This paper brings new insight to poverty and social exclusion through an analysis of how poverty-related issues are commented on in the largest online discussion forum in Finland: Suomi24 (‘Finland24’). For data, we use 32,407 posts published in the forum in 2014 that contain the word köyhä (‘poor’) or a predefined semantically similar word. We apply the Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) method, which combines quantitative methods and qualitative discourse analysis. This methodological solution allows us to analyse both large-scale tendencies and detailed expressions and nuances on how poverty is discussed. The quantitative analysis is conducted with topic modelling, an unsupervised machine learning method used to examine large volumes of unlabelled text. Our results show that discussions concerning poverty are multifaceted and can be broken down into several categories, including politics; money, income and spending; and unequal access to goods. This 1 Lehti is the corresponding author. Lehti and Luodonpää-Manni are first authors with equal contribution.
Language learning is one of the key predictors of how well immigrants will integrate into a new society. In many European countries, the resources reserved for language education have proved insufficient as people fleeing the war in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria have entered Europe. This situation has called for ways of mobilising volunteer workers to help newcomers in a coordinated manner. In Finland, a method called Toisto has been developed to enable volunteers with little or no teaching experience to teach the basics of Finnish to newcomers. From the pedagogical and linguistic point of view, Toisto derives from a usage-based notion of language, according to which the spoken modality in general, and modelling-based instruction in particular, can be used to teach grammar without the explicit formulation or explanation of rules. In addition, Toisto aims to compensate for the written language bias very much present in the L2 context in the Finnish education system. In this paper, we outline the theoretical grounding and basic characteristics of the Toisto method. We map the ways in which a usage-based notion of language motivates a communicative, oral language pedagogy, and provide some initial evidence of the feasibility of the method. Finally, we discuss the implications of the Toisto method for adult language education.
This study explores the question of whether native and non-native listeners, i.e. natives familiar with the language they are judging and non-natives who are not, manage to distinguish a foreign accent from a native accent in the speech of native speakers (NSs) and nonnative speakers (NNSs). Participants included 21 speakers (11 NSs and 10 NNSs who were native Turkish speakers) as well as two listener groups that consisted of 61 Finnish listeners (FLs), and 10 Turkish listeners (TLs) without Finnish experience. This study compares accent ratings by these two listener groups that evaluated the 21 spontaneous speech samples for foreign accent using a 9-point scale. The results showed a very significant difference between the listener groups for the NSs but no significant difference for the NNSs. The difference between the FL and the TL groups was because the FLs managed to distinguish the NSs from the NNSs, but otherwise these two listener groups exercised statistically similar ratings. Therefore, these results demonstrate that the listeners’ familiarity with Finnish, the target language, hence listeners’ native speaker status strongly affect ratings of foreign accents, since native listeners could distinguish the NSs, whereas non-native listeners could not. The results suggest that listeners’ familiarity with the target language plays a much more MELIKE UZAL, ERKKI KOMULAINEN, MEHMET AKIF KƖLƖÇ AND OLLI AALTONEN 110 profound role in accent detection than their familiarity with the accent language. Moreover, the results show that contrary to previous research, in the absence of listeners’ familiarity with the target language, it is much more challenging to detect a foreign accent. The results also showed that speech rate correlated with the judgments provided by the TLs but not with the judgments provided by the FLs. This result raises the possibility that there are salient universal features of non-native speech such as speech rate that even non-native listeners unfamiliar with the language they are judging utilize while judging a foreign accent.
