Invited Speakers
Abstracts for Accepted Talks
Arshad Ali
Language Attitudes and Media Consumption Among Pakistani Speakers of English
Most of the studies on attitudes towards different varieties of English have reported that Received Pronunciation of English is the most liked model (see Dalton‐Puffer, Kaltenboeck, & Smit, 1997; Ladegaard & Sachdev, 2006). However, in a study conducted in Australia, New Zealand and the USA, it was reported that standard American was perceived as equal to RP on most status dimensions (Bayard, Weatherall, Gallois, & Pittam, 2001). The present study investigates the influence of language attitudes and media engagement on the speech of Pakistani speakers of English. To do this, I collected data on attitudes and media use using a questionnaire from over four hundred participants. In the first phase of analysis, I have examined the language attitudes among Pakistani speakers of English towards different varieties of English particularly British English, American English and Pakistani English. An important part of my questionnaire was to find out the type and degree of the media engagement. The questionnaire was analysed using R statistical model and the preliminary results show that British accent is the most liked model on most status dimensions. One of the reasons for this could be the colonial past of Pakistan and the second reason could be type of English being followed as preferred model of English language teaching in Pakistan. Participants also seem to have positive attitudes towards American accent to a certain degree. The favourable attitudes towards American accent could be attributed towards the American media being consumed by Pakistani youth. The results of the media part of the questionnaire indicate that there is a considerable media consumption of American and British media along with Indian and Pakistani media.
Eli Asikin-Garmager
Sasak Dialect Variation and Austronesian Subject and Topic
Structural contrasts are often accompanied by corresponding morphological contrasts. For example, Eastern Sasak has two syntactically transitive constructions, and in one of these the lexical verb is prefixed with /ng-/. The other clause type occurs with the unprefixed verb. If this morphological contrast were lost, one possibility might be subsequent structural simplification, and in the case of Sasak, reduction to a single transitive clause type. In contrast to Eastern Sasak, Central Sasak transitive clauses occur only with the unprefixed form of the lexical verb, possibly suggesting that Central Sasak transitive clauses with varying word orders correspond to a single syntactically transitive clause type (meaning the word order variation involves simple NP fronting). This paper argues that the structural contrast is not dependent on verbal morphology, and Central Sasak maintains two different transitive clause types in the absence of the morphological contrast found in Eastern dialects. Evidence that a structural contrast remains in the absence of the morphological contrast comes from subject-to-subject raising and quantifier float data, which also corroborate arguments based on relativization data that Sasak has both a syntactic subject and topic position (Shibatani, 2008). A grammatical subject position is motivated by patterns of pronominal clitics; meanwhile, a higher structural position of grammatical topic is required to account for subject-to-subject raising (in which an NP moves from an embedded clause to the matrix clause). This is because subject-to-subject raising can only target the NP in topic position in the subordinate clause. In addition, when a quantifier is moved out of its canonical position (‘floated’), it is interpreted as modifying the NP in topic, not subject, position. More broadly, these Sasak data bear on long-standing debates about the elusive set of universal subject properties in Austronesian languages (e.g., Kroeger, 1993; Schacter, 1976). More specifically, when combined with data from other Indonesian languages (Davies, 1993; Guilfoyle, Hung, & Travis, 1992; Shibatani, 2008), the Sasak data add to an increasing amount of evidence that subject properties are frequently split across two NPs in a single clause.
Usma Azhar
Morpho-syntactic Evaluation of Written Errors Produced by the Bilingual Deaf ESL Learners in Pakistan
The deaf or hard of hearing face many language learning and acquisition challenges because of their diversified mode of communication in the society where interpersonal communication is dominated by speech (Martin, 2009). Herman & Morgan (2011). This gestural or sign language communication system has the same ability to be acquired by any learner (either deaf or hearing) as it processes in the case of any other language system. Moreover, the deaf or hard of hearing learners follow the same broad trajectory as children acquiring any other language in a traditional society like Pakistan where literacy level is low, disability has been either concealed or perceived as a stigma in a family. The learning process of deaf or hard of hearing is not different from the students `with hearing ability. However, these handicapped learners face a number of challenges like Morpho-syntactical errors, preposition errors, subject and verb agreement error and sentence fragments errors which their hearing peers do not experience to this extent while learning English as a second language. The present research has employed qualitative and quantitative tools which have helped to get more detailed and in-depth findings of the problem. In order to investigate and analyze the errors, Pakistani learner’s writing specimen has been analyzed. The findings thus showed that deaf /hard of hearing learners can produce better morphosyntactical structures assisted by sign language systems.
Douglas Bagnall, Keoni Mahelona and Peter-Lucas Jones
Kōrero Māori: a serious attempt at speech recognition for te reo Māori
Te Hiku Media is leading an effort to enable computers to understand spoken Māori. The bulk of the work consists of collecting and managing a large corpus of short pieces of speech and text aligned in the particular format required by speech recognition software. Initially the project is concentrating on native speakers of the Muriwhenua dialect, but the corpus uses a Creative Commons Attribution license, meaning it can be combined with or extended by corpora from other regions and L2 speakers to form a pan-Māori corpus. The license means it will be available for research and other projects, including for commercial speech recognition. As we collect the corpus we are periodically generating speech recognition models using the open-source projects PocketSphinx and Kaldi. This ensures we remain focused on the right aspects of corpus quality, and as a side effect offers speech recognition solutions for te reo Māori that are freely available to everyone. Companies like Google and Apple are more likely to use the corpus itself rather than these models. This work has been significantly funded by Te Puni Kōkiri’s Māori ICT Development Fund.
Laurie Bauer
The Productivity of Phrasal Verbs
Phrasal verbs (look out, put up, set on) are generally described as being pieces of syntax in English (as opposed to what happens in Dutch and German, where they are generally described as a type of word-formation). While they are certainly not typical instances of word-formation, neither are they automatically productive, as we usually expect syntactic constructions to be. One of the reasons for this is that so many phrasal verbs have an idiomatic reading, and the reading of the particle cannot necessarily be predicted out of context. Nevertheless, some patterns of phrasal verb are clearly productive in contemporary English, including those illustrated in the attested examples to be conferenced out ‘to have attended a sufficiency of conferences’, to nause it all up ‘to make a mess of it’. In this paper, I show how there are various paradigms of phrasal verb which make these readings possible. We can either look on the productive patterns as the result of intersecting paradigms, or as the interdependency of constructions. My purpose here is less to argue for a particular analysis than to show that the factors leading to productive patterns of phrasal verb are complex, so that modelling what is going on is no simple matter.
Natalia Beliaeva
What produces productivity? A corpus study of English neologisms
How to estimate morphological productivity and what makes a process productive are among the key questions in morphological research. Productivity has been defined both qualitatively, e.g. in Spencer (1991), and quantitatively, e.g. in Baayen (1992). A major problem with quantitative approach to productivity is that most measures that are used to date estimate past productivity, or profitability, in the terminology of Carstairs-McCarthy (1992), but not availability, or potential productivity. However, a growing number of contemporary studies are inspired by the realization that ‘morphological analysis must rely on newly created words much more than on the long-recorded lexicon’ (Dal & Namer, 2017, p. 82). The present paper analyses potential productivity in word formation, focussing on items that are not yet recognized as affixes, but can be classified (following Warren (1990), among others) as initial or final combining forms, e.g. mobi (the initial part of mobile, used in blends such as mobisode) or noia (the final part of paranoia used in blends such as parentnoia). Data from the NOW corpus (Davies, 2010) are used to investigate the changes in the use of a selection of combining forms over the last few years, in relation to such factors as the number of orthographic and phonological neighbours, and the range of contexts in which the combining forms are encountered. Similar analysis is carried out on a selection of affixes that are characterized in Bauer, Lieber & Plag (2013) as marginally productive (such as the adverb suffix –ways, e.g. in elseways and the verb prefix fore- e.g. in forejudge), in order to detect the possible direction of change in their productivity. The results are then used to work out uniform principles of characterising the productivity of different morphological processes. In particular, the paper provides insights into the input language users exploit when applying word-formation patterns.ReferencesBaayen, H. R. (1992). Quantitative aspects of morphological productivty. Yearbook of Morphology 1991, 109–149.Bauer, L., Lieber, R., & Plag, I. (2013). The Oxford reference guide to English morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Carstairs-McCarthy, A. (1992). Current morphology. London & New York: Routledge.Dal, G., & Namer, F. (2017). Productivity. In A. Hippisley & G. Stump (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of morphology (pp. 70–89). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Davies, M. (2010). The News on the Web Corpus(NOW): 4.78 billion+ words, 2010-present. Retrieved from http://corpus.byu.edu/now/Spencer, A. (1991). Morphological theory. Oxford: Blackwell.Warren, B. (1990). The importance of combining forms. In W. U. Dressler, H. Luschützky, O. E. Pfeiffer, & J. R. Rennison (Eds.), Contemporary morphology (pp. 111–132). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Natalia Beliaeva and Corinne Seals
The role of distance: Speakers’ perceptions and attitudes in discussions of political conflict
There is a long tradition in linguistics of examining how language shapes the way we think and, vice versa, how speakers’ knowledge, perceptions, attitudes and beliefs are reflected in speech. For example, the on-going conflict in Eastern Ukraine can be labelled as a ‘civil war’, ‘anti-terrorist operation’, ‘military intervention’ or ‘revolution’, depending on who the speakers are and what attitudes they have towards the events and their participants. As has been shown in Bilaniuk (2005), Kubicek (2000) and Seals (forthcoming), political opinions in Ukraine can be related to the regions people live in and their dominant language(s) (Ukrainian and/or Russian). This is a consequence of sociocultural linguistic and ethnological differences that have developed historically (Kubicek, 2000; Shulman, 2005). The present paper investigates how individual Ukrainians who are speakers of both Ukrainian and Russian reveal their perceptions and beliefs regarding different regions of Ukraine and the people living there, especially in the situation of emotional and cognitive strain. This study is a part of a larger project on moment-to-moment linguistic identity negotiation for Ukrainians. The data for the study come from interviews with 38 Ukrainian adults (ages 18-40) from four regions: Central Ukraine, Western Ukraine, South-Eastern Ukraine (the war zone and the regions in immediate vicinity), and the Black Sea region (including Crimea). One-third of the participants currently live in Ukraine; others reside in North American or New Zealand diaspora communities. This paper argues that 1) speakers’ perceptions of various parts of Ukraine and the war zone in particular differ depending on how close the speakers are to the conflict zone geographically, and how closely they are involved in the events; and 2) more blurred perceptions of the conflict zone cause a higher amount of pauses, false starts and other hesitation phenomena in the participants’ speech. As discussed, for example, in (Bortfeld et al. 2001; Merlo & Mansur, 2004), cognitive load is a predictor of speech disfluency. This paper investigates possible reasons for cognitive load in the case of discussing current events in Ukraine and provides insights into patterns of speech behaviour for speakers discussing places and times of conflict. REFERENCES Bilaniuk, L. (2005). Contested tongues: Language politics and cultural correction in Ukraine. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Bortfeld, H., Leon, S. D., Bloom, J. E., Schober, M. F., & Brennan, S. E. (2001). Disfluency rates in spontaneous speech: Effects of age, relationship, topic, role, and gender. Language and Speech, 44, 123–147.Kubicek, P. (2000). Regional Polarisation in Ukraine: Public opinion, voting and legislative behaviour. Europe-Asia Studies, 52(2), 273–294.Merlo, S., & Mansur, L. L. (2004). Descriptive discourse: Topic familiarity and disfluencies. Journal of Communication Disorders, 37, 489–503.Seals, C. (2018). ‘Choosing a mother tongue’: Positioning, dialogism, and identity in Ukrainian narratives of conflict. Multilingual Matters.Shulman, S. (2005). National identity and public support for political and economic reform in Ukraine. Slavic Review, 64(1), 59–87.
