Competing criteria for error gravity

Thirty judges (ten native-speaker teachers of English, ten Greek teachers of English, ten educated English native-speakers who were not teachers) judged the seriousness of 32 errors made by Greek-speaking students of English in their penultimate year of High School. Both groups of native-speakers were more lenient than the Greek teachers. The three groups differed in their assessment of the relative seriousness both of individual errors and of categories of error. In judging the seriousness of errors, the Greek teachers made reference to the 'basic-ness' of the rules infringed, while the non-teachers depended almost exclusively on the criterion of intelligibility. The English teachers made use of both criteria, but showed some preference for that of intelligibility. It is suggested that if the objective of teaching is the development of communicative competence, then the work must be assessed with reference to the effectiveness of the communication that it achieves, i.e. to its intelligibility. © 1982 Oxford University Press

Word Order flexibility and adjacency preferences: Competing forces and tension in the Greek VP

The present paper aims at further investigating the relative degree of flexibility of constituent order in Greek, which has been classified as a free word order language (Tzartzanos 1946, 1963; Greenberg 1963; Philippaki-Warburton 1982, 1985, 1987; Lascaratou 1984, 1989, 1994, among others). In this study we present additional evidence in support of the view expressed in Lascaratou (1989, 1994, 1999) that, though very flexible, Greek word order is not completely free, but rather it is the result of tension between competing forces determining linear arrangements. Focusing on the analysis of various VP structures drawn from the Hellenic National Corpus (HNC)(tm), we observe that no single (syntactic and/or lexical/semantic) factor appears to override the others in a salient manner, the relative strength of each individual factor not always being clearly and reliably measurable. In particular, it seems that constituent length does not constitute a more important factor than the syntactic and/or lexical/semantic relations holding between elements in the Greek VP. What is more, with respect to the concept of "adjacency" put forward by Hawkins (2001, 2004) to interpret the preference for certain linearization patterns vs. others, we propose that constituent length essentially operates in a substantially different way and direction than syntactic and/or lexical/semantic dependency relations. More specifically, while-for parsing efficiency-constituent length may often be responsible for the postposition of heavy constituents thus resulting in the disruption of adjacency by separating elements which "belong together", syntactic and/or lexical/semantic relations, on the other hand, intrinsically motivate the adjacency of elements which "belong together", thus resisting any rearrangement that would bring them apart. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden

The passive voice in Modern Greek

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Exploring "happiness" and "pain" across languages and cultures

This paper argues that the cross-linguistic study of subjective experience as expressed, described and construed in language cannot be set on a sound footing without the aid of a systematic and non-Anglocentric approach to lexical semantic analysis. This conclusion follows from two facts, one theoretical and one empirical. The first is the crucial role of language in accessing and communicating about feelings. The second is the demonstrated existence of substantial, culture-related differences between the meanings of emotional expressions in the languages of the world. We contend that the NSM approach to semantic and cultural analysis (Wierzbicka 1996; Gladkova 2010; Levisen 2012; Goddard and Wierzbicka 2014a; Wong 2014; among other works) provides the necessary conceptual and analytical framework to come to grips with these facts. This is demonstrated in practice by the studies of "happiness-like" and "pain-like" expressions across eight languages, undertaken in the present volume. At the same time as probing the precise meanings of these expressions, the authors provide extensive cultural contextualization, showing in some detail how the meanings they are analyzing are truly "cultural meanings". The project exemplified by the volume can also be read as a linguistically-anchored contribution to cultural psychology (Shweder 2004, 2003), the quest to understand and appreciate the mental life of others in a full spirit of psychological pluralism.Arts, Education & Law Group, School of Languages and LinguisticsFull Tex