Conventionally, ethnographic methods in sociolinguistics aim to discover how language works as “situated social practice and how it is tied to social organisation” (Heller 2011: 10). Within this, ethnography has viewed participant observation as central and essential. More recently ethnographers have moved to combine this with more structured, researcher-facilitated question-based tools such as ethnographic interviews (Sherman Heyl 2001) and focus groups (Suter 2000). This article reports on another creative method, aiming to bring together the strengths of both these approaches to access school-age young people’s orientations to language education policies. There were three main motivations: firstly, to minimise the distracting influence of the researcher’s presence, secondly, to aid in empowering participants, encouraging them into an active role in the research process and thirdly, to avoid favorability bias in participant responses. On the latter point, to truly value the voice of participants you have to find ways to move beyond the “right answer”, which often requires pushing methodological boundaries. I developed a new protocol, ethnographic chats , which I found offered the best of both from existing approaches: a compromise between the immersive depth of participant observation and the greater thematic precision of focus groups or ethnographic interviews. The method was characterised by specific procedural and interactional characteristics of frame and genre, which differentiate it in specific ways from ethnographic interview and focus group methods. Rich data emerged from this process, which would not otherwise have been available. I conclude by outlining the potential for ethnographic chats in other social and geographical contexts.
Review of: Tyysteri, L. & Lehtosalo, K. (eds.) (2013) Hyva sanakirja. Tieteellisia, kaytannollisia ja eettisia nakokulmia leksikografiaan. Turku: University of Turku. Pp. 212.
The Linguistic Association of Finland was founded in 1977 to promote linguistic research and the teaching of linguistics in Finland by offering a forum for discussion, both in Finland and abroad.
The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) is a method of semantic analysis, used for various tasks mainly in the field of linguistic research. A crucial part of the theory is the set of primes, minimal lexical units that are used to explicate words, cultural scripts and other concepts. Identifying the primes in a new language is an opportunity to reinforce and/or revisit the theory. The remarks presented in this paper resulted from the identification process of the Finnish-based NSM primes. The goal of this paper is to direct attention to some fundamental aspects in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage theory, especially to the relation between the universal language-independent NSM concepts and the English-based NSM. A number of remarks are made on the general system of the primes, as the paper points out issues related to e.g. the number, selection and mutual hierarchy of the primes. The economy and logic of certain prime constructions and the argumentation behind allolexy are discussed as well.
This study investigates various communicative functions served by hashtags in written communication on Twitter from a linguistic pragmatic perspective. A tweet containing a hashtag links to, and is ...
Fictive motion is a phenomenon whereby linguistic elements describing motion are used to depict static situations. As a result, static and dynamic situations may be expressed alike. However, it has been argued that the encoding of fictive motion differs from that of actual motion in several aspects; the most significant difference is said to be related to the encoding of space which in fictive motion sentences is more restricted than in actual motion sentences (Matsumoto 1996a, 1996b; Matlock 2004a; Ruppenhofer 2006). The current corpus-based study has compared Estonian fictive and actual motion sentences containing the verbs viima ‘take, lead’, minema ‘go’, suunduma ‘head’, tousma ‘rise’, poorama ‘turn’, uletama ‘cross’, kulgema ‘run, move forward’, and looklema ‘wind’, and focusing on how these sentences encode space. The results of the study showed that the presence of a locative expression is rather verb-specific, although slightly dependent on the type of construction (i.e., fictive or actual motion construction). If locative expression occurred the main influencer of the choice of spatial relation was the type of the verb: Path verbs incorporating the meaning of direction (i.e., viima ‘take, lead’, minema ‘go’, suunduma ‘head’, tousma ‘rise’, poorama ‘turn’) tended to be used together with elements referring to the direction or goal, whereas manner of motion verbs (i.e., kulgema ‘run, move forward’, looklema ‘wind’) and the verb referring to the trajectory of the motion (i.e., uletama ‘cross’) mostly occurred together with elements expressing the location or trajectory. Given this, the consistent windowing hypothesis is proposed.
This corpus-based study of the emergence of epistemic must in English aims to reassess Sweetser‘s (1990) account of the conceptual and historical links between root and epistemic meanings and defends an alternative view of the category of epistemic qualification. After discussing the problems posed by the metaphorical hypothesis, it proposes a frame-based account of modality and of the various meanings of must in the light of which the historical data is re-examined. It is then suggested that the problems with Sweetser‘s analysis spring from the commonly-held view that epistemic meanings are conceptually derived from root ones. The hypothesis is formulated that epistemic qualification, unlike root modality, does not pertain to the schematic system of forcedynamics and that there is no conceptual basis for postulating a general semantic category (known as modality) subsuming root and epistemic meanings. The rise of epistemic must is explained by the fact that root meanings are underpinned by complex conceptual frames which, beside their core force-dynamic structure, also contain components that pertain to epistemicity and which, in certain contexts, become so prominent that they take over the primary root interpretation.
