Vol. XXIII Nr. 1

DOI: 10.31178/BWPL.23.1

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Piergiorgio Mura

Speakers selection for a matched-guise technique in Sardinia: How to appropriately select valid representatives of Sardinian and Italian

Abstract: This article deals with the selection of speakers for a Matched-Guise Technique to be conducted in Sardinia, with the final aim of studying attitudes towards Sardinian and Italian. Speakers who could validly represent the two main varieties of Sardinian – Campidanese and Logudorese – and the variety of Italian typically spoken in Sardinia were sought after. Following mainly Newman et al. (2008) and Nejjari et al. (2019), twenty candidates produced a reading in Sardinian (either in Campidanese or in Logudorese) and in Italian: the nativeness of their Sardinian voices and the accentedness (or typicalness) of their Italian voices were evaluated by sixty non-linguists with bilingual competence in Sardinian and Italian. Seven candidates out of twenty were perceived as not native or typical enough to be accepted as “matched guises”. This demonstrates that the selection of appropriate guises should not rely only on the judgment of researchers, but it should also rely on the perceptions of linguistically naïve evaluators, especially when speakers of minority languages in which literacy is normally not acquired are asked to read aloud a text. Nevertheless, the procedure carried out in this study allowed us to identify speakers with the required level of nativeness while speaking Sardinian (Logudorese or Campidanese) and with the required level of typicalness while speaking Italian. Moreover, it has been found that male candidates were perceived as having a more pronounced regional accent than female candidates when speaking Italian; and Logudorese candidates reached higher peak scores than Campidanese candidates, especially when they got judged on the nativeness of their Sardinian voices. Even regardless of the specific outcomes though, the procedure described in this article provides a helpful contribution for the selection of speakers in matched-guise experiments to be conducted in contexts where a national majority language and an unstandardised minority language are involved.

Keywords: speakers selection, matched-guise technique, language attitudes, Sardinian, Italian

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Imola-Ágnes Farkas  

Towards a unified analysis of three cross-linguistically correlated telic constructions in Romanian 

Abstract: Recent approaches to the theory of aspectuality assume that there is a conceptual similarity and cross-linguistic correlation between the (un)availability of goal-of-motion, strong resultative and aspectual cognate object constructions. This paper, examining Romanian data, brings further evidence in favour of the parallel between these three telic constructions and supports the tight correlation between them. It shows that although, at first glance, this verb-framed language shows patterns that seem to argue against the above correlation and especially against the unavailability of these structures, they prove to be only apparent counterexamples to it. Moreover, without questioning the typological classification of Romanian as a verb-framed language or the validity of the cross-linguistic correlation between these constructions, it reveals that a more detailed analysis of aspectual cognate object constructions in Romanian requires a different and more careful approach, which also takes into consideration the source of the diachronic data.

Keywords: goal-of-motion structure, strong  resultative construction, aspectual cognate object construction, cross-linguistic correlation, verb-framed language, Romanian

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Andrei A. Avram  

Revisiting the Dutch lexical contribution to Malacca Portuguese Creole

Abstract:The paper looks at the Dutch-derived loanwords attested in Malacca Portuguese Creole. The sources cover a period ranging from the last decades of the 19th century to the present day and it consists mainly of lexicographical works, but also includes folk songs, proverbs and religious texts. The loanwords of Dutch origin identified are first listed, with the proposed etyma. This is followed by a discussion of the following topics: other potential etyma and the possibility of multiple etymologies; the proportion of Dutch loanwords in the lexicon of Malacca Portuguese Creole; the phonological adjustment of Dutch loanwords; the syntactic categories to which Dutch loanwords belong; the semantic fields in which Dutch loanwords are found; the semantic changes undergone by some of the Dutch loanwords. Also discussed are some implications of the findings.

Keywords: Dutch, loanwords, Malacca Portuguese Creole 

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Samuel Figueira-Cardoso & Alexandre da Silva Borges

Brief history of general languages and language policies in colonial Brazil

Abstract: Brazil is a multilingual and multicultural country and was so even before the Europeans arrived in the territory. Over the centuries, contact and conflict between European and African languages with indigenous languages have influenced the variety of Portuguese spoken in the country since the 16th century. In this paper, we present an overview of Brazil’s languages, referring to the so-called general languages and the language policies in favor of the Portuguese language in the period. To this end, we resort to the contributions of scholars who investigate the use of language in society or “social history of language” (Burke 2002, Freire 2003); some concepts derived from the field of language policy; notions of heritage and indigenous culture. It is shown that the policies of colonization were harmful to linguistic diversity, as in the case of the Nheengatu language spoken until today in the North of the country, due to the continuous resistance of the speakers of the language.

Keywords: general languages, language policy, multilingualism, Amazon region

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REVIEWS

Sven Leuckert. 2019. Topicalization in Asian Englishes: Forms, Functions, and Frequencies of a Fronting Construction. (Reviewed by Gabriela Anidora Brozbă)

Ursula Stephany and Ayhan Aksu-Koç (eds.). 2021. Development of Modality in First Language Acquisition. (Reviewed by Veronica Tomescu)

Sean Wallis. 2021. Statistics in Corpus Linguistics Research: A New Approach. (Reviewed by Mihaela Buzec)

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