Accessing the Classroom Discourse Community Through Accountable Talk: English Learners’ Voices

This case study draws on Gee's (1989) D/discourse theory to investigate English learners’ (ELs’) perspectives regarding Accountable Talk (AT)—a structured, discourse‐intensive instructional approach—after a yearlong implementation in three content‐based (mathematics) middle school classrooms. Interviews with 21 ELs (3 Advanced Placement, 18 comprehensive) 1 1 In this article, the authors use the district's term comprehensive when referring to regular education (not Advanced Placement) classrooms.
revealed that students perceived AT as a means for (a) improving the quality of classroom interactions, (b) having expanded learning opportunities, and (c) getting ahead in school and life. In particular, students felt that by establishing shared norms for talk, explicitly teaching them verbal and nonverbal features of the school Discourse (e.g., active listening strategies), and increasing their access to peer experts and to opportunities to take on roles of authority (i.e., teachers/helpers), AT enabled their classroom participation on a more equal footing. These results suggest that giving the school‐based Discourse a name (such as AT) and explicitly teaching about its principles may benefit culturally and linguistically diverse students by facilitating their socialization into the community of practice. At the same time, the study revealed that teacher perceptions and practices may limit the benefits of AT for ELs.     

Institutionalized ghosting: policy contexts and language use in erasing the person with Alzheimer’s

The ordinary social engagement of human life would not usually be considered an arena for language policy. Yet clinical evidence mounts that social interaction improves our lives as we age. Since social engagement decreases cardiovascular risks (Ramsay et al. in Ann Epidemiol 18:476–483, 2008) and delays memory loss among those living in communities (Ertel et al. in Am J Public Health 98:1215–1220, 2008), practices that prohibit social interaction threaten human well-being. For persons who have Alzheimer’s disease (AD), social interaction continues to play an integral part in cognitive function and delays in memory loss, according to a longitudinal study of social networks (Bennett et al. in Lancet Neurol 5:406–412, 2007). Increasingly, person-centered care that promotes social engagement for those with AD is promoted as an institutional policy to improve outcomes of dementia care (Edvardsson et al. in Int Psychogeriatr 20:764–776, 2008). Yet the training of caregivers may neither reflect person-centered care nor include attention to communication, suggesting covert policies in practice.     

Dimensions in Korean Laryngeal Phonology<Superscript>*</Superscript>

The often-cited phenomenon of post-obstruent tensing in Korean is taken here to be primarily a skeletal strengthening rather than a feature accretion. On this view, a tense consonant in Korean phonologically fills two skeletal timing slots, i.e., forms a geminate, and the fact that it is articulated with a discernable degree of tension, or glottal constriction, derives from the effects of a surface embellishment which (amending Avery and Idsardi, 2001). We term Korean Enhancement. The special quality of Korean tense consonants then is that they are phonological geminates phonetically augmented with the laryngeal dimension of Glottal Width, which implicates a gesture of glottal constriction; elsewhere, i.e., in singletons, the default gesture for a Glottal Width specification is that of a spread glottis, which results in heavy aspiration in the phonemically aspirated series. A further requirement that the Laryngeal node be structurally bipositional accounts for the celebrated syllable-final neutralizations (monopositional coda obstruents necessarily simplify to lax stops, which have no specified Laryngeal structure) as well as for the appearance of raised pitch on vowels following either tense or aspirated obstruents but not laryngeally empty lax ones (Jun (1993).     

Placeholders in the English Interlanguage of Bilingual (Basque/Spanish) Children

In this article we provide an explanation for 2 syntactic phenomena whose systematic production has been observed in the English nonnative grammar of 3 different age groups of 58 bilingual (Basque/Spanish) children after 4 years of exposure to English in a formal setting: (a) insertion of is before a lexical verb and (b) insertion of a subject personal pronoun before a lexical verb. We argue that the presence of these phenomena could be explained assuming the transfer of a functional projection common to the participants’ first languages and a gradual incorporation of the second language lexical items involved.     

The Spanish Progressive Construction and its Latin Source

This article analyzes the origins of the progressive construction: estar + -ndo. Traditional accounts suggest that this verbal structure, which is found in Spanish and other Romance languages, evolved directly from the Latin Ablative gerund. Data from historical texts, however, indicate that the Latin gerundive – an adjectival form phonologically and morphologically similar to the gerund – is the correct source of the progressive construction. Using a generative framework, this article argues that the gerundive was reanalyzed as a non-finite verb. Furthermore, this syntactic reanalysis was facilitated by the identical position of subjects and predicates in constructions containing a raising verb or an auxiliary verb.     

