'The Social Motivation of Sound Change' was the first of a string of William Labov's publications in the 1960s, challenging the received wisdom that studying language change in progress was impossible. Documenting generational differences in Martha's Vineyarders' pronunciation of /ai/ as in fight and /aw/ as in about in 1961-1962 revealed an ongoing change towards increased centralization of both diphthongs, as confirmed by data from the 1930s. Rather than eliciting isolated words, Labov recorded conversational speech, raising topics of interest to respondents. Interviewing 69 Vineyarders aged 15 - 90 yielded approximately 3500 instances of /ai/ and 1500 of /aw/, coded along a three point scale of centralization. Establishing change in progress, Labov's next task was to explain it. He began with social parameters that became familiar in later studies, partitioning the data in turn by speakers' gender (men > women); place of residence ('up-islanders' > 'down-islanders'); occupation (fishermen > others), and ethnicity ('Yankees' > others). Finally, he uncovered the dimension that subsumed all the others: orientation toward the island itself: centralization scores of speakers positively oriented to the island were twice as high as those of 'neutral' orientation, and 7 times higher than those with a negative orientation.
M.A.K. Halliday's Categories of the Theory of Grammar (1961) was published in WORD (Vol. 17, Issue 2, pp. 241-292). Categories was Halliday's first journal article following the completion of his doctoral dissertation six years earlier. Firth's influence is evident in this paper, which Jim Martin describes as "generally landmarked as the founding paper for what evolved as systemic functional linguistics" (WORD, Vol. 62, Issue 1, pp. 35-58). What becomes evident from this comparison between the seminal concepts presented in Categories and the current state of SFL theorizing about language is that the same brilliant mind that produced Categories never ceased in the pursuit of a better understanding of how language works to make meaning.
Charles Hockett's "Two Models of Grammatical Description" (1954) gave us insightful characterization of the methods of structural linguistics, becoming a springboard for those who proposed alternative approaches. I explore the article connections to the Structuralist past and its influence on two models that followed: Transformational Grammar (Hockett's paper is repeatedly cited in Chomsky's Syntactic Structures) and word-based models of morphology.
Charles Ferguson's most cited article was one of many forays into "language situations" that inspired thousands of studies of various types of linguistic behavior. His interest in "conventionalization" was the impetus for "Diglossia" and continued to productively engage his wide-ranging intellect over the course of his life. Reflections by Bill Labov, Joshua Ferguson and others, as well as his own published retrospective and interviews with him provide background to this seminal publication that shows no sign of ceasing to generate productive research.
Halle's "Phonology in Generative Grammar" (1962) expounds, concisely yet explicitly, a theoretical approach progressing on seemingly all fronts: it already points the way to Chomsky and Halle's 1968 Sound Pattern of English and later developments inspired by it. Simplicity criteria lie at the heart of all Halle's points: segments as feature complexes in matrices, lexical underspecification, rules expressed in features, and rule ordering, especially as related to dialect differences, language acquisition, and linguistic change. The solutions offered for existing and novel phonological problems combined economy and explanatory power in a manner that necessarily galvanized progressives and challenged traditionalists to respond.
This study builds upon Hesseltine and Davis ([2020]. "The Communicative Function of Adjective-Noun Order in English." WORD 66 (3): 166-193. https://doi.org/10.1080/00437956.2020.1793499), which examines word order in modification in English and proposes the Assertion of Characterization hypothesis. To communicate an assertion of an entity's traits, speakers employ two different meanings: weaker, signaled by the order AB as in long (A) hair (B), and stronger, signaled by BA as in hair (B) long (A). The attribution of the characterization is thus made less or more assertively. This work focuses on examples where the characterized entity, the B, is a form traditionally termed a "pronoun." Although the hypothesis holds regardless of the traditional categorization, one particular aspect of characterized pronouns, which marks them as different from other types of characterized Bs, invites this further investigation: Pronouns, when characterized, occur much more frequently in the order that indicates the stronger Assertion of Characterization (BA, e.g., consider her lucky, meet someone special, vs. AB Lucky her!, a special someone). Examination of this subset of Bs accounts for the pattern: When a person chooses a pronoun, the implication is that the receiver of the communication knows enough to identify the referent adequately for present communicative purposes and so any further characterization will deserve to be strong there.
This paper revisits Saussure's scalar analysis of phonemes, offering a modern reinterpretation that replaces binary features with phonological dimensions grounded in measurement theory. By redefining Saussure's [openness] and [backness] as ordered scales and Chomsky and Halle's "combination and concatenation" as partially ordered scales, the paper introduces a notion of "[phono]logical simultaneity." This framework renders the variously-defined phoneme and segment redundant, and shifts the focus of distinctiveness to the linguistic sign, the morpheme. It demonstrates how phonological dimensions link continuous articulations and acoustic signals (e.g., F1 and F2) with discrete linguistic signs through calibrated distinctive features. The analysis identifies Saussure's two dimensions as the only universal phonological dimensions, with all others being optional, providing a novel basis for cross-linguistic classification. By reframing distinctive features as discrete calibrations of phonological dimensions, the paper reconciles high-level morphophonemic processes (e.g., vowel harmony) with phonetic alternations. Furthermore, it proposes an algorithm for discovering phonological dimensions, applicable both to specific languages and linguistic universals, advancing the theoretical scope of phonology. This work positions phonological dimensions as essential for linguistic analysis, bridging phonetics and phonology while situating distinctive features within interlinguistics, socio-linguistics, and historical linguistics, opening avenues for understanding the universality and specificity of language structure and use.