This paper focuses on the complex factors which ren der subject domains opaque to subextraction. Subjects have been held to be islands f or extractability possibilities. Gallego & Uriagereka (2006) suggest that sub-extraction is banned from subjects when they occupy the specifier position of TP because TP is a phase in Romance. By contrast, I show that this is not the right constraint in langu ages such as Spanish or Italian, in which sub-extraction is licit from both post-verbal and pre-verbal subjects. In addition, English and other non-Romance languages also instantiate cases of sub-extraction from subjects, irrespective of their pre-verbal or post- verbal position. Building on Chomsky’s (2008) notion of phase, I propose that DPs may be s trong or weak phases depending on two major discourse-related factors; namely, Defini teness and Discourse-Linking. Thus, sub-extraction from a weak DP phase is possible if the DP is marked as indefinite and discourse-linked.
The essay makes advances toward identifying the form and function of burlesque narrative as a discursive resource in broadcast interaction. It complements existing studies of burlesque in spoken discourse through the examination of situated interaction in a televised Hungarian political talk show (Sajtoklub). The study includes the analysis of a segment of interaction characterized as a bounded episode of interactionally managed burlesque narrative. Burlesque narratives are identified as narratives in which the speaker adopts a persona and performs imaginary actions in the ideological universe of an adversary that reveal the absurdity of that universe and the insidious motives of the adversary. The burlesque narrative emerges as a speech genre that speakers employ in the specific situational context of the political talk show and the discursive context of perceived political provocation (1) to render the adversary’s stance to a public issue absurd, (2) to mitigate their own accountability for the norm violation that this rendering may constitute in the eye of the lampooned adversary, (3) to create opportunities for participant affiliation by means of humor. The analysis also shows that in the extended context of Hungarian political discourse the burlesque narrative functions as a counterdiscourse in opposition to a perceived dominant political discourse.
In this article it is claimed that language contact has led to structural homogeneity in the languages of Mesoamerica. Mesoamerican languages are demonstrated to be structurally homogeneous insofar as they tend to be consistently right-branching. This tendency can naturally be explained in terms of Hawkins’ (1994, 2004) theory of Early Immediate Constituents (EIC), which predicts that uniform branching facilitates online processing. Adopting an evolutionary model of language change proposed by Kirby (1999), it is argued that Mesoamerican languages have become structurally homogeneous as a result of the adaptive interplay between the generation of structural variation on the one hand, and the process of selection from among existing variants on the other: Language contact acts as a source and amplifier of variation and therefore feeds the evolutionary mechanisms of change. It offers speakers a choice and allows for the selection of those structures which optimize Early Immediate Constituent recognition best.
The formation of slang words in English often relies on the combined action of ellipsis and homophony. Both these processes are also used for humorous effect, and in much the same way, in the creation of nicknames. This article explores how puns based on the ellipsis of homophones or near-homophones (i.e., 'cut-down puns,' as the author terms them) may give rise to nicknames and slang words. In the first part, the author focuses on so-called 'inseparable nicknames' and examines in detail the role of allusions and cut-down puns in their formation. The second section then describes and analyses the coinage of punning slang terms derived from proper names. To this purpose, the author delves into the main subclasses of cut-down puns and, in the final section, gives good evidence of their use by offering a glossary of name-derived slang words, both old and new, drawn from a number of sources.
On the basis of corpus data, it is suggested that a prototypical Finnish idiom is a verb phrase consisting of idiom-prone words, especially basic verbs and body part nouns. The Finnish data indicates that idioms—albeit syntactic phrases—also play an important role in lexicalization, not through the regular lexeme formation processes, i.e. derivation and compounding, but through using idiom constructions with case and/or number inflections, with a relatively simple morphological structure and prototypical simplex words. 1