The Sense of An Ending: <Emphasis Type="Italic">Les Liaisons Dangereuses</Emphasis> Revisited

It is generally accepted that in Laclos’s novel the Marquise de Merteuil competes with Mme de Tourvel for Valmont’s adoration, and that she does so by attempting to impress him with her libertine prowess more effectively than the Présidente does by her virtue. However, I argue here that as Merteuil sees this strategy continually failing, she turns instead to an opposite one, which is to demonstrate that she can prove herself Tourvel’s superior on the latter’s own territory. Valmont has from the outset praised Tourvel’s virtue, manifested in her determination to resist his advances; indeed, for him ‘virtue’ and ‘resistance’ are interchangeable terms. Accordingly, when towards the end of the novel the Marquise spurns Valmont, she provocatively shows herself more capable of resistance, and therefore of ‘virtue’, than her fallen rival. By the same token, she surprisingly ceases to behave as a libertine (who observes a form of ascesis but never renounces her object) in order to behave instead as a version of the prude (who strives to overcome desire). Though this strategy is revealed in the denouement, its seeds are sown in the earliest letters, and it is developed in a number of ways throughout the novel.     

Raising of major arguments in Korean and Japanese

The question of whether languages like Korean and Japanese possess genuine instances of Subject-to-Object Raising (SOR) has been a matter of debate since Kuno (1976), as a number of the properties of the putative SOR construction in the languages differ from those found in languages like English, while others are shared between the languages. I argue in this paper that the paradoxical properties begin to fall into place once we posit that what undergoes movement in SOR in these languages is not the embedded subject, but the embedded Major Subject. The Major Subject is the initial Nom-marked DP in a Multiple Nominative Construction. It is shown that if we posit that the Major Subject raises in SOR, the unexpected properties of SOR can be accounted for. Under this analysis, SOR in Korean and Japanese conform to known constraints on A-movement taking place from the highest A-specifier (Major Subject) position of the embedded clause. It is the coindexation of the Major Subject with the predicate-internal position that gives rise to the illusion of non-locality. I then compare the analysis with an alternative base-generation analysis. While the two are roughly equal in terms of coverage, only the Major Subject raising analysis is able to account for properties of the raised nominal that could only have been determined in the embedded clause. The research reported in this paper has been presented in various incarnations at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (2003), Indiana University (2003), Seoul National University (2004), the summer international conferences of the Linguistic Association of Korea and the Modern Linguistic Society of Korea (2004), the Workshop on Japanese and Korean Linguistics at Kyoto University (2005), and at the LSA workshop ‘New Horizons on the Grammar of Raising and Control’ (2005). A preliminary version of the work was also presented at the Workshop on Formal Altaic Linguistics (2003) and appears in the proceedings. I would like to thank the audiences at these venues for their critical feedback. Special thanks go to Karlos Arregi, Cedric Boeckx, Youngju Choi, Hajime Hoji, Kisun Hong, JuHyeon Hwang, Ji-Hye Kim, Soowon Kim, Yoshihisa Kitagawa, Peter Sells, Keun Young Shin, Yukinori Takubo, and Yunchul Yoo whose input and criticism shaped and guided the paper. Bill Davies and Stan Dubinsky deserve special thanks for putting together a timely project on a topic of perennial interest to linguists as well as for comments and feedback and to Joan Maling for encouraging the submission of the paper and offering editorial assistance.     

Complex Predicates,Aspect, and Anti-reconstruction

This paper contrasts two families of approaches to certain affixal verb constructions in Japanese, with particular emphasis on the ’potential’ construction. Scope facts in this construction have been offered as support for complex predicate analyses, in which there is no syntactic constituent consisting of the object and lower verb, to the exclusion of the potential head -rare. We provide a variety of arguments, primarily from aspectual modification properties, which strongly challenge this family of approaches and favor instead VP-complementation approaches in which the potential head selects a thematically complete VP complement. Finally, we show how the scope facts may be accommodated on such a viewpoint, drawing connections to similar properties with other restructuring configurations cross-linguistically. For discussion of the material presented here, and judgements on examples, we are grateful to Kimiko Nakanishi, Masashi Nomura, Mamoru Saito, Tomokazu Takehisa, Kazuko Yatsushiro, and the JEAL editors and reviewers, as well as the audiences at CLA 2003 (Halifax) and JK-14 (Tucson). Parts of this research were funded by a grant from the Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture.