Linguistics International Journal

Teaching Second Language Learners How to Make Invitations and Refusals Using Preference Organization

2022-01-26T01:03:46-07:00

This study investigated the effects on instruction on second language learner ability to perform invitations and refusals. For invitations, the instructional targets were formulaic sequences for pre-invitations and invitations. For refusals, the instructional target was preference organization, specifically, markers to show dispreference. Novice Japanese learners of English (n = 42) received four 20-minute treatments and data were collected on a pretest, midterm test, and posttest. The data collection instrument consisted of four elicited role plays, two invitation-acceptance sequences and two invitation-refusal sequences, between pairs of participants. The results showed that instruction had a positive effect on pre-invitation usage and a negative effect on the usage of direct negation (uttering “no” or saying that one dislikes the stated activity) during refusals. However, both explicit and implicit instruction had little to no effect on dispreference marker usage. The results indicated that preference organization might lack saliency for learners, and therefore require longer, more explicit instruction to increase interactional competence.

Historical Practices of Standardization in Spanish: A Preliminary Study of Phonetic and Orthographic Changes in the Siete Partidas

2022-01-26T01:08:07-07:00

The current study examines early-modern standardization practices of Spanish that occurred through the reduction or elimination and codification of linguistic variation, specifically the standardization of graphic-phonetic features of Spanish. By comparing various manuscripts with the first printed version of the Siete Partidas--a legal text during the reign of Alfonso X—four graphic-phonetic variables are examined: ff/f, d/t, o/u, and e/i. Findings suggest that there is a movement toward standard variants in the more recent manuscripts, namely f, d, u, and i. It is argued that the republication and printing of the Siete Partidas not only had the purpose of linguistic updating, but also had the objective of standardizing these four variables (Harris-Northall, 1996; Tejedo-Herrero, 2009).

Functional Grammar Systemic Approach in Selected Essays of Junior High School Students: A Metadiscourse Analysis

2022-01-26T01:13:13-07:00

The study determined the metadiscourse frequently occurring in a writing discourse genre among selected junior high school students of San Antonio Integrated School, San Antonio, Science City of Muñoz, Nueva Ecija. The study followed the descriptive qualitative design of research. Female respondents slightly outnumbered the males. Most respondents used Tagalog at home, were Catholics, and had either their fathers or their mothers working. The study revealed the most frequently used transitions, frame markers, hedgers, boosters, attitude markers, engagement markers, and self-mentions. Findings also indicated that no significant relationship was noted between sex and metadiscourse, language used at home and metadiscourse, religion and metadiscourse, parental work and metadiscourse.

Framework for Improving English to Hindi Rule-Based Translation System

2022-01-26T01:21:20-07:00

Presently the information captured through Morpheme, Lexeme or Word-based Morphological Analysis, for word or words in phrases is not enough for Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems as words have different meanings as individuals or in groups. Since some phrases are well structured, sentence level morphological analyzer provides effective knowledge base for NLP. This paper presents work of phrase level and word level morph analyzers for English-Hindi language pair(s) of (most vibrant) tourism domain. The approach proposed is of identifying unique sentence structures capable of representing complete targeted corpus. First the available corpus is used to analyze sentence structures with the help of available and developed IT tools to provide the necessary information such as occurrence of the “group of words”, classify these group of words into various grammatical categories, study their behavior in rule-based machine translation system, find out the divergence between human and machine interpretation and find suitable rules to reduce the divergence. This captured intelligence can be useful as knowledge base for NLP systems.

A Qualitative Study Investigating Roles of Parents with Low and Middle SES in Supporting Their Children’s Foreign Language Development: Perspectives of Nine Advanced Learners

2022-01-26T01:39:11-07:00

A wealth of literature on parental factors has seen a significant correlation between the family’s socio-economic status (SES) and learners’ linguistic performance. However, some learners from less privileged backgrounds still reach a high level of foreign language proficiency. In this study, the researcher conducted a qualitative case study to understand how nine advanced EFL college learners from low and intermediate SES families perceived the role and support their parents afforded in their English learning process. Data gathered in this study included a questionnaire, semi-structured interviews, and written narratives. A constant comparison method was employed to analyze the data collected. Participants in this study explicitly credited and attributed their language learning success to their parents, who acted as agents of change in locating, securing, and orchestrating various English learning resource, as well as served as learning cheerleaders/collaborators, nurturers/motivators, coercers, and role models while affording financial, social, cognitive, and emotional support to scaffold their children’s level of English proficiency. These supports are in accordance with the values and beliefs of the social, cultural, and historical contexts where the participants and their parents resided. The parents’ ability to come up with creative strategies, their attitude towards learning, and belief in learners offset the disadvantaged factors and account for their children’s FL learning success. Implications drawn from this study are to encourage parents from disadvantaged SES backgrounds to make use of available public resources, as well as to help them develop supporting strategies and identify agents to secure learning resources otherwise unattainable.

A Comparative Study of Corpus-based and Corpus-driven Approaches

2022-01-26T01:48:02-07:00

Based on the comparative method, this article seeks to conduct a feature-by-feature comparison between the corpus-based and corpus-driven approaches in corpus linguistics. The similarity between the corpus-based and corpus-driven approaches is present through the use of corpus as the primary tool to collect and analyse data. Meanwhile, the differences between these approaches are present in four aspects: top-down vs. bottom-up approaches, different selection and sampling methods, opposite views towards the corpus annotation, and different paradigmatic claims. The most significant advantages of the corpus-based approach lie in the values added by annotation and flexible size. However, its disadvantages include subjective and incorrect annotation and overreliance on intuition. Moreover, the primary advantages of the corpus-driven approach include objective perspective, novel methodology, and full exploitation of corpus evidence, while its weakness includes the difficulty in collecting meaningful data and formulating a theory based on the corpus and the rejection to annotate corpus.