Concentric - Volume 48, Issue 1, 2022

This study aims to examine the roles of second language (L2) learners’ autistic traits and working memory capacity in detecting prosodic boundaries. Forty-six learners of English with Mandarin as their native language completed questionnaires on personality and cognitive assessment – an Autism-Spectrum Quotient questionnaire (AQ) and a Working Memory questionnaire (WM). They also completed a Rapid Prosody Transcription (RPT) task in which they were asked to mark prosodic boundaries produced by Barack Obama in recordings of his Weekly Address. The results revealed that autistic traits and working memory capacity were positively correlated with each other, and attention to detail was the primary predictor for the detection of boundary tones. These findings provide insight into L2 learners’ detection of prosodic boundaries along the autistic traits and working memory capacity continuum and further indicate that EFL instructions should take individual differences into consideration when assessing L2 learners’ performance in listening or comprehension tasks.

In modern Chinese, the adverb chi-zao is regarded as an adjective-adjective compound, with morphemes chi ‘late’ and zao ‘early’ as extreme poles in a gradable temporality. The formation of chi-zao as an antonymous compound has not received much attention from a diachronic construction grammar perspective. This study reports on the historical change of chi-zao as evidence showing the interplay of antonymous compounds and constructionalization in modern Chinese. Based on corpus analysis, I found that the formation of chi-zao as a lexical construction inherits from previous changes but emerges instantaneously in Pre-Modern Chinese, where its form has been condensed and its meaning has been bleached to indicate subjectivity. Three arguments shed light on the model of constructionalization: (1) constructionalization at the compound level can be associated with three motivations: subjectivity, frequency, and metaphor; and (2) the operation of constructionalization is at work not only at the sentential and phrasal level but also at the morphological level of compound word formation in Chinese; (3) rhetoric as an output of language use plays a part in the development of constructionalization in relation to antonymous compounds.

This work investigates the syntax of nominal modification involving the linker a in Siwkolan Amis, one of the dialects of Amis, an Austronesian language spoken in Taiwan. Based on the two observed types of NP-ellipsis patterns and the formal licensing condition, I argue that Amis displays two types of modification. Modifiers in direct modification are functional heads projecting extended functional projections of NP, whereas those in indirect modification are modifier phrases base-generated at [Spec, ModP]. This distinction adds weight to J. Wu’s (2003) view that relative clauses and description-denoting modifiers marked by -ay are clausal modifiers that have a full-fledged CP structure from a cartographic perspective. Furthermore, I argue that a projects the Modifier Phrase (ModP) and is a modificatory clitic endowed with a [+mod] feature that attaches to a head element moving from a lower head position to form a morphological word. Very much in line with Philip (2012), the proposed analysis suggests that a is endowed with an interpretative profile in marking a modification relation between an extended functional projection (a modifier phrase) and a dependent word (a modified noun) in the nominal domain. Issues involved in dealing with the structure of Amis complex noun phrases are discussed.

This study takes a corpus pragmatics approach to investigate the use of evaluative language in professor reviews, focusing on how review writers express evaluation through recurrent four-word sequences and the pragmatic functions of these sequences in positive and negative reviews on the website, RateMyProfessors.com. Based on an analysis of a 2.9-million-word corpus of free text comments, the findings indicate that positive reviews used more 4-grams, and more varied types, than negative ones. The 4-word sequences were found to carry out four pragmatic functions: attitudinal evaluation, reader engagement, referential expression, and discourse organization. While a similar distribution of the main functional categories was observed among the top 100 4-grams in both review types, with evaluative clusters being most predominant, distinctive intra-genre variations were found in the ways review writers employed different functional sub-categories. For example, positive reviews relied heavily on hedged suggestion 4-grams to engage readers, whereas negative reviews used directive 4-grams for the same purpose. These findings suggest the important role of multi-word sequences in the understanding of evaluative resources in professor reviews of different valence types.