Foreword

The winter issue of Volume 11 presents a selection of seven different research articles on Japanese, Tetun Dili, Sylheti Bangla, Pahari, and Saraiki language. The rise of the Covid-19 pandemic, of which continuation unfortunately still allows many to collect data for research, has prompted us to publish several other interesting studies. This compilation brings to the readers the following topics. This issue opens with Saki AMANO’s paper “Polysemy of ‘Common Language’ and the Modern Japanese Nation: The Universalization of a ‘Standard Language’ to correct ‘Dialects’?”. The author examines the term futsūgo (common language) over two periods and explains the shift from the populace’s everyday commonplace language to a unified national language. In the next paper “From Native-speaker Likeness to Self-representation in Language: Views from the Acquisition of Japanese Transitive and Intransitive Verbs”, ITO Hideaki considers the degree to which a language user’s own will is recognized in language education. The author demonstrates that the usage-centric acquisition process can create opportunities for language users to make expressive choices focused on what they wish to say. The third article is Nastja PAHOR’s paper “Corpus analysis of the collocations of the transitive verbs owaru and oeru”, in which the author approaches the transitivity of Japanese verbs from the corpus perspective. Semantical analysis of collocations in combination with the morphological analysis of co-occurring verbs reveals some interesting findings. After the first three papers that focus on Japanese, the fourth one brings some new insights into Tetun Dili. Andrei A. AVRAM in his paper “Contact-induced variation in Tetun Dili phonology” analyzes Portuguese influence on Tetun Dili phonology, and demonstrates that the intricacies of inter-speaker variation cannot be merely reduced to variation between more Portuguese-like phonology and a more Tetun-Dili-like one.   Arpita GOSWAMI’s paper “Marked Geminates as Evidence of Sonorants in Sylheti Bangla: An Optimality Account” analyzes the universal concept that sonorants are marked geminates in the gemination process of Sylheti Bangla, and proposes a hierarchy of the constraints for analyzing the gemination processes in SHB. Besides, the author illustrates some additional constraints found to be necessary. The following article “Stop Voicing and F0 Perturbation in Pahari” presents the findings of Nazia RASHID, Abdul Qadir KHAN, Ayesha SOHAIL, and Bilal Ahmed ABBASI. The authors investigate the perturbation effect of the voicing of initial stops on the fundamental frequency of the following vowels in Pahari.    Last but not least, “Word Stress system of the Saraiki language” is an article by Firdos ATTA, who presents an Optimality-Theoretic analysis of Saraiki word stress. The author concludes that Saraiki has a trochaic stress system and falls in the category of quantity-sensitive languages. This paper also indicates further research work on word stress at the sentence level. Editors and Editorial board wish the regular and new readers of the ALA journal a pleasant read full of inspiration, and a rise of new research ideas inspired by these papers.