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Australian Linguistic Society (ALS) annual conference

7-9 December 2016

Monash University, Melbourne

List of Abstracts

Plenary Keynotes 2

Themed Panels 7

Papers 12

Lightning Plenaries 207

Please note that this electronic document will not be supplied in printed format.

We recommend that delegates who wish to have a copy on hand during the conference bring a copy on their own electronic device. Please consider the environment before printing this document.

Thank you for your understanding.

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Plenary keynotes

Note: All plenary keynotes are held in Building K on the 3rd floor, in room K309.

Wednesday 7 December (Day 1 – joint day with ALAA 2016)

11:30am – 12:30pm

Money talk and conduct from Cowries to Bitcoin Asif Agha (University of Pennsylvania)

Thursday 8 December (Day 2)

9.00am-10.00am

The typology of nominal classification: Australian perspectives and a Canonical Typology approach Greville Corbett (University of Surrey)

2.30pm-3.30pm

Alternate world languages: Constrained creativity and folk linguistics Jane Simpson (Australian National University)

Friday 9 December (Day 3)

9.00am-10.00am

Polar Answers: a cross-linguistic study Nick Enfield (University of Sydney)

Abstracts in this section are listed in order of presentation.

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Money talk and conduct from Cowries to Bitcoin

Asif Agha (University of Pennsylvania)

What role do forms of money play in social life? What kinds of sociocultural variation do they exhibit? What variety of things do people do with varieties of money? How are activities involving money differentiated into registers of money-conduct in specific times and places? How are specific forms of money-conduct recognized and differentiated from other cultural routines by those who encounter them? It has long been understood that money is intimately linked to varied forms of discursive semiosis (whether oral, written, numerical, algorithmic, customary, or law-based; whether manifest as fiscal policy, computer code, or common sense) through which distinct forms of money are created and endowed with distinct use characteristics; that specific forms of money are readily linked to (or appropriated by) group-specific interests or ideologies; and that differences in types of money-conduct readily differentiate social roles and relationships among persons and groups in social history. Yet the role of discursive semiosis in the existence and use of money is not well understood, a lacuna that links most descriptions of “money” to voicing structures (or discursive positionalities) that are not grasped for what they are by those who offer such descriptions (e.g., “speaking like the State” without knowing it). The paper clarifies the role of discursive semiosis in the social life of money. It shows that such clarification is a prerequisite on ethnographic answers to the questions listed at the beginning of this abstract. It presents a comparative framework for reasoning about forms of money in forms of life.

Biography

Asif Agha is professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. He previously taught at the University of Chicago, Vassar College and UCLA. His research interests include:

Linguistic and cultural anthropology; sociolinguistics; semiotics; language and social relations; metaphor and tropes; registers of language; speech style; rhetoric; language ideologies.

Mediatization in complex societies; bureaucracies, legislatures, and the State as discursive installations; the making and unmaking of institutions; mass media, advertising and the public sphere; public relations and consumer-citizens; electoral campaigns and candidate-politicians.

Language structure and function; grammatical and indexical categories in language; language typology and universal grammar; discourse analysis; meaning and reference; language and cognition; speech as action; deference systems; evidential categories; modality and deixis; animal communication; Sino-Tibetan and Indo-Aryan linguistics.

Professor Agha has published extensively in these areas including his 2007 volume on ‘Language and Social Relations’.

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The typology of nominal classification: Australian perspectives and a Canonical Typology approach

Greville Corbett (University of Surrey)

Depending on the research tradition, there are types of data which are handled by some as representing a single (complex) system and by others as two systems operating side by side. Nominal classification, including gender and classifiers, is one such domain. However, particular analyses are often assumed rather than argued for, which can leave important questions unanswered. Instances of explicit argumentation for one system versus two include Goddard (1982) on case and Round & Corbett (2016) on tense-aspect-mood. Our aim is a general typology of nominal classification, and a crucial component will be the application of explicit arguments for determining the number of systems involved in a given language. Hence a focus of the talk will be interesting languages which – arguably – have more than one system of nominal classification.

The idea of an opposition between gender and classifiers was articulated clearly by Dixon (1982, 1986). He used a set of criteria to oppose gender systems and classifier systems, (his terms were ‘noun class’ and ‘noun classification’, respectively), and this approach was adopted in, for instance, Corbett (1991). While some of his criteria have stood the test of time, others have to be jettisoned or at least revised. Seifart’s (2005) account of Miraña presented a system with clear characteristics of gender and of classifiers, making it harder to maintain a divide between the two. And Reid (1997) on Ngan’gityemerri provided another reason against maintaining a clear gender-classifier divide, since classifiers can grammaticalize into gender systems, giving rise to a range of intermediate types. And recent research has uncovered more and more languages that combine gender and classifiers. These languages can be found mainly in South America, for example Tariana (Arawakan; Aikhenvald 1994, 2000), and Ayoreo and Chamacoco (Zamucoan; Bertinetto 2009, Ciucci 2013). A key language for us will be the Papuan language Mian, which is analyzed as having four genders as well as six classifiers that appear as prefixes on a subset of verbs (Fedden 2011, based on a Melbourne PhD). All this suggests that the sharp divide between gender and classifiers that seemed reasonable and attractive cannot be maintained.

Once we see nominal classification like this, then we can get a clearer picture of the range of possible systems. If we pull apart the characteristics we traditionally associate with gender systems, and those of classifier systems, we see that they combine in many ways. This is a cue to adopt a canonical perspective, in which we define the notion of canonical gender, and use this as an idealization to calibrate from. This allows us to situate the interesting mixes present in some of the languages of Australia, for instance in Ngalakgan (Baker 2002) and Mawng (Singer 2016). It also leads to a typology of concurrent systems, like that of Mian.

Biography

Greville Corbett is Distinguished Professor of Lingustics at the University of Surrey and a member of the Surrey Morphology Group. His research attempts to bring together the remarkable variation we find across languages with the sense that they are deeply similar and covers three broad areas of interest: typology, including the development of the Canonical Typology framework; morphosyntactic features, such as number, gender, person and case; and inflectional morphology, especially using the Network Morphology framework. He has published monographs on gender (1991), number (2000), agreement (2006) and morphosyntactic features (2012) amongst other book length studies and numerous journal articles.

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Alternate world languages: Constrained creativity and folk linguistics

Jane Simpson (Australian National University)

Any fiction writer creates an alternate world, but in some genres, the alternate world is intended to be different from the novelist’s own society. This is most noticeable in science fiction, historical novels, fantasy novels, steampunk, and novels set in non-English speaking countries. The question of languages arises at the moment when characters speak to each other. Do the characters speak the same language as the readers? Part of world-building is indicating that the characters do speak different languages ((‘alternate world languages’, AWLs, a type of ‘conlang’). Clearly, most of what the characters say or think must be expressed in the language of the readers. However, within this limit, writers have some freedom to invent new words, phrases and sentences. These have communicative and symbolic functions. The symbolic functions are most obvious – marking the world-building by showing that this world has a different geography and ecology (and so has different place-names, plant and animal names), that there are different groups speaking different languages, that people in this world have different social structures, different practices and material culture. But the communicative functions are also important – the invented words of the AWL name these unfamiliar things and practices, and the reader must notice them.

AWLs are a window on folk linguistics – how do we expect strangers and foreigners to talk, how would supernatural beings and aliens talk, what languages and what writing systems would they have, and what would they use them for? This papers addresses the questions of how English writers use words and phrases from other languages (actual or invented) in building alternate worlds, what these invented words look like, how writers help their readers to understand the AWLs (and how readers receive them), what sub-genre distinctions there are, how the AWLs relate to English, to other languages, to conventions used by other authors, and to folk stereotypes of ways of talking. Data comes from a survey of 60 novels, with more detailed study of three novels, along with consideration of parodies of fantasy novels, and discussion of reader reviews on Amazon and Good Reads.

Biography

Jane Simpson studies the structure and use of several Australian Aboriginal languages: Warumungu, Kaurna and Warlpiri, and the morpho-syntax of English. She is interested in documenting languages, from place-names, to kinship systems, to dictionary-making to land tenure,. She is involved in longitudinal study of Aboriginal children acquiring creoles, English and traditional languages which has led to an interest in education. She is Deputy Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language.

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Polar Answers: a cross-linguistic study

Nick Enfield (University of Sydney)

How are polar questions answered? A received view is that there are two basic types of system. ‘Echo/Repetition systems’ confirm by repeating part or all of the question. Q: Are they asleep? A: They are asleep. ‘Interjection systems’ confirm by saying ‘yes’ or equivalent. Q: Are they asleep? A: Yes. This typology is flawed, on empirical grounds: All languages provide both ways of answering. I present a reappraisal of this typology, based on results of a multi-authored study of how polar questions are answered in conversational corpora in 14 languages. We find the following. First, speakers of all languages use both the interjection and repetition type, so the issue is not which type is used in a language, but rather the relative frequency, and distinct function (if any) of each type. Second, we find that in most languages the repetition type is by far the minority choice, occurring very infrequently (as little as 4% of the time). Even in the languages that rely on the repetition strategy most, it is only used around half the time. We propose to explain this asymmetry with reference to the semantic/semiotic difference between the two strategies. The account explains why the interjection strategy is better fitted to the function of answering polar questions, and hence why it is globally and locally dominant.

Biography

Nick Enfield is Professor and Chair of Linguistics at The University of Sydney, and a research associate in the Language and Cognition Group at the Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. His research on language, culture, and cognition is part of a long-term project aimed at understanding the foundations of human sociality. Nick’s research addresses the intersection of language, cognition, social interaction, and culture, from three angles: Semiotic structure and process; Micro-macro relations in semiotic systems; and Social cognition and social action. His empirical specialization is in the languages of mainland Southeast Asia, especially Lao and Kri. Lao is the national language of Laos, spoken by over 20 million people in Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and elsewhere. Kri (Vietic sub-branch of Austroasiatic) is spoken near the Laos-Vietnam border in Khammouane Province by an isolated community of around 300 people.

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Themed Panels

Wednesday 7 December (Day 1 – joint day with ALAA 2016)

2pm-5.30pm Forensic linguistics H237 (Building H, level 2)

How to ensure language and speech evidence is used appropriately in court Helen Fraser (Independent researcher), Diana Eades (University of New England), Georgina Heydon (RMIT University), Kate Burridge (Monash University), and Hon. Peter Gray (Monash University)

4pm-5.30pm Intercultural and intergenerational encounters K309 (Building K, level 3)

Rethinking second language learning: intercultural and intergenerational encounters Hui Huang (Monash University), Marisa Cordella (University of Queensland), Brigitte Lambert (Monash University), Colette Browing (Monash University), and Ramona Baumgartner (Monash University)

Abstracts in this section are listed in order of presentation.

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How to ensure language and speech evidence is used appropriately in court

Helen Fraser (Independent researcher), Diana Eades (University of New England), Georgina Heydon (RMIT University), Kate Burridge (Monash University), and Hon. Peter Gray (Monash University)

Wrongful convictions resulting from poor-quality forensic science have been widely publicised (Harris, 2012). In response, moves have been made, internationally, to formulate rules ensuring the reliability and validity of expert evidence admitted in criminal trials (LCGB, 2011; NRCC, 2009). Similar rules are gradually being accepted in Australian jurisdictions (e.g. FCA, 2013), and lawyers are being encouraged to cross-examine expert witnesses in ways that ensure weaknesses in their evidence are revealed (e.g. Edmond et al 2014).

The aim of this workshop is to encourage more linguists, including but not limited to those involved in forensic case work, to engage with this ongoing inter-disciplinary discussion.

Two issues seem particularly worthy of consideration by linguists.

1. Ensuring the rules are suitable for language and speech evidence

To date, most of the rules are based on the model of DNA analysis as the ‘gold standard’ of forensic evidence. However, characteristics of the language and speech sciences arguably make our situation somewhat different (e.g. Foxen & Bunn, 2015). For example, technical sciences typically prefer rules that admit only results of well-tested methods with statistically expressible error rates. However, while this is no doubt valid for many sciences, it is not always possible or even desirable for language and speech evidence. Indeed, insisting on it could have the effect of leading courts to prefer unreliable but ‘technical-sounding’ evidence over more nuanced or counter-intuitive explanations from analysts with genuine expertise in linguistics.

2. Ensuring results of expert analyses are communicated effectively to the jury

An important part of scientific evidence (from any field) is communicating the conclusion in a way that will be understood appropriately by the court. This is a particularly complex form of indirect communication, in which the expert must explain difficult concepts for the jury by responding to questions from a barrister who has limited understanding of the field. Linguists (e.g. Eades, 2016; Haugh & Liddicoat, 2009) have emphasised limitations of the ‘conduit’ metaphor of communication, and developed sophisticated concepts that can potentially offer helpful contributions to current topics such as (for one example) the relative effectiveness of expressing conclusions via numerical statistics (e.g. Likelihood Ratio), verbal scales (e.g. highly likely, somewhat likely etc) or a paragraph of plain language (see Edmond, 2013 and other papers in that special issue of AJFS).

References

Eades, D. (2016). Theorising language in sociolinguistics and the law: (How) can sociolinguistics have an impact on inequality in the criminal justice process? In N. Coupland (Ed.), Sociolinguistics: Theoretical Debates (pp. 367–388). Cambridge University Press.

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Edmond, G. (2013). Expert evidence in reports and courts. Australian Journal of Forensic Sciences, 45(3), 248–262. AND SEE OTHER ARTICLES IN THIS SPECIAL ISSUE AT http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/tajf20/45/3

Edmond, G., Martire, K. A., Kemp, R. I. et al (2014). How to Cross-Examine Forensic Scientists: A Guide for Lawyers. Australian Bar Review, 39, 175–197.

Federal Court of Australia. (2013). Practice Note CM 7 - Expert Witnesses in Federal Court proceedings. http://www.fedcourt.gov.au/law-and-practice/practice-documents/practice-notes/cm7

Foxen, S., & Bunn, S. (2015). 'Forensic Language Analysis', PostNote 509. researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/POST-PN-0509/POST-PN-0509.pdf

Harris, D. A. (2012). Failed evidence: Why law enforcement resists science. NYU Press.

Haugh, M., & Liddicoat, A. J. (Eds.). (2009). Conceptualising communication. Special issue of Australian Journal of Linguistics

Law Commission of Great Britain. (2011). Expert Evidence in Criminal Proceedings in England and Wales. London: The Stationery Office. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/229043/0829.pdf

National Research Council Committee on Identifying the Needs of the Forensic Sciences Community. (2009). Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/228091.pdf

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Rethinking Second Language Learning: Intercultural and Intergenerational Encounters

Hui Huang (Monash University), Marisa Cordella (University of Queensland), Brigitte Lambert (Monash University), Colette Browing (Monash University), and Ramona Baumgartner (Monash University)

The project introduces a model of intergenerational, intercultural encounters that is designed to deliver a number of pedagogical and societal benefits simultaneously. Specifically, it aims to promote the utilisation of community language resources, enrich the experiences of young language learners, foster greater understanding between young and old, break down cultural stereotypes, encourage appreciation of different cultures, and enhance the quality of life and community engagement of older people with a bilingual/multilingual background.

Keywords: Community resources, L2 learning, multilingualism

Speakers and titles:

Marisa Cordella & Hui Huang: Many cultures, many opportunities: Multiculturalism, language skills and community resources

Brigitte Lambert & Marisa Cordella: The Migration Experience and the Ethos of Self

Hui Huang, Marisa Cordella, An Innovative Model for Second Language Learning and

C. Browing, & R. Baumgartner: Social Inclusion

Many cultures, many opportunities: Multiculturalism, language skills and community resources

Marisa Cordella (University of Queensland) and Hui Huang (Monash University)

This paper sets the scene by discussing issues around the three main themes of multiculturalism, healthy ageing and social inclusion, and second language learning in Australia. It starts to discuss the idea of multiculturalism, the arguments for and against it, the history of immigration in Australia, and the various government programs that have shaped the national character, from its ‘White Australia Policy’ at the beginning of the 20th century to the reforms after the Second World War that progressively ended the racial discrimination of immigration policies, introduced the term ‘multiculturalism’ into the vernacular, and led to a diverse and largely tolerant society. It then offers an overview of second language learning in Australian schools and describes the impact of various government policies on language education. Within the conceptualisation of situated learning, the project is then described, including its location, languages chosen, participants, data collection procedures, and the various studies undertaken within the project as a whole. The intercultural dimension of the project was achieved by matching L1 speakers of Chinese, German and Spanish with students of the target language, observing the similarities and differences between the three groups, and considering to what extent cultural variables could explain some of the findings.

The Migration Experience and the Ethos of Self

Brigitte Lambert (Monash University) and Marisa Cordella (University of Queensland)

Of the studies on older immigrants, this paper is the one to explore the stance-taking acts of senior German- and Spanish-speaking participants in relation to the personal identities presented during talk about their life experiences. Analysis of the recorded data was facilitated by five non-grammatical categories of stance - expert, contextual, epistemic, comparative and affective -- which are identified as contributing to the seniors' ethos of self. This study

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documents different patterns of stance usage between the two cultural groups as well as between individuals, and suggests reasons for the greater emphasis on language learning by the German and the stronger connection to homeland as expressed by the Latin American cohort. It is argued that the stances adopted by the seniors make them positive role models for the students, encouraging greater awareness of cultural differences and the challenges of building a life in an unfamiliar society.

An Innovative Model for Second Language Learning and Social Inclusion

Hui Huang (Monash University), Marisa Cordella (University of Queensland), Colette Browing (Monash University), and Ramona Baumgartner (Monash University)

The paper brings together all findings of the project in a model of language learning and social inclusion that is designed to supplement formal L2 classroom teaching in primary and secondary schools. This innovative, empirically based model offers a framework for the collaborative utilisation of community language resources to enhance second language learning and social inclusion. The model’s fresh approach lies in its multi-faceted design, which integrates at least four dimensions and situates language learning within the broader objective of social inclusion. These dimensions can be summarised as: (1) second language learning; (2) cross-cultural understanding and multiculturalism; (3) development of intergenerational empathy; and (4) engagement of older people in community life. The model is built on a foundation of co-construction, in which L1 speaker and the L2 learner work together to develop the conversation in the target language for their mutual benefit.

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Paper presentations

The following section lists abstracts for papers held across all three days of the Australian Linguistic Society (ALS) annual conference, including abstracts from the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia (ALAA) annual conference that are scheduled for the combined day on Wednesday 7th December.

Abstracts in this section are listed in alphabetical order by first author’s family name.

Please refer to the program schedule for session times and room numbers.

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Redefinition or linguistic makeover? Ageing and stereotypes in Australian English

Keith Allan (Monash University), Réka Benczes (Monash University), and Kate Burridge (Monash University)

Ageing is currently undergoing a major redefinition. As baby boomers are reaching retirement age and wish to remain active for many more decades, they are redefining the concept of ageing considerably (Kalache 2012). This redefinition is all the more relevant in Australia, which has the third highest proportion of people aged over 65 in the world.

According to the Australian Longitudinal Study of Ageing (2006), the majority of the 2,000 people aged over 65 that participated in the study enjoyed an active and high-quality life, and the respondents had “a strong sense of psychological well-being […] maintained well into advanced old age” (p. 65). This proposed change in attitude, however, has brought about an onomasiological problem with it: how can this new approach to old age be expressed with the right words? McCallum (1997) emphasized the inadequacy of the language to express this change: “The old-age pensioner name tag is now as ill-fitting as the discarded grey clothes.”

In previous research we reported that the labels that Australian English uses for the category of “old people” are changing: the expression older Australians is showing dynamic growth rates in the media as compared to more established terms, such as the elderly, old people or even seniors. We reasoned that the preference for older Australians is partly attributed to the comparative suffix, which blurs the entry age of “senior citizenship” by overgeneralization. What is happening here, therefore, is that the boundary of the original category of “old people” has become substantially extended towards the bottom end of the scale, thereby merging it with the upper boundary of middle age. If this is the case, then ageing – and old people in particular – are indeed undergoing a redefinition or reconceptualization.

However, an alternative explanation can also be presented, whereby the popularity of older Australians can be accounted for by the “euphemistic treadmill” (Pinker 2002): when a concept that has a negative connotation is given a new name, the concept tarnishes the name over time; therefore, the effect of the new name wears off rather quickly, which means that new euphemisms need to be constantly generated. In other words, the referent (in this case, “old people”) ultimately remains the same; it is the lexical form (i.e., older Australians) that changes. In this scenario, we are simply dealing with a linguistic makeover – and not a redefinition.

Therefore, in order to settle the question, we have compiled a Survey Monkey questionnaire that contains a list of 25 stereotypical statements about old people (13 positive and 12 negative ones), with an “X” in the subject position. E.g.: “X contribute economically to society” and “X are forgetful”. For each statement, participants are asked to select which expression for “old people” – old people, older people, the elderly, seniors and oldies – is the most common for that particular statement and thus participates best as subject. We hypothesize that if no trends emerge in the selection of the expressions and the stereotypes associated with old people, and each expression can be used for any one of the stereotypes, then the terms can be viewed as more-or-less equivalent in meaning, all describing the category of “old people”. If, however, trends do appear, and particular expressions for “old people” are associated with particular stereotypes, then it can be hypothesized that the terms for “old people” are used with different meanings. Thus, the expressions are labels for various subcategories of “old people” and a redefinition of ageing is indeed taking place in Australian English.

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We are still in the data collection phase; a full account of the data will be presented at the ALS Conference. Yet the initial results suggest that 1) the expressions are not considered by language users as synonymous; and 2) age might be a significant influencing factor in the emergence of more nuanced distinctions among the subcategories themselves.

References

Australian Longitudinal Study of Ageing, The. 2006. Adelaide: Flinders University. http://www.flinders.edu.au/sabs/fcas-files/Documents/StudyOfAgeing[1].pdf

Kalache, Alexander. 2012. How the baby boomers are reinventing old age. The Huffington Post. 4 April 2012.

McCallum, John. 1997. Fictional ageing crisis obscures health facts. The Australian. 10 January 1997.

Pinker, Steven. 2002. The blank slate: The modern denial of human nature. New York: Penguin.

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Getting a grip on context as a determinant of meaning

Keith Allan (Monash University)

The significance of context to the proper interpretation of texts has been known for millennia; it is implicit in some of Aristotle’s recommendations in Rhetoric and Quintilian’s in Institutes that rhetoric should ideally be appropriate to what was, post Augustine, called its context. Malinowski wrote that a stick may be used for different purposes in different contexts, e.g. digging, punting, walking, fighting. Exactly the same is true of language expressions, e.g. a word which is an insult in one context may be an expression of camaraderie or endearment in another (and vice versa). Stalnaker’s claim ‘context [is] a body of available information: the common ground’(Stalnaker 2014: 24) is nearly, but not quite, right. I define common ground as in Allan 2013. The speaker/writer/signer makes presumptions about common ground which may properly be called presuppositions, but I argue that utterances carry pragmatic entailments rather than presuppositions, such that where A pragmatically entails B, B cannot – given A – be denied without creating a paradox, absurdity, or contradiction. I distinguish three aspects of context: C1, C2, and C3. C1 is the world (and time) spoken of, which is largely identified from co-text; to oversimplify, it captures what is said about what at some world (and time). C2 is the world (and time) spoken in, the situation of utterance; it captures who does the saying to whom, and where and when this takes place. C3 is the situation of interpretation, the circumstances under which the hearer/reader/viewer interprets what the speaker/writer/signer said, and these may be very different in space and time from C2, which may impact the interpretation.

Keywords: context, co-text, common ground, presupposition, pragmatic entailment

References

Allan, Keith. 2013. What is common ground? In Perspectives on Linguistic Pragmatics, ed. by Alessandro Capone, Franco Lo Piparo & Marco Carapezza. Cham: Springer. Pp. 285-310. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-01014-4_11

Stalnaker, Robert C. 2014. Context. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Interpreting Translated Adverts: A Multi-Modal Approach

Mohammed Alhuthali (Taif University)

As advertising is inherently multi-modal, there is a significant challenge when translating from one language and culture to another. Conventionally the focus has been on achieving accuracy of language in the target language. However, speech or text is only one way in which an advert is understood and ensuring that imagery and the wider narrative is effective matters as much as accuracy of language translation.

Someone brought up in one culture may easily recognise certain iconic images as carrying a particular meaning. To an individual lacking this context, the image may be misinterpreted. In terms of the wider scenario, the interaction between the characters or between a character and the product may be realistic (or at least plausible) in one culture and seen as implausible in another.

This research reviews a short advertisement originally made in Arabic and translated into English. It notes that the rendition into the target language is effective but that the overall advert fails as little account was taken of the overall narrative and scenario presented being seen as plausible to an English-speaking target audience.

This suggests that to evaluate the translation of adverts means there is a need to take a multimodal approach.

Keywords: Multimodality, Advertising, Translation

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Indonesian Loanwords and their integration into dialects of Acehnese

Rob Amery (University of Adelaide) and Zulfadli Aziz (Syiah Kuala University)

Acehnese, like other regional languages throughout Indonesia, is in constant and intense contact with Indonesian. Indonesian serves as the official and national language of Indonesia – the language of government, of education, of the law courts and of the media, whilst Acehnese serves as the language of the home and of the community. Whilst Acehnese is a relatively large language with 2-3 million speakers, even in the home there are signs that it is beginning to give way to Indonesian in some families living Banda Aceh or other large towns. The pervasive influence of Indonesian is beginning to show signs of altering the Acehnese phonological system for younger speakers with the loss of the unique dental sibilant /S/ as it is replaced by the alveolar sibilant /s/.

Not surprisingly under these circumstances, a great many Indonesian loanwords are flooding into Acehnese. There are some interesting sound changes affecting both consonants and vowels, phonotactics and stress. The sound changes affecting the vowels of Indonesian loanwords are most unusual. Standard Bahasa Indonesia has just six vowel phonemes plus three diphthongs (Echols & Shadily, 1989). Acehnese, by contrast has a much more complex vowel inventory with ten vowel qualities, oral and nasal vowels and many diphthongs (Durie, 1985: 9). North Acehnese has ten oral monophthong vowels, seven nasal monophthongs, twelve oral diphthongs and five nasal diphthongs (Asyik, 1987: 17-18), whilst West Acehnese has considerably fewer diphthongs (Zulfadli, 2014: 139, 151-2). Acehnese already has all the vowels of Bahasa Indonesia, yet when it adopts Indonesian loanwords various vowel substitutions are made, often involving a substitution of the back unrounded vowel /ɯ/ for Indonesian /i/, /a/ and /ǝ/ as well as other vowel substitutions. An epenthetic back unrounded vowel /ɯ/ is also inserted to break up consonant clusters. Different dialects of Acehnese behave differently in regard to these vowel substitutions.

The behaviour of the vowels in Indonesian loanwords is not a simple case of phonological assimilation, as usually occurs in loanword phonology but must be an expression of Acehnese identity. This paper will explore this topic in some detail, drawing on data from a range of sources.

Keywords: Acehnese, Language Contact, Loanword Phonology, Indonesian

References

Asyik, Abdul Gani. (1987). A Contextual Grammar of Acehnese Sentences. (PhD), The University of Michigan, Michigan.

Durie, Mark. (1985). A grammar of Acehnese on the basis of a dialect of north Aceh. Dordrecht, Holland; Cinnaminson, U.S.A: Foris Publications.

Echols, John M. & Hassan Shadily (1989) Kamus Indonesia Inggris. P.T. Gramedia, Jakarta.

Zulfadli (2014) A Sociolinguistic Investigation of Acehnese with a Focus on West Acehnese: A Stigmatised Dialect. PhD thesis, University of Adelaide.

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Clausal complexity and syntactic gradience: evidence from Balinese SVCs

I Wayan Arka (ANU)

The structures of the type shown in (1) in Balinese are classified as Serial Verb Constructions (SVCs) (Shiohara and Artawa 2012, Indrawati 2014). There has been, however, no solid argumentation in previous studies on Balinese showing that such structures are all indeed syntactically SVCs. Unanswered crucial questions include, among others, to what extent SVCs differ from structures with complement, adverbial, or coordinate clauses in this language. What is the evidence that the second V(P)s in (1) cannot, for example, be analysed as (subordinate) adverbial clauses? In this paper, I will propose and discuss novel, language-specific diagnostic morphosyntactic tests to identify SVCs in Balinese, revealing patterns consistent with well-known SVC properties (cf. Durie 1997, Aikhenvald and Dixon 2006, Senft 2008 among others). Such tests have never been done in previous studies on SVCs in Balinese. We can now claim for sure that Balinese does have SVCs and that a subset of certain structures previously claimed as SVCs in Balinese—e.g., with the verb (ng)ajak, meaning ‘invite, ask to come along’, as seen in (2)—are, in fact, not SVCs.

One of the obvious points of difference briefly discussed in this paper is regarding the argument structure relation: complements are arguments (i.e., subcategorised by the matrix verbs) whereas adverbial clauses are not. Coordinate clauses, as their name suggests, have no argument-structure relation to each other. SVCs, while like adverbial and coordinate clauses in that one predicate is not the argument of the other, are like complement clauses in that there is possibly argument sharing.

Detailed discussions will be given for the application and assessment of the syntactic tests for SVCs in Balinese, which are summarised in Table 1. It will be demonstrated that SVCs are indeed a distinct syntactic type in Balinese, behaving differently from complement, adverbial, or coordinate clauses in terms of reflexivisation, bare possessive constructions, and double negation. As an illustration, the VP+VP structure in (1b) is an SVC because the bare possessive test reveals that the possessor of the bare noun, lima ‘hand’ (i.e., object of the second VP), is, as the translation shows, the shared subject Nyoman. It cannot be the object of the first VP within the SVC, namely Ketut. In contrast, the seemingly similar pattern with the verb ngajak ‘invite, come along’ in (2) is not an SVC. Rather, it is a complement clause with control. The evidence comes from the reflexive test. The reflexive awak can have different possible binders, as seen from the translation shown by the indices. Only reading (i) (i.e., with ‘Mother’ being the antecedent; index i) is expected on the SVC analysis. The multiple possible readings are expected on the complement analysis with control, because the controlled subject of nyerahang, ‘AV.surrender’, is not required to be shared with the subject of the first verb, ngajak. It is the nature of the lexical semantics of the first (matrix) verb, ngajak, which then allows more than one reading of the control relation.

The fresh findings of the study on SVCs in Balinese also reveals that SVCs have an intermediate status in the syntactic gradience of clausal complexity between mono-clausal structures at one end and bi-clausal structures at the other end, and that it is important to untangle the complexity by means of language-specific tests.

1 a. Nyoman [[meli baju]VP [baang(=a) Wayan]VP]SVC. Nyoman AV.buy shirt give=3 Wayan ‘Nyoman bought a shirt and gave it to Wayan’ or ‘Nyoman bought a shirt for Wayan’ (Shiohara and Artawa 2012)

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b. Nyoman [[namplak Ketut]VP [ngganggo lima]VP]SVC. Nyoman AV.hit Ketut AV.use hand ‘Nyoman_i hit Ketut_j with his_i/*j (own) hand.’

2 I Meme_i/j ngajak [I Bapa]_k/j [ __ nyerahang awak_i/j/k] Art mother AV.invite Art father AV.surrender 3.self i) ‘Mother_i invited Father_j (to come along) to surrender herself_i.’ ii) ‘Mother_i invited Father_j (to come along) to surrender her_i.’ iii) Mother_i invited Father_j (to come along) to surrender himself_j.’ iv) ‘Mother_k invited Father_k (to come along) to surrender themselves_k.’

Table 1: Complex syntactic units and their properties

Simple/ complex predicates

SVC COMP with control

COMP without control

Coor- dinate

clause

Adverbial

clauses

monoclauasal<------- --- ---->biclausal-------------------------------------------

Argument sharing

√ √ √ - - -

Simple Reflexives

√ – – – – –

Complex Reflexives

√ √ √ (√) – –

Bare possessive √ √ – – – –

Poss. with padidi √ √ – – – –

Double negation √ √ √ – – –

References

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y, and R.M.W Dixon. 2006. Serial verb constructions: a cross-linguistic typology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Durie, Mark. 1997. "Grammatical structures in verb serialisation." In Complex predicates, edited by A. Alsina, J. Bresnan and P. Sells, 289-354. Stanford: CSLI.

Indrawati, N .L. K Mas. 2014. "The typological perspective of the Balinese serial verb constructions." In Argument realisations and related constructions in Austronesian languages: papers from 12-ICAL, Vol 2, edited by I Wayan Arka and N .L. K Indrawati, 353-368. Canberra: Asia-Pacific Linguistics.

Senft, Gunter. 2008. Serial Verb Construction in Austronesian and Papuan Languages. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics

Shiohara, Asako, and I Ketut Artawa. 2012. Grammaticalization of verbs of giving, using and inviting in Balinese. In 12-ICAL (International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics). Bali-Indonesia.

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Bayesian phylogenetics, sequence alignment and the genetic structure of the Kainji languages

Geoff Bacon (University of California, Berkeley) and Steven Bird (University of Melbourne, UC Berkeley, Charles Darwin University)

This paper makes two contributions. First, we present a detailed internal subgrouping and higher-order structure of the Kainji languages of Nigeria. Second, we introduce a newly open source computational tool for phonetic sequence alignment that was crucial in arriving at our first contribution.

The Kainji languages are a collection of 50-60 languages of rural northwestern Nigeria which form a branch of the Benue-Congo family. Their genetic unity has only recently been established due to their diverse lexicon and morphology (Blench & McGill 2012). A tentative subgrouping exists, however proposals for the higher-order structure remain speculative (Blench & McGill 2012: 36-7). These previous results were all achieved using the comparative method by hand. We introduce new data and Bayesian phylogenetic inference to the problem. Our results largely confirm the existing subgrouping proposal while simultaneously providing a detailed description of the higher-order structure of Kainji.

Our new data is the result of recent fieldwork on CiShigini, which supplements existing data on 19 other Kainji languages from various sources such as the Benue-Congo Comparative Wordlist (Blench 2009) and recent documentary works (Blench 2011, Smith 2015, Agamalafia n.d.). This sample of 20 languages represents all Kanji languages with sufficient data available. We use cognate data for 116 basic meanings across our sample to estimate the structure of the family using Bayesian phylogenetic inference, a method which searches through the space of possible trees and returns the tree which best explains the data. Bayesian phylogenetic inference has recently proved highly successful in elucidating genetic relationships in the cases of Pama-Nyungan (Bowern & Atkinson 2012), Indo-European (Chang et al. 2015, Gray & Atkinson 2003), Austronesian (Greenhill et al. 2009), and Tupí-Guaraní (Michael et al. 2015). Here, we apply these methods to clarify the structure of Kainji. These methods also allow us to quantify our (un)certainty in any node in the tree.

In preparing the cognate data for the phylogenetic inference, thousands of comparisons between phonetic sequences were necessary. In order to compare phonetic sequences for cognacy, it is necessary to align them. Informally, sequence alignment is the process of mapping related segments in two sequences to each other, illustrated in Fig. 1. Currently, most phonetic sequence alignment in linguistics is performed implicitly and manually. In this paper, we introduce a port to the Python programming language of Kondrak’s (2002) ALINE, an algorithm for computing optimal alignments between phonetic sequences. This allowed us to align phonetic forms across Kainji languages quickly and in a principled manner.

Aligning and comparing phonetic sequences are common tasks not only in historical linguistics, but also sociolinguistics and synchronic phonology. As data sets increase in size, manual alignment becomes practically impossible. ALINE provides an automatic solution, facilitating the study of linguistic data sets too vast for traditional methods. The present Python implementation has been incorporated into the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), an open source software library supporting computational linguistics. This makes the algorithm available, easier to use and modifiable for a wide base of linguists.

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References

Agamalafia, B. (n.d.). Towards a Reshe dictionary. Unpublished ms.

Blench, R. (2011). Benue-Congo Comparative Wordlist. Unpublished ms.

Blench, R. & McGill, S. (2012). The Kanji Languages of Northerwestern and Central Nigeria. Unpublished ms.

Bowen, C. & Atkinson, Q. (2012). Computational phylogenetic and the internal structure of Pama-Nyungan. Language.

Chang, W., Cathcart, C., Hall, D. & Garrett, A. (2015). Ancestry-constrained phylogenetic analysis supports the Indo-European steppe hypothesis. Language.

Smith, R. (2015). The noun class system of Ut-Ma’in, a West Kainji language of Nigeria. Unpublished MA thesis, University of North Dakota

Gray, R. & Atkinson, Q. (2003). Language-tree divergence times support the Anatolian theory of Indo-European. Nature.

Greenhill, S., & Gray, R. (2009). Austronesian language phylogenies: Myths and misconceptions about Bayesian computational methods. Austronesian historical linguistics and culture history: A festschrift for Robert Blust. Canberra: Australian National University.

Kondrak, G. (2002), Algorithms for Language Reconstruction, University of Toronto PhD dissertation.

Michael, L., Chousou-Polydouri, N., Barolomei, K., Donnelly, E., Wauters, V., Meira, S. & O’Hagan, Z. (2015). A Bayesian phylogenetic classification of Tupí-Guaraní. Línguas Indígenas Americanas.

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The use and functions of general extenders in contemporary Australian English

Erin Barnes (University of Melbourne), Maria Karidakis (University of Melbourne), Linda Leembruggen (University of Melbourne), Jean Mulder (University of Melbourne), Cara Penry Williams (La Trobe University), Nicholas Sgro-Traikovski (University of Melbourne)

General extenders such as and stuff like that, or something and and so on have received a great deal of attention for a discourse feature, particularly in recent years. Research has explored their distribution, functions and forms (e.g. Aijmer, 2013, Tagliamonte & Denis, 2010). However, many claims about their functions have been tested on just one corpus in one variety of English and assumed to be relevant for numerous contexts within a variety as well as across all varieties of English.

Using over 20 hours of interview data collected in Melbourne in 2014, this paper provides an updated account to previous work completed in the same city (i.e. Dines, 1980, Norrby & Winter, 2002), addressing claims regarding ongoing changes in which forms might be most common (Tagliamonte & Denis, 2010). After this discussion of the prevalence of forms, the focus shifts to their uses and functions, exploring two main issues:

1) The claim that intersubjective functions are fundamental to the use of general extenders and that adjunctive forms (those beginning with and) mark positive politeness while disjunctive forms (those beginning with or) mark negative politeness (Overstreet, 1999).

2) How the potential opacity of a set created by a general extender is managed in interaction.

In relation to the first claim, there is some support for Overstreet’s (1999) finding for American English but it is shown that, in Australian English at least, there is more to the picture than this dominant intersubjective function and this simple split in politeness function. General extenders evoke different degrees of shared knowledge, and fulfil multiple discourse functions beyond intersubjectivity alone. Some forms primarily index common ground and others more explicitly have hedging and downplaying functions In terms of potential opacity, it emerges that not only are there methodological issues with the classification of opacity (both structural and semantic) but that these ambiguities also potentially play out between interlocutors, being moderated by face-saving practices.

This presentation therefore contributes to our understanding of the place of general extenders in contemporary Australian English, focussing on their role in creating and maintaining social relations in discourse.

References

Aijmer, K. (2013). General extenders. In Understanding pragmatic markers: A variational pragmatic approach (pp. 127–147). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Dines, E. R. (1980). Variation in discourse—"and stuff like that". Language in Society, 9(1), 13–31.

Norrby, C., & Winter, J. (2002). Affiliation in adolescents’ use of discourse extenders. In C. Allen (Ed.). Proceedings of the 2001 conference of the Australian Linguistic Society. Retrieved from http://www.als.asn.au/proceedings/als2001.html.

Overstreet, M. (1999). Whales, candlelight, and stuff like that: General extenders in English discourse. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Tagliamonte, S. A., & Denis, D. (2010). The stuff of change: General extenders in Toronto, Canada. Journal of English Linguistics, 38(4), 335–368.

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Cross-Linguistic Typology of Reported Speech and Human Referents

Danielle Barth (Australian National University) and Nicholas Evans (Australian National University)

Social cognition – the sum of those cognitive abilities needed to navigate our social world, including talk – is grammaticalised in remarkably different ways cross-linguistically (e.g. kintax, encoding of mental states). Does this mean that speakers of different languages actually express these concepts in different ways, or with different frequencies? Seen from the other angle, are differences in lexical occurrence frequencies for particular categories a possible explanation for why certain categories grammaticalise in some languages but not others?

The Social Cognition Semi-Parallel Corpus (SCOSPAC) is a collection of annotated spoken texts from approximately twenty languages. For each language represented, the same “Family Problems Picture Task” was run (cf. San Roque et al., 2012) resulting in semi-parallel, semi-directed spontaneous speech data. The resulting data includes three genres of text: exposition/description, cooperative problem-solving dialogue and monologic narratives. An international team of researchers has coded this data for an initial set of variables of interest to social cognition, including expressions of reported speech, thought and emotions and expression of human referents. This paper will present the initial results from this study and will describe typological variation between languages and variation within the particular languages using a combination of classification trees, random forests and mixed-effects models.

Two aspects of reported speech and thought are examined: 1) differences in expression of speech, thought and emotion that either a) frame directly and indirectly quoted speech or b) does not frame any reported speech, and 2) the structure of expression of reported speech, i.e. if that speech is framed or not and if so, if it introduced with complementizers, prepositions or neither of these elements. Conditioning factors such as genre, context, position in narrative and range of choice for expressing reported speech (type vs. token frequency in a particular language) are used as independent variables. Initial results show significant differences between languages in what kinds of predications can frame reported speech and thought (cognitive and quotative, but not emotional, etc.) and how often these are used. There are also significant differences in the structure of reported speech with some languages relying heavily on complementizers and other languages using direct speech without any grammatical or lexical framing.

Two aspects of human referent expression are explored: 1) the distribution of lexical items for reference to humans within a language, and 2) a detailed examination of kinship terms and their distribution. Conditioning factors such as genre, context, position in narrative and range of lexical choice for human, and gender and familial relationships of the kinship terms are used as independent variables. Initial results show significant differentiations in language groups based on context. Kinship terms and more semantically rich descriptors are used in contexts depicting characters in the picture-tasks engaging in family-oriented tasks and more generic terms and pronouns are used when the characters are engaged in fighting. There are additional significant differences between languages in those that have a high distribution of possessed kinship terms (Australian languages in the sample), a high distribution of pronouns (German and Avatime) and a high distribution of group and dyadic terms (languages of Papua New Guinea in the sample).

A cross-linguistic examination of representation of reported speech and human referents helps us to understand how speakers in different language communities deal with the complex representation of the social world. The SCOSPAC can be generally used to examine how the human mind responds to the challenge of representing social cognition through language when speakers are free to highlight aspects of

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social situation. The initial results show us that despite variation within particular languages, languages still constitute distinct profiles and that structural and areal factors influence these profiles typologically.

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Exploring and Developing Automatic & Computer-Assisted Term Extraction Tools for Translation

Jonathan Beagley (Monash University)

Natural language processing is, due to its link with machine translation (MT), seen as mutually exclusive with human translation by many translators. Nevertheless, machine translation is far from being the only conceivable application of NLP to the practice of translation. Computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools are perhaps the most obvious example of NLP being applied to translation. Indeed, for the 21st century translator, language technology and translation are almost inextricably linked due to the prevalence of CAT tools and the widespread use of search engines, such as Google, and other corpora-based linguistic resources, such as Linguee, both of which make heavy use of natural language processing.

At the same time, terminology is gaining in importance rapidly, particularly for translators specialising in new and emerging technical fields (Kageura and Murayama, 2013). Automatic and computer-assisted (or semi-automatic) term extraction are, thus, very attractive for technical translators who encounter new terminology on a daily basis. While search engines have undoubtedly revolutionised the practice of translation by providing easier access to reference materials, automatic and computer-assisted term extraction provide new opportunities for improving both translator productivity and quality by streamlining the process of terminology research (Papavassiliou et al., 2013).

At present, the use of such technology by translators is quite limited, and the tools available for corpus analysis and term extraction are often unintuitive for those without a background in computational or corpus-based linguistics. In this presentation, I will compare several existing solutions for term extraction before proposing and demonstrating a prototype for domain-specific, computer-assisted term extraction software (written in Python) that combines data mining (such as web/RSS crawling) and NLP.

Keywords: natural language processing, term extraction, corpus-based linguistics, translation, web-as-corpus

References

Kageura, K., Murayama, R., 2013. Web-based Archiving of Parallel and Comparable Documents for Online Translators.

Papavassiliou, V., Prokopidis, P., Thurmair, G., 2013. A modular open-source focused crawler for mining monolingual and bilingual corpora from the web, in: Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora. pp. 43–51.

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Cultural Conceptualizations of body parts in some Turkic languages

Ruben Benatti (Universita' del Piemonte Orientale)

This paper aims to analyze some body parts conceptualization as they show up in some Turkic languages. The theoretical framework adopted is that of Cultural Linguistics (Palmer, 1996; Sharifian, 2011, 2015). The study of cultural conceptualizations is vital for an adequate understanding of the relationship between language and culture.

For example, in Uzbek heart is conceptualized in two words: qalb or yurak, while just one word is used in Turkmen (yürek) and Kirghiz (žurek). In Uzbek qalb also refers to the soul, while yurak refers to the physical organ, and it is used as symbol of bravery and courage. The organ used to refer metonymycally to family or relatives is jigar (liver). Not in all Turkic languages the word for heart is used to mean “the center of something” i.e. “The heart of the city”.

