idst thou mark how poorly Jane Wilson looked?”

cultural chasm between Lia’s family, with its generations-old animist beliefs, and her rationalist American doctors.

A work of narrative nonfiction

calling someone by his or her first name without asking permission is inappropriate in Latin America

You can't expect the interpreter to improve on your articulation of ideas. If you want to explain a complicated procedure to an unsophisticated person, speak plain English so that the explanation can be put in simple terms in the patient's language. By the same token, don't expect the interpreter to clean up a patient's rambling, disjointed statements and turn them into concise answers.

up to snuff in no tim

" Interpreting is a lot like pouring water from a two-quart pitcher into a two-liter beaker: The water (the message) doesn't change; only the shape of the vessel (the words) does. The interpreter's job is to make sure no water is spilled during the transfer, and that no contaminants are introduced into the second container.

friend? What difference would it make if the author participated in the events they write about?

Linguistic diversity is not just about speaking multiple languages, of course, but about speaking the ostensibly same language in different ways, in different places, and with different social consequences

It highlights the necessity to examine ELF as a social practice and in relation to the diversity of students and interactional contexts

A spatial understanding of translanguaging foregrounds a co-constructed, distributed, and emergent view of communication in multilingual communities that involve people with diverse linguistic and life trajectories.

In the current study, the speakers are brought up in an environment where they have different languages at their disposal. At home they mostly use their native language, while at university, they are officially supposed to use English. With their friends and colleagues, they are more at liberty to deploy any one of the languages in their repertoire or an amalgamation of languages that are mutually understood by their interlocuters. Thus, in such multilingual contexts, TL is a natural outcome.

Although the MI is English, there was extensive use of Pashto in the interactions (see Fig. 2). This indicates a fault line in the current policy as it shows that the policy is not consistent with actual classroom practices because of the multilingual context within which the interactions took place (i.e. multilingual speakers at a university in their home region,

It was also noted that although all the students are competent users of Urdu, which is the national language, it is not used as much as Pashto and English among speakers from the same region and who share the same first language. As previously mentioned, the findings indicated than less that one quarter of the total instances of TL involved Urdu with English or Pashto or all three of them, while the majority of the instances involved English and Pashto only. It is not uncommon for multilingual speakers to use their ethnic or regional language amongst themselves

Lines can intensify an experience by how thick or thin they are and the smoothness and jaggedness of lines can also affect us. Bang points out how this is something that we have just learned as a people. We don’t like sharp pointy things because they can hurt us and we like curved, rounded things, she adds, because we associate them with something that is ‘huggable’ and comforting.

This may only mean that it is more cognitively taxing to arrive at the same notion or it can mean that an idea is highly unlikely to be expressed in a particular language

Language appears to exert considerable influence over how people categorise, evaluate, and remember the world, especially in languages where nouns belong to different semantic categories

More recent studies have shown that there are in fact significant and reliable differences across languages in how colour is perceived, classified, and remembered

My second aim is to draw on these insights to articulate a Whorfian agenda for the field of second language acquisition (SLA) that asks new questions about second language learning and cognition and expands the boundaries of the field and the scope, duration, and locations of SLA research.

In the two such cases considered here, both acoustic analyses and playback experiments suggested that piping calls can be initiated by the first (peow) elements of middle-distance contact calls (forming peow-pipe calls) and by broadband adult begging calls (forming beg-pipe calls). Further, playback experiments also suggested that initiating piping calls with peow elements and begging calls modifies function, with responses by dominant females being exaggerated during peow-pipe playbacks and attenuated during beg-pipe playbacks, relative to piping call playbacks

In support, we found that the acoustic properties of begging calls and peow elements from middle distance calls were equivalent when used in these contexts and in combination with piping calls. Furthermore, responses to playbacks of natural maternal contact calls in peow-pipe and beg-pipe combinations were equivalent to those in which we generated such maternal contact calls artificially using peow elements from middle-distance contact calls and begging elements from begging calls. These results suggest that maternal contact calls can include combinations of other calls or call elements

Finally, we use playbacks to test whether the three forms of maternal contact call combinations under consideration here (i.e., piping calls alone, beg-pipes, peow-pipes) generate differential behavioral responses, the final criteria for syntax-like structuring.

