No abstract

Jenkins (2000, 2002, 2006) attempts to establish the Lingua Franca Core features of English, or phonological features crucial to achieving mutual intelligibility in a lingua franca situation, but she does not focus upon Japanese-influenced variations of English. This paper aims to identify phonological “errors” found in Japanese science major student-researchers’ speech which might lead to miscommunication. Through the analysis of the transcription of Japanese-influenced speech, we argue that the following three types of mispronunciation would seriously impede intelligibility: (1) mispronunciation of consonants such as plosives and liquids; (2) vowel length alternation; (3) misplaced or absence of word stress. These findings may offer implications for English language teaching, especially the prioritization of phonological instructions.

Previous studies have noted that there are two kinds of secondary predicates in English: depictive predicates and conditional predicates.However, a systematic analysis of the two kinds of predicates has not yet been done, and their relationship has not been made clear. In this paper, we will examine syntactic and semantic properties of these predicates and point out peculiar properties of conditional predicates. We argue that in a generic context depictive predicates can be interpreted as conditional predicates and that under the non-instantaneous framework proposed by Kajita 1977, depictive predicates in a generic context develop into conditional predicates. It will be shown that the relationship between the two kinds of predicates and the unique properties of conditional predicates automatically follow from our analysis.