Another example of different conceptualization is head: for example in Turkmen there are three words for the concept of head: the word kelle refers to the physical head, whereas akyl refers to “the mind, intellect”. Instead, the word baş is used in time expressions where the head is mapped onto the beginning of a time period. Baş can also refer metonymically to the whole person: in Uzbek the words kalla and bosh have the same meaning of, respectively, kelle and baş.

Metaphor and metonymy are not necessarily universal (Kövecses, 2005). They can be sensitive to cultural influences. Conceptualizations of heart, head and liver differ between Turkic languages like Turkmen, Uzbek, Kirghiz and Kazakh. They sometimes work as a CONTAINER; sometimes they are used metonymycally; and sometimes they are capable of movement as in UP-DOWN (i.e. the heart in expressions of fear, panic or joy). Compared to the conceptualizations of body parts in English, they can show a wider or a fairly restricted scope.

References

Kövecses, Z. (2005), Metaphor in Culture, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Palmer, G. (1996), Toward a Theory of Cultural Linguistics, Austin, University of Texas Press.

Sharifian, F. (2011), Cultural Conceptualization and Language: Theoretical Framework and Applications, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, John Benjamins.

Sharifian, F. (ed.) (2015), The Routledge Handbook of Language and Culture, New York/London, Routledge (Taylor and Francis Group).

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Stories of the Indian diaspora: Capturing sociocultural and linguistic ecologies of multilingual migrant communities

Sana Bharadwaj (University of Western Australia)

Variationist sociolinguistics has made substantial contributions to our understanding of language variation and change, but the focus has persisted on mainstream speech communities. With over 16 million persons of Indian origin residing outside India, the Indian diaspora is the world’s largest and features prominently in Inner Circle countries (Kachru, 1985). While language variation and change in the Indian diaspora has been well documented in the UK (Sharma, 2011; 2014; Sharma & Sankaran, 2011), the USA (Sharma, 2005a; b), New Zealand (Hundt, 2014) and South Africa (Mesthrie, 1993; 2013), the sociolinguistic landscape of the Indian diaspora in Australia remains largely unmapped. Furthermore, despite the growing body of research on migrant communities in English-speaking contexts (e.g. Hoffman & Walker, 2010; Meyerhoff & Schleef, 2013), we have yet to establish guidelines on how to accurately capture contextual information to better understand the linguistic and cultural ecologies of multilingual migrant communities.

In this paper, I draw on my research on English in the Indian diaspora of Australia to explore methodological issues I have encountered thus far. These include:

(1) The delimitation of the speech community (accounting for substrate effects by ensuring homogeneity of speakers’ L1).

(2) Capturing the complex range of sociolinguistic factors specific to multilingual migrant communities.

The typological diversity of the Indian subcontinent means that the term ‘Indian English’ encompasses an array of Englishes spoken across the sub-continent (Sharma, 2012). Correspondingly, I adopt a bottom-up approach by investigating language variation and change in a single group – the Marathi community in Perth, Western Australia – before generalizing about the sub-continental variety.

Central to the migrant experience is the construction of ethnic identity and, based on current research (e.g. Hoffman & Walker, 2010), I argue that to understand the complex interaction between language and ethnicity in multilingual migrant communities, we need to account for language contact in the homeland as well as the range of social factors in the migrant community, including age at migration, maintenance of heritage languages and strength of transnational ties. As such, I suggest the use of a modified Ethnic Orientation Questionnaire (Hoffman & Walker, 2010) as a reliable tool to capture this information, complemented and supported by interview data on the same topics to ensure accurate representation of the speech community’s cultural and linguistic profile (cf. Travis & Torres Cacoullos, 2016).

While this paper focuses on the Indian diaspora, these issues can be extended more generally to sociolinguistic inquiry into multilingual migrant communities around the world.

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References

Hoffman, Michol F & Walker, James A. (2010). Ethnolects and the city: Ethnic orientation and linguistic variation in Toronto English. Language Variation and Change 22(1): 37-67.

Hundt, Marianne. (2014). Zero articles in Indian Englishes. In Hundt, M. & Sharma, D. (Eds.), English in the Indian diaspora. Amsterdam/Philedalphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. 131-170.

Kachru, Braj B. (1985). Standards, codification and sociolinguistic realism: the English language in the outer circle. In Quirk, R. & Widdowson, H. G. (Eds.), English in the world: teaching and learning the language and literatures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 11-30.

Mesthrie, Rajend. (1993). South African Indian English. English Today 9(2): 12-63.

Mesthrie, Rajend. (2013). Transfer and contact in migrant and multiethnic communities: the conversational historical be + -ing present in South African Indian English. In Schreier, D. & Hundt, M. (Eds.), English as a contact language Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 242-257.

Meyerhoff, Miriam & Schleef, Erik. (2013). Hitting an Edinburgh target: Immigrant adolescents' acquisition of variation in Edinburgh English. In Lawson, R. (Ed.), Sociolinguistic perspectives on Scotland. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillian. 103-128.

Sharma, Devyani. (2005a). Dialect stabilization and speaker awareness in non�native varieties of English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 9(2): 194-224.

Sharma, Devyani. (2005b). Language transfer and discourse universals in Indian English article use. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 27(04): 535-566.

Sharma, Devyani. (2011). Style repertoire and social change in British Asian English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15(4): 464-492.

Sharma, Devyani. (2012). Indian English. In Kortmann, B. & Lunkenheimer, K. (Eds.), The Mouton World Atlas of Variation in English. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. 523-530.

Sharma, Devyani. (2014). Transnational flows, language variation and ideology. In Hundt, M. & Sharma, D. (Eds.), English in the Indian Diaspora. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. 215-242.

Sharma, Devyani & Sankaran, Lavanya. (2011). Cognitive and social forces in dialect shift: Gradual change in British Asian Speech. Language Variation and Change 23(3): 399-428.

Travis, Catherine & Torres Cacoullos, Rena (2016). Grouping minority language speakers. Paper presented at Sociolinguistics Symposium 21. Murcia, Spain.

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Negotiating Ethnic Identity

Jessica Birnie-Smith (Monash University)

Research on ethnic identity has often highlighted the high school as the primary locus for identity work in relation to social identities and social groups (Bailey, 2013; Bucholtz, 2010; Drager, 2015; Eckert, 1989; Mendoza-Denton, 2008). However, identity work does not necessarily occur exclusively at the high school level across different cultural and linguistic settings. For instance, in the Indonesian context, a significant amount of identity work occurs during the transition to tertiary education and/or the workplace (Manns, 2011). The transition typically involves a shift from high to low density social networks, increased exposure to and understanding of wider socio-political paradigms as well as enhanced personal agency and engagement with different social groups, all of which influence individuals’ sense of identity (Eckert, 2002; Milroy & Milroy, 1992). The present study examines how these factors impact on the negotiation of ethnic identity amongst ethnic Chinese girls in tertiary education in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Chinese girls’ negotiate their identity through their linguistic practices, sociophonetic variation as well as attitudes towards language and phenotype. The analysis draws on several data sets including recorded conversation, interviews and an experimental procedure. The results of the analysis reflect some of the patterns in linguistic practices and identity work observed in other ethnic minority communities at the high school level (Bailey, 2013; Bucholtz, 2010; Drager, 2015; Mendoza-Denton, 2008). The present study therefore demonstrates that in the Indonesian context, identities remain fluid after high school, and are subject to continued influence from changes in their sociocultural context. Individuals respond to changes in their sociocultural circumstances by continually repositioning themselves in relation to those around them through their linguistic practices.

References

Bailey, B. (2013). Language and negotiation of ethnic / racial identity among Dominican Americans. Language in Society, 29(4), 555–582.

Bucholtz, M. (2010). White Kids : Language, Race and Styles of Youth Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Drager, K. (2015). Linguistic variation, identity construction and cognition. Berlin: Language Science Press.

Eckert, P. (1989). Jocks and Burnouts: Social Categories and Identity in the High School. Teachers College Press.

Eckert, P. (2002). Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Manns, H. (2011). Stance, style and identity in Java. Monash University Faculty of Arts School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics.

Mendoza-Denton, N. (2008). Homegirls : Language and Cultural Practice Among Latina Youth Gangs. Hoboken: Wiley.

Milroy, L., & Milroy, J. (1992). Social network and social class: Toward and integrated sociolinguistic model. Language in Society, 21(1), 1–26.

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Creating a digital shell for Indigenous language and culture sharing

Cathy Bow (Charles Darwin University)

Aboriginal languages are largely invisible in Australian universities, with opportunities to learn only 6-7 languages currently available (University Languages Portal Australia, 2016). While many Australian universities are keen to enable Indigenous knowledge and culture to have a role in the intellectual life of the academy, the multiplicity and complexity of issues makes the development and delivery of language courses difficult, requiring careful local negotiation across many different groups.

An experimental and generative solution to the perceived problems, funded by the federal Office of Learning and Teaching, is developing an online ‘shell’ through which Aboriginal language owners can teach their languages, histories, art and other knowledge and culture forms to university students, on their own terms. The goal is to enable Australian university students to access the on-line study resources and engage with language speakers and owners, through arrangements negotiated on a case-by-case basis by their universities. Ideally this will create opportunities for students across different disciplines to access language materials to inform their studies in linguistics, medicine, education, environment, law, etc. and to equip those planning to work in Indigenous communities, as well as attracting those with a general interest in the area.

A pilot program is currently in development, working with one community which had already begun sharing their knowledge and language online. In second semester 2016, a group of volunteer learners are invited to participate in the online course provided via the digital ‘shell’ site. This presentation will include a description of the pilot program, including some of the negotiations involved with local authorities, some technical aspects of setting up the site and selecting resources, and preliminary results of the trial with feedback from volunteer learners. Lessons learned from the pilot project will inform further development of the resource, with a view to sharing the shell with other communities interested in developing their own courses.

References

University Languages Portal Australia (2016). http://www.ulpa.edu.au/where-can-study-indigenous-languages/. Accessed 28 June 2016.

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Predicting discourse topics: Evidence for the privileged role of the syntactic subject during the comprehension of naturalistic auditory stories using event-related potentials

Ingmar Brilmayer (Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz), Katerina Kandylaki (Imperial College London), Beatrice Primus (University of Cologne), Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky (University of South Australia), Matthias Schlesewsky (University of South Australia)

The syntactic subject possesses a key function during discourse comprehension in serving as an attentional cue of upcoming discourse topics. Cross-linguistic text analyses (e.g. Givón, 1983) showed that syntactic subjects have a high cataphoric potential, i.e. they are more likely to be referred to in subsequent parts of a discourse compared to syntactic objects (subjects are persistent). Previous behavioural experiments suggest a connection between attentional focus and the syntactic subject: in an attentional cueing paradigm (Tomlin, 1995), participants described pictures of transitive events after either the actor or undergoer was visually cued. In support of the attention-related role of the syntactic subject, participants realised cued actors as subjects of an active sentence and cued undergoers as subjects of a passive sentence. Here, we present evidence demonstrating that the cataphoric function of the subject can also be observed in real-time sentence processing.

We will present three studies: a text-based analysis of topic persistence in German using a contemporary novel (the first 100 pages of “Breaking News” by Frank Schätzing); and two experiments (Exp. 1 and 2) using electroencephalography (EEG) to track brain activity in real time during online discourse comprehension. Exps. 1 and 2 tested how prominence features influence online predictive processes connected to the reoccurrence of the subject in upcoming discourse. In Exp. 1, we embedded sentence pairs in short stories, which were presented auditorily in German (mean length: 106.3s). Critical referents were first introduced as full NPs in sentences with additional manipulations of actor prototypicality (via verbs with high/ low causality, e.g. schlagen, ‘to hit’ vs. sehen, ‘to see’, cf. proto-role properties by Dowty, 1991) and grammatical voice (active/passive). A later sentence in the discourse then referred back to the differentially introduced subject by using the same NP as subject of a new sentence (anaphor). After the presentation of each story, participants answered 2 general comprehension questions. Exp. 2 was similar to Exp. 1, but manipulated definiteness rather than voice or causality.

The text-based study replicated the finding that topic persistence (i.e. likelihood of remention) is higher for subjects than for all other arguments. It was also higher for human versus non-human and for definite versus indefinite arguments. For Exps. 1 and 2, event-related potential (ERP) responses at the position of the anaphor revealed a dominant effect of subject persistence, irrespective of the additional manipulations. This effect manifested itself mainly in the N400 ERP component. Notably, as anaphors were identical across conditions, these ERP effects must have resulted from the manipulation of the discourse context.

The present experiments thus support the cataphoric function of the grammatical subject during auditory story comprehension by demonstrating that the subject function modulates the predictability of a referent’s reoccurrence in the discourse. These findings are in line with Bornkessel-Schlesewsky and Schlesewsky’s (2014) view that the grammatical subject serves as an attentional ‘attractor’ in providing a reliable predictive cue for upcoming topics during incremental language processing. They further demonstrate that Givón‘s production-based finding of high topic persistence for syntactic

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subjects extends to real-time language comprehension. This means that hearers use subjecthood as a cue to establish predictions about upcoming referents in the discourse.

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When Only Words Remain: Testing a Method of ‘Comparative Reconstitution’ in Ngarluma

Mitchell Browne (University of Western Australia)

Estimates suggest Australia was once home to over 250 distinct languages, and now only 15-18 continue to be learned by children (Koch & Nordlinger 2014: 4). For many of these extinct languages only ‘historical sources’ – such as word lists collected by untrained amateurs – remain. Retrieving useful linguistic data from historical sources is often problematic, with interpretations typically being made on an ad hoc basis.

Broadbent (1957) suggests a more consistent approach to interpretation, which she terms ‘reconstitution’, which is extended by Dench (1999), who terms the methodology ‘comparative reconstitution’. However this methodology has remained untested. This paper reports on the first application of the ‘comparative reconstitution’ methodology and an evaluation of its reliability.

A case study of Ngarluma, a language spoken in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, was undertaken. Ngarluma provides an ideal case to test the methodology, as it has both ‘historical sources’ which can be reconstituted, and more recent linguistic field notes (Hale 1960ms) which can be compared to the reconstitution. Additionally, a number of grammatical descriptions exist for related languages which can be used to evaluate the (contextualised) naturalness of any phonological details of Ngarluma determined through the reconstitution.

In the test of reliability, 87.02% of reconstituted forms common to at least two historical sources were identical to the forms given in Hale’s (1960ms) field notes. Individual sources differed in terms of reliability, the factor common to the more reliable sources appears to be the recorder’s degree of familiarity with the target language. The phonological analysis is also reasonably consistent with those of languages related to Ngarluma.

The study shows that ‘comparative reconstitution’ is a very successful method for retrieving good linguistic information from historical sources.

Keywords: Reconstitution, historical sources, amateur sources, Ngarluma.

References

Broadbent, S. M. (1957). Rumsen I: Methods of Reconstitution. International Journal of American Linguistics, 23(4), 275-280.

Dench, A. C. (1999). Comparative Reconstitution. In J. C. Smith, & D. Bentley, Selected papers from the 12th International Conference of Historical Linguistics (pp. 57-72). Manchester: John Benjamins.

Hale, K. (1960ms). Ngarluma Field notes. Roebourne.

Koch, H., & Nordlinger, R. (2014). The Languages and Linguistics of Australia. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

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Negation in modern Australian English: “Saying fuck all is fine… but double negation? That’s just not on!”

Isabelle Burke (Monash University)

This study is an overview of negation in modern conversational Australian English, based on grammaticality judgement surveys performed with over 180 students and corpus data from the UWA Corpus of English in Australia, collected from 2012-2015 and consisting of over a million words.

Preliminary findings indicate that Australian English negation shows meaningful divergences from other varieties. The ‘punctual’ never (e.g. I never taught my phonology class today) is a stalwart of non-standard British Englishes (see Cheshire 1998, Palacios Martinez 2011) and is among the most popular and widespread vernacular universals (Kortmann & Lunkenheimer 2011). Intriguingly, this is almost entirely absent from Australian corpus data. Survey data in combination with the historical insights in Lucas & Willis 2012 begin to solve the mysterious case of the missing punctual never. Australian speakers show a much greater preference for particular verbs in which the punctuality of never is ‘disguised’: these are ‘ninja nevers’, sneaking into the language under the radar.

Survey data also confirms that Australian English has completed a ‘mini-Jespersen cycle’, reanalysing taboo NPIs (negative polarity items) such as bugger all and jack shit as negators proper. When presented with pairs of sentences such as a) and b) below, students overwhelmingly found a) more acceptable, in which bugger all is used as a negator. Indeed, reanalysis of taboo NPIs such as bugger all is so complete that sentences like b), students expressed great vitriol on the subject of multiple negation. This is significant, as it shows that students simply assumed a negative value for bugger all.

a) This essay’s due tomorrow and I’ve done bugger all b) This essay’s due tomorrow and I haven’t done bugger all

Qualitative data from the survey also appears to counter claims made by scholars such as Hoeksema (2009) that it is the frequency of multiple negation in the type of ‘unregulated’ speech in which taboo expressions flourish that triggers the Jespersen Cycle. Students frequently commented that it was not the lexical items themselves that triggered negative ratings, but rather the ‘double negation’ (e.g. “fuck all, I don’t have a problem with. But double negation? That’s just not on.”) Certainly in Australian English, the presence of taboo language does not imply an acceptance of multiple negation.

Lastly, survey data also suggests that some forms of negation are unique to social media (e.g. particular forms of post-sentential negation, such as …said no one ever!), and surprisingly, remain ‘inappropriate’ for spoken language.

References

Cheshire, J. (1998). ‘English negation from an interactional perspective’ in I Tieken-Boon, van Ostade I ,G Tottie & W van der Wurff (eds) Negation in the History of English. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. pp. 29–54

Hoeksema, J. (2009) ‘Jespersen recycled’ in E van Gelderen (ed) Cyclical Change. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. pp. 15–35

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Kortmann B & K Lunkenheimer (2011). Electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English (eWAVE) Available at: http://www.ewave-atlas.org/

Lucas, C., & Willis, D. (2012). Never again: The multiple grammaticalization of never as a marker of negation in English. English Language and Linguistics, 16(3), 459-485.

Palacios Martinez, M. (2011) The expression of negation in British teenagers’ language: a preliminary study. Journal of English Linguistics 39: 4–35.

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Learning as a process of discourse socialisation: Implications for language and linguistics teaching practice

Melanie Burns (Monash University) and Lee Murray (Monash University)

Traditional conceptualisations of learning have framed it as a process of information transmission from expert to novice. These models have now largely been replaced with recognition of the role of collaboration, self discovery, and active learning. Within a situated learning perspective (Lave & Wenger, 1991), the method by which a student acquires competency in a given academic area can be understood as a process of academic discourse socialisation. This model frames learning as “developing the capability to participate in new discourse communities as a result of social interaction and cognitive experience” (Duff, 2007, p. 01.4). Thus, learning is not simply a matter of acquiring knowledge of facts, analytical techniques, or theories but rather a process whereby a newcomer learns how to become a member of a particular academic community. This process involves acquiring the discourse of the community; the particular ways of thinking and being associated with that group. In the academic environment, the student becomes familiar with the ways of thinking, norms, and language of the field under study. These are then internalised as the student moves from novice to full member of the academic community.

This presentation explores the nature of academic discourse socialisation and the role this plays in learning in the tertiary context. In particular, it discusses how this process may be nurtured and promoted in the higher education environment. It does so by considering how communities of practice (CoPs; cf. Wenger, 1998) may form in this context. Through the examination of an undergraduate linguistics course, we describe the emergence of a CoP within a tutorial classroom and discuss the benefits of this with respect to academic discourse socialisation. Finally, we consider ways in which the CoP framework may be applied, both to understand the dynamics of the tutorial context and to enhance student learning outcomes.

Keywords: academic discourse, discourse socialisation, learning as a social practice, classroom practice

References

Duff, P. A. (2007). Problematising academic discourse socialisation. In H. Marriott, T. Moore & R. Spence-Brown (Eds.), Learning Discourses and the Discourses of Learning (pp. 1.1-1.18). Melbourne: Monash University ePress.

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge, UK; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

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Particles in the intermediate zone: The case of to in Southwestern Mandarin

Hong Cai (University of Adelaide)

This paper provides the first semantic and pragmatic description of the particle to in Gong’an Hua, which is a dialect of the Southwestern Mandarin subgroup spoken in Gong’an County, Hubei Province, China. As a grammaticalized particle occurs primarily at the sentence-final position, to performs several simultaneous functions in discourse. Based on the contextual data collected from the field, this paper identifies the following uses and underlying meanings of to: (a) it has a volitive meaning which indexes the speaker’s attitudinal stance; (b) it denotes that priority should be given to the proposition it is attached to; (c) it directs the inferential comprehension process in which the hearer infers a (temporarily) negative answer which is mitigated due to the presence of to; and (d) it can function as a temporal deixis which indicates the completion of a certain event or realization of certain status prior to another. In the light of recent studies on the semantics and pragmatics of discourse particles and pragmatic markers (cf. de Saussure, L., 2007; Degand et al, 2013; Fraser, 2006; Sperber & Wilson, 1995; among others), I argue that to has a hybrid nature in that it exhibits both characteristics of discourse markers and modal particles. In doing so, this paper empirically confirms the proposal of a cline from prototypically modal to prototypically structural marking by Cuenca (2013, p. 208) and presents a descriptive model for fuzzy particles that challenge any attempt of classification.

References

Cuenca, M. (2013). The fuzzy boundaries between discourse marking and modal marking. In: Degand, L., Cornillie, B., & Pietrandrea, P. (Ed.). Discourse Markers and Modal Particles : Categorization and description. John Benjamins Publishing Company.

de Saussure, L. (2007). Procedural pragmatics and the study of discourse. Pragmatics & Cognition, 15(1), 139-159.

Degand, L., Cornillie, B., & Pietrandrea, P. (2013). Discourse Markers and Modal Particles : Categorization and description. John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Fraser, B. (2006). Towards a theory of discourse markers. In: Fischer, K. (Ed.), Approaches to Discourse Particles. Elsevier, Amsterdam, pp. 189-204.

Sperber, D. & D. Wilson. (1995). Relevance: communication & cognition. Blackwell Publishing.

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Entrenchment, autonomy and language change: The discourse marker ¿cachái? (’you know’?) as a driver of change in Chilean Spanish

Matthew Callaghan (ANU)

This paper investigates the linguistic mechanisms behind language change, and questions to what degree entrenched forms may (or may not) play a role in driving gradual change. Following De Smet (2016) which tracked the gradual development from nominal to adjectival usage of English ‘key’, this study looks at a morphosyntactic variable: the second person singular (2sg) verbal paradigm in Chilean Spanish, which has undergone rapid change, and specifically the effect of the highly frequent discourse marker cachái ‘you know’.

While most varieties of Spanish spoken in Spain and Latin America use the standard second person singular (2sg) familiar pronoun tú and corresponding tuteo verb forms as in (1), Chilean Spanish (like some other varieties), is characterised by the co-existence of voseo – the use of the pronoun vos as a second person singular familiar form (with corresponding voseo verb forms as in (2)).

(1) No po si tú tienes razón.

No you-TÚ are-TÚ right. (CSSS 150206-000; 868; Trinidad)

(2) vos cachái que ese estadio lo hicieron,

You-VOS know-VOS they made that stadium, (CSSS 141217-000; 1216; Matías)

The 2sg paradigm in Chilean Spanish has undergone a very rapid change in the past 40 years (Morales, 1972, Torrejón, 1991, Torrejón, 1986, Lipski, 1994, Bishop and Michnowicz, 2010), whereby traditionally stigmatised voseo verb forms have expanded to the speech of all social classes, at the expense of the standard tuteo. In conversational data of young educated speakers in the 1970s (1990, Rabanales and Contreras, 1979) and 2010s (Callaghan, in prep), voseo verb forms go from virtually non-existent in the 1970s data (2/700), to become the majority form today (91%, 683/751).

The rise in use of voseo has been accompanied by the development of a new discourse marker, cachái ‘you know’ (literally ‘catch-VOS-IND’). This form – absent in the 1970s data – accounts for over a quarter (356/1321) of all 2sg forms and a third of voseo verbs in the 2010s recordings. It is particularly frequent in the speech of young speakers providing further evidence that it is an innovative form.

Given this, it is a prime candidate for testing the role of entrenched forms in language change, specifically two hypotheses drawn from De Smet (2016: 83) : (1) “innovative constructions should be more likely to emerge if their analogical models are better entrenched” and (2) “an expression’s retrievability can also be improved by priming, which in the short term should have a similar effect to priming.”

Evidence for the first hypotheses was found in that those speakers who were categorized as ‘high’ users of cachái (those for whom cachái represented over 15% of their total 2sg verbs) were found to use proportionally more voseo verb forms than those categorized as ‘low’ cachai users. However, this may partly be an age effect, given the strong correlation between young speakers and high cachái and voseo usage in general.

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To explore this further, all tuteo and voseo tokens were coded for the form of the previous 2sg verb. Here, evidence for the second hypothesis was found in that the probability of occurrence of subsequent voseo verb forms increases if there is a cachái in the preceding environment; the rate of voseo in the context of a preceding voseo is 88% (462/523), twice as high as that in the context of a preceding tuteo (46%, 51/112). Cachái itself also enters into the priming with a rate of 91% voseo (82/90) in contexts where the previous 2sg token was cachái. This shows, then, that cachái is not wholly autonomous, but is recognised as a voseo form by speakers (Cacoullos and Walker, 2009). Given the high frequency of cachái it certainly could have played a role in the rise of the change.

References

BISHOP, K. & MICHNOWICZ, J. 2010. Forms of Address in Chilean Spanish. Hispania, 93, 413-429.

CACOULLOS, R. T. & WALKER, J. A. 2009. The present of the English future: Grammatical variation and collocations in discourse. Language, 85, 321-354.

DE SMET, H. 2016. How gradual change progresses: The interaction between convention and innovation. LANGUAGE VARIATION AND CHANGE, 28, 83-102.

LIPSKI, J. M. 1994. Latin American Spanish, London; New York, Longman.

MORALES, F. 1972. El voseo en Chile. Boletín de Filología de la Universidad de Chile, 23-24, 261-273.

RABANALES, A. & CONTRERAS, L. 1979. El Habla culta de Santiago de Chile: materiales para su estudio, Universidad de Chile, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Departamento de Lingüística y Filología.

RABANALES, A. & CONTRERAS, L. 1990. El Habla culta de Santiago de Chile: materiales para su estudio, Instituto Caro y Cuervo.

TORREJÓN, A. 1986. Acerca del Voseo Culto de Chile. Hispania, 69, 677-683.

TORREJÓN, A. 1991. Fórmulas de tratamiento de segunda persona singular en el español de Chile. Hispania, 74, 1068-1076.

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Applicative suffix –kan and its relation to prepositions in Indonesian (bahasa Indonesia)

Clarice Campbell (Monash University)

The aim of this research is to examine the use of the applicative suffix –kan and its relation to prepositions in Standard Indonesian. With the use of –kan as an applicative suffix onto a verb, the preposition should be omitted in relation to the direct object however this is not always the case.

(1) Yang penting saya sangat mencintai Sandy

REL important 1.SG very AS.love.APPL Sandy

dan menyenangkan atas semua kejadian itu

and AS.pity.APPL on all event that

‘What is important is that I love Sandy and I regret all these events’ (Musgrave 2001:156)

What conditions this phenomenon is being examined through an analysis of corpus data to determine whether there is a correlation with certain verbs or whether this is dependent on other syntactic properties.

Applicative morphology is used in a number of languages however the literature suggests that Indonesian is unique in that it can retain the object of the verb within the prepositional phrase despite the presence of the valence changing morpheme (Cole & Son 2004: 343). Furthermore, there has been no literature that discusses this phenomenon in depth, other than briefly mentioning that this is a possibility in some cases and that it requires further research.

References

Cole, P. & M. Son. 2004. The argument structure of verbs with the suffix -kan in Indonesian. Oceanic Linguistics 43(2). 339–364.

Musgrave, S. 2001. Non-subject arguments in Indonesian. Doctoral dissertation. The University of Melbourne.

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Humour, Gender and Character identity in Chinese sitcom Ipartment

Ying Cao (Western Sydney University)

This study intends to explore the interactions of gender, humour and character identity in fictional conversations in the Chinese sitcom, Ipartment. While gender, humour and identity have been widely investigated in natural conversations (Hay, 1995; Holmes, 2006; Lampert & Ervin-Tripp, 2006), few work has been done in the genre of dramatic discourse (sitcoms in particular). This study intends to fill this gap, and to answer the following research questions: (1) what are the characteristics of the humour strategies used in the conversations of each single-gender group and in mixed-gender groups? (2) How do male and female characters contribute to the humour sequences, i.e. collaboratively or competitively? (3) How does humour unveil male and female characters’ identities? Using Norrick (2010)’s theoretical framework of conversational joketelling and Culpeper (2001)’s framework of character and characterisation in dramatic discourse, this study explores from the dimension of gender how the seven main characters in Ipartment display their identities through conversational humour. Drawing on the data composed of 137 conversations of both single-gender groups and mixed-gender groups, this study found that humour strategies used by females and males do not present distinct differences. Humour strategies of teasing and irony are favoured by both genders. A significant finding is that, the character identities of females displayed in single-gender conversations in Ipartment share some features with that in natural conversations, i.e. a mild and cooperative participant (Hay, 1995). However, in mixed-gender conversations, female characters are more often competitively contribute to previous humour sequences, and the identities they intend to display via humour are significantly different from what observed in natural conversations (Holmes, 2006). To be more precise, female characters in Ipartment prefer to display their identities as independent, tough and dominant participants in mixed-gender conversations.

Keywords: Humour, Gender, Chinese sitcoms.

References

Culpeper, J. (2001). Language and Characterisation: People in Plays and Other Texts. Harlow: Longman.

Hay, J. (1995). Gender and Humour: Beyond a joke. (Master Thesis), Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington.

Holmes, J. (2006). Sharing a laugh: Pragmatic aspects of humor and gender in the workplace. Journal of Pragmatics, 38, 26-50.

Lampert, M. D., & Ervin-Tripp, S. M. (2006). Risky Laughter: Teasing and Self-Directed Joking among Male and Female Friends. Journal of Pragmatics, 38(1), 51-72.

Norrick, N. R. (2010). Conversational narrative: Storytelling in everyday talk. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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What’s on the list? An evaluation strategy in Gun-nartpa narrative discourse

Margaret Carew (Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education)

In this paper I discuss evaluative strategies within the narrative practices of Gun-nartpa people, a Gu-jingarliya speaking network of local clan groups resident in north-central Arnhem Land, Australia. As noted by Blythe (2011), most linguistic studies of narrative in Australia have focused on formal elicited narratives, drawing upon on such narratives as data for grammatical description and discourse analysis. They rarely investigate the ways in which narrative discourse is socially situated, how it is interwoven with other discourse formats nor the social meanings of different components of narrative discourse (however see Blythe 2009, 2011; Green 2014; Klapproth 2004). This is despite the overt orientation that Indigenous societies in northern Australia have towards the importance of story telling in political oratory (Clunies-Ross 1983; Gurrmanamana et al. 2002), the socialisation of young people (Etherington 2006) and the construction of identity (Carew in prep; Morphy 1990).

I employ a broad definition of narrative and situate it as part of everyday communication practices (Ochs & Capp 2001). Narrative discourse is organised in terms of temporal and/or spatial succession of episodes (Hoffmann 2015) and an orientation towards agents where, at least in part, the identity of agents persists throughout discourse (Longacre 1983). Narrative discourse is also associated with the notion of narrative peaks or highpoints. These are marked episodes that correspond to climaxes in the “notional structure” of a story (Longacre 1983:24) and which are given prominence by a range of evaluative strategies (Margetts 2015; Polanyi 1985). Evaluative prominence is central to the notion of narrative as social practice. In developing cognitive worlds and cultural schemas, mediated as they are through narrative practice, “evaluation allows the story recipients to build up a model of the relevant information in the text which matches the teller’s intentions” (Polanyi 1985:13). Prominence is given to evaluative episodes in narrative through a range of rhetorical markings and strategies, that include reported speech, sound symbolism, code-switching and the clustering of participants, events and evaluative devices at narrative highpoints (Longacre 1983).

I focus on listing as one significant means of evaluation that occurs across various contexts of narrative performance (Clunies-Ross 1983). Listing sequences are clearly bracketed away from surrounding discourse through distinctive prosody. Globally the pitch of list items is raised, each item is prosodically separate, and the intonational contour is rising. Syllables are accented, and a strong emphasis placed on the final syllable of prosodic units. In affect-laden listing episodes people list items that are highly culturally valued and listing intonation can take on a distinctive rhythm and voice quality. Listing is usually displaced from participant and action-based narrative highpoints, and on a surface level may seem marginal to the narrative. However, through listing tellers cue the relationality that pertains between items of cultural value, people and events, establishing coherence in the framing of the storyworld within the wider social context and revealing relationships that may not be otherwise apparent. In this respect we can see that lists often index meanings that are central to the notional structure or schema that underpins the narrative (Klapproth 2004; Longacre 1983). In particular, listing is a strategy that validates constructs of identity, such as kin and country-based relationships, and the authority of senior people in establishing consensus. Listing, among other evaluative strategies deployed in narrative performance, is central to the everyday interactional discourse of Gun-nartpa people, where assertions of rights and connections and the listing of signifiers

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of belonging is common practice. The distinctive form that listing takes are central indices of the local concepts janguny ‘story’ and joborr ‘law’; both which are underpinned by socially based negotiations of the meaning of the complex sets of signifiers that construct belonging as authentic, ethical and real in a changing world (Carew in prep).

References

Blythe, J. (2009b). Prosodic Person Reference in Murriny Patha Reported Interaction. In D. Barth-Weingarten, N. Dehé, & A. Wichmann (Eds.), Where Prosody Meets Pragmatics (pp. 23-52).

Blythe, J. (2011). Laughter is the best medicine: roles for prosdy in a Murriny Patha conversational narrative. In B. Baker, I. Mushin, M. Harvey, & R. Gardner (Eds.), Indigenous Language and Social Identity: papers in honour of Michael Walsh (pp. 223-36). Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.

Carew, M. (in prep.). Gun-ngaypa Rrawa 'My Country': intercultural alliances in language research. (PhD Thesis), Monash University, Clayton.

Clunies-Ross, M. (1983). Two Aboriginal oral texts from Arnhem Land, North Australia, and their cultural context. In S. Wild & S. N. Mukherjee (Eds.), Words and Worlds: Studies in the Social Role of Verbal Culture (pp. 3-20). Sydney: Association for Studies in Society and Culture.

Etherington, S. (2006). Learning to be Kunwinjku. Kunwinjku people discuss their pedagogy. (PhD Thesis), Charles Darwin University.

Green, J. (2014). Drawn from the ground: Sound, sign and inscription in Central Australian Sand Stories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hoffmann, D. (2015). Moving through space and (not?) time. In F. Gounder (Ed.), Narrative and Identity Construction in the Pacific Islands (pp. 15-36): John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Klapproth, D. (2004). Narrative as Social Practice: Anglo-Western and Australian Aboriginal Oral Traditions. Berlin: Walter De Gruyter.

Longacre, R. E. (1983). The grammar of discourse. New York: Plenum Press.

Margetts, A. (2015). Person shift at narrative peak. Language, 91(4), 755-805.

Morphy, H. (1990). Myth, Totemism and the Creation of Clans. Oceania, 60(4), 312-28. doi:10.2307/40332449

Ochs, E., & Capps, L. (2001). Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling. Cambridge Massachussets: Harvard University Press.

Polanyi, L. (1985). Telling the American Story: A Structural and Cultural Analysis of Conversational Storytelling. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex Publishing Corporation.

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Measuring exponence complexity: A minimum description length approach

Matthew Carroll (Australian National University) and T. Mark Ellison (Australian National University)

In this paper we construct a preliminary typology of inflectional exponence and apply the informational-theoretic concept of description length (Rissanen 1985) to the quantification of the complexity of each identified type of exponence relationship. It is our contention that by providing an explicit quantification of the complexity of each phenomenon entailed by the typology, we can provide a precise and nuanced measurement of the design space of language as well going some way to providing an explanation of the distribution of languages over that space.

We see exponence as the relationship between morphosyntactic-semantic features and inflectional markings (Matthews 1974, Stump 2001). In the construction of our typology, we make use of Canonical Typology which defines canonical exponence as a unique bijective relation between features and inflectional markings (Corbett 2009). We identify the possible design space by projecting the logical parameters of potential deviation from the canonical case, in this case as deviations from the one-to-one correspondence between features and forms. We identify three levels at which this deviation may take place: the word, the lexeme and the lexicon (language). Having established the set of phenomena that populate this typology we provide complexity measurements of each of these using an application of minimal description length (MDL) with examples taken from natural languages and scaled for comparability.

Minimal description length (Rissanen 1985) is a method for evaluating generalisations of a data-set that prefers generalisations minimising the sum of the information required to express the generalisation, and to code the data-set given the generalisation. It is a model-restricted version Kolmogorov complexity, and can be cast as an implementation of Bayes’ Theorem.

We are not alone in using MDL to measure morphological complexity. Sagot and Walther (2011) have also used MDL, and like us, they define morphological complexity as deviations from the Canonical Ideal. Our work differs from theirs in two ways: 1. They seek to measure inflectional complexity whilst our focus is on the narrower notion of exponence. 2. Their goal was to use MDL as a means of determining between competing analyses whilst our goal is to quantify distributions in the design space of language.

PRELIMINARY RESULTS:

Languages and paradigms vary in the number of features they represent so a sample has been chosen which is controlled for the number of features with each paradigm chosen having a total of 12 cells (6x2). For the purposes of illustration, we can consider the 4 paradigms provided on the following page as representing core exponence phenomena (Matthews 1974). In Table 1 we have a Turkish nominal paradigm representing the canonical case. Table 2 is an idealised Russian nominal paradigm representing cumulative exponence with the syncretisms removed. Table 3 is a partial paradigm of Archi nominal declension representing multiple exponence. Table 4 is the correct Russian nominal paradigm including syncretisms. Table 5 lists the measurements of each of these paradigms; these represent an initial quantification of key cardinal points in the design space of exponence relations in terms of complexity. More natural examples involve interesting combinations

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of these phenomena and our full paper entails idealised examples for all 8 phenomena identified in our typology as well as measurements of paradigms drawn from natural languages. Even in this limited example, we can see that in terms of description length cumulative exponence represents a considerable increase in complexity over the canonical example with extended exponence a slight increase again. More unexpectedly, the syncretisms in the Russian example actually provide a simplification of the overall system since they increase predictability in the system.

SG PL

nominitive ev ev-ler

accusative ev-i ev-ler-i

genitive ev-in ev-ler-in

dative ev-e ev-ler-e

locative ev-de ev-ler-de

ablative ev-den ev-ler-den

Table 1 – Paradigm of Turkish noun: ev ‘house’

SG PL

nominitive zakon-q zakon-x

accusative zakon-p zakon-i

genitive zakon-a zakon-ov

dative zakon-u zakon-am

locative zakon-om zakon-ami

ablative zakon-e zakon-ax

Table 2 – Idealised paradigm of Russian noun Zakon 'law' (without syncretism)

SG PL

nominative q’in q’onn-or

ergative q’inn-i q’onn-or-čaj

genitive q’inn-i-n q’onn-or-če-n

dative q’inn-i-s q’onn-or-če-s

comitative q’inn-i-ɬu q’onn-or-če-ɬu

comparative q’inn-i-Xur q’onn-or-če-Xur

Table 3 – Partial paradigm of Archi noun q’in ‘bridge’

SG PL

nominitive zakon zakon-i

accusative zakon zakon-i

genitive zakon-a zakon-ov

dative zakon-u zakon-am

locative zakon-om zakon-ami

ablative zakon-e zakon-ax

Table 4 – Paradigm of Russian noun Zakon 'law'

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bits

Turkish – Canonical exponence 346.22

Idealised Russian – Cumulative exponence 435.06

Partial Archi – Multiple exponence 498.33

Russian – Syncretism with cumulative exponence 394.51

Table 5 - Measure of complexity of exponence relation types and examples (in bits)

References

Corbett, G. (2009). Canonical inflectional classes. Selected proceedings of the 6 the Décembrettes, 1–11.

Matthews, P.H. (1974). Morphology. Cambridge: CUP.

Rissanen, J. (1985). Minimum‐Description‐Length Principle. Encyclopedia of Statistical Sciences.

Stump, G. (2001). Inflectional Morphology: A Theory of Paradigm Structure. Cambridge: CUP.

Sagot, B and G. Walther (2011). Non-Canonical Inflection: Data, Formalisation and Complexity Measures. Systems and Frameworks for Computational Morphology, 100, pp. 23-45.

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A sociocultural approach on the study of negative language transfer: The effect of peer interaction on the acquisition of the Japanese noun modifier no

Sally Chan (University of New South Wales)

This presentation aims to investigate the effects of peer interaction on the acquisition of the Japanese noun modifier の (no) (an ownership indicator) by Chinese L1 learners of Japanese as a foreign language as an early attempt to apply a Vygotskian Sociocultural theory (SCT) onto examining negative language transfer (-LT).

-LT is the impediment effect of a source language(s) on the recipient language. Chinese L1 learners of Japanese with an advanced proficiency have demonstrated -LT in the misuse of no (e.g. Chan, 2014). Although the study of no, and studies of -LT in general provide useful insights of the cause and effect of -LT within individuals’ in their second/foreign language acquisition, it is criticised for providing minimal insights into how learning occurs, i.e. the effect of the learning environment in promoting the acquisition of a linguistic feature influenced by –LT (Firth and Wagner, 1997).

SCT view language learning as a social phenomenon that occurs during interactions with others. Peer interaction research to date has demonstrated positive effects on learning grammatical structures (e.g. Aljaafreh and Lantolf, 1994). As little research has investigated the effect of peer interaction on the learning of a target grammatical structure influenced by -LT, this study will utilise peer interaction in examining the misuse of no and its acquisition by the Chinese L1 learners.

In this study, Chinese, Korean and English L1 learners of Japanese with an advanced proficiency and Japanese L1 speakers participated in four sessions (1. pre-test, 2. peer interaction, 3. immediate post-test and 4. 6-months follow-up post-test) and acquisition was measured using the grammaticality judgment task. The statistical analysis is underway and results on the statistical significance of the Chinese L1 learners’ performance pre and post-interaction will be reported in this presentation.

Keywords: Sociocultural approach, negative language transfer, peer interaction, second/foreign language acquisition, the Japanese noun modifier no

References

Aljaafreh, A., & Lantolf, J.P. (1994). Negative feedback as regulation and second language learning in the zone of proximal development. The Modern Language Journal, 78, 465-483.

Chan, S. (2014). The effects from prior language knowledge in japanese acquisition as a foreign language: The case of the japanese noun modifier no. New Voices, 6, 27-50.

Firth, A., & Wagner, J. (1997). On discourse, communcation, and (some) fundamental concepts in SLA research. The Modern Language Journal, 81(3), 285-300.

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A Case Study of Translingual Literacy: Intrasentential Code-Meshing in Personal Correspondence

Ivy Chen (University of Melbourne)

‘Pinocchio’: Italian children’s novel, Disney cartoon, or … Korean TV show? Translanguaging has emerged as a more accurate way to describe the way ‘languagers’ language (García & Li, 2014), where writers and readers negotiate meaning and literacy is performative (Canagarajah, 2009, 2013). Within this framework, research on translingual writing has been explored in the academic genre, with a heterogeneous group of readers; writing where the writer has a specific reader in mind has not. In this study, a corpus of one year’s worth of personal correspondence (i.e. emails and messages) between a multilingual international student and her parents was analysed in order to (1) identify the difficulties in analysing translingual writing and to (2) explore the effectiveness of translanguaging in writing. Stimulated recall reveals that limited literacy skills of either reader or writer lead the writer to resort to transliterations, and participants utilized similarities between languages to facilitate understanding. This, along with lexical borrowings, makes it difficult to assign a ‘language’ to the code-meshing. In terms of effectiveness, even when writers are familiar with the intended reader’s linguistic repertoire, some instances of code-meshing were more rhetorically effective than others, such as providing the reader with too many clues (Canagarajah, 2013). The analysis points to issues in the analysis of translingual writing and the development of translingual literacy.

Keywords: translanguaging; multilingualism; writing; translingual literacy; code-meshing

References

Canagarajah, S. (2009). Multilingual strategies of negotiating English: From conversation to writing. JAC, 29(1/2), 17-48.

Canagarajah, A. S. (2013). Negotiating translingual literacy: An enactment. Research in the Teaching of English, 48(1), 40-67.