Alexandra Birchfield
“Both a maid and a man”: Linguistic variation in Shakespeare’s cross-dressing plays
This study will investigate the use of linguistic resources to construct different social identities in Shakespeare’s plays. It will focus particularly on the so-called “breeches parts” – female characters who disguise themselves as men – to see whether and in what way linguistic resources are employed to construct two different gender identities performed by the “same” person. This study will compare variation in the speech of these characters when performing their different gender identities as well as the speech of other characters in the plays. By looking at variations from this time period that are fairly well documented, for instance; the rise in use of do-support (Kroch 1989, Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003) and the development of certain verb suffixes (Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003), we can explore how far the variation in Shakespeare was representative of social variation at the time. This work is intended to contribute to the discussion surrounding the validity of historical fiction data as source of information about sociolinguistic variation in the past (Blaxter 2015, Froehlich 2012). When looking at historical sociolinguistic variation and change, we are often dependent on limited data. This study seeks to explore some ways in which we might use the data we do have effectively and productively. Shakespeare is often touted as an astute observer of human nature; this study seeks to discover whether he may also have been particularly attuned to the variation in human speech. References:Blaxter, Tam 2015. Gender and language change in Old Norse sentential negatives. Language Variation and Change 27(3): 349-375. Froehlich, Heather 2012. Do I Put Up That Womanly Defense? This Tune Goes Manly: A Corpus Stylistic Study of Gender-Specific Grammatical Constructions of Possession in Two Shakespearean Plays. Masters Dissertation, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland.Kroch, Anthony 1989. Reflexes of grammar in patterns of language change. Language Variation and change 1: 119-244.Nevalainen, Terttu and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg 2003. Historical linguistics. Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd.
Sasha Calhoun and Emma Kruse Va’ai
What’s the question? Perception of focus in Samoan and English
This study probes listeners’ judgments about the location of focus in Samoan and English, given different syntactic and prosodic cues. The focus is the part of an utterance which updates the question-under-discussion (QUD), or the topic being discussed (e.g. Krifka 2008, Vallduví to appear). Languages use different means to mark focus, primarily syntactic and prosodic cues (Féry & Ishihara 2016). Samoan and English are interesting to compare, as Samoan is said to mainly use syntax to mark focus, with the ‘o-fronting construction (Mosel & Hovdhaugen 1992, Calhoun 2015), and English prosodic prominence (e.g. Calhoun 2010).One of the primary means in linguistic research of diagnosing which element of an utterance is the focus is by testing which question it is most compatible with. There are, however,surprisingly few experimental studies which have tested this using naïve listener judgments. Two parallel experiments were run involving 60 New Zealand English speakers in Wellington, and 60 Samoan speakers in Āpia. Listeners heard one of six target sentences (see Table 1, underline indicates main stress). The target sentences varied according to whether the subject (S) or object (O) carried the main stress, and whether the sentence was in canonical word order (canon) or was a subject or object cleft (Scleft/Ocleft). The listeners chose which of two questions was more likely to have been asked given the way speaker answered (see Table 1). A subject question (SQ) is should be compatible with subject focus, and an object question (OQ) with object focus. There were 12 test items plus fillers.
Table 1: Experiment Stimuli Type Samoan EnglishTarget canonS Sa ave e le elefane le manukī. The elephant carried the monkey.Sentence canonO Sa ave e le elefane le manukī. The elephant carried the monkey. ScleftS’O le elefane sa avea le manukī. It was the elephant that carried the monkey. ScleftO ‘O le elefane sa avea le manukī. It was the elephant that carried the monkey. OcleftO ‘O le manukī sa ave e le elefane. It was the elephant that carried the monkey. OcleftS ‘O le manukī sa ave e le elefane. It was the elephant that carried the monkey.Question SQ ‘O le ā le mea sā avea le mānukī? What carried the monkey?Choice OQ ‘O le ā le mea sā ave e le elefane? What did the elephant carry?
Results showed that in each language, listeners had clear preferences about which sentence types were more compatible with subject or object focus (see Table 2). In both languages, as expected, the element in a cleft was strongly preferred to be the focus. Somewhat surprisingly, in English this preference was lessened, but not overridden, by stress in the main clause (ScleftO and OcleftS). In canonical word order sentences in English, as expect ed, the main stress strongly cued the focus. However, somewhat surprisingly, stress had no effect in Samoan, with object focus preferred (canonS and canonO). Table 2: Experiment results – question choice preference by target sentence type SQ OQSamoan ScleftS = ScleftO OcleftO = canonO = canonS = OcleftSEnglish ScleftS = canonS < ScleftO OcleftO = canonO < OcleftS This research contributes to efforts within the laboratory phonology and psycholinguistics community, which have increased in recent years, to experimentally test longstanding claims about the role of focus and focus marking based on introspective judgments; including in lesser studied languages. While the experimental results are largely compatible with these claims, there are surprising results about the role of sentence stress in both languages which need to be explained.ReferencesCalhoun, S. 2010. The Centrality of Metrical Structure in Signaling Information Structure: A Probabilistic Perspective. Language 86(1): 1-42. Calhoun, S. 2015. The interaction of prosody and syntax in Samoan focus marking. Lingua 165: 205-229Féry, C. & S. Ishihara (eds) 2016. The Oxford Handbook of Information Structure, UK: Oxford University Press.Krifka, M. 2008. Basic notions of information structure. Acta Linguistica Hungarica, 55, 243-276.Mosel, U. & E. Hovdhaugen 1992. Samoan Reference Grammar, UK: Oxford University Press.Vallduví, E. 2016. Information structure. In M. Aloni & P. Dekker, eds., The Cambridge handbook of formal semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 728-755.
Andreea Calude, Sally Harper, Steven Miller and Hemi Whaanga
Matariki – investigating the use of Māori loanwords in New Zealand English
The use of Māori loanwords within New Zealand English (NZE) is one of the most salient features of this newly emerging dialect of English (Deverson 1991). Although NZE borrows more Māori loanwords today than it did in the past (Macalister 2006, Kennedy & Yamazaki 1999), the topic of discourse plays a crucial role in influencing the extent to which such loanwords are indeed used (Degani 2010). In this interdisciplinary project, we investigate the use of Māori loanwords related to the growing use of Matariki in newspaper articles. In the last two decades Aotearoa New Zealand has seen a resurgence in interest in Māori astronomy with the celebration of the heliacal (pre-dawn) rising of Matariki leading the way (Matamua 2017; Whaanga & Matamua 2016). Matariki has transformed from a celebration of Māori culture to one that celebrates our Aotearoa New Zealand distinctiveness. Every year, numerous celebrations, activities, shows, exhibitions, balls, dinners, and commercial ventures are held during the months of June and July. For the analysis, we built a diachronic corpus of newspaper articles collected from local and regional newspapers over a period of 10 years (2007-2016) which include the word “Matariki” (the Matariki Corpus). We then analysed this corpus for loanword use (excluding personal names) and investigated the relationships between loanwords, using a combination of statistical methods (binomial regression, network analysis), and manual sense disambiguation (manually coding the senses of the word “Matariki”). An inspection of the 674 articles that make up the corpus confirms that the loanword “Matariki” is indeed increasing in frequency in Aotearoa New Zealand newspapers. We also find that regional newspapers are statistically more likely to involve the use of loanwords compared to national newspapers. Furthermore, the use of a loanword in the title of an article increases the likelihood of uses of loanwords in the main body of the article by 50%. Calculating the frequency of the loanwords used in our corpus, we find that the most frequent Māori loanwords in the Matariki corpus overlaps with, but does entirely match the most frequently used loanwords in the Wellington Corpora of NZE. Finally, we present a visual representation of networks between the various loanwords identified in the Matariki corpus in a bid to investigate which loanwords co-occur in the same text. ReferencesDeverson, T. 1991. New Zealand English lexis: The Māori dimension. English Today 28. 18–25. Degani, M. 2010. The Pakeha myth of one New Zealand /Aotearoa: An exploration in the use of Maori loanwords in New Zealand English. In R. Facchinetti, David Crystal & Barbara Seidlhofer (eds.), From international to local English – and back again, 165–196. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Kennedy, G. & S. Yamazaki. 1999. The Influence of Māori on the New Zealand English lexicon. In J. Kirk (ed.), Corpora galore: Analyses and techniques in describing English, 33–44. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Macalister, J. 2006. The Maori presence in the New Zealand English lexicon, 1850 –2000: Evidence from a corpus-based study. English World-Wide 27. 1–24.Matamua, R. 2017. Matariki – The star of the year. Wellington: Huia. Whaanga, H. & Matamua, R. 2016. Matariki tāpuapua: Pools of traditional knowledge and currents of change. In M. Robertson, & P. K. E. Tsang (Eds.), Everyday knowledge, education and sustainable futures: Transdisciplinary research in the Asia/Pacific Region (pp. 59-70). Singapore: Springer.
Helen Charters and Louise Jansen
In the first place: Adverbial placement and function in early learner utterances
There is considerable interest in relating grammatical structures to information structure (IS), especially in SLA. Processability Theory (PT, Bettoni & DiBiase, 2015) claims that for early learners, semantic, syntactic and pragmatic domains are undifferentiated and the sentence-initial position is filled by an element that is at once, the topic, the subject and the most agentive. An important developmental step is then marked by emergence in first position of elements described as topical but not denoting core participants. This is said to force the learner to separate topicality and subjecthood, and realize there is a position preceding the ‘subject’. Without analyzing the discourse in this new position occurs, PT assumes it hosts the topic in statements. Klein and Perdue (1992) also mention that time and place adverbials “regularly show up in initial or final position depending on whether they belong to the topic or to the focus” (1992:304), but admit that they did not look at the development of adverbials systematically, and for them, everything that is not the focus, is part of the topic. However, in contrast to PT, they suggest that word order in early SLA is determined by two separate principles, one pragmatic – Focus last, the other semantic – Controller first, and that early learners may not use the category ‘subject’ at all; syntactic organization takes over only as learners confront situations where the semantic and pragmatic principles conflict. For Klein and Perdue the conflict motivating development is between semantics and pragmatics, for PT, between syntax and pragmatics. However, neither reports on the development and the discourse functions of initial adverbials in sufficient detail to test the relationship between topicality, as usually defined, and the use of the first position in early SLA.Adopting well-established IS categories, Topic, Focus, presupposition (Lambrecht, 1994; Erteschik-Shir, 2007) and others, we report on a case study of adverbials in the output of Andrea, an adult Italian-speaking learner of English, showing that only six of his 28 adverbials occupy the first position within a proposition. None of these were topical, but their presence was associated with non-canonical word order later in the sentence. ReferencesBettoni, C. and DiBiase, B. (Eds) 2015. Grammatical Development in Second Languages: Exploring the boundaries of Processability Theory. Eurosla Monographs Series 3. Amstrerdam: The European Second Language Association.Erteschik-Shir, N. 2007. Information structure: the syntax-discourse interface. Oxford/ New York: Oxford University Press.Klein, W. and Perdue, C. 1992. Utterance structure: Developing Grammars again. Amsterdam, BenjaminsLambrecht, K. 1994. Information structure and sentence form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lynn Clark and Daniel Villarreal
Phonological priming across the vowel space
Experimental studies of priming have shown that we have a strong tendency to repeat lexical and grammatical items that we have recently produced, seen or heard (Bock 1986; Bock & Loebell 1990; Branigan et al 2000). A growing body of work suggests that this also happens in more natural types of speech (Gries 2005; Szmrecsanyi 2006; Poplack 1980; Travis 2007; Mayol, 2012). Results from studies of phonological priming have been more discordant, with some studies finding clear phonological priming (e.g. Clark 2014; Dimitropoulou et al 2010) while others find that phonological priming is more heavily restricted than grammatical or lexical priming (e.g. Tamminga 2014; Mousikou et al 2010). Almost all previous attempts to explore the role of priming in accent variation and change use data from dyadic conversations, treating these conversations as if they were monologues and ignoring speech from speakers who are not main participants. Clark (forthcoming) attempted to address this methodological issue by exploring priming in medial /t/ variation in a corpus of NZ English monologues. Clark (forthcoming) found that phonetic variants with the same voicing tend to prime each other in naturally occurring speech and that priming interacts with widely attested sociolinguistic predictors of variation. This paper builds on Clark (forthcoming) by examining evidence for within-speaker priming across several stressed monophthongs in NZ English. By fitting mixed effects regression models (Baayen et al 2008), incorporating both the realisation of the preceding vowel, and a range of other linguistic and social predictors, we show two main findings:1.Vowels involved in the short front vowel shift in NZ English (specifically, TRAP, DRESS and KIT) show within-speaker priming behaviour similar to that which has been previously found for medial /t/, a consonantal change in progress. 2.More stable vowels (such as STRUT) are constrained by linguistic and social variables in largely predictable ways but are not constrained by the previous vowel realisation; that is, there is no clear priming effect for STRUT. In other words, it may not be possible to state whether phonological priming affects natural speech in general terms without also considering the extent to which the phonological variation in question is undergoing change. Incorporating insights from work on sociolinguistics and sound change into psycholinguistics and cognitive science (i.e. priming research) is therefore mutually beneficial to both disciplines.
Ross Clark
Morpho-phonemic disaster and recovery in Oceanic languages
Categorical loss of original word-final consonants has affected a large proportion of Oceanic languages, reflecting at least two separate historical events. One consequence of this was that transitive verb forms, previously marked with a suffix POC *-i, came to show an apparent suffix -Ci, where C is a (“thematic”) consonant not generally predictable from any property of the base morpheme.
Before consonant loss (POC)
| Intransitive | Transitive | |
| *polas | *polas-i | spread out |
| *ʔalop | *ʔalop-i | beckon |
| *inum | *inum-i | drink |
After consonant loss
| Intransitive | Transitive | |
| *pola | *pola-si | spread out |
| *ʔalo | *ʔalo-pi | beckon |
| *inu | *inu-mi | drink |
There has been considerable argument over the synchronic analysis of languages inheriting this loss, as to whether the psychologically real situation is that shown in the “After” table above, or that shown in the “Before” table, with the addition of a surface rule which removes word-final consonants. Perhaps the strongest evidence for the “After” analysis is the fact that no language has correctly preserved all the historic (thematic) consonants. The primal disaster, then, is the “After” situation, in which the transitive suffix has as many as a dozen different forms, and the appropriate suffix form must be individually learned for each verb. Studies of individual daughter languages have shown both phonological and semantic strategies – working simultaneously and sometimes in conflict – have been used to create some degree of predictability in suffix choice.
Moonsun Choi
Word order variation and particles in Korean
This paper presents preliminary results from an investigation of the relation between word order variations and the particles i/ga, eul/leul and eun/neun in eight contemporary Korean dramas broadcast from 2004-2016. The aim of the study is to identify how the particles affect the meaning of sentences and relate to the wider discourse. Typologically, Korean is a SOV language with a relatively flexible word order. I look at the presence and absence of the particles in SOV, OSV, OV, SV, Topicalisation and Right Dislocation structures and examine their function. For example, in the Right Dislocation structure (1a), the nominative particle ga marks focus on the speaker as the person who is upset in the situation (she has to care for her grandfather who has dementia). Without ga, the meaning would be vague and the structure would be unacceptable in natural spoken contexts. In (1b), the particle n marks ajeossi ‘uncle’ as the topic of the sentence and indicates that the speaker is surprised that he is sitting there. If the particle was absent, this would be a simple question that asks what the addressee is doing.(1) a. Mista Lee ttaeme mossala, nae-ga /? na-ø Mr. Lee because of cannot live-PRES.INFORM.DECL I-NOM / I-ø ‘Lit. I cannot live because of Mr. Lee.’ (I am upset because of Mr. Lee.) (gommapseubnida ‘Thank you’, 2007, episode 4, scene 11) b. Eojjeon iliseyo, ajeossi-n /ajeossi -ø What work.be-PRES.HON.Q uncle-TOP /uncle-ø ‘What are you doing uncle? (gommapseubnida ‘Thank you’, 2007, episode 2, scene 12)I decided to base my analysis on drama scripts after a pilot study of a range of written and spoken genres revealed that it is easiest to find different uses of the particles with a variety of word order variations in drama scripts. My sample includes family dramas, office dramas, melodrama, and romantic comedies. Preliminary findings suggest that Right Dislocation structures like (1) are particularly common in a family drama where one of the main characters is a small child, but not so common in office dramas. This may reflect a tendency towards Right Dislocation in child-directed speech.
Rolando Coto-Solano
Romance and Germanic Language Contact and its Consequences for Japanese Loanword Accentuation
Loanwords in Japanese are more likely to be accented (93%) than Native Japanese (29%) or Sino-Japanese words (51%) (Kubozono 2006). Current hypotheses for this asymmetry suggest speakers have access to foreign words and their stress, and therefore process loanwords as accented (Kubozono 2006:1162). I present an alternate hypothesis: loanword accentuation increased over time due to universal principles, such as weight-to-stress (Gordon 2004), acting together with previously existing rules in Japanese. These mutually supporting processes increased accentuation when the main source of loanwords switched from Romance to Germanic. This was amplified when the channel for loanword transmission changed from oral to written, which transformed [+accent] into a mark of hyperforeignism (Janda, Joseph & Jacobs 1994).I analyzed 436 loanwords from 1592-2000, from the Kadokawa Loanword Dictionary (Arakawa 1977) with accentuation from the Super Daijirin Dictionary (Matsumura 2006). These originated from Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, German and English. Loanwords began with similar accentuation to Sino-Japanese words, but became significantly more accented over time (binary-logit regression: χ2(3)=16.71,p<0.001).LoanwordsAccented (%)Before 1700 (n=39)54Between 1700-1800 (n=30)77Between 1800-1854 (n=48)73After 1854 (n=319)93Table 1. Loanword accentuation in JapaneseRomance loans, predominant at first (1500s-1600s), more closely resembled Japanese phonotactics. However, Germanic loanwords (1700s on) incorporated heavy syllables, particularly geminates, which attract accentuation cross-linguistically. Heavy syllables also caused an increase of epenthetic vowels. Epenthesis creates opacity in phonological processes (Hall 2011), and these syllables created deep consonant clusters that generate weight-to-stress attraction. Finally, loanwords became longer over time (3.6 versus 4.9 moras before and after 1854). Japanese nouns longer than 4 moras are virtually always accented (Kubozono 2006), which generated a length→accentuation association in loanwords. Finally, starting in the 1720s loanwords were borrowed predominantly from writing. With the original prosody unavailable, conditions were set for the indexicalization of [+accent] as a hyperforeignism (Ochs 1992), leading to increases in accentuation. Together these results push the emergence of a distinct loanword stratum to the mid-18th century, at least 50 years previous to current proposals (Crawford 2008).
Mohammed Dagamseh
Language Maintenance, Shift and Variation among Arabic Jordanians in Christchurch/ New Zealand
Investigating the issue of heritage language and maintenance in the New Zealand context is important being a country of cultural and linguistic diversity (Lee, 2013; Revis, 2015). Some studies (see Al-Sahafi, 2010) show that there is a lack of research on some minority groups such as Arabs in New Zealand. The present study investigates the process of language maintenance, shift and attitudes toward both Arabic and English among Arabic Jordanians in Christchurch/New Zealand. The study also discusses the influence of the participants’ attitudes toward Arabic and English on their speech production. The study uses data that were collected through structured questionnaire and interviews from the Jordanian and Palestinian communities who are over 18 years old in Christchurch. The collected data were analysed quantitatively using R software. The results show that there is heritage language maintenance in all domains (e.g. home, friends and religion) among all participants of different ages, genders and times of arrival with some regression in their proficiency especially in the literacy skills mainly with those who were born in or came very early to New Zealand. Moreover, the results show that Arabic Jordanians in Christchurch are very loyal and positive toward the Arabic Language being the language of the Holy Quran, and a symbol of their culture and ethnic identity. They also have positive attitudes toward English due to its perceived usefulness as well as its status as an international language. ReferencesAl-Sahafi, M. (2010). The dynamics of language maintenance among Arabic-speaking Muslim immigrant families in New zealand. The University of Auckland. Lee, S. E. (2013). Spanish language maintenance and shift among the Chilean community in Auckland. Auckland University of Technology. Revis, M. S. (2015). Family Language Policies of Refugees: Ethiopians and Colombians in New Zealand.
Zoe Evans and Catherine Watson
Revisiting the Acoustics of Sound Change: The impact of formant-tracking methodologies
With advent of forced-alignment systems coupled with formant trackers, such as FAVE, and the increased availability of spoken corpuses, large-scale phonetic analysis of vowels has become feasible for more researchers. This is in contrast to earlier studies where speech data required hand-labelling, which was both time-consuming and expensive. There are, however, some pitfalls that need to be addressed when using these automated systems. Using the same corpus, [1] contrasted the findings from hand-segmented and labelled data to those obtained from two forced-alignment systems. They showed that the different methods of data preparation skewed the relative positions of vowels in the F1/F2 space, resulting in different conclusions about sound change over time. In this study we continue the comparison of data preparation methods, with an analysis of formant tracking techniques. As with labelling, in earlier studies all formant tracks were hand checked by experienced phoneticians. Given the larger size of modern speech corpora, researchers are increasingly relying on the accuracy of automatic formant-tracking algorithms. However, in a recent study, [2] found 38% of formant values were mistracked. To investigate the potential impact of incorrect formant tracking on sound change, we used the same corpus as [1], containing data from 5 male speakers of New Zealand English. We compared hand-checked formant values to those automatically calculated using PRAAT. For all speakers, F1 values for the high vowels were always higher in the automatically tracked formants, and the F1/F2 values for the THOUGHT vowel showed the greatest discrepancies between hand-checked and automatically tracked data. In contrast, the F1/F2 values for the open vowels were very similar across the two methods. We argue that these results are to be expected when one considers the phonetic properties of the vowels, and we finish with a reflection on the implications of sound change studies that are based on large amounts of data derived from unchecked acoustic features.[1]2016 Watson, C.I. and Evans Z.E. “Sound Change or Experimental Artifact?: A study on the impact of data preparation on measuring sound change.”, The proceedings of 16th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology SST 2016,Parramatta, Dec 6-9, p261-264[2]2016 Altairi H, Watson C.I., and Brown J, “Secondary Tongue Retraction in Arabic Emphatics: An acoustic study”, The proceedings of 16th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology SST 2016,Parramatta, Dec 6-9, p 257-260
Susan Foster-Cohen, Viktoria Papp and Anne van Bysterveldt
Vocabulary, pragmatics and the emergence of syntax in young children with language delays
The goal of this study was to identify the features of language use which indicate that preschool children with complex multi-system developmental disabilities are ready to respond to therapy aimed at encouraging productive word combining. Participants were the parents of 69 children aged between 2;0 and 6;7 whose language delay was identified both through clinical assessment and through their parents’ completion of an ABASII (Harrison, Oakland, & Corporation, 2000). All the children were attending the same multi-disciplinary family-centered early intervention programme in New Zealand. Language development was assessed using the Language Use Inventory (LUI) (O’Neill, 2009) and the New Zealand version of the MacArthur-Bates CDI (Reese & Read, 2000). Outcome measures for word combining presented here are parents’ responses to word combining questions on these two measures. A linear mixed effects model and a procedure employing untrained statistical classifiers were applied to parent responses. Results suggested that (1) vocabulary size is a poor indicator of word combining readiness; (2) pragmatic development as measured by the LUI is a significant predictor of word combining; (3) a baseline of pragmatic development, specifically children’s emerging ability to talk about things, themselves and others, is a pre-requisite for word combining; (4) vocabulary size is relevant only once that baseline has been reached; and (5) at that baseline, vocabularies need to be significantly larger to predict word combining than suggested in the literature. Given the relationships between the LUI and the CDI with respect to vocabulary development, it is also suggested that the LUI alone can serve to indicate readiness for clinical interventions for word combining. The importance of helping both parents and clinicians understand the relationships between pragmatic and lexical development and the nature of transitional forms that precede productive multi-word utterances is suggested in light of these results.
Karen Huang
Dialect differences in Mandarin lexical tones – A second-language speech account
The pitch contours of Taiwan Mandarin tones are different from those of Standard Mandarin. In order to find out the role of L1 Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM) on Taiwan Mandarin, this study examines the tone productions of TSM-Mandarin bilinguals and Mandarin monolinguals in Taiwan. The comparisons suggest that not all of the Taiwan Mandarin tonal features can be attributed to second language speech produced by the bilinguals. The bilinguals and the monolinguals share the pitch contours of Tone 1-3 [44, 323, 21]. On the other hand, Tone 4 [53] seems to show L1 TSM influences—the higher pitch range likely resulted from the assimilation to the TSM high falling tone. Also, Mandarin Tone 3 might have been assimilated to TSM low-falling tone because Taiwan Mandarin tends to use the low-falling pitch variant rather than the dipping one. Lastly, the bilinguals tend to produce a flattened Mandarin Tone 2 at the non-XP-final positions, which seems to be influenced by the TSM phonology. The result exhibits the complex nature of dialect development, and the influences of the first language are shown in a context-specific way.
Yishan Huang
Contextual Sensitivity of Obstruent Coda Realisation in Zhangzhou
Three types of obstruent codas /p, t, k/ are identified at the underlying level in Zhangzhou, but their realisation appears contextually-sensitive. The codas tend not to be realised in the utterance-final position but are largely realised in the non-utterance-final contexts. Nevertheless, whether the obstruent codas are realised or not in utterances, they give rise to different sets of phonetic effects on the whole syllables, including syllable length, voice quality, vowel quality and pitch/F0 contour. In the utterance-final position, where the obstruent codas are not realised, the syllables are lengthened; vowels are laryngealised; high vowels are diphthongised, and the pitch/F0 contour is depressed. In contrast, in the non-utterance-final contexts, the preservation of obstruent codas significantly shortens the syllable length, and causes all vowels to be produced with falsetto voice in a specific tonal environment (tone 6) in Zhangzhou. This study primarily addresses two issues. First, how can the contextual sensitivity of obstruent codas in Zhangzhou be acoustically justified? Second, how can the obstruent coda-induced phonetic effects be judged in corresponding acoustic manifestations? The findings are supposed to expand the knowledge of segmental system of Zhangzhou, but also contributes to the understanding of human speech in general.
Dan Jiao, Vicky Watson, Sidney Wong, Jessie Nixon and Ksenia Gnevsheva
Age estimation in foreign-accented speech by non-native speakers of English
Previous research indicates that native listeners are able to estimate speaker age with some accuracy (Moyse, 2014). However, there have been relatively few studies regarding the effects of the speaker and listener’s native language on age estimation. Where some studies have found no effect (Braun & Cerrato, 1999), Nagao and Kewley-Port (2005) discovered an own-language advantage when comparing accuracy of native Japanese and English speakers. A study using native English speakers listening to native English and Japanese-accented English indicated the Japanese-accented speakers were perceived to be younger overall (Bürkle & Gnevsheva, 2017). Age estimation in accented speech by non-native listeners has not been explored; therefore, our focus is investigating the effect listener and speaker native languages may have on age perception. We examine the role language familiarity plays on accuracy and reaction times across language backgrounds. In our perception experiment, 60 listeners of Arabic, Korean and Mandarin Chinese speaking backgrounds listen to randomly presented audio-stimuli of 48 speakers (3 languages x 2 sexes x 8 ages) reading the “Please call Stella” passage in English (Weinberger, 2015) and are asked to estimate the speakers’ ages. For each language and sex, we selected speakers along an eight-point age continuum from early 20s to late 50s . Age estimation accuracy and reaction times are measured. It is our hypothesis that listeners will display an own-language advantage in terms of speed and accuracy. When listening to more culturally related languages, we also expect that the response to more familiar languages (Mandarin<->Korean) will be faster and more accurate than less familiar languages (Mandarin<->Arabic and Korean<->Arabic). References:Braun, A., & Cerrato, L. (1999). Estimating speaker age across languages. Proceedings of ICPhS 99, San Francisco, CA, 1369–1372.Bürkle, D., & Gnevsheva, K. (2017). Age estimation in foreign-accented speech. Paper presented at the International Conference on Language Variation in Europe. Malaga, Spain.Moyse, E. (2014). Age Estimation from Faces and Voices: A Review. Psychologica Belgica, 54(3), 255-265.Nagao, K., & Kewley-Port, D. (2005). The effect of language familiarity on age perception. Poster presented at the International Research Conference on Aging and Speech Communication, Bloomington, Indiana, USA.Rodrigues, P., & Nagao, K. (2010). Effects of listener experience with foreign accent on perception of accentedness and speaker age. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 127(3), 1956–1956. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.3384968Weinberger, S. (2015). Speech Accent Archive. George Mason University. Retrieved from http://accent.gmu.edu
Jacq Jones
A Case Study in Nonbinary Gender Identity and Sociophonetic Variation Across Contexts
From birth, social expectations of gender performance, of what it means to “talk like a boy” or girl, are reinforced and sometimes rejected. Among these rejecters are nonbinary people, those who do not identify as wholly male or female. 6% of LGBT+ youth identify as nonbinary, and over half of Millennials believe that gender isn’t limited to a binary designation. Despite this growing recognition, the literature, media, and culture often assume and presume a gender binary. Nonbinary people, then, represent a population that is growing despite most external influences minimizing or erasing them. Gender as an oppositional binary, in which that which is not male is de facto female and vice versa, is played out at all levels of social interaction and understanding, and language is no exception: For most speakers in most contexts, everything they say will be interpreted through an assumption of the gender binary. The purpose of this research is to examine the speech of nonbinary people with the understanding that it exists outside of the confines of binary descriptors, but must be constructed and performed within a system where every act is assigned a binary label. To examine the ways nonbinary speakers use speech to encode their gender identity, a novel corpus has been created. RAINBO contains the selfies and transcribed audio recordings of nonbinary speakers in natural conversations, as well as sociolinguistic interviews centred on the nonbinary experience of gender, which include specific questions about each conversation’s context, interlocutors, and selfies. My presentation will use both quantitative and qualitative methods to analyse the data of a single participant, NB03. Differences across contexts in pitch, /ʃ/, and pre-pausal /t/ will be examined, as these have been found to correlate with gender in both production and perception. The phonetic analysis will be informed by NB03’s sociolinguistic interview, to determine the extent to which their deliberate choices about gender presentation affect production. For example, correlations will be examined between NB03’s use of masculine-perceived acoustic queues, and their use of “bloke mode”, a speech style deliberately affected when they wish to appear more physically competent.
Maxwell Kadenge and Keneilwe Matlhaku
Spreading in Setswana loanword phonology
Setswana, a southern Bantu language spoken in Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe, is among the many African languages that have borrowed words from English and Afrikaans over a long period of time. This paper focusses on spreading (also known as echo epenthesis) in Setswana which manifests in two forms: vowel epenthesis to eliminate consonant clusters and codas and, glide epenthesis to eliminate diphthongs. Our data comes from native speaker intuition, dictionaries and an unpublished corpus. Our findings demonstrate that the primary epenthetic strategy in Setswana is vowel copying (82.1%) e.g. kɛrɛkɛ ‘church’, ‘kerk’ in Afrikaans, wiki ‘wig’ and tɪrɔŋkɔ ‘prison, ‘dronk’ in Afrikaans’ and the second best strategy is consonant assimilation (12.4%) e.ge. sɪpiti ‘speed and alɪbamʊ ‘album’. The least preferred strategy is default insertion (5.5%) pʊrema ‘pram’ and tirina ‘train’. While previous studies such as Rose and Demuth (2006) and Downing (2016) have claimed that dorsals and liquids do not trigger place agreement and that the pharyngeal [a] does not participate in vowel harmony, our findings demonstrate that the coronal [ɪ] is systematically epenthesized following [l] e.g. alɪfabɛtɛ ‘alphabet’, alɪtara ‘altar’ and mɛtalɪ ‘metal’ and the pharyngeal [a] triggers vowel harmony e.g. katara ‘guitar’ and pʊlaka ‘plug’. Our findings challenge Batibo’s (1996:36) observation that “more than 67% of complex vowels, such as diphthongs, from loanwords, have been nativised in Tswana through the process of resyllabification. The two (or three) vowels which were considered to belong to one syllable in the source language have been resyllabified into separate syllables [heterosyllafication].” We demonstrate that diphthongs are simplified through spreading (homorganic glide epenthesis), e.g., thaji ‘tie’ cf. *tha.i and bʊlawʊsɪ ‘blouse’ cf. *bʊla.u.sɪ; ensuring that vocalic hiatus does not occur in Setswana. This pattern of diphthong simplification is in keeping with the patterns of vocalic hiatus resolution in native Setswana phonology: e.g. glide formation: cf. /ʊ1-a2kajɪ/ [wa2.ka.jɪ] ‘where are you going?’, /ʊ1-a2ʤa/ [wa2.ʤa] ‘he is eating’, /ɪ1-a2mɛ/ [ja2.mɛ] ‘mine’ (classes 4 and 9) and secondary articulation: cf. /mʊ1-a2na/ [ŋwa2.na] ‘child’ and /mʊ1-ɛ2di/ [ŋwɛ2.di] ‘moon’.
Stephanie Kaefer
What’s in a name? An investigation into patterns occurring in lists of names in the Wardens’ Accounts and Minute Books of the Goldsmiths’ Mistery of London: 1334-1446.
This paper looks at the relationship between language choice, case endings and the use of prepositional phrases with names in the Wardens’ Accounts and Minute Books of the Goldsmiths’ Mistery of London: 1334-1446. Since this text mostly contain list of individuals, who either owe, have paid, or received monies from the Goldsmiths Mistery, with additional information such as who they served under as apprentices or were masters over, names are a very prominent feature in these accounts. This investigation is part of my PhD research, which focuses on changes in the frequency and function of the components of the prepositional phrases (prepositions and case endings) in Medieval Latin within multilingual documents of English provenance during the later Middle Ages compared with the occurrences of prepositional phrases in monolingual English Medieval Latin texts. This study intends to analyse the lists of names occurring in this text to assess:(a)whether the patterns occurring in the lists of names are the result of the interference from the other languages present in these documents, Anglo Norman and Middle English, (b)how these patterns relate to the changes in prepositional phrases noted in my PhD research(c)whether there is evidence of code-switching, and (d)how these changes relate to previous and present studies of code-switching in written historical environments. Code-switching and multilingualism in medieval manuscripts is an area that has been gaining increasing recognition in linguistic and medieval circles over the last ten years (cf. Schendl & Wright 2011). Previous studies in this area have predominantly focused on literary sources scientific and medical texts or religious texts such as sermons carols and hymns of the later Middle Ages. The administrative text type has also been extensively analysed for evidence of code-switching (Wright, 1992-2013). No prior studies have investigated code-switching in guild accounts, or the patterns of names alternating between languages within the same text which could suggest code-switching.
Hideki Kishimoto
On A-bar dependencies in Sinhala interrogative focus constructions
In Sinhala, a focus particle is utilized to mark focus. Primarily, focus is overtly marked by a focus particle in clause internal-position, but this particle is allowed to occur in clause-final scope position as well, in which case focus is not delimited.(1) a. Ranjit [ee potə] də kieuwe ? Ranjit that book Q read.E ‘Was it that book that Ranjit read?’ b. [Ranjit ee potə kieuwa] də? Ranjit that book read.A Q ‘Did Ranjit read that book?’In this paper, paying particular attention to the focus constructions of the interrogative type, I argue that a clause-internal interrogative focus particle in (1a) serves as an operator to encode the scope of a focused constituent and is raised to its scope position in the CP domain—the position where the focus particle appears in (1b). This claim is motivated by the fact that the focus construction under investigation displays A-bar properties (i.e. properties involving operator movement), including: (A) when a focus particle is placed in clause-internal position, the predicate gains the special scope marking, and this relation can be long distance; (B) when a focus marker is placed in syntactic islands, island effects are observed. Furthermore, in yes-no interrogative focus construction, a wh-island effect is observed for long distance pseudo-clefting of a phrasal element, as in (2a) but this effect is absent in a wh-interrogative focus construction, as in (2b).(2) a. Oyaa [kau də ti kieuwe kiyəla] danne ee potəi. you who Q read.E that know.E that book ‘It is that booki that you know who read ti. b. ??Oyaa [Chitra də ti kieuwe kiyəla] danne ee potəi. you Chitra Q read.E that know.E that book ‘It is that booki that you know if Chitra read ti.’Drawing on data like (2), I argue that in the wh-interrogative focus construction, the focus particle də undergoes LF movement. In the yes-no interrogative focus construction, on the other hand, I suggest that the focus particle undergoes overt syntactic movement, while the copy of the particle left behind by movement is pronounced. Selected referencesChandralal, D. (2010) Sinhala. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Kishimoto, H. (2005) “Wh-in-situ and movement in Sinhala questions.” NLLT 23, 1-51. Hagstrom, P. (1998) Decomposing Questions. Ph.D. dissertation. MIT. Pesetsky, D. (1998) “Some optimality principles of sentence pronunciation.” In P. Barbosa, D. Fox, P. Hagstrom, M. McGinnis, and D. Pesetsky (eds.), Is the Best Good Enough?: Optimality and Competition in Syntax, 337–383. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Jemma L. Konig, Ian H. Witten and Shaoqun Wu
Language and Technology – using a mobile application to study vocabulary acquisition
Our talk describes a new approach to investigating vocabulary size with the help of a mobile reader that is augmented with tracking facilities. This tool can be applied to a variety of vocabulary-related problems, such as modelling the vocabulary size of learners or modelling knowledge of incoming loanwords from a donor to a host language. The work presented here is part of a larger PhD project, and this talk will focus on two aspects: (1) developing the mobile software I wrote for tracking vocabulary usage, and (2) using the information it records to measure learner vocabulary using intelligent computer assisted language learning (iCALL) techniques. The first part of the talk describes the FLAX Reader software. This was developed first as a web based application (Walmsley, 2015), and later extended into a mobile application (Konig, Witten, & Wu, 2016). It takes advantage of implicit learning techniques and provides learners with a wide variety of interesting texts, promoting the concept of extensive reading to encourage learners to develop an interest in reading for enjoyment. The FLAX Reader facilitates the learner’s interaction with the text and provides dictionary definitions of words that are clicked. It keeps track of reading speed (words per minute) and words clicked, and subsequently uses this information both to build a model of a learner’s receptive vocabulary and to generate individualized language learning exercises for that learner. The second part of the talk focuses on methods for building vocabulary models. The relationship between word frequency and word knowledge is a critical component in measuring vocabulary acquisition for second language learners. Palmer (1917) observes that “the more frequently used words will be the more easily learnt” (see also Mackey 1965, McCarthy 1990, and Meara 1992). The mobile version of the FLAX Reader uses Nation’s (2004) BNC/COCA lists to divide words into frequency bands and calculate a probability for each word. This will be extended to investigate whether the vocabulary models that are generated by the FLAX Reader could be used to predict an individual learner’s receptive vocabulary, and whether our findings support existing theories on receptive vocabulary size and acquisition.
Megan Lake and Te Whainoa Te Wiata
Prominence in Madurese
Current research on the prosody of Madurese (Austronesian) has yielded inconclusive results. At present, there is little consensus about whether the language makes use of word stress, and there are few clear reports on the intonational structure of the language. Previous analyses of the language have indicated that there is no significant use of word-level stress; however, semantically prominent (e.g. focused) words tend to exhibit exaggerated prosodic characteristics. The present study aims at targeting constituents in focused positions in order to determine whether there is any evidence for stress (and intonation). The methods for the study closely follow those of Maskikit-Essed & Gussenhoven (2016), who claim that there is no word-stress, phrasal stress, or intonation in Ambonese, a closely related language. Stimuli include words in 3 different discourse contexts, and 2 different positions (final vs. non-final), as well as 2 focus conditions, yielding 24 different conditions. Preliminary results indicate that F0 is increased for words in focal, though contexts it remains to be determined whether the effect is consistent across conditions.
Clare Li
The Syntactic and Pragmatic Properties of A-not-A Questions in Chinese
This paper looks at the syntactic structure and pragmatic functions of A-not-A questions in spoken Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese, and in written Chinese. The data analysed in this study comes from three films produced in Hong Kong which have audio in Cantonese and Mandarin, plus Chinese and English subtitles.My findings suggest that A-not-A questions can function as indirect speech acts and gambits as well as genuine questions, and that there are morphological, lexical and grammatical differences between Cantonese, Mandarin and written Chinese.As illustrated in (1), Cantonese A-not-A questions usually contain a sentence-final particle (SFP) whereas most Mandarin and written Chinese A-not-A questions do not. The initial A-not-A question involving the adjective ‘suitable’ takes the A-not-AB form in Cantonese, whereas in Mandarin and written Chinese it has the a-not-AB form, where the only the initial syllable of the disyllabic predicate appears before ‘not’. Interestingly, the adjective involves the same morphemes in spoken Mandarin and written Chinese, but in a different order. All versions use the monosyllabic adjective 夠 gou ‘enough’ in the second question. In Cantonese, this question has an A-not-A form, but in Mandarin and written Chinese the verb 用 yong ‘use’ occurs as a complement, so the question takes the A-not-AB form. (1)a)睇 吓 你 教 拳 啱 唔 啱 用 喇 吓 ？tai2- haa5 nei5 gaau3 kyun4 ngaam1-m4-ngaam1 jung6 laa3 haa2look-DEL you teaching fist suitable-not-suitable use SFP SFP… 夠 唔 夠 呢 ？… gau3-m4-gau3 ne1 …enough-not-enough SFP(Cantonese)b)你 看 這裡 合 不 合適 教 拳 ？ ni kan zheli he-bu-heshi jiao quan youu look here suitable-not-suitable teaching fist… 夠 不 夠 用 ？… gou-bu-gou yong…enough-not-enough use(Mandarin)c)你 看 這裡 適 不 適合 教 拳 ？ ni kan zheli shi-bu-shihe jiao quan you look here suitable-not-suitable teaching fist… 夠 不 夠 用 呢 ？… gou-bu-gou yong ne…enough-not-enough use SFP(written Chinese)‘See if it’s suitable for your martial club. It’s pretty spacious. Is it big enough?
Eden Sum Hung Li, Andy Fung, Percy Lui and John Li
An appraisal analysis of the language of argumentation in two political events in Hong Kong
The present paper is part of an ongoing research project of ‘Political Discourse in Hong Kong’ in which a political act is perceived as a construction of and around word, and analysing political discourse is thus an important means to the understanding of how political ideologies are embedded, how political strategies are employed, and how political agendas are achieved through the discourse (Chilton 2004; Fairclough & Fairclough 2012). Political discourse is basically argumentative and persuasive in nature. The choices of interpersonal linguistic resources among the political actors are thus an important aspect of the study of political discourse. Adopting the SFL perspective, the present study focuses on two important related political events in Hong Kong: first, a televised meeting in which five officials of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) and five student representatives of the Hong Kong Federation of Students (HKFS) during the “Occupy Central Movement” in Hong Kong on 21 October 2014, which was considered as a ‘crucial moment’ politically and pragmatically to the future development of Hong Kong’s democratization process; and second, a televised debate by the three candidates in the election of Chief Executive in 2017, in which universal suffrage – a major political goal of the “Occupy Central Movement” – became an important issue. This study applies Martin and White’s (2005) APPRAISAL theory to analyse and discuss the following three questions: First, how did the political actors express their emotional dispositions, ethical judgement and evaluation to construct their identities and their relationships with each other as well as with the general public watching the televised meeting in these political events? Second, how did these political actors negotiate the arguability of their propositions and proposals in relation to their roles? Third, what linguistic means did they use to modulate the intensity of their assessments in their discourse? In short, this paper discusses how appraisal resources are used in political discourse with respect to the speaker’s identity, role and agenda.ReferencesChilton, P. (2004). Analysing Political Discourse: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge.Fairclough, I. & Fairclough, N. (2012). Political Discourse Analysis: A Method for Advanced Students. London and New York: Routledge.Martin, J.R. & White, P.R.R. (2005). The language of evaluation, appraisal in English. London & New York: Palgrave Macmillian.
Meredith Marra and Janet Holmes
Depending on norms? Shared practices in different kinds of communities
Within the field of workplace discourse research, analytic interest has traditionally been the shared practices which shape and constrain the way language is used to make meaning in established communities. The focus on intact teams and ‘backstage’ interactions (Goffman 1959) has also been a deliberate measure to ensure genuine informed consent is received from all those involved in the audio and video recordings used as core data. Researchers have identified team-dependent norms for a range of different communicative behaviours, from disagreeing (Jacquin 2017, Marra 2012) and giving directives (Vine 2004), to the use of humour (Schnurr 2009) and small talk (Murata 2012, Chan 2008). In each case, the findings have made use of material collected over an extended period of time and analysts have consistently argued the need for additional ethnographic information to support and warrant interpretations.In pilot research conducted in 2016/2017, we have developed a new ethically-appropriate methodology to gain access to ‘frontstage’ interactions amongst people who may meet on just one occasion, or for one specific activity type. While there can be little expectation of established norms between the interactants in these fleeting ‘moments of co-presence’ (Coupland 2000), we have been struck by the relevance of implicit understandings shared by the participants in the recordings we have collected to date. In this paper our analysis explores and contrasts the role of norms in ongoing and one-off interactions. We draw on two different types of workplace data to illustrate our discussion: recordings between team members who meet the criterial requirements of Wenger’s (1998) Communities of Practice framework, and who share repertoires and understandings developed over time; and adhoc service encounters between individuals who have no existing relationship and limited expectation of further interactions (recorded using the recently developed data collection technique) with shared understandings which might be better explained through a ‘nexus of practice’ model (Scollon 2001). ReferencesChan, Angela 2008. Meeting openings and closings in a Hong Kong company. In Hao Sun and Dániel Z. Kádár (eds.), It’s the Dragon’s Turn: Chinese Institutional Discourse(s), 181-229. Bern: Peter Lang.Coupland, Justine. 2000. Introduction to Part II. In Small Talk, Justine Coupland (ed), 135-136. Harlow, UK: LongmanGoffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday.Jacquin, Jérôme. 2017. Multimodal politeness resources in New Zealand English management meetings. Paper presented at the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) Conference, Belfast, July 2017.Marra, Meredith 2012. Disagreeing without being disagreeable: Negotiating workplace communities as an outsider. Journal of Pragmatics 44: 1580-1590.Murata, Kazuyo 2011. The discourse of business meetings in New Zealand and in Japan. Unpublished PhD Thesis, Victoria University of Wellington.Schnurr, Stephanie. 2009. Leadership Discourse at Work: Interactions of Humour, Gender and Workplace Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Scollon, Ronald. 2001. Mediated Discourse: The Nexus of Practice. London/New York: Routledge.Vine, Bernadette. 2004. Getting Things Done at Work: The Discourse of Power in Workplace Interaction. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Wenger, Etienne. 1998. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sharon Marsden and Tony Fisher
Representations of immigration in New Zealand political discourse
In recent years, immigration has become a highly salient and often contentious issue in the political discourse of many nations, including New Zealand. In the context of New Zealand’s 2017 general election, immigration has been constructed by politicians and the media as a key issue for the country’s ongoing economic and cultural wellbeing. In this cultural climate, a critical analysis of the discursive strategies that politicians use in relation to immigration is both relevant and timely. Immigration discourse plays an important role in the representation of national values (Skilling, 2005). The liberalisation of New Zealand’s Immigration Policy in 1987 served as a means to (re)construct national identity as being founded on cultural diversity. We question how in the current political climate the National Government and its opponents position themselves in relation to the ‘immigration diversification’ that has resulted from policy changes (Spoonley and Peace, 2012). In this paper we critically examine key immigration-related discourse events involving representatives of mainstream political parties in New Zealand, probing how specific policies on immigration are voiced by political representatives in public forums. Our data include public announcements, speeches and press interviews generated during the three years since the last general election in 2014. The study draws upon the techniques of both corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis (Baker et al. 2008) to identify salient discourses and rhetorical strategies surrounding immigration in the texts we analyse. We then provide a more focused textual analysis to account for the discursive construction of immigration as both a resource and a burden in economic and cultural terms. We argue that New Zealand’s discourses of immigration and national identity are intimately related, and that immigration is problematized by politicians in the pursuit of political objectives.ReferencesBaker, P. Gabrielatos, C., Khosravinik, M., McEnery, T. & Wodak, R.(2008) A useful methodological synergy? Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press. Discourse and Society 19: 273-306.Skilling, P. (2005). National identity and immigration: Contemporary discourses. New Zealand Sociology, 20(2), 98-120.Spoonley, P. and R. Peace (2012). Social cohesion in a bicultural society: The challenges of immigrant diversity in Aotearoa/New Zealand. In Paul Spoonley and Erin Tolley (eds.) Diverse Nations, Diverse Responses (pp. 810-103). Ontario, Canada: School of Policy Studies, Queen’s University at Kingston.
Forrest Andrew Panther, Mark Harvey and Michael Proctor
The Word Edge and Rounding in Kaytetye
The Arandic Languages, including Kaytetye, have been analysed with a two-vowel system: a phonemic low vowel /a/, and a non-low /ə/ (Breen & Pensalfini, 1999; Turpin & Ross, 2011). The /ə/ is taken to have a range of realisations based on assimilation with adjacent segments, including /wə/ → [ʊ]:1.a. /kaʈnwənt̪ə/ → [kaʈnʊnt̪ə]b. /atwəcə/ → [atʊcə]‘crack’‘baby kangaroo’A recent study of Kaytetye has found that vowels phonetically form four targeted groups: /a, ə, i, u/ (San, 2016). This supports a four-vowel analysis, in which [ʊ] is not an allophone of /ə/, but is instead the realization of an independent /u/ phoneme:2.a. /kaʈnunt̪ə/ → [kaʈnʊnt̪ə]b. /atucə/ → [atucə]‘crack’‘baby kangaroo[ʊ] never occurs word-finally. Where [ʊ] is expected, [wə] instead occurs.3.a. [at̪n̪ələŋkʊ-lə]b. [at̪n̪ələŋkwə]emu-ergemu‘the emu’‘the emu’A two-vowel analysis explains this by preserving the underlying form. Only word-internally does the allophony rule take place:4.a. / at̪n̪ələŋkwə-lə/ → [at̪n̪ələŋkʊ-lə]b. /at̪n̪ələŋkwə/ → [at̪n̪ələŋkwə]emu-ergemu‘the emu’‘the emu’The word-final position is typologically one of decreased contrast (Beckman, 1997; Kopkalli, 1993; Myers & Hansen, 2007). We propose this leads to Kaytetye showing a similar restriction to that in English (Hammond, 1999). That is, while schwa and long vowels are grammatical word-finally, short vowels are not. The four-vowel analysis proposes a repair strategy that unpacks the final vowel, moving the rounding to the syllable onset:5.a. /at̪n̪ələŋku/ → [at̪n̪ələŋkwə]‘emu’The two-vowel analysis proposes a typologically unusual position that all words end phonemically with a schwa. Under the four-vowel analysis, well-established, cross-linguistic word-final restrictions account for the Kaytetye data without recourse to atypical typology.
Jennie Popp
A socio-linguistic approach to Rapa Nui Spanish: Features of phonological, lexical-semantic and morpho-syntactic interference of Rapa Nui language in Rapa Nui Spanish
Since the promulgation of the indigenous law 19.253 in 1993, using and preserving their language became one of the most essential rights granted to Chilean ethnic groups. Therefore, governmental programs, competitive funding and financial support from corporations emerged to endorse research on native languages. As a result, writing systems for oral native languages are developed, and several dictionaries, grammar books and oral tradition compilations are published. Yet, the efforts to preserve and revitalize native languages fail to account for an unquestionable fact: contact has already occured and in a lenghty process, Chilean Spanish and the different native languages have had an impact on each other causing undeniable linguistic change. Hence, the focus of this research study on languages in contact in the context of Rapa Nui.Recorded interviews of original Rapa Nui speakers seek to identify those features in Rapa Nui Spanish that evidence interference in Rapa Nui Spanish at the phonological, lexical-semantic and morpho-syntactic levels.A descriptive transversal research study with a mixed methods design, it concentrates on a group of speakers, both male and female who are more than 50 years old as this age group very rarely had access to formal education in inland Chile.
’Olcay Turk
The Temporal Relationships between Gesture, Prosody and Information Structure
Gesture and speech are known to collaborate in order to convey a single thought. In doing so gesture has been shown to temporally align with speech signal. This temporal synchronization has been mostly discussed on the basis of gesture-prosody interface and it has been found that prominent units in those modalities i.e. nuclear accents and gesture strokes fall together. If the temporal occurrence of gesture is decided by prosodic aspects in this manner, this kind of dependency should not be ignored by information structure which also has a clear connection with prosody. This study explores if there is interdependence between constructs of these modalities in Turkish language. For this purpose, prominent points in time and onsets/offsets of units at different levels in prosody and information structure are compared to check if they temporally align with their corresponding unit in gesture structure. Each subject watches pairs of short videos and narrates what s/he has seen in the videos to a confederate listener who supposedly has not seen the videos before. The confederate listener tells a summary of the subject’s narrations to check understanding but he makes deliberate mistakes which are then corrected by the subject. The videos in the pairs also have minor differences between them and the subjects are asked to pay attention those while narrating. The mistakes in the confederate’s summary and stimuli with minor differences are used to elicit different constructs of information structure enabling a comprehensive analysis. The presence of a listener also provides a target for interaction facilitating gesture use. Since this is an ongoing study, the findings of the analysis of only two subjects are presented.
James Walker
Sex and the City: The Role of Sex/Gender in Ethnolinguistic Variation
Recent sociolinguistic research on ‘ethnolects’ (ethnically marked ways of speaking) is typically conducted without reference to sex/gender of the speakers, or at best includes sex/gender as an additional factor in the analysis (e.g. Boberg 2004; Cheshire et al. 2011; Hoffman & Walker 2010). Previous studies of language variation and change have shown that sex-based patterns of behaviour (women’s higher use of standard features and adoption of incoming changes; Eckert 1998, Labov 1991) interact with those of other social factors such as class, social network and community of practice (Dubois & Horvath 1999; Eckert 2000; Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 1992; Labov 1991; Milroy 1987; Nichols 1983). In contrast, the interaction of sex with ethnicity has received less attention in the study of language variation and change.This paper examines the effects of speaker sex and ethnicity on English in Toronto, the largest and most ethnolinguistically diverse city of Canada. Using a corpus of sociolinguistic interviews with 175 residents of the city stratified by generation, sex, ethnic background and degree of orientation toward their ethnic identity, I examine the contribution of these social factors to the occurrence of a range of phonetic, grammatical and discourse features (Canadian Raising, the Canadian Vowel Shift, t/d-deletion, existential there is/are and quotative be like).As discovered in previous studies of these data, these features occur at different overall rates for speakers of different ethnic backgrounds and orientations. While women do tend to use higher rates of standard variants and incoming phonetic and discourse features (regardless of ethnic background or degree of ethnic orientation), the effects of sex become more complicated when examined together with ethnicity. Many sex-based differences that are significant within the British/Irish-origin ethnic group are weaker or insignificant within other ethnic groups, suggesting that the social meaning of a linguistic feature is not distributed in the same way across all groups within the city. These findings may be adduced as evidence that the different aspects of social identity that are expressed by and constructed through linguistic variation do not occur independently of each other.
Lauren Whitty
A corpus-based analysis of ‘can’ and ‘could’ and its dependency on categorical criteria and expanded context
Through investigation of the central modal auxiliaries ‘can’ and ‘could’ in the British National Corpus, this paper examines the roles of criteria and context when performing corpus-based analyses. I first review the semantic categories utilised in previous modal auxiliary studies of ‘can’ and ‘could’ and then provide a description of the categories established in my study, as well as the criteria for each category. In comparison to prior studies, this study relies on more categories than previously identified, and recognises the function of prototypicality in assigning usage categories. Next, I consider the role of expanded context, which is twofold. Expanded context is required for understanding ‘can’ and ‘could’ in use, as well as for reporting these uses. I demonstrate how in order to identify their categories of use, many instances require expanded context, which, to anyone studying ‘can’ and ‘could’, the need for context is not a new finding. However, the extent of context required in some cases may come as a surprise. With regard to reporting analyses, too often, linguists present one sentence (or shorter) extracts as examples. For instance, in Biber et al. (1999), “He goes, I can’t swim” (p. 492) is given as an example of ‘ability’ but when searching “I can’t swim” in the BNC, there are additional readings, such as ‘possibility’. This paper recognises the importance of: (a) making usage criteria as explicit as possible; (b) context in understanding ‘can’ and ‘could’ in use; and (c) context in reporting analyses of instances. I show how a strong corpus-based analysis of ‘can’ and ‘could’ is dependent upon these three factors, factors which are also applicable to other lexical items under examination using corpus-based methods.
Emma Wollum
You can trust me? Effects of listener age and speaker occupation in the interpretation of uptalk
This research explores how uptalk use affects listener perceptions of the trustworthiness, competence, and education level of speakers from five different professions involving technical language, and whether these perceptions differ based on the age of the listener. In previous perceptual studies, uptalk has been associated with a lack of certainty or confidence (Tomlinson Jr & Fox Tree, 2010), a decreased belief in the uptalk user’s ability to answer a question correctly (Smith & Clark, 1993), and decreased suitability for high-status professions (Borgen, 2000). Many guides on professional speaking also warn against uptalk use in professional situations (Graham & Reidy, 2009; Guffey, 2006; Guffey & Almonte, 2009; Hustad, 2008). However, other evidence suggests that uptalk is also used by people in positions of authority (Brazil, 1997; Cheng & Warren, 2005), suggesting that uptalk could indicate competence in one’s field. As well as negative interpretations such as uncertainty, tentativeness, and insecurity, uptalk can also be interpreted as expressing politeness, solidarity, helpfulness, and inclusivity (Borgen, 2000; Britain, 1992; Warren, 2016). Moreover, interpretation of uptalk may depend on the listener’s age, with older listeners more likely to interpret uptalk as expressing uncertainty given their intonational inventories (Warren, 2016). The current research is based on a pilot study conducted in 2016, in which participants aged 18-28 and participants aged 60-72 provided competency and trustworthiness ratings for 10 passages of advice offered in a computer technical support context, half of which featured uptalk. The results indicated that in the younger participant group, perceptions of competence and trustworthiness were not affected by uptalk use, whereas the older participant group rated the passages featuring uptalk with lower scores for both competency and trustworthiness. The current research expands upon the pilot study by adding the professions of doctor, lawyer, and librarian to the stimuli, and also includes an additional assessment category in which listeners are asked to judge the speaker’s highest education level. Findings of this research will indicate whether uptalk is becoming more accepted as a professional communication style, and whether the use of uptalk to communicate professionally is perceived differently based on the age of the listener.
