Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus
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The use of discourse markers by Afrikaans-speaking preschoolers with and without specific language impairment
Full text linkDiscourse markers (DMs) are words or phrases speakers employ to coordinate what they want to say when, to whom and how during conversation. The purpose of this study was to establish (i) what types of DMs occur in the language of young Afrikaans-speaking children; (ii) what development, if any, takes place in DM use from the age of 4 years to 6 years; and (iii) how, if at all, the use of DMs by children with specific language impairment (SLI) differs from that of typically develping (TD) children. The participants were three Afrikaans-speaking groups: 15 TD 6-year-olds, 15 6-year-olds with SLI, and 15 TD 4-year-olds matched on mean length of utterance with the SLI group. A 30-minute spontaneous language sample was obtained from each participant. The number of occurrences of DMs (tokens) and the number of different DMs (types) used during these 30 minutes were tallied for each participant individually and for each of the three groups. It was found that maar 'but', en 'and', ja 'yes', and dan 'then' were some of the most frequently occurring DMs in the three groups. The SLI group used DMs that also occurred in the language of the TD groups, but the SLI group also used DMs which were not used by the TD groups at all. In terms of number of different DMs used, the SLI group functioned at a level between the two TD groups: They used more and a wider range of markers than the 4-year-olds but fewer and a smaller range of markers than their 6-year-old peers. It appears then that the use of DMs shows development between the ages of 4 and 6 years and that the use of DMs is delayed in children with SLI. Appropriate use of DMs can improve listeners' understanding of what is said; as such, it is recommended that speech-language therapists make DMs a focus point during therapy delivery to children with language impairment
Expressions of futurity in the Vilamovicean language
Full text linkoai:spilplus.journals.ac.za/oai:article/1The present paper aims at presenting all major morphosyntactic means of expressing future meaning in Vilamovicean, the smallest Germanic language spoken in the town of Wilamowice in Southern Poland. As will be demonstrated – and contrary to the opinion found in the literature published so far – the concept of futurity is not limited to the wada future but, rather, can be conveyed by a number of constructions. These forms may be divided into two main groups: the first one includes formations that are employed with no restriction by all speakers (among others these are constructions like the present tense, the periphrases wada + infinitive, wjyd + past participle or adverbials, wada hon/zajn + past participle, and zuła + infinitive, as well as various modally based future expressions) while the second class consists of two novel and "rare" locutions which are accepted uniquely by a limited number of speakers (this group includes locutions such as wada + past participle and wada + present). Furthermore, two other Vilamovicean periphrases will be discussed, namely wie + past participle and wie + present, which, even though restricted to the conditional value, display a similar morphosyntactic shape as the "rare futures"
Towards an integrated approach to cohesion and coherence in interlingual subtitling
Full text linkThis paper is written from the perspective of systemic functional linguistics (Halliday 1978). In this perspective, a text is a semantic unit that has a particular function and is related to its social system via its context of situation and of culture (Eggins 1994; Halliday and Hasan 1985). These inherent properties of a text hold true for a translated text as well. Since translation is an act of communication, priority is given to functional equivalence (Waard and Nida 1986) and norms (Toury 1995). The aim of this paper is to propose an integrated approach – an approach that combines linguistic and nonlinguistic resources – to cohesion and coherence in interlingual subtitling since this has not yet been done in translation studies. Thus, the paper is purely theoretical in nature. It is divided into four sections. The first section is an introduction to the notions of cohesion and coherence. The second section discusses current theories of cohesion and coherence. The third section reviews various approaches to these notions. In the final section, an integrated approach is proposed as a viable approach to cohesion and coherence in interlingual subtitling. Advantages and implications of this integrated approach are highlighted for further research
Foreign language teaching and learning: Challenges and opportunities at Makerere University
Full text linkAt Makerere University, foreign language courses in French, German and Arabic are attended by a variety of students at beginner, advanced and voluntary levels. Language students either learn foreign languages as service courses within the framework of academic programmes such as Tourism and Secretarial Studies, or as fully-fledged subjects at undergraduate level. In spite of the emphasis on language skills in job advertisements in the Ugandan press, the teaching of foreign languages tends to be oriented more towards theoretical requirements of academic (language) programmes and numbers of students, rather than toward the intensity of language contact, quality of language courses and students as well as standardised language course evaluations. The criteria for the selection of potential language students and the language learning policy are problematic and partly the cause of the unpopularity of language courses. On the basis of the evaluation of the course "German for Secretarial Studies", the current paper outlines challenges of teaching and learning German as a foreign language. There seems to be a discrepancy between the language skills that job markets require from university graduates and the skills which graduates are likely, at present, to acquire upon completion of their foreign language courses. The paper also focuses on factors that constitute barriers to foreign language learning and recommends ways in which foreign language students and teachers can exploit the potential of the budding Ugandan language industry
Verryking as 'n leksikografiese prosedure
Full text linkIn metalexicography the term "enriched item" refers to a dictionary item of which the centre has been expanded, i.e. enriched, by other item parts so that a new complex item is established as topic. This paper provides a brief discussion of the prevailing notion of enrichment. It is then indicated that the lexicographic practice has already increased the scope of this procedure, albeit that these innovations have not yet sufficiently been described in metalexicographic work. The lack of a theoretical discussion often leads to a haphazard application of enrichment where this procedure is not optimally employed. A classification is given of different procedures of enrichment, allowing a distinction between data-homogeneous and data-heterogeneous enrichment. These procedures can present examples of either single or double enrichment. It is shown that enrichment does not only target a single item but also an article zone where the procedure of enrichment can add another item, representing either the same or a different data type, to complement the original item. A typological distinction is made between enrichment aimed at expanding the data transfer in a dictionary article, enrichment aimed at enhancing the access in a dictionary and enrichment aimed at adding to the lexicographic functions. This last type is discussed with reference to the addition of the cognitive function in a dictionary with communication as primary function. The paper argues in favour of an even closer relation between lexicographic theory and practice, which will lead to a better description of enrichment but also a better application of this lexicographic procedure
Motion events in Afrikaans: their expression by adult speakers and by children with and without language impairment
Full text linkMotion events occur frequently in everyday life as people and objects constantly change their relative location to one another. Although children's descriptions of motion events resemble those of adults in their own language group from very early on (Choi and Bowermann 1991), there is increasing evidence for subtle differences as well. Young children speaking different languages seem to have some difficulty in expressing two types of spatial information in the same conceptual frame (e.g. Ochsenbauer and Hickmann 2010). In English and other satellite-framed languages such as German and Afrikaans, this task involves using a complex particle verb construction in which a directional particle (e.g. out) combines with a prepositional phrase carrying further information about the source or goal of movement (e.g. some bees came out of the tree) (Berman and Slobin 1994:161). Little is known about the development of this type of structure in satellite-framed languages such as Afrikaans. This paper examined whether (i)Â there are developmental differences between adults and 6-year-old Afrikaans-speaking children in the production of preposition+verb particle structures, and whether (ii) children with language impairment produce these structures in a different way than typically developing children. Target elements were preposition+verb particle structures with the particles af 'down', in 'in', uit 'out' and op 'up'. The performance of ten adults was compared to that of 30 typically developing and three language-impaired 6-year-olds. Half of the participants in the adult and typically developing groups were speakers of Mainstream Afrikaans (MA), and half were speakers of Cape Afrikaans (CA), a non-mainstream dialect. Distinct developmental differences that could not be attributed to dialectal variation, were found between 6-year-olds and adults. Children with language impairment showed less variation in their responses than their typically developing peers. Possible explanations for the findings are discussed
"Unlearning" construction types transferred from the L1: Evidence from adult L1 Afrikaans L2 French
Full text linkTwo construction types that are allowed in Afrikaans but not in French are transitive expletive constructions and full-NP object shift constructions. The study reported here tested whether Afrikaans-speaking advanced adult learners had knowledge of the ungrammaticality of these two construction types in the target L2 French, given that they had not been instructed about this ungrammaticality. The results of this study show that a large number of the L2 learners had indeed acquired knowledge of this ungrammaticality, despite the absence of (explicit) negative evidence to this effect, raising the question of which types of input or evidence learners make use of in L2 acquisition