Department of Linguistics

In September 2012 the think tank 'Meaning and Implications of Excellence' kicked off their research project at the 13 th international ECHA conference on 'Giftedness across the Lifespan' in Münster, Germany. This conference provided the perfect opportunity for us to get to know each other, meet our German fellow students for the first time and above all, gather information about this rather comprehensive topic. During the ECHA conference, both the importance as well as the complexity of the topic became immediately clear to all think tank members.

Besser wie als. The acceptance of ‘wie’ as a comparative particle in German (Abstract).
The Standard German prescriptive rule dictates the use of the particle als ‘than’ in comparisons of inequality and the use of the particle wie ‘as’ in comparisons of equality. However, in substandard varieties of German wie is commonly used in both types of comparison constructions. The use of comparative-wie dates back to the eighteenth century and has since then increased in its areal distribution and frequency of occurrence. Nevertheless, comparative-wie is socially negatively stigmatized, indicating that speakers are highly conscious of the norm violation. The combination of these factors suggests that there might be a process of language change at hand whereby the equative particle replaces the comparative particle. To explore the possibility of wie becoming an accepted comparative particle in Standard German, the current research focuses on how both variants of comparative constructions (standard and substandard) are processed by native speakers by means of a sentence matching task.

Perkembangan kosa kata bahasa Dayak Ngaju dalam kurun waktu terakhir ini semakin tergerus. Tergerusnya bahasa daerah ini ditandai oleh munculnya beragam kosa kata baru yang disebabkan oleh interaksi budaya dan interferensi sesama bahasa daerah bersaing yang ada di Provinsi Kalimantan Tengah dan juga tak lepas dari pengaruh bahasa Indonesia sebagai bahasa nasional. Sejalan dengan fenomena tersebut, upaya untuk mendokumentasikan bahasa Dayak Ngaju dalam bentuk “Kamus” merupakan upaya positif untuk melestarikan bahasa tersebut di kemudian hari. Kamus Pelajar Dayak Ngaju—Indonesia; Indonesia—Dayak Ngaju ini disusun untuk siswa sekolah dasar yang mempelajari Bahasa Dayak Ngaju sebagai mata pelajaran muatan lokal di Sekolah Dasar. Bentuk dan susunan kamus pun dibuat sepraktis mungkin dengan tidak menggunakan simbol penanda khusus dalam pemerian kata berimbuhan dan dalam contoh kalimat seperti kamus-kamus pada umumnya. Hal ini dilakukan supaya siswa setingkat sekolah dasar dapat memahami dengan cepat dan praktis tentang cara menggunakan kamus ini.

Banjar language is one of natives in Borneo and is spoken by all Banjar people (urang Banjar). Number of its speakers today is approximately 5.9 million people including who live in Malaysia and Brunei. In Kalimantan Island, Banjar language is considered as a lingua franca especially in the provinces of South Kalimantan, East Kalimantan, and Central Kalimantan (except in West Kalimantan where Malay is more popular). The maintenance of Banjar language in Dayak village community has not much been written yet by linguists in Indonesia. This paper is willing to uncover deeply on the motivation factors of Banjar language maintenance in the Province of Central Kalimantan through the perspective of sociolinguistics. Since when and why is Banjar language prone to be dominant in Dayak village community?

Kamus Pelajar Dayak Ngaju—Indonesia—Inggris ini merupakan kamus ‘edisi khusus’ karena di dalamnya ada entri bahasa Inggris. Karya leksikografi tiga bahasa yang di dalamnya ada bahasa Dayak Ngaju, Indonesia dan Inggris merupakan kamus pertama kali di Kalimantan Tengah. Penyusun berharap agar siswa sekolah dasar dan menengah yang menggunakan kamus ini tidak saja pandai berbahasa Dayak Ngaju dan Bahasa Indonesia, tetapi juga pandai berbahasa asing, yakni bahasa Inggris. Kamus Pelajar Dayak Ngaju—Indonesia—Inggris ini disusun  untuk siswa sekolah dasar dan menengah yang mempelajari Bahasa Dayak Ngaju sebagai mata pelajaran muatan lokal di sekolah. Bentuk dan susunan kamus pun dibuat sepraktis mungkin dengan tidak menggunakan simbol penanda khusus dalam pemerian kata berimbuhan dan dalam contoh kalimat seperti kamus-kamus pada umumnya. Hal ini dilakukan supaya siswa setingkat sekolah dasar dan menengah dapat memahami dengan cepat dan praktis tentang cara menggunakan kamus ini.

—Teaching English in multicultural or in multiethnics situation presents a unique challenge as the question is often raised by English teachers as to which variety of English phonemes or pronunciation should be accurately accepted. Indonesia has approximately 757 languages to be spoken by the same number of their ethnic groups. Multicultural education is a very challenging issue to all aspects of study today, which has no exception in linguistics, where multiethnic students bear a unique perspective in the language repertoire, especially in the aspect of phonology. This paper (from the perspective of socolinguistics) is the result of a case study in teaching English of speaking class to secondary school students in multiethnics classroom where English phonetic transcription used as the data comparison to find phonemic variations among students' pronunciation. There were twenty students taken as the subject of the study which represented four ethnic groups of Indonesian; Dayak Ngaju, Banjar, Javanese, and Ma'anyan. The results showed that (1) the mother tongue accents of those ethnic groups influenced the way to pronounce phonemes of English; (2) those five ethnic groups had phonemic variation in speaking English in terms of vowel and consonant sounds.