Sidney Gig-Jan Wong and Viktoria Papp
Speaker-specificity of hesitation markers in bilingual New Zealand English & te reo Māori speakers
The current study uses 21 bilingual speakers of New Zealand English and te reo Māori from the Māori and New Zealand English (MAONZE) [1] Corpus in order to investigate hesitation markers as a speaker-specific variable for forensic voice comparison. The hesitation markers of interest in this study are non-lexical hesitation markers ah and um which occur frequently in the parallel corpora. This study builds upon the current findings of hesitation markers as a speaker-specific variable [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] within a cross-language context. Foulkes et al., [3] investigated the speaker-specificity of hesitation markers by applying a linear discriminant function (LDA). Foulkes et al. [3] found that non-lexical hesitation markers, showed the least within-speaker variability and were more reliable than lexical words in speaker discrimination. In the current study, acoustic values such as duration, formant values, and f0 were extracted through LaBB-CAT [7] and analysed using LDA with a jacknifed prediction, and variance in the dataset were analysed using Welche’s two sample t-tests and multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA). Based on the findings of the current study, non-lexical hesitation markers such as uh and um showed speaker-specificity in their acoustic realisation. The acoustic realisation of the formant frequency measurements held constant across language conditions, followed by pitch information which did not show significant variation within-speakers. However, there is variability among the prediction accuracy of the models. Numeric variables such as the first three formant measurements (F1, F2, and F3) and pitch data (minimum, mean, and maximum) were the most reliable factors for speaker discrimination and in turn the most speaker-specific. There are distributional differences between the usage of non-lexical hesitation markers in English and te reo Māori. The results from this study indicates that acoustic values of non-lexical hesitation markers remain constant over language condition.References[1] King, J., Maclagan, M., Harlow, R., Keegan, P., & Watson, C. (2010). The MAONZE Corpus: Establishing a Corpus of Maori Speech. New Zealand Studies in Applied Linguistics, 16(2), 1.[2] Braun, A., & Rosin, A. (2015). On the Speaker-Specificity of Hesitation. In 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2015). University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK.[3] Foulkes, P., Carrol, G., and Hughes, S. (2004). Sociolinguistics and acoustic variability in filled pauses. In International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics. Helsinki, Finland.[4] Hughes, V., Foulkes, P., & Wood, S. (2016). Formant dynamics and durations of um improve the performance of automatic speaker recognition systems. In 16th Australasian Conference on Speech Science and Technology (ASSTA). University of Western Sydney, Australia: York.[5] Hughes, V., Wood, S., & Foulkes, P. (2016). Strength of forensic voice comparison evidence from the acoustics of filled pauses. International Journal of Speech Language and the Law, 23(1), 99–132. https://doi.org/10.1558/ijsll.v23i1.29874%5B6%5D Wood, S., Hughes, V., & Foulkes, P. (2014). Filled pauses as variables in speaker comparison: dynamic formant analysis and duration measurements improve performance for ‘um’. In 23rd Annual Conference of the International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics (IAFPA), Zurich, Switzerland.[7] Fromont, R., & Hay, J. (2017). Language, Brain & Behaviour Corpus Analysis Tool. English, Christchurch, New Zealand: New Zealand Institute of Language, Brain and Behaviour. Retrieved from https://labbcat.canterbury.ac.nz/system/
Mengzhu Yan
The role of context in association strength and word retrieval
A key method used in psycholinguistic research on lexical retrieval is priming, i.e. using a word or phrase to prime (speed recall) of a target word (Husband & Ferreira, 2016; Kember, Choi, & Yu, 2016; Swinney, 1979). The stimuli used in these studies rely on norms from word relatedness studies (Landauer & Dumais, 1997; Nelson, McEvoy, & Schreiber, 1998). Most of these norms are created using words out of context, but most experiments use those words in context. However, context might enhance or suppress semantic relationship between two words (Kutas & Federmeier, 2000; Swinney, 1979), which might change their association strength. Therefore, the relatedness score would be context-dependent. This study investigates the difference that a context sentence (e.g. the cake attracted insects) causes to the association strength between a prime word (e.g. cake) and related associates (targets) in Mandarin Chinese. The study looks at two types of semantic association: contrastive (e.g. bread), i.e. a plausible alternative in the context, and non-contrastive (e.g. birthday), i.e. a generic associate which is not an alternative. The relatedness scores of 225 word pairs (75 primes with their related associates and unrelated items) in and out of context will be collected from an online survey constructed in Qualtrics (2017) with more than a hundred participants. Each participant will rate 75 word pairs including 25 pairs from each type on a scale from ‘1’ (not related at all) to ‘7’ (highly related). We expect that in general context might constrain the types of association considered by participants and thus lower the relatedness scores. However, we also expect that the decrease of association strength between the prime and contrastive associate will be smaller than that between the prime and non-contrastive associate, as in many cases contrastive associates are still plausible in the context while non-contrastive associates are not. The data will be a useful resource for psycholinguistic studies on the effect of context on priming in word retrieval in Chinese. The results will also be important for any research that involves using relatedness norms to investigate lexical relationships between words in context, as the relatedness ratings collected out of context will not necessarily hold.References:Husband, E. M., & Ferreira, F. (2016). The role of selection in the comprehension of focus alternatives. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 31(2), 217-235. Kember, H., Choi, J., & Yu, J. (2016). Searching for importance: focus facilitates memory for words in English. In C. Carignan & M. D. Tyler (Eds.), Proceedings of the Sixteenth Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (pp. 181-184). Parramatta, Australia.Kutas, M., & Federmeier, K. D. (2000). Electrophysiology reveals semantic memory use in language comprehension. Trends in cognitive sciences, 4(12), 463-470. Landauer, T. K., & Dumais, S. T. (1997). A solution to Plato’s problem: The latent semantic analysis theory of acquisition, induction, and representation of knowledge. Psychological review, 104, 211-240. Nelson, D. L., McEvoy, C. L., & Schreiber, T. A. (1998). The University of South Florida word association, rhyme, and word fragment norms. http://www.usf.edu/FreeAssociation/ Qualtrics. (2017). Qualtrics (Version August 2017). Provo, Utah, USA. Swinney, D. A. (1979). Lexical access during sentence comprehension:(Re) consideration of context effects. Journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior, 18(6), 645-659.
Tomohiro Yanagi
Adjectival Modification of Nouns in Old English
This paper deals with the ‘adjective-noun-and-adjective’ construction in Old English (Mitchell (1985), Fischer (2000), Hauman (2003, 2010), and Pyze (2009)) and argues that the construction can be classified into two types from a generative perspective (Chomsky (2001, 2008)). One is that two adjectives modify the same noun, such as godum lande and widgyllum ‘a good and broad land’. In this example, the noun lande ‘land’ is modified by both the prenominal adjective godum ‘good’ and the adjective widgyllum ‘broad’ preceded by and. The other type is that two adjectives modify two different nouns, as in cynelico getimbro and anlipie ‘public and private buildings’, though no overt noun in the second conjunct is expressed. In this instance, the noun getimbro ‘building’ is modified by the prenominal adjective cynelico ‘public’ and the other adjective (anlipie ‘private’) does not modify the noun overtly.In this paper, based on data retrieved from the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (Taylor et al. 2003), I will claim that two types of the ‘adjective-noun-and-adjective’ construction are derived through two distinct syntactic operations. The first type (i.e. godum lande and widgyllum) is a subtype of discontinuous coordinate construction (Sielanko (1994)). When two pre-modified noun phrases are coordinated, forward deletion can eliminate the nominal head in the second conjunct, yielding the ‘adjective-noun-and-adjective’ construction. This operation takes place only if the two nominal heads refer to the same entity.On the other hand, the second type (i.e. cynelico getimbro and anlipie) is derived when the nominal head of the second conjunct is replaced with an empty element like pro. In this case, each nominal element in the two conjuncts refer to a different entity. The empty element is licensed by the presence of inflectional endings of the second adjective. In Old English adjectives are inflected according to the gender, number and case of nouns they modify. Since the inflectional endings were obsolete, this licensing method has not been available. Then, this type of construction disappeared and it can be said that the prop word one is employed as a new licensing method.
Bin Yin
Form-meaning connection in the acquisition of lexical aspect by Chinese-English Bilinguals
This study examines how the nature of the mapping relationship between form and meaning influences Chinese-English bilingual adolescents’ learning of lexical aspect.Lexical aspect refers to how the elements within the verb phrase affect the aspectual meanings of the predicate, while grammatical aspect refers to the role of aspectual morphology (e.g., -ed versus –ing). While lexical aspect comprises numerous semantic primitives (e.g., telicity, dynamicity and punctuality), we focus on telicity. Traditionally, the telicity literature focuses on the role that direct objects play in aspectual construal (e.g., Borer, 2005): John ate the apple vs. John ate apples. Thus, spatial boundedness in the nominal domain (bounded NP ‘the apple’ versus unbounded NP ‘apples’) translates into boundedness in the aspectual domain (telic versus atelic readings for the sentence above). Prior second language (L2) studies on telicity have focused on precisely the role of direct objects, particularly in situations where the first language (L1) differs from L2 in the nominal domain (e.g., Slabakova, 2000). The present study expands on existing literature and examines bilingual learners’ acquisition of English telicity in four elements ((direct object) nouns, verbs, resultatives and prepositions). Please see examples 1-4 for illustrations. We examine these four elements in terms of the mapping relationship between form and meaning. Specifically, we argue that they vary across two factors relevant to the mapping: degree of transparency (1-to-1 mapping versus 1-to-2 mapping) and structural complexity (presence or absence of syntactic movement). In addition, we also tested learners’ knowledge of aspect morphology to explore a direct relationship between grammatical and lexical aspect. A sentence judgment task (telicity) and a cloze procedure (grammatical aspect) were administered on 228 bilingual adolescents from Singapore. We found that both transparency and complexity factors influenced participants’ performance on telicity. We did not find a link between grammatical and lexical aspect, which contributes new insights into the relationship between these two areas of aspectual knowledge in learning. We discuss the results in terms of form-meaning mapping and the relationship between morphology and semantics in language acquisition. 1. John ate the apple.[direct object]2. John covered the table.[verbal semantics]3. John painted the house red.[resultative adjective]4. John walked to the store.[preposition]
Linguistic Society of NZ 