Volume 42 (2006) Abstracts

Adil Al-Kufaishi: Lexical cohesion patterns in Arabic and English expository texts. PSiCL 42 (2006). Pages: 7-34.


The paper deals primarily with lexical cohesion as a text-forming phenomenon. It analyzes the patterns of lexical cohesion in a pair of parallel Arabic and English expository texts. The lexical patterns which operate through an interwoven network of lexical links are realized via the lexical resources of: (a) recurrence, which involves simple repetition, complex repetition (variation), pattern repetition and repetition by a general term; (b) superordinate-hyponymy and hyponymy- hyponymy relation; (c) synonymity or near synonymity relation; (d) contrast which could either be complementary or antonymic; (e) meronomy: the relation of the part to the whole which could either be: concrete or abstract; (f) collocation: a sequence of lexical items which either belong to an ordered series or are relevant to a specific topic; (g) co-reference: two occurrences that have the same referent; (h) pronominal reference: the replacement of a noun with a pronoun; (i) parallelism: using parallel structures such as two or more than two noun phrases, verb phrases, adverbial phrases, noun clauses, adjectival clauses, adverbial clauses, sentences, etc.; and (j) paraphrasing: repeating the same content in different forms.

The objective of this paper is to identify the lexical cohesion patterns that characterize two parallel Arabic and English expository texts, to specify the type of cohesive ties utilized, to determine their frequency of occurrence in each text and to indicate the language specific rhetorical tendencies of Arabic and English exposition.

Among the findings the study produced are the following: (a) the ratio of lexical repetition in English expository texts is as high as that in Arabic expository texts (36.66% to 35.57%); (b) the recurrence of Arabic root repetition (variation) is higher than that of English (15.01% to 9.40%); and (c) the occurrence of synonymy and near synonymy in English texts is higher than that in Arabic texts (11.88% and 16.33% to 5.92% and 7.90%, respectively). Two of the postulated three hypotheses proved to be invalid: the claim that Arabic expository texts are dominated by a higher ratio of recurrence than English expository texts and the claim that English expository texts utilize complex repetition (variation) more extensively than Arabic expository texts. The third postulated hypothesis, which states that parallel repetition-replacement/synonymy pattern characterize Arabic texts more conspicuously than English texts, was substantiated.

Piotr Cegłowski: Viewed from a different perspective: Language as a biological system; the case of language evolutionin the minimalist account. PSiCL 42 (2006). Pages 35-68.


In this article I shall scrutinize the relevance of certain rudimentary generativist assumptions derived within the generativist framework and confront it with the recent findings in genetics, neurobiology and evolutionary biology. The major task is to present a plausible scenario for the emergence and evolution of human speech, one that would attempt to consolidate all the scientific facts ranging from the above mentioned areas. Chomsky himself, for example, is rather reluctant to present any elaborate opinions on the evolution of language. Still, his views concerning the theory of language have for years provided food for thought as far as the analysis of language as the component of the human mind/brain goes. For some linguists, particularly intriguing seems to be the assumption that “[t]he faculty of language can reasonably be regarded as a ‘language organ’ in the sense that scientists speak of the visual system, or immune system [...u]nderstood in this way, the organ is not something that can be removed from the body leaving the rest intact” (Chomsky 2000: 4). Such a postulate emphasizes the need to treat language as the natural object of study and, thus, it subjects linguistics to the scientific scrutiny typical of other natural sciences such as biology or physics. The strive for “naturalistic inquiry” appears to raise the whole array of problematic, but, simultaneously, extremely interesting questions. The thorough research of the relations between language and the brain (Lieberman 2002, 2003) as well as the evolutionary underpinnings of human speech seem to hint at the fact that there are “wheels within wheels” in the generative machinery.

I therefore take the opportunity to present new evidence concerning language as the natural object with its own evolutionary record and measure it against the mainstream generativist assumptions (including some details of the minimalist model).

To that purpose, I will present and discuss the minimalist evolutionary scenario (Berwick 1998) which, in my opinion, captures and accounts for the recent scientific findings (such as the analysis of the “grammar gene” FOXP2 (Enard et al. 2002). Bearing this in mind, I assume that the theory of UG/I-language holds for language as a biological system (Chomsky 2001; Li 1997).

