This study examines head nods produced as embodied and silent answers to polar questions before a transition relevance place has been reached. It discusses the notion of "response" and the ways in which the literature conceptualizes head nods. The analysis of video recordings of ordinary and institutional multiparty interactions shows…

Previous studies provided evidence for a connection between language processing and language change. We add to these studies with an exploration of the influence of lexical-distributional properties of words in orthographic space, semantic space, and the mapping between orthographic and semantic space on the probability of lexical extinction.…

The study investigates the reflections on tempo-aspectual morphology in Italian expressed by undergraduate multilingual learners with previous knowledge of Swedish and a Romance language (N = 22). The reflections of the participants, who were divided into four groups depending on a combination of proficiency in their background Romance language…

Researchers on bilingual processing can benefit from computational tools developed in artificial intelligence. We show that a normalized Levenshtein distance function can efficiently and reliably simulate bilingual orthographic similarity ratings. Orthographic similarity distributions of cognates and non-cognates were identified across pairs of…

The present study investigates lexical inter- and intralingual influences in the oral production of 14 very advanced learners of French L3. Lexical deviances are divided into two main categories: formal influence and meaning-based influence. The results show that, as predicted with respect to advanced learners, meaning-based influence is the most…

Reviews three Italian-French dictionaries recently published in Italy comparing them with an older one. States that all three mark a definite progress compared to the latter, for the variety and abundance of examples and the coverage of phraseology, but finds them lacking in the areas of syntactic and semantic information. (MES)

Analyzes the purpose of metaphor, distinguishing five different types, proposes terms that describe its components, and lists seven procedures for its translation. It is claimed that metaphor is at the center of all problems of translation theory, semantics, and linguistics. (MES)

The properties of one of the structures of politeness in the romance languages, the deference system connected with the use of conditional tenses, are analyzed in this paper. Although only Spanish examples are given, the conclusions also apply to French, Italian and Roumanian. The first part of the paper analyzes politeness in relation to its…

Student papers presented at a sociolinguistics conference include: "La variation phonologique [d'une voyelle] a Hull"; "La force illocutoire des pronoms personnels 'je' et 'tu' en tant qu'insignes des places d'ou parlent les femmes et les hommes"; "L'emploi des modes indicatif et subjonctif dans le francais parle de la…

This volume is a collection of bibliographies designed as a basic professional reference library for teachers of the five modern foreign languages most commonly taught in the United States. After a general reading list, the bibliographies are divided according to the language they deal with: (1) French, by Andre Martinet and Stanley Lampach; (2)…