LURA 2022

Finnish & Estonian: A "Case" Study

Anonymous — Wed, 27 Apr 2022 07:22:42 +0000

Finnish & Estonian: A "Case" Study Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/27/2022 - 01:22

Author: Aidan Carroll
Nominator: Hannah Haynie
Course: LING 4420 Morphology & Syntax, Fall 2021
LURA 2022

Fewer people speak Finnish and Estonian combined than the population of New York City by a margin of some 2.5 million, a fact which would be easy to blame on the complexities of the two languages in comparison to… well, most other languages, especially in regard to their case marking systems. Finnish and Estonian both feature detailed case marking systems that serve multiple grammatical and locative functions within their respective languages, and in my 2021 paper “Case Marking Structures in Finnish and Estonian” I both detail these functions as well as how the two closely-related languages compare in their usage of case marking.

Now… what does any of this mean? To an English speaker, the concept of case marking is entirely foreign to begin with, as English has only featured relics of case marking for several centuries (For example, the distinction between “I” [nominative] versus “me” [accusative]). In short, a ‘case’ marks the function of a noun within a phrase: where English uses linguistic structures like prepositions and strict word order to denote a noun’s role in a phrase, Finnish and Estonian employ grammatical (denoting noun relations within the phrase) and locative (denoting noun locations in physical/conceptual space) cases to express the role of a noun in a sentence.

For example, consider the English phrase “I am petting the dogs”: it is clear by the order of the words that it is me who is petting the dog, since “I” comes before the verb “pet” and “dog” comes after. In Finnish, the same meaning is derived from minä silitin koirata, literally “Me I am petting part of the whole of all dogs”—this, notably, is a much more complex meaning achieved by markedly fewer words than the English equivalent, due to Finnish’s case marking system. The partitive grammatical case marker -a on koirat “dogs” implies that only some out of all dogs in the world are being pet by me in this moment: if the marker were not used, the meaning would imply I am petting all of the dogs in the world, which, while a lovely idea, would unfortunately be all but impossible.

Additionally, due to these case markers, strict word order is not needed, and can in fact be modified for emphasis on different parts of the phrase: having the object at the beginning, as in koirata minä silitin, would emphasize it is the dogs I was petting, say, in opposition to the cats; similarly, silitin koirata minä emphasizes that I was petting the dogs specifically, say, in opposition to feeding the fish. This same example is used in my essay with somewhat more detail as to the linguistic implications of this phenomenon—in short, Estonian case marking functions approximately the same, albeit with more locative cases than Finnish and certain vocabulary-dependent forms of the language’s case markers.

In my analysis I conclude that while the languages are closely related, Estonian features much more irregular case marking than Finnish and as such the languages would be all but unintelligible even before lexical differences are taken into account: nevertheless, their case marking systems function very similarly, especially in regard to the degree of specificity within phrases these systems provide when compared to “blunter” languages like English. This kind of case marking is rare in the world’s languages, which is regrettable considering the small community of speakers both languages have. Overall my research encapsulates the uniqueness of Finnish and Estonian and, in my opinion, the humble elegance of these languages as achieved by their case marking systems.

Header image credit: The Finnic Languages - By ValtteriLahti12 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=109946239

Off

Traditional

White

Honorific Language in Japanese and its Effects on Translator Systems

Anonymous — Mon, 25 Apr 2022 18:34:31 +0000

Honorific Language in Japanese and its Effects on Translator Systems Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 04/25/2022 - 12:34

Author: Madelyn Weber
Nominator: Orin Hargraves
Course: LING 3430 Semantics, Fall 2021
LURA 2022

As languages grow further apart in terms of their similarities, translator systems often become less accurate in producing accurate and grammatical translations. An example of this is in regards to the use of Keigo - honorific language - in Japanese. In a broad sense, Keigo is a way of marking language in different levels of politeness depending on who is speaking to whom and in what context. Overall, Japanese is a highly context-dependent language, and that is reflected in this system of polite speech. Japanese grammar marks different levels of honorific language by vocabulary and grammar - something which English does not do.

We can think of Keigo as having three different “levels”:

Casual Speech - used between friends, romantic partners, or toward those who hold a lower social status from the speaker

Polite Speech - used in most day-to-day interactions, such as when communicating with strangers, or, for example, when a shopper is addressing a store employee

Honorific/Humble Speech - often used in the same situations, and are dependent on who the subject of an utterance is. If the speaker is addressing their boss, company CEO, professor, or even the elderly, they would opt for honorific speech when speaking about the listener, but would use humble speech when speaking of themselves, which essentially adds an extra layer of “distance” between the speaker’s and the listener’s difference in social position

This system can present problems for online translator systems due to how highly context-dependent it is; especially when translating from a language that holds no such notion of formality embedded within its grammar, such as English.

Let’s take a look at some ways in which discrepancies in the usages of Keigo produced by Google Translate occur when using English → Japanese directed translations.

Translation 1: Asking a simple (polite) question in Japanese.

Sentence breakdown:

なんて [nante] - what

言い [ii] - say/ask

ました [mashita] - (polite, past-tense form)

か [ka] - (question marker)

Translation 2: Putting output from translation 1 back into the translator.

Sentence breakdown:

何って [nantte] - what

言 [i] - say

った [tta] - (casual, past-tense form)

の [no] - (casual, question marker)

As can be seen from translations 1 and 2, we are getting two different Japanese grammatical forms, one casual and one formal, from the same English sentence. As English has no means of encoding the level or respect one desires to use from its grammar alone, we have no idea as to what level of honorific language the translator will produce for the Japanese translation. We can look into one more example to further exemplify such discrepancies.

Translation 3: Using the same English sentence, but with a different pronoun.

Sentence breakdown:

彼ら [karera] - they

は [wa] - (grammatical particle)

何 [nan] - what

と [to] - (grammatical particle)

言い [ii] - say

ました [mashita] - (polite, past-tense form)

か [ka] - (question marker)

Notice how we switched up the pronoun in the English sentence from “you” to “they”. From this alone, we are now getting a formal Japanese output. This exemplifies the discrepancies in the translator system’s ability to form sentences; sometimes they come out very casual and other times, formal. In English, there is no such notion of the pronoun “they” being more formal than “you”, and this holds true in Japanese as well, thus offering no clear explanation as to why the addition of a different English pronoun would provide us with a different formality in the Japanese output.

