How to accurately identify the root causes of rural relative poverty and alleviate the problem of rural relative poverty has become the key factor to realize rural revitalization. Using the binary logistic regression model and the comprehensive survey data of Chinese society, it is found that the lack of feasible ability of farmers has an obvious poverty effect. Among them, the lack of basic feasible ability such as physical health and mental health and feasible development ability such as education are important factors leading to farmers’ relative poverty; however, the poverty causing effect of farmers’ willingness to work is not obvious, and the state of relative poverty will stimulate farmers’ willingness to work to a certain extent; increasing the supply of basic public services in rural areas is an important way to alleviate rural relative poverty; increasing rural social development opportunities also has an important effect on poverty alleviation, which can significantly reduce the probability of farmers’ relative poverty

Types of Social Support Associated with Depression in the UK Adult Population

Many well-established sociological studies pertaining to the salubrious link between social relations and mental health have been published. In particular, numerous researchers address the issue of how social isolation and lack of family support and social ties can adversely affect one’s mental well-being. In this paper, we seek to identify and explore the relationships between people who were clinically diagnosed with depression and the aspects of their social environment, namely their social and family circumstances in the UK adult population. One hundred and ten blogs mentioning depression as their main condition were selected from a mental health support website, Time to Change, for analysis. As not many studies have analyzed such narratives, we expected the analysis to provide a fresher and deeper understanding of the experiences of those afflicted with depression. We observed that there is a consistent discourse emphasizing the importance of social support from close loved ones, in particular friends and family members. There is evidence that social circumstances can be mediating factors in depression

A social-cognitive research on metaphor and metonymy: Taking age appellations in Chinese as an example

The process from individual language to communal language, from individual experience to communal embodiment, and from individual cognition to collective cognition is based on human embodiment and social interactions. Metaphor and metonymy are two basic cognitive approaches to the world. Thus, human cognition is metaphorical and metonymic in essence, and metaphonymy is embodied and social in nature. In the perspective of social embodied cognition, this paper, taking social metaphonymy as a theoretical foundation and the Chinese age appellations as the corpus, demonstrates that Chinese age appellation has eight metaphonymic categories, namely, physiology, gender, wisdom, accessories, raising, behavior, animal and plant, and number. The paper, by expounding the embodiment and metaphonymy, aims to reveal metaphonymic cognitive mechanism of Chinese age appellations

A new approach to the study on counterexamples of generic sentences: From the perspective of interactive reference point-target relationship and re-categorization model

Based on deficiencies of existing researches, this paper, aiming at taking the tolerance of counterexamples reflecting seeming syntax-semantic mismatch in generic sentences, and the online cognitive process of these sentences into the same analyzing framework, proposes the Interactive Reference Point-target Relationship and Re-categorization Model (IRPR-RC Model) to give a unified explanation to the main types of counterexample-tolerating generic sentences (GS), thus further fulfilling the generalization commitment of cognitive linguistics. According to this model: 1) there is an interaction relationship between reference points and targets connecting generic words and attribute words in counterexample-tolerating generic sentences (GS); 2) this interactive relationship provides the premise for re-categorization, which selects a particular sub-category and makes it salient. This process can also be viewed as a phenomenon of attribute words coercing the generic words; 3) the model can be divided into three types: Focusing Type, Imbedding Type and Repulsing Type, according to different operation mechanism of IRPR-RC Model in counterexample-tolerating generic sentences (GS)