This paper recapitulates the address given on the second day of the conference by the author as a representative of the hosting department. It is based on my personal experience as a lifelong learner of English and university professor, rather than on expert research on the subject. I recall the most embarrassing English errors I made during my teaching career, present evidence of the power of preconceived notions in judging language performance from my childhood and from my son’s youth, and provide examples of varying language use by English native speakers that present problems for the concept of linguistic “correctness.” I conclude by stressing the value of linguistic diversity found in the U.S. and the wisdom of nurturing the richness of linguistic heritages this country possesses.

This dissertation investigated the relationship between Linguistic Empathy and Psychological Empathy by implementing a psycholinguistic experiment that measured a person’s acceptability ratings of sentences with violations of Linguistic Empathy and correlating them with a measure of the person’s Psychological Empathy. Linguistic Empathy demonstrates a speaker’s attitude and identification with a person or event in an utterance (Kuno & Kaburaki, 1977; Kuno, 1987; Silverstein, 1976; Yokoyama, 1986). This identification is represented in the utterance through a speaker’s unconscious/automatic selection from grammatically valid options that convey pragmatically different attitudes. On the other hand, Psychological Empathy is a social psychological notion that allows a person to understand and experience the emotional reality of others. The capacity for Psychological Empathy is known to differ among individuals, and assessment of this capacity is often implemented in a clinical setting to indicate those at risk of conditions with deficits of Empathy, such as Autism Spectrum Disorder. This study measured Psychological Empathy with the Empathy Quotient test, which was designed for both clinical and non-clinical settings (Baron-Cohen & Wheelwright, 2004).

This study extended the notion of Linguistic Empathy from a linguistic phenomenon that is represented in speech to a measurable trait in an individual. The measure of Linguistic Empathy specifies the individual’s capacity to notice and rate sentences that are grammatically valid but contain unnatural violations of Linguistic Empathy phenomena (e.g., I met Nancy versus Nancy met me). The results of the experiment showed that Linguistic Empathy is a measurable and systematic trait, and that it has a significant positive correlation with Psychological Empathy. This correlation suggests that despite their disparate theoretical origins, Linguistic and Psychological Empathy share a common information processing component. One important clinical application of the results is to use a test of Linguistic Empathy as an unbiased screen for individuals at risk for a deficit of Psychological Empathy.

This dissertation study explores a young Japanese heritage language speaker’s learning process of formal writing in Japanese. With a rapid increase in immigrants into the U.S. and growing importance of diversity, many researchers have shown interest in immigrant children, i.e., heritage speakers, from educational and research perspectives and have found that many heritage speakers, even though they have a native-like fluency in informal conversations, cannot read and write in their heritage languages as native speakers at their age do. Regarding Japanese heritage speakers, Japanese supplementary schools play an important role in fostering their Japanese proficiency and cultural identities, but once children leave supplementary schools around age nine because of difficulty in curricula, it is hard for them to acquire advanced Japanese afterward.This dissertation provides a four-week intensive academic Japanese reading and writing program based on a usage-based language acquisition for the Japanese heritage speaker, Sakura, who has never attended Japanese schools. Her argument essays drastically improve, which empirically supports the efficacy of usage-based instruction for formal writing to some degree. The qualitative analysis of this study and its findings suggest multiple implications and possibilities for future research: (1) it is generally held that kango ‘Sino-Japanese words’ are more challenging for learners than wago ‘Japanese native words,’ but the most difficult words for Sakura are some extremely topic- and genre-specific wago; (2) new words are registered in her receptive lexicon through their frequent occurrences, but advancing them to productive lexicon necessitates varying contexts, collocations, and functions; (3) L1 transfer is not limited to beginners, but Sakura’s writing also reveals an influence from English to satisfy her L1 linguistic sophistication; and (4) the most crucial factor in Sakura’s improvement is her strong “mission-like” motivation with a sense of responsibility, which I call heritage motivation and which is not extractable from a conventional quantitative approach. This motivation has grown in her mind through a positive attitude, or somatic value, toward Japanese and their culture. It suggests a focal shift from “how teachers can teach learners” to “how teachers and others can nurture their positive somatic value leading to motivation.”

When professional translators are not available parents often rely on their children to help them translate written and verbal communication. These children serve as language brokers. This research qualitatively looks at language brokering within the medical/health domain by means of focus groups. Looking at data from seventeen participants - focus group data is qualitatively analyzed using the constant comparison approach in order to answer the research questions. The answers to questions leading this research provide insight about who language brokers translate for, where within the medical/health domain brokering occurs, and the tasks that are associated with brokering. It also provides insight on themes that arose during the focus groups. These themes include analyzing tactics of language brokers, methods for easing the experience formulated by language brokers themselves, feelings of language brokers, the parental role during a brokering experience. This research contributes to the gap in language brokering literature seeking domain specific analysis.

This dissertation critically compares the two German focus particles eben and gerade. It has been repeatedly noted in the relevant literature that the two display an intriguing yet challenging near-synonymy. However, factors motivating this relationship have not been sufficiently explained to date. This study argues that the particles’ ostensible partial overlap is systematic and non-trivial in nature and that it can be explained by positing two distinct speaker motivations for uttering each particle to mark a constituent in a sentence: While the particle eben marks a constituent as conform-to-expectation, gerade marks a constituent as counter-to-expectation. Each marking is prompted by the discourse situation: If there is (extra)linguistic evidence that the interlocutor is inclined to select the same constituent as the speaker for completing a sentence, then eben is the appropriate marker. Alternatively, if no contrary evidence exists, eben may still be the appropriate marker. In the absense of favorable evidence, the speaker relies on assumptions about human communicative strategies and biases for arriving at the constituent choice matching the speaker’s and may still be prompted to utter eben. Conversely, the speaker utters gerade to mark a constituent as counter-to-expectation when there is (extra)linguistic evidence that a different constituent is more likely to be selected, or has been selected. Alternatively, if at least no (extra)linguistic evidence exists that the identical constituent is selected, assumptions about human communicative strategies and biases for arriving at a different constituent choice as the speaker’s prompt the use of gerade. The hypothesis is supported by two analyses: a minimal pair analysis employing substitution, elimination, and continuation tests as well as a synchronic, large-scale corpus-based analysis of syntactico-semantic features that frequently occur as the particles’ constituents. The former is employed to do away with compartmentalized interpretation suggestions for the particles, contaminated by adjacent elements, and suggests the underlying meanings of the particles to interact with said elements in generating the interpretations. The latter analysis presents a selection of syntactico-semantic features with which each particle frequently occurs in natural language and offers new insights on their functions based on interactions with eben and gerade.