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Covering all seven countries on the isthmus, this volume presents the first collection of original linguistic studies on Central American Spanish varieties, which have long been neglected in Hispanic Linguistics. The analyses in this collection span across disciplines such as sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, bilingualism, historical linguistics, and pragmatics. This volume bridges the gap between international and Central American scholars, as it highlights the work that has already been done by Central American scholars but is relatively unknown to scholars outside of the region. It also introduces readers to more recent work that sheds new light on Central American Spanish varieties, from both urban and rural settings as well as in bilingual communities where Spanish is in contact with indigenous languages.
Covering all seven countries on the isthmus, this volume presents the first collection of original linguistic studies on Central American Spanish varieties, which have long been neglected in Hispanic Linguistics. The analyses in this collection span across disciplines such as sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, bilingualism, historical linguistics, and pragmatics. This volume bridges the gap between international and Central American scholars, as it highlights the work that has already been done by Central American scholars but is relatively unknown to scholars outside of the region. It also introduces readers to more recent work that sheds new light on Central American Spanish varieties, from both urban and rural settings as well as in bilingual communities where Spanish is in contact with indigenous languages.
Abstract
Concept-Based Language Instruction (C-BLI) has been shown to be an effective approach for teaching second language (L2) learners complex grammatical features. However, it is unclear whether C-BLI is equally effective for heritage language (HL) learners. 30 L2 and 27 HL learners of Korean completed a series of tasks designed in a pre-intervention-post-test model that focused on speech level through verbal morphology of honorific second-person address forms. The positive change seen in self-reported understanding of speech level from pre- to post-test in both groups was not significantly different, indicating equal self-reported gains in understanding, regardless of group. However, the qualitative analysis showed differences in the ways that L2 and HL learners verbalized their understanding and appropriateness judgments of speech level. The findings provide evidence that HL learners benefit equally in overall growth, although slightly differently in how they develop, from C-BLI.
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This study used shell noun as the starting point to analyze language activities that used the word shì shí shàng ‘in fact’ by Internet users on PTT, to understand the truth event that this empty shell noun signifies; and to identify the characteristics of pragmatic practice in the texts screened by the shell noun. Through the PTT Tool, posts with more than 100 comments on the PTT Gossip board during the level 3 alert were first screened out, after which comments that used the word “in fact” were identified. A total of 867 comments contained the word “in fact”. Next, content analysis was applied to classify these comments according to their literal themes. The author discovered that the functional word “in fact” was a word used to provide multiple evidence and create words with ‘objective’ effects. When used to express dissenting opinions, “in fact” enables netizens to use it for shifting their tone, willingly abandoning the responsibility for the speech.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has not only brought considerable challenges to public health, but also diffusions of fake news on social media platforms, taking on the moniker of “infodemic”. To have a better understanding of the infodemic, this research takes 580 pandemic-related fake news stories from two Taiwanese fact-checking platforms and 180,000 real news articles from four major newspapers in Taiwan spanning from January 2020 to August 2021. The paper presents lexical usages and discourses of fake news from the perspective of corpus-assisted discourse study. Keyword comparison and collocational network analysis are adopted as the major analytic framework to identify keyness keywords and to uncover the discourses embedded in COVID-19 fake news. Results suggest that pandemic-related fake news tend to emphasize the themes of virus, vaccine, and immunity regarding the content keywords. Personal pronouns that differentiate us and them, conjunctions used to construct causal explanations, time-frames that denote a confirmed social fact in false stories are also prominent lexical usages in COVID-19 fake news. Notably, verbs related to promoting action and expressions of polite requests are often fabricated in fake news messages. Collocational network reveals five main themes in pandemic-related fake news: virus, vaccine and vaccination, symptom, food and drink, caution and warning and mask wearing. This paper concludes that more than simply differentiating between true and false, fake news involve miscellaneous discursive constructions of existing political, social, and cultural dimensions within alternative and unverified reality.
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Social media platforms such as YouTube have become increasingly popular for language teaching and learning. Despite adequate research on the use of YouTube for educational purposes, it is necessary to explore the verbal and non-verbal features YouTubers deploy, as in Taiwan, to construct online discourse in a multilingual context. Using the Appraisal Theory framework, this study analyses the evaluative practices in three Taiwan-based English-teaching videos. The results reveal that YouTubers made evaluations fairly frequently and used specific multimodal devices for evaluation in language-teaching videos, such as expressions of judgement, disclaim, and focus, and gestures such as beats and pointing. The evaluation was found to serve genre-specific functions, including explaining pedagogical content, making meta-pragmatic comments about language use, marking the opening and closing of the video, and promoting products or services. The findings have implications for research on appraisal, social media pragmatics, and online language teaching practices.
Abstract
This study explores a new type of grammaticalisation, namely, grammatical constructionalisation, based on an investigation of the use of a newly emerging construction, the [X.jpg] construction, in online forums in Taiwan. JP(E)G stands for ‘Joint Photographic Experts Group’. As an abbreviation for the file extension of images, it was initially attached to image files in computers. However, in Taiwanese Mandarin, new usages for it have developed, whereby it can be attached to any phrase, including those without any source images, thereby simply pretending that the phrase has an attached image. Since the file extension .jpg is a technical term and a bound morpheme, when it extends to attenuating the force of the speech act, it functions as a pragmatic marker or hedge. This process of change from lexical to grammatical is known as grammatical constructionalisation and reveals the results of the interplay between popular Internet memes and user psychology. When using [X.jpg], users tend to downtone the speaker’s attitude, increase solidarity among insiders and pursue vividness and a sense of humour. This usage initially emerged under the technical limitations of a text-only online environment. The findings of this study suggest that the constructionist approach is an efficient, unified theoretical framework for its explanatory adequacy in addressing issues concerning both synchronic lexical semantics and diachronic grammatical change.