Second, although the quintessential stem of maternal contact calls comprise a series of strident, high-pitched “piping” elements (Fig. 1A), anecdotally, such calls are often preceded by other independent calls and/or call elements. Most notably, “piping” calls can be initiated by calls that appear reminiscent of adult “begging” calls used by females in association with allo-feeding by other group members (Fig. 1B) or by the first (“peow”) element of middle-distance contact (“peow-pee”) calls that are used in recruitment and group cohesion (Fig. 1C) (Crane et al., 2016). These observations suggest that maternal contact calls offer a candidate syntactic-like structure, providing further insights into the form of syntactic-like processes in nonhuman animals

Given that vocal combinations have been proposed to evolve when the efficiency of information transfer is enhanced by building on existing signals rather than generating new ones (Nowak & Krakauer, 1999; Nowak et al., 2002) and that the need for increased information likely correlates with social complexity (Freeberg et al., 2012; Leighton, 2017; Leighton & Birmingham, 2021; Peckre et al., 2019), the study of call combinations in social animals might offer insights into the origin of syntax-like communication processes and its early forms (Collier et al., 2017).

we have demonstrated that this sequencing of calls is unlikely to be a random co-occurrence but instead pant hoots and food calls are strongly attracted to one another, more than expected by chance

Critically, acoustic analyses demonstrated that calls comprising the combination did not differ statistically from the same calls produced in isolation. This is particularly relevant as it suggests that rather than being a distinct, novel call type, the sequence is a product of already existing call units that have subsequently been recombined

Without this, it becomes problematic to convincingly investigate the semantic relationship between a nonrandom call combination and its individual call building blocks: namely whether the combination is related to the meaning of its comprising parts (compositional structuring) or whether it is distinct from them (idiomatic structuring).

First, we applied collocation analyses, methods traditionally used in language sciences, to confirm the combination of pant hoots with food calls was not a random co-occurrence, but instead a consistently produced structure. Second, using acoustic analyses, we confirmed pant hoots and food calls comprising the combination were acoustically indistinguishable from the same calls produced in isolation, indicating the pant hoot–food call combination is composed of individually occurring meaning-bearing units, a key criterion of linguistic syntax. Finally, we investigated the context-specific nature of this structure, demonstrating that the call combination was more likely to be produced when feeding on larger patches and when a high-ranking individual joined the feeding party

In particular, although these studies have offered different conclusions about the emergence of gesture combinations, none of them has found evidence that primates combine gestures into longer sequences to specifically create novel meanings

Regularities in the structure of communication systems do not necessarily provide information about the meaning of sequences and about the compositional aspects of communication but suggest that some properties that constrain human language evolution are largely shared across species

Several taxa, for instance, have complex sequential calls with regularly recurring patterns, hierarchical structures and/or specific ordering rules, suggesting that these properties of communication are phylogenetically widespread and likely to have emerged through convergent evolution

We trace the evolutionary origins of human compositionality in the multicomponent communication systems of other species to identify possible lines of future research based on the main limitations of current research on this topic

Although these terms are not used consistently, combinatoriality generally refers to the ability to combine meaningless sounds into meaningful morphemes and words, whereas compositionality usually refers to the ability to further recombine already meaningful elements (i.e., morphemes and words) into new elements with novel meanings

A review of the literature makes the authors conclude that compositionality research requires the inclusion of meta-communicative aspects of communication

the first collection of papers reviews how the presence of combinatoriality and compositionality is examined in extant primate and bird communication systems

Meaningful call combinations have now been observed in numerous animal and primate species (reviewed in Engesser & Townsend, 2019; Suzuki & Zuberbühler, 2019). Multimodal communication in primates (Levinson & Holler, 2014; Liebal et al., 2014, Slocombe et al., 2011) is one such example whereby already meaningful constructions, each produced by different modalities, often become joined into larger aggregates with variable meanings dependent on their context of use

Questioning the validity of these assumptions, the authors in this issue examine how combinatoriality and compositionality can be defined and identified in three key players of the debate: (multimodal) communication systems of primates and birds

language's generative system also represents an assemblage of individually evolved traits

combinatorial capacities in primates

Such a patchwork of different strategies across the animal kingdom implies that different combinatorial mechanisms canemerge independently. From a language evolution perspective, such a finding might suggest language's generative system alsorepresents an assemblage of individually evolved traits (Townsend et al., 2018), rather than a “package” evolved in a suddenevolutionary transition with no similarities in other species (Bolhuis, Tattersall, Chomsky, & Berwick, 2014).