Research and Innovation

This review discusses a number of recent studies focusing on the role of phonological and morphological structure in lexical access of Russian words by non-native speakers. This research suggests that late second language (L2) learners differ from native speakers of Russian in several ways: Lower-proficiency L2 learners rely on unfaithful, or fuzzy, phonological representations of words, which are caused either by problems with encoding difficult phonological contrasts, such as hard and soft consonants, or by uncertainty about the phonological form and form-meaning mappings for low-frequency words. In processing morphologically complex inflected words, L2 learners rely on decomposition to access the lexical meaning through the stem and may ignore the information carried by the inflection. The reviewed findings have broader implications for the understanding of nonnative word recognition, and the role of L2 proficiency in lexical processing.

Two auditory lexical decision tasks explore the role of case form (citation or oblique) and the type of inflection (overt or zero). In native speakers, the study reports an additional processing cost for both overtly and zero-inflected oblique-case nouns compared to the same nouns in the citation form. It is interpreted as the cost of checking the recomposed word within the inflectional paradigm rather than the cost of affix stripping, because there is no affix to strip in zero-inflected words. Conversely, nonnative speakers of Russian in Experiment 1 do not show additional processing costs either for case form or inflection type, which suggests that they do not process the morphological information encoded in the inflection. In Experiment 2, we add a new manipulation to the nonword condition such that the nonwords illegally combine real stems and real inflections to emphasize the need for processing the inflection. This time, nonnative speakers show additional processing costs for oblique-case nouns, and their sensitivity to case increases with proficiency, with only high-proficiency nonnative speakers demonstrating native-like sensitivity. We show that citation forms are processed faster than oblique forms regardless of inflection, and that nonnative speakers’ engagement of morphological information is task and proficiency-dependent.

For several decades, researchers have studied the field of heritage language (HL) teaching and learning. The intention of this review is to analyze these studies in order to find broader and more specific applications to inform the current situation in the Hebrew class. These ap- plications are limited for several reasons. First, virtually all HL studies focus on the children of immigrants who speak or are learning the new region’s majority language while attempting to preserve their HL (usually their home language). Most young American Hebrew learners, apart from a number of children of Israeli immigrants, speak English as their home and first language (L1). Second, though prior studies of HL learning are numerous, the research usually consists of qualitative case studies focusing on one aspect of learning (for example, attitudes toward the teacher, reactions to class activities, or parental influences on learning). There is very little in-depth analysis or connection of results and implications. Third, “He- brew” is an umbrella term1 that includes biblical, liturgical, literary, modern and other genres and uses of the language and that can be meaningful for social, communal, reli- gious, affective, nostalgic, nationalistic, and instrumental reasons. It is difficult to pinpoint which Hebrew we can study and compare to other HLs.

For intermediate to advanced learners of Japanese, developing sociocultural competence in the use of Japanese politeness strategies is a well-documented challenge. As Wetzel (2011) points out, however, cultural artifacts such as public signs in Japan may be utilized effectively to illustrate contrasts in sonkeigo (honorific polite) vs. kenjōgo (humble polite) usage, and more broadly speaking, to elucidate the many ways in which the Japanese politeness system indexically points to one or more referents in a given interaction without the use of pronouns. That is, keigo (polite language) inherently demonstrates social deixis. This point is a fundamental one for students to grasp if they are to become adept interpreters and users of keigo expressions. This paper presentation discusses an approach adopted in a hybrid Japanese linguistics and Japanese business language course in which business e-mails in the author’s corpus from a variety of firms such as Amazon Japan, Starbucks, bookstores, and other online vendors were used to illustrate contextualized forms of sonkeigo and kenjōgo. Through a number of reading and discussion exercises, students first learned to identify keigo forms in sample texts, then developed a receptive understanding of keigo usage and meaning in those texts, and finally moved on to acquire more active skills in adopting appropriate keigo forms in their speech and writing in business contexts. Such exercises are particularly useful in demonstrating to students how Japanese keigo expressions already encode information about the referent(s) of an utterance, thereby rendering the use of personal referents such as anata (you), watashi (I), the company name, and even an addressee’s name superfluous in e-mail discourse. In the process, learners develop a socioculturally grounded knowledge of this discourse genre (Berkenkotter and Huckin 1995, Yoshimi 2008), along with a newfound confidence in utilizing keigo.

