Linguistics Beyond and Within, 2017, Vol. 3

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https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12153/7122

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    The influence of rater empathy, age and experience on writing performance assessment
    (Wydawnictwo KUL, 2017) Alp, Pilvi; Epner, Anu; Pajupuu, Hille
    Assessment reliability is vital in language testing. We have studied the influence of empathy, age and experience on the assessment of the writing component in Estonian Language proficiency examinations at levels A2–C1, and the effect of the rater properties on rater performance at different language levels. The study included 5,270 examination papers, each assessed by two raters. Raters were aged 34–73 and had a rating experience of 3–15 years. The empathy level (EQ) of all 26 A2–C1 raters had previously been measured by Baron-Cohen and Wheelwright’s self-report questionnaire. The results of the correlation analysis indicated that in case of regular training (and with three or more years of experience), the rater’s level of empathy, age and experience did not have a significant effect on the score.
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    ‘TAM’ in English constructions vs. Polish renditions – Selected transference pitfalls
    (Wydawnictwo KUL, 2017) Chłopek, Dorota
    This paper argues that a cognitive, constructional, view of the English categories of tense, aspect, and mood (‘TAM’) influences comprehension resulting in a more accurate grammatical performance by Polish users of English. Five English constructions considered to be transference pitfalls for Polish users are highlighted through juxtaposing original examples from The Hobbit by Tolkien (1937/1978) with three Polish renditions. The pitfalls addressed in this paper concern absence of equivalent Polish constructions to English expressions in the perfect aspect, the progressive aspect and to English constructions which ‘lexicalize’, i.e. convey with words, a compilation of the perfect and the progressive aspects. The Polish versions of the examples analysed and discussed in the present paper demonstrate a variety of means in which Polish grammar is used to handle the disparities between the English and Polish versions. The objective of the paper is to apply a cognitive interpretation to the aforementioned English constructions.
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    The locative syntax of Experiencers. The case study of phraseological units as psych-predicates
    (Wydawnictwo KUL, 2017) Dąbrowska, Anna
    The name psych-verbs is commonly assigned to verbs denoting mental or emotional states, such as fear, worry, frighten, or surprise. Such verbs select a participant/an individual who experiences an emotional or mental state, usually referred to as an Experiencer, and a non-Experiencer argument, sometimes called stimulus, trigger of emotion, causer or target/subject matter, or subsumed under the label of ‘theme’ (Landau, 2010, p. 5). The special behaviour of Experiencers, related to the so-called ‘psych effects’, is the reason why psychological predicates have been a subject of debate in theoretical syntax for several decades. The aim of this study is to check whether English verbal phraseological units, which denote a psychological condition of an Experiencer and occur with locative Prepositional Phrases (PPs), may serve as evidence for Landau’s (2010, p. 6) hypothesis of ‘Experiencers as mental locations’. Landau’s theory has been chosen since it covers a much broader variety of data, in comparison with the previous approaches, offered by Belletti & Rizzi (1988), Grimshaw (1990), and Pesetsky (1995), among others. The data analysed in the paper have been extracted from English dictionaries of idiomatic expressions, supported with the COCA Corpus. The study focuses on Object Experiencer verbal phraseological units that display a structure V + PP. The results of the study reveal that, in total, out of 3,000 tokens, there are only 50 psychological verbal idiomatic expressions with an Object Experiencer. However, the data show that a lexical P with the Experiencer as an object appears only in 13 (26%) idiomatic expressions out of the 50, whereas 37 items (74%) include an Experiencer preceded with no P. The latter might be treated as exhibiting an oblique Experiencer with a null preposition. However, no relevant syntactic evidence can be found in support the claim that there is a covert P in this type of phrase. Therefore, the results do not provide enough evidence in favour of Landau’s (2010) theory of Experiencers as mental locations, placed either in a covert or overt PP.
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    Little pro’s, but how many of them? – On 3SG null pronominals in Hungarian
    (Wydawnictwo KUL, 2017) Dalmi, Gréte
    While Hungarian 3SG individual reference null pronominals are in free variation with their lexical counterparts, 3SG generic reference null pronominals do not show such variation. This follows from the fact that Hungarian 3SG generic null pronominals behave like bound variables, i.e. they always require a 3SG generic lexical antecedent in an adjacent clause. Both the 3SG generic lexical antecedent and the 3SG generic null pronominal must be in the scope of the GN operator, which is seated in SpeechActParticipantPhrase (SAPP), the leftmost functional projection of the left periphery in the sentence (see Alexiadou & D’Alessandro, 2003; Bianchi, 2006). GN binds all occurrences of the generic variable in accessible worlds (see Moltmann 2006 for English one/oneself). These properties distinguish Hungarian from the four major types of Null Subject Languages identified by Roberts & Holmberg (2010).
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    Political discourse as practical reasoning: A case study of a British Prime Minister candidate speech
    (Wydawnictwo KUL, 2017) Harmon, Lucyna
    The paper outlines the method of political discourse analysis proposed by I. Fairclough & N. Fairclough (2012), who point to argumentative and deliberative nature of political discourse as practical reasoning that aims to decide a problem-solving action in a given situation. The novelty of this approach is explained through references to its established alternatives as focused on representation and power relations. The above mentioned method is applied to the British PM campaign candidacy speech by Andrea Leadsom to test how it works in the case of this type of political discourse which is different from the one originally examined. On this occasion, the meaning of the term ‘discourse’ is illustrated through the practical necessity of involving in the analyses the extra-linguistic and intertextual context.