García, O., & Li, W. (2014). Translanguaging: Language, bilingualism and education. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Orthographic Folk Etymological Nativisation: A Chinese Perspective

Yan Chen (Yancheng Teachers University)

Whereas folk etymology has been derided as “nonsensical”, “wrong/erroneous/mistaken”, “pathological”, “lack of education”, “corruption”, “distortion” etc. in traditional linguistic studies, recent years has witnessed an intensified interest in folk etymology in various languages. Generally speaking, researchers have interpreted folk etymologization as “de-isolation”, “de-alienating”, “de-obscuring”, “reanalysis”, “remotivation”, “reinterpretation”, “reshaping” etc. depending on the perspective(s) they take, i.e. from the phonological, morphological, or semantic plane or from a combination of several planes. So far, researchers have reached consensus on two points: (i) There is no necessary semantic link between the “folk etymological” form and the source of its components, and folk etymology involves endowing the unfamiliar with familiar content from elsewhere in the speakers’ lexicon, and (ii) Folk etymology involves conferring internal structure on unfamiliar (and usually long) forms. Among the various types of folk etymology, “orthographic folk etymological nativization” (i.e., the neologism which is spelled/written as though it were a folk etymological nativization – FEN - but pronounced as a loanword) has received little attention. Based on previous research findings and with special reference to FENs of lexical borrowings in Chinese, the present paper argues that in Chinese, FENs affect speakers’ perceptions of the borrowings and play a role in determining which borrowed elements are more likely to gain currency in the language. It is found that due to the phono-logographic nature of the Chinese writing system, (1) A FEN may be indicative of the meaning of the source language parallel by directly labeling its semantic category with radicals or characters, or by indirectly suggesting its meaning through combining characters in syntagmatic lexical relations conforming to Chinese word-formation processes, or by adding a meaning to the original through characters with positive, negative, or jocular connotations, and (2) FENs in close correlation with their source language parallels in both meaning and pronunciation and those with positive associations are more likely to be adopted and prevail in the language. This research supports the idea that orthography does indeed shape language and is part of language and that its role in language should not be underestimated or overlooked.

Keywords: FEN; orthographic FENs; phono-logographic; semanticize

References

Bauer, L. “Folk Etymology”, in Keith Allan (ed.) Concise Encyclopedia of Semantics. Oxford: Elsevier, 2006.

Crystal, D. A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics (2nd edn). Oxford: Blackwell, 1985.

De Saussure, F. Course in General Linguistics. Trans. by Charles Bally et al. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959.

Durkin, P. The Oxford Guide to Etymology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Gao, M., & Liu Z. A Study of Loanwords in Modern Chinese. Beijing: Script Reform Press, 1958.

Liu, Z., Gao, M., Mai, Y., & Shi, Y. (eds.) A Dictionary of Loan Words and Hybrid Words in Chinese. Shanghai: Shanghai Lexicographical Publishing House, 1984.

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Maiden, M. “Lexical Nonsense and Morphological Sense: on the Real Importance of ‘Folk Etymology’ and Related Phenomena for Historical Linguists”, in Thórhallur Eythórsson (ed.) Grammatical Change and Linguistic Theory: The Rosendal Papers. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2008.

McMahon, A. M. S. Understanding Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Palmer, A. S. Folk-etymology: A Dictionary of Verbal Corruptions or Words Perverted in Form or Meaning, by False Derivation or Mistaken Analogy. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1890; Johnson Reprint, 1969.

Rundblad, G. & D. B. Kronenfeld. “Folk-Etymology: Haphazard Perversion or Shrewd Analogy” in Julie Coleman et al. (eds.) Lexicology, Semantics and Lexicography. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2000: 19-34.

Rundblad, G. and David B. Kronenfeld. “The Inevitability of Folk Etymology: A Case of Collective Reality and Invisible Hands”. Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003): 119–138.

Shi, Y. Chinese Loanwords. Beijing: Commercial Press, 2000.

Ullmann, S. The Principles of Semantics. Glasgow: Jackson, 1951.

Zuckermann, G. Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew. London: Palgrave, 2003.

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Implications of grammaticalization for language change: The emergence of the German present perfect and the rise of new periphrastic constructions

Valentina Concu (Purdue University)

Scholars such as Rödel (2007), Gersbach (1982), Maiwald (2002) and Schrodt & Donhauser (2003), consider the development of the German double present perfect such as “hat vergessen gehabt” (has forgotten had); “ist gefahren gewesen” (is gone been) and the double past perfect, such as(hatte vergessen gehabt ‘had forgotten had’; war gefahren gewesen ‘was gone been’) constructions as a result of the decline of the German preterite.

In this paper, I present evidence that challenges these claims, and argue instead that the emergence of these constructions is the direct outcome of the grammaticalization of the present perfect, since, as argued by Frajzyngier (2012), “the grammaticalization of a function may itself be the motivation for the grammaticalization of other functions in the same domain”.

The morphology of these forms suggests that the present perfect served as a base for their formations, and especially the forms of the past participles of haben (to have) and sein (to be), gehabt (had) and gewesen (been).

Furthermore, the first attestations of both double perfect constructions can be traced back to the thirteenth century (Wargenau, 2012). It was in this period that the present perfect grammaticalized (Kuroda, 1999) which took place before the alleged decline of the preterite around 1450 (Werner & Conradie, 2001).

Moreover, the analyses of the data show that the double perfect constructions were used in combination with present perfect and preterite which challenges also the position of many scholars, such as Gersbach (1982), Semejuk (1981), Trier (1964 -1965), Hauser-Suida / Hopper Beugel (1972), Eroms (1984), Thieroff (1992), Dorow (1996), Henning (2000), Buchwald (2005a) and Litvinov (1969), who claimed semantic overlap between both double present perfect and past perfect and the traditional tenses.

In conclusion, my analysis shows how German speakers created two new constructions from an existing grammaticalized form. It also provides support for Fraizyngier’s framework of grammaticalization, as well as some new insights for the diverse implications of grammaticalization to language change.

Selected references

Lopez-Couso, M.J., Seoane, E. (ed). (2008). Rethinking Grammaticalization. Amsterdam: John Benjamins B. V.

Bybee, J. (2006). From usage to grammar: the mind’s response to repetition. Project Muse. Language, Volume 82, Number 4.

Bybee, J. (2007). Frequency of Use and the Organization of Language. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hopper, P., Traugott, E. (2003). Grammaticalization. Cambridge: University Press.

Kuroda, S. (1999). Perfektkonstruktionen im Deutschen. Tübingen: Buske Verlag.

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"“You Can’t Turn Us against Myself”: The Integrity of Conceptual Blends in Video Game Let’s Plays

Catherine Cook (Monash University)

The generic space is an important, but seemingly neglected, aspect of a conceptual blend. In this paper, I explore the importance of the generic space in blends between speakers and fictional entities. To do this, I use the spontaneous, spoken data of a group of video game let’s players.

This study builds on Tea and Lee’s 2004 study of conceptual blending in a video game. I aim to extend Tea and Lee’s study by focusing primarily on the generic space, which they leave out of their discussion. Focusing on first person, speaker-inclusive blends between player and character, I investigate the effect certain in-game events have on a conceptual blend, and the generic space in particular. The generic space was found to be the foundation of a blend. Even a minor change in the generic space, whether through loss of shared experience or the inability to relate to a character on a human level, is detrimental to the integrity of a conceptual blend, resulting in a split between the player and character.

The importance of the shared experience and relatability in the player character relationship shows how important a personal connection is to the experience of gaming, and to reference use in general.

References

Tea, Alan J.H. and Lee, Benny P.H. (2004) Reference and Blending in a Computer Roleplaying Game. Journal of Pragmatics. Volume 36 (9). P. 1609-1633

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Immigrant Metaphors in American Presidential Elections

Ruiguo Cui (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) and Peter Teo (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)

Immigration has become a hotly contested and highly politicized issue in recent times. It is therefore unsurprising that it is subjected to much political caricaturing, in which immigrants and immigration are portrayed in various forms and figures of speech. This study focuses on the metaphors used to depict immigrants and immigration in the campaign speeches of American presidential candidates. Metaphor is a cognitive heuristic to facilitate understanding of abstract and less familiar concepts, and therefore represents a potentially potent tool for politicians to peddle their political ideologies. By analyzing the speeches of the primary presidential candidates taken from the website of The American Presidency Project, this study aims to uncover ideological meanings beneath the metaphorical construction of immigrants and immigration. Informed by Lakoff and Johnson’s contemporary theory of metaphor and using Steen’s framework to identify and analyze conceptual metaphors, 17 speech texts and 11 immigration manifestos from the Republican and Democratic candidates were analyzed. The analysis shows that the Republican candidates tend to represent immigrants and immigration as a natural disaster and threat through ‘flood’, ‘pollution’, ‘criminal’ and ‘rival’ metaphors. The Democratic candidates, on the other hand, tend to use ‘family’ and ‘dreamer’ metaphors to portray immigrants as people like ‘Us’ who are pursuing their American dreams. These findings offer evidence of how language can be manipulated to serve political or ideological purposes. The study therefore raises awareness of the ideological nature of language as well as the linguistic nature of ideology. With more porous geographic borders made possible through globalization, the issue of immigration is likely to escalate, simultaneously connecting and polarizing people around the world. In a small way, this study contributes to our understanding of the important role of language in this process by showing how language is not only constituted in, but also constitutive of, society.

Keywords: Immigration and immigrants; Conceptual metaphor; American presidential elections

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Reconstructing Pragmatic Borrowing along the Ramu River

Don Daniels (Australian National University) and Joseph Brooks (University of California, Santa Barbara)

Extremely little research has investigated prehistoric language contact in New Guinea, and what research has been done has focused primarily on contact between Papuan and Austronesian languages (e.g., Ross 1996, 2008). Almost nothing is known about contact between different groups of Papuan languages.

This paper describes reconstructed language contact between two genealogically unrelated groups: the Ramu languages, a branch of the Lower Sepik–Ramu family (Foley 2005) and the Sogeram languages, a branch of the Madang subgroup of Trans New Guinea (Pawley 2005). We argue that a pragmatic particle *=a was borrowed from Ramu into the common ancestor of three western Sogeram languages: Mand, Nend, and Manat. This particle is an enclitic that attaches to an intonational phrase and serves one of two functions, each of which has its own intonational properties. The first is to link a dependent clause or other unit to what follows it, as illustrated below with Chini (1) and Nend (2). The second function is exclamative: =a attaches to the end of an utterance to convey different kinds of emphasis, as illustrated with Chini (3) and Manat (4).

The reflexes in Ramu languages and Sogeram languages have a very high degree of functional parallelism (Andersen 2014), and also have a meaning and a phonological form that is very borrowable (Matras 1998, Fuller 2001). Since the languages are unrelated, it is most plausible to suppose that *=a was borrowed from one family into the other. This clitic is widespread in the Ramu family, being found in languages as far afield as Bore at the mouth of the Ramu River (Parrish 1989), but is restricted to the three western Sogeram languages and absent in the eastern ones which have no known historical contact with Ramu languages. Thus the distributional evidence suggests it was borrowed into Sogeram from Ramu. There is additional evidence that *=a was borrowed into the Sogeram languages, though, which comes in the form of peculiar effects that *=a has had on the lexicon of the languages it was borrowed into.

Proto-Sogeram has been reconstructed in some detail (Daniels 2015). In the Sogeram languages that have borrowed this enclitic, word-final *a was lost from pronouns and verbs but retained in nouns, adjectives, and adverbs. Sound change is not normally sensitive to word class, so this pattern demands an explanation. The explanation can be found in the interaction between the pragmatic and phonological properties of *=a and certain syntactic facts about the Sogeram languages. The Sogeram languages are verb-final, meaning that the verb often occurs at the end of an intonational unit. They also exhibit frequent zero anaphora, meaning that pronouns are used most often for emphasis and are thus more likely to receive their own intonation contour. Nouns, adjectives, and adverbs, however, are not likely to occur at the end of an intonational unit.

We thus reconstruct the following scenario. The enclitic *=a was borrowed from a Ramu language into the common ancestor of Mand, Nend, and Manat. After it was borrowed, tokens of the phoneme *a that happened to occur at the end of an intonational unit were reanalyzed as being tokens of the enclitic *=a. After reanalysis was complete, these words began to occur in non-emphatic contexts

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without their former final phoneme. Thus, for example, *ara ‘1PL.SBJ’ was reanalyzed as *ar=a ‘1PL.SBJ=EXCL’, which then resulted in the modern Nend and Manat pronoun ar ‘1PL’.

This study expands our sorely inadequate understanding of prehistoric language contact between speakers of Papuan languages. It also demonstrates that, with a thorough understanding of the historical phonology of a family, it is possible to reconstruct prehistoric contact developments in considerable detail, even going so far as to describe the effect that borrowed forms can have on native ones.

References

Andersen, Gisle. 2014. Pragmatic borrowing. Journal of Pragmatics 67. 17–33.

Daniels, Don. 2015. A Reconstruction of Proto-Sogeram: Phonology, Lexicon, and Morphosyntax. University of California, Santa Barbara Ph.D. dissertation.

Foley, William A. 2005. Linguistic prehistory in the Sepik–Ramu basin. In A. Pawley, R. Attenborough, J. Golson & R. Hide (eds.), Papuan Pasts, 109–144. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.

Fuller, Janet M. 2001. The principle of pragmatic detachability in borrowing: English-origin discourse markers in Pennsylvania German. Linguistics 39(2). 351–369.

Harris, Kyle. n.d. Nend texts. Electronic files, Pioneer Bible Translators.

Matras, Yaron. 1998. Utterance modifiers and universals of grammatical borrowing. Linguistics 36(2). 281–331.

Parrish, David. 1989. The Bore grammar essentials. Unpublished ms, Pioneer Bible Translators.

Pawley, Andrew. 2005. The chequered career of the Trans New Guinea hypothesis: Recent research and its implications. In A. Pawley, R. Attenborough, J. Golson & R. Hide (eds.), Papuan Pasts, 67–107. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.

Ross, Malcolm. 1996. Contact-induced change and the comparative method: Cases from Papua New Guinea. In M. Durie & M. Ross (eds.), The Comparative Method Reviewed, 180–217. New York: Oxford University Press.

Ross, Malcolm. 2008. A history of metatypy in the Bel languages. Journal of Language Contact 2(1). 149–164.

Examples

Chini (Ramu)

(1) Nu chindata gavɨgɨ.

nu chi=ndatɨ=a ga=avɨ-gɨ

2SG ascend.OPT=MED.IRR=LNK after=descend-OPT

‘Once you’ve gone up then come back down.’

Nend (Sogeram)

(2) O-e-m mɨra ikŋɨ-z=a ntɨ na-ma-r.

go-SS-CONT pig shoot-3SG.DS=LNK blood eat-HPST-3SG

‘He went and shot a pig and it drank the blood.’ (Harris n.d.)

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Chini (Ramu)

(3) Avɨnɨ mɨndara!

av-ɨnɨ mɨ=nda-rɨ=a

rain-PC it=stop-OPT=EXCL

‘The rain needs to stop already!’

Manat (Sogeram)

(4) A, amɨŋ=a! Inɨ-n pɨ krɨs=a!

ah mother.1.POSS=EXCL ND-ACC house bad=EXCL

‘Ah, Mom! This is a bad house!’

Abbreviations

ACC accusative

CONT continuative

DS different subject

EXCL exclamative

HPST historic past tense

IRR irrealis

LNK linker

MED medial verb

ND near deictic

SG singular

SS same subject

OBJ object

OPT optative

PC paucal

PL plural

POSS possessive

SBJ subject

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That’s my toy/This is my country: Verbal disputes in children’s Murrinhpatha

Lucinda Davidson (University of Melbourne)

This paper looks at instances of spontaneously occurring oppositional talk amongst children acquiring the Australian language, Murrinhpatha. The study draws on naturalistic speech data of 4 children, aged 3- 7, recorded in the remote community of Wadeye, NT. I examine verbal disputes between each focus child and a same aged peer. The disputes are analysed in terms of content, linguistic form and function, with a particular focus on claims of ownership. The results are then discussed from a developmental perspective.

Children’s peer disputes are considered to be highly revealing of social and communicative development (e.g. Church, 2009; Goodwin, 1982). Also referred to as ‘oppositional talk’ (Corsaro & Maynard, 1996), ‘conflict talk’ (e.g. Kyratzis, 2004) and ‘adversative episodes’ (Eisenberg & Garvey, 1981), disputes are defined as being “general disagreements in interaction which are displayed by the occurrence of some sort of opposition to an antecedent event” (Corsaro & Rizzo, 1990, p. 26). One aspect that is particularly common to children’s disputes is the issue of ownership, be it ownership of objects (e.g. Cobb-Moore, Danby, & Farrell, 2009), of physical spaces (e.g. Corsaro, 1997) or even of ideas (e.g. Theobald, 2013). It has been argued that children’s keen attendance to ownership in their peer interactions is informed by their environmental context (Theobald, 2013). Much research draws on data collected in schools, which are shared contexts, where objects and spaces are freely ‘claimable’.

This study instead presents data from a non-institutional, Australian Indigenous context. It thus provides a further layer of complexity to children’s claims of ownership, particularly with regards to space, in that each recording location is on land that is ‘owned’ by members of a particular Aboriginal clan. Traditional sociocultural categories, such as country and totems, continue to play an important role in the social organisation of Wadeye. This is indicated by socialisation practices that many caregivers engage in with young children. It is further evidenced in this study’s findings.

The analysis reveals a stark contrast between the younger children’s talk and that of the older children. The 3-4 year olds at times refer to country and totems in their disputes. In some instances these categories form the content of the oppositional talk, as in (1), while in other interactions they appear to be employed as an argumentative strategy, as in (2). Such uses were absent from the 5-7 year olds’ data. Results are discussed in relation to age-related patterns of oppositional talk, and also the development of children’s social identities.

Although small in scale, this study builds on prior research around children’s verbal disputes by analysing markedly different data from that which has been examined in many existing studies. Through looking at speakers of a non-Indo-European language, in a context that is not Western, middleclass, nor institutional, this study offers a window onto the developing conversational and social competence of children who are underrepresented in acquisition studies, and, in this particular context, have an extra layer of ownership to contend/play with in their verbal disputes.

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Examples

(1) LAMP_20140917_LD_01_00:01:20.153

T= Tabitha (3;6) C= Casimira (3;4) B and P = adult caregivers

(2) LAMP_20151106_LD_01_ 00:12:36.305

Here Dominic (4;9) is calling out to Piwu, his 4 year old cousin, who he has an on-going feud with. Alice is Dominic’s baby sister.

1. Piwu! * kamarl-ka thangku?! *

Piwu! * What are you staring at?! *

2. (10.0) (Dominic clambers onto the top of the car)

3. mere kangathi nhinhi da kanhiyu! (3) kangathi nan nukun (1.5)

4. nena ngay nukun kanhiyu (1.6) Alice-ka kantri-wa

This isn’t your mother’s country here! (3) It’s whatshername’s mother’s

country here (1.5) My nanna’s. (1.6) And it’s Alice’s country!

References

Church, A. (2009). Preference organisation and peer disputes. [electronic resource] : how young children resolve conflict. Farnham, England ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

Cobb-Moore, C., Danby, S., & Farrell, A. (2009). Young children as rule makers. Journal of Pragmatics, 41(8), 1477–1492.

Corsaro, W. A. (1997). The Sociology of Childhood (1st ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.

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Corsaro, W. A., & Maynard, D. W. (1996). Format tying in discussion and argumentation among Italian and American children. In D. I. Slobin, J. Gerhardt, A. Kyratzis, & J. Guo (Eds.), Social interaction, social context, and language: Essays in honor of Susan Ervin-Tripp (pp. 157–174). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Corsaro, W. A., & Rizzo, T. A. (1990). Disputes in the peer culture of American and Italian nursery school children. In A. D. Grimshaw (Ed.), Conflict Talk: Sociolinguistic investigations of arguments in conversations (pp. 21–66). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Eisenberg, A. R., & Garvey, C. (1981). Children’s use of verbal strategies in resolving conflicts 1. Discourse Processes, 4(2), 149–170.

Goodwin, M. H. (1982). Processes of dispute management among urban black children. American Anthropologist, 9, 76–96.

Kyratzis, A. (2004). Talk and interaction among children and the co-construction of peer groups and peer culture. Annual Review of Anthropology, 625–649.

Theobald, M. (2013). Ideas as ‘possessitives’: Claims and counter claims in a playground dispute. Journal of Pragmatics, 45(1), 1–12.

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Do serial verb constructions describe single events? A study of co-speech gestures in Avatime

Rebecca Defina (University of Melbourne)

Events occur in a continuous stream all around us, yet we think and talk about them as discreet units. Many researchers in linguistics and psychology alike have assumed a tight, even one-to-one relationship between the units we divide events into for thinking and speaking. However, such a relationship has not been firmly established and indeed there is no strong agreement regarding the appropriate linguistic units. Some researchers talk about events relating to verbs, such as when Malaia (2014:89) says that ‘During perception, humans constantly and automatically segment reality into individualized event (verb) units’. In contrast, others speak of events relating to clauses e.g. when Evans (2010:5) discusses ‘the mapping between the semantic level of ‘event’ and the syntactic level of ‘clause’’. Often a clause will contain only one finite verb and there is little distinction between these two positions. However, this is not the case with serial verb constructions which therefore provide an excellent case for testing these positions.

Serial verb constructions are single clauses containing more than one verb with no indication of subordination or coordination. They have generally been claimed to refer to single conceptual events (e.g. Aikhenvald 2006; Comrie 1995). However, there have also been suggestions that they refer to complexes of events with each verb referring to its own subevent (e.g. Baker & Harvey 2010; Pawley 2008). Evidence to support either position has so far been elusive (Senft 2008).

The present study applies a new method to the search for evidence concerning the relationship between these linguistic and conceptual event units. Research on co-speech gestures (e.g. Kita & Özyürek 2003) suggests they are produced in parallel to speech but from the same conceptual message. This makes them an excellent tool for investigating the event structures referred to by different syntactic structures. In particular it suggests the following prediction: if serial verb constructions are used to refer to single conceptual events then they should occur with single event gestures overlapping the entire construction, whereas other multiverb constructions referring to multiple events should occur with multiple, distinct event gestures.

The serializing language Avatime (Ka-Togo, Kwa, Niger-Congo) was examined here as a case study. Avatime is spoken by around 15000 people in seven villages in the south-eastern Ghana. Serial verb constructions are a frequent used construction type, constituting roughly 25% of Avatime utterances. The alignment between gestural units relating to events and syntactic units was compared over 45 minutes of speech taken from four monologues delivered by four different speakers.

Results showed that serial verb constructions indeed tended to occur with single event gestures overlapping the entire construction. Moreover, they never occurred with multiple, distinct event gestures. In contrast, other multiverbal constructions frequently occurred with multiple event gestures. This suggests serial verb constructions are in fact used to refer to single conceptual events and supports a connection between clausal units and conceptual event units.

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References

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2006. Serial verb constructions in typological perspective. In Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald & R. M. W. Dixon (eds.), Serial verb constructions: A cross-linguistic typology, 1–68. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Baker, Brett & Mark Harvey. 2010. Complex predicate formation. In Mengistu Amberber, Brett Baker & Mark Harvey (eds.), Complex predicates: Cross-linguistic perspectives on event structure, 13–47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Comrie, Bernard. 1995. Serial verbs in Haruai (Papua New Guinea) and their theoretical implications. In J. Bouscaren, J. Franckel & S. Robert (eds.), Langues et langage: Problèmes et raisonnement en linguistique, mélanges offerts à Antoine Culioli, 25–37. Paris: University Presses of France.

Evans, Nicholas. 2010. Complex events, propositional overlay, and the special status of reciprocal clauses. In Sally Rice & John Newman (eds.), Empirical and experimental methods in cognitive/functional research. Stanford: CSLI Publictaions.

Kita, Sotaro & Asli Özyürek. 2003. What does cross-linguistic variation in semantic coordination of speech and gesture reveal?: Evidence for and interface representation of spatial thinking and speaking. Journal of Memory and Language 48. 16–32. doi:10.1016/S0749-596X(02)00505-3.

Malaia, Evie. 2014. It still isn’t over: Event boundaries in language and perception. Language and Linguistics Compass 8(3). 89–98. doi:10.1111/lnc3.12071.

Pawley, Andrew. 2008. Compact versus narrative serial verb constructions in Kalam. In Gunter Senft (ed.), Serial verb constructions in Austronesian and Papuan languages, 171–202. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.

Senft, Gunter. 2008. Event conceptualisation and event report in serial verb constructions in Kilivila: towards a new approach to research an old phenomenon. In Gunter Senft (ed.), Serial verb constructions in Austronesian and Papuan languages, 203–230. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics Publishers.

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Testing factivity tests: ‘the fact that’ in Spanish and Portuguese

Manuel Delicado Cantero (ANU) and Patrícia Amaral (Indiana University)

Since the seminal work of Kiparsky and Kiparsky (1970), the expressions the fact of/that, el hecho de (Spanish) and o facto de (Portuguese) have been used as a standard test for factivity of predicates, as in (1) and (2). In Spanish el hecho de is also analysed as a paraphrasis of the clausal nominalization el que (3) (Demonte 1977, Serrano 2014); while el que has recently been proved to not be restricted to factivity (Serrano 2014), the former continues to be used as a reliable test for factivity (Serrano 2014, a.o.). However, we document and analyse evidence which reveals non-factive interpretations of this expression both in Spanish and Portuguese under specific semantic conditions, showing that it is not an infallible test of factivity. Naturally-occurring data from both languages provide evidence for the existence of factive and non-factive interpretations.

Our data show the contribution of both lexico-semantic and syntactic constraints of the interpretation of the nouns hecho (Spanish) and facto (Portuguese). Examples in which the complement of el hecho de and o facto de is not true are given in (4)-(7). Such uses show that the (non-)factivity of the complement of the noun fact depends on the veridicality of the overall sentence. The nouns el hecho de and o facto de may receive a non-factive interpretation under two types of conditions: (i) the non-veridicality of the predicate that selects for el hecho de; e.g. verbs meaning ‘render difficult’, ‘cast doubt’, ‘deny’, as in (4)-(6), or (ii) through the negation of positive implicative verbs like consentir ‘allow’ (Karttunen 1971), as in (7).

On the other hand, factive interpretations are obtained with aspectual and change of state verbs like comenzar (‘begin’), seguirse (‘continue’), and a range of veridical contexts including evaluative verbs like disgustar (‘not please’) and constructions like se demostró (‘it was proved’), es cierto (‘it is true’), and sucedió (‘it happened’), as in (8). The data highlight the importance of considering the veridicality properties of the whole sentence in order to re-examine the validity of commonly used factivity tests across languages (Schulz 2003).

This paper contributes to the discussion on the syntax of factivity and clausal nominalization in Ibero-Romance and other languages (Serrano 2014, a.o.) and to the current research on the semantic compositionality of so-called ‘constructions/collocations’ (Mendívil 1999, Alonso 2004). It also brings a cross-linguistic perspective to current debates on the nature of veridicality (Karttunen and Zaenen 2005).

Examples

(1) María lamenta (el hecho de) que Pedro esté triste. [Span.]

‘Mary regrets (the fact) that Peter is sad’

(2) Lamento (o facto de) que a casa tenha sido vendida. (Barbosa 2013: 1847) [Port.]

‘I regret (the fact) that the house has been sold.’

(3) María lamenta (el) que Pedro esté triste. [Span.]

‘Mary regrets (the fact) that Peter is sad’

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(4) las actitudes hacia las mujeres que resultan de este desequilibrio de poder dificultan el hecho de que las mujeres puedan salir de estas situaciones violentas. [Span.]

‘the attitudes towards women that result from this power imbalance stand in the way of the fact that women may get out of such violent situations’

http://goo.gl/wBxi1s [25-1-16]

(5) A maioria das pessoas questionadas também afirma que duvida do facto de que, um dia, possa realmente haver processo contra Nyimpine Chissan [Port.]

‘The majority of the people who were questioned also claim that they doubt the fact that, one day, there may actually be a [judicial] case against Nympine Chissan’ www.rsf.org/IMG/pdf/3anosCardoso.pdf [3-2-16]

(6) E a propósito de estar com alguém, tem sido lançados imensos rumores sobre Ed Sheeran… Porém, o cantor negou o facto de haver qualquer envolvimento romântico [Port.] http://goo.gl/87jm1V [3-2-16]

‘And regarding being in a romantic relation, there have been many rumors about Ed Sheeran…However, the singer denied the fact that there is any romantic involvement’

(7) Pensó en irse varias veces pero su orgullo era más grande y no consentía el hecho de irse de allí cuando había sido el quien había interrumpido su descanso.

‘He thought about leaving many times but his pride was stronger and would not agree to the fact of leaving when he had been the one who had interrupted his rest’

http://saintseiyaeternal.foro.pro/t292p10-de-paseo-en-los-jardines [11-4-16]

(8) sucedió el hecho de que había un panal de abejas y mucha gente salió picoteada. [Span.]

‘[I]t happened the fact that there was a honeycomb and many came out with stings’

www.lapoliciaca.com/nota-roja/niegan-balacera-pero-hallan-armas/ [17-7-15]

References

Alonso Ramos, M. 2004. Las Construcciones con Verbo de Apoyo. Madrid: Visor.

Barbosa, P. 2013. “Implicação e pressuposição na subordinação argumental finita”. In Gramática do Português, E. Raposo et al. (eds.), 1821-1897. Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian.

Demonte, V. 1977. La Subordinación Sustantiva. Madrid: Cátedra.

Karttunen, L. 1971. The Logic of English Predicate Complement Constructions. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club.

Karttunen, L. & Zaenen, A. 2005. “Veridicity”. In Annotating, Extracting and Reasoning about Time and Events, G. Katz et al. (eds.), Dagstuhl (Germany). urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-3148

Kiparsky, P. & Kiparsky, C. 1970. “Fact”. In Progress in Linguistics, M. Bierwisch & K.E. Heidolph (eds.), 143-173. The Hague: Mouton.

Mendívil Giró, J. L. 1999. Las Palabras Disgregadas. Zaragoza: Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza.

Schulz, P. 2003. Factivity: its Nature and Acquisition. Tübingen: M. Niemeyer.

Serrano, S. 2014. “The article at the left periphery”. In Left Sentence Peripheries in Spanish, A. Dufter & Á.S. Octavio de Toledo (eds.), 185-214. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

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Affordances for multilingual learning in remote Australian communities

Samantha Disbray (Charles Darwin University)

Aronin and Singleton’s (2012) model of affordances provides a powerful lens to capture complex relationships that impact on languages teaching and learning. In this paper it is applied to bi- and multilingual learning in remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory now. Affordances come in all shapes and sizes; material, cognitive, evaluative and emotional (p. 319). The history of a speech community, its language and literacy practices and community and learner attitudes to these, along with local and official language status constitute affordances. In school settings, the inventory includes school policy and timetabling, curricula, the professionalization and status of language teachers and the availability of resources for learners. Affordances cluster together and impact on the languages teaching and learning at a given time.

The NT Bilingual Education Program provided an important affordance for bi- and multilingual learning during its 45 year history (1973-2008) (Devlin, Disbray, & Devlin, forthcoming). Now very few schools operate Bilingual Education or Indigenous Language and Culture programs, however collaborations with partners outside of schools are providing new affordances for multilingual teaching and learning. The burgeoning domains of digital technology, cultural and land management embrace and enhance local knowledge in remote contexts. Here educators, community members, through collaborations with diverse partners, identify and realise affordances that allow innovative bi- and multilingual language and cultural teaching and learning practices, in and out of schools. The legacy of the NT Bilingual Education Program underpins many of these and so acts an affordance for new developments.

References

Aronin, L., & Singleton, D. (2012). Affordances theory in multilingualism studies. Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching, 2(3), 311-331.

Devlin, B., Disbray, S., & Devlin, N. (Eds.). (forthcoming). History of bilingual education in the Northern Territory: People, programs and policies. Singapore: Springer Publishing.

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The Acquisition of variation: A case study of Polish and Chinese migrants in Dublin, Ireland

Chloé Diskin (University of Melbourne)

Variationist sociolinguistics has offered us many insights into the study of language varieties, how languages change over time and how certain groups use specific features to index style or identity, all while adopting a rigorous quantitatively-oriented methodology (Bayley 2013). However, variationist sociolinguistics has tended to focus on ‘native’ or L1 speakers of a variety, either in monolingual or bilingual settings (see Sankoff 2013). There has to date been limited attention paid to ‘non-native’ or L2 speakers and how they negotiate a new and complex sociolinguistic environment, particularly in the context of migration (but see Adamson & Regan 1991; Corrigan 2015; Drummond 2012; Meyerhoff & Schleef 2014; Nestor 2013).

Taking a sociolinguistic approach to Second Language Acquisition (SLA), this paper draws on a corpus of over 50 hours of sociolinguistic interviews (Labov 1984) with 48 participants (21 Polish migrants, 20 Chinese migrants and 7 native Irish) recorded by the author in Dublin, Ireland in 2012. Taking discourse-pragmatic variation as its focus, the paper investigates the frequencies, functions and syntactic positions of over 2,800 tokens of the discourse-pragmatic markers (DPMs) ‘like’, ‘you know’ and ‘I mean’, as well as quotative complementizers such as ‘be like’ or ‘go’. While discourse-pragmatic variables have “not traditionally fallen under the remit of variationist sociolinguistics” it has been recognised that they “carry social meaning, perform indispensable functions in social interaction and constitute essential elements of sentence grammar” (Pichler 2010: 582). Moreover, they have been examined in migratory contexts to measure the degree to which migrants are integrated into the new community (see Hellermann & Vergun 2007; Sankoff et al. 1997). This paper examines how such variation is conditioned by both intra-linguistic and extra-linguistic variables, including nationality, sex, proficiency in English, length of residence in Ireland (LOR), level of education and reason for migrating.

Employing statistical tests such as mixed effects regression, the results show that after approximately three years LOR in Ireland, migrants begin to use DPMs at comparable rates to the ‘native’ Irish; however overall language proficiency does not have an effect. This indicates that degree of exposure to native speakers is a crucial aspect of the acquisition of discourse-pragmatic features. This may be compounded by the absence or ‘invisibility’ of DPMs in formal classroom discourse and English language textbooks (Liao 2009: 314), which was the primary context in which the migrants in this study had previously been exposed to English.

Variation was also constrained by the syntax, with the ‘native’ Irish, as compared to the Poles and Chinese, using significantly higher rates of ‘like’ in clause-final position, which has been reported to be a dialectal feature of Irish English and other ‘peripheral’ varieties of English, such as Tyneside English in the UK (Bartlett 2013; Kallen 2006). In this case, reason for migrating also had an effect, with migrants who had migrated to pursue employment more likely to use clause-final ‘like’ than those who had migrated to pursue further education, or those who were fulfilling a desire to travel and ‘see the world’. This suggests that certain discourse-pragmatic features may be used as a tool to integrate into local social and professional networks. As regards the quotative system, only higher proficiency migrants had acquired quotative ‘be like’, demonstrating that the acquisition of ‘like’ at the syntax-discourse interface, which is at a “higher level” of language use (Tsimpli & Sorace 2006:

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653) may be more complex when it functions as a quotative complementizer, as compared to its use as a DPM, where it may be acquired as a single lexical item.

References

Adamson, Hugh Douglas & Vera Regan. 1991. The Acquisition of Community Speech Norms by Asian Immigrants Learning English as a Second Language: A Preliminary Study. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 13.1–22.

Bartlett, Joanne. 2013. "Oh I just talk normal, like": A corpus-based, longitudinal study of constituent-final like in Tyneside English. Newcastle Working Papers in Linguistics 19.1–21.

Bayley, Robert. 2013. The Quantitative paradigm. The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, ed. by J.K. Chambers & N. Schilling, 85–107. Malden, MA; Oxford; Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

Corrigan, Karen P. 2015. "I always think of people here, you know, saying 'like' after every sentence": The dynamics of discourse-pragmatic markers in Northern Irish English. Pragmatic Markers in Irish English, ed. by C.P. Amador-Moreno, K. Mc Cafferty & E. Vaughan, 37–64. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Drummond, Rob. 2012. Aspects of identity in a second language: ING variation in the speech of Polish migrants living in Manchester, U.K. Language Variation and Change 24.107–33.

Hellermann, John & Andrea Vergun. 2007. Language which is not taught: The discourse marker use of beginning adult learners of English. Journal of Pragmatics 39.157–79.

Kallen, Jeffrey. 2006. Arrah, Like, You Know: The Dynamics of Discourse-Marking in I.C.E.-Ireland. Paper presented at the Sociolinguistics Symposium 16, University of Limerick, Ireland.

Labov, William. 1984. Field methods of the project on linguistic change and variation. Language in Use, ed. by J. Baugh & J. Sherzer. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.

Liao, Silvie. 2009. Variation in the use of discourse markers by Chinese teaching assistants in the U.S. Journal of Pragmatics 41.1313–28.

Meyerhoff, Miriam & Erik Schleef. 2014. Hitting an Edinburgh Target: Immigrant Adolescents' Acquisition of Variation in Edinburgh English. Sociolinguistics in Scotland, ed. by R. Lawson, 103–28. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Nestor, Niamh. 2013. The positional distribution of discourse like—A case study of young Poles in Ireland. Linguistic and cultural acquisition in a migrant community, ed. by D. Singleton, V. Regan & E. Debaene, 49–74. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Pichler, Heike. 2010. Methods in discourse variation analysis: Reflections on the way forward. Journal of Sociolinguistics 14.581–608.

Sankoff, Gillian. 2013. Linguistic outcomes of bilingualism. The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, ed. by J.K. Chambers & N. Schilling, 501–18. Malden, MA; Oxford; Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

Sankoff, Gillian, Pierette Thibault, Naomi Nagy, Hélène Blondeau, Marie-Odile Fonollosa & Lucie Gagnon. 1997. Variation in the Use of Discourse Markers in a Language Contact Situation. Language Variation and Change 9.191–218.

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Tsimpli, Ianthi & Antonella Sorace. 2006. Differentiating Interfaces: L2 performance in syntax-semantics and syntax-discourse phenomena. BUCLD Proceedings 30.653–64.

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An acquisition of syntactic elements of repair in English learners’ conversational interaction: from the perspective of second language acquisition

Kaori Doi (Institute of Technologists)

This study analyzes conversational repairs in English learners’ interactions from the perspective of syntax and second language acquisition. Most of previous studies about “repair” have analyzed the types of repair, the organization of it and repair position in interaction. Relationships between repair and syntax have received relatively little attention except for the study by Fox, Hayashi and Jasperson (1996) that focuses on the relationships between syntax and repair and demonstrates the difference of repair between languages that can be attributed by syntax of both languages. However, most of previous researches on repair have not studied the relationships between repair and language acquisition. This study focuses on the syntactic features of repairs and investigates how learners of English acquire “how to use repairs” in English (their second language).

The data in this study consists of conversational interactions videotaped and transcribed in detail in which pairs talk about given topics freely. English conversation data in which Japanese speakers have to communicate only in English are analyzed. This study uses TOEIC as a criterion of English proficiency and conversation data by participants in conversation. The study divides learners’ level of English by TOEIC score into advanced and basic level learners of English.

This study investigates repairs in learners’ conversational interactions at two levels (advanced and basic level) and analyzes what kind of repairs they use in their second language from the perspective of syntactic elements. Furthermore, the study analyzes how learners acquire repairs and difficulty they have in acquiring them. This study also demonstrate which syntactic system learners use, whether they acquire the syntactic system of their second language or they use the one of their first language when they have to speak in second language.

Keywords: repair, Second language acquisition, conversation analysis

References

Fox, B. A., Hayashi, M., & Jasperson, R. (1996). Resources and repair: a cross-linguistic study of syntax and repair. In E. Ochs, E. A. Schegloff, & S. A. Thompson, Interaction and grammar (pp. 185-237). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Areal typology, history, and a central Bhutanese language

Mark Donohue (Australian National University) and Naomi Peck (Australian National University)

In this talk, we will discuss an unusual cluster of word order restrictions that apply in Bumthang, a Tibeto-Burman language of central Bhutan. After presenting data showing the order of elements in the noun phrase, which contains both pre-nominal and post-nominal constituents, we examine the implications of an investigation of the combinations of these word order facts for the typological canon, and the unwritten history of the central Himalayas.

Examining the distribution of typological features in languages can allow us to make inferences about the past histories of the societies that speak them. This is especially true when we encounter an unusual feature or features (for example, the existence of high vowels in a language is uninformative, while the existence of front rounded vowels can be probative). Morphosyntactically, we could argue that the absence of tense-marking in a language is (areally) significant, while the presence of definiteness marking has a (roughly) random distribution in the languages of the world.

The order of elements in clauses or (noun) phrases has been the subject of much discussion, analysis, and debate in linguistics (e.g., Greenberg 1964, Dryer 1992, Hawkins, Tomlinson, etc.). Most discussion has centred on the order of subject, object and verb, complicated by pragmatic factors (such as topic and focus positions – e.g., Aissen 1992); despite this, and despite much discussion of the order of NP modifiers with respect to the (head) noun, little overall work has been done at the noun phrase level examining the combinations of constituents. We examine the overall order of elements in the NP in Bumthang, and show how examining pre-head and post-head modifiers with respect to each other as well as with respect to the head noun allows us to arrive at more nuanced typological comparisons between language.

After comparing the Bumthang data with data from other noun phrase structures worldwide, we discovered that the Bumthang NP order is similar to only one other language – that of Zhang-Zhung, a language from an ancient pre-Buddhist empire of western Tibet. Given the geographical distribution of these features, and the local geography of Bumthang within Bhutan, we can thus infer that Bumthang retains the last traces of a now-extinct linguistic ecology. We assert that this ecology prevailed across the higher Himalayas and surrounding Tibetan plateau prior to the levelling that occurred with the spread of (central) Tibetan influence and the influx of influences from Indian polities to the south.

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Triggers of fronting in Toba Batak

Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (National University of Singapore)

Summary: I present novel data from Toba Batak (Austronesian; northern Sumatra), including examples where two nominal arguments are fronted to the clause periphery. This will include fronting of active patients and passive agents which are otherwise immobile (Schachter, 1984; Cole and Hermon, 2008). Such data counterexemplifies Cole and Hermon’s approach to Toba Batak clause structure, where only one nominal argument can be fronted at a time. The data presented motivates the idea that fronting of arguments to preverbal position is licensed by particular formal features, including wh/focus.

Background: Toba Batak exhibits a two-way Malay/Indonesian-type voice alternation, illustrated in (1). Following previous literature, I gloss the two voices as ACT(IVE) and PASS(IVE). Voice tracks the choice of nominal argument which acts as the subject (in bold in (1)). While the subject is typically sentence-final, it may be fronted to preverbal position as in (2). Referential subjects are preverbal in this way about one third of the time, according to Cumming’s (1984) corpus study. Wh-questioning, focus-fronting, and relativization must target the subject (3). For transitive verbs, the non-subject core argument must be strictly verb-adjacent (Schachter 1984).

Cole and Hermon (2008) show data akin to (4), showing that the two core arguments of a verb cannot be simultaneously fronted, when one is a wh-word and the other is simply referential. They take this as evidence for a particular derivational account of Toba Batak clauses, where only one nominal argument is allowed to be fronted at a time.

New data — simultaneous fronting of wh and focused arguments: New data as in (5) shows that simultaneous fronting of both core arguments is possible, as long as the arguments are a wh-word and an only-marked focused argument. The availability of such structures are unpredicted by Cole and Hermon’s account. The contrast between examples in (4) and (5) show the importance of formal focus (only-marking) which makes such word orders possible.

Proposal: I follow the view that Toba Batak clauses are all underlyingly verb-initial. I propose that fronting of nominals is then licensed by two formal features: wh/focus and nominal. These features do not necessitate fronting, but make them possible—wh-in-situ and in-situ focus is possible, which will be shown (data not included here), and the fronting of referential subjects is optional (1–2). The patterns of grammatical and ungrammatical word orders can be explained by the following procedure:

First look for wh/focus + nominal together; if such a target exists:

optionally front

continue to look for additional targets of wh/focus + nominal together

If and only if no target exists for wh/focus and nominal together:

look for wh/focus and nominal separately and optionally front such targets

This procedure explains the multiple fronting of wh/focus core arguments in (3), the unavailability of wh and referential core arguments in (3), while preserving the possibility of optional fronting of

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referential subjects in (2). The presentation will also include a proposal for the mechanism of voice morphology in Toba Batak (see also some notes below).

Multiple fronting with adjunct wh: In contrast to wh-argument fronting, with wh-adjunct fronting, referential (non-wh/focus) nominal arguments can be simultaneously (6), reminiscent of the so-called ‘bodyguard’ construction in Malagasy (Keenan 1976). This is predicted by my account, where wh/focus can attract the wh-adjunct independently of the nominal.

Implications for Austronesian voice: The new data here has two important implications for Austronesian voice. First, the examples in (5) show that, when multiple core arguments are fronted, the subject argument (whose choice is tracked by voice morphology on the verb) must be in immediately preverbal position. Second, the availability of multiple fronting as in (5)—made available by the combination of wh and focus on two core arguments—casts doubt on previous descriptions of Austronesian languages which have been described as allowing only one nominal argument to be fronted at a time, just as Toba Batak had been in the past.

Examples:

Abbreviations: PN = proper name marker; ACT = active; PASS = passive

(1) Two-way voice alternation (Schachter, 1984:123):

a. Mang-ida si Ria si Torus. b. Di-ida si Torus si Ria.

ACT-see PN Ria PN Torus PASS-see PN Torus PN Ria

‘Torus saw Ria.’ ‘Ria was seen by Torus’ (= ‘T. saw R.’)

(2) The subject may be topicalized to preverbal position:

a. Si Torus mang-ida si Ria. b. Si Ria di-ida si Torus.

PN Torus ACT-see PN Ria PN Ria PASS-see PN Torus

‘Torus saw Ria.’ (=1a) ‘Ria was seen by Torus’ (= 1b)

(3) Questioning must target the subject (same for relativization, not shown):

a. Ise {okmang/*di}-alang indahan? b. Aha {*maN/okdi}-tuhor si Poltak?

who {okACT/*PASS}-eat rice what {*ACT/okPASS}-buy PN Poltak

‘Who ate rice?’ ‘What did Poltak buy?’

(4) Wh-word and other argument cannot both be fronted, regardless of voice:

a. * Aha si Poltak maN/di-tuhor? b. * Ise pinahan-on mang/di-alang?

what PN Poltak ACT/PASS-buy who pork-this ACT/PASS-eat

Intended: ‘What did Poltak buy?’ Intended: ‘Who ate this pork?’

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(5) Simultaneous fronting of wh and only-marked arguments (cf 3):

a. Aha holan si P. {okmang/*di}-alang? b. Ise holan buku-on {*man/okdi}-jahar?

what only PN P. {okACT/*PASS}-eat who only book-this {*ACT/okPASS}-read

‘What did only Poltak eat?’ ‘Who read only this book?’

(6) Wh-adjunct can be fronted together with a referential subject:

a. Andigan si Poltak maN-tuhor buku? b. Andigan buku-i di-tuhor si Poltak?

when PN Poltak ACT-buy book when book-that PASS-buy PN Poltak

‘When did Poltak buy a book?’ ‘When did Poltak buy the book?’

References

Cole and Hermon 2008. VP raising in a VOS language, Syntax 11

Cumming, Susanna. 1984. The syntax and semantics of prepredicate word order in Toba Batak, in Schachter, ed., Studies in the structure of Toba Batak, UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics.

Keenan, Edward. 1976. Remarkable Subjects in Malagasy. In Li and Thompson, ed., Subject and Topic.

Schachter 1984. Semantic-role-based syntax in Toba Batak, in Schachter, ed., Studies in the structure of Toba Batak, UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics.

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Context and subeventual structure in Depictive secondary predication

Jake Farrell (University of Melbourne)

Depictives are a subclass of secondary predicates, and are chiefly notable for adding an ‘extra’ or second predicate to a sentence, which denotes a property that holds of its predicated subject at the time of the matrix event of the sentence:

(1) Johni arrived drunki

An issue for this is how to fix the size and overlap of the depictive property with the matrix event. Depictives are unlike adverbial modification in that they hold directly of their subject, and not just the event. Compare:

(2) i) Johni drove the car drunki

ii) John drove the car drunkenly

The adverbial form of the sentence only requires that John drive the car in a drunken manner (e.g. if he was acting/pretending to be drunk), while the depictive requires that John actually be drunk. So, depictives have a closer, factual link to its predicated participant. This raises a number of questions–- how should depictives be composed with the matrix event, and do depictives introduce states or events? Rothstein (2004) uses a summing operation, which takes two atomic events and forms a singular event which is the summing of these. As a consequence of this, Rothstein (2004: 70) argues that English depictives are never VPs, are always homogeneous, and that the the matrix event determines the size of the summed event. This faces a number of issues. First, VP depictives do appear to be possible:

(3) i) Peteri and Johni arrived at the tomb [VP noticing the linen clothes and not Jesus]i (Google)

ii) Johni died [VP whistling Ode to Joy]i (Truswell 2007: 1378)

If (3ii) is negated, then this can only mean either John didn’t die, or he died but wasn’t whistling, which shows that the adjunct is inside the scope of negation (c.f. “John didn’t arrive, hungry”). Second, (3i) is telic, and so is not homogeneous, which poses issues for Rothstein’s account of a summing operation. Thirdly (3ii) shows that the temporal overlap for whistling can be construed in terms of “immediate temporal precedence” (Truswell 2007: 1378), as the culmination of the event of John dying cannot have John whistling, as dead men cannot (usually) whistle. However, the semantics of the depictive construction also require the ability for the depictive in (2i) to be interpreted as holding for the entirety of the event, and not just immediate temporal precedence. This need for a finer structure for events and the temporal overlap of the depictive can be seen in other examples:

(4) i) They dissected the animali alivei

ii) Mary threw the balli to John weti (...but it was dry by the time he caught it)

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iii) John cooked the chickeni frozeni (...but it wasn’t frozen by the time he was finished)

So while it is the case that there must be some overlap between the matrix event and the depictive, it can’t be the case that there must be a full overlap. As such, there needs to be a way of partitioning the depictive to hold only of certain times of the matrix event. This variance would be partially conditioned by verb class, but also by pragmatic world-knowledge and context; both depictives in (4) could describe any number of similar situations, as long as the secondary predicate doesn’t hold at the end of the matrix event, or entail that it must have the property at the culmination of the action. I argue that this can be captured by using a cover (Cov) in the spirit of Schwarzschild (1996). How long the property of the depictive applies in the matrix event is contextually determined, with the relevant subparts of the events decided on depending on the situation and pragmatic knowledge.

References

Rothstein, S. (2004). Structuring events: A study in the semantics of aspect. John Wiley & Sons.

Schwarzschild, R. (1996). Pluralities (Vol. 61). Springer Science & Business Media.

Truswell, R. (2007). Extraction from adjuncts and the structure of events. Lingua, 117(8), 1355-1377.

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Intercultural and Native Speakers’ Casual Conversations: A Comparative Study of Involvement and Humour

Yusnita Febrianti (University of Adelaide), Elise Lopez (University of Adelaide), Thao Vu (University of Adelaide), and Jie Yang (University of Adelaide)

Research on spoken language has mainly focused on spoken discourses in settings such as classroom and workplace. Another important use of speech, casual conversation, has received much less attention. Casual conversation is a functional and semantic activity. It is a site for the establishment and development of social identity and interpersonal relationships; a way of conveying who we are and of interacting with others in different contexts. This paper reports a comparative study on two casual conversations, which naturally occurred in two different settings; between international students from different language backgrounds and between native speakers of English. The texts were constructed in everyday social settings and reflect the role of language in the construction of social identities and interpersonal relations. The two settings display different uses of language to construct solidarity, intimacy and affiliation. The study uses Eggins and Slade’s (1997) functional and semiotic theoretical framework for analysing casual conversation, in order to describe and explain two aspects of casual talk; namely involvement and humour. Using a bottom-up approach, the conversations are analysed to look at the use of naming, technicality, swearing and slang for the purpose of involvement. Humour in each conversation is analysed through language devices that trigger laughter from participants. Situational and cultural influences on meaning-making are explored and compared in the analysis of involvement and humour in the two different settings. This paper has implications for applied linguists, social semioticians and teachers of English as a second or foreign language.

Keywords: casual conversation, humour, involvement.

References

S. Eggins & D. Slade. 1997. Analysing Casual Conversation. London: Cassell.

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The Fuzziness of Interlanguage (IL) Truth and Presuppositions

Marie Fellbaum Korpi (Sydney University)

In the latter part of the 19th century, Frege put forth the idea that no theory of meaning in language is complete unless it accounts for the connection between truth and the meaning of the words and larger linguistic units, and their reference to things in the world. Since the days of Aristotle, logicians and philosophers had appealed to logic to explain the truth conditions of propositions in natural language; truth in semantics is defined according to the truth in a proposition. Building on Frege and Aristotelian logic, 20th century model theoretic semanticists developed a system of explaining meaning by applying techniques from mathematical logic to the semantics of natural language Dowty, et al (1981). Kamp & Reyle (1993) further developed this in Discourse Representation Theory (DRT).

This paper Investigates meaning and its connections to referents in the real world of IL discourse by using notions from DRT and model theoretic semantics. A task-based corpus of twenty-four hours of nonnative to nonnative learners (NNS-NNS) of English IL speech was analysed using this empirical data rather than pairs from semantic modeling. Utterances with non-referring reference within the discourse and between the real world of the four tasks were disclosed. Constraining the context using the information in the IL discourse, the tasks, and the set of presuppositions within the discourse and real world of the tasks, the truth of the utterances is investigated following Frege. This reveals patterns of truth values in IL speech which can be used for the foundation of the systematic study of presupposition in the study of the development of meaning for second language learners. Specifically, types of presuppositions are isolated in the data based on their relation to the discourse and information in the tasks.

Keywords: interlanguage, discourse, presuppositions

References

Dowty D, R Wall & S Peters 1981 Introduction to Montague semantics v. 2. Dordrecht: Holland: Reidel Publishing Company.

Frege G 1892 ‘Uber Sinn und Bedeutung’ Zetschrift fur Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 100: 25-50.

Kamp H & Reyle U 1993 From Discourse to Logic Vol 2. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

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Vowel Harmony in Fanbyak, an Oceanic language of Vanuatu

Mike Franjieh (University of Newcastle)

Fanbyak, spoken on Ambrym Island, is one of the smaller languages of Vanuatu with around 100 speakers. Fanbyak shows a complex system of vowel harmony between the verb root, subject agreement prefixes and reduplicants. Data for this presentation comes from the current documentation of Fanbyak by the author.

Fanbyak vowel harmony rules show that the vowels of subject agreement prefixes and reduplicants either match or are higher than the vowel of the root. The basic rule of vowel harmony is height assimilation, as shown in table 1.

Root 3SG Subject Prefix Reduplicant Gloss

ler mwe-ler mwe-ler~ler flick

loo mo-loo mo-lo~loo` bathe

fuune mu-fuune mu-fu~fuune squeeze

libse mwi-libse mwi-lib~libse fan

Table 1: height assimilation

When the initial vowel of the root is the low vowel /a/, harmonised vowels are also raised and fronted to /e/, as shown in table 2.

Root 3SG Subject Prefix Reduplicant Gloss

taa mwe-taa mwe-te~taa sit

ka mwe-ka mwe-ke~ka fly

war mwe-war mwe-wer~war speak

Table 2: low to mid front vowel harmony

I argue that when vowel harmony also involves raising and fronting of the vowel this is a synchronic process that has developed from the Oceanic historical phenomena of low vowel dissimilation (Blust 1996; Lynch 2003). Historically, low vowel dissimilation occured when the initial vowel of two adjacent low vowels was raised and fronted. For example, Proto Oceanic *mata-na changed to mera-n ‘his/her eye’ in Fanbyak.

There are exceptions to the rules, where some low and mid height initial vowels of verb roots are raised to high vowels in the subject agreement prefixes and reduplicants, as in table 3.

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Root 3SG Subject Prefix Reduplicant Gloss

rang mwi-rang mwi-ring~rang cry

ken mwi-ken mwi-kin~ken be sharp

Table 3: low and mid to high vowel harmony

I argue that the data in table 3 is best understood through a diachronic lens, where the harmonised vowel matches a historically lost vowel that originally appeared before the remaining vowel of the verb root. I will chart the historical development of the roots to show how synchronic vowel harmony functions. This analysis is only possible due to the documentation and description of neighbouring related languages which has lead to the reconstruction of proto forms that explain idiosyncrasies in synchronic morpho-phonological rules.

References

Blust, Robert A. 1996. Low vowel dissimilation in Oceanic languages: An addendum. Oceanic Linguistics 35:305-309.

Lynch, John. 2003. Low vowel dissimilation in Vanuatu languages. Oceanic Linguistics 42:359-406

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What happens when linguists are NOT asked for their expertise: Why forensic transcription needs a pro-active approach from the discipline as a whole

Helen Fraser (independent researcher)

Forensic transcription is often seen as a branch of phonetics. This is perhaps because, when the law seeks assistance in interpreting covert recordings (‘bugs’ or ‘wiretaps’), it is most often in relation to a ‘disputed utterance’. These are cases where a particular phrase is open to alternative interpretations. A colourful example (French and Harrison 2006) involves a recording in which a recording indicates the deceased died ‘after wank off/one cough’. Resolving issues like this clearly requires expertise in phonetics (in this case the experts opted for ‘one cough’).

However, covert recordings are obtained for nearly every serious crime. Many are very indistinct throughout, not just in particular utterances. Citizens are often surprised to discover that in these cases, expert opinion is not sought to help with interpreting what is said in the recording. Rather transcripts prepared by detectives investigating the crime are admitted to ‘assist’ the court, with determination of the accuracy of their interpretation of key phrases left as a matter for the jury. Many linguists, regardless of their specific expertise in phonetics, or even in forensics, would recognise problems with this process (see references) – and indeed numerous cases of actual and potential injustice are known.

This paper outlines the legal concepts that allow police transcripts to be used in court, shows how these concepts conflict with basic principles of linguistic science, demonstrates the injustice that can arise, discusses what is involved in creating a better system, and enlists the contribution of linguists (with or without a background in phonetics) interested in bringing about change.

References

Bucholtz, M. (2009). Captured on tape: professional hearing and competing entextualizations in the criminal justice system. Text and Talk - an Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse & Communication Studies, 29(5), 503–523.

Eades, D. (1996). Verbatim courtroom transcripts and discourse analysis. In H. Kniffke (Ed.), Recent Developments in Forensic Linguistics (pp. 241–254). Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

Eades, D. (2010). Sociolinguistics and the Legal Process. Multilingual Matters.

Edwards, J. A. (2008). The transcription of discourse. In D. Schiffrin, D. Tannen, & H. E. Hamilton (Eds.), The Handbook of discourse analysis (pp. 321–348). Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Fraser, H. (2014). Transcription of indistinct forensic recordings: Problems and solutions from the perspective of phonetic science. Language and Law/Linguagem E Direito, 1(2), 5–21.

French, P., & Harrison, P. (2006). Investigative and evidential applications of forensic speech science. In A. Heaton-Armstrong (Ed.), Witness testimony: psychological, investigative and evidential perspectives (pp. 247–262).

Lapadat, J. C., & Lindsay, A. C. (1998). Examining Transcription: A Theory-Laden Methodology. Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association.

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Ochs, E. (1979). Transcription as theory. In E. Ochs & B. B. Schieffelin (Eds.), Developmental pragmatics (pp. 43–71). New York: Academic Press.

Roberts, C. (2006). Issues in transcribing spoken discourse. In Qualitative research methods.

Wray, A., & Bloomer, A. (2012). Transcribing speech orthographically. In Projects in Linguistics and Language Studies (pp. 195–204). London: Routledge.

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Out of sight and out of mind: Kuuk Thaayorre demonstrative ‘whatchamacallit’s

Alice Gaby (Monash University)

In Kuuk Thaayorre (Paman, Australia), demonstrative pronouns commonly function as ‘fillers’; lexical substitutes that fill a pause when the speaker is unable to provide the desired lexeme (akin to the English whatchamacallit and wossname, cf. Enfield 2002). Kuuk Thaayorre fillers additionally specify the degree of disruption caused to the conversation. For example, where a word’s omission is communicatively unproblematic, it is replaced by the proximal demonstrative pronoun (inhul ‘this one’). This is the case in example (1):

(1) ngul nhul irra yat… inhul, wanhul-ak.

then 3sgNOM to.there go:P.PFV this.one who-DAT

‘then she went off to that whatchamacallit [other man]’

This sentence was uttered to an addressee who was unfamiliar with the man in question—and his identity was not central to the story in any case—so the omission of his name was not a barrier to effective communication. In (2), however, the speaker replaces the forgotten word with the distal demonstrative pronoun (yuunhul ‘that one’), signalling that the disfluency is preventing him from communicating what he wants the addressee to know (i.e. that he previously worked as a policeman).

(2) mit kanpa ngay...

work before 1sg(NOM)

‘before that I worked…’

mit ngay kanpa yuunhul-ak rirk-m,

work 1sg(NOM) before that.one-DAT do-P.IPFV

‘before that I was working as a whatchamacallit’

policeman-ak rirk-m=ay

policeman-DAT do-P.IPFV-1sg(NOM)

‘I was working as a policeman’

Whether or not a speaker is prepared to disrupt his/her speech to search for a forgotten word will depend on a variety of factors, including: the ease with which the speaker expects to remember the

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forgotten word; the ease with which the addressee is expected to glean the speaker’s meaning in its absence; and the importance of the referent to the larger message.

References

Enfield, N. 2002. The definition of WHAT-d’you-call-it: semantics and pragmatics of recognitional deixis. Journal of Pragmatics 35: 101-117.

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Small Stories and Language of Persuasion in WeChat Advertisements

Chong Han (Western Sydney University), Kenny Wang (Western Sydney University), and Wei Shi (Fuzhou University)

This study investigates narrative practices in advertisements on WeChat, one of the most popular Chinese messaging and communication platforms. It adopts both quantitative and qualitative analyses on a corpus of 100 advertising posts written by six independent WeChat users between 2015 and 2016. The posts, consisting of both texts and images, promote products they buy in Australia to prospective buyers in China. Unlike prototypical advertisement writing, these users embed product promotions within their personal everyday story-telling practice to create a promotional testimonial. Adopting Georgakopoulou’s (2007) small stories paradigm and recent studies on social media discourse (e.g. Dayter 2015, Page 2012), this study examines the characteristics of storytelling on WeChat and the linguistic strategies of persuasion in advertising. Three major small-story narrative patterns are identified in the mini-texts, namely Breaking News, Projections and Shared Stories (Georgakopoulou 2007: 78). Shared Stories is the most prominent of the three major narrative patterns identified. This narrative pattern serves the function of transferring values, as well as building rapport between the advertiser as a satisfied and empathetic consumer and prospective buyers. Our data suggests that WeChat users-as-advertisers merchandise Australian-made products, which are framed as healthy, trendy, status-enhancing high-end goods, over others, which are insinuated as being of inferior quality. WeChat users-as-advertisers present their products as “natural” while insinuating other products as “artificial”; the underlying presumption is that the former is valuable and beneficial for consumers, and the latter is undesirable or even harmful. They also portray themselves as ‘lab rats’ speaking from first-hand experience of the products, and as conscientious quality controllers who would never promote anything they themselves have not tested, or of which they do not approve. The findings of the study may contribute to small stories research in general and to the understanding of Chinese-language social media discourse and community in particular.

Keywords: small stories, WeChat, advertisement

References

Dayter, Daria. (2015). Small stories and extended narratives on Twitter. Discourse, Context and Media, 10, 19-26.

Georgakopoulou, Alexandra. (2007). Small Stories, Interaction and Identities. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Page, Ruth. (2012). Stories and Social Media: Identities and Interactions. New York: Routledge.

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Self-deprecation in initial interactions between Australians and Americans

Michael Haugh (University of Queensland) and Donal Carbaugh (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)

Self-deprecation involves directing negative assessments at self, or alternatively, playfully understating one’s achievements or abilities in the course of self-disclosure sequences. In this paper we focus on analysing jocular and non-jocular forms of self-deprecation, and how it is managed by participants in initial interactions between American and Australian speakers of English. Drawing from approaches in interactional pragmatics and cultural discourse analysis, we analyse instances of self-deprecation identified from a corpus of more than 50 video recorded interactions involving Australians and Americans getting acquainted in both same and different nationality pairings. Our analysis reveals that despite claims in both popular and academic discourse that Australians favour modest forms of self-presentation, while Americans favour positive forms of self-presentation, the relative frequency of self-deprecation is largely consistent across the Australian and American participants. Differences emerged, however, with respect to the ways in which Australian and American participants responded to instances of self-deprecation on the part of another participant. While American participants frequently reciprocated prior self-deprecation on the part of another participant with further self-deprecation on their part, Australian participants tended to reciprocate with self-deprecation less frequently. We suggest that this tendency reflects the way in which self-deprecation is open to serious or non-serious interpretation by those participants. It is suggested that amongst American participants self-deprecation is more likely to be treated as potentially threatening to their ongoing attempts at positive self-presentation in initial interactions, and so the tendency to reciprocate with further self-deprecation constitutes a way of “neutralising” this potential threat, while amongst Australian participants self-deprecation is not evaluated as threatening to the same extent, and so a range of other responses to self-deprecation tend to arise. We conclude that while self-deprecatory practices are an important means of inviting relational intimacy in the course of getting acquainted, they are also a locus of potential misunderstanding or misconstrual in initial interactions amongst American and Australian speakers of English.

Keywords: self-deprecation, self-disclosure, American English, Australian English, pragmatics

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“Looking for a good laugh”: Using ontologies to access pragmatic phenomena through spoken corpora

Michael Haugh (University of Queensland), Simon Musgrave (Monash University), Andrea Schalley (Karlstad University)

In this paper, we focus on the phenomenon of ‘embarrassed laughter’ as a case study of one approach to corpus pragmatics. We construct a set of interlinked ontologies by comparing the transcription practice of various collections of data as summarised by Hepburn and Varney (2013), making explicit the implied knowledge underlying those transcription practices about the characteristics of laughter which have been treated as interactionally relevant. These ontologies allow us to see the essentially combinatorial nature of certain pragmatic phenomena and therefore also allow us to develop strategies for searching for relevant data. We then proceed to illustrate how such search strategies can work with the example of ‘embarrassed laughter’. Such laughter often occurs early in an interaction (especially first encounters) and following long pauses. We can therefore establish a set of search criteria (laughter AND (start of interaction OR long pause) to try to find possible instances of this phenomenon in varied collections of data such as those which form part of the Australian National Corpus. Our approach acknowledges the complexity of the factors which may be relevant to the identification of any pragmatic phenomenon without relying on the prior identification of instances in any specific dataset, and has the capability to generate candidate sets of examples across varied data sets while relying on features which are annotated in standard practice. We suggest that looking for clusters of features which characterize pragmatic phenomena and organizing our knowledge of the features with ontologies constitutes a very promising approach in the field of corpus pragmatics.

References

Hepburn, Alexa & Scott Varney. 2013. Beyond ((Laughter)): Some Notes on Transcription. In Phillip Glenn & Elizabeth Holt (eds.), Studies of Laughter in Interaction, 25–38. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

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Brokers, dual-role mediators and professional interpreters: a discourse-based examination of mediated speech and some of the roles and interests that linguistic mediators serve

Jim Hlavac (Monash University)

The advent of the professional interpreter over the last 30 years has occurred with a series of developments that have sought to define, articulate and delineate practices of behaviour so that interpreters are recognised as a distinct group. One development is the distinction that interpreting is inter-lingual transfer performed by paid and trained professionals, while the type of linguistic mediation practised by brokers, multiple-role helpers or volunteers is something else, eg. ‘lay mediation’. A hallmark of professional groups is a code of ethics, and in codes for interpreters, ethical principles such as accuracy, impartiality and even clarity of role boundaries appear regularly. Conference interpreting practices that are based on a conduit model and the fidelity of transfer of all source speech have imposed themselves on many codes of conduct and have shaped contemporary theory and pedagogy of interpreting. The ‘social turn’ in Interpreting Studies (cf. Pöchhacker, 2009) has not only kick-started investigations into macro- and micro-social dynamics that pertain to interpreting (and how linguistic mediation and linguistically-mediated situations re-shape social relations), but allowed a re-appraisal of phenomena that have hardly been absent from interpreter-mediated events: acknowledgement of social and power relations, advocacy and even activism.

This paper seeks to contribute to discussions on social relations by presenting a discourse analysis of three real-life interactions that feature mediators with different roles: (child) broker; dual-role (teacher/lay interpreter) mediator; professional interpreter. Examination of the three mediators’ forms and conventions of linguistic mediation reveals differences in the way others’ talk is re-presented: from private dyads and a recontextualisation of speech to variation in the strategies employed by mediators as they deal with varying senses of duty - to source speech, to their role to others, and to the interests of others and their own interests. The empirical data of this study attest to differences in communicative strategies adopted by the linguistic mediators. But at the same time, features such as socially-motivated alterations and mitigations are found not only in the speech of non-professionals, but also in that of the professional interpreter. Contemporary interpreting can be conceived of as verbal (or signed) positioning along continuums of practice that reflect occupational (role), macro-social (power) and micro-social (setting, context) relations. This ‘positioning’ that the interpreter is required to perform is itself something no less value-laden and pertaining to ethics than other concepts such as accuracy and impartiality which guide but which need not dominate discussions on ethics.

References

Pöchhacker, Franz. (2009). The turns of Interpreting Studies. In: Hansen, G., Chesterman, A. & Gerzymisch-Arbogast, H. (Eds.) Efforts and Models in Interpreting and Translation Research: A Tribute to Daniel Gile. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 25-46.

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Revisiting Chomsky’s generative devices: a new tool for critical analysis of language

Bob Hodge (Western Sydney University)

Chomsky’s early work (1957) famously introduced the concepts of transformations and generative grammar, which came to define the new paradigm he founded. His later work (e.g 1995) modified his account of both concepts, reducing their scope. This paper will revisit his earlier formulations, and revisit their motivation and problems. It will then look critically and constructively at the later modifications, and his reasons for making them, in the context of what have been called the ‘Linguistic wars’ (Harris 1993).

The aim of this paper is not merely historical or descriptive. It will consider different proposals against 5 desiderata, not emphasised by Chomsky, premises coming from the experience and needs of critical forms of linguistics and discourse analysis. The theory should:

1. Analytically illuminate actually occurring instances of language in use;

2. Relate meaning and syntax in a systematic way;

3. Investigate psychologically real operations of users of language;

4. Be socially real, including effects and meanings of socially-formed individuals in social contexts;

5. Include the multimodal range of realization systems.

It will use its analysis of Chomsky’s work to argue that a theory much closer to Chomsky’s original proposal is potentially stronger than its later forms, and than any currently competing models. It will illustrate this model with an analysis of materials from Chomsky’s own work. It will not argue that a theory along these lines was ‘what Chomsky really thought’: just that it merits consideration because it would be superior in important ways to current theories of CDA and TGG alike.

References

Chomsky, N 1957 Syntactic structures Mouton, the Hague

--------------- 1995 The minimalist program MIT Press, Cambridge

Harris, T 1993 Linguistic wars CUP, Cambridge

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The Cape York lexical records of Bruce Sommer

Jordan Hollis (UQ), Genevieve Richards (UQ), Jayden Macklin-Cordes (UQ), Erich Round (UQ)

We report on a project which has created a digital version of lexical material on approx. 70 language varieties of Cape York, from the archival records of Bruce Sommer [1]. Our focus here is on methodology.

Background & aims Great strides have been made in preparing the lexicons of Australian languages in digitally readable and accessible form, however a notable gap so far is Cape York [2]. Bruce Sommer deposited lexical, grammatical and textual materials on some 70 language varieties of central and southern Cape York, comprising 4,950 pages of fieldnotes and summaries, and 203 audio tapes. Our aim was to key in Sommer’s handwritten and printed lexical materials, as a first step in the digital representation and eventual audio time-alignment of his invaluable archive.

Materials Fryer Library digitised Sommer’s print materials in 2014 and tapes in 2015. We identified 1,520 pages of lexical material. These wordlists range in length from 2 entries to 2635 (mean 485, median 255). Many are numbered, following the Hale–O’Grady 100-item list.

Methods Our work plan centred on SIMULTANEOUS AND COLLABORATIVE DATA ENTRY. Two researchers entered the same wordlist simultaneously into a Google spreadsheet, where the other’s activity is also visible. Each worker focussed on either the vernacular or English, but also provided constant checking of the other’s work, and assistance when necessary. The spreadsheet contained columns for: speaker, language, tape number, subheadings, page number, language form, notes on language form, English gloss, notes on English gloss, other text and notes on other text. Additional columns were added if wordlists become more complex: language form corrections, number, addi-tional language form columns for lists with two vernacular languages.

Challenges 1. Legibility of handwriting was a challenge. To improve accuracy, researchers examined illegible entries together to reach agreement; if needed, other wordlists were consulted, to see if a word appeared elsewhere with a similar form. In rare cases where neither of these solutions worked, a note was entered. 2. Sommer used many abbreviations. These were gradually deciphered as our familiarity increased. 3. Some pages contained extensive corrections, annotations and/or margin notes; some had multiple languages or speakers. Extra columns were added for those documents. 4. Most of the materials were in IPA. This was entered using a convenient set of as hoc conventions to enable fast data entry, and then transposed into IPA afterwards. Having two researchers dealing collaboratively with challenges led to rapid and effective problem solving.

Analysis Cape York is a notoriously complex region [3]. Cross-linguistic datasets such as Sommer’s lexicons will make possible automated analyses which can detect diffuse patterns which challenge the observational and memory limitations of human linguists. We present some initial examples, including automated phylogenetic analysis [4]; network analysis [5]; and admixture analysis [6]. These do not replace expert manual analysis, but can increase productivity by rapidly highlighting areas deserving particular attention.

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Methodological recommendations We cannot recommend strongly enough the method of collabo-rative data entry for this kind of data, which enables quick and effective detection and correction of data entry errors. It makes the task more collaborative, and hence enjoyable.

References

[1] Sommer, B. 2003. Papers, 1964–2003 (item number UQFL476), Fryer Library, St Lucia.

[2] Bowern, C. 2016. Chirila: Contemporary and Historical Resources for the Indigenous Languages of Australia. Language Documentation and Conservation. Vol 10.

[3] P.Sutton (ed.) 1975. Languages of Cape York, Canberra:AIAS.

[4] Blomberg, S.P., T. Garland & A.R. Ives. 2003. Testing for phylogenetic signal in comparative data: Behavioral traits are more labile. Evolution 57:717-45.

[5] Bryant, D., & Moulton, V. 2004. Neighbor-net: an agglomerative method for the construction of phylogenetic networks. Molecular biology and evolution,21(2), 255-265.

[6] Pritchard, J. K., Stephens, M., & Donnelly, P. (2000). Inference of population structure using multilocus genotype data. Genetics, 155(2), 945-959.

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The Syntax of Inner Aspect and the Nature of Verbal Le in Chinese----A Yixing Chinese Based Investigation

Xuhui Hu (Peking University)

1 Data & Issues

This paper draws upon data from Yixing, a variety of Chinese Wu dialect, which contains two distinct verbal particles, lə and dzə, both corresponding to the verbal le in Mandarin. lə exhibits the following special properties: (i) Imposing a telic interpretation (evidenced by the 'in... time' phrase), which is not only compatible with achievement and accomplishment predicates illustrated in (1a) and (1b), but also coerces a state into a dynamic and telic event, shown in (1c). For all the following telic examples, telicity will disappear if lə is not attached. (ii) Quantifying over the bare nominal object, imposing a definite and quantity reading on the bare nominal (1d). (iii) Triggering object fronting when the object is either a bare nominal (1d) or a definite nominal (1e). These data then present a striking similarity between lə and the perfective prefix in some Slavic languages, illustrated in (2), which also yields telicity and quantifies over the bare nominal object by propviding a definiteness and quantity reading (Filip 1997, Borer 2005). dzə cannot yield a telic interpretation, nor can it quantify over the bare nominal. It signals the information that the event denoted by the sentence happened before the topic time (example 3):

2 Analysis

We argue, following Borer (2005), Macdonald (2008), and Travis (2012), among others, as well as the general mechanism of feature valuation in Minimalism (Chomsky 1995, 2000), that inner aspect (aktionsart) is not lexical information, but is derived in the syntax, and telicity is the result of valuation of the telic feature (quantity feature in Borer 2005) on the inner aspectual head, that is, AspQP in between VP and v. In particular, lə is a functional item that bears an interpretable telic (quantity) feature that yields telicity, which explains why telicity is invariably yielded by lə, regardless of the predicate types, and why without lə, telicity will not be attested. The quantity feature of lə is copied onto the DP structure of the bare nominal in the [Spec AspQP], and serves as a specificity operator by providing a specificity D feature to the bare nominal. This then addresses the issue represented in (1d) that in a lə-marked sentence, the bare nominal will get a quantity and specific reading. The bare nominal has to be fronted to the topic position due to the C-I interface requirement: to guarantee that the quantity reading on the bare nominal derived in narrow syntax accessible to the hearer, it has to be fronted to the topic position to convey the presupposition that this bare nominal refers to a specific entity with a certain quantity known to both the speaker and the hearer. The definite DP in a lə - marked sentence has to be fronted to the topic position is for the sake of resolving type-mismatch (Diesing 1992; Diesing & Jelinek 1997): the specificity operator provided by lə requires the object to be of <e, t> type, but the definite DP itself is already an <e> type. For the purpose of type mismatch resolution, the only way out is to move the definite nominal out of the quantifying scope of lə. dzə is functional item merged on the outer aspectual head in between T and vP, providing the viewpoint aspectual information (Smith 1997). The structure involving both the inner and out aspectual heads is then roughly like this:

[T [Aspouter [v [AspQ [V ]]]]

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We further posit, with the fact that both lə and dzə are realised as le in Mandarin, that Mandarin contains two homonymous verbal les --- inner and outer aspectual markers respectively. These two particles happen to take the identical phonological form in Mandarin, which blurs the picture of the aspectual system in Chinese at the surface level, leading people to assume that there is only a single verbal le, being a completion/termination marker (Smith 1997; Soh & Gao 2008; Soh 2014) or a realisation marker (Sybesma 1997, 1999; Lin 2003a,b).

Examples

(1) a. tɔ sasə fəŋdzoŋ lidou mə lə sa bən ʃy.

He thirty minute in lose lə three CL book.

'He lost three books in thirty minutes.'

b. tɔ sasə fəŋdzoŋ lidou ʧɛ lə sa dzə bɪŋgo.

He thirty minute in eat lə three CL apple.

'He ate three apples in thirty minutes.'

c. dzaŋsa ʤiŋdzao jɨ te lidou kaeʃiŋ lə sa tsi

Zhangsan today one day in happy lə three time

'Today, Zhangsan became happy three times in one day.'

d. ʤu ŋo jiʤiŋ ʧɛ lə lɨ.

alcohol I already eat lə lɨ. (lɨ is the counterpart of sentential le in Mandarin)

'I have drunk the alcohol (i.e. the certain amount of alcohol has been drunk up by me)'

e. dɔ bae ʤu tɔ ʧɛ lə lɨ.

that CL alcohol he eat lə lɨ.

'He has drunk up that glass of alcohol.'

(2) a. PilI

vi ́no. (Czech)

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drank-SG wine-SG-ACC

‘He was drinking (the) wine.’

b. VypilP

vi ́no. (Czech)

PREF-drank-SG wine-SG-ACC

‘He drank up (all) the wine.’ (Filip 1997)

(3) ŋo ʧɛ dzə va lɨ.

I eat dzə rice lɨ.

'I've had meal.'

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Towards a comprehensive model of tone change: evidence from synchronic dialectal variations

Karen Huang (University of Auckland)

Due to the perplexing nature of the tone values, linguists often focus on the split or merger of the tonal categories rather than their pitch development. Fewer studies focus on how the pitch values of lexical tones subsequently change phonetically. Until recently, Pittayaporn (2007) proposed a model on the directionality of tone change, and argued for three mechanisms that motivate tone change: segment-tone interaction, contextual variation and perceptual maximization.

This study reviews the explanatory power of Pittayaporn’s (2007) model by comparing tone values of different dialects in subgroups of Mandarin, Wu, Min, Yue and Thai. Only dialects with the same tonal categories are compared, and Pittayaporn’s (2007) model was adopted in attempt to explain the tonal variations. The results show that Pittayaporn’s model can explain observed contour changes such as rising > convex > falling, as well as falling > concave > rising by the mechanisms peak-sliding and contour reduction. The mechanism perceptual maximization are also illustrated by dialects with different degrees of contour excursion. However, Pittayaporn’s model fails to account for the tonal change of level tones. In his model, level tones can only change due to segment-tone interaction, but our data suggest that level tone could change to contour tones without segmental effects. The data suggest that the structural pressure of the lexical tones should be added to a model of tone change. The composition of the tonal inventory also plays an important role in determining the directionality of the tone change. For example, a level tone is more likely change into a falling tone if there is no falling tone in a dialect. This study sheds light on developing a more comprehensive model of tone change.

References

Pittayaporn, Pittayawat. (2007). Directionality of tone change. Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS XVI), Saarbrücken, 1421-1424.

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Interdependence between Tones, Vowel Qualities and Voice Qualities in Zhangzhou

Yishan Huang (Australian National University)

Tone is conventionally characterized as a contrastive use of the perceptual dimension of pitch, corresponding to the acoustic dimension of fundamental frequency (F0) which reflects the rates of vibration of vocal cords. Nevertheless, increasing amount of empirical data from unrelated tonal languages have been revealing that, poly-dimensional phonetic parameters, including F0, duration, vowel quality, voice quality, and aspiration or manner of initial consonants, often systematically serve together to make the complex physical reality of the tone system. This paper aims to explore the nature of correlation between tones, vowel qualities and voice qualities of Zhangzhou, a Southern Min language spoken in the southern Fujian province of mainland China.

Zhangzhou has received a considerable amount of impressionistic descriptions on the monosyllabic citation tones [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10], but has arguably received inadequate attention acoustically [9] [11]. All except two-- consistently identify seven surface tonal contrasts but they differ enormously on the actual tonal representation in terms of pitch patterns, for example, tone 1 is represented as a low rise [24], a high level [44] or a high rise [45]. According to the multi-speaker fieldwork data collected in Zhangzhou urban areas of Longwen and Xiangcheng, it was clear that there were seven citation tones, but the auditory characteristics of most turned out to be different and more complicated from those available in the literature. In addition to pitch differences, they are characterized by a variety of co-occurring auditory features, including duration, vowel quality, voice quality, loudness, and manner of articulation of syllable-initial consonants.

This paper will attempt three things. Firstly, it will provide a linguistic-phonetic description of Zhangzhou citation tones by deriving normalized acoustic representations of F0 and duration from six male and six female native speakers. The z-score normalization approach will be applied to abstract away between-speaker variance from invariable linguistic contents [12], and the normalization index (NI) will be used to assess the effectiveness of normalization [13].

Secondly, it will look into the correlation between tones and vowel qualities. The monosyllabic citation data show a co-occurrence restriction on vowel distributions and alternations with respect to different tonal environments. Phonologically-high vowels, /i/ and /u/, are observed active in alternating between monophthongs in unstopped tones and diphthongs in stopped stone of both Yin and Yang registers. Non-high vowels on the other hand behave consistently across different tonal environments.

Thirdly, it will investigate the interaction between tones and voice qualities. The multi-speaker Zhangzhou data show that high front vowel [i] has the tendency to be produced with breathy phonation, while low vowels [ɔ], [ɐ] and [ɛ] are more likely to be articulated with creaky voice no matter which tones they are in. Stopped tones 6 and 7 tend to be pronounced with creaky quality to most speakers, but with a salient perception of tense quality to others.

The statistically-based normalized results will supersede previous works in characterizing the actual tonal representation of Zhangzhou. The interdependence of tones, vowel qualities and voice qualities of Zhangzhou has not yet been described before, but this study will provide a testable base to tonal studies from typological and universal points of view.

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References

[1] T. Dong, Four Southern Min varieties 四个闽南方言, Taipei: Zhongyang Yanjiuyuan中央研究院, 1959.

[2] B. Lin, “Zhangzhou vocabularies 漳州方言词词,” Fangyan 方言, pp. 1-3, 1992.

[3] C. Ma, Studies of Zhangzhou dialect 漳州方言研究, Hongkong: Zongheng Chubanshe纵横出版社, 1994.

[4] FCCEC, Fujian chorography-dialect volume 福建省志-方言志, Beijing: Fangzhi Chubanshe 方志出版社, 1998.

[5] ZCCEC, Zhangzhou chorography-dialect漳州市志-方言, vol. 49, Beijing: Zhongguo Shehui Kexue Chubanshe 中国社会科学出版社, 1999.

[6] R. Gao, “Introduction to the sound system of Zhangzhou 漳州方言音系略说,” in Minnan dialect-studies of Zhangzhou variety 闽南方言-漳州话研究, Beijing, Zhongguo Wenlian Chubanshe 中国文联出版社, 1999, pp. 109-116.

[7] C. Zhou, The great Southern Min dictionary 闽南方言大词典, Fuzhou: Fujian Renmin Chubanshe 福建人民出版社, 2006.

[8] Z. Chen, Southern Min dictionary of Zhangzhou variety 闽南漳州腔辞典, Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju 中华华局, 2007.

[9] X. Yang, Studies of tones and regional cultures of Zhangzhou dialect 漳州方言声调与地域文化研究, Beijing: Zhongguo Shehui Kexue Chubanshe 中国社会科学出版社, 2008.

[10] J. Guo, Zhangzhou Southern Min 漳州闽南方言, Zhangzhou: Zhangzhou Library 漳州图华图, 2014.

[11] X. Yin, “Acoustic analysis of tonal patterns in Zhangzhou 漳州话声调格局的分析,” Journal of Chifeng University 赤峰学院学报, vol. 30, no. 6, pp. 31-33, 2009.

[12] P. Rose, “The normalization of tone,” in Proceedings of the First Australian Conference on Speech Science and Technology, Canberra, 1986.

[13] M. Earle, An acoustic phonetic study of North Vietnamese tones, Santa Barbara: Speech Communication Research Laboratories Inc., 1975.

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“I hope you’ll join us in this course”: Lecturers’ adaptations of genre, pronouns and reference in response to the Massively Online Open Course (MOOC) environment

Mitch Hughes (Western Sydney University)

The recent higher education trend of Massively Online Open Courses (MOOCs) usually involves purpose-made pre-recorded online video lectures as a technological solution for replacing traditional live face-to-face lectures. Such pre-recorded online lectures create new pragmatic challenges for lecturers, because the MOOC environment asks them not only to engage with audiences from which they are physically and temporally disconnected, but also to bear heavier burdens in engaging with students from more diverse backgrounds and retaining these students throughout the course without the traditional institutional incentives of grades and course progression. Even before the advent of MOOCs, however, previous research on spoken academic discourse had already established the pragmatically problematic nature of speaker and listener interaction in university lectures. In particular, Lee’s (2009) functional genre analysis of lecture openings posited that lecturers in large classes display compensations for the reduced opportunity to interact with the audience in what is necessarily a monologic and largely non-interactive situation. These compensations are manifested in adaptations of genre structure that incorporate more interactive lexico-grammatical features, such as interpersonal pronouns with inclusive reference. This paper describes an application of Lee’s genre analysis framework to a corpus of MOOC promotional videos that aim to recruit students into the free courses. This analysis reveals multiple parallels with traditional lecture introductions, and uncovers some pragmatic resources lecturers draw on to meet the additional interactional challenges inherent in the MOOC environment. In particular, patterns of interpersonal pronouns, semantic reference and collocated verbs, are seen to function in building rapport with the unknown audience, inviting the audience to enrol, or justifying the lecturer’s authority. The paper concludes with suggested improvements to the analytical framework used in previous research on spoken academic discourse and suitable adjustments for considering data from the emerging environments of online learning.

Keywords: Academic discourse, lectures, pronouns, online learning, Corpus Linguistics

References

Lee, J. J. (2009). Size matters: an exploratory comparison of small- and large- class university lecture introductions. English for Specific Purposes, 28(1), 42-57.

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Biscriptality: A typology of written forms of language

Arvind Iyengar (University of New England)

The general academic opinion that the spoken form of language is paramount has resulted in the written form of language being neglected, whether deliberately or inadvertently, as a subject of serious research. More importantly, the role of written language in society and the sociolinguistic implications of the use of certain scripts, glyph shapes and orthographies have received scant attention in the literature.

Recent attempts have been made to highlight the “sociolinguistics of writing” (Coulmas, 2003; Sebba, 2007). In particular, an initial step has been taken towards drawing attention to the written parallel of bilingualism, which has been termed “biscriptality” (Bunčić, 2016). Biscriptality refers to the synchronic use of two or more script, glyph or orthographic variants in writing a particular language. The distribution and occurrence of such variation in written language is illustrated with the help of the following 3×3 matrix (Bunčić, 2016). This matrix classifies variation in said parameters as status-based, ethnogeographical, or ‘free’.

Script Glyph shape Orthography

Vertical (status-based

variation)

digraphia medieval Scandinavia: runes vs. Latin alphabet

diglyphia Russian (18th/19th c.): Old Cyrillic vs. civil

script

diorthographia medieval Novgorod:

standard vs. vernacular

Horizontal (geographic/ethnic

variation)

scriptal pluricentricityHindi-Urdu:

Devanagari vs. Arabic

typeface pluricentricityMedieval Latin:

Caroline vs. Beneventan

orthogr. pluricentricity English:

color vs. colour etc.

Free variation

bigraphism Serbian:

Cyrillic vs. Latin

biglyphism German (1749–1941): blackletter vs. roman

type

biorthographism Belarusian (1980s–2008):

Narkamaŭka vs. Taraškievica

This presentation will briefly explain the individual components of the above matrix. Further, it will be argued that the above matrix does not account for forms of writing involving ‘controlled’ variation in script, glyph shape and orthography. In other words, forms of writing involving two or more script, glyph or orthographical variants within the same text, but restricted to certain positions, need to be incorporated into the above matrix. It is proposed that the matrix be extended as shown below.