This study investigates the use of the third-person don't (e.g., he don't want a chocolate) variable in present-day British English. By analyzing the Sampler of the Freiburg Corpus of English Dialects (FRED-S), the demographically sampled part of the Spoken British National Corpus 1994 (BNC 1994), and the Spoken British National Corpus (BNC 2014), this study addresses two questions: (a) what is the usage frequency of the third-person don't in the 1970s-2010s? and (b) how do external (age, social class, and gender) and internal (subject types, sentence types, and co-occurrence with multiple negation) factors influence the use of this variable in periods of diachronic change? The results reveal that the use of the third-person don't is the lowest in the BNC 2014, followed by the BNC 1994, and the FRED-S. The analysis also shows that while the effect of internal factors remains relatively stable across the corpora, certain social groups have led to the decline of this feature: younger people, the middle class, and women. This trend may be linked to the growing influence of prescriptivism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a process that may have particularly affected younger people, the middle class, and women.
Symbolic violence in videogames refers to the implicit power that normalizes and legitimizes certain addictive words and behaviors through in-game narratives and mechanics. Applying Halliday's grammatical metaphor framework and Bourdieu's theory of symbolic power, this article focuses on videogame discourse to explore how symbolic violence is realized through mood metaphors. Voice recordings of 44 game characters in the Role-Playing Game (RPG) of Genshin Impact were collected and built into a corpus of 90,752 tokens. The findings reveal a significant prevalence of using mood metaphors, particularly in the transferring of statements into questions when realizing the speech function of giving information, which include: (1) the semi-question, characterized by the structural framework of a statement coupled with the interrogative intonation, and (2) the complete question, manifesting both in form and content of interrogative intonation but to realize the declarative function. These mood metaphors disguise indoctrination in induced mood forms, subtly imposing symbolic violence to players through repetition, assertion, and diffusion. Consequently, mood metaphors which are recognized as anything but violence in linguistics, are an important way to create misrecognition, and a major manifestation of symbolic violence.
Living in a multilingual society, the Duano people, who speak the Duano language in Jambi Province, Sumatra, Indonesia, are inevitably exposed to language contact with various languages spoken in the region. This exposure provides Duano speakers with a range of linguistic options to select from in order to achieve their communicative goals. Among these, speakers adopt and replicate linguistic features, including affixes from Jambi Malay, a dominant language, into their linguistic repertoire. This study addresses two primary research questions: (1) How are replicated affixes from Jambi Malay used by Duano speakers? and (2) What motivates the replication of Jambi Malay affixes in Duano? Fieldwork conducted in Tanjung Jabung Barat in August 2024 collected natural data, narrative data, and elicited data. The findings reveal that most replications of Jambi Malay affixes in Duano are non-obligatory and are considered optional. Due to this non-obligatory nature, the replicated affixes function primarily as linguistic "ornaments." Furthermore, the motivations behind the replication of these affixes include prestige and identity-flagging (both as Duano speakers, as well as part of the Jambi Malay community). This explains why the replication of affixes remains non-mandatory and is closely tied to social motivations, functioning as a symbolic "social token."
Discourse is dynamic, varied, and tailored to match the communication needs of an environment. In Nigeria, the need to communicate mental health awareness (MHA) is imminent; thus, the advent of social media discourse allows mental health awareness content creators to reach a wider audience. The study aims to identify the predominant MHA themes in two purposively selected Instagram platforms, Mentally Aware Nigeria Initiative (MANI) and She Writes Woman (SWW), and to analyze the recurrent linguistic resources in the selected MHA texts. The study uses the transitivity framework for descriptive-qualitative and qualitative data analysis. The findings show three major themes: diagnosis, treatment/therapy, and prevention/recovery. It also shows the material process as the most frequently used transitivity in mental health awareness advocacy on both Instagram pages. This suggests that the triggers of mental health issues are majorly related to the verbs 'doing' and 'happening', from diagnosis and treatment processes to recovery.
Following a discourse-oriented approach, this study examines variations student translators made in reproducing important source text (ST) evaluative meanings, aiming to gain insights for translator education. Key aspects of maintaining ST evaluative meanings include recognizing and re-expressing the ST author's positive/negative attitudes, stances, and their degree of intensity. For this purpose, we adopt the appraisal framework to systematically examine and compare the evaluative meanings in the source and the target texts. Our dataset consists of two English news reports as the STs and their 130 Chinese translations by 65 students at the undergraduate level. Analyses reveal that variations of the renderings of evaluation in language would result in divergence from the STs. The variations indicate a potential lack of awareness or sensitivity to evaluative language among the student translators. Thus, we stress the importance and usefulness of appraisal-based analysis as a pedagogical tool for translator education.
Based on ideas derived from the Prague School, Halliday made a distinction between thematic structure and information structure. Thematic structure divides the clause into a theme and a rheme. While there is a vast literature on the nature of the theme, that on the rheme is sparse. At the same time the rheme is frequently long and complex, a fact which led some to suggest that the theme extends beyond the first major component, which Halliday had identified as constituting the theme. It is hypothesized that Halliday's position is basically correct, but that where the rheme contains more than one component, these will be ordered by the speaker in decreasing order of thematic importance. This is illustrated with several authentic examples.