The translation examples above are just a snapshot as to the discrepancies that online translators exhibit when it comes to producing Japanese translations and the usage of honorific language within them. Such discrepancies can become a problem for someone who wishes to use an online translator system if they do not speak Japanese, or understand the cultural significance of using the correct forms of Keigo. For this reason, there are two proposals that I would make to potentially increase the correctness of such online translator systems, first, to always output sentences in the polite form, as this is considered to be the general form that would be used in most day-to-day interactions, and is the best form to fall back on to avoid accidentally offending someone. My second proposal would be to add a means of marking which “level” of politeness one wishes their sentence to be output as. Although it wouldn’t be perfect, it would help hinder any obstacles in communication one may face when using an unpredictable translator system.

Header image credit: https://www.healthimaging.com/topics/molecular-imaging/ai-method-high-quality-amyloid-pet-images-less-radiation

Online translators, such as Google Translate, are a convenient and fast tool to facilitate communication and understanding between speakers of different languages, especially when both parties are not mutually fluent in either language. However, the provided translations are not always accurate, and we can often find strange and unnatural uses of language provided from such translation software.

Off

Traditional

White

Just a Dash of Farsi: Language and Identity

Anonymous — Mon, 25 Apr 2022 05:47:54 +0000

Just a Dash of Farsi: Language and Identity Anonymous (not verified) Sun, 04/24/2022 - 23:47

Author: Vida Alami
Nominator: Adam Hodges
Course: LING 4800 Language and Culture, Spring 2021
LURA 2022

Representations of Afghan cultural identity in the American consciousness are few and far between. It would be hard to dispute that the most famous of these representations is authored by Khaled Hosseini, whose crown jewel, The Kite Runner, seems to have achieved permanent residence on every “books that everyone should read” list.

The novel details a lifelong pursuit of redemption for the protagonist, Amir, after a tragedy he let befall his childhood best friend and servant, Hassan. Their relationship lies on ethnic and class divides, unjust social conditions that are further agitated with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and subsequent war in the 1980s. American readers have widely gushed about the story’s poignant themes despite the unfamiliar cultural context.

For all the praise that The Kite Runner has received, it has failed to appeal to many people. I surveyed some critical reviews of the novel and noticed a frequent complaint that had to do with language. Goodreads user Chris articulated this criticism best by mocking Hosseini’s choice to “include some random words in [his] native language for no reason whatsoever” (2007). Indeed, Farsi words and phrases are peppered liberally throughout The Kite Runner.

In this essay, I wanted to see why that was. I argue that Farsi in The Kite Runner creates an inoffensive Afghan-American identity for its English-speaking audience to consume.

First, a short tour of the Farsi instances in the novel shows that Farsi words and phrases are used even when a very direct English equivalent is available.

Words like morgh (chicken) and balay (yes) offer no additional semantic value to the sentences in which they appear. Instead, we can understand their value through the lens of Peirce’s (1960) idea about the indexical relationship between a word (signifier) and what it represents (signified). To take one example, the word iftikhar in this sentence from Amir’s perspective is pointing back to, or indexing, the Afghan identity that the text as a whole creates: “I couldn't lie to her and say that my pride, my iftikhar, wasn’t stung at all that she had been with a man, whereas I had never taken a woman to bed” (Hosseini, 2003, p. 142). Because the reader depends entirely on the author’s provided translation to know what the word signifies, iftikhar primarily offers a social meaning and indexes the specific pride associated with Afghan masculinity.

We can also consider how this written text still manages to be interactive, requiring the audience to help build. The effect that Farsi has in The Kite Runner is an example of a pair of processes involved in the creation of identity through language. These “tactics of intersubjectivity”, a framework developed by Bucholtz and Hall (2004), are adequation (highlighting similarities between groups) and distinction (highlighting differences).

To see how the novel accomplishes adequation of Afghan culture with its Western audience, we can look at instances of Farsi as a sort of metafiction. It reflects awareness of the audience. In one example, a minor character says, “‘It sounded like a jaroo, a broomstick, snapping in half’” (Hosseini, 2003, p. 166). The translation was written in as part of her speech, but a person wouldn’t realistically translate a word to English when talking to other Farsi speakers. This is purely to make readers feel included, as they can now point to a single object in the world and name it in two languages.

Just as important is the manner in which Farsi maintains a distinction between cultures. Hosseini does things like use yelda, the culturally significant and celebrated winter solstice, in analogies for beauty. Similarly, while characters in the narrative immigrate to the U.S. and try to assimilate, Farsi vocabulary continues to appear in the prose, resisting assimilation. It is important to realize that these tactics create “just enough” distinction: enough for the audience to feel like they are learning something about people across the world from them, but not enough to alienate them.

With these concepts in mind, it’s clear that Khaled Hosseini’s use of Farsi in The Kite Runner indexes Afghan identity and balances adequation and distinction to attract American readers’ approval of that identity.

Header image credit: https://miro.medium.com/max/1050/1*0i09Dg7mijfV6fUE62gd0A.jpeg

Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2004). Language and Identity (pp. 369–394). https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470996522.ch16

Chris. (2007, May 21). Review of The Kite Runner [Book Review]. Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1338106?book_show_action=true

Hosseini, K. (2003). The Kite Runner. Riverhead Books.

Peirce, C. S., Hartshorne, C., Weiss, P., & Burks, A. W. (1960). Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

What's really the point of those random Farsi words and phrases in Khaled Hosseini's "The Kite Runner"?

Off

Traditional

White

The Wealth Gap Through Content-Based ESL Instruction

Anonymous — Mon, 25 Apr 2022 05:35:18 +0000

The Wealth Gap Through Content-Based ESL Instruction Anonymous (not verified) Sun, 04/24/2022 - 23:35

Authors: Kim Gramse, Ever Gray, Jenny Hopkins, and Alia Viscardi
Nominator: Rai Farrelly
Course: LING 4620 Teaching L2 Oral Skills and Communication, Fall 2021
LURA 2022

The Wealth Gap is an economic term used to describe the gap in wealth between the rich and poor on a global scale. The increase of this gap is cause for concern, which we hoped to address in this curriculum design assignment via three ninety minute units.

As part of our Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) certification program, we were tasked with creating three fully interconnected units based around a social justice topic that any teacher of English as an additional language (EAL) could implement in their own classroom. We chose to focus on the wealth gap because of the various contributing factors to this gap, such as housing and education, that we wanted students to be able to explore in an educational setting.