Shehdeh Fareh and Aziz Thabit Saeed: Rate of information packaging in English and Arabic: A contrastive study. PSiCL 42 (2006). Pages: 69-84.


This study aims at comparing and contrasting the informational status of discourse entities in Arabic and English texts. Four fairly similar texts – two narrative and two non-narrative – were selected from both languages. Prince’s (1981, 1991) model of Assumed Familiarity, which avoids the binary classification of information into “Given vs. New”, was adopted in the analysis. Prince divides discourse entities into three levels: New, Inferable and Evoked. After comparing the frequency of each category in both languages, the study delineates the major similarities and differences between the two languages.

Dylan Glynn: Conceptual metonymy – A study in cognitive models, reference-points, and domain boundaries. PSiCL 42 (2006). Pages: 85-102.


This study takes the discussion on concept structure in metonymy presented by Truszczyńska (2003) as a starting point and raises further questions on its linguistic structure and cognitive processing. Although we agree with Truszczyńska that the fundamental issues for the study of conceptual metonymy are concept delimitation and concept structure, we argue that she overlooks some important insights into these issues. We focus especially on the interaction of metaphor and metonymy and Langacker’s (1987) cognitive grammar and its proposals for the structuring and processing of metonymic language. We propose a methodology for concept delimitation and an alternative explanation for concept structuring. These are applied in a small case study of metonymic expressions for ‘sorry’ and ‘forgive’ in English. The discussion concludes that although better concept delimitation is an important step for the rigorous treatment of metonymic relations, current cognitive approaches to metonymy still do not offer sufficient means for explaining the role of context dependent signification.

Małgorzata Haładewicz-Grzelak: Dispreferred clusters in Received Pronunciation: A Beats-and-Binding typology. PSiCL 42 (2006). Pages: 103-122.


Conflicts among universal preferences, and especially those between hearer-friendly and speaker-friendly preferences, are mediated by the major tendency for balance (cf. Maddieson 1992), which is realized on a language-specific level. Thus, despite the existing bindings (hearer-friendly) and preferred sonority distances between segments (hearer-friendly), articulatory adjustments between segments are possible (speaker-friendly), which eventually also serve the hearer. Conflict solutions are implemented language-specifically to establish language-specific or typological relations between bindings, phonotactic preferences and articulatory preferences (Dziubalska-Kołaczyk 1995: 65). The aim of the article is to investigate typological relations between bindings and phonotactics in RP English. In particular, I discuss the so-called “dispreferred clusters” within the Beats-and-Binding (henceforth, B&B) syllable-less model, as developed by Dziubalska-Kołaczyk (1995, 2002). I argue that the B&B interpretation was able to capture important generalizations which might be omitted using syllable-based frameworks. The paper also offers an extension to the B&B model by means of the concept of binding clutch and blueprint principle of clustering. In addition, I apply the tenets of Ludwik Zabrocki’s (1960 [1980]) structural phonetics to the analysis of the word-initial clusters. One of the outcomes of the analysis was the verification and corroboration of the predictions of the B&B model against the tenets of structural phonetics.

Iwona Knaś: An image-schematic analysis of English at and Polish przy. PSiCL 42 (2006). Pages: 123-144.


Spatial prepositions have been much studied in cognitive linguistics; however, the vagueness of the preposition at has discouraged cognitive linguists from its analysis, and what comes with it, from diagramming particular meanings. This paper is an attempt to analyze static spatial at-constructions which concern the location of one physical object in relation to another, using the framework of image schematic analysis of prepositions. Two major types of at image schemas are recognized here: external and internal proximity. Next, the image schemas of at identified in this article are compared to the image schemas of przy, the closest equivalent of this preposition in Polish. The analysis of the latter is based on Przybylska (2002). The subsequent comparison of the two prepositions reveals that they share only certain image schemas of external proximity, with internal proximity being a characteristic only of at.

Piotr Labenz and Kelly Nedwick: Freedom shall prevail: Some Optimality-Theoretic remarks on word order in Latin and Polish. PSiCL 42 (2006). Pages: 145-162.