In the process of learning English, foreign or second-language
learners produce a type of language that is different from both the mother tongue and the target language. The basic assumption in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research is that the learners create a grammar out of their available linguistic data, a new and unique system, called interlanguage (IL). Interlanguage can be seen as a continuum made up of the first and the second language at either end, and the learners are travelling along this continuum while learning the target language. Tollefson and Firn (1983) hold the view that almost all adult L2 learners fail to achieve native-like competence and will ‘fossilize’ somewhere along the IL continuum.The issue of fossilization is still debatable among SLA researchers.Some claims that fossilization is inevitable for all learners, but somedoubt the existence of fossilization and claim that it is only theoretically possible and empirically impossible. This paper addresses some study findings by raising and discussing three issues of SLA: (1) Is fossilization merely a temporary plateau or is it really a permanent learning-cessation? (2) Does fossilization happen globally or locally? (3) How to differ concept of stabilization in a language learning development as it is opposed to fossilization?

One of the crucial functions of any human language, such as English or Korean, is to convey various kinds of information from the everyday to the highly academic. Language provides a means for us to describe how to cook, how to remove cherry stains, how to understand English grammar, or how to provide a convincing argument. We commonly consider certain properties of language to be key essential features from which the basic study of linguistics starts.

Needless to say that linguistic borrowing is a very common phenomenon and that no language is completely free of borrowed lexical terms. It is also noticed that languages vary drastically as to the number of foreign elements comprised therein. This study provides two finding remarks related to English borrowing in Bahasa Indonesia news contexts; (1) categories of semantic distribution are mostly borrowed in the news context. In relation to this, it is also to specify whether English loanwords give positive or negative contribution to a certain semantic field categorized; and (2) linguistic motivation of English loanwords towards Bahasa Indonesia lexicons which is to attest whether or not they are purely motivated by the lack of Bahasa Indonesia lexicons. This study used 1,000 English loanwords elicited randomly from the data corpus built in 2009. There were 3,538 English borrowings in the corpus in which they were downloaded from three online Indonesian prominent newspapers; Kompas, Koran Tempo, and Media Indonesia. The study comes to the conclusion that Indonesia news media actually had no reasons to borrow the English loanwords since they had their counterparts in Bahasa Indonesia lexicons. Of all 1,000 loanwords sampled in the study showed that the tendency of lexical borrowing in BI is not reasoned by the lack of BI terms to express the word-filled gap but it is caused by a non-linguistic factor; that is the preference factor of users to English.

This research was aimed to know the effectiveness of skimming and scanning strategies to improve students’ reading ability indicated by their competence to comprehend texts and their performance in the speed of reading. Pretest-posttest control group design was used in this research. Third year students of English Study Programme of FKIP of Palangka Raya University were taken to the reasearch subject. There were 54 students taken which were equally in number grouped into an experimental group and a control group. Both groups were considered to be equal in reading performance with regard to the result of pretest carried out before the experiment. Experimental group was the class where the researcher supervised it, and control group was a group where he did not supervise it with the experiments. The result showed that scores of reading tasks given to the experimental group were significantly different with the control group in which t-value was 9.928 with the significance (2-tailed) v...

The objective of this study is to find out the effect of using listening logs through WhatsApp on listening comprehension of EFL students in the Department of English Education of Palangka Raya University. The listening comprehension of students is categorized low which hampers their proficiency in English. Then an experiment is done to improve students’ comprehension in listening skill by using listening logs through WhatsApp application on smartphones. The experiment treated in this study was to make a learning group of WhatsApp by inviting the students joining the group. The experiment was held for three weeks which practiced four aspects of listening comprehension: (1) identifying main ideas or main gists, (2) identifying supporting details, (3) identifying moods of message, and (4) developing new vocabularies. There were 40 students (24 females and 16 males) fulfilling the sample of the study taken from the second year EFL students of English study program at Palangka Raya Univ...

Background: Large cell neuroendocrine carcinoma (LCNEC) is a high-grade malignant pulmonary neuroendocrine tumour. The distinction of pulmonary large cell carcinoma (LCC) and LCNEC is based on the presence of neuroendocrine morphology and the expression of at least one neuroendocrine marker in at least 10% of tumour cells in the latter. According to the current classification, LCC with neuroendocrine morphology and without neuroendocrine marker expression is classified as LCC. This subgroup we have named LCNEC-null and aimed to analyze its characteristics. Methods: 31 surgical samples resected in West China Hospital of Sichuan University between 2017 to 2021 were collected, including 7 traditional LCCs, 11 LCNEC-nulls and 13 LCNECs. Each case was conducted to immunohistochemistry and 425-panel-NGS. Results: Compared to other LCCs, detailed analysis of LCNEC-nulls revealed biological features similar to those of LCNECs, especially for immunohistochemistry and molecular analysis: 1. diffusive, coarse granular and high expression of Pan-CK; 2. rare PD-L1 expression; 3. High rate of p53 expression and Rb deficiency 4. abundant genetic alterations are similar to LCNEC. All characteristics above deviated from traditional LCC, indicating they have the same origin as LCNEC. Furthermore, LCNEC could be genetically divided into two subtypes when we reclassified LCNEC-null as LCNEC, and the mutational type and prognosis differed significantly. Conclusions: We consider that LCNEC-null should be reclassified as LCNEC based on analysis above. In addition, two genetic types of LCNEC with different prognosis also indicate two mechanism of tumour formation.