In this monograph, Julie Koser sheds new light on how women’s bodies became a battleground for competing social, cultural, and political agendas in one of the most pivotal periods of modern history. She traces the women warriors in this work as reflections of the social and political climate in German-speaking lands, and she reveals how literary texts and cultural artifacts that highlight women’s armed insurrection perpetuated the false dichotomy of "public" versus "private" spheres along a gendered fault line. Koser illuminates how reactionary visions of "ideal femininity" competed with subversive fantasies of new femininities in the ideological battle being waged over the restructuring of German society.

The Routledge Handbook of Hispanic Applied Linguistics provides a comprehensive overview of Hispanic applied linguistics, allowing students to understand the field from a variety of perspectives and offering insight into the ever-growing number of professional opportunities afforded to Spanish language program graduates. The goal of this book is to re-contextualize the notion of applied linguistics as simply the application of theoretical linguistic concepts to practical settings and to consider it as its own field that addresses language-based issues and problems in a real-world context. The book is organized into five parts: 1) perspectives on learning Spanish 2) issues and environments in Spanish teaching 3) Spanish in the professions 4) the discourses of Spanish and 5) social and political contexts for Spanish. The book’s all-inclusive coverage gives students the theoretical and sociocultural context for study in Hispanic applied linguistics while offering practical information on its application in the professional sector.

Forgetting Differences: Tragedy, Historiography and the French Wars of Religion (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), is a study of the role of conceptions of tragedy and the tragic in the rhetoric of reconciliation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French historiographical and theatrical works about France’s Wars of Religion. Taking account of the overlaps and disjunctions between juridical and theological conceptions of pardon, amnesty, and reconciliation, and opening up a broader inquiry into conceptions of memory and forgetting as they bore on representations of the Wars of Religion in historiography and theatrical tragedy from 1550–1630, the arguments in the book examine attitudes toward history in early modern Europe, provide an account of the emergence of the ideal of aesthetic distance as one of the foundations of French literary theory of the seventeenth century, and offer an analysis of the shifting conceptions of emotion that informed postwar reconciliation in early modern France.

This article is anchored in Labov’s (1966) language stratification theories and builds on the work of several authorsto explain why heritage language speakers in New York City perceive their variety of Spanish as being lessprestigious compared with the Spanish varieties imposed in formal/academic contexts. The methodologyused included an innovative matched-guise technique with rap followed by an interview. In the contextof Hip-Hop, the results suggest that the stigmatized vernacular variety becomes the prestige variety. Thesocial and educational significance of these findings is discussed. Furthermore, reflection on the researchmethods adopted in the study lends support to qualitative approaches for studying language attitudes.

Language and money function metaphorically in similar ways; therefore, we tend to accept or reject the value of a coin or the coining of a word for very similar reasons. Benito-Vessels presents an overview of language-value and money-value in several historical time periods and specifically focuses on the early appreciation of language as an instrument of power in five medieval Spanish texts: Cantar de mio Cid, Bocados de oro, Tractado de amores de Arnalte y Lucenda, Sergas de Esplandián and Estoria de España. Through a close reading of these and other medieval and contemporary texts, the author demonstrates that the name of Beatriz de Suabia was considered of such value that it was misused as currency. Carmen Benito-Vessels is a Professor of Medieval Studies and History of the Spanish Language at the University of Maryland. She earned her M.A. in Romance Philology at the University of Salamanca (1977), she pursued postgraduate studies at the University of Lisbon (1977-79) and obtained her Ph.D. at the University of California-Santa Barbara (1988). Benito-Vessels is "Miembro Colaborador" of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language and she is the author and editor of several books and numerous articles, including: Juan Manuel: Escritura y recreación de la historia (1994); Women at Work in Spain. From the Middle Ages to Early Modern Times (1998); and La palabra en el tiempo de las letras. Una historia heterodoxa (2007).

Wajdi Mouawad's works are haunted by the war that devastated his native Lebanon, and by his subsequent exile. This article focuses on Littoral (1999), Visage retrouvé ( 2002) and Incendies (2003). By highlighting the central role of specters and graves, it argues that the burial of the dead is a quest for a long-lost past, a means to reclaim a piece of oneself and rebuild memory and history alike. Furthermore, it shows how Mouawad seeks, through theater, storytelling, and writing, to confront both the war, and the lack of a story about the war, the past, and origins.

Contemporary French & Francophone Studies, Dec. 2014, Vol. 18, Issue 5

Keywords: War; Narrative; Burial of the Dead; Specters; Storytelling; Theater