In our first lesson, we introduce the concept of the wealth gap and the ideas of upper, middle, and lower class designations. Through classroom activities built to foster listening and speaking skills in the English language, we guide the students towards an understanding of some contributing factors to this issue on a global scale. Once we have solidly established these foundational concepts, the students should be well prepared to move on to the next lesson.

In the second lesson, we focused specifically on educational inequality and the factors that contribute to it. We developed more content-based ESL activities that could also allow for variety in the classroom, including both physical movement and personal involvement. This lesson ends with a wrap-up activity that gives students an opportunity to discuss their own experiences with educational inequality and further explore their own opinions around the subject.

The final lesson focuses on housing inequality, specifically in a US context. The first activity in this lesson was pronunciation Jenga, which acts as a low-stress introduction to the beginning of class but also allows students to practice their pronunciation of difficult words with their peers. The end of this lesson culminates with the opportunity for students to share the video projects they were assigned at the start of the unit with the goal of developing their own research skills and raising their awareness of factors that contribute to the wealth gap. This video project also helps students broaden their understanding of the wealth gap as it provides an opportunity for other factors not addressed in the unit to be taught by students to their peers.

All three lessons can be found on our class's website of Teaching L2 Oral Skills: https://sites.google.com/colorado.edu/teaching-l2-oral-skills/thematic-units/the-wealth-gap

As a whole, we hope this unit provides students with multiple and well-rounded opportunities to improve their English oral language skills of speaking, listening, and pronunciation through a focus on content that is reflected in their lives. We also hope that, as a content-based curricular unit, teachers can find use for it in their own classrooms in the future.

We approached the work for this project as an equal collaboration. We spent a lot of time discussing and brainstorming ideas, but we also each took the lead designing certain activities within the units. As a class, each group delivered three separate activities to our peers, which our group greatly appreciated as an opportunity to not only practice our teaching skills but also to test and refine our lesson plans before making them publicly available. Now that each of us has begun our student teaching experience, we’ve found ourselves implementing the insight and skills we’ve gained through the course of this project into our real-life classrooms.

Header image credit: Vieira, T. (2004). Paraisopolis, a favela in Sao Paulo, next to its wealthy neighbor Morumbi [Image]. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/29/sao-paulo-injustice-tuca-vieira-inequality-photograph-paraisopolis

The wealth gap is a problematic trend that needs to be addressed through education in all parts of the world.

Off

Traditional

White

Japanese, Ryukyuan, and the 51st State

Anonymous — Sun, 24 Apr 2022 22:31:55 +0000

Japanese, Ryukyuan, and the 51st State Anonymous (not verified) Sun, 04/24/2022 - 16:31

Author: Richy Hayes
Nominator: Hannah Haynie
Course: LING 4420 Morphology and Syntax, Fall 2021
LURA 2022

Let’s suppose that one day we all wake up in the same alternate reality – a rather boring one where everything is the same, aside from an island not so far east of Washington. It’s been there the whole time in this reality, and to President Biden’s great surprise, it’s the 51st state. Regardless, we still have our 50-star flag, and the Dakotas firmly refuse to be merged as one large Dakota, so without consulting any vexillologists, President Biden, himself, puts the 51st star on the bottom left corner of the blue part in Microsoft Paint, and with his team, he heads over to this state. When they arrive in South Alaska (the name of the state he discovers from a “Welcome to South Alaska” sign at the airport) he is greeted by the Governor, the two shake hands and the Governor says “To’s neece yo noot sou Anster Biden.”

If, after President Biden’s visit to South Alaska, some linguists headed over to try to understand South Alaskan, and following a bit of ostentation they discover that South Alaskan is nearly grammatically identical to English but the words vary greatly (President Biden’s greeting being translated as “It’s nice to meet you Mister Biden”), would South Alaskan and English be the same language?

Let’s return from that miserable modal reality and consider the case of the well known language, Japanese, and the lesser known, Ryukyuan. While Japanese is spoken by 120 million people (Kaiser 2013), Ryukyuan is spoken primarily by elderly individuals, and the actual number of speakers is unknown (Shimoji 2010). Additionally, the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger recognizes six languages of the Ryukyu Islands (Yaeyama, Yonaguni, Amami, Kunigami, Uchinaa, and Miyako) all of which are endangered.

Picture of Japonic tree

Similar to how species can be endangered or go extinct, when a language’s speakers begin to dip in numbers, the language can become endangered or even go extinct. To further this analogy, similar to how different organisms can be related on a phylogenetic tree, languages can as well. Japanese and Ryukyuan are part of the Japonic family of languages, and they are “sister languages,” meaning that they both originated from the same “mother language,” or origin. Although, some linguists posit that Ryukyuan might actually be a dialect, or a daughter language of Japanese. This is a tough distinction to make. Just how similar are they? Let’s look at an example:

Ryukyuan:

tɨgan=ba jud-ɨ k-on

letter=ACC read-MED come-NEG.NPST

‘(He) will not go to read the letter and come back’

Japanese:

tegami=o jonde konai

Letter=ACC read-MED come-NEG.NPST

‘(He) will not read the letter and come back’

You might've noticed the verb (read) comes after the object (letter). Japanese and Ryukyuan are Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) languages, while English is a Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) language. In this example we have a verbal predicate. If you recall back to your last grammar class, sentences typically consist of a subject and a predicate. Take the English example, “Richy studies linguistics.” “Richy” is the subject (this sentence is about him), “linguistics” is the object (the entity which is acted upon, or objectified), and “studies” is the predicate, which is often a verb; the “predicate” predicates (i.e., states, affirms, or asserts) something about the subject. Let’s look at another example:

Ryukyuan:

arəə ɨn ja-ta

that.TOP dog COP.PST

‘That was a dog’

Japanese:

aɾe (ɰa) inɯ daʔta

That.TOP dog COP.PST

‘That was a dog’

In this example, we have a copular predicate (ja-ta/daʔta). I spoke above about sentences having a subject and predicate, but the predicate in these examples is essentially “was.” That doesn’t really predicate anything about “that,” does it? Instead, “was” (or “is”) is a copula, which is a verb that serves to link the subject to the predicate complement – the part of the sentence that provides information about the subject (Kroger, p. 174). In the above examples, “dog” is the predicate complement and ja-ta/daʔta are the copulas, respectively. Now let’s look at a grammatical feature that doesn’t appear in English:

Ryukyuan:

ɨn=nu wu-i

dog=NOM exist-NPST

‘There is a dog’

Japanese:

inɯ=ga iɾɯ

dog=NOM exist-NPST

‘There is a dog’

In our final example, we have a unique feature in Japanese and Ryukyuan which doesn’t appear in English – the existential phrase (and no, not a phrase you shout in your early-fifties when you’re discontent with your perceived unfulfilled potential). In English, if I wanted to point out the presence of a dog near me, I would say “there is a dog,” not just “is a dog.” English requires a dummy subject (i.e., there & it). Japanese and Ryukyuan are pronoun-dropping (pro-drop) languages (Kroger, p. 80), so saying “is a dog” is not only acceptable, but grammatically preferred.

Additionally, Ryukyuan and Japanese have an animacy hierarchy; that is, different existential verbs for animate and inanimate objects. Contrast the previous existential sentences above to these existential sentences with inanimate subjects:

Ryukyuan:

kɨɨ=nu a-i

tree=NOM exist-NPST

‘There is a tree.’

Japanese:

ki=ga aɾɯ

tree=NOM exist.NPST

‘There is a tree.’

From all the above examples, you might’ve caught on to the stunning similarities between Japanese and Ryukyuan. Let’s quickly revisit my made-up language, South Alaskan. Is it the same language as English? According to Carol Genetti in “How Languages Work,” the benchmark for making this distinction is: mutual intelligibility (p. 12). President Biden was at a loss by the greeting, regardless of the identical grammar structure, so no, they are not the same language. Now are Japanese and Ryukyuan mutually intelligible? In most instances that go beyond very basic expressions, no; their sound systems differ too greatly. Furthermore, there are specific grammatical trends and diachronic innovations observed amongst the various Ryukyuan dialects that cannot be found in Japanese and its dialects (Heinrich 2015). It follows that Japanese and Ryukyuan are not the same language, but more likely sister languages, dominated by (originating from) a similar mother language, where they inherited their morphosyntactic similarities, rather than Ryukyuan having come from Japanese.

Header image credits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_the_United_States.svg & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Location_of_the_Ryukyu_Islands.JPG

Genetti, Carol (ed.). 2019. How Languages Work: An Introduction to Language and Linguistics. Cambridge University Press.

Heinrich, Patrick, Shinsho Miyara, & Michinori Shimoji. 2015. Handbook of the Ryukyuan Languages: History, Structure, and Use. The Asia-Pacific Journal 7(9). 1-20.

Kaiser, Stefan, Yasuko Ichikawa, Noriko Kobayashi & Hirofumi Yamamoto. 2013. Japanese: A Comprehensive Grammar. London: Routledge.

Kroeger, Paul. 2005. Analyzing Grammar: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press.

Shimoji, Michinori & Thomas Pellard (eds.). 2010. An Introduction to Ryukyuan Languages. Tokyo University: ILCAA.

Let’s suppose that one day we all wake up in the same alternate reality – a rather boring one where everything is the same, aside from an island not so far east of Washington.

Off

Traditional

White

The Essentials of Figurative Language through the Whimsical Perspective of Robert Frost

Anonymous — Sun, 24 Apr 2022 19:00:47 +0000

The Essentials of Figurative Language through the Whimsical Perspective of Robert Frost Anonymous (not verified) Sun, 04/24/2022 - 13:00

Author: Maria Dunatov
Nominator: Rebecca Lee
Course: LING 3185 Figurative Language, Fall 2021
LURA 2022

To the Thawing Wind

Come with rain, O loud Southwester!

Bring the singer, bring the nester;

Give the buried flower a dream;

Make the settled snowbank steam;

Find the brown beneath the white;

But whate’er you do tonight,

Bathe my window, make it flow,

Melt it as the ice will go;

Melt the glass and leave the sticks

Like a hermit’s crucifix;

Burst into my narrow stall;

Swing the picture on the wall;

Run the rattling pages o’er;

Scatter poems on the floor;

Turn the poet out of door.

Robert Frost’s “To the Thawing Wind” is most fondly remembered for its inspiring tone and universally applicable motifs, but it’s also heralded from a linguistic perspective for its seamlessly employed personification, metonymy, and hyperbolic imagery related to nature’s whimsical acts of brutal force that create a blissfully succinct poetic narrative on the desperately awaited arrival of spring and the desire for sudden, impactful change.

The most pervasive and foundational figurative instantiation consistently establishes the conceptualized scale of perspective for the entirety of the poem: personification or OBJECT AS PERSON. Even the title of the poem personifies the wind by addressing it like a recipient of a dear letter, so it’s not surprising that each verse is soaked in continued personification as the speaker demands more and more from the Southwester. For example, Frost brings the Wind to life within several requests, as seen in the third and seventh lines: “Give the buried flower a dream;” and “Bathe my window, make it flow.” These requests portray the wind in situations imageable at the human scale, involving “direct action and perception inside familiar frames, typically involving few participants and direct intentionality,” (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002, p. 322). Although the physical notion of bathing isn’t exclusive to humanity, the speaker’s request that the Southwester bathe his window with its bountiful, stormy tears is a rather affectionate behavior for one entity to engage in with another, as one would with a child. Without elevating the incorporeal entity of a wind current to the level of anthropomorphization or even deification, none of the fantastical events throughout the poem could occur. So, to fully understand these poetic events’ causation and impact, the audience must generously extend the shared knowledge of personhood to the Wind by interpreting events involving it as volitional actions (Lakoff & Johnson, 1989). Through this shift in perspective, Frost communicates his reverence for nature through the eyes of one man as he conceptually bridges the gap between these two unrelated concepts and allows new opportunities for direct interaction.

Next, Frost generates referential intimacy with the unsung hero of prose: metonymy or “a kind of shorthand in which a relatively simple or concrete entity is used to provide easy access to an entity that is much more complex or abstract,” (Littlemore, 2018, p. 65). As he summons “the singer” and “the nester,” it’s easy to deduce that Frost is addressing birds, but it also begs the question: why not just call them what they are? Through these metonymic expressions, Frost isolates which aspects of birds he references by focusing on their unique, even tokenized behaviors, singing and nesting, over their more obviously recognizable attributes or titles. Littlemore (2018) suggests that metonymy highlights particular features of a phenomenon, while downplaying others, in order to foreground the information that is most important to the communicator (p. 73). The information here most important to Frost is that the birds go out and actually do things rather than just idly sit by, existing, which is a central theme to the poem as it transitions from the sleepiness of winter to the active birth of spring.

The most stark example of metonymic construal is when the speaker demands for the Southwestern Wind to “Find the brown beneath the white” because it so clearly maps the conceptual metonymy of COLOR FOR ENTITY but in a provocative manner that forces the audience to reflect on what’s happening. The entities that the colors are standing in for are of course, earth and snow, and so the complex maneuver of uncovering snow to expose the ground underneath and the figurative implication of winter transforming into spring is artfully summarized into an imageable sub-event within the whole event.

Finally, Frost utilizes descriptive hyperbole to exaggerate the rate at which spring transforms the speaker’s surroundings, creating vivid images that propel the audience to the finish-line of the poem. Hyperbole “requires for a scalar concept itself to be first taken to an extreme and then to examine the nature of the non-maximized version of the concept in terms of the maximized version,” mapping the psychological impact of this exaggeration onto the more realistic scenario (Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, 2014, p. 199). For example, Frost beseeches the en route spring Wind to “Melt the glass and leave the sticks like a hermit’s crucifix.” The preceding line of this verse depicts the expected image of ice melting off a window, but for the heat to be strong enough to melt the glass and not the wood of the window pane, the laws of science and reality would have to bend to Frost’s will. This line is therefore undoubtedly hyperbolic in its description with a wink of biblical allegory to up the ante. The psychological impact of following this illogical sequence of events is thus drawn on to understand the intense contrast to Frost’s current inaction. In the poem’s final act of exaggeration, the speaker welcomes the great Wind to spastically disembowel his home and awaken its spirit: “Burst into my narrow stall; Swing the picture on the wall; Run the rattling pages o’er; Scatter poems on the floor; Turn the poet out of door.” The imagery of this entire scene could only be possible in natural disaster conditions, which is what makes it hyperbolic. Frost could easily have set up a more realistic scene in which the greenery of spring slowly came out of hiding over time and the sound of the howling wind outside distracted the Poet from his work, however, that would be a disservice to the theme of ending the monotony and starting anew with energy and motivation. Exaggerating something as commonplace as ice thawing or pages scattering makes the theatricality of the rich imagery pop and is therefore a wonderful tool for Frost to drive his point home.

Now that the figurative effects of Frost’s cohesive personification, frame-shifting metonymy, and imagistic hyperbole have been addressed linguistically, it’s not difficult to see why this demure masterpiece with all its subtle intricacies defies the stereotypes of haughty poetry as distant from the masses and their underlying, individual thoughts, since each instantiation is purposeful in reaching out to the shared consciousness of the audience.

Header image source: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Frost → image credit: Ruohomaa/Black Star

Fauconnier, G., & Turner, M. (2002). The way we think: Conceptual blending and the mind's hidden complexities. Basic Books.

Fillmore, C. (1982). Frame Semantics. In The Linguistic Society of South Korea (Ed.), Linguistics in the Morning Calm: Selected Papers from SICOL-1981 (pp. 111–137). Hanhin Publishing Company.

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1989). Metaphors We Live by. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Littlemore, J. (2018). Metonymy: Hidden Shortcuts in Language, Thought and Communication. Cambridge University Press.

Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, Francisco José, & Masegosa, A. G. (2014). Cognitive modeling: A linguistic perspective. John Benjamins Publishing Company.

For most, poetry is considered to be an unattainable pleasure, in that it’s either governed by the strictly enforced canons of the elite or by rhythmic anarchy itself and its youthful desire to shock or unsettle, but how exactly does Robert Frost utilize the same literary tools to refute these generalizations throughout his work?

Off

Traditional

White

Interviewing Female Superheroes

Anonymous — Sun, 24 Apr 2022 18:44:42 +0000

Interviewing Female Superheroes Anonymous (not verified) Sun, 04/24/2022 - 12:44

Author: Delenne Phan
Nominator: Katie Conger
Course: LING 1000 Language in U.S. Society, Fall 2021
LURA 2022

Interviews are for the public/fans to get to the interviewee. They give the public insight into who the celebrity is. This is based on the information that comes out of the celebrities’ mouth, which corresponds to the presentation of self. It depends on how they present themselves and what kind of image they want to portray. The answers are only half as important in an interview though, the other half are questions being asked. Questions are often overlooked because the person asking the questions isn’t the one in the spotlight. Little does the audience know, the questions set the interview agenda. Without certain questions, there won’t be certain answers. With uncomfortable topics, questions can embody presuppositions, meaning that they are built upon assumptions. Additionally, questions may have incorporated preferences, allowing the interviewer to ‘push’ towards an answer they want. These questions come with strategic answers, most of the time celebrities dodge uncomfortable questions in such a way that the audiences don't even notice. They can set another agenda or even turn the question right back at the interviewer. The perfect example of such interviews is from interviewer Jerry Penacoli and interviewees Anne Hathaway and Scarlett Johansson respectively.

In the interview for ‘The Dark Knight Rises’, between Jerry Penacoli and Anne Hathaway, the interviewer focused on her physique while playing Catwoman.

First image retrieved from Vanityfair and second image retrieved from joe.le

The interviewer, Jerry Penacoli, was asking questions about Hathaway's body and this was how she answered:

Penacoli: “You’re always in great shape, but you had to make sure you were in perfect shape for this one, didn’t you?”

Hathaway: “Eh, it wasn’t about being in perfect shape it was being able to do the stunts and the fighting perfectly”

Penacoli: (Went on to focus on her form by talking about her leather suit)

Hathaway: “It wasn’t very form fitting. I mean it’s not a pair of sweatpants, I wouldn’t describe it as that kind of comfortable”

Penacoli: (Continues to ask about her body asking her to share her ‘feline fitness’)

Hathaway: “It’s all the boring stuff that no one ever wants to do. It’s just watching what you eat and getting yourself to the gym.”

Hathaway: “Are you trying to lose weight? What’s the deal man, you look great! No no we have to talk about this. What do you want? Are you trying to fit into a catsuit?” (Swift 2018).

At first, Hathaway was certainly trying to respond kindly to the odd questions, but when she got uncomfortable, she switched the questions right back at Penacoli. The way she did it, wasn’t aggressive, it was more in a humorous way like ‘why are you asking all these questions, are you trying to fit into a catsuit yourself?’ This made a lot of people laugh but was also a very effective technique used to stop the questioning and resist the agenda. Analyzing the questions, Penacoli did not get the answer he wanted so he pushed Hathaway with bolder questions. He started out soft, by asking about the catsuit, then jumped and asked about the feline fitness. Hathaway answered his questions because she didn’t want the interview to be awkward, but he took it as a ‘go’ sign to ask bolder questions.

The second Penacoli interview was with ‘The Avengers’ stars Scarlett Johansson and Jeremy Renner.

Image is from Business Insider

This interview showed resistance from Scarlett Johansson, since Penacoli seemed to have gone too far. Penacoli, in this interview, asked if Scarlett (Black Widow) was wearing any undergarments under her suit when acting for ‘The Avengers’, and that got a powerful resistance from her:

Penacoli: “Were you able to wear undergarments?”

Johansson: “You’re like the fifth person that’s asked me today. What is going on?”

Johansson: “Since when did people start asking each other in interviews about their underwear?”

Penacoli: “Because it is so skintight….”

Johansson: “I’ll leave it up to your imagination. Whatever you feel like I should be or should not be wearing under that costume” (Swift, 2018).

Johansson was shocked at the questions. Penacoli focused on her undergarments, instead of focusing on her work. Her response from the start showed that the questions were offensive. Even though Penacoli saw this, he stuck with the questions knowing they were inappropriate and offensive. He pushed for the answer he wanted just like in Hathaway’s interview, but in Johansson’s case, she showed more resistance in a much more aggressive way. By asking if she was wearing undergarments under her costume, Penacoli showed presumption when he assumed that she didn’t wear any under her suit.

These types of questions seem to show up a lot with female actresses. Questions ranging from their clothes, their makeup, their physique, their beauty, etc. These questions are rarely found in interviews with interviewees who are male. The interview with Scarlett Johansson and Jeremey Renner proves this. The interview was with both Scarlett Johansson and Jeremy Renner, but Jeremey did not get asked about his undergarments, he got asked about his work and his injury on set.

Header image credit: https://discover.hubpages.com/entertainment/Who-Is-The-Sexiest-Comic-Book-Female-Character-In-Movies

Handy, B. The Dark Knight Rises Review: Anne Hathaway is the best catwoman ever. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2012/07/dark-knight-rises-review (accessed Feb 17, 2022).

JOE_co_uk. Here's Anne Hathaway in her skin-tight 'The dark knight rises' Catwoman costume. you're welcome. https://www.joe.ie/uncategorized/heres-anne-hathaway-in-her-skin-tight-the-dark-knight-rises-catwoman-costume-youre-welcome-34769 (accessed Feb 17, 2022).

Orange, B. A. Scarlett Johansson's pregnancy could impact 'Avengers' sequel. https://www.businessinsider.com/scarlett-johanssons-pregnancy-could-impact-avengers-sequel-2014-3 (accessed Feb 17, 2022).

Swift, N. Stars Who Fired Back At Their Interviewer On Live TV. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeA0iXWH_i0&t=210s (accessed Feb 24, 2022).

Instead of asking about the roles of the female superheroes or what they thought of the movie, the actresses who play these roles were asked about their skintight suits.

Off

Traditional

White

Linguistics and Familiar Conversation Over Text

Anonymous — Sun, 24 Apr 2022 18:35:05 +0000

Linguistics and Familiar Conversation Over Text Anonymous (not verified) Sun, 04/24/2022 - 12:35

Author: Jillian Broome
Nominator: Forest Stuart
Course: LING 1000 Language in U.S. Society, Fall 2021
LURA 2022

Everybody says stupid things to their friends–things that only you and your friends can make sense of. To an outsider, it is nonsense. Among friends, it is founded in logic. All the images in this are screenshots of text conversations between myself and Farren Adler, a student at Oregon State University, and one of my closest friends. I was able to take note of a number of unique linguistic conventions that we had established, deliberately or not, in our conversations. I hope that by sharing these I can encourage others to look more closely at their own everyday conversations and maybe share a few jokes along the way.

The addition or substitution of the letter 'm' into words that do not contain it, particularly words describing the weather, is common, and despite this conversation occurring over text, I can assure that both of us are guilty of pronouncing this verbally. Pronouncing rainy as raym-nee /ɹeɪmni/ or windy as wim-dee /wɪmdi/ extends the time it takes to physically say the word and conveys a sense of tiredness and familiarity. In our context, this is used to indicate a general commentary rather than a serious discussion. Additionally, it is my fault that we discovered at least one rule to this insertion: attempting to add an 'm' to the word coffee (“comffee”) produces something very similar to the word comfy /kɑmfi/ and creates confusion requiring clarification. Thus, words subject to this insertion must not bear a resemblance to other, preexisting words.

The deletion of vowels, particularly long vowels, has an opposite effect in physically shortening the word. Changing scream to screm /skɹɛm/ makes it much more difficult to draw out the vowel, allowing it to come across cuter and less harsh by comparison.

Mc- is a morpheme exclusive to one particular setting thanks to the copyright McDonald's holds. In legal battles over this copyright, the morpheme was defined as "'basic, convenient, inexpensive, and standardized'" (Shuy, 2002, p. 98). For our purposes, Farren and I agreed that the addition of mc- to words in casual conversation is often not to change the meaning, but rather to improve the overall rhythm of the sentence, such as through consonance (mcfuckin'). In this regard, the definition of mc- as a morpheme to indicate convenience and standardization is rather fitting.

Tone tags are one of many examples of evolving internet language to cross the barriers of text-based conversation that prevent communicative clarity. However, while these are a widespread convention, indicators of tone can be extremely nuanced within a smaller circle. In these particular text conversations, ::) rather than :) began as a Halloween joke and came to be an indicator for degree of amusement:

The additional eyes indicate a longer pause, and, therefore, a sense of smugness in the above. In adopting this convention, both of us began to view a regular smiley face :) as short and clipped, and two sets of eyes became our standard practice ::).

While keysmashes are a standard convention in online communication, I personally struggle to make aesthetically pleasing keysmashes and often have to try multiple times:

As a result of adopting this and using agatha as a standard indication of amusement, the use of a "proper" keysmash now indicates a higher degree of amusement as it takes more effort to type out.

Across all of these conversational conventions, there is perhaps one that has most affected the daily lives of myself and Farren. If somebody were to ask "How are you?," most people would reply with a common courtesy response of "fine" or "good," as these are generally expected responses; for Farren and I, "fine" and "good" are not our default responses:

Used almost exclusively in an ironic manner, and with long forgotten origins, "thriving" is our automatic response–ingrained in our common speech to the point that we use it with people who do not understand it as a joke and, therefore, assume it to be genuine. This has led to more than one harried explanation.

The conversations that I have with my friend are the result of a cumulative seven years of inside jokes. Without the context built over that time, they become incredibly warped to outsiders. For Farren and I, they are intrinsic to how we speak. However, this type of language manipulation among close groups is not exclusive to me, nor to my friends. That "all living languages change is not a matter of faith or opinion or aesthetics, but observable fact" (Lippi-Green, 2012, p. 7). The examples above only scratch the surface of how I communicate with my friend, but by revealing these conversations, I hope that others can gain a different understanding of how they speak to one another every single day and the nuance that lies beneath the words.

Header image credit to Farren Adler and Jillian Broome

IPA chart with sounds. (2022). International Phonetic Alphabet. https://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-sounds/ipa-chart-with-sounds/

Lippi-Green, R. (2012). English with an accent: Language, ideology, and discrimination in the United States (2nd ed.). Routledge.

Sacks, H. (1984). On doing "being ordinary".

Shuy, R. (2002). Linguistic battles in trademark disputes, 95-109. Palgrave MacMillan. http://www.rogershuy.com/pdf/McDonald%27s%20case%20chap.pdf

ToPhonetics. (2022). https://tophonetics.com/

How obscure can an inside joke become (no bone intended)?

Off

Traditional

White

From Axolotls to Airplanes: How Ancient Aztec Word Construction Translates to the Modern World

Anonymous — Sun, 24 Apr 2022 18:22:48 +0000

From Axolotls to Airplanes: How Ancient Aztec Word Construction Translates to the Modern World Anonymous (not verified) Sun, 04/24/2022 - 12:22

Author: Annika Ekrem
Nominator: Ambrocio Gutiérrez Lorenzo
Course: LING 3220 American Indigenous Languages, Fall 2021
LURA 2022

Nahuatl, the language of the ancient Aztec civilization spoken today by the Nahua people in southern Mexico, has made a surprisingly profound impact on several languages, including English and Spanish. This far-reaching influence can be attributed to its status as a lingua franca in Mesoamerica. Another key factor behind this influence and longevity is the creative and metaphorical nature of Nahuatl word construction, which has allowed speakers to contrive rich, descriptive nouns that bridge the gap from ancient to modern times.

Nahuatl noun construction typically follows a straightforward convention in which complex concepts are built from simpler, preexisting words in the language. These constructions often rely on metaphor, which allows many Nahuatl words to paint a vivid picture of the concepts they describe. Numerous Nahuatl nouns contain components that date back to the ancient ideograms used in the original Aztec writing system. Some of these building blocks include atl ‘water’, calli ‘house’, and tepostli, ‘metal’.

Examples of ancient Aztec ideograms

The impact of Nahuatl on English often goes unnoticed since many Nahuatl loanwords have been adapted into the English sound system. However, by investigating the etymologies of these words, it becomes evident that many names for the flora, fauna, and foods of Mesoamerica have roots in Nahuatl. Take, for instance, the word chocolate. At first, it’s difficult to discern how the word chocolate could have originated from Nahuatl, but upon converting its spelling into the Nahuatl convention and breaking the word down into its smaller morpheme units, a story emerges about the word’s origin:

Originally, chocolate was a thick, unsweetened drink that the Nahua people prepared by mixing ground cacao nibs, chiles, corn, and spices with water. This drink, referred to as ‘bitter water’, eventually evolved into the unmistakable sweetened, solid bars that we consider chocolate today.

An obvious Nahuatl loanword in English is axolotl. These salamanders are native to lakes near Mexico City, the center of what used to be the Aztec empire. The meaning of their name is almost as adorable as the axolotls themselves, as axolotl is derived from atl ‘water’, and the Aztec deity Xolotl, who was often represented as a dog or a monster. Depending on the interpretation of Xolotl, the word axolotl can translate directly to either ‘water dog’ or ‘water monster’ (Watson, 1938).

A captive axolotl

A third example of a Nahuatl word used commonly in English is chipotle, which has been popularized by the Mexican grill of the same name. This Nahuatl word can be deconstructed into chīlli ‘chile’, and pōctli ‘smoke/smoked’, describing a smoked chile pepper, or in colloquial English, a famous restaurant chain.

A sign for Chipotle Mexican Grill™ brandishing the namesake smoked pepper

More English words that originated in Nahuatl include coyote, ocelot, tomato, chile, sapote, avocado, and chia.

Nahuatl loanwords are also partly responsible for Mexican Spanish having multiple words for the same concepts. In many cases, one form of a word can be traced directly from Nahuatl. For instance, Mexican Spanish has two words for owl: búho and tecolote. Tecolote is derived from the Nahuatl word tecolotl. Similarly, the term elote, meaning corn, is derived from Nahuatl elotl, which refers to fresh corn before it is dried and converted into maiz.

Other Spanish words adopted from Nahuatl follow a similar loan process to the English examples, such as the word papalote from papalotl, or butterfly, or the word cacahuate from tlācacahuatl, meaning peanut but literally translating to ‘earth bean’ (Silver and Miller, 1997).

More Spanish words that originated in Nahuatl include mapache ‘raccoon’, chicle ‘gum’, molcajete ‘mortar and pestle’, chile, zapote, aguacate ‘avocado’, guacamole, and mole ‘sauce’, among hundreds of others.

The flexible metaphorical nature of Nahuatl word construction allows speakers to create neologisms for new concepts in the language instead of borrowing words from other languages, helping Nahuatl to adapt to a rapidly evolving world (Hadley 2021). Nahuatl neologisms generally follow the same template as older words like xocolātl and axolotl, but many of these new constructions center around the concept of metal, especially for metallic inventions. Take the word airplane, for example. Nahuatl speakers have devised multiple compound neologisms to describe airplanes:

Similar to airplanes, trains can also be described through an animal-centered metaphor or more directly by characterizing their behavior:

The inventive, poetic word generation of Nahuatl makes this language impressive and versatile. From forming a substantial unseen portion of English and Spanish vocabulary to adapting to the challenges of an increasingly oppressive world, this native language has not only survived but has made a significant impact on the very languages that constrain it in modern times.

Header image created by Annika Ekrem

Hadley, Scott. “How Nahuatl Uses Compound Words to Adapt to an Ever-Changing World.” Mexicolore: Bringing Mexico and the Aztecs to Life in Schools and the Community, 3 July 2021, https://www.mexicolore.co.uk/aztecs/language/how-nahuatl-adapts-to-changing-world.

Olko, Justyna, and John Sullivan. “Toward a Comprehensive Model for Nahuatl Language Research and Revitalization.” Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, vol. 40, 2014, p. 369., https://doi.org/10.3765/bls.v40i0.3149. Silver, Shirley, and Wick R. Miller. American Indian Languages: Cultural and Social Contexts. University of Arizona Press, 1997.

Sullivan, Thelma D. “Characteristics of the Nahuatl Language.” Thelma D. Sullivan's Compendium of Nahuatl Grammar, edited by Wick R. Miller and Karen Dakin, translated by Neville Styles, University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1988, pp. 1–44.

“University of Oregon Online Nahuatl Dictionary.” Edited by Stephanie Wood, Welcome to the Nahuatl Dictionary! | Nahuatl Dictionary, National Endowment for the Humanities, 2020, https://nahuatl.uoregon.edu/content/welcome-nahuatl-dictionary.

Watson, George. “Nahuatl Words in American English.” American Speech, vol. 13, no. 2, 1938, p. 108., https://doi.org/10.2307/451954.

What do chocolate, an endangered salamander, and a popular restaurant chain have in common? They all have etymological roots in Nahuatl!

Off

Traditional

White

All, Everything, and Only: Defining The Taxonomy of Copular Clauses

Anonymous — Fri, 22 Apr 2022 18:23:43 +0000

All, Everything, and Only: Defining The Taxonomy of Copular Clauses Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 04/22/2022 - 12:23

Author: Alexis Cooper
Nominator: Orin Hargraves
Course: LING 3430 Semantics, Fall 2021
LURA 2022

Consider the following sentences:

(1) a. Everything I don’t eat is food for the dog.
b. All I don’t eat is food for the dog.

These sentences appear very similar on the surface, but have very different meanings. (1a) means the speaker gives the dog their leftovers, while (1b) means that the speaker is willing to eat anything but dog food. These constructions are labeled all-clefts and everything-copular clauses respectively, and are two different types of copular clauses which I hoped to investigate.

Copular clauses - clauses whose main verb (in English) is the copular verb be - have been the subject of much work over the decades. Relevant here is the taxonomy first developed by Higgins (1979) and further developed in subsequent years. This differentiates several different types of copular clause based on their syntactic and semantic behavior; the two most important classifications are predicational and specificational copular clauses. Following are examples of each:

(2) a. The person with the umbrella is walking alone. (Predicational)

b. What I don’t eat is food for the dog. (=The dog eats my leftovers, from Hedeburg (1993))

(3) a. The person with the umbrella is my sibling. (Specificational)

b. What I don’t eat is food for the dog. (=I don’t eat dog food, from Hedeburg (1993))

The semantic definition of the mentioned taxonomy, though, is somewhat vaguely-defined. The broad strokes are that predicational sentences further specify the pre-copular constituent, while specificational sentences denote some attribute of it. However, a more rigorous definition is still not agreed upon. Two proposed definitions are outlined below:

Mikkelsen (2005, 2011) and Geist (2007) use a definition which bases the taxonomy on the referentiality of a given sentence’s pre- and post-copular constituents – essentially, it considers whether each constituent is a definite noun or not. A predicational clause has a referential constituent at the start and a non-referential constituent at the end; a specificational clause has the opposite.

A more nuanced definition was given in Heller (2005), based on discriminability. An item is said to be more discriminable the closer it is to a specific, discrete object in space – In essence, this is just a sliding scale of referentiality. In this framework, specificational clauses increase in discriminability, while predicational clauses decrease.

I sought to compare and evaluate these definitions using my previous work in all-clefts – crucially, I had shown in this work what can be seen in (1): all-clefts must be specificational, while everything CCs must be predicational. These two constructions can therefore be used as an ‘anchor’ to specificational and predicational clauses, and by comparing the postcopular parts of these two constructions, we can compare the behavior of specificational and predicational clauses. I used a web corpus to gather examples of these constructions for comparison, as well as only-clefts, another similar construction which patterns with all-clefts, to ensure that specificational clauses do act similarly to each other, and the data is not random noise.

The data collected did not support Mikkelsen’s metric. It did hold up for predicational clauses – everything-CCs universally showed non-referential postcopular constituents; however, the purely binary definitions offered would predict that all-clefts must always have a referential postcopular constituent. This was directly refuted by examples such as (4), where the postcopular constituent (bracketed) was a full clause:

(4) All that means is [that they aren’t looking hard enough].

However, these results do show a relative trend towards Mikkelsen’s criteria. The specificational constructions analyzed, although they are far from entirely referential, do show a higher percent of referential and noun-phrase postcopular constituents than their predicational counterparts, which show a much higher proportion of adjectival (i.e. less referential) constituents. In fact, this is very close to Heller’s definition – the sliding scale of referentiality mentioned above. I argue that the data supports Heller’s definition over Mikkelsen’s and Geist’s.

As a side note from the main findings of the study, it can be seen in the table that there were two instances of adjectival all-clefts. These are shown in (5):

(5) a. All that he says is true; he does not speak empty and false words.
b. All that he does is true and actual.

These read more like everything-CCs than all-clefts. These sentences were both drawn from a religious website, and seem archaic in nature. It is possible that the specificational use of all-clefts is a new phenomenon, and sentences like these are relics of the construction’s past usage. Hopefully, more research will be able to shed some light on this in the future.

Cooper, A. (2020) ‘The Syntax of All-Clefts and All-RC Constructions’, BA Thesis, University of Sheffield

Geist, L. (2007) ‘Predication and equation in copular sentences: Russian vs. English’ In: I. Comorovski, K. von Heusinger (eds.) Existence: Semantics and Syntax, Berlin: Springer

Hedeburg, N. (1993) ‘On the subject-predicate structure of pseudoclefts’, In: Eid, M. and G. Iverson (eds.) Principles and Prediction: The Analysis of Natural Language, Amsterdam: John Benjamins

Heller, D. (2005) ‘Identity and Information: Semantic and Pragmatic Aspects of Specificational Sentences’ PhD Thesis, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Mikkelsen, L. (2005) Copular clauses: specification, predication, and equation, Amsterdam: John Benjamins

Mikkelsen, L. (2011) ‘Copular clauses’ In: Maienborn, C. K. von Heusinger, and P. Portner (eds.) Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning, 2 vols. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 1805-1829

How everything can help us describe copular clauses.

Off

Traditional

White