Open Access Published by De Gruyter Open Access

Volume 8 Issue 1

January 2022

Issue of Open Linguistics

Contents
Journal Overview

The global reach of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing localized policy reactions provides a case to uncover how a global crisis translates into linguistic discourse. Based on the JSI Timestamped Web Corpora that are automatically POS-tagged and accessible via SketchEngine, this study compares French, German, Dutch, and English. After identifying the main names used to denote the virus and its disease, we extracted a total of 1,697 associated terms (according to logDice values) retrieved from news media data from January through October 2020. These associated words were then organized into categories describing the properties of the virus and the disease, their spatio-temporal features and their cause–effect dependencies. Analyzing the output cross-linguistically and across the first 10 months of the pandemic, a fairly stable semantic discourse space is found within and across each of the four languages, with an overall clear preference for visual and biomedical features as associated terms, though significant diatopic and diachronic shifts in the discourse space are also attested.

Providing access to knowledge and information for all citizens, including the disadvantaged ones, is a constant preoccupation of the decision-making bodies of countries across the globe, particularly of developed and developing ones. In Europe, guidelines for creating accessible informational content have been created, being constantly improved and adapted to the new social realities. As a member state of the European Union, Romania also fosters social inclusion at various levels, including that of making information accessible to all people. Nevertheless, a lot still needs to be done in the field of linguistic accessibility as the analysis presented in the article shows. For example, research should be conducted to draft guidelines for using accessible languages . Then, the study of accessible languages should be implemented in “Translation and interpreting” study programmes for the purpose of developing skills that could be employed socially to increase knowledge accessibility, through interlingual and intralingual translation and interpreting services. In this way, awareness is raised in society and professionals specialised in linguistic accessibility are provided to the labour market to contribute, as language professionals, to the creation of an inclusive society.

This article discusses the diachronic development and the different uses of the reportative word dizque (diachronically based on diz que ‘she/he/it says that’) using data from Colombian and Mexican Spanish. The study presents a predominantly qualitative analysis of diachronic, twentieth- and twenty-first-century written data. The theoretical framework applied in this article is Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG), which is particularly useful in this context as it distinguishes between the interpersonal and representational functions of language. The main points made are: (i) dizque is an adverb that arose from a process of lexicalization rather than grammaticalization; (ii) in most of its uses, dizque has an interpersonal function in the sense that the Speaker instructs the Addressee that she/he is not the source of the information provided; (iii) by means of diachronic, dialectal, and typological data, it is shown that the scope of dizque is gradually decreasing; (iv) the only scope decrease that leads to a functional change of dizque is its application outside the context of speech-reports. FDG serves to account for each step in the scope decrease of dizque by means of its hierarchical approach to the actional and descriptive functions of verbal interaction.

About this journal

Open Linguistics is an academic peer-reviewed journal covering all areas of linguistics. The objective of this journal is to foster free exchange of ideas and provide an appropriate platform for presenting, discussing and disseminating new concepts, current trends, theoretical developments and research findings related to a broad spectrum of topics: descriptive linguistics, theoretical linguistics and applied linguistics from both diachronic and synchronic perspectives.

Article Processing Charges

Call for papers

Translation Times
Coordinating Editors: Titela VÎLCEANU, Antonia CRISTINOI BURSUC, Verónica PACHECO COSTA, Loredana PUNGÃ
manuscript submission deadline: 15 June 2023

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