We briefly present Choi’s (1999) OT account of word order (section 1.1) based on information structure, subsequently applying it to Polish (section 2.1) and Latin (section 2.2). It turns out to be sufficient to explain the default word orders in these languages, including specificity effects. However, it is inherent in both languages that also non-default orders are acceptable (section 3). In order to account for that, we introduce a new constraint dealing with the fronting of a “secondarily focused” element. It allows to explain scrambling (section 3.1) and – along with a version of unambiguous encoding constraint – freezing (section 3.2). The motivation behind this approach is treating the freedom of word order as a means of adding new information into the sentence, possibly finer-grained than just focusing an element. We end by some suggestions of how “secondary focus” can fit in a broader picture (section 4).

Beata Łukaszewicz and Monika Opalińska: ‘e-raising’ in child Polish: Phonetics-phonology interface. PSiCL 42 (2006). Pages: 163-190.


In this paper, we discuss a protracted process of e-raising in the context of palatals, reported in the speech of Zosia (Z), during a period of development (3;0–3;8). The process serves as an illustration of two issues, both central to the acquisition of phonology: the phonetics-phonology interface (see Vihman 1996: 4) and the intra-child variation (for example, Smith 1973; Ferguson and Farwell 1975; Goad and Ingram 1987; Rice and Avery 1995). Although prima facie the process of e-raising seems to exemplify a low-cost motor behaviour, we adduce several arguments pointing to its phonological rather than coarticulatory nature, thus supporting the view advocated, among others, by Macken (1992, 1995) that there is an autonomous phonological component in the child grammar and that the learning task must encompass not only the intricacies of the physics of speech but also abstract phonological structures. In fact, at the stage of development under discussion, Z’s phonological system seems to show more stability than her articulatory system. While some sounds noticeably exhibit variability in production (for example, soft and hard consonants often depart from their adult equivalents), their behaviour vis-à-vis e-raising uniformly points to the adult-like underlying contrasts. These findings run against the claim made by Rice (1995), Rice and Avery (1995) that variability in child speech occurs in the absence of a phonological contrast and is not different in kind from that found in adult speech.

Abdelgawad T. Mahmoud: Dative shift in Arabic and English: A contrastive study. PSiCL 42 (2006). Pages: 191-218.


The syntactic phenomenon of dative shift has received no attention in the Arabic linguistic literature; therefore the issue of whether certain Arabic double object (DO) constructions can be related to their corresponding prepositional object (PO) counterparts is a neglected one. The main objective of this study is to show that Arabic exhibits the phenomenon of dative shift and to provide a contrastive analysis of this phenomenon in English and Arabic. In addition, the study attempts to investigate the relevance of certain morphosyntactic properties of the Arabic DO constructions to the phenomenon of dative shift.

It was found in this study that certain Arabic DO constructions can indeed be related to their corresponding PO constructions, which means that Arabic exhibits the phenomenon of dative shift. It was also found that English and Arabic exhibit some similarities and differences with respect to this phenomenon. On the one hand, English seems to be generally more productive with respect to the verbs that allow for both the DO and PO alternations. On the other hand, the two languages exhibit significant similarities with respect to the verb classes that allow for the PO alternation only, as well as the verb classes that allow for the DO alternation only. However, two exceptions were pointed out in this regard: the first is concerned with the class of the English “Latinate verbs”, while the second has to do with the class of “accord verbs”. It was found that the Arabic equivalents of some of the “Latinate verbs” allow for both alternations, while their English counterparts allow for the PO alternation only. On the other hand, it was found that some of the Arabic equivalents of the “accord verbs” allow for the PO alternation only, while their English counterparts allow for the DO alternation only.

As to the relevance of the morphosyntactic properties of the Arabic DO constructions, three morphosyntactic parameters were employed in this study: the “equational sentence derivation”, “cognate objecthood” and “causative ditransitivization”. It was found that the parameter of the ‘equational sentence derivation’ accounts for a relatively large amount of data; however, due to exceptions and counterexamples, none of the three parameters can be considered as a necessary or sufficient condition for the occurrence of the dative shift in Arabic. On this basis, it was concluded that the lexical semantic properties of the verb, rather than its morphosyntactic features, are responsible for its participation in the dative shift in Arabic. This conclusion seems to corroborate Pinker’s (1989) and Krifka’s (1999, 2001) analyses of the phenomenon of dative shift in English and thus vindicates the lexical treatment of this phenomenon.

Alice Mwihaki: Word-level phonemic licencing. PSiCL 42 (2006). Pages: 219-228.


This study of Gĩkũyũ loanwords reveals three major strategies of phonological adaptation: sound substitution, sound insertion and syllable deletion. These strategies correlate with three aspects of loanword phonology: phonemic, phonotactic and prosodic. Plausibly, all the strategies function simultaneously. This article focuses more specifically on the phonotactic function.

Traditionally, phonotactic structure is conceived in relation to the syllable level organization of the phonemic units of a language. At this level, the syllable regulates phonotactic function in terms of the preferred phonematic (skeletal) structure (see Lass 1984; Katamba 1981; Carr 1993). This article develops the notion of phonotactic function further, to incorporate phonemic licensing at the level of the phonological word.

Ben Paflin: Some performative aspects of general extenders in German and English. PSiCL 42 (2006). Pages: 229-238.


This study attempts a cross-linguistic analysis of general extenders in German and English. Forms such as und so, und co., und pipapo (German) and and stuff flike that, and so on, and whatever (English) are discussed. The study identifies new examples of general extenders in German on the basis of Internet sources. It is found that German constructions of this type are numerous, and usually convey a strong evaluative attitude on the part of the speaker.

Jerzy Rubach: Perspectives on Polish palatalization. PSiCL 42 (2006). Pages: 239-268.


This article reviews the treatment of Polish palatalization in various theoretical frameworks that have developed from the standard model of generative phonology codified in The Sound Pattern of English (Chomsky and Halle 1968 – SPE, henceforth) and known as SPE phonology. Attention is focused on changes in research methodology that have led to progress in the analysis of Polish palatalization since the time when SPE phonology was the default framework.

Analysis of palatalization is a matter of how theories of representations interact with theories governing the organization of generalizations. Perspectives change radically when we move from the SPE type of representations to autosegmental representations. The most significant aspect of the latter is the claim that features are organized in a hierarchical fashion, which leads to the tenet of inherent underspecification. Equally significant is the tenet that phonological operations are limited to spreading and delinking, which has the consequence of bringing naturalness to the statement of generalizations regarding palatalization.

Theories concerned with the organization of phonological generalizations address the basic question of whether the interaction between generalizations should or should not be expressed by invoking derivation. If derivation is admitted, the further question is how many derivational steps should be allowed and how generalizations interact at different steps of derivation.

This article is organized as follows. Section 1 states informally the basic descriptive general­izations that govern the fragment of Polish phonology considered here. Section 2 shows how these generalizations are expressed in terms of SPE phonology. Section 3 offers a revision of the analysis in the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993; McCarthy and Prince 1995 – OT, henceforth). The most important conclusions are summarized in section 5.

Danko Šipka: Ambiguous definitions: A case study. PSiCL 42 (2006). Pages: 269-278.


Material from Benson’s Serbo-Croatian–English dictionary is used to explore ambiguous definitions. A part of the analysis was the creation of a Perl script designed to capture ambiguous definitions in the aforementioned dictionary. Extraction of the headwords along with their respective definitions yielded 37,090 lines. Out of this number 6,328 definitions (or 17%) were marked by the tool as ambiguous. Over 28% of these definitions are disambiguated elsewhere in the dictionary microstructure – most frequently by grammatical labels (90% of all disambiguated labels), but also by expansion, usage labels, examples, and cross-referencing. In the remaining ambiguous entries (over 70%), one half is ambiguous in both L1 and L2, while the other half is ambiguous only in English. Perusal of the entries containing the English-only ambiguity reveals that its main causes stem from a dominant meaning, rich network of senses, and L1 interference. This case study suggests that ambiguity should be given a more prominent role in lexicographers’ training, lexicographic workbenches, and evaluative metalexicography.