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Script Glyph shape Orthography

Controlled variation

ambigraphism Japanese:

kanji + kana

kanji + ruby text

ambiglyphism Latin alphabet:

uppercase vs. lowercase

Arabic/Hebrew/Greek: positional variants

ambiorthographism English:

US English text quoted in UK English text

References

Bunčić, D. (2016). Concept. Retrieved June 24, 2016, from Biscriptality: http://biscriptality.org/concept/

Coulmas, F. (2003). Writing systems: An introduction to their linguistic analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sebba, M. (2009). Sociolinguistic approaches to writing systems research. Writing Systems Research, 1(1), 35-49. doi:10.1093/wsr/wsp002

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Flexible uses of personal pronouns in Modern Chinese and New Zealand English: A comparative study based on oral corpus data

Dan Jiao (University of Canterbury)

While there has been considerable language-specific research on the flexible uses of personal pronouns in written Chinese (Hsiao, 2011; Huang, 2012; Jiang & Zhang, 1981; Nie, 1959; Sun, 1981; Wang, 1995) and in written English (Kitagawa & Lehrer, 1990; Wales, 1995), only a few studies have so far examined flexible pronoun uses in spoken data and compared them across languages. This paper presents findings from a systematic quantitative and qualitative comparison of flexible uses of personal pronouns in the Beijing Oral Corpus and the Canterbury Corpus from the Origins of New Zealand English archives. My sample included 32 speakers from each corpus, carefully matched for gender and year of birth.

The corpus-based comparison has revealed interesting differences and similarities in flexible pronoun uses by Chinese and New Zealand English speakers. Both Chinese and English have the generic reference use of singular ‘you’ as well as a high frequency of the interchange of ‘you’ for ‘I’. However, Chinese speakers have a much higher frequency of the interchange of ‘we’ for ‘I’ than English speakers, especially when they discuss their family and job. Furthermore, ‘nǐ你(2sg)’ and ‘tā他(3sgM)’ can be used as discourse markers in spoken Chinese, whereas ‘you’ and ‘he’ do not appear to be used as discourse markers in English. In the Canterbury Corpus, speakers use both unisex ‘he’ and unisex ‘they’. In the transcripts of the Beijing Oral Corpus, unisex ‘tā他(3sgM)’ alternates with unisex ‘tā她(3sgF)’. Which 3sg character the transcriber opted for appears to have been influenced by stereotypes about the occupations of the referents. Interestingly, Chinese ‘tā他(3sgM)’ can be used to refer both to singular and plural entities, whereas English ‘he’ cannot.

I propose that the cross-linguistic similarities in flexible pronoun use between Chinese and English can be accounted for by image schema theory from cognitive linguistics (cf. Johnson, 1987; Evans & Green, 2006) and empathy theory from pragmatic linguistics (cf. Kuno, 1987; Zhao, 2013; Gast et al., 2015), and that the differences can be explained from differences in language properties and cultural orientation (cf. Hofstede et al., 2010; Uz, 2014).

References

Evans, Vyvyan, & Green, Melanie. (2006). Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Gast, Volker, Deringer Lisa, Haas, Florian, & Rudolf, Olga. (2015). Impersonal uses of the second person singular: A pragmatic analysis of generalization and empathy effects. Journal of Pragmatics 88, p. 148-162.

Hofstede, Geert, Hofstede, Gert Jan, & Minkov, Michael. (2010). Dimension data matrix. Retrieved from http://www.geerthofstede.com/media/651/6%20dimensions%20for%20website.xls.

Hsiao, Chi-hua. (2011). Personal pronoun interchanges in Mandarin Chinese conversation. Language Sciences 33, p. 799-821.

Huang, Jiran. (2012). Research on unconventional usage of personal pronouns in Modern Chinese. Master thesis, Shanghai Normal University.

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Jiang, Yinan, & Zhang, Heng. (1981). Some non-canonical forms and rhetoric of personal pronouns in Modern Chinese. Journal of Zhengzhou University (Philosophy and Social Science Edition) 3, p. 19-24.

Johnson, Mark. (1987). The body in the mind: the bodily basis of meaning, imagination, and reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kitagawa, Chisato, & Lehrer, Adrienne. (1990). Impersonal uses of personal pronouns. Journal of Pragmatics 14, p. 739-759.

Kuno, Susumu. (1987). Functional syntax: anaphora, discourse and empathy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Nie, Minxi. (1959). Brief discussion of non-canonical uses of personal pronouns. Chinese Language Learning 7, p. 30-32.

Sun, Rujian. (1981). Non-canonical uses of personal pronouns. Chinese Language Learning 3, p. 15-19.

Uz, Irem. (2014). Individualism and first person pronoun use in written texts across languages. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, vol. 45(10), p. 1671-1678.

Wang, Guian. (1995). Discussion of ‘non-canonical uses of personal pronouns’. Journal of South China Normal University (Social Sciences Edition) 2, p. 82-86.

Wales, Katie. (1995). Personal pronouns in present-day English. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Zhao, Chengxin. (2013). Analysis of indefinite function of English second person pronouns. Foreign Studies 1(2), p. 23-28.

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Social variability in the spontaneous speech of 1970s Sydney teenagers: Revisiting Horvath’s analysis with acoustic methods

Caroline Jones (Western Sydney University) and Catherine Travis

In her seminal work in the 1980s on Australian English, Barbara Horvath (Horvath 1985, 1991; Horvath and Sankoff 1987) asked how migrants enter the speech community and what role they play in language change. To answer this question, she compiled the Sydney Social Dialect Survey, a corpus of close to 180 sociolinguistic interviews, recorded 1977-1980 in Sydney, stratified according to ethnicity (Anglo, Italian, Greek), age (teenagers, adults), sex, and socioeconomic status.

Horvath found that 2nd generation Australian teenagers of Italian and Greek heritage were leading a general contraction of the broadness continuum for the five diphthongs she examined (FLEECE (IY), FACE (EY), GOAT (OW), PRICE (AY), MOUTH (AW) (1985:94). In terms of social conditioning, she found that gender differences among the Anglo teenagers were absent among the Italian and Greek teenagers (1985:81).

Horvath’s analysis was based on auditory coding of 20 tokens of each vowel type per speaker. Modern analytical tools have impacted substantially the field of phonetics, such that today, acoustic methods are called for in production studies, and semi-automated methods of data extraction are becoming widely used. In this paper, we revisit Horvath’s study, and ask whether similar results are obtained applying these modern analytical methods.

We focus the analysis on the speech of 30 of the Anglo and Italian teenagers included in Horvath’s sample, evenly divided according to sex and ethnicity, and balanced for SES. We extract all tokens of the same five diphthongs examined by Horvath, utilizing semi-automated vowel extraction through the DARLA web interface (Reddy and Stanford 2015), based on the FAVE automatic vowel extraction program (Rosenfelder et al. 2014). We exclude unstressed tokens and those occurring preceding another vowel or approximant, leaving a total of 11,333 tokens for analysis (20-150 tokens of each vowel type for each of the 30 speakers). All tokens were Lobanov normalized (to remove physiological variation while preserving sociolinguistic variation) then rescaled into Hertz values, using the vowels package in R (Kendall and Thomas 2014). For each vowel, we use mixed effects models to analyse F1 and F2 values at 35% and 80% of vowel duration (approximately the first and second targets of the diphthong), with focus on the first target, which shows the most consistent sociolinguistic differences in Australian English in general (Bernard 1967; Cox 2012; Harrington et al. 1997) and in this dataset in particular (Horvath 1985:68).

Overall, the application of acoustic methods to a larger sample size replicates Horvath’s perceptually based results as regards sex and ethnicity, while at the same time, provides more detailed insights into the social patterning of individual diphthongs. As shown in Figures 1 and 2, first target values are ‘broader’ for males than females, but for all vowels except OW (in F2) and AW (in F1) this sex effect tends to be smaller for teenagers of Italian heritage than for Anglos: see AY (in F2), AW (F2), IY (F1), and EY (F2). Beyond these expected interactions of sex with ethnicity for the first target, the analysis reveals further main effects for sex in the second target: males end IY higher (p=0.002), and OW lower (p=0.002). We also find a near-significant ethnicity effect for IY (where Anglos tend to have longer onglide in F1 when F1 difference scores are computed per token, p=0.053).

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In sum, the larger scale, acoustic analyses conducted here corroborate Horvath’s conclusions and reveal further detailed social patterning by individual vowels in 1970s Sydney.

References

Bernard, John R.L. 1967. Some measurements of some sounds of Australian English. PhD thesis, University of Sydney.

Cox, Felicity. 2012. Australian English: Pronunciation and transcription. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Harrington, Jonathan, Felicity Cox and Zoe Evans. 1997. An acoustic phonetic study of Broad, General and Cultivated Australian English vowels. Australian Journal of Linguistics 17: 155-184.

Horvath, Barbara. 1985. Variation in Australian English: The sociolects of Sydney. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Horvath, Barbara. 1991. Finding a place in Sydney: Migrants and language change. In Suzanne Romaine (ed), Language in Australia, 304-317. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Horvath, Barbara and David Sankoff. 1987. Delimiting the Sydney speech community. Language in Society 16(2): 179-204.

Figure 1. Diphthong trajectories for Anglo teenagers

Figure 2. Diphthong trajectories for teenagers of 2nd generation Italian heritage

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Kendall, Tyler and Erik R. Thomas. 2014. Vowels: Vowel Manipulation, Normalization, and Plotting in R, R package, version 1.2-1. http://blogs.uoregon.edu/vowels/.

Reddy, Sravana and James Stanford. 2015. Toward completely automated vowel extraction: Introducing DARLA. Linguistics Vanguard 1(1): 15-28.

Rosenfelder, Ingrid, Josef Fruehwald, Keelan Evanini, Scott Seyfarth, Kyle Gorman, Hilary Prichard and Jiahong Yuan. 2014. FAVE (Forced Alignment and Vowel Extraction) Program Suite v1.2.2 10.5281/zenodo.22281.

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Relativization in Kunbarlang

Ivan Kapitonov (University of Melbourne)

The present paper investigates relative clause (RC) formation in Kunbarlang, a polysynthetic Gunwinyguan language with free word order (for the purposes of the paper assume discourse-configurationality), polypersonal agreement, valency-changing derivations and grammatical gender. Relativization in Australian languages has been subject of controversy: some have interpreted Hale (1976) to mean that there are no relative clauses in Warlpiri and other languages of the continent, and probably even no syntactic subordination (cf. Nordlinger 2006). Instead, flat structure or some sort of adjunction was assumed. Nordlinger (2006) argues on Wambaya data that such view underestimates both Hale’s original claims and availability of subordinate structures in Australian languages. The present work contributes to the debate with Kunbarlang relativization data.

No dedicated complementizers or subordination devices such as the special use of TMA or case have been found in Kunbarlang so far. This makes recognition and identification of subordinate structures, incl. relativization, an important and challenging goal on its own. Gaps are also difficult to spot: full NPs relativized over are naturally absent from their positions, but pro-drop is ubiquitous in general, and pronominal prefixes do not reflect relativization in any way. Based on linear order syntax, the use of noun markers, and interpretive effects, RCs can be distinguished from clausal coordination, and two major kinds of RCs can be recognized: headed and free relatives.

The headed type employs the so-called noun markers, determiner-like elements that agree with N’s grammatical gender, in a function that resembles that of relative pronouns. Though their semantics is not yet well understood, it is clear they are not wh-operators, and there is evidence suggestive that they can act as complementizers (in other, non-relativization subordination contexts). One clear syntactic restriction on their placement is the ban on NP-final position. In the relative pronoun use the noun markers often appear between a nominal and a full-fledged clause (1), which would be the NP-final position unless the clause were a constituent within the NP.

Based on the facts of noun class agreement, and despite the alleged use of the noun markers as complementizers elsewhere, we will argue that in relativization they behave as relative pronouns. Noun markers’ resemblance of Siloni’s (1995) complementizers D0 is superficial; unlike Hebrew, French etc., Kunbarlang has full TMA specification in the relative clauses with noun markers. In fact, as we will show, the relative complementizer is never overtly present.

The other type we discuss is the free/headless relatives (FRC). They are hard to discern as there is neither overt complementizer nor relative pronoun, nor do the personal prefixes signal relativization in any way. Rather they are identified when a clause is used in a nominal context. In (3), the clause ‘we were staying’ is the complement of the generic preposition korro. On the other hand, the specification of the location of the stay is missing, although the predicate rna ‘sit; live’, when used in the sense ‘stay, live’, normally subcategorizes for a locative adjunct; cf. (3). But in (2), the locative adjunct of ‘stayed’ is relativized over, which makes the clause available to combine with the preposition. Both the relative pronoun (something like ‘where’) and the complementizer are phonologically empty. This contrasts with the typical configuration of FRCs and correlatives, which standardly employ wh-operators as relative pronouns. Even more paradoxically, we suggest

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(involving apparent island violations (4)) that Kunbarlang FRCs may be headed RCs in disguise, and invite a matching, rather than raising, analysis (Hulsey & Sauerland 2006, Cinque 2015) along the lines of (5), with a silent external head. We also argue, contra Falk (2010) and similar reductionist attempts, that a mediating element/operation is necessary for correct typing, even in a polysynthetic language that might be thought of as less constrained syntactically.

Abbreviations

Relative clauses are demarcated with brackets, || denotes an audible pause. The abbreviations used are: 1 = first person, 3 = third person, COM = comitative, EXCL = exclusive, I = class I, NM = noun marker, OBJ = object, OBL = oblique, PL = plural, PREP = preposition, PST = past, R = realis, RDP = reduplication, SG = singular.

Examples

(1) ...kadda-kalng || na-buk-ma dead body la [kirrdimark nayi ka-nganda.rlakwang].

3PL-get.PST I-person-FOC ENGLISH CONJ man NM.I 3SG.R-hurl.PST

‘...they took the dead body and the man who threw the spear.’

(2) Kadda-maddjing ka-mankang korro [ngadbe ngadda-rninganj].

3PL.R-pierce.PST 3SG.R-fall.PST PREP we.EXCL 1PL.EXCL.R-sit.PST

‘They shot [that plane] and it fell down (to) where we were staying.’

(3) Kadda-rninganj korro rlobbel-rlobbel kadda-rdukidanj bi-rnungu.

3PL.R-sit.PST PREP outside-RDP 3PL.R-wait.PST OBL-he.OBL

‘They were sitting outside looking for him/waiting for him.’

(4) Kadda-maddjing nayi erreblen ka-mankang korro [kinbadda-kaybi kadda-rninganj].

3PL.R-pierce.PST NM.I airplane 3SG.R-fall.PST PREP 3PL-who 3PL.R-sit.PST

‘They shot down that airplane and it fell down to where what mob was sitting?’

(5) ex. (2): ka-mankang korro [DP proi [CP � [TP ngadbe ngadda-rninganj korro kendai]]]

References

Cinque, Guglielmo. 2015. Three phenomena discriminating between “raising” and “matching” relative clauses. Semantics-Syntax Interface 2(1):1–27.

Falk, Yehuda N. 2010. An Unmediated Analysis of Relative Clauses. Ms. Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Hale, Kenneth. 1976. The adjoined relative clause in Australia. In Robert M. W. Dixon (ed.), Grammatical categories in Australian languages, 78–105. Canberra: AIAS.

Hulsey, Sarah & Uli Sauerland. 2006. Sorting out relative clauses. Natural Language Semantics 14. 111–137.

Nordlinger, Rachel. 2006. Spearing the Emu drinking: Subordination and the adjoined relative clause in Wambaya. Australian Journal of Linguistics 26(1). 5–29.

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Siloni, Tal. 1995. On participial relatives and complementizer D0: A case study in Hebrew and French. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 13(3). 445–487.

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Trends in Indigenous Language Usage 2011

Maria Karidakis (University of Melbourne) and Barbara Kelly (University of Melbourne)

There has been substantial research into trends in maintenance and shift of community languages among Australian migrants (Clyne, 2003; Clyne & Kipp, 1999; Karidakis & Arunachalam, 2015). However, similar studies for Indigenous language usage in Australia are scarce (Walter & Anderson, 2013). Studies of language maintenance and shift have tended to focus on language shift across specific languages. In this paper, we report on a study based on census data to identify reports of Indigenous language usage across three census periods; 2001, 2006 and 2011. The study examines the linguistic distribution of Indigenous language groups and identifies changes in numbers of speakers of specific Indigenous languages over the last intercensal period. It then investigates language use on the basis of the age and gender distribution of Indigenous language speakers. We conclude with a discussion of the motivations for some of the changes observed in the language landscapes of Indigenous languages in Australia. This analysis has highlighted the volatile state of Indigenous languages in Australia (McConvell & Thieberger, 2001). The main findings reflect this as there has been a decline in the proportion of Indigenous Australians who report speaking an Indigenous language at home (Biddle, 2012; 2014). However, that more people are identifying as Indigenous Australians is encouraging as there has been a sustained growth of the Indigenous population over the decade.

Keywords: Indigenous languages, language maintenance, language loss, language contact, sociolinguistics

References

Biddle, N. (2012). Indigenous Population Project: 2011 Census Papers, Part 1 Indigenous

Language Usage. Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research: ANU.

Biddle, N. (2014). Data about and for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians.

Issues paper no. 10. Produced for the Closing the Gap Clearinghouse. Canberra:

Australian Institute of Health and Welfare & Melbourne: Australian Institute of Family Studies.

Clyne , M. (2003). Dynamics of Language Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Clyne, M., & Kipp, S. (1999). Pluralistic languages in an immigrant context: Spanish Arabic and Chinese. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Karidakis, M., & Arunachalam, D. (2015) Shift in the use of community languages in Australia. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 1-22.

McConvell, P., & Thieberger, N. (2001). State of Indigenous languages in Australia – 2001, Australia State of Environment Second Technical Paper Series (Natural and Cultural Heritage), Department of the Environment and Heritage, Canberra.

Walter, M., & Anderson, C. (2013). Indigenous statistics: a quantitative research methodology. Walnut Creek, California: Left Coast Press.

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Children's pointing gestures in Murrinhpatha

Barbara Kelly (University of Melbourne), Lucy Davidson, William Forshaw

This paper examines pointing gestures in spontaneous communications of children who are growing up acquiring Murrinhpatha, a polysynthetic Indigenous language of northern Australia. It investigates the range of pointing gestures found in interactions of pre-school and early school-aged children, focusing on those that co-occur with speech and those that have no accompanying speech.

While studies have investigated children’s finger pointing (Wilkins 2003), and reaching (Dixon 2015) the study reported here is one of few studies of children’s gesture in Indigenous Australia. Blythe et.al (2016) have shown that in Murrinhpatha co-speech pointing gestures accompanying demonstratives are a crucial part of the expression of spatial deixis. This study examines the range of pointing gestures used in the spontaneous communications of young Murrinhpatha users. The study addresses the following research question (RQs):

1. What pointing gestures are evident in Murrinhpatha-learning children’s communications?

2. Are children’s pointing gestures accompanied by co-occurrent speech or vocalisations?

Data for this study comes from thirty hours of carer-child interaction. Six primary carers and six children at different ages (3;8–6;0) who produced multi-morpheme utterances were recorded across multiple time points.

Findings for the study indicate that pointing gestures have an important role in children’s Murrinhpatha communications. Results for RQ(1) indicate a range of pointing gestures used by Murrinhpatha children, including: index point (extension of an index finger toward an object, often to draw an interlocutor’s attention to the object or its location, or to request it) ; hand extension point (open hand supine - palm up - with four fingers extended to mark a location or direction).); lip point (extension of the lips toward a referent, typically accompanied with a gaze alignment). Findings for RQ(2) show that index finger points are used in multiple contexts across all children in the study and typically occur with a vocalisation (not always speech). Hand extension points and lip points are used by four of the six children and typically co-occurred with a vocalisation.

Despite employing different kinds of pointing gestures in combination with a typologically different language, the results of the current study are in line with studies of children’s index finger pointing gestures in languages such as English and Japanese in which speech and gesture are typically combined (Butcher and Goldin-Meadow 2000) with around only 10% of gestures occurring without speech (McNeill 1992). This study of gesture and speech combinations offer a window to the integration of linguistic, cognitive and interactional processes of the Murrinhpatha-learning child and contributes to our growing understanding of the role that gesture and speech combinations play in communicative development.

References

Blythe, Joe; Mardigan, Kinngirri Carmelita; Perdjert, Mawurt Ernest; & Stoakes, Hywel (2016). Pointing out directions in Murrinhpatha. Open Linguistics (2):132-159.

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Butcher, C., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2000). Gesture and the transition from one- to two-word speech: When hand and mouth come together.

McNeill, D. (Ed.), (2000). Language and gesture (pp. 235–258). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Dixon, S. (2015). ‘Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!: Object requests, ownership and entitlement in a children's play session’, Journal of Pragmatics 82. 39-45.

McNeill, D. (1992). Hand and mind: What gestures reveal about thought. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Wilkins, D. (2003). Why pointing with the index finger is not a universal (in sociocultural and semiotic terms), pp. 171–215. In Kita, S (Ed.) Pointing : where language, culture, and cognition meet. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 339pp.

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Morphological and syntactic parallels predicted by Dual Route models

Peter Kipka (La Trobe University)

Subject-verb agreement violations are not infrequent amongst native speakers of English. Major daily newspapers publish a steady stream of such ungrammaticalities and psycholinguistic researchers (e.g. Staub 2009) have shown that it is relatively easy to elicit such errors in the laboratory. In this paper, I explore how Dual Route models of language provide an account for these and similar phenomena.

Dual Route approaches have been proposed for syntactic comprehension (e.g. Townsend & Bever 2001), inflectional morphology (e.g. Pinker 1998; Ullman 2004), and morphosyntax more generally (e.g. Kipka 2014). They invoke (a) a combinatorial grammar operating in parallel with (b) an associative mechanism. Inflectional regularity versus irregularity reflects this division of labour. Furthermore, novel but compositionally interpreted combinations of existing roots, prefixes and suffixes align with (a), while (b) is evident in neologistic blends. Turning to syntax, Frazier & Clifton (2011) argue for the Acceptable Ungrammaticality Hypothesis; they point to blending as a possibility for sentences which (while technically ungrammatical) sound more acceptable than comparable counterparts. Apart from subject-verb agreement violations, quantification (i.e. adverbs of quantification versus quantifying determiners) and pronoun-antecedent relations arguably exhibit such blending. Restrictions of register, token-based statistics and affective connotations can be found for both these putative syntactic blends as well as for the more classical morphologically blended neologisms. I argue that the parallels between syntax and morphology should be taken seriously and potentially construed as further evidence for Dual Route processing.

References

Frazier, L. & C. Clifton (2011) Quantifiers undone: Reversing predictable speech errors in comprehension. Language. 87(1): 158-171.

Kipka, P. (2014) Jawsome! – linguistic evidence for dual route models of language. In L. Gawne & J. Vaughan (eds.) Selected papers from the 44th conference of the Australian Linguistic Society. (283-294) Melbourne: University of Melbourne.

Pinker, S. (1998) Words and rules. Lingua. 106: 219-242.

Staub, A. (2009) On the interpretation of the number attraction effect: Response time evidence. Journal of Memory and Language. 60: 308-327.

Townsend, D. & T. Bever. (2001) Sentence comprehension: The integration of rules and habits. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Ullman, M. (2004) Contributions of memory circuits to language: the declarative/procedural model. Cognition. 92: 231-270.

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Colloquialisation in Australian English: A multidimensional analysis of the Australian Diachronic Hansard Corpus

Haidee Kruger (Macquarie University / North-West University) and Adam Smith (Macquarie University)

Colloquialisation has been identified as one of the most important factors in short-term language change (Leech et al. 2009; Mair 2006), although its role has been attested in diachronic corpus studies of written texts from as far back as the seventeenth century (Biber & Finegan 1989). Colloquialisation may be defined as the process through which lexicogrammatical features associated with casual conversation spread to more formal genres (or registers), both spoken and written (Collins & Yao 2013: 480). It has been proposed as playing a particularly important role in Australian English, with this variety frequently leading changes in the direction of more colloquial usage, alongside American and Canadian English (Collins 2013; Collins & Yao 2013).

Existing studies of Australian English have primarily used synchronic corpora, used to infer “apparent-time diachronic implications” (Collins 2013: 209). However, recent work by Collins (2016), using a diachronic register-differentiated corpus of written, published Australian English, including three registers (press, learned and fiction) from four periods (1931, 1961, 1991 and 2006) provides further support for the important role of colloquialisation in Australian English – though these effects are strongly mediated by register (see also Biber & Gray 2012; Hundt & Mair 1999; Peters 2014 on the relative receptivity of certain registers to change).

This paper expands the limited number of diachronic investigations of Australian English by investigating colloquialisation using a newly compiled 5-million-word diachronic corpus of speech-based Australian English, composed of Hansard transcripts of parliamentary speeches and debates from five periods reflecting major social changes in Australia: 1900-1904, 1935-1945, 1965-1975, 1995-2005 and 2015 to the present. As a specialised formal spoken register with both prepared and spontaneous elements, parliamentary discourse lends itself particularly well to the investigation of colloquialisation. Hansard transcripts are, of course, edited representations of speech (Mollin 2007; Slembrouck 1992). In this paper, we consider the Hansard data as an edited construction of spoken language, in which colloquialisation may potentially be traced in relation to both changing norms for formal spoken language, and changing norms for the written representation of such discourse.

In most existing studies of colloquialisation in varieties of English around the world (using both synchronic and diachronic corpora), relatively small numbers of features have been used as operationalisation (see Collins 2013; Collins & Yao, 2013; Leech et al. 2009; 2012; Leech & Smith 2009). This means that current research in this area has given limited consideration to the internal coherence of and relations among larger sets of potentially changing features. To address this gap, we apply the multidimensional method of Biber (1988) to the Hansard corpus to investigate lexicogrammatical changes from a diachronic perspective, following previous extensions of the method to diachronic register analysis (see Kytö & Smitterberg 2015 for an overview). The multidimensional method offers the advantage of taking into statistical account the covariation of features, an approach which has not frequently been used in previous studies of colloquialisation.

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The analysis is composed of two steps. In the first step, we replicate Biber’s (1988) model using the Hansard corpus, to investigate how speech-based Australian English, as reflected in this corpus, changes across the five periods in relation to the underlying dimensions of register variation identified by Biber (1988). We focus specifically on Dimension 1, which captures the distinction between “[h]ighly interactive, affective discourse produced under real-time constraints” and “highly informational discourse produced without time constraints” (Biber 1988: 135), and which contains many of the features included in prior studies of colloquialisation. In the second step of the analysis, we focus on individual features (among the set of 67 included in Biber’s model) that demonstrate a significant change in frequency across time, particularly with reference to existing research on features assumed to index colloquialisation processes (see Leech et al. 2009; Collins & Yao 2013).

References

Biber, Douglas. 1988. Variation Across Speech and Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Biber, Douglas & Bethany Gray. 2012. The competing demands of popularization vs. economy: Written language in the age of mass literacy. In Terttu Nevalainen & Elizabeth Closs Traugott, eds. The Oxford Handbook of the History of English, 314–328. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Biber, Douglas & Finegan, Edward. 1989. Drift and evolution of English style: A history of three genres. Language 65(3): 487-517.

Collins, Peter & Yao, Xinyue. 2013. Colloquial features in World Englishes. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 18(4): 479-505.

Collins, Peter. 2013. Grammatical variation in English worldwide: The role of colloquialization. Linguistics and the Human Sciences, 8(3): 289-306.

Collins, Peter. 2016. Colloquialisation in contemporary Australian English. Unpublished conference paper. ICAME 2016. Hong Kong, 25-29 May.

Hundt, Marianne & Mair, Christian. 1999. “Agile” and “uptight” genres: The corpus-based approach to language change in progress. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 4(2): 221-242.

Kytö, Merja & Smitterberg, Erik. 2015. Diachronic registers. In Douglas Biber & Randi Reppen, eds. The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 330-345.

Leech, Geoffrey. & Smith, Nicholas. 2009. Change and constancy in linguistic change: How grammatical usage in written English evolved in the period 1931-1991. In Antoinette Renouf & Andrew Kehoe, eds. Corpus Linguistics: Refinements and Reassessments. Amsterdam: Rodopi. p. 173-200.

Leech, Geoffrey, Hundt, Marianne, Mair, Christian & Smith, Nicholas. 2009. Change in contemporary English: A grammatical study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Leech, Geoffrey, Smith, Nicholas & Rayson, Paul. 2012. English style on the move: Variation and change in stylistic norms in the twentieth century. Language & Computers 76: 69-98.

Mair, Christian. 2006. Twentieth-century English: History, variation, and standardization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mollin, Sandra. 2007. The Hansard hazard: Gauging the accuracy of British parliamentary transcripts. Corpora, 2(2): 187-210.

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Peters, Pam. 2014. Australian narrative voices and the colloquial element in nineteenth century written registers. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 34(1): 100-117.

Slembrouck, Stef. 1992. The parliamentary Hansard ‘verbatim’ report: The written construction of spoken discourse. Language and Literature, 1(2): 101-119.

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Atypical script choice in Japanese: the case of foreign loanwords in hiragana.

Hannah Kunert (University of Melbourne)

Loanwords (外来語・カタカナ語) are an integral part of the Japanese language, and are estimated to account for around 10% of the modern Japanese lexicon; examples include miruku (milk) and intaanetto (internet). Written Japanese utilizes a mix of three scripts, and while loanwords are conventionally written in katakana script, they sometimes appear in hiragana. Hiragana is usually reserved for words of Japanese origin, and has been noted to have a range of connotations including ‘traditional’ and ‘Japanese’. It is therefore argued that its marked use for words of foreign origin shows an aspect of ‘glocalization’ and/or a sense of ownership of these non-Japanese words.

This presentation will firstly describe the trend of loanwords in hiragana quantitatively through an analysis of a corpus of these words collected during fieldwork and through social media. The data is composed of a range of texts, including product packaging, shop signage, and social media posts.

The second aspect of the presentation will describe how Japanese people perceive this marked use of hiragana. This data was gathered through an online survey which investigated responses to these unusual transcriptions of loanwords, eliciting participants’ judgement on the appropriateness of selected examples from the corpus, and the reasons for these opinions.

This research project is the first to investigate loanwords in hiragana, and finds its place amongst the scholarship of a range of disciplines, including world Englishes, linguistic landscapes, social semiotics, and language play. It will investigate how a change in script is being used to add new layers of meanings to familiar words, and how this may be echoing a change in the status of English as a ‘foreign’ language in Japan.

Keywords: orthography, Japanese, “glocalization”, sociolinguistics, World Englishes

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Contour signs in Russian Sign Language (RSL): An analysis of the non-manual component

Maria Kyuseva (University of Melbourne)

This study analyses the non-manual co-articulation in Russian Sign Language contour signs (Zwitserlood, 2003), or, according to Supalla’s terminology (1986), tracing size and shape specifiers (SASSes). These signs describe the size and the shape of objects: ‘big’, ‘small’, ‘round’, ‘square’, ‘smooth’, etc. The hand configuration in these signs provides information about the dimensionality of the object, while the movement component traces its form (see examples in Fig. 1). Tracing SASSes are often excluded from grammatical analyses as highly unrestricted and pantomimic, because they change their form significantly depending on context (Fig. 2 illustrates RSL SASSes ‘thick’ in different contexts). However, on closer examination, there can be found some linguistic structure in these signs (Kyuseva & Moroz, 2015).

This project investigates the internal organization of contour signs in RSL. Usually they are treated as a homogenous set. At the same time, even the term itself presupposes that this group is not homogenous, but contains two subgroups – these of the size and the shape. The general question this study addresses is whether the semantic distinction between the signs depicting the shape vs. the size of objects is reflected in their formal linguistic characteristics.

The present analysis focuses on the non-manual (primarily, lips) co-articulation of the RSL contour signs. This co-articulation is not obligatory: the same sign can be accompanied by it in some contexts and be produced without it (i.e., with closed lips) in others. I hypothesize that the size signs tend to occur with the lips co-articulation more frequently than the shape ones. The rationale for this hypothesis is that the most widespread RSL lips co-articulations are mouth gestures with the adverbial function of intensifier (meaning ‘very’, ‘in a high degree’, see Fig. 3). This function is semantically more compatible with the size, than with the shape meanings: for example, ‘very thick’ is a much more natural characteristic than ‘very round’.

In order to check this hypothesis I carried out a statistical analysis of 108 RSL contour signs, collected on the basis of the Russian sign language corpus (www.rsl.nstu.ru). The sample contained 28 signs describing an object’s shape and 80 signs characterizing an object’s size. Such disproportion is due to the underrepresentation of shape specifiers in the corpus. All SASS items were annotated with respect to the presence/absence of the lips co-articulation. It was presented in the majority of analyzed signs (almost 70%).

A 2×2 Chi-square statistics was calculated, the result is significant: χ2 (1) = 12.138, p<.001. The effect size is moderate (φ = .358). The table with observed vs. expected frequencies (Fig. 4) shows that the unequal distribution is in the predicted direction: there are more lips co-articulation with size specifiers, than with shape specifiers, and not vice versa.

The significant difference in the presence/absence of the lips co-articulation in the size vs. shape specifiers supports the hypothesis that this semantic distinction is reflected in formal characteristics of these signs. However, first, the non-manual component represents just one aspect of their linguistic features. If the size vs. shape specifiers indeed constitute two distinct groups, this should be evident from other aspects of their linguistic behaviour as well. For example, I estimate that as size specifiers

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are often used with intensifying mouth gestures they will be generally longer (i.e. it will take more time to produce them), than shape specifiers. Second, it may well be the case that the number of subgroups in the group of contour signs is more than two. Here the non-manual data can be of use as well. For example, different lips co-articulations may accompany big vs. small size signs. I will discuss the meaning of these hypotheses, as well as my original findings, for the theory of sign language lexicon.

a b

Figure 1. American sign language: ‘rectangular flat object’ (a); ‘thick pole’ (b) (Valli & Lucas, 1995)

a b c

Figure 2. RSL SASSes ‘thick’ in the context of the nouns ‘wall’ (a), ‘tree’ (b), ‘rope’ (c)

Figure 3. RSL: ‘very long table’. The meaning ‘very’ is expressed with the mouth gesture /fu:/.

shape specifiers size specifiers total

no lips articulation observed 17 18 35

expected 9.1 25.9

lips articulation observed 11 62 73

expected 18.9 54.1

total 28 80 108

Figure 4. Observed vs. expected frequencies

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References

Kyuseva, M., & Moroz, G. (2015). Lexika so znacheniem formy i razmera v russkom zhestovom yazyke [Signs denoting size and shape of objects in Russian Sign Language]. Manuscript.

Supalla, T. R. (1986). The Classifier System in American Sign Language. In C. Craig (Ed.), Noun Classes and Categorization (pp. 181 – 214). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Valli, C., & Lucas, C. (1995). Linguistics of American Sign Language: An introduction. Washington.

Zwitserlood, I. (2003). Classifying hand configurations in Nederlandse Gebarentaal (Sign Language of the Netherlands). Utrecht: LOT.

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Revisiting restructuring phenomenon in Isbukun Bunun

Tingwu Lee (National Taiwan Normal University)

This paper provides an alternative analysis on the so-called Restructuring Phenomenon in Isbukun Bunun, argued by Wu 2013b. In her work, there are two types of verbs in Isbukun Bunun: restructuring verbs, such as miliskin ‘want’ and tanam ’try’, and non-restructuring verbs, such as minatulun ‘regret’. To be a restructuring verb, it must have several properties that indicate the transparent clausal boundaries, including (a) having a mono-clausal structure (Cinque 2000, Wurmbrand 2001), (b) allowing clitic climbing and long passives, (c) allowing the subject in either the main clause position or the subordinate clause position (exemplified by (1)) while those properties are not detected in the sentences with non-restructuring verbs. However, the mono-clausal analysis faces several difficulties. First, the obligatory complementizer tu requires a landing site (e.g. CP, or a functional layer between CP an IP) between two VP, but it is not possible for mono-clausal structure. Second, the infinitive embedded verb is expected to be left unmarked with voice (Wurmbrand 2001:19), contrary to fact; the embedded verb can be marked with (passive) voice independently. Third, the mono-clausal analysis is incompatible with predicate-fronting analysis, which accounts for the predicate-initial word order, proposed by Wu 2013a; the predicate-fronting analysis fails to derive an acceptable word order in the construction involving restructuring. Thus, I will argue in line with Wurmbrand 2015 that the syntactic behaviors of the two types of verbs can be distinguished by Backward/Forward raising analysis (Hornstein 1999) with a traditional bi-clausal structure. According to Horstein 1999, the traditional raising and control constructions can be accounted for by a unified analysis of Backward/Forward raising, but they differ only at the PF: which copy is pronounced, as shown in (2). Adopting this view, we can account for the derivation of sentence with the so-called restructuring verbs in Isbukun Bunun, dispensing the assumption of mono-clausal structure, as shown in (3). The immediate problem of the raising/control analysis is the case licensing to the raised DP on the edge of clause boundary. Wurmbrand 2015 notices this problem, and it is argued that the obligatory V to v to T movement will result in phase extension (Den Dikken 2005, Gallego 2010), so that the moved subject is still on the edge of phase (extended from vP to CP), waiting to be licensed with a case. The consequence of this analysis is to reject the view that two types of verbs differ in terms of restructuring/non-restructuring verbs. New evidence will be shown to indicate that two types of verbs differ in the (non)finiteness of subordinate clauses. First, the subordinate clause in the regret-type verbs allows independent voice and TAM marker inflection, while it is not acceptable in that of want-type verbs. Also, the double existence of an argument in the main clause and the subordinate clause at the same time indicates that the subordinate clause in regret-type verbs is an independent clause. Third, the voice in the subordinate clause can be marked independently, as shown in (4). Those are the properties that are not found, or receive inconsistent grammatical judgements in the so-called restructuring verbs. In the last part of this work, I will argue that the adverbial verbs in Isbukun Bunun are true restructuring verbs, which have typical restructuring properties.

Keywords: Syntax, Austronesian, restructuring, Isbukun Bunun, Backward/Forward raising, phase extension

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The complexities of a Cantonese Natural Semantic Metalanguage

Helen Hue Lam Leung (Griffith University)

This study considers the complexities of using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) for Hong Kong Cantonese. NSM features 65 ‘semantic primes’, which are simple, commonly used words which represent the most basic meanings and shared human concepts (see e.g. Goddard & Wierzbicka 2002, 2014). The primes are expected to have semantic equivalents in all natural languages. Using the primes and ‘mini-syntax’ of NSM, explications and cultural scripts can be constructed to express the meanings of complex words and concepts, avoiding common problems with definitions such as obscure terms, circularity, and ethnocentrism. Explications and cultural scripts should be translatable into any other natural language to give an identical meaning. However, a Cantonese-based NSM faces several challenges which do not arise in English or other languages.

Cantonese is the primary spoken language of Hong Kong, and the most widely known and influential variety of Chinese besides Mandarin. In a diglossic relationship with Mandarin, Cantonese is the ‘low’ variety and is traditionally regarded as a dialect, even by its own speakers. However, Mandarin and Cantonese are mutually unintelligible in everyday speech, differing in vocabulary and grammar as well as in phonology. The first dilemma regarding Cantonese NSM is to do with the level of formality or naturalness. On one hand, formal Cantonese, which has more similarities with Mandarin, is learnt in schools and is closer to written Chinese, although it is not typically used in ordinary conversation. On the other hand, everyday, spoken Cantonese may seem unusual in explications and academic contexts, particularly to Cantonese speakers themselves. It also does not have a standardised written form which is taught in schools (standard written Chinese is essentially written Mandarin) (Matthews and Yip 2011). Moreover, notable characteristics of informal Cantonese, such as heavy use of utterance particles, cannot be included in NSM, where they would lead to problems such as obscurity and circularity. However, their omission makes Cantonese sound unnatural. Finally, Cantonese exponents of some NSM primes, like PLACE~WHERE and VERY, cause semantic ambiguity.

This paper addresses these problems and how they may be overcome. It proposes Cantonese exponents for all 65 semantic primes, many of which are different to those of Mandarin (Mandarin primes were proposed by Chappell (1994, 2002)). Some Cantonese explications and cultural scripts are presented, demonstrating that they can adhere to the necessary rules of NSM and still accomplish its goals. Overall, a Cantonese-based NSM is viable, and can be used to explain complex and language-specific concepts. It reinforces the universality of NSM, and lays the groundwork for future NSM studies of Cantonese.

Keywords: Cantonese, Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), Chinese, semantics

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References

Chappell, Hilary. 1994. ‘Mandarin semantic primitives.’ In Semantic and Lexical Universals: Theory and Empirical Findings, edited by Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka, 109-147. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Chappell, Hilary. 2002. ‘The universal syntax of semantic primes in Mandarin Chinese.’ In Meaning and Universal Grammar: Theory and Empirical Findings, edited by Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka, 243-322. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Goddard, Cliff, and Anna Wierzbicka, eds. 2002. Meaning and Universal Grammar: Theory and Empirical Findings. 2 vols. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Goddard, Cliff, and Anna Wierzbicka. 2014. Words and Meanings: Lexical Semantics Across Domains, Languages, and Cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Matthews, Stephen, and Virginia Yip. 2011. Cantonese: A Comprehensive Grammar. 2 ed. London and New York: Routledge.

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Enriching Chinese-English Bilingual Education with Translanguaging: an Australian case-study

Xuan Li (University of South Australia)

This paper reports on a study of the provision of Chinese language bilingual programs (as immersion and as CLIL) in two multilingual primary schools in Australia. In the immersion program, Chinese language is used as the medium of instruction for two days a week for students from Prep to Year 6, while in the CLIL program, Chinese language is used as the medium of instruction for Science for a lesson per day for students from Prep to Year 2. The purpose of the study is to understand the practices that would best support expanding the provision of Chinese English bilingual programs in Australia.

This study incorporates qualitative approaches that include: 1) ethnographic research as conceptualized by a number of researchers (see for example Blommaert & Dong, 2010), using classroom observation, interview, and questionnaire; and 2) document collection and analysis, which allows triangulation with the ethnographic data. Data are analysed through thematic analysis, focusing on the nature of and pedagogical practices of Chinese language bilingual education.

In the current context of ‘super-diversity’ (Vertovec, 2007), the reality of growing multilingualism in schools, the complexity of linguistic interactions in classrooms, and the significance of translanguaging for bilinguals and bilingual education (García & Li, 2014), this study discusses the potential of expanded Chinese-English bilingual programs that go beyond the conventional separation of two languages. Instead there is reason to suggest that contemporary bilingual programs can be enriched with opportunities for translanguaging teaching and learning practices in ways that respond to changing needs of contemporary multilingualism.

Keywords: Chinese-langauge-bilingual-education, multilingual-primary-school, translanguaging, Australia

References

Blommaert, J., & Dong, J. (2010). Ethnographic Fieldwork. A Beginner's Guide. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters.

García, O., & Li, W. (2014). Translanguaging. Language, Bilingualism and Education. Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan.

Vertovec, S. (2007). Super-Diversity and Its Implication. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30(6), 1024-1054.

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Language use and language attitudes in multilingual habitats: A survey among Filipino students

Loy Lising (Macquarie University), Pam Peters (Macquarie University) and Adam Smith (Macquarie University)

Within the framework of World Englishes, attitudes towards varieties of English spoken in multilingual postcolonial contexts have been regarded as an important factor in the evolution of these varieties. Schneider’s (2007) stage 4 of his evolutionary model emphasises that for nativised structures to become accepted as local norms, and for an exonormative orientation to be replaced with an endonormative one, positive attitudes towards and endorsement of the local variety of English are essential. He also emphasises the close relationship between such acceptance of local norms, and the development of a local identity (Schneider 2007: 49).

A number of attitudinal studies in the framework of World Englishes have focused on the attitudes of speakers towards different varieties of English. Bernaisch (2012) and Bernaisch and Koch (2016), for example, focus on the attitudes of Sri Lankan and Indian users of English towards their own and other varieties of English. Hundt et al. (2015) carry out a similar analysis of attitudes towards different varieties of English in Fiji. These studies yield important attitudinal findings. However, they focus on attitudes towards different varieties of English only, with little emphasis on the relation between English and the other languages with which it coexists in complex multilingual settings. Other research, focusing on the multilingual repertoires of users of English in postcolonial settings, rather than on English only, sketches a complex picture of the interplay between language use, language attitudes, and identity (see, for example, Coetzee-Van Rooy 2012).

This paper combines these two areas of research, focusing on the Philippines as multilingual setting. It reports on the results of a language use and language attitude survey among a group of 40 Filipino private university students, extending similar work by, for example, Borlongan (2009). The survey investigated the multilingual repertoires of the respondents, focusing on contexts of use for and attitudes towards multiple languages in domains such as the home, at university, in social media, and in transactional settings. Attitudes towards different varieties of English, and the relation between language and identity were also investigated. The results demonstrate a complex interplay of English, Filipino, and other languages across different contexts. The choice of languages across these contexts is dictated to a certain extent by existing institutional language policies and varying social motivations, and although American English is till strongly preferred in certain academic domains, the respondents’ attitudes towards Philippine English are positive, consistent with Bautista (2001) and Borlongan (2009). A more detailed qualitative analysis of the data reveals that preference for language choice in specific domains is determined by a complex set of motivations with cultural identity highlighted as a compelling reason for choosing the Philippine English variety over the exonormative American variety. In the discussion, these findings are related to existing findings on multilingual repertoires and attitudes towards varieties of English in the Philippines and elsewhere, so as to contribute to the broader understanding of the multilingual dynamics of World Englishes. Further study in this area can benefit from surveying students from public universities.

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References

Bautista, M.L.S. (2001). Attitudes of selected Luzon university students and faculty towards Philippine English. In M.L.G. Tayao et al. (Eds.), Rosario E. Maminta in focus: Selected writings in applied linguistics (pp. 236-273). Quezon City: Philippine Association for Language Teaching.

Bernaisch, T. (2012). Attitudes towards Englishes in Sri Lanka. World Englishes 31(3) (pp. 279-291).

Bernaisch, T. & Koch, C. (2016). Attitudes towards Englishes in India. World Englishes 35(1) (pp. 118-132).

Borlongan, A.M. (2009). A survey on language use, attitudes, and identity in relation to Philippine English among young generation Filipinos: An initial sample from a private university. Philippine ESL Journal 3 (pp. 74-107).

Coetzee-Van Rooy, S. 2012. Flourishing functional multilingualism: Evidence from language repertoires in the Vaal Triangle region. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 218 (pp. 87-119)

Hundt, M., Zipp, L. & Huber, A. 2015. Attitudes in Fiji towards varieties of English. World Englishes 34(4) (pp. 688-707).

Schneider, Edgar W. (2007) Postcolonial English: Varieties around the world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Language and Power: A Quantitative Profile of Interpersonal Linguistic Choice in Political Discourse

Percy Lui Luen Tim (Open University of Hong Kong), Eden S H Li (Open University of Hong Kong), John Li (Hong Kong Community College, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University), and Andy Fung (Open University of Hong Kong)

The relation between language and power has drawn much attention in Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 2015). Though having the merit of providing a holistic view of an issue, a quantitative study, however, is not a popular approach. Based on the Systemic Functional Linguistics, the present study investigates the issue of language and power of the discourse in a political event – a televised meeting between five government officials of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) and five student representatives of the Hong Kong Federation of Student (HKFS) during the Occupy Central Movement in Hong Kong. It examines the power relationships not only between the government officials and the student representatives but also the individual actors within each party and its influence on the linguistic choice in the discourse of the meeting, focusing on the interpersonal linguistic elements in a language (Halliday 2004). The paper intends to answer the following questions: First, what are the power relationships between the actors in the event? Second, how do their power relationships affect their discursive roles or division of labour in the interaction between the two parties? Third, how do their discursive roles in turn influence their linguistic choices?

Keywords: language, power, Critical Discourse Analysis, Systemic Functional Linguistics, Occupy Central Movement

References

Fairclough, N. (2015). Language and Power. 3rd Ed. London: Routledge.

Halliday, M.A.K. (revised by Matthiessen, C.M.I.M) (2004). An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Edward Arnold.

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Setting stars: disappearing systems of spatial reference in Dhivehi

Jonathon Lum (Monash University)

Dhivehi (Indo-Aryan) is spoken throughout the Maldives, an Indian Ocean archipelago comprising nearly 1200 islands in 26 atolls. Although Dhivehi is not currently endangered, radical social, technological, and environmental changes loom as serious threats to the future of the language. These threats include massive internal migration to the capital, Malé, the introduction of English-medium schooling, and rising sea levels (the Maldives is the world’s lowest country, with almost all of its land less than two metres above sea level (Woodroffe 2008:88)). While Dhivehi overall may survive the abrupt changes to the social and physical environment in which it is spoken, several traditional features of spatial reference in Dhivehi are being lost. This paper reports on these, drawing on data collected in nine months of recent fieldwork focusing on spatial reference in the Maldives (as part of a broader project investigating spatial reference in atoll-based languages).

One of these features is a 32-point sidereal compass originally borrowed from medieval Arab traders. As in the Arabic sidereal compass (Halpern 1986), the names of the 32 points refer to the rising and setting points of various stars and constellations, e.g., agurabu īrān ‘Scorpio rising’ (i.e., SE by E or 123.75 degrees). However, although most old men still have mastery of the sidereal compass, very few younger speakers are even aware that such a system exists. Another endangered feature is a directional axis in which eggam-as ̣̊ ‘inland-DAT’ points to the interior of an island while atiri-as ̣̊ ‘beach-DAT’ points in the opposite direction, towards the (nearest) beach. On many islands, this ‘inland-beachward’ axis is also invoked by horizontal senses of the directional verbs aranī ‘going up’ and erenī ‘going down’, the former pointing inland and the latter beachward, though the system varies somewhat according to island topography. Finally, there is an unusual application of terms for ‘front’ and ‘back’ to the inner and outer sides of items in ring-like formations, a pattern possibly motivated by the conceptualization of the inner/lagoonward side of atoll islands as front sides and the outer/oceanward side as back sides.

These features of Dhivehi spatial language appear to be disappearing under the influence of urbanization, bilingualism, and modern technologies (such as GPS navigation) that make the traditional systems redundant. The paper concludes by underlining the value of documenting traditional systems of spatial reference even in widely spoken languages, given the sweeping social, technological and environmental changes taking place in many communities.

References

Halpern, Michael. 1986. Sidereal Compasses: a case for Carolinean-Arab links. The Journal of the Polynesian Society 95(4). 441–460.

Woodroffe, Colin D. 2008. Reef-island topography and the vulnerability of atolls to sea-level rise. Global and Planetary Change 62. 77–96.

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Reflections of Linguistic History in Quantitative Phonotactics

Jayden Macklin-Cordes (University of Queensland) and Erich Round (University of Queensland)

Advanced quantitative methods are at the cutting edge of historical linguistics, however these methods often ideally require many hundreds of data points per language. In order to generate reliable inferences at ever greater time depths, there is a need for typological datasets which are not only broader in coverage, but also contain a deeper store of information. We explore one avenue by extracting large numbers of high-definition phonotactic ‘traits’ per language. We show that these traits contain phylogenetic signal, thus demonstrating an important path towards high-powered methods of the near future.

Methodology: Languages may be compared in terms of which two-segment sequences they permit. Moreover, such biphones possess distinct lexical frequencies, which can also be compared. We examined whether such data contain information about family-tree structure, i.e., phylogenetic signal. Two standard statistics are used: D [1] tests coarse-grained biphone ‘permissibility’ data; and K [2] tests higher-definition transition probabilities.

We examined 2 subgroups of the Australian Pama-Nyungan family: 10 languages of Ngumpin-Yapa [3] and 7 of Yolngu [4], represented by phonemically-standardised lexicons from the CHIRILA database [5]. Phylogenetic signal is calculated with reference to phylogenies from C. Bowern (updated from [6]). Australian languages present a tough challenge, since phonotactically they are notoriously uniform [7–9]. Moreover, Ngumpin-Yapa has some of the world’s highest borrowing rates [10–11]. Thus we hypothesized that the coarse-grained D test would fail. The key question is whether the high-definition K test succeeds.

Results: D attempts to reject two null hypotheses: that traits’ distributions are (A) too uniform to reveal structure present in the reference tree; and (B) random. We extracted 184 (Ngumpin-Yapa) and 164 (Yolngu) traits per language. We were surprised to reject both hypotheses for Yolngu (Stouffer’s Z>100, p=0.00): thus, even binary permissibility data revealed some phylogenetic signal. For N-Y only the second null hypothesis could be rejected (p=0.00), and further testing showed that when the subgroup’s outermost language was removed, even this failed. We conclude that binary phonotactic data contains weak phylogenetic signal at best; the Y result may represent statistical noise, and more subgroups should be tested.

K attempts to reject one null hypothesis: that no phylogenetic signal is present. A value K=0 represents random trait distribution relative to the reference tree; K=1 represents an exact match and K>1 indicates that outermost languages are even more distinct in the test data than in the reference tree. With 451 (Ngumpin-Yapa) and 541 (Yolngu) traits per language, we reject the null hypothesis in both subgroups (Stouffer’s Z=9.87; 17.6, p=0.00). In Ngumpin-Yapa, the confidence interval for K of [0.86, 0.92] indicates a very good match with the reference phylogeny, and in Yolngu, [1.15, 1.26] indicates an even stronger sorting of languages. Further testing, which removed the outermost language from both subgroups showed the result is stable: [0.81, 0.87] for Ngumpin-Yapa and [0.96, 1.00] for Yolngu.

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Conclusion: As linguists attempt to up-scale efforts in quantitative historical linguistics, we demonstrate the significant potential of high-definition phonotactics, which permits the extraction of several hundred traits per language and has revealed phylogenetic signal in two Australian subgroups.

n(traits) Mean D SD MFDR-CIa

Ngumpin-Yapa 184 0.372 3.592 [−0.23, 0.97]

Yolngu 164 –1.486 4.269 [−2.97, −0.73]

Figure 1: Results for coarse-grained, binary data (D test)

n(traits) Mean K SD MFDR-CIa

Ngumpin-Yapa 451 0.893 0.27 [0.86, 0.92]

Yolngu 541 1.206 0.595 [1.15, 1.26]

Figure 2: Results for high-definition, continuous data (K test) a Benjamini–Hochberg [12] mean false discovery rate adjusted CI

References

[1] S.A. Fritz and A. Purvis, “Selectivity in mammalian extinction risk and threat types: A new measure of phylogenetic signal strength in binary traits,” Conserv. Biol., vol. 24, no. 4., pp. 1042-1051, 2010.

[2] S.P. Blomberg, T. Garland and A.R. Ives, “Testing for phylogenetic signal in comparative data: Behavioural traits are more labile,” Evolution, vol. 57, no. 4, pp. 717-745, 2003.

[3] P. McConvell and M. Laughren, “The Ngumpin-Yapa subgroup,” in Australian Languages: Classification and the comparative method, C. Bowern and H. Koch, Eds. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004, pp. 151-177.

[4] Schebeck, Bernhard Dialect and Social Groupings in North East Arnhem Land, typescript, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Library, Canberra, 1968.

[5] C. Bowern, “Chrila: Contemporary and Historical Resources for Indigenous Languages of Australia,” Language Documentation and Conservation, vol. 10 http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/ldc/

[6] C. Bowern and Q.D. Atkinson, “Computational phylogenetics and the internal structure of Pama-Nyungan,” Language, vol. 88, no. 4, pp. 817-845, 2012.

[7] R.M.W. Dixon, The Languages of Australia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

[8] P.J. Hamilton, “Phonetic constraints and markedness in the phonotactics of Australian languages,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 1996.

[9] B. Baker, “Word structure in Australian languages,” in The Languages and Linguistics of Australia: A comprehensive guide, H. Koch and R. Nordlinger, Eds. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2014, pp. 139-214.

[10] C. Bowern, et al., “Does lateral transmission obscure inheritance in hunter-gatherer languages?” PLoS One, 2011: e25195.

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[11] P. McConvell, “Loanwords in Gurindji, a Pama-Nyungan language of Australia,” in Loanwords in the world's languages: A comparative handbook, M. Haspelmath and U. Tadmore, Eds. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2009, pp. 790–822.

[12] Y. Benjamini and Y. Hochberg, “Controlling the false discovery rate: A practical and powerful approach to multiple testing,” J. R. Stat. Soc. Series B (Stat. Methodol.), vol. 57, no. 1, pp. 289-300, 1995.

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Language background conditions variation in English stop pronunciation on Croker Island

Robert Mailhammer (Western Sydney University), Stacey Sherwood (Western Sydney University), Hywel Stoakes (The University of Melbourne)

Phonetic differences between Aboriginal varieties of English and Standard Australian English have been reported (see e.g. Butcher 2008, Fletcher & Butcher 2014). However, the reasons for these differences are still under-researched (Eades 2014: 438). While it is commonly suspected that relevant local Australian Indigenous languages are at least partially responsible for phonetic differences (see e.g. Butcher 2008: 627, already Elwell 1979: 150), this has so far not been demonstrated in a published case study. Based on acoustic experimental data, we will argue that the local Indigenous languages Iwaidja and Kunwinjku have influenced the pronunciation of English stops by Iwaidja/Kunwinjku bilinguals but in different ways due to differences in the phonological and phonetic setup of these languages.

To support this argument, we will present results from an acoustic analysis of English stop and affricate phonemes, investigating three parameters, closure duration, voice onset time and lenition (measured as intensity abatement, see Ennever, Meakins & Round subm.). The main research question we asked was whether the way these parameters pattern in Iwaidja and Kunwinjku show parallels to English spoken by Iwaidja/Kunwinjku-English bilinguals that English spoken by non-Iwaidja/Kunwinjku speakers does not.

The data come from experiments conducted on Croker Island and in Western Sydney with four different populations: 4 Iwaidja-English bilinguals (2 male), 4 Kunwinjku-English bilinguals (2 male), 3 (Croker Island) Aboriginal English monolinguals (1 male), 4 Australian Standard English monolinguals (2 male). Suitable target words were elicited in English, Iwaidja and Kunwinjku (written stimuli or shadowing) with stop phonemes in initial, medial and final position embedded in a natural carrier phrase controlling for the phonological environment (4 target words per condition, 3 repetitions each). Recordings were made with a Countryman EMW microphone using an iPad with iRigPro preamp with a 16-bit sampling depth and a 48kHz sampling rate. The data was analysed using the Praat for R script developed by Ennever, Meakins & Round (subm.). We ran a linear mixed effects model with speaker as a random factor and language as a fixed factor investigating a main-effect on amplitude abatement.

The results give an affirmative answer to the research question: Especially with respect to lenition, the samples of English spoken by Iwaidja/Kunwinjku speakers show clear parallels to Iwaidja/Kunwinjku (see Figure 1). Both samples of English differ significantly from the sample of Aboriginal English and Australian Standard English speakers. This suggests that the differences in the pronunciation of stops found in English spoken by Iwaidja/Kunwinjku bilinguals are indeed due to contact between these Australian languages and English in the repertoires of the relevant speakers. The second conclusion is that English on Croker Island is heterogenous, and that it is questionable whether it should be regarded as one variety or rather as a bundle of varieties or a repertoire. Third, all samples of English from Croker Island show maintenance of the phonological “voicing” opposition in stops. This contrast is often neutralised in other varieties of Aboriginal English (see e.g. Butcher 2008: 627).

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Our study contributes to the sociolinguistics of English, by describing the phonetics of English spoken on Croker Island for the first time and by demonstrating that key features are best interpreted as results of language contact. We also show that English on Croker Island is likely to be not a monolithic variety, which has also important ramifications for sociolinguistic theory and the history of English.

Figure 1: Intensity abatement (lenition) in medial position in all samples (AbEng = monolingual English sample from Croker Island; AusEng = monolingual sample from Western Sydney; Iwa = Iwaidja sample from bilingual Iwaidja-English speakers; Iwa_Eng = English sample from bilingual Iwaidja-English speakers; Knw_Eng = English sample from bilingual Kunwinjku-English speakers; Kun = Kunwinjku sample from Kunwinjku-English speakers)

References

Butcher, Andrew. 2008. Linguistic aspects of Australian Aboriginal English. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics 22.8, 625-42.

Eades, Diana. 2014. Aboriginal English. In Harold Koch & Rachel Nordlinger (eds.), The languages and linguistics of Australia: a comprehensive guide, 417-47. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter Mouton.

Elwell, Vanessa. 1979. English as a second language in Aborignal Australia as a second language in Aboriginal Australia: a case study of Milingimbi. dissertation, Australian National University.

Ennever, Thomas, Felicity Meakins & Erich Round. subm. An acoustic measure of lenition, Gurindji stops, and the puzzle of Australian obstruents. Ms.Reprint Edition.

Fletcher, Janet & Andrew Butcher. 2014. Sound patterns of Australian Languages. In Harold Koch & Rachel Nordlinger (eds.), The languages and linguistics of Australia: a comprehensive guide. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter Mouton.

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Repetition and resonance as politeness in Deafblind signing

Howard Manns (Monash University), Louisa Willoughby (Monash University), Shimako Iwasaki (Monash University), Meredith Bartlett (Monash University)

This paper examines politeness through a frame of dialogic syntax, resonance and repetition. In doing so, it seeks to provide a more nuanced understanding of politeness strategies among Tactile Auslan users, and explores the relevance of dialogic syntax to sign languages.

Tactile Auslan is used by Deaf Australians who generally learned to sign early in life and subsequently suffered a significant sight loss. There are certain challenges in adapting a visual sign language for tactile delivery but these challenges are little understood by researchers and interpreters.

With this in mind, we analysed seventeen dyadic conversations between experienced Tactile Auslan users and examined politeness through the sequential perspective, and with an eye to dialogic syntax (e.g. Du Bois 2014). Dialogic syntax focuses on mapping resonance across utterances, such as in the following exchange:

(1) Sam: I don’t like those.

(2) Angela: I don’t like those either.

Du Bois (2007:159)

In this case, the repetition of I don’t like those in lines (1)-(2) creates resonance between the two speakers and the utterances as does the use of either.

In the current paper, we firstly show how a ‘traditional’ sequential perspective (e.g. CA) shows that, compared to spoken English, Tactile Auslan speakers draw on fewer ‘traditional’ face-mitigating forms, like discourse markers or address terms. At the outset, this can lead to a view of these speakers as more direct communicators in terms of politeness (cf. Hoza 2007).

Yet, a more sophisticated understanding of politeness in Deafblind communities emerges by appealing to resonance, dialogic syntax and repetition. For instance, while face-mitigating forms rarely appear, repetition of questions, in varied but related forms (i.e. resonance), hints at more subtle forms of politeness.

We close our talk by arguing the resonance mapping sheds light on the under-defined aspects of structures and their functions (e.g. politeness). Consequently, appeals to the broader text (e.g. Du Bois 2007, 2014) and beyond traditional notions of directness/indirectness (Silverstein 2010) can lead to a more a sophisticated understanding of politeness.

References

Du Bois, J. (2007). Ths stance triangle. In R. Englebretson (ed.), Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation and Interaction (pp. 139-182). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Du Bois, J. (2014). Toward dialogic syntax. Cognitive Linguistics, 25(3): 359-410.

Hoza, J. (2007). It’s Not What You Sign, It’s How You Sign It. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet Press.

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Silverstein, S. (2010). ‘Direct’ and ‘indirect’ communicative acts in semiotic perspective. Journal of Pragmatics, 42: 337-353.

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Exploring Murrinhpatha dialectal variation in a diachronic corpus

John Mansfield (University of Melbourne)

Murrinhpatha is one of the few Australian Aboriginal languages that has maintained a vibrant speech community, centred around the town of Wadeye in the Daly River region (Walsh, 1976). The language was traditionally spoken by nine patrilineal clans occupying the land around Wadeye, inland to the east, and along the coast to the south-east (Ward, 1983). Little has been documented of dialectal variation among these clans, and eighty years of town settlement has changed the patterns of clan co-residence, not just among Murrinhpatha clans, but also with a further 15 clans of the region, who previously spoke other Aboriginal languages but now speak Murrinhpatha.

Dialectal variation among Murrinhpatha clans is quite subtle, and it is only the compilation of an extensive corpus that has allowed clan–variant associations to be revealed. This study draws on a corpus of speech samples from some 50 speakers, born between 1900 and 2000, and belonging to some 20 clans, both those that traditionally speak Murrinhpatha and those that have shifted to Murrinhpatha in the wake of missionary settlement. The dialectal variant discussed here is the sequencing of tense and number (TNS, NUM) suffixes at the end of the verb, which can take either order, TNS-NUM or NUM-TNS. (Mansfield, 2015).

(1a) purdeneyitj-dha-nime

they.explain-PST-PAUC-IMPF

they (paucal) explained

(1b) pardeneyitj-nime-dha

they.explain-PAUC-PST

they (paucal) explained

The oldest stratum of speakers in the corpus suggest that the variant sequences were largely distributed along clan lines in the pre-missionary period. However as we move diachronically towards speakers growing up in millenial Wadeye, we see one variant, TNS-NUM, originally associated with inland or “fresh-water” clans living far from Wadeye, becoming the dominant variant among speakers of all clans. The spread of this fresh-water variant appears to be based on marriage ties and territorial proximity. However the spread appears to be a “change from below” (Labov, 2001), rather than being driven by sociolinguistic prestige. Unlike the kun-dangwok interjections used as clan indexical markers in Bininj Gun-wok (Garde, 2008), the verb suffix sequence variable of Murrinhpatha shows no sign of social salience for speakers.

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References

Garde, M. (2008). Kun-dangwok: “clan lects” and Ausbau in western Arnhem Land. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 191, 141–169.

Labov, W. (2001). Principles of linguistic change - volume 2: Social factors. Malden MA: Blackwell.

Mansfield, J. B. (2015). Morphotactic variation, prosodic domains and the changing structure of the Murrinhpatha verb. Asia-Pacific Language Variation, 1(2), 162–188.

Walsh, M. (1976). The Murinypata language of north-west Australia (PhD thesis). Australian National Univeristy, Canberra.

Ward, S. T. (1983). The peoples and their land around Wadeye: Murrinh kanhi ka kardu i da putek pigunu. Wadeye: Wadeye Press.

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Addressee-based demonstratives as topic markers

Anna Margetts (Monash University)

In Papuan and Oceanic languages there is a well-established phenomenon of demonstratives developing into topic markers and clause-backgrounding devices. This development appears to originate with demonstratives in anaphoric use. In person-oriented systems it tends to be addressee-based forms which occur in anaphoric use and which take on topic-related functions. I present evidence that this constitutes a general cross-linguistic tendency for three-member person-oriented systems rather than an areal phenomenon. The findings presented here contribute to the study of demonstratives and their grammaticalization and, more generally, to the cross-linguistic investigation of referential choice.

Keywords: demonstratives, topic, person-oriented demonstratives, addressee, clause-backgrounding, subordination

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Can we Identify Bilingual-Led Lexical Differentiation in Oceanic?

Luisa Miceli (University of Western Australia), T. Mark Ellison (Australian National University), Bethwyn Evans (Australian National University), Simon Greenhill (Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History & Australian National University)

Ellison & Miceli (forthcoming) identify a bias in lexical production which involves the avoidance of shared vocabulary (doppels) by bilingual speakers: when the speaker’s languages share a similar word form for a particular meaning, the speaker tends to select an alternative word form distinctive to only one of the languages, if one is available. We propose that a monitoring mechanism in speech production is responsible for this “anti-doppel” bias. This bias, when multiplied over a population and if consistent over time, may lead to the rapid differentiation of the vocabularies of related languages. When bilingualism involves unrelated languages, the same monitoring mechanism may instead reduce the likelihood of lexical borrowing, as observed for example in the languages of Amazonia (Aikhenvald 2002, Epps 2007) where distinctiveness of word forms has been maintained despite much structural convergence.

Presence of this bias therefore steers the process of lexical inheritance in predictable directions. In situations where languages develop relatively independently of each other we do not expect retentions to be in any way dependent on the lexical properties of other language(s). However we would expect this dependence in languages affected by the anti-doppel bias. For example, if language A replaces a shared word form there it is less likely that the same word form will also be replaced in language B as it is no longer a doppel. In languages that share this type of history we therefore expect to find a pattern of lexical inheritance that reflects a certain degree of dependence between lexical replacements cross-linguistically.

In this paper we investigate patterns of lexical inheritance in Oceanic languages with these predictions in mind. Oceanic languages make an ideal case study for a number of reasons. Firstly, much lexical reconstruction has already been carried out and the internal structure of the subgroup is well understood (see Lynch, Ross & Crowley 2002, Ross, Pawley & Osmond 2011). Secondly, there are enough sound changes for lexical layers within languages to be identifiable. Thirdly, and most importantly for this study, it is likely that a number of different bilingual scenarios were in place across the Oceanic-speaking world. We hypothesise that the following sociolinguistic situations are likely to have been present in the four regions initially selected for analysis:

a. Bilingualism between Oceanic languages and Papuan languages (Bougainville)

b. Bilingualism between Oceanic languages from different sub-branches (Micronesia)

c. Bilingualism between Oceanic languages from the same sub-branch (New Georgia)

d. Little contact with other languages (Rarotonga)

We describe the patterns of lexical retention and replacement across these regions, and discuss whether they can be explained in terms of likely past speaker behaviours influenced by the anti-doppel bias to varying degrees.

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References

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. (2002). Language Contact in Amazonia. Oxford: OUP.

Ellison, T. Mark & Luisa Miceli (forthcoming). Language monitoring in bilinguals as a mechanism for rapid lexical replacement. Language 93.

Epps, P. (2007). The Vaupés melting pot: Tucanoan influence on Hup. In A. Y. Aikhenvald and R. M. W. Dixon (eds.), Grammars in Contact: A Cross-linguistic Typology (pp. 267-289). Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Lynch, John, Malcolm Ross & Terry Crowley (eds). 2002. The Oceanic languages. London: Curzon.

Ross, Malcolm, Andrew Pawley & Meredith Osmond (eds). 2011. The lexicon of Proto Oceanic: The culture and environment of ancestral Oceanic society, Vol.4: Animals. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.

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The Mediopassive in Arandic languages

David Moore (University of Western Australia)

In the Arandic languages of Central Australia Mediopassive derives an intransitive stem from a transitive root and hence lowers valency. It has a range of functions dependent upon the individual verb root. Some verb roots occur with just one of these functions and others have more than one. In Arrernte for example, akelheme has the senses ‘break’ (middle) and ‘cut self’ (reflexive). The traditional analysis of Mediopassive in Arandic languages is ‘reflexive’ (Yallop 1977; Wilkins 1989) with the central interpretation of ‘do to self’. The Reflexive characterization has sometimes gone along with a less detailed analysis of its functions, based upon the analysis of a limited number of verb roots according to over a century of grammatical analysis in Central Australia. This paper presents an updated analysis of the Mediopassive based upon recent data.

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The linguistic features of the traditional Aboriginal songs of Victoria

Stephen Morey (La Trobe University)

Texts of more than 100 different traditional songs of Indigenous people in Victoria were recorded between 1835 and 1970. A small number of these have sound recordings, in particular those recorded by Luise Hercus from Mr. Stan Day (Wembawemba) in the 1960s.

For many of the Aboriginal languages of Victoria, very few texts were recorded. These song texts are thus perhaps the most important surviving examples of the usage of some of these languages, although the texts are often very brief.

Some of the songs are presented with linguistic glosses, particularly those recorded by A.W. Howitt in Woiwurrung, Gunnai/Kurnai and Western Kulin varieties. Many of the songs recorded by researchers like A.W. Howitt, R.H. Mathews, John Bulmer and William Thomas include a substantial amount of contextual information.

In our paper I will present linguistic analyses of traditional songs from Gippsland (the Gunnai/Kŭrnai language) and from Melbourne (the Woiwurrung language), and discuss the insights into the morpho-syntax of these languages that can be gained from this analysis.

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“Lucky enough to get the embrace”: Get-constructions as an Irish inheritance in Australian English

Jean Mulder (University of Melbourne), John Rice-Whetton, Cara Penry Williams

In understanding the development of Australian English (AusE) some but limited attention has been given to influences from Irish English (IrE) and its historical input (e.g. Jones & McDougall, 2006; Lonergan, 2003). There is a relative scarcity of clearly identified IrE features when viewed in the context of the 19th century, when the Irish were the second largest group of immigrants to Australia (Moore, 2008:90). The commonly held explanation of this fact is that the Irish formed a distinct out-group of low social status, and as such, identifiably Irish features were stigmatized and avoided, particularly by non-Irish people (Burridge and Musgrave, 2014). This leaves open the tantalizing prospect that there may be evidence of IrE influence in AusE on a subtle level, in features marginalised in the face of a codified AusE.

This paper investigates one potential example of IrE influence in the use of specific get-constructions. Nolan (2012) maintains that constructions, such as in (1), are distinctively Irish, not being found in Standard British English and perhaps due to analogy with Irish faigh ‘get’ constructions.

(1) She got the flu so he brought her to the doctor. (Nolan 2012:1144)

Similar uses of get are found in contemporary AusE. If this can be traced historically to people of Irish background, but not to people of non-Irish background, then there is good evidence that these particular constructions with get do, in fact, represent a feature present due to IrE influence.

To assess this possibility, we constructed a corpus of letters and diaries of Australian WW1 soldiers. This corpus of informal writings consists of approximately 71,000 words by 12 Australian soldiers who had parents and/or grandparents born in Ireland matched with approximately 40,000 words by 10 Australian soldiers of English descent.

Using this corpus, we firstly analyse the actual range of variation found in the get-constructions, which is often glossed over in discussions. Secondly, we demonstrate that indeed, the IrE get-constructions are used almost exclusively by writers of Irish, but not English, background.

This paper therefore provides both a thorough account of an under-researched syntactic construction and further evidence of IrE inheritances in AusE.

References

Burridge, K., & Musgrave, S. (2014). It's speaking Australian English we are: Irish features in nineteenth century Australia. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 34(1), 24-49.

Jones, M. J., & McDougall, K. (2006). A comparative acoustic study of Australian English fricated /t/: Assessing the Irish (English) link. In P. Warren & C. I. Watson (Eds.). Proceedings of the 11th Australian International Conference on Speech Science & Technology, (pp. 6–12). Auckland: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association. Retrieved from http://www.assta.org/sst/2006/sst2006-16.pdf.

Lonergan, D. (2003). An Irish-centric view of Australian English. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 23(2), 151–159.

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Moore, B. (2008). Speaking our language: The story of Australian English. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.

Nolan, B. (2012). The GET constructions of Modern Irish and Irish English: GET-passive and GET-recipient variations. Linguistics 50(6), 1111-1161.

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Space vector models and empirical Saussurean semantics

Simon Musgrave (Monash University), Alice Gaby (Monash University) , Gede Primahadi Wijaya Rajeg (Monash University), David Dowe (Monash University)

In a well-known passage, Saussure states that: “In the language itself, there are only differences” (Saussure 1986:118 [1916:166]). Semantic analysis on this basis seems to be inevitably limited to restricted domains (such as pronoun systems) in which finite sets of oppositions can be identified. However, recent developments in computational linguistics may assist in increasing the possibilities for semantics which is empirically based and respects Saussure’s insight.

Space vector models (Clark 2015; Turney & Pantel 2010) of word meaning use models of text in which each word is located a in multi-dimensional space; words which are used in similar contexts are close to each other in the spatial model and words which rarely co-occur in the text are far apart. Given a sufficiently large text sample, a model can be constructed which approximates the Saussurean ideal of showing the differences between every lexical element of a language. Implementations of algorithms to produce such models are now easily available (Mikolov et al. 2013).

In this paper, we present initial results of semantic analysis using space vector models. This case study took 22 verbs used to describe events of cutting and breaking (as identified in the study by Majid, Boster & Bowerman 2008; Majid et al. 2007). A 20 dimensional model was built using the entire contents (more than 500 million words) of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies 2008). A vector matrix for the 22 cut/break words to was extracted from the model. The matrix was then the basis for hierarchical clustering analysis, resulting in the dendrogram in Figure 1 which shows seven clusters as the most parsimonious grouping of the data.

We suggest that the dendrogram shows two aspects of the value of these methods in semantic analysis. Firstly, the clustering reflects semantic intuitions in most cases. For example, the first split in the clustering contrasts words which can be viewed as more basic, such as cut and break themselves, against more specific words, such as slash and hack, which are hyponyms of the first group. As another example at a lower level of the clustering, the somewhat archaic words hew and cleave group together. However, there are anomalies in the clustering: for example, saw is in the first main group discussed, and scythe does not group with hew and cleave. Secondly, the lowest level of clustering show us the words which are closest to each other in the model, allowing us to ask what conceptual differences are relevant in distinguishing these words. An interesting example of this is the group slice, peel and chop. Intuition might suggest that slice and chop would be close to each other with peel denoting a rather different type of cutting. But in the model, peel and chop are closest with slice grouping together with them at the next level in the hierarchy.

The anomalies in these results suggest that the next step in applying these methods is to use them in association with collocational analysis. The space vector model is built from co-occurrence of words, therefore a phenomenon such as the relation seen here between peel and chop may be based on a commonality in what entities the activity is applied to rather than intrinsic properties of the activity.

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Figure 1 – Hierarchical cluster analysis of 22 verbs of cutting and breaking

References

Clark, Stephen. 2015. Vector Space Models of Lexical Meaning. In Shalom Lappin & Chris Fox (eds.), The Handbook of Contemporary semantic theory, 493–522. Second Edition. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons.

Davies, Mark. 2008. The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 520 million words, 1990-present. http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.

Majid, Asifa, James S Boster & Melissa Bowerman. 2008. The cross-linguistic categorization of everyday events: A study of cutting and breaking. Cognition 109(2). 235–250.

Majid, Asifa, Melissa Bowerman, Miriam van Staden & James S Boster. 2007. The semantic categories of cutting and breaking events: A crosslinguistic perspective. Cognitive Linguistics 18(2). 133–152.

Mikolov, Tomas, Kai Chen, Greg Corrado & Jeffrey Dean. 2013. Efficient estimation of word representations in vector space. arXiv preprint arXiv:1301.3781.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1986. Course in general linguistics. (Ed.) Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye & Albert Riedlinger. (Trans.) Harris. LaSalle, Ill: Open Court.

Turney, Peter D & Patrick Pantel. 2010. From frequency to meaning: Vector space models of semantics. Journal of artificial intelligence research 37(1). 141–188.

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The Southern Gulf Region as a Sprachbund

Ilana Mushin (University of Queensland) and David Osgarby (University of Queensland)

Languages of the Barkly Tableland and Gulf Country of Northern Australia form part of the boundary between languages traditionally classified as Pama-Nyungan (e.g. Ngumpin-Yapa, Warluwarric) and Non-Pama-Nyungan (e.g. Mirndi, Garrwan, Tankgic), and include language families and subgroups which are today discontinuous (e.g. Mirndi, Walurwarric). A number of languages in this area show typological peculiarities, such as the loss of prefixing in Mirndi languages (Green, 1995; Harvey, Green, & Nordlinger, 2006) and the emergence of prefixing in Yanyuwa (Warluwarric) (Dixon, 2002, p. 664) that may be indicative of sustained contact between genetically and typologically diverse languages. Additionally, grammatical similarities have been observed between language of this region that cross-cut their genetic boundaries, but these observations have typically been footnotes to more detailed comparative work within genetic groupings (Breen, 2003; Harvey, 2008).

In this paper we investigate whether the grammatical convergences we see across genetic groupings in this region are evidence that a section of the Southern Gulf region should be considered as a Sprachbund—a commonly used term, attributed to Trubetzkoy (1928), to refer to languages which share a high degree of grammatical similarity, but not from common inheritance. To do this we focus on languages from three families: Ngarnka (Osgarby et al., in prep.) and Wambaya (Nordlinger, 1998) (Mirndi), Garrwa (Mushin, 2012) and Waanyi (Laughren et al., 2005; inter alia) (Garrwan) and Gangalidda (Keen, 1983; Round, 2014) (Tangkic).

In all of these languages, clauses are organised around a second position auxiliary that serves to cross-reference core arguments and some adjuncts, and to express some finite tense distinctions (Mushin, 2005, 2006). In addition to these functions, in Ngarnka and Wambaya the auxiliary encodes direction of motion, and in Gangalidda the auxiliary encodes transitivity. Each of the languages surveyed also possesses a set of modal or subordinating clitics that precede core-argument marking. Second position clitic clusters are illustrated in (1)–(3) for three of the languages we survey. The second position clitic complex is evidence of contact-related convergence as other Mirndi and Tangkic languages do not have this construction. We argue here that by taking this shared feature as a point of departure we are able to start to account for other shared features in lexicon and grammar across languages of this region that also support the notion of a Sprachbund.

Examples

(5) Injuku =miji ngu-lu ngarl-ani.

how =INFER IRR.1SG.S-POT[DO.NPRS] speak-NPRS

Somehow I'll be able to speak it (but I don’t know how) (Ngarnka: Osgarby et al., in prep.)

(6) Don’t you touchim! Najba =wali ninya waydbala-wanyi.

see =EVID 2SG.ACC white.man-ERG

Don’t touch! He might see your fingerprints, the whitefella. (Garrwa: Mushin, 2012, p. 232)

(7) Balath-a =mangala =gandi dathin-a marnduwarra,

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hit-IND =IF =TR.FUT[3SGS.3SGO] that-ABS boy

gamu ginaj-a =thu.

then tell-IMP =1SGG(2SG.O)

If he hits that boy, then tell me. (Gangalidda: Round, 2014)

Keywords: Sprachbund, Typology, Wackernagel position, Non-Pama-Nyungan languages

References

Breen, G. (2003). Wanyi and Garrwa comparative data. In N. Evans (Ed.), The non-Pama-Nyungan languages of northern Australia: Comparative studies of the continent’s most linguistically complex region (pp. 425–462). Canberra, ACT: Pacific Linguistics.

Dixon, R. M. W. (2002). Australian languages: Their nature and development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Green, I. (1995). The death of “prefixing”: Contact induced typological change in Northern Australia. In Twenty-first annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General session and parasession on historical issues in sociolinguistics/social issues in historical linguistics (Vol. 21, pp. 414–425). Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Linguistics Society.

Harvey, M. (2008). Proto Mirndi: A discontinuous language family in Northern Australia. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.

Harvey, M., Green, I., & Nordlinger, R. (2006). From prefixes to suffixes: Typological change in Northern Australia. Diachronica, 23(2), 289–311. http://doi.org/10.1075/dia.23.2.04har

Keen, S. (1983). Yukulta. In R. M. W. Dixon & B. Blake (Eds.), Handbook of Australian Languages (Vol. 3, pp. 190–304). Canberra, ACT: Australian National University Press.

Laughren, M., Pensalfini, R., & Mylne, T. (2005). Accounting for verb-initial order in an Australian language. In A. Carnie, H. Harley, & S. A. Dooley (Eds.), Verb First: On the syntax of verb-initial languages (pp. 367–401). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Mushin, I. (2005). Second position clitic phenomena in North-Central Australia: Some pragmatic considerations. In Proceedings of the 2004 conference of the Australian Linguistics Society (p. 16). Sydney, NSW: The University of Sydney.

Mushin, I. (2006). Motivations for second position: Evidence from North-Central Australia. Linguitic Typology, 10, 287–326. http://doi.org/10.1515/LINGTY.2006.010

Mushin, I. (2012). A grammar of (Western) Garrwa. Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

Nordlinger, R. (1998). A grammar of Wambaya, Northern Territory (Australia). Canberra, ACT: Pacific Linguistics.

Osgarby, D., Pensalfini, R., & Moerkerken, C. (in prep.). A grammar and lexicon of Ngarnka. Manuscript in preparation.

Round, E. (2014). A short description of Gangalidda (Ganggalida/Yukulta). In C. Nancarrow (Ed.), Gangalidda dictionary. Cairns: Carpentaria Land Council Aboriginal Corporation.

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Trubetzkoy, N. S. (1928). Proposition 16. In Acts of the 1st International Congress of Linguistics (pp. 17–18). Leiden.

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English “on top”: audience design and lexical borrowing in Indonesia print media

Muziatun Muziatun (University of South Australia)

Lexical borrowing in the print media has been well investigated (Bell, 1984, 1991, 1997; Chan, 2000; Daulton, 2003a, 2003b, 2011; Mohideen, 2006; Shimada, 2003; Takashi, 1990). However, research on lexical borrowing and its relationship with aspects of the intended audience in print media is less developed. This paper reports a sociolinguistics analysis of lexical borrowings from English in Indonesia print media targeting different audiences in terms of gender and age. This corpus-based study used data collected from four magazines published in Indonesia targeting different gender and age categories. There are four different audiences examined in this study, teenage females, adult females, teenage males and adult males. For each category of audiences, two editions of magazines were chosen. Across all audience types, there is a common finding that English is by far the most commonly borrowed language with other languages contributing very little to lexical innovation in Indonesian publications. The study found that neither age nor gender seems to be associated with borrowing in Indonesian publications, which is different from similar studies in other languages. Takashi (1990), for example, has found that there is a strong relationship between lexical borrowings and the age and gender profile of the intended audience in the Japanese media. Rather than age and gender of the intended audience alone being associated with amount of borrowing in magazines, there is a complex relationship between age and gender categories in borrowing practices of Indonesian magazines.

Keywords: Lexical borrowing, English in media, audience design, gender, age, Indonesian print media, magazines.

References

Bell, A. (1984). Language style as audience design. Language in Society, 13(02), 145-204.

Bell, A. (1991). The language of news media: Blackwell Oxford.

Bell, A. (1997). Language style as audience design Sociolinguistics (pp. 240-250): Springer.

Chan, Y.-Y. (2000). The English-Language Media in Hong Kong. World Englishes, 19(3), 323-335.

Daulton, F. (2003a). The effect of Japanese loanwords on written English production-A pilot study. JALT Hokkaido Journal, 7, 4-14.

Daulton, F. (2003b). Loanwords in the Media.

Daulton, F. (2011). Lexical Borrowing and the Global Web of Words. The Ryukoku Journal of Humanities and Sciences Vol. 33, No. 1 (2011).

Mohideen, S. B. H. (2006). A Study of English Loan Words in Selected Bahasa Melayu Newspaper Articels.

Shimada, M. (2003). Functions of western loanwords in Japanese newspaper articles. University of British Columbia.

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Takashi, K. (1990). A sociolinguistic analysis of English borrowings in Japanese advertising texts. World Englishes, 9(3), 327-341. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-971X.1990.tb00270.x

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Effects of academic interventions: Language ideologies in linguistic research and beyond in the case of Tok Pisin and Hawai’i Creole

Christoph Neuenschwander (University of Bern)

Tok Pisin and Hawai’i Creole are treated quite differently in the academic literature in terms of the roles they play in their respective communities and in terms of the status they have acquired (cf. Tryon and Charpentier 2004, Siegel 2008).

While Tok Pisin is regarded as a successful lingua franca that facilitates communication within the linguistically fragmented state of Papua New Guinea, Hawai’i Creole is often portrayed as a typical low-status variety, considered mere “broken English” by its speakers (Siegel 2008: 267). Yet, it is striking how Tok Pisin’s kinship to the lexifier English has prevented its breakthrough in education and literature. Many Papua New Guineans acknowledge it as a marker of identity, but reject it as inferior to English in formal contexts. It is equally interesting how productive Hawai’i Creole has become in creative writing, despite its negative image.

In this paper, I argue that (a) the discrepancy between alleged status and actual language practices in both cases reflect language ideologies that are perpetuated within the academic discourse on these varieties, and (b) that the limited and very domain-specific status of both varieties can be traced back to what I term ‘academic interventions’, i.e. moments in history when linguists have made an effort to influence metalinguistic debates and promote a more wide-spread use of the creole in question. The paper thus aims to address misconceptions about the two creoles in the academic literature, and to encourage a critical discussion of linguists’ roles in public discourse.

Following Blommaert’s (1999) historiographical approach to language ideological debates, I will draw on a range of historical data that I have analysed qualitatively. This includes written data (newspaper articles, letters to the editor, official documents, etc.) that goes back to World War II, as well as semi-structured interviews conducted in 2014 and 2015.

Keywords: Language ideology, language policy, creoles

References

Blommaert, Jan (1999). The debate is open. In Blommaert, Jan (ed.), Language Ideological Debates. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1-38.

Siegel, Jeff (2008). The Emergence of Pidgin and Creole Languages. New York: Oxford University Press.

Tryon, Darrell T. and Jean-Michel Charpentier (2004). Pacific Pidgins and Creoles: Origins, Growth and Development. Trends in Linguistics 132. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Convergence and divergence in empirical linguistics: Subject preferences for English <roar>

John Newman (University of Alberta) and Tamara Sorenson Duncan (University of Alberta)

The increased use of multi-methodological research designs in Linguistics is a welcome development in the field, providing linguists with a more complete understanding of linguistic phenomena than single-methodological research provides. A combination of lab-based experimental methods with speakers and corpus-based methods is especially favoured as a particular kind of multi-methodological approach. Combining research methods such as these can, however, lead to quite disparate kinds of research findings and the notions of convergence and divergence have emerged as a key way of categorizing outcomes from alternate methods. Simply put, convergence is taken to mean that the research outcomes from different methodologies and data types point to one and the same result. When this is not the case, we speak of divergence.

There is a clear preference for seeking and reporting on convergence of rather than divergence in the relevant literature, as exemplified in Brdar, Gries, and Fuchs (2011), Gries, Hampe, and Schönefeld (2005a), Gries, Hampe, and Schönefeld (2005b), Schönefeld (2011), Wulff (2009), and Wulff, Ellis, Römer, Bardovi–Harlig, and LeBlanc (2009). The preference for focusing on converging results, while understandable, can distort our understanding of language phenomena, comparable to how a tendency to look for too much successful replication in experimental work—the so-called “publication bias”—can lead to a distorted interpretation of the phenomenon under study (Francis 2012). Our view is that both converging and diverging research outcomes have their proper place when it comes to advancing our knowledge about language, agreeing with the more nuanced discussion of the two kinds of outcomes to be found in Arppe and Järvikivi (2007), Ellis and Simpson-Vlach (2009), and Mollin (2014).

We illustrate these points by reference to the outcomes that emerge from applying different kinds of methodologies to the study of one English construction. We consider the relatively straightforward question of which nouns are preferred as syntactic subjects of the verb ROAR, using experimental methodology as well as a corpus-based methodology. For the experimental part, native speakers were simply asked to write out a sentence containing ROAR. Noun subjects of a verb use of ROAR in the resulting sentences were counted and the results pointed to one overwhelming finding: the word lion is by far the most preferred subject. For the corpus-based part of this study, we applied some familiar measures of association strength utilizing the Corpus of Contemporary American English COCA (Davies 2008-), exploring both the whole corpus as well as its main sub-genres. The association measures applied to the date included raw frequency of co-occurrence, reliance (cf. Schmid, 2010), Mutual Information, and Collostructional Analysis (cf. Stefanowitsch and Gries 2003). Interestingly, the corpus-based results do not point unequivocally (or at all) to the noun lion (or the semantic category [animal]) as the preferred syntactic subject of ROAR, presenting us therefore with what appears ot be a case of divergence of outcomes.

We discuss the significance of these results and argue that the divergence of outcomes reflects quite different, but equally valid, kinds of linguistic realities (cf. also Arppe & Järvikivi 2007).

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References

Arppe, A. and J. Järvikivi. 2007. Every method counts: Combining corpus-based and experimental evidence in the study of synonymy. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 3.2: 131-159.

Brdar, Mario, Stefan Th. Gries, and Milena Žic Fuchs (eds.) 2011. Cognitive linguistics: Convergence and expansion. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Davies, Mark. 2008-. The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 450 million words, 1990-present. Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.

Ellis, Nick C. and Rita Simpson-Vlach (2009) Formulaic language in native speakers: Triangulating psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, and education. Corpus Linguistics and LinguisticTheory 5.1: 61–78.

Francis, Gregory. 2012. Publication bias and the failure of replication in experimental psychology. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 19:975–991.

Gries, Stefan Th., Beate Hampe, and Doris Schönefeld. 2005a. Converging evidence: Bringing together experimental and corpus data on the association of verbs and constructions. Cognitive Linguistics 16.4: 635–676.

Gries, Stefan Th., Beate Hampe, and Doris Schönefeld. 2005b. Converging evidence II: More on the association of verbs and constructions. In John Newman & Sally Rice (eds.), Empirical and experimental methods in cognitive/functional research, 39–72. Stanford: CSLI Publications.

Mollin, S. 2009. Combining corpus linguistic and psychological data on word co-occurrences: Corpus collocates versus word associations. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 5.2: 175–200.

Schmid, H.-J. 2010. Does frequency in text instantiate entrenchment in the cognitive system? In D. Glynn and K. Fischer (eds.). Quantitative methods in cognitive semantics, 101-133. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Schönefeld, Doris (ed). 2011. Converging evidence: Methodological and theoretical issues for linguistic research. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Stefanowitsch, Anatol and Stefan Th. Gries. 2003. Collostructions: Investigating the interaction between words and constructions. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 8.2: 209-243.

Wulff, Stefanie. 2009. Converging evidence from corpus and experimental data to capture idiomaticity. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 5.1: 131-159.

Wulff, Stefanie, Nick C. Ellis, Ute Römer, Kathleen Bardovi–Harlig, and Chelsea LeBlanc. 2009. The acquisition of tense–aspect: Converging evidence from corpora and telicity ratings. Modern Language Journal 93.3: 354–369.

153

Storytelling and Young Learners: Translanguaging Facilitates Learning English as a Foreign Language

Thao Nguyen (University of Queensland)

Children have a natural disposition for stories and storytelling and through storytelling children can experience vocabulary comprehension together with semantic development. Storytelling has a clear place in developing language and literacy in first language because it creates a positive learning condition and engages learners to have meaningful contact with the language, especially oral language. In English as a foreign language (EFL) teaching, the process of using storytelling may be similar, but how children learn a foreign language must be different regarding comprehension and language reproduction involving translanguaging between English and the mother tongue. Translanguaging is an approach to the use of language as bilingualism and how learners learn a new language by ‘translanguaging’ the language in their mind. The study aims to gain an understanding about how storytelling as pedagogy may support children’s oral comprehension in English learning as a foreign language and how storytelling offers more than many second language acquisition approaches. This presentation reports on how translanguaging facilitates young learners’ language comprehension and use through storytelling. Workshops of storytelling and class activities were delivered to 8 year old children by a storytelling teacher and a practitioner-researcher. Through practitioner research, the practice of language instruction through storytelling was cyclically assessed and improved on a weekly basis for eight weeks. The findings show that translanguaging is pedagogical potential of facilitating understanding of learners in language learning process and indication of language comprehension and use. Implications for using storytelling in teaching English to young learners are discussed.

Keywords: storytelling, translanguaging, young learners, EFL learning, EFL teaching

154

Working at the interface: the Daly languages project

Rachel Nordlinger (University of Melbourne), Peter Hurst (University of Melbourne), Ian Green (Flinders University)

The development of sustainable, accessible corpora of small languages has been an increasing focus of language documentation in recent years. Central to this has been the discussion of best practice in making good language records, and in archiving them appropriately to ensure their longevity and availability for future generations (e.g. Johnson 2004, Thieberger & Berez 2012). Less attention has been paid as yet to the ways in which such corpora are best made accessible to members of the language community and their descendants, despite the fact that this is often stated as a primary goal in developing the language archives in the first place.

In this paper we present the Daly Languages project (www.dalylanguages.org), funded by the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, which has developed website landing pages for all of the languages of the Daly River region of Australia. These landing pages provide a clear and easy-to-use interface for the extensive corpora of Dr. Ian Green, including recordings, field notes and manuscripts of 10 languages across the region, many of which are no longer spoken fluently. The websites are powered by a relational database which allows for easy updating, ensuring consistency and allowing for immediate response to community requests about the information contained on the various pages.

We present the motivation and rationale behind the project and the key features of the website design that ensure it will be of use to both researchers and community members who wish to access information about these languages. We also report on a field trip through the Daly region in which we returned language recordings to the various communities represented in the corpora, and discussed with them the nature of the web pages and their requirements.

We believe the Daly langauges project provides a useful model for other researchers, showing how corpora can be packaged and presented in a way that is usable and accessible for community members. In this presentation we discuss the benefits of this approach, the current obstacles faced, and advise participants on how they can access and adapt the open-source framework for their own purposes.

References

Thieberger, Nicholas and Andrea L. Berez. 2012. Linguistic data management. In Nicholas Thieberger (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Fieldwork, Oxford: OUP. 90-118.

Johnson, Heidi. 2004. Language documentation and archiving, or how to build a better corpus. In Peter Austin (ed.) Language documentation and description, Volume 2. London: School of Oriental and African Studies. 140-153.

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Multilingual professionals’ experience of moving between their languages and cultures: A narrative study

Fiona O'Neill (University of South Australia)

In migrant-receiving countries such as Australia there is a growing need to communicate across diverse languages and cultures, yet monolingual and monocultural attitudes remain prevalent (Clyne, 2005). This paper reports on a narrative study which has explored how multilingual professionals, who have relocated to live and work in Australia, make sense of their movement between their languages and cultures. This includes how they interpret and manage perceptions of risk to their social and professional identities, how they understand the resources and skills that their linguistic and cultural repertoires afford them, and how they respond to broader social discourses which shape understandings of their social and professional worlds. The analysis of interview data draws on an innovative synthesis of Bourdieu’s notion of ‘habitus’ (1977), Ricoeur’s (1984) notion of narrative identity and Riessman’s (2008) dialogic/performance narrative approach. The findings highlight the ways in which these people reflect on their experiences of interacting across languages and cultures, manage reflexively perceptions of their social and professional identities, and develop ways of working, being and belonging that go beyond notions of competence and challenge monolingual understandings. Through their intercultural experience these people develop a socialised intersubjectivity, seen in internalised dispositions characterised by a high degree of reflection and reflexivity (Ricoeur 1984). This is significant when we consider how these people navigate the monolingual mainstream to position themselves favourably in a world where professionals are increasingly called to work and communicate across complex configurations of linguistic and cultural diversity.

Keywords: multilingual, professional, narrative, intercultural, reflexivity

References

Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. (R. Nice, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Clyne, M. (2005). Australia’s language potential. Sydney: UNSW Press.

Ricoeur, P. (1984). Time and narrative. (K. Mclaughlin & D. Pellauer, Trans.). Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Riessman, C. (2008). Narrative methods for the human sciences. Thousand Oaks CA: Sage Publications Inc.

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What children do and don't do in contact-induced language change

Carmel O'Shannessy (University of Michigan)

Major questions in contact-induced language change are whether adults or children lead change, and what cognitive mechanisms are involved. Bickerton's (1981, 1984) view that children create a creole language from impoverished input continues to be debated. Often the sociolinguistic situation at the time of the change cannot be pieced together adequately, as the change took place long ago, and there is little documentation. Where we do have a reasonable amount of background data, we have seen that different age groups have each been agentive in promulgating change, in different contexts. Adults are believed to be responsible for the development of pidgins and creoles (Plag, 2008, 2009; Siegel, 2008), mixed languages (Thomason, 2003), and frequently the transfer of lexicon and structure from one language to another; adolescents have led development in koines (Amery, 1993; Kerswill & Williams, 2000); elementary school-aged children have created at least a creole (Kegl, Senghas, & Coppola, 1999) and multiethnolects (Cheshire, Kerswill, Fox, & Torgersen, 2011); and children have created a mixed language (O'Shannessy, 2012).

I present new data on the emergence of Light Warlpiri, a mixed language spoken in northern Australia, to illustrate that when children lead contact-induced change, they re-analyse and regularise patterns in the input provided to them, as child learners do in every context. It may be that often the input from adults (and maybe other younger speakers) was not known to the researchers, but provided the motivation for the re-analysis. A re-analysis and regularisation of a pattern from the point of view of the child learner can then result in a dramatic change in terms of language structure.

Specifically, in Light Warlpiri, a pronoun form in the input, im '3SG', was reanalysed as i-m '3SG-NONFUTURE', and regularised across other pronouns, creating a structure that was not in the input languages, in which past and present tense contrast structurally with future tense (or a realis –irrealis modal contrast). A past tense marker in the input bin 'PAST' was largely replaced by the new structure. In this paper I show that constructions such as im faind-im '3SG find-TRANS' (or, PRONOUN + PERFECTIVE) were already in the input the children received. The children re-analysed patterns they heard, in which perfective and past contexts could be realised without an overt past element, bin 'PAST'. The result is a radically different verbal structure in the new system, but the step of re-analysis is easily motivated by the input patterns.

The data show that children can lead language change, and when they do, their re-analyses can be motivated by the patterns in the input they hear. Researchers do not usually have access to adult-child interactions during the time of change, and tend to posit a greater change than may have in fact taken place. Adult patterns might already have differed from the documented language, e.g. through systematic code-switching. There is no need to posit mechanisms that involve children creating structure from lack of input. A better understanding of the input the children received may show that the children acted as child learners always do, but the result was more dramatic than in some other contexts.

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References

Amery, Rob. (1993). An Australian Koine - Dhuwaya, a variety of Yolnu Matha spoken at Yirrkala in North-East Arnhem Land. International Journal of the sociology of language, 99, 45-64.

Bickerton, Derek. (1981). Roots of language. Ann Arbor: Karoma.

Bickerton, Derek. (1984). The language bioprogram hypothesis. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 7, 173-221.

Cheshire, Jenny, Kerswill, Paul, Fox, Sue, & Torgersen, Elvind. (2011). Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: The emergence of multicultural London English. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 15(2), 151-196.

Kegl, Judy, Senghas, Ann, & Coppola, Marie. (1999). Creation through contact: Sign language emergence and sign language change in Nicaragua. In Michel DeGraff (Ed.), Language creation and language change: Creolization, diachrony and development (pp. 179-237). Cambridge: MIT Press.

Kerswill, Paul, & Williams, Ann. (2000). Creating a new town koine: Children and language change in Milton Keynes. Language in Society, 29, 65-115.

O'Shannessy, Carmel. (2012). The role of code-switched input to children in the origin of a new mixed language. Linguistics, 50(2), 305-340.

Plag, Ingo. (2008). Creoles as interlanguages: Inflectional morphology. Journal of pidgin and creole languages, 23, 114-135.

Plag, Ingo. (2009). Creoles as interlanguages: Word formation. Journal of pidgin and creole languages, 24, 339-362.

Siegel, Jeff. (2008). The emergence of pidgin and creole languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Thomason, Sarah G. (2003). Social factors and linguistic processes in the emergence of stable mixed languages. In Yaron Matras & Peter Bakker (Eds.), The Mixed Language Debate (pp. 21-40). Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Verbal number in Mono-Alu (Oceanic)

Bill Palmer (University of Newcastle) and Sabrina Meier (University of Newcastle)

Verbal number is under-investigated in Oceanic. This paper investigates the category in Mono-Alu (MA) (Northwest Solomonic (NWS), Solomon Islands), finding that pluractionality is expressed by a reduplicant with several unusual formal and distributional characteristics. It further finds that a very rare category, referred to here as duactional, is also present in the language.

Corbett (2004:243-244) distinguishes between verbal number, and number of participants expressed on the verb (e.g. in agreement), which remains nominal number. Verbal number instead affects the semantics of the verb (Lasersohn 1995:241). In (1b) from Rapanui (Oceanic, Easter Island), more than one event of diving occurs. It is ambiguous as to whether a single individual dives on multiple occasions, multiple individuals dive on a single occasion each, or multiple individuals dive on multiple occasions. It is the event that is plural, not the participants per se. Plurality of arguments is an artefact of event plurality, where the possibility of multiple participants may prompt a plural argument reading. For example, massacre involves plural objects because its meaning relates to multiple events of killing, entailing multiple victims, while kill is underspecified for event number. Massacre, however, is not suppletive pluractionality, as kill and massacre are separate lexemes related semantically but not paradigmatically (Corbett 2004:258-259). In many languages, formal derivation derives a pluractional stem, as with reduplication in Rapanui. Pluractionality is ergative in nature: intransitive pluractionals involve plural subjects, while transitive pluractionals involve plural objects. This is attributed to affectedness: multiple intransitive events affect the subject, while multiple transitive events typically affect the object (Corbett 2004:253; Dimmendaal 2014:58).

Verbal number is common in North America (Mithun 1988) and Africa (Dimmendaal 2014:58-59; Storch & Dimmendaal 2014b:15-16; Newman 1990), and is well represented in New Guinea (Foley 1986:128-130) and South America (Veselinova 2013). In a survey of 193 languages, Veselinova (2013) identifies only Samoan in Austronesian as displaying verbal number (bizarrely she classifies Rapanui as lacking the category). Corbett finds it in some Austronesian languages, including Rapanui and Tokelauan (2004:245). However, the category remains significantly under-investigated in Austronesian in general, and Oceanic in particular.

MA encodes pluractionality for what Corbett (2004) calls event number and participant number, with a single formal exponence, reduplication, for both (see Corbett 2004:249-250). With transitive verbs, pluractional is usually interpreted as indicating plural objects (2a). However, with objects known to be singular, it is interpreted as event number (2b). With intransitives, the interpretation is again typically participant number (3a), but indicates event number with singular subjects (3b).

In its most common form, the MA pluractional reduplicant is a disyllabic foot (2a),(3). Typically for verbal reduplication in NWS, the reduplicant is outside the causative prefix fa-, resulting in copying of the causative plus first syllable of the root (4). However, in some environments the reduplicant is monosyllabic (2b),(5). Further, the reduplicant may co-occur with another reduplicant with a different function. As with most NWS languages, MA has an imperfective construction involving postverbal subject indexing and inflectional reduplication (see Palmer 2007, 2011). In MA this reduplicant is always monomoraic and may co-occur with the pluractional reduplicant (5).

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Verbal number encoding dual rather than plural is extremely rare. Veselinova (2013) identifies 7/193 (3.6%) languages with this category, all but one (Kunama, Nilo-Saharan) in North America. Corbett (2004:248-249) identifies only North American languages as displaying the category. Duactional verbal number is attested in intransitives, typically postural or motion verbs (Veselinova 2013), indicating participant number. MA is unique as it has a duactional prefix isa- attested with transitives, as participant number indicating a dual object (6a), and active intransitives, as participant number indicating dual subject, in both cases indicating the event involved both participants simultaneously. Moreover, this is the first attestation of dual verbal number outside North America or Africa.

(1) a. ruku b. ruku~ruku RAPANUI (Corbett 2004:6)

dive pluract~dive

dive go diving

(2) a. Nihe emi-a gasu~gasu=au.

snake 2PL.SBJ-IRR PLURACT~chase=thither

You drive away snakes. (W12b/038)

b. Ir-i ko~koput-i ena pakusi, tolo'o kanega-na.

3PL.SBJ-REAL PLURACT~chop-TR INSTR axe eel be.big-NMLZ

They chopped up the giant eel with axes. (W26/15)

(3) a. Fanua ir-i ue~ue. b. I muna~muna.

people 3PL.SBJ-REAL PLURACT~disappear 3SG.SBJ-REAL PLURACT~move

The people had gone away. (W26/57) She moved about. (W26/01)

(4) Efu emi-a hare~ha-reko.

panpipes 2PL.SBJ-IRR PLURACT~CAUS-be.good

You make the musical pipes to be good. (W12b/036)

(5) I fulau fabiu-na ga ka~ka~kanega sa-ra.

3SG.SBJ[REAL] be.afraid grandchild-3SG.PSSR so IPFV~PLURACT~be.big IPFV-1INC.PL.SBJ

Her grandchild was frightened, therefore we get old. (W26/62A)

(6) a. I isa-togom-i-ri.

3SG.SBJ[REAL] DUACT-swallow-TR-3PL.OBJ

It swallowed both of them together. (W26/58)

b. Ir-i isa-olomo.

3PL.SBJ-REAL DUACT-throw

They [the two chiefs] threw [their spears] together [simultaneously]. (W26/41)

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References

Corbett, G.G. 2004. Number. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dimmendaal, G.J. 2014. Pluractionality and the distribution of number marking across categories. In Storch & Dimmendaal (eds) 2014a.

Lasersohn, P. 1995. Plurality, conjunction and events. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Mithun, M. 1988. Lexical categories and number in Central Pomo. In W. Shipley (ed.) In honor of Mary Haas. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 517-537

Newman, P. 1990. Nominal and verbal plurality in Chadic. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Palmer, B. 2011. Subject-indexing and possessive morphology in Northwest Solomonic. Linguistics. 49/4:685–747

Palmer, B. 2007. Imperfective aspect and the interplay of aspect, tense, and modality in Torau. Oceanic Linguistics. 46/2:499-519

Storch, A. & G.J. Dimmendaal 2014a. Number – constructions and semantics. Case studies from Africa, Amazonia, India and Oceania. London: Benjamins.

Storch, A. & G.J. Dimmendaal 2014b. One size fits all? On the grammar and semantics of singularity and plurality. In Storch & Dimmendaal (eds) 2014a

Veselinova, L.N. 2013. Verbal number and suppletion. In M.S. Dryer & M. Haspelmath (eds.) The world atlas of language structures online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. (wals.info/chapter/80)

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Polarity, case marking and aspect in Bumthang, a central Bhutanese language

Naomi Peck (Australian National University), Mark Donohue (Australian National University), Thomas Wyatt (Australian National University)

This talk describes the morphosyntactic effects of negation on case and aspect marking in Bumthang, a language of central Bhutan in the Himalayas. We find that a negated clause contrasts with its positive counterpart in terms of both case marking on transitive subjects and on aspect marking on verbs.

It is well-known that negated clauses can differ structurally from positive ones, and that they often show a restricted range of morphological possibilities, typically showing less ‘transitive’ features (after Hopper and Thompson 1980). The negation of clauses in Bumthang causes deviations to canonical behaviour, with NPs and verbs splitting in different directions with respect to ‘transitivity’. Noun phrases show more highly transitive behaviour in that ergative case marking (Donohue and Donohue 2016) is obligatorily present in more situations than in positive clauses. Verbs, on the other hand, show less transitive behaviour, in that perfective aspect (where the category of personal/impersonal is encoded) is not a permitted option.

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A sociolinguistic perspective on root modality in Australian English

Cara Penry Williams (La Trobe University) and Minna Korhonen (University of Helsinki)

This paper examines the distribution and sociolinguistic patterning of a set of modals and quasi modals which can express necessity and obligation in Australian English: must, have to, have got to, got to and need to.

Collins (e.g. 2009a, 2009b) has extensively discussed and quantified the distribution of (quasi) modals in corpora of Australian English (AusE). In terms of the root modality (deontic and dynamic) forms of concern here, he has found use is sensitive to genre and, for instance, must is rare in speech where forms like have to and have got to are increasingly common. Work focussing on the sociolinguistic dimension of their distribution has not previously been completed in AusE. Studies elsewhere, of multiple British varieties of English (Tagliamonte & Smith, 2006) and Canadian English (Tagliamonte & D’Arcy, 2007), have shown that the frequency of forms in speech differs by variety and they are sensitive to a range of social factors including age and gender. In a more recent study replicating these methods in Tyneside English however, Fehringer & Corrigan (2015) did not find these same relationships with social factors.

The current investigation is based on interview material from 87 AusE speakers, analysed in four age groups: adolescent, young adult, middle-aged and older participants. The aim is to explore the distribution of these (quasi) modals in AusE by firstly comparing the cross varietal differences after which the analysis centres on exploring whether AusE displays distribution of forms related to speaker age and/or gender.

The overall results confirm the reported increasing rareness of must in speech with it accounting for less than ten tokens while have to dominates the dataset. In terms of the sociolinguistic distribution, the data suggest that in AusE have to is sensitive to age and gender, with younger people and females favouring this construction. The association between males and got to is also supported by the data. These findings are both in line with the results of Tagliamonte and Smith (2006) and Tagliamonte and D’Arcy (2007).

By taking into consideration the importance of social factors, this study further contributes to the understanding of modality in AusE. In addition, it allows comparisons with sociolinguistic work on other varieties of English and with the use generational data highlights potential language change in progress.

References

Collins, P. C. (2009a). Modals and quasi-modals. In P. C. Collins, P. Peters & A. Smith (Eds.), Comparative studies in Australian and New Zealand English (pp. 73-88). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Collins, P. C. (2009b). Modals and quasi-modals in English. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Fehringer, C., & Corrigan, K. (2015). ‘You’ve got to sort of eh hoy the Geordie out’: modals of obligation and necessity in fifty years of Tyneside English. English Language and Linguistics, 19(Special Issue 02), 355-381.

Tagliamonte, S. A., & D'Arcy, A. (2007). The modals of obligation/necessity in Canadian perspective. English World-Wide, 28(1), 47-87.

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Tagliamonte, S., & Smith, J. (2006). Layering, competition and a twist of fate: Deontic modality in dialects of English. Diachronica, 23(2), 341-380.

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The semantics of emotive interjections in Dalabon and Barunga Kriol (Top End, Northern Territory)

Maïa Ponsonnet (University of Sydney)

In this presentation I will describe and compare the respective inventories for emotive interjections in Dalabon (Gunwinyguan, south-western Arnhem Land) and Barunga Kriol, the creole that has now replaced Dalabon. I adopt Wilkins’ (1992) and Ameka’s (1992) definitions of interjections and emotive interjections. The semantics of interjections is inherently versatile: each interjection affords a very broad range of meanings, often including contradictory ones. Therefore, the semantics of a given interjection is better characterized as a range of possible meanings with assigned frequencies. This implies that the semantics of emotive interjections should be explored quantitatively throughout corpora (see Kockelman 2003; Rézeau 2006; Swiatkowska 2006; Goddard 2014 inter alia for comparable methodology). This presentation will rely upon first hand corpora of comparable extent (about 7 hours each) and content in Dalabon and Barunga Kriol, including emotionally oriented narratives as well as comments upon emotionally loaded movies, a context that approaches spontaneous speech (see Author 2014a).

As discussed by Author (2014b:109–128), Dalabon has three frequent emotive interjections (along with a number of less frequent ones). While each of the three displays a subtly different semantic profile, quantitative analyses show that all three often express the emotion of compassion, which is therefore at the core of this semantic system. The set of emotive interjections in Barunga Kriol displays a somewhat different structure (see Dickson (2015:140–144) for an inventory of interjections the Roper Kriol variety). This set is largely dominated in terms of frequency by two related interjections: bobala and bala, the latter being a reduced form of the former. Conforming to their English etymology ‘poor fellow’, these interjections primarily express compassion, matching the focus of Dalabon emotive interjections. However, the only other emotive interjection with high frequency in Barunga Kriol is oh, the semantic profile of which compares with English oh. All the other emotive interjections display much lower frequency.

After presenting the system of emotive interjections in Dalabon, I will describe the semantics of the most salient interjections and Barunga Kriol. I will then discuss how these Barunga Kriol interjections, considered as a system, carve the emotional space, and I will compare the semantic orientation of this system with that of Dalabon emotive interjections.

References

Ameka, Felix. 1992. Interjections: The universal yet neglected part of speech. Journal of Pragmatics 18(2-3). 101–118.

Dickson, Gregory F. 2015. Marra and Kriol: The loss and maintenance of knowledge across a language shift boundary. Linguistics, SCHL, CAP. Canberra: The Australian National University.

Goddard, Clifford. 2014. Interjection and emotion (with special reference to “surprise” and “digust.” Emotion Review 6(1). 53–63.

Kockelman, Paul. 2003. The meaning of interjections in Q’eqchi' Maya: From emotive reaction to social

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discursive action. Current Anthropology 44(4). 467–490.

Rézeau, Pierre. 2006. L’interjection accompagnée d'un geste. Plaidoyer pour une description lexicographique. Langages 161. 91–100.

Swiatkowska, Marcela. 2006. Sémiotique de l’interjection. Langages 161. 47–56.

Wilkins, David. 1992. Interjections and deictics. Journal of Pragmatics 18(2-3). 119–158.

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Sociolinguistic constraints on present perfect usage in Australian English narratives

Sophie Richard (University of Western Australia)

The present perfect (PP) has been documented in Australian English (AusE) narratives to encode temporal progression (cf. Engel & Ritz 2000; Ritz & Engel 2008) (see example 1).

(1) And this guy um Dereck who was playing my husband, I’ll always remember him sitting in the chair. Well he’s gone puce in the face. His eyes are popping out like organ stops. And I said to him, “I think we have a bit of bother here.” And he goes, “Bother! Bother! I’ll give you bother!” So <LAUGHTER> with that I’ve walked behind him and I’ve put my hands on his shoulders and I said, “There, there dear. Nah nah nah.” And somehow rather, I don’t know what kicks in but something kicks in <LIP SMACK> and you manage to pick up the play. (Female, 67, medial liaison officer)

This Narrative PP has been described as ‘vivid’ (Ritz & Engel 2008: 132), offering a retrospective look on the situation depicted (Ritz & Engel 2008: 156). However, previous studies have not investigated the sociolinguistic factors constraining its use.

In this paper I analyse tense/aspect variation in an original corpus of 275 performed narratives produced by 96 native AusE speakers (55 males, 41 females), aged 13 to 81, and of various occupational backgrounds. Following the principle of accountability (Labov 1972: 72), I extracted and coded all the narrative clauses (see Labov & Waletzky 1967: 27) in the corpus and ran two multivariate analyses using Goldvarb X (Sankoff, Tagliamonte & Smith 2005).

Results show that the Narrative PP is socially constrained by speaker occupation (range=30), sex/gender (range=24) and age (range=17). Speakers who are non-professional, male and older favour the form. A range of linguistic constraints also operate on the Narrative PP such that (1) the occurrence of the Narrative PP in a preceding narrative clause favours the occurrence of the form (.78), that is there is a priming effect at play; (2) it is favoured with non-quotative verbs (.60); (3) it appears most readily in the middle of the sequence of narrative clauses; (4) it is favoured in the absence of temporal disambiguation and (5) with singular subjects. Further investigation into quotative environment shows a strong lexical effect from quotative go (.89), quotative which has been associated with “uneducated, lower class males” or “men like Rocky” (Blyth, Recktenwald & Wang 1990: 224).

These results provide a synchronic snapshot of the use of the Narrative PP in AusE narratives and shed light on the sociolinguistic constraints governing its (non-) occurrence. The form is indexical of working class male speech. It does not appear to be encroaching on the territory of the Simple Past but rather plays a discourse/pragmatic function in the context of narrative performance.

References

Blyth, Carl, Recktenwald, Sigrid & Wang, Jenny (1990). I’m like, ‘Say what?!’: A new quotative in American oral narrative. American Speech 65(3): 215–227.

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Engel, Dulcie & Ritz, Marie-Eve (2000). The use of the present perfect in Australian English. Australian Journal of Linguistics 20(2): 119–140.

Labov, William (1972). Some principles of linguistic methodology. Language in Society 1(1): 97–120.

Labov, William & Waletzky, Joshua (1967). Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience. In Helm, J. (Ed.), Essays in the verbal and visual arts. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 12–44.

Ritz, Marie-Eve & Engel, Dulcie (2008). Vivid narrative use and the meaning of the present perfect in spoken Australian English. Linguistics 46(1): 131–160.

Sankoff, David, Tagliamonte, Sali & Smith, Eric (2005). Goldvarb X: A multivariate analysis application for Macintosh and Windows. Department of Linguistics - University of Toronto and Department of Mathematics - University of Ottawa.

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Three strategies for adding directional information to verbs in Southeast Ambrym (Vanuatu)

Eleanor Ridge (University of London)

Southeast Ambrym has three strategies for adding directional information to a lexical verb: the verbs ha ‘go’ and ammei ‘come’ can appear a) in auxiliary verb constructions, b) following a lexical verb in a construction that could be analysed as core-layer serialisation, or c) preceding a lexical verb in a construction that could be analysed as an alternative serialisation strategy or as the matrix verb in a subordination structure. This paper will discuss possible syntactic analyses of each strategy and semantic differences in how they are used, using evidence from a corpus of about 30,000 words of elicited and spontaneous texts as well as grammaticality and felicity judgements from speakers.

a) Auxiliary verb constructions

Two directional auxiliary verbs can be used in Southeast Ambrym: ha ‘go’ and mei ‘come’ (derived from the lexical verb ammei ‘come’). The interpretation of the directional is as a purposive – the motion has been or needs to be carried out in order to perform the action of the main verb.

The lexical verb is the morphological head of the construction (Anderson 2006) and auxiliary verbs undergo partial morphological inflection. They do not take any verbal affixes for subject agreement, tense or polarity, but they do undergo verb-initial consonant mutation like their lexical verb equivalents (Parker 1968; 1970; Crowley 1991), though under slightly different conditions. In example (1) the base form of the verb is used in a distant future context, while in (2) the present form of the verb is used for the narrative present. They appear before the main verb and after any subject noun-phrase, and can be analysed as head of IP at constituent structure.

b) Verb-phrase modification following the lexical verb (core-layer serialisation)

The verbs ha ‘go’ and ammei ‘come’, along with a number of other verbs with directional meanings (such as ‘go to’, ‘go in’, ‘come back’) can take part in a construction similar to those described as core-layer serialisation in other Vanuatu languages (Crowley 2002). Semantically they add path information to the action of the lexical verb (3), or describe the path travelled by the object as a result of the lexical verb in switch-subject serial verb constructions (4). It is not clear whether the directional verb phrase in these constructions should be considered a co-head to the lexical predicate, an adjunct or in some case a complement.

Morphological inflection is mostly predictable from the tense and polarity of the main verb as in core-layer serial verb constructions described by Crowley (1987; 2002) in closely related Paamese. However compared to Paamese there seems to be more optionality in some tense environments (especially immediate future) and also a more complicated morphological dependency in negative polarity. Rather than always appearing with affirmative marking, the serialised directional verb is partially marked for negative polarity, taking the negative prefix naa- but no post-verbal negative clitic ti (5).

c) Verb-phrase modification preceding the lexical verb (serialisation or subordination?)

An inflected directional verb (ha ‘go’, ammei ‘come’ and more rarely he ‘go to’) can also appear after the subject noun phrase and before the main verb (6). Given the greater restrictions on verbs appearing in this position, it could be posited that they are the matrix verbs in subordination

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structures, however they never appear with the general subordinator xa. The directional verb and the main verb always have the same subject and tense marking. This could either be a constraint on this separate serialisation strategy, or a subset of the morphological dependencies found in strategy (b), a question to be resolved in upcoming fieldwork.

Examples1

1) inou ha ni-xol ueili xil

1SG go 1SG.DFUT-chase pig PL

‘I’ll go chase the pigs.’ 20141027a_n01m001_42

2) xatel ba lata-gal tuto xatel xil

3PC GO.PRES 3PC.PRES-buy.PRES chicken 3PC PL

‘They go and buy their chickens.’ 20141125a_x01s004_43

3) xil la-loh la-be Sahuot

3PL 3PL-run 3pl-go_to.PRES Sahuot

‘They ran to Sahuot.’ 20150226a_n01s098_20

4) pot mi-leh xil la-be sip

boat 3SG.PRES-carry 3PL 3PL-go_to.PRES ship

‘The boat carried them to the ship.’ 20150305h_h01s111_08

5) visuvong mal-naa-kaakau ti mal-naa-ve bien

tomorrow 1DU-NEG-walk NEG 1DU-NEG-go_to.NEG sea

‘Tomorrow we won’t go to the sea.’ 20150227a_x01s046

6) inou na-ba na-gal tuto

1SG 1SG-go.PRES 1SG-buy.PRES chicken

‘I go and buy a chicken.’ 20141125a_x01s004_41

References

Anderson, Gregory D. S. 2006. Auxiliary verb constructions. Oxford University Press.

Crowley, Terry. 1987. Serial verbs in Paamese. Studies in language 11(1). 35–84. 1 Abbreviations: DFUT ‘distant future’; DU ‘dual’; NEG ‘negative’, PC ‘paucal’; PL ‘plural’; PRES ‘present’; SG ‘singular’

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Crowley, Terry. 1991. Parallel development and shared innovation: Some developments in Central Vanuatu inflectional morphology. Oceanic Linguistics 30(2). 179–222.

Crowley, Terry. 2002. Serial verbs in Oceanic: A descriptive typology. Oxford University Press.

Parker, Gary J. 1968. Southeast Ambrym verb inflection and morphophonemics. In A. Capell, Gary J. Parker & A. J. Schütz (eds.), Papers in linguistics of Melanesia. (Pacific Linguistics Series A 15).

Parker, Gary J. 1970. Southeast Ambrym Dictionary. (Pacific Linguistics Series C 17). Australian National University.

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Subject-auxiliary ellipsis in Australian English vivid narratives.

Marie-Eve Ritz (University of Western Australia) and Sophie Richard (University of Western Australia)

The aim of this paper is to examine instances of subject-auxiliary ellipsis in sequences of present perfect (PP) clauses in Australian English narratives. The paper builds on previous work by Engel & Ritz (2000), Ritz & Engel (2008), Ritz (2007, 2010) which showed that in this English variety and in some narratives the PP has acquired some of the functions of the Simple Past (SP), namely, it can be used in sequences expressing temporal progression, and combines with past-time adverbials.

Within this context, it is interesting to take a closer look at sequences of clauses where the common subject is ellipsed. Example (1) shows such a case in the second clause, where the presence of a past participle suggests that two PPs have been conjoined and that the auxiliary has been ellipsed:

(1) …the frisbee’s hit a chandelier, broken part of it, and it’s landed down on a guy who’s sitting in the audience. (Triple J radio, Sydney, 28.02.2000)

Of course, many English verbs have identical past participle and SP forms, as exemplified in (2). Here, the two underlined clauses are conjoined with ‘and’, leading to the reasonable assumption that the second VP, ‘held it’ is in its past participial form:

(2) ‘‘And then he’s taken him up into his arms, he’s rocked it and held it like it was his own child and then taken him off to the ambulance,’’ Mr. Fitzgerald said. (The West Australian, 12.4.2000)

����full form would then be “…and [he’s] held it…”. However, now consider (3):

(3) A vehicle has pulled up behind him and a male person has walked over to the driver’s side […] The male driver has panicked and drove away. (Craig Bailey, WA Police Media, 26.7.2005) (Ritz, 2010:3405)

Here, the second VP in the two underlined conjoined clauses has the form of a SP. While such examples are not overly frequent, they are exemplified in our corpora, even sometimes in cases of reasonably ‘fixed’ constructions such as ‘go and VP’:

(4) …so I’ve thrown the biggest tanti [tantrum], gone and hid under me bed for the most of the day… (Nova 93.7 FM radio, Perth, 19 02. 2004)

We also find cases where the first of two conjoined clauses is in the SP and the second, with an ellipsed subject, is in the PP:

(5) This [= a bottle] was thrown through the driver’s open window and has struck the driver in the left eye. (Ros Weatherall, WA Police Media, 4. 11. 2005).

Given the above examples, we need to be cautious about the way in which we code data. When considering any sequence of clauses with an ellipsed subject and a verb whose past participle has the same form as a SP, we cannot be certain that the form of the VP is intended to be the same in each clause. Nor can the presence of an irregular participle guarantee that the form is indeed a perfect, as, at least for some speakers, the distinction between the two forms appears to have become blurred.

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The present paper explores the hypothesis that the auxiliary (either realized in full as has/have or morpho-phonologically reduced as ’s/’ve) may be becoming a marker in its own right, and so serves specific discourse functions, showing a widening in its scope and exemplifying a process that has been shown to be typical of semantic change (Traugott and Dasher, 2002). We use a set of three corpora, (i) spoken narratives contributed by speakers calling Australian radio chat-show programs; (ii) spoken narratives collected through face-to-face interviews; (iii) more formalized written narratives exemplified by police media reports. We explore the discourse functions of the auxiliary in terms of its ability to define distinct sub-episodes, in a sense ‘bracketing’ particular sequences of VPs denoting a set of temporally ordered events that relate to the main topic. Finally, we discuss our results in relation to the semantics of this vivid narrative perfect.

References

Engel, Dulcie, Ritz, Marie-Eve, 2000. The use of the present perfect in Australian English. Australian Journal of Linguistics 20 (2), 119–140.

Ritz, Marie-Eve, Engel, Dulcie, 2008. ‘Vivid narrative use’ and the present perfect in spoken Australian English. Linguistics 46 (1), 131–160.

Ritz, Marie-Eve, 2007. Perfect change: synchrony meets diachrony. In: Salmons, J., Dubenion-Smith, S. (Eds.), Historical Linguistics 2005. Selected papers from the 17th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, 31 July–5 August 2005. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 284. Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 133–147.

Ritz, Marie-Eve. 2010. “The perfect crime? Illicit uses of the present perfect in Australian police media releases.” Journal of Pragmatics 42: 3400-3417.

Traugott, E. C. & Dasher R. B. (2002). Regularity in semantic change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Lexical conditioning on tense/aspect variation in Australian English narratives

Celeste Rodriguez Louro (University of Western Australia) and Sophie Richard (University of Western Australia)

Variationist research on English quotation has focused primarily on how the quotative system operates when all quotative variants are considered. For instance, be like (example 1) has been prolifically studied with respect to all other quotatives in the vernacular of diverse speech communities (e.g. Tagliamonte & Hudson, 1999). Additionally, the study of tense/aspect variation, which examines how different tense/aspect configurations are deployed in discourse (e.g. Levey, 2006), has brought to light how tense/aspect variability interacts with specific lexical items, including quotative verbs.

We follow Labov & Walezky (1967) and analyse all complicating action clauses stemming from 275 performed narratives produced by 96 Perth-based speakers aged 13-81 for whom mainstream Australian English (AusE) is their first language. Our analysis reveals a significant interaction between tense/aspect configurations and quotative verbs. Both go and be like are used with the Historical Present (HP); however, be like exerts a stronger effect on HP choice (75%) (example 1) than does go (52%). The Narrative Present Perfect (NPP) is predicted in the presence of quotative go (example 2) but is wholly unattested with be like.

We attribute the latter distributions to structural considerations. Be like is a stative predicate and – because of this – it is dispreferred with the NPP; in fact, be like never occurs with the NPP in our 10.5-hour narrative corpus. By contrast, the NPP is favoured with eventive predicates (Ritz & Engel, 2008: 141) and, although go’s lexical status is ‘quite diminished’ when it participates in the quotative go construction (Bybee, 2010: 2), its co-occurrence with the NPP is structurally predictable.

The frequent collocations noted in our corpus can be seen as constituting conventionalised multi-word expressions which have been ‘established (tacitly, through repetition) as the appropriate way to say something in a particular community’ (Bybee, 2010: 35). We suggest that, rather than speakers making a tense choice anew every time performed storytelling comes to the fore – and in addition to the structure imposed by the narrative genre itself (e.g. through priming) – tense/aspect + quotative combinations, including NPP-go and HP-be like, are used formulaically. As argued by Bybee & Torres Cacoullos (2008: 404), ‘grammatical domains are contoured by lexical units’.

Examples

(1) I got a phone call from my housemate. […] And I’m like, ‘What’s happened?’ She’s like, ‘My boyfriend’s car’s rolled down into the front of our house and smashed the whole front of the house down’. (Female, 25)

(2) We had three bags when we got off the plane. And when we got off the bus we had two. […] And I’ve gone, ‘You’re kidding! Are you kidding? Oh my God’. (Male, 33)

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References

Bybee, Joan (2010). Language, usage and cognition. Cambrige: Cambridge University Press.

Bybee, Joan & Rena Torres Cacoullos (2008). Phonological and Grammatical Variation in Exemplar Models. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 1(2): 309–413.

Labov, William & Joshua Waletzky (1967). Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience. In Helm, J. (Ed.), Essays in the Verbal and Visual Arts. Seattle: Washington University Press. 12– 44.

Levey, Stephen (2006). Tense variation in preadolescent narratives. Journal of English Linguistics 34(2): 126–152.

Ritz, Marie-Eve & Dulcie Engel (2008). Vivid narrative use and the meaning of the present perfect in spoken Australian English. Linguistics 46(1): 129–158.

Tagliamonte, Sali & Rachael Hudson (1999). Be like et al. beyond America: The quotative system in British and Canadian youth. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3(2): 147–172.

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The Grammar Harvester

Erich Round (University of Queensland), Jacqui Cook (University of Queensland), Mark Ellison (ANU), Jordan Hollis (University of Queensland), Jayden Macklin-Cordes (University of Queensland), and Genevieve Richards (University of Queensland)

Background: Computational tools have revolutionized other disciplines: thirty years ago, it took a PhD project to sequence one gene; now a whole genome is sequenced in 24 hours, for $150, in a process where automated comparison is central. Linguistic typology has yet to undergo a similar revolution, but there is no reason why we could not soon be regularly querying the entire store of published knowledge of all human languages, when we do our research. However, that will require machine-readable representations of the bulk of our knowledge, and thus, we introduce the concept and initial prototyping of a Grammar Harvester, a set of processes for creating richly annotated, machine-readable versions of existing grammatical descriptions, starting from a scanned pdf.

Aims: Our aim is to conceptualize and develop tools for creating a Data Store of published know-ledge about languages. A Data Store will contain a representation of its entire source documents, plus many layers of annotations [1]. Here we focus on the very initial stage: the leap from a printed page to a digital representation of key pieces of content.

Materials & methods: We take advantage of the fact that linguists have many conventions in the publication of data, which enable automated inferences of the functions of a document, given its literal content and layout. Key conventions include the use of italics to cite vernacular items; standardized example sentence layouts; phoneme tables; morphological paradigms; likely topics of chapters, etc. Importantly, our code evaluates its own uncertainty levels and produces reports to aid and speed up human redaction of its output; the redacted material feeds more automated analysis, which feeds redaction, and so on, in a cycle referred to as ‘human computing’ [2]. An XML repre-sentation allows us to represent document structure, while remaining human-readable in a web browser. ‘Triple store’ representations encode queryable semantic propositions (e.g. ‘[b] is an allo-phone of /p/’), based on and extending existing general and linguistic-specific ontologies [3,4].

Challenges: While linguists have conventions, we are nevertheless an inventive mob. Ad hoc departures from conventions, such as extra glossing lines, idiosyncratic terminology etc., present challenges, but ultimately these are surmountable, either through better code or through improving the cycle of automation and human intervention. Small, easily missed pieces of information can sometimes be crucial and are thus challenging, e.g. the indication that a particular example sentence is from a language other than the main one being described.

Results: Currently we are working with grammars of languages of Australia and New Guinea written in English. We have succeeded in detecting example sentences in a range of formats, and other common tables of data. We can generate automated reports, for example, of all the morphemes in the data, where they’re found, and their allomorphs. This can then interoperate with other large digital sources [5, 6, 7] or tools, such as phonemicizers [8]. We are making progress with tables of phonemes and in-text statements made about them.

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Priorities: The next major step is to improve the process to the point where a machine learner offers plausible interpretations of the text to human experts, who can guide the process in a simple but powerful user interface, and whose guidance in turn feeds the learning process. Getting there will require the basic ingesting and annotation of an initial stock of grammars, from which variation on common themes can then be recognized, to guide the interpretation of novel material. This is what we are working on now.

References

[1] Cooper, D. 2015. Big Austronesian data: it takes a warehouse. 13th International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics 18-23 July 2015.

[2] Michelucci, P. & J.L. Dickinson. 2016. The power of crowds. Science 351.6268: 32-33.

[3] Mascardi, V., V. Cordì, & P. Rosso. 2007. A Comparison of Upper Ontologies. Workshop From Objects to Agents.

[4] Farrar, S. & D.T Langendoen. 2003. A linguistic ontology for the Semantic Web. GLOT International. 7.3:97-100.

[5] Bowern, C. 2016. Chirila: Contemporary and Historical Resources for the Indigenous Languages of Australia. Language Documentation and Conservation.10.

[6] Greenhill, S. 2015. TransNewGuinea.org: An online database of New Guinea languages. PloS one, 10(10), e0141563.

[7] sealang.net accessed 29-Jun-2016.

[8] Round, E. 2016. The Million Phoneme Project. Language Documentation Tools Summit, 2 June 2016. Melbourne.

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Referent introductions and their miscommunication in L2 speech

Jonathon Ryan (Waikato Institute of Technology)

A central topic in multidisciplinary approaches to language is that of reference, whereby specific individuals are introduced into discourse (usually with a full noun phrase) and thereafter tracked across subsequent utterances (often with pronouns). Mastery of reference in a second language is considered fundamental to establishing coherent discourse, and has been the focus of numerous previous studies. To date, the prevailing wisdom has been that referent tracking (anaphoric reference) poses a substantial pragma-linguistic challenge for learners, but that adult second language learners experience relatively few problems with referent introductions. However, the latter conclusion warrants caution. In particular, previous studies have typically blurred the crucial distinction between recognitional and non-recognitional introductions (archetypally encoded by definite and indefinite NPs respectively), in which only the former prompts the addressee to recall a specific individual. A further limitation of previous studies has been the overwhelming focus on the noun phrase as the primary unit of analysis, obscuring the complex interactional practices used to introduce less accessible individuals (Smith, Noda, Andrews & Jucker, 2005).

This paper reports on a study designed to address these issues in an analysis of references by both native and non-native English-speaking university students engaged in a film retelling task. Through the use of stimulated recall interviews, the analysis also identifies which introductions were miscommunicated. The findings suggest that, for many language learners (IELTS 6.0-6.5), introductions represent a far greater communicative challenge than previously reported, with evidence of under-explicitness triggering frequent miscommunications and of learners adopting referential strategies not used by the native speakers. The findings highlight the value of analyzing how learner language is interpreted by interlocutors, and further suggest a need to address pedagogically the complex interactional practices and move structure required to introduce less accessible entities for recognition.

Keywords: reference, miscommunication, recognition

References

Smith, S. W., Noda, H. P., Andrews, S., & Jucker, A. H. (2005). Setting the stage: How speakers prepare listeners for the introduction of referents in dialogues and monologues. Journal of Pragmatics, 37(11), 1865-1895.

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Singular thought in non-singular propositions: A cognitive linguistic perspective

Tomohiro Sakai (Waseda University)

The purpose of this talk is to show, from a cognitive linguistic perspective, that the interpretation of identity statements such as (1) and propositions about ‘aspects’ of an individual such as (2), generally considered to lend support to non-singular thoughts, is in fact supported by our ability to entertain singular thoughts (thoughts about individuals).

The puzzle raised by identity statements runs as follows: “Roughly speaking, to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing at all” ([15]: 5303, emphases in the original). According to the Fregean solution ([6]), Clark Kent and Superman have the same reference, but have different ‘senses’, which makes (1) meaningful. Note that, although object-determining, Fregean senses are essentially object-independent ([1]: 60). Since in principle any proper name can occur in identity statements like (1), it may be concluded that proper names in general have object-independent senses, which lends support to descriptivism, a dominant view in the philosophy of language (cf. [11]), according to which “our mental relation to individual objects goes through properties of those objects” ([10]: 141), and “our view of the world would be entirely qualitative” ([1]: 39).

A similar puzzle is raised by (2) ([12], [13], [14]). Given the identity in (1), (2) would be equivalent to (3), an absurd proposition. This problem can be solved by assuming that (2) expresses a proposition about different aspects of the same individual such as (4), rather than a singular proposition ([3], [4], [8], [9]). The fact that even unenlightened speakers (speakers who are not aware of (1)) can ascribe the same truth-value to (2) as enlightened speakers do ([2]) suggests that it is possible to access aspects directly, without recognizing that they belong to one and the same individual. It can then be concluded that the meaning of proper names is first and foremost object-independent, which again might lend support to descriptivism.

This talk argues that enlightened and unenlightened speakers do not understand (2) in exactly the same manner. To be sure, even unenlightened speakers can entertain the truth-conditional content of (2), given in (5). The same truth-conditional content, however, is construed differently by enlightened and unenlightened speakers. Especially relevant here is the cognitive linguistic view developed by Langacker: “Most broadly, a meaning consists of both conceptual content and a particular way of construing that content. The term construal refers to our manifest ability to conceive and portray the same situation in alternate ways.” [7]: 43, emphases in the original). For unenlightened speakers, a and b are different individuals as illustrated in Figure 1, while for enlightened ones, a and b are aspects of one and the same individual c, as illustrated in Figure 2. Unenlightened speakers, while being able to understand the truth conditional content of (2), still fail to capture the complete proposition expressed by (2) in that they wrongly construe a and b as two different individuals. This shows that the full understanding of the proposition about aspects a and b in (2) requires a singular thought about c, as against descriptivism.

The above discussion enables us to define the meaning of identity statements such as (1) without evoking Fregean senses, as in (6). Since, given the definition in (6), a proper understanding of X = Y

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necessarily involves both the notion of aspect and that of individual, the meaning of X = Y is essentially individual-dependent.

When there is an individual Z such that X and Y are aspects of Z, the terms X/Y can refer to Z by metonymy, in which case X and Y are equivalent to each other. Accepting X = Y thus amounts to recognizing that X can be substituted for Y and vice versa salva veritate if and only if X and Y have a singular reference (cf. [5], [15]: 6.23). This accounts for the fact that (3) does not follow from (1) and (2), where there is no singular reference, whereas (7), when interpreted as a singular proposition, is equivalent to (8). Crucially, those who live in entirely qualitative worlds would never accept the equivalence of (7) and (8), and thus never properly understand (1). This suggests that the understanding of identity statements presupposes singularism as opposed to descriptivism.

From the above argument, it should be concluded that, as a basic cognitive ability, singular thought is indispensable for a proper understanding of non-singular propositions such as (1) and (2), contrary to what has often been assumed in the philosophy of language.

References

[1] Bach, Kent (2010) Getting a Thing into a Thought, Robin Jeshion (ed.) New Essays on Singular Thought, Oxford University Press: 39-63.

[2] Braun, David & Jennifer Saul (2002) Simple Sentences, Substitutions, and Mistaken Evaluation, Philosophical Studies 111: 1-41.

[3] Forbes, Graeme (1997) How Much Substitutivity? Analysis 57: 109-113.

[4] Forbes, Graeme (1999) Enlightened Semantics for Simple Sentences, Analysis 59: 86-91.

[5] Frege, Gottlob (1879) Begriffsschrift, Nebert.

[6] Frege, Gottlob (1892) Über Sinn und Bedeutung, Zeitschrift für Philosophosche Kritik C, S, 25-50, translated by Max Kölbel.

[7] Langacker, Ronald W. (2013) Essentials of Cognitive Grammar, Oxford University Press.

[8] Moore, Joseph (1999) Saving substitutivity in simple sentences, Analysis 59: 91-105.

[9] Moore, Joseph (2000) Did Clinton Lie? Analysis 60: 250-254.

[10] Recanati, François (2010) In Defense of Acquaintance, Robin Jeshion (ed.) New Essays on Singular Thought, Oxford University Press: 141-189.

[11] Russell, Bertrand (1956) The Philosophy of Logical Atomism and Other Essays 1914-19 (The collected papers of Bertrand Russell 8). Allen & Unwin Ltd.

[12] Saul, Jennifer (1997) Substitutions and Simple Sentences, Analysis 57: 102-108.

[13] Saul, Jennifer (1999) Substitution, Simple Sentence, and Sex Scandals, Analysis 59: 106-112.

[14] Saul, Jennifer (2007) Simple Sentences, Substitution, and Intuitions, Oxford University Press.

[15] Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1922) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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Figures

a = Superman b = Clark Kent

Figure 1.

c = individual having a and b as aspects

a = Superman b = Clark Kent

Figure 2.

Example sentences

(1) Superman is (identical with) Clark Kent. / Superman = Clark Kent

(2) Superman leaps more tall buildings than Clark Kent.

(3) Superman leaps more tall buildings than Superman.

(4) Clark/Superman’s Superman-aspect leaps more tall buildings than Clark/Superman’s Clark-aspect.

(5) Truth-conditional content of (2): An entity a referred to by Superman leaps more tall buildings than an(other) entity b referred to by Clark Kent.

(6) X = Y if and only if there is an individual Z such that X and Y are aspects of Z.

(7) Sometimes Clark Kent [=Z] leaps tall buildings. (adapted from Braun and Saul (2002))

(8) Sometimes Superman [=Z] leaps tall buildings.

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Atolls, islands and endless suburbia: space and landscape in Marshallese

Jonathan Schlossberg (University of Newcastle)

The nature of the relationship between spatial reference and the physical landscape has recently become of considerable scholarly interest (Majid et al. 2004; Bohnemeyer et al. 2014; Palmer 2015). In this paper I discuss findings based on data collected from Marshallese speakers living in three disparate topographies: an atoll (Jaluit), a non-atoll island (Kili) and an inland urban environment (Springdale, Arkansas). In the case of both Kili and Springdale, the communities are the result of relatively recent migration, therefore allowing for direct analytical access to how communities shape their systems of spatial reference to the landscapes they find themselves inhabiting.

On the basis of a mixed-methods approach, including quantitative analyses and ethnographic inquiry, along with traditional language documentation and description techniques, I explore the Marshallese conceptualisation of space via two of the most commonly-invoked coordinate systems of linguistic spatial reference.

The first is (i)ar-lik, which has traditionally been translated as a lagoonward-oceanward axis. However, these terms are also employed on islands like Kili which do have a lagoon. Here I use a mixture of historical-comparative evidence and ethnographic interviews to show that the translation ‘calm side – back side’ better captures the underlying senses of the terms.

The second is the Marshallese cardinal system. I use evidence from the unusual use of cardinals on Kili (where the ‘north-south axis’ runs parallel to the ‘east-west axis’), as well as testing of cardinal knowledge in Jaluit and Springdale, to demonstrate that individual cardinals are locally-anchored for the majority of Marshallese speakers, functioning more like landmarks rather than true cardinals.

In addition, other aspects of Marshallese spatial reference are discussed more briefly, including the use of terms for ‘left’ and ‘right’ which are rare in the Marshall Islands, but common in Springdale, as well as the use of landmarks, which overwhelmingly tend to be larger and more distant in the Marshall Islands (schools, houses, airports, etc.) but more immediate and accessible in Springdale (walls, doors, televisions, etc.). Together, this use of egocentric terms and more ad hoc landmarks indicates that the Springdale community is moving away from a geocentric worldview, and provides evidence for the possibility that use of the relative frame of reference is more likely in urban environments (see Majid et al. 2014).

Finally, these findings are then discussed within the framework of a Socio-Topographic Correspondence Model (Palmer et al. 2016) to illustrate how the relationship Marshallese people have with their local environments – both historically and presently – shapes their linguistic system of spatial reference.

References

Bohnemeyer, Jürgen, Katharine T. Donelson, Randi E. Tucker, Elena Benedicto, Alejandra Capistrán Garza, Alyson Eggleston, Néstor Hernández Green, et al. 2014. The cultural transmission of spatial cognition: evidence from a large-scale study. Cogsci 2014 Proceedings, 212–217.

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Majid, Asifa, Melissa Bowerman, Sotaro Kita, Daniel B.M. Haun & Stephen C. Levinson. 2004. Can language restructure cognition? The case for space. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8(3). 108–114.

Palmer, Bill. 2015. Topography in Language: Absolute Frame of Reference and the Topographic Correspondence Hypothesis. In Rik De Busser & Randy J. LaPolla (eds.), Language Structure and Environment. Social, Cultural and Natural Factors, 179–226. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Palmer, Bill, Alice Gaby, Jonathon Lum & Jonathan Schlossberg. 2016. Topography and Frame of Reference in the threatened ecological niche of the atoll. Paper presented at Geographic grounding: Place, direction and landscape in the grammars of the world. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen.

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How well do children in mixed-language classrooms understand each other? A case study in language planning from Vanuatu

Cindy Schneider (University of New England) and Charlotte Gooskens (University of Groningen)

The Vanuatu government has recently implemented a policy of vernacular literacy. Children are now to receive the first three years of schooling in a vernacular language. Needless to say, in a country with less than 300,000 people (Vanuatu National Statistics Office 2016) and more than 100 indigenous languages, some classrooms have more than one L1. In such cases, the language policy recommends that the variety with the most native speakers should be promoted. This is a good solution for those speakers of the majority language, but what impact does such a policy have on the children whose L1 is not included in the curriculum, and who are instructed in a vernacular language that is not their own?

To answer this question, we conducted intelligibility tests across closely related varieties of northern and central Vanuatu. We conclude that in villages where children already receive a good deal of exposure to other language varieties in their daily lives, implementation of the government’s language policy is a viable option. However, we make this point with the caveat that what is practical and beneficial for literacy education is not necessarily optimal for the preservation of small endangered varieties.

References

Vanuatu National Statistics Office. 2016. < http://vnso.gov.vu/>. Accessed 4th January 2016.

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Hierarchical number marking and agreement in Vera’a

Stefan Schnell (University of Melbourne)

Vera’a (ISO 639-3: vra; Oceanic, North Vanuatu), has distinct systems of number marking, corresponding only roughly to different stretches of the Animacy Hierarchy (Corbett 2000): pronouns inflect for number (in addition to person and clusivity) and reflect distinctions between singular-plural-dual-trial. The trial form is a true trial, not a paucal. For a closed subclass of nouns denoting salient social roles (kin, age groups, ranks), a special personal-noun construction, distinguishing dual and plural from singular, is obligatorily used for two or more individuals referred to; the lexical noun is reduplicated (exs in (1)). This construction is used in specific as well as non-specific and generic contexts. For all other nouns, including human and animate ones, non-singular reference is optionally marked by a plural particle (ex (2a)) (which is not attested in neighbouring Mwotlap, Francois 2001:567ff). Whether a bare noun phrase (without the pluralising particle) has possible plurative reading is closely tied to cultural knowledge, but does not necessarily coincide with animacy: thus, ‘persons’ can be referred to by a bare NP with a specific plurative reading (ex (3a)), whereas ‘house’ would always have a singulative reading when being a specific referent of a bare NP.

The use of anaphoric expressions depends on the class of noun, but also more immediately on animacy and overt number marking: socially salient nouns always have exact singular, plural, or dual forms when taken up by anaphoric pronouns, and also agree in singular versus non-singular number with the aorist marker when function as subject (exs in (1)). Where human nouns are pluralised – which they usually are – they are also taken up by anaphoric pronouns of exactly the same number value (ex (2a)), and they agree in non-singular with aorist markers when they are subjects (ex (3b)). Non-human animate noun phrases are often left unmarked when having specific non-singular reference, and are then treated as singular by the aorist marker (ex (4a)). Where they are pluralised, they also agree with non-singular aorist markers (ex (4b)). In either case, an anaphoric pronoun will pick up the exact number reference. With inanimate nouns, anaphoric pronouns are singular, even where the reading of a bare NP is plurative.

Number marking is analysed here as having very different functions in noun phrases and anaphoric pronouns: in the former, they flag out collectives (groups or couples) with socially salient roles, plurality with other humans and animates, and distributive, or sorts or portion readings with inanimate and mass nouns. Number marking in pronouns serves mainly reference tracking according to semantic number. Number agreement in aorist markers is never semantic, and reacts merely to structural properties of the subject NP. It is a clearly grammatical category for only a small closed class of socially salient nouns and pronouns. The availability of the number category is not a matter of animacy as such, but an idiosyncratic property of these nouns (see Mosel 1982 for similar observations in Tolai (Oceanic)). This underlines the idea that the so-called Animacy Hierarchy is merely a conceptual space for language comparison, rather than a rendition of language-specific rules motivating constructional splits.

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Examples

References

Corbett, Greville C. 2000. Number. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Franҫois, Alexandre. 2001. Constraintes de structures et liberté dans l’organisation de discours. Une description du mwotlap, langue océanienne du Vanuatu. Doctoral dissertation. Paris: Sorbonne.

Lynch, John & Malcolm Ross & Terry Crowley. 2002. The Oceanic languages. Richmond: Curzon.

Mosel, Ulrike. 1982. Number, Collection and Mass in Tolai. In: H. Seiler and F. Stachowiak (eds.), Apprehension. Das sprachliche Erfassen von Gegenständen. Part II. Die Techniken und ihr Zusammenhang in Einzelsprachen, 123-154. Tübingen: Narr.

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Preverbal morphemes in Sudest, an Oceanic language of Papua New Guinea

Harriet Sheppard (Monash University)

This study examines two classes of preverbal morphemes in Sudest (ISO 636-3 tgo), an Oceanic language of the Papuan Tip cluster. Sudest is unusual among the Papuan Tip group as one of the few languages to retain Oceanic SVO clause order and prepositions. There has been only limited linguistic research on Sudest to date, primarily for translation purposes (Anderson & Anderson 1991; Anderson and Ross 2002) or as part of areal surveys (Ray 1938; Henderson & Henderson 1974; Lithgow 1976).

Oceanic languages are known for the complexity of their verbal morphology (Lynch et al. 2002: 45). The verb phrase in Sudest is no exception with more than ten pre and postverbal slots. The current study examines two classes of preverbal morphemes found in Sudest based on text-data collected during recent fieldwork.

Classificatory prefixes have been attested in multiple Papuan Tip languages (Ezard 1978). Similar prefixes have also been documented in other Oceanic languages (Osumi 1995; Ozanne-Rivierre & Rivierre 2004). In Sudest, classificatory prefixes are used with transitive action verbs such as ‘hit’, ‘cut’ and ‘kill’ and indicates the body part of instrument used to carry out an action (1). ‘Object classifying prefixes’ (following Anderson and Ross’ (2002) terminology), however, are unattested in other Papuan Tip languages. They are used with transitive verbs of motion and cross-reference number (singular or plural) and particular qualities of the referent of the object of the verb. Humans, animals, foods and other solid objects take one set of object classifiers (2), non-solid objects such as string, leaves and empty containers (3) another and full containers and multipart objects yet another (4). The classificatory prefixes and object classifiers can occur in the same verb phrase to specify the manner of causation and the referent of the object (5). The two classes of preverbal morphemes are of interest as they both reference properties of core and non-core arguments within the verb phrase. Both classes of morphemes were originally verbs in serial verbs constructions; Papuan Tip classificatory prefixes are fully grammaticalized prefixes (Lynch et al. 2002: 47), while the object classifiers appear to be less grammaticalized and can still function as the single verb of a verb phrase with the meaning ‘get’ (6).

(1) karitau i=rɨ-mbiye le-nji ela-ghɨ

tridacna.clam 3SG=with.teeth-hold POSS.CLF2-3PL.POSS woman-old/esteemed

‘the giant clam clasped their old woman (with its teeth)’

.

(2) i=mban-kaivɨ bwarogi=ma

3SG=OBJ.CLF.PL-steal fish=DEM

‘he steals the fish’

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(3) thɨ=li-ranggi=ya jin-ma

3PL=OBJ.CLF.SG-come.out=FOC flower=DEM

‘they took the flower out’

(4) thɨ=thɨn-vatomwe=ya iya

3PL=OBJ.CLF.SG-show=FOC DEM

‘they are showing that (a full bottle)’

(5) amba i=vo-thɨn-vairɨ=Ø

then 3SG=with.instrument-OBJ.CLF.SG-up=3SG

‘then it lifts him up (with sticks)’

(6) wo=mban=ya varɨvarɨ=ma

1EXCL=get=FOC red-stone=DEM

‘we got the stones’

References

Anderson, M, Anderson, T, 1991, Sudest Grammar Essentials. Summer Institute of Linguistics, Milne Bay Province.

Anderson, M, Ross, M, 2002, ‘Sudest’, in J Lynch, M Ross, T Crowley (eds.), The Oceanic Languages, Curzon, Richmond, Surrey, pp. 322 – 346.

Henderson, J, Henderson A, 1974. ‘Three studies in languages of eastern Papua’, in Workpapers in Papua in Papua New Guinea Languages, SIL, Ukarumpa, pp. 39–61.

Lynch, J, Ross, M & Crowley, T (eds.) 2002, The Oceanic languages. Curzon, Richmond, Surrey.

Osumi, M. 1995. Tinrin Grammar. Oceanic Linguistics Special Publications, No. 25.

Ozanne-Rivierre, F, Rivierre, J-C, 2004. ‘Verbal compounds and lexical prefixes in the languages of New Caledonia, in I. Brille & F Ozanne-Rivierre (eds.) Complex predicates in Oceanic languages: studies in the dynamics of binding and boundness. De Gruyter Mouton: Berlin; New York, pp. 347 – 372.

Ray, S H, 1937, ‘The Languages of the Eastern Louisiade Archipelago’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 9(2), pp. 363–384.

188

Relative Clauses in Nama: How European!/?

Jeff Siegel (University of New England)

The “Relative Pronoun” strategy for relative clause constructions, has three defining characteristics: (1) the head nouns stays outside the relative clause; (2) the head noun is indicated by a pronoun that shows its semantic or syntactic role in the relative clause (by case marking or an adposition); and (3) this pronoun appears at the beginning of the relative clause (Comrie 2006: 135). This strategy is found in formal English, as in the following (with the relative pronoun in bold):

The woman who won the lottery is my neighbour.

The woman whom you insulted is my neighbour.

According to Comrie (1998, 2006:136), the Relative Pronoun strategy “is, by and large, restricted in its areal coverage to languages spoken in Europe, plus languages that have been in areal contact with languages of Europe”.

Surprisingly, then, Nama, a Papuan language of southern New Guinea, appears to use the same strategy for relativisation. This paper examines relative clauses in Nama and describes how European they are.

References

Comrie, Bernard. 1998. "Rethinking the typology of relative clauses." Language Design: Journal of Theoretical and Experimental Linguistics 1:59-85.

Comrie, Bernard. 2006. "Syntactic typology: just how exotic ARE European-type relative clauses?" In Linguistic Universals, edited by Ricardo Mairal and Juana Gil, 130-154. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

189

The Translation Encounter: using Linguistics to reconstruct the “Violence of Translation” during the Dakota-US war (1862-1878): A cross-disciplinary study

Taylor Spence (Monash University), Ruben Benatti (Universita' del Piemonte, Orientale), and Angela Tiziana Tarantini (Monash University)

Since Kripke’s seminal lectures Naming and Necessity (Kripke 1980), the discussion of the nature of names in language has always taken place within the framework of philosophy, rather than linguistics (Sainsbury 2005, Casalegno 1997). Our research utilizes Linguistics and Translation Theory to create new forms of historical evidence in order to illuminate “the translation encounter:” the moment when an agent of the government translates an Indigenous person’s name and records it. This paper builds on Spence’s article (forthcoming in The Journal of Social History) on the violence an Episcopal missionary committed against a Dakota girl named Tipidutawin and her community in the Dakota-US War (1862-1878). Spence argues that the Episcopal Church and the U.S. state translated Tipidutawin’s name into “Scarlet House” in order to create a persona that excused allegations of sexual violence on the part of the missionary.

In this paper Benatti analysis the issue of naming from the point of view of Semantics, Philosophy of Language, and Cognitive Linguistics. After a brief overview of the theory of reference, the authors compare and contrasts typological features of Dakota (such as word order), and cultural aspects such as the value of colours in the different cultures.

Building on Spence’s historical research, and on Benatti’s linguistic analysis, Tarantini examines the positionality of the translator within the uneven power dynamics between translators and indigenous peoples in the context of violence, and the dislocation of war.

Keywords: History, Cultural Linguistics, Translation Studies

References

Casalegno, Paolo. 1997. Filosofia del linguaggio. Rome: Carocci.

Kripke, Sau. 1980. Naming and Necessity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Sainsbury, Mark. 2005. Reference without reference. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

190

Robustness, communication and the cultural evolution of duality of patterning

Matthew Spike (ANU)

The existence of two distinct levels of analysis – one involving meaningful units, and another meaningless units – appears to be unique to human communication (Hockett, 1959; Martinet, 1960/1984; Ladd 2012). The identification of idiosyncratic features of human language has prompted a number of evolutionary explanations, often relying on mechanisms of functionally-motivated natural selection (e.g. Pinker & Bloom, 1990; Pinker & Jackendoff, 2005). However, no uncontroversially universal aspect of human language has been identified (Evans & Levinson, 2009), and duality is neither an omnipresent feature nor an uncomplicated notion (Blevins, 2014). This is problematic for fully nativist accounts: why are hard-wired features not universally present? In response to this, and in light of the fundamental role of social learning in human language, cultural evolutionary explanations have come to the fore.

Cultural evolutionary approaches to language allow us to relax the assumption that any given linguistic feature is a direct reflection of some innate, specific capacity. Instead, we can work under the hypothesis that the shape of language takes form gradually, in response to various pressures related to communication, acquisition, cognition, and the physical environment. Note that this does not do away with functional explanations, but recasts them as any number of biases acting collectively over time.

Duality of patterning and its components - semantic compositionality and non-semantic combinatoriality – have been the target of a growing number of studies involving cultural evolution. These studies feature both formal modelling (e.g. Kirby, 2002; De Boer, 2000, Tria, 2012) and communication experiments (e.g. Kirby, Cornish, Smith, 2008; Verhoef 2012). A variety of functional pressures have been invoked: learnability, efficiency, expressivity, physical limitations and more. In a unifying move, Kirby et al (2015) argue that we can identify two competing pressures of compression and communication as underlying the emergence of compositional structure. I propose that we can take a further step, and see both compositionality and combinatoriality as the result of a single functional pressure – robust communication – in response to noisy processes at different levels of analysis.

Plotkin & Nowak (2000) identified a number of connections between language evolution and Shannon’s information theory (1948), but these were all couched in a rather improbable application of natural selection. I will argue that we can instead apply similar arguments to the cultural evolution of language. Assuming a single underlying pressure – simply, that language remain robustly communicative – we can see that, depending on the presence of noise affecting signals and associations, combinatorial and compositional structure will emerge either alone or together. Supported by results from a simple computational model which assumes only minimal cognitive processes, my conclusion is that duality of pattering is a functional, cultural adaptation of language to maintain robust communication.

191

References

Blevins, J. (2014). Duality of patterning: Absolute universal or statistical tendency? Language and Cognition, 4(04), 275–296.

Boer, B. De. (2000). Self-organization in vowel systems. Journal of Phonetics, 25.

Evans, N., & Levinson, S. C. (2009). The myth of language universals: language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32(5), 429–494.

Hockett, C. F. (1959). Animal `languages’ and human language. Human Biology, 31(1), 32–39.

Kirby, S. (2002). Natural Language From Artificial Life. Artificial Life, 215(2), 185–215.

Kirby, S., Tamariz, M., Cornish, H., & Smith, K. (2015). Compression and communication in the cultural evolution of linguistic structure. Cognition, 141, 87–102.

Ladd, D. R. (2012). What is duality of patterning, anyway? Language and Cognition, 4(4), 261–273.

Martinet, A. (1984). Double articulation as a criterion of linguisticity. Language Sciences, 6(1), 31–38.

Plotkin, J. B., & Nowak, M. a. (2000). Language evolution and information theory. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 205(1), 147–59. Shannon, C. (1948). A mathematical theory of communication. The Bell System Technical Journal, 27(July, October), 379–423, 623–656.

Tria, F., Galantucci, B., & Loreto, V. (2012). Naming a structured world: a cultural route to duality of patterning. PloS One, 7(6), e37744.

Verhoef, T. (2012). The origins of duality of patterning in artificial whistled languages. Language and Cognition, 4(4), 357–380.

Pinker, S., & Bloom, P. (1990). Natural language and natural selection. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, (13), 707–784.

Pinker, S., & Jackendoff, R. (2005). The faculty of language: What’s special about it? Cognition, 95, 201–236.

Shannon, C. (1948). A mathematical theory of communication. The Bell System Technical Journal, 27(July, October), 379–423, 623–656.

192

Automatic Detection of Lexical Replacement in a 20-year News Corpus

Terrence Szymanski (University College Dublin)

Among the multitude of new tools and data sets that have become available to computational linguists in recent years, two worthy of note are large-scale diachronic corpora, e.g. the Google Books corpus (Michel et al. 2011) and efficient algorithms for computing effective semantic word vectors, e.g. word2vec (Mikolov et al. 2013). Each of these resources has inspired new, previously unimaginable lines of research, and the combination of the two together has made it possible to automatically detect and quantify changes in word meanings over time—for example illustrating how the meaning of words like gay (whose semantic neighbors shifted from cheerful and pleasant to bisexual and lesbian) have changed over the 20th century (Kim et al. 2014; Kulkarni et al. 2015) or identifying general laws that govern semantic change (Hamilton et al. 2016). While approaches based on distributional semantics (Harris 1954) are not new, the recent availability of data and computing power have greatly expanded their influence.

Some previous work has additionally incorporated word frequency as a factor in their analysis, for example showing how frequency and semantic change sometimes, but not always, correlate (Kulkarni et al. 2015), or how high-frequency words change more slowly than low-frequency words (Hamilton et al. 2016). However, none has looked at how word frequency can reveal a specific type of semantic change, lexical replacement, in which one word gradually or suddenly supplants another word in a specific semantic space.

In this talk, I present a method combining time series analysis and word embeddings to automatically detect instances of lexical replacement in a diachronic corpus, and I illustrate its application to a newspaper corpus. The corpus consists of roughly two million news articles published by the New York Times over a twenty-year period ranging from 1987 to 2007 (Sandhaus, 2008). For each year, a word embedding model is trained using word2vec, producing semantic word vectors for each word in the corpus and allowing the nearest neighbors to each word to be computed using cosine similarity. Additionally, the cumulative frequency of each word in the corpus is plotted over time, and a piecewise linear model is fit, assigning breakpoints at points in time when the rate of occurrence suddenly changes.

By clustering words based both on their semantic similarity and their time series similarity (i.e. the nearness of their breakpoints), it is then possible to identify points in time when significant news events cause a constellation of related words to suddenly become mentioned much more or less frequently than they had been. For example, the breakup of the USSR (causing the terms Russia and Soviet Union to correspondingly rise and fall in frequency) or the election of a U.S. President (causing George Bush and Ronald Reagan to rise and fall respectively). An illustration is given below. Table 1 lists the ten tokens most similar to george_bush in 1991, midway through his term as president: note that many are names of former presidents, including the previous president Ronald Reagan. Figure 1 shows the cumulative frequency of the tokens reagan, bush, and clinton: note that sometime around 1989, reagan ceases to be steeply linear and tails off, ultimately becoming linear at a lower slope; meanwhile bush gradually increases to become linear for the four years of his term in office, before settling back down (bush becomes popular again in 2001, when the second president Bush takes office).

193

This study uses a news corpus and focuses on a very specific type of lexical replacement driven by world events; however, this same method could potentially be applied to a longer, more general diachronic corpus to reveal more generic cases of lexical replacement driven by internal linguistic forces. In this context it is related to epoch detection (Popescu and Strapparava, 2013) and has potential applications in corpus-based historical linguistics. As it stands, the method and analysis presented here has applications to media analytics and the study of the language of the media, and offers new insights into how word meanings and use change together over time in conjunction with changes in the state of the world.

Figure 1: Frequency of president names over time.

Token Cosine Distance

george_bush 1.000000

ronald_reagan 0.655032

jimmy_carter 0.636692

richard_nixon 0.598942

george_mcgovern 0.569560

president_bush 0.553947

franklin_roosevelt 0.553804

quayle 0.547015

michael_dukakis 0.544634

reagan 0.544047

mondale 0.541207

Table 1: Tokens similar to george_bush in 1991.

References

W. L. Hamilton, J. Leskovec, and D. Jurafsky. 2016. Diachronic Word Embeddings Reveal Historical Laws of Semantic Change. To appear in Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

Z. Harris. 1954. Distributional structure. Word, 10(23):146–162. �

Y. Kim, Y.-I. Chiu, K. Hanaki, D. Hegde, and S. Petrov. 2014. Temporal analysis of language through neural language models. In Proceedings of the ACL 2014 Workshop on Language Technologies and Computational Social Science, pages 61–65.

V. Kulkarni, R. Al-Rfou, B. Perozzi, and S. Skiena. 2015. Statistically significant detection of linguistic change. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web, pages 625–635.

J.-B. Michel, Y. K. Shen, A. P. Aiden, A. Veres, M. K. Gray, T. G. B. Team, J. P. Pickett, D. Hoiberg, D. Clancy, P. Norvig, J. Orwant, S. Pinker, M. A. Nowak, and E. L. Aiden. 2011. Quantitative analysis of culture using millions of digitized books. Science, 331(6014):176–182.

T. Mikolov, K. Chen, G. Corrado, and J. Dean. 2013. Efficient estimation of word representations in vector space. CoRR, abs/1301.3781.

194

O. Popescu and C. Strapparava. 2013. Behind the times: Detecting epoch changes using large corpora. In Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, pages 347–355.

E. Sandhaus. 2008. The New York Times Annotated Corpus LDC2008T19. Linguistic Data Consortium.

195

‘The tribe’ in John Bodey’s The Blood Berry Vine: a corpus-based study of an Aboriginal cultural category

Siew Imm Tan (University of Canberra)

This paper reports a corpus-based cultural linguistic exploration of the “cultural category” (Sharifian, 2011) of ‘the tribe’ in John Bodey’s The Blood Berry Vine.

Comprising 8,787 words in running text, The Blood Berry Vine is one of four short stories which appear in the volume, When Darkness Falls. Set in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, this collection won John Bodey the 1997 David Unaipon Award for unpublished Aboriginal writers. The Blood Berry Vine is one of the many stories that the author “unfolded … from within” for “children white, black and brindle of all ages and background” (Bodey, 2000, p. 5). It is this authenticity that makes this tale particularly apt as a vehicle to further our understanding of how variation in cultural conceptualisations is reflected in Aboriginal English. For this purpose, The Blood Berry Vine was digitised in February 2016.

The reference corpus used in this study is a 147,163-word corpus of general Australian English literature extracted from The Australian Corpus of English (ACE). Compiled by Macquarie University, the notionally 1 million-word ACE was modelled on the Brown and LOB corpora, and represents contemporary Australian English (for details, see Green & Peters, 1991). The corpus has a significant copyright-cleared literature component comprising general fiction, mystery, science fiction, adventure, romance, humour, historical fiction and women’s fiction, and it is this that was extracted for use as a reference corpus.i

The significance of the cultural category of ‘the tribe’ in The Blood Berry Vine emerged from a key word analysis. Using Wordsmith Tools, it was discovered that the word ‘tribe’ is the common noun with the highest keyness index. This is to say that in comparison with the reference corpus, ‘tribe’ is the most unusually frequent common noun in The Blood Berry Vine. In addition to this, the word ‘tribes’ also appears in the list of 41 key words (20th place). A transitivity analysis (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004) of the concordance lines of ‘tribe’ (n=19), ‘tribes’ (n=9), ‘tribal’ (n=3), ‘tribesmen’ (n=2) and ‘tribespeople’ (n=1) in The Blood Berry Vine, in comparison with ‘tribe’ (n=2) and ‘tribes’ (n=1) in the reference corpus, revealed the salience of notions such as territorial integrity, community, recognition of membership, expectations and responsibilities in the cultural category of ‘the tribe’ in Aboriginal English. That ‘tribe’ and ‘tribes’ often carry an undertone of backwardness in general Australian English literature further contributes to the distinctive of this cultural category in Aboriginal English.

This study contributes in significant ways to our understanding of aspects of Aboriginal worldviews. It also demonstrates the feasibility of combining a corpus-based approach with systemic functional grammar in identifying and analysing variation in cultural conceptualisations.

References

Bodey, J. (2000). When darkness falls. Queensland: University of Queensland Press.

196

Green, E., & Peters, P. (1991). The Australian corpus project and Australian English. ICAME Journal: International Computer Archive of Modern English, 15, 37-53.

Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen, Christian M. I. M. (2004). An Introduction to functional grammar (3rd ed.). London/New York: Oxford University Press.

Sharifian, F. (2011). Cultural conceptualisations and language. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins

197

A psycholinguistic Approach to Theatre Translation

Angela Tiziana Tarantini (Monash University)

Ever since the publication of the first edition of Venuti’s The Translator’s Invisibility (Venuti 1995), the dichotomy between the foreignizing and the domesticating approach to translation has been an object of debate in translation studies. With this paper I argue that when translating for the stage, a higher degree of domestication might be necessary because of the different medium involved. I aim to show that the translator not only has to take into account the spoken nature of the dramatic dialogue, but also the aural nature of its reception, since language processing times differ considerably according to the medium. I will draw from studies in psycholinguistics, particularly on written and spoken language processing and processing times (Cacciari 2001, Rayner and Duffy 1986, Vitevitch and Luce 1998, among others) to show that certain translation strategies successfully applied to the translation of written language might be prove problematic when applied to stage translation (Tarantini 2016). For that purpose, I will use a single case study, an ongoing drama translation project: the translation of Convincing Ground (Mence 2013) into Italian. My aim is to demonstrate that a foreignizing strategy may not only hinder the audience’s lexical decision response, or prevent it altogether within the given time of utterance. It may also result in failure to convey the characterisation of the people depicted in the fictional world (Culpeper 2001), as well as the relationship they have with one another (Fiske 1992), shaped and negotiated through language.

References

Cacciari, Cristina 2001. Psicologia del Linguaggio. Bologna: Il Mulino.

Culpeper, Jonathan. 2001. Language and characterisation: People in plays and other texts. Edited by Mick Short, Semino, Elena, Textual Explorations. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited.

Fiske, Alan Page. 1992. "The four elementary forms of sociality: Framework for a unified theory of social relations." Psychological Review 99 (4):689-723.

Mence, David. 2013. Unpublished script, workshopped by the Melbourne Theatre Company in 2009. Revised edition.

Rayner, Keith, and Susan A. Duffy. 1986. "Lexical Complexity and Fixation Times in Reading: Effects of Word Frequency, Verb Complexity, and Lexical Ambiguity." Memory & Cognition 14 (3):191-201. doi: 10.3758/BF03197692.

Tarantini, Angela Tiziana. 2016. "A Psycolinguistic Approach to Theatre Translation." The AALITRA Review : a Journal of Literary Translation (11):60-77.

Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. The translator's invisibility: A history of translation. London ; New York: Routledge.

Vitevitch, M. S., and P. A. Luce. 1998. "When words compete: Levels of Processing in Perception of Spoken Words." Psychological Science 9 (4):325-329.

198

Imperialism, the state and English hegemony in Papua New Guinea and Nauru

Amy Thomas (University of Technology Sydney)

In the context of worldwide economic integration through neoliberal globalisation, it is common to assume the erosion of national state power and the supremacy of supra-national Empire. It follows that the associated ideological hegemony of the periphery by powerful nation states may be an obsolete phenomenon. The linguistic commodity of neoliberal globalisation par excellence is English, as its pre-eminence in international business, academic, the internet and any number of global domains attests. Comprehending the force and breadth of English’s global spread must involve acknowledging its connection to economically hegemonic states—and the continued relevance of theories of imperialism and geopolitical rivalry—in economic globalisation.

This paper applies this argument to developing an understanding of the rapacious spread of English in the South Pacific. Both Papua New Guinea and Nauru are former Australian colonies, and have a continued strong economic and political relationship with Australia, the region’s foremost economic and military power. What has Australia’s role been in encouraging the apparent dominance of English as a language of power in Papua New Guinea and Nauru? How does colonial suspicion of linguistic diversity live on in the post-colonial era? Answers will be sought by establishing links between the historical patterns of language policy, English spread and Australian involvement in the two former colonies.

Such an approach embraces the call by Block, Holborow, Gray and others for applied linguists to further develop a political economy of language. It challenges a celebratory reading of global linguistic flows, instead, encouraging an interrogation of power relationships that drive English linguistic dominance in our region today—and insists upon the continuing relevance of the state form in understanding the relationship between language, capitalism, and inequality.

Keywords: Australia, power, imperialism, Papua New Guinea, Nauru

199

Understanding Violence Against Women: Linguistic Constructions of Agency and Responsibility

Celia Thompson (University of Melbourne) and Jasmin Isobe (University of Melbourne)

Violence against women (VAW) is a recognised public health issue present around the world (WHO, 2013). It affects individuals, families, and societies. While much progress has been made in supporting and aiding victims, there is still much work to be done in order to better understand and address this phenomenon, particularly in specific cultural contexts. Knowledge of a wide range of factors that relate to VAW is needed. Much research has focused on the link between patriarchal attitudes and VAW (Flood & Pease, 2009), revealing consistent links between these kinds of attitudes and the perpetuation of VAW at institutional and individual levels. In Australia, young peoples' attitudes have been identified as an area of concern with regards to VAW (VicHealth, 2014, 2015). Some studies into the relationship between language and VAW suggest that the ways in which the male perpetrator and female victim are represented in terms of agency are central to our understanding of VAW. This language has been examined in relation to attitudes in contexts such as the legal and justice systems (Bavelas & Coates, 2001), in the media (Sutherland et al., 2016), and, to a lesser extent, non-professional contexts (Bieneck & Krahe, 2011; Bohner, 2001) such as undergraduate students.

This paper offers further insight into these complex relationships by exploring the linguistic constructions used by non-professionals when discussing VAW in the Australian context. Our study focuses on the nature of the constructions used to attribute agency and responsibility, and aims to investigate their relationship to attitudes regarding VAW. Data sources consist of an online survey and focus group discussions. Preliminary findings suggest that participants’ language use in terms of attribution of agency and responsibility seems to be commensurate with that found in professional legal and media contexts. For example, in the majority of media reports there is little or no reference to perpetrators of violence; in some of these reports, a causal role is accorded to women’s behaviour, thus diminishing responsibility attributed to male perpetrators of these incidents. Further analysis of our data set is still needed to reach a fuller understanding of the potential associations between linguistic constructions of agency and responsibility with respect to the nature of participants’ attitudes in this study.

Keywords: violence against women, agency, attitudes

References

Bavelas, J., & Coates, L. (2001). Is It Sex or Assault? Erotic Versus Violent Language inSexual Assault Trial Judgements. Journal Of Social Distress And The Homeless, 10, 29-40.

Bieneck, S., & Krahe, B. (2011). Blaming the victim and exonerating the perpetrator in cases of rape and robbery: is there a double standard? Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 26(9), 1785-1797. doi:10.1177/0886260510372945

Bohner, G. (2001). Writing about rape: Use of the passive voice and other distancing text features as an expression of perceived responsibility of the victim. British Journal of Social Psychology, 40(4), 515-529.

200

Flood, M., & Pease, B. (2009). Factors influencing attitudes to violence against women. Trauma Violence Abuse, 10(2), 125-142. doi:10.1177/1524838009334131

Sutherland, G., McCormack, A., Pirkis, J., Vaughan, C., Dunne-Breen, M., Easteal, P., & Holland, K. (2016). Media representations of violence against women and their children: Final report. Sydney: ANROWS.

VicHealth. (2014). Australians' attitudes to violence against women: 2013 National Community Attitudes Towards Violence Against Women Survey - Research Summary. Melbourne: Victorian Health Promotion Foundation.

VicHealth. (2015). Young Australians' attitudes to violence against women: Summary of findings from the National Community Attitudes towards Violence Against Women Survey for respondents aged 16-24 years. Melbourne: Victorian Health Promotion Foundation.

WHO. (2013). Global and regional estimates of violence against women: prevalence and health effects of intimate partner violence and non-partner sexual violence. Geneva: WHO.

201

Place, space and the construction of linguistic landscapes of a bathroom within a shared home

Tu Thanh Tran (La Trobe University), Donna Starks (La Trobe University), and Howard Nicholas (La Trobe University)

The field of linguistic landscape (LL) research has as its major focus the written language and semiotic resources inscribed on billboards and signage in varied but specific public domains. As such, LL provides a good opportunity to explore understandings of place and space. Although the LL literature makes frequent mention of space and place, the use of these terms is varied and inconsistent with little explanation of how they are used in LL studies. This paper begins to unpack the notions of space and place in order to consider how these concepts can be used to help define LL as a semiotic resource that can be public, shared and private. We do this by exploring how inhabitants in a shared home construct the LL of their shared bathroom. We present this case to show the value of studying well-known, non-public locations. We gathered data through interviews with the residents in the different rooms in their shared home but restrict this analysis to the bathroom. The findings suggest that what is known about LL in public areas also applies to this shared bathroom but additionally they suggest that the landscapes of this shared room involve layers that have not normally been discussed in the literature. These additional layers reflect the inhabitants’ associations in this room with not only artefacts but also the activities that occur within it and the people who use it. We conclude by suggesting that LL should be seen as three-dimensional space that includes the viewer.

Keywords: Linguistic landscape, space, place, viewers.

202

Dealing with Tone in an Undocumented Tibetoburman Language

Kellen Parker vanDam (La Trobe University)

Tangsa is a Tibetoburman language spoken on the India/Myanmar border. It is typically classified as a Northern Naga variety (French 1983), however the exact relationship of the dozens of speech varieties classified under the name "Tangsa" is still yet to be determined. The majority of Tangsa varieties have lexical tone, but with varying degrees of functