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The terminology that we use to refer to English learners has shifted over the past two decades, from limited English proficient to English language learner to what is now the preferred term in California and, increasingly, other states: English learner. Yet, what has not changed is how this category continues to limit our thinking about bilingual/multilingual students. English learner is a label that conceals more than it reveals. It emphasizes what these students supposedly do not know instead of highlighting what they do know. As a category, “English learner” constrains our ability to perceive the many strengths that bilingual/multilingual students bring to the classroom—strengths on which we might build to support their language and literacy learning. The author describes how this label distorts our view of bilingual/multilingual students and proposes an alternative perspective that highlights the richness of these students’ linguistic repertoires.

This paper first provides an overview of the various senses in which the terms ‘marked’ and ‘unmarked’ have been used in 20th-century linguistics. Twelve different senses, related only by family resemblances, are distinguished, grouped into four larger classes: markedness as complexity, as difficulty, as abnormality, and as a multidimensional correlation. In the second part of the paper, it is argued that the term ‘markedness’ is superfluous, because some of the concepts that it denotes are not helpful, and others are better expressed by more straightforward, less ambiguous terms. In a great many cases, frequency asymmetries can be shown to lead to a direct explanation of observed structural asymmetries, and in other cases additional concrete, substantive factors such as phonetic difficulty and pragmatic inferences can replace reference to an abstract notion of ‘markedness’.

In this article, I address the issue of head movement in current linguistic theory. I propose a new view of the nature of heads and head movement that reveals that head movement is totally compliant with the standardly suggested properties of grammar. To do so, I suggest that head movement is not a single syntactic operation, but a combination of two operations: a syntactic one (movement) and a morphological one (m-merger). I then provide independent motivation for m-merger, arguing that it can be attested in environments where no head movement took place.

This article locates Norton's foundational work on identity and investment within the social turn of applied linguistics. It discusses its historical impetus and theoretical anchors, and it illustrates how these ideas have been taken up in recent scholarship. In response to the demands of the new world order, spurred by technology and characterized by mobility, it proposes a comprehensive model of investment, which occurs at the intersection of identity, ideology, and capital. The model recognizes that the spaces in which language acquisition and socialization take place have become increasingly deterritorialized and unbounded, and the systemic patterns of control more invisible. This calls for new questions, analyses, and theories of identity. The model addresses the needs of learners who navigate their way through online and offline contexts and perform identities that have become more fluid and complex. As such, it proposes a more comprehensive and critical examination of the relationship between identity, investment, and language learning. Drawing on two case studies of a female language learner in rural Uganda and a male language learner in urban Canada, the model illustrates how structure and agency, operating across time and space, can accord or refuse learners the power to speak.

This department explores how teachers can sustain students’ multilingual literacies and reimagine literacy learning across multiple contexts in conversation with researchers, practitioners, and communities.

In “The Devil's Dictionary”, Bierce (1911) defined language as “The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another's treasure.” This satirical definition reflects a core truth – humans communicate using language to accomplish social goals. In this Keynote, we urge cognitive scientists and neuroscientists to more fully embrace sociolinguistic and sociocultural experiences as part of their theoretical and empirical purview. To this end, we review theoretical antecedents of such approaches, and offer a new framework – the Systems Framework of Bilingualism – that we hope will be useful in this regard. We conclude with new questions to nudge our discipline towards a more nuanced, inclusive, and socially-informed scientific understanding of multilingual experience. We hope to engage a wide array of researchers united under the broad umbrella of multilingualism (e.g., researchers in neurocognition, sociolinguistics, and applied scientists).

This study aims to analyze a representative sample of French relational compounds such as “relations parents-enfants” (“parents-children relationship”) extracted from the FrWac corpus. Relational compounds have been defined as constructions made up of three nouns according to the structure N1 -N2a-N2b with, on the one hand, a subordinative relation between N1 and N2 and, on the other hand, an exocentric coordinative relation between N2a and N2b. The analysis of extensive data from the FrWac corpus made it possible to show that French relational compounds can be described according to the same parameters as Italian relational compounds, namely: (a) the polyvalence / monovalence of the head noun (N1 ); (b) the (non-)autonomy of the modifier N2a-N2b; (c) the type of the subordinate relationship between N1 and N2a-N2b; (d) the nature of the coordinative relationship between N2a and N2b; and (e) the fact whether the relationship between N2a and N2b is oriented or not. On a more general level, the framework of Construction morphology made it possible to identify in the data the following three principal sources which lie behind the creation of the relational compounds: (a) the polyvalent nature of the head noun; (b) the use of the iterative binary structure with a “dvandva” modifier; and (c) the fusion of two binominal subordinate compounds into a single relational compound. To the best of the author’s knowledge, the last type has not been mentioned in previous studies on the topic.

Transformers are emerging as the new workhorse of NLP, showing great success across tasks. Unlike LSTMs, transformers process input sequences entirely through self-attention. Previous work has suggested that the computational capabilities of self-attention to process hierarchical structures are limited. In this work, we mathematically investigate the computational power of self-attention to model formal languages. Across both soft and hard attention, we show strong theoretical limitations of the computational abilities of self-attention, finding that it cannot model periodic finite-state languages, nor hierarchical structure, unless the number of layers or heads increases with input length. These limitations seem surprising given the practical success of self-attention and the prominent role assigned to hierarchical structure in linguistics, suggesting that natural language can be approximated well with models that are too weak for the formal languages typically assumed in theoretical linguistics.

This department explores how teachers can sustain students’ multilingual literacies and reimagine literacy learning across multiple contexts in conversation with researchers, practitioners, and communities.

In the past decades, there has been a surge in interest in the study of language complexity in second language (L2) research. In this article we provide an overview of current theoretical and methodological practices in L2 complexity research, while simultaneously framing these within the broader scientific interest into the notion of complexity. In addition to focusing on the role of complexity in L2 research, we trace how language complexity has figured in formal theoretical and typological linguistics. It is argued that L2 complexity research has often adopted a reductionist approach to the construct, both in terms of its definition and its operationalization. As such, previous L2 research has often confused related but conceptually distinct and operationally separable notions, such as relative and absolute complexity, and it has overemphasized syntactic and lexical forms of complexity at the expense of complexity related to morphology or linguistic interface phenomena. We then discuss a collection of five empirical studies which react to several of these issues by highlighting hitherto underexplored forms of complexity, adopting an explicitly cross-linguistic perspective or by proposing novel forms of L2 complexity measurement.