The article takes a cognitive linguistic approach to numeral incorporation in sign languages and demonstrates on the material from 32 sign languages the indispensable role of metonymy within this family of constructions. These constructions are argued to be blends of signs for numerals, i.e., numerical handshapes, exhibiting high degree of iconicity, with base signs that denote a range of measurable/countable units within domains such as time and age, currency, grades, or floors, but also pronouns and classifiers. The base signs are claimed to be motivated primarily by conceptual metonymies rather than metaphors although their motivation need not be clearly transparent due to diachronic erosion and/or the fact that they become blended with numerical signs in a fashion that is similar to lexical blends in spoken/written languages and in sign languages.
In an era of accelerating globalization and frequent cross-cultural contact, willingness to communicate (WTC) in a second language is widely recognized as a critical predictor of successful language acquisition. To deepen the understanding of cultural influences on the formation of language-related behaviors, this study examines how Chinese learners of Korean as a Foreign Language (KFL) perceive the coolness of Korean popular music (K-POP) culture and how such perceptions influence their WTC in Korean. Grounded in Perceived Coolness Theory and Attachment Theory, the study proposes a structural model incorporating four dimensions—Perceived Subculture, Perceived Attractiveness, Perceived Utility, and Perceived Originality—and introduces emotional attachment as a mediating variable to uncover the psychological mechanisms linking cultural perception to communicative behavior. Structural equation modeling using partial least squares (PLS-SEM) was conducted on survey data from 360 Chinese KFL learners recruited online via Wenjuanxing. The analysis employed 5000 bootstrap samples to test the measurement and structural models, including bias-corrected confidence intervals for mediation effects. All four dimensions of perceived K-POP coolness significantly predicted emotional attachment, which in turn strongly enhanced willingness to communicate (WTC) in Korean. Emotional attachment mediated the relationships between perceived coolness and WTC. These findings offer concrete guidance for KFL instructors and curriculum designers: selecting K-POP materials high in attractiveness, subcultural appeal, and language-learning utility, and explicitly linking them to noticing activities can strengthen learners’ emotional investment and oral participation.
The fourteen Śivasūtras of Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī organize the phonological inventory of Sanskrit through ordered phoneme sequences marked by thirteen mute consonants (anubandhas: Ṇ, K, Ṅ, C, Ṭ, M, Ñ, Ṣ, Ś, V, Y, R, L), enabling the formation of pratyāhāras—compressed representations of phonological classes that underlie the grammar’s derivational rules. While their structural economy has been noted in modern graph–theoretic and set–theoretic treatments, the principles governing the selection and exclusion of specific anubandhas remain insufficiently explained.This study proposes a functional-phonological account of the anubandha inventory by examining patterns of feature contrast, sonority hierarchy, articulatory ease, morphophonemic stability, and pratyāhāra economy. In most cases, the selected anubandha is typically phonetically distinct from the phoneme set it delimits through contrasts in manner, voicing, place of articulation, or a combination of these features. Sonorant anubandhas—particularly nasals and semivowels—are preferred in many environments because they permit smoother articulation and reduced boundary disruption, whereas stops and fricatives tend to occur in environments involving stronger phonetic demarcation.The study further examines the exclusion of aspirated stops, the glottal/h/, and dentals, arguing that these omissions reflect concerns of phonological stability, recoverability, and structural economy within the grammatical system. Counterfactual substitutions demonstrate that alternative configurations often reduce the phonological coverage or increase descriptive complexity. By integrating evidence from grammatical usage, phonetic organization, and traditional commentary, the paper argues that the Śivasūtra anubandhas constitute a highly constrained and carefully stabilised metalinguistic system rather than an arbitrary mnemonic arrangement.
This paper examines the place of ecolinguistics within the broader discipline of linguistics, arguing that it constitutes a transversal paradigm with the potential to redefine language as an ecological phenomenon (Steffensen et al., 2024). Tracing the historical development of linguistic thought from Saussurean structuralism to contemporary cognitive and critical approaches, analysis highlights how dominant paradigms have been constrained by anthropocentrism and a monomodal conception of language centred on the verbal dimension (Perniss, 2018). Ecolinguistics, emerging from the broader ecological turn in the social sciences, allows a challenge of this foundation by integrating the more-than-human world into linguistic inquiry. The paper posits that ecolinguistics as theoretical framework provides tools to deconstruct human exceptionalism in linguistic studies, shifting the focus from what makes language uniquely human to how it situates communicative beings within a shared ecosystem. To fully realize this reorientation, I advocate for the adoption of a multimodal approach to language. By recognizing meaning as constructed through the integration of diverse semiotic resources & horbar;gesture, posture, facial expression, vocalization, and image & horbar;this framework deconstructs the barrier between human language and animal communication. Reviewing evidence from cognitive science and zoo semiotics, including the syntactic alarm calls of prairie dogs, the cultural performativity of birdsong, and the embodied cognition of octopuses, the argument establishes a communicative and multimodal continuum across species. This perspective reveals that many species employ complex, context-dependent combinations of modalities, suggesting that human linguistic distinctiveness is one of degree and combinatorial emphasis, not of kind (de Waal, 2016). Ultimately, the paper contends that a multimodal ecolinguistics fosters a critical epistemology essential for a world in socio-ecological crisis. It moves linguistics from an anthropocentric monologue towards an ethics of dialogic participation within a living, semiotic web. By analysing how discourses construct human -environment relations, ecolinguistics can become a vital tool for deconstructing narratives of domination and fostering ecological kinship, humility, and responsibility. (c) 2026 Elsevier Ltd. All rights are reserved, including those for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies.
The aim of this study is to determine the frequency of environment-related words such as forests, trees, soil and seafood in Turkish government programs issued from 1923 to 2016. Utilizing the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics, the study focuses on the transitivity system, examining the types of processes, participant roles and circumstantial depictions of these words to understand how these are represented in these texts. The corpus analysis produced 193 environment-related statements, 97 keywords and 3480 environment-related words. The findings illustrate that the inclusion of environment-related topics becomes systematic in government programs from the 1960s. Environment-related statements are mostly expressed in material processes, but relational and mental processes are also used to communicate them, albeit less commonly. The most frequent participant role of these elements is found to be that of Goal while Purpose is their most frequent circumstantial expression. Diachronic analysis demonstrates that the processes, participant roles and circumstantial representations of environment-related terms exhibit a variation across six periods covered in the corpus. In this regard, the period between 1923 and 1950 considerably differs from the other periods in terms of the distribution of components of the transitivity system. The study illustrates that changes in frequencies reflect differences in the representation and conceptualization of environment-related terms in official discourse. (c) 2026 Elsevier Ltd. All rights are reserved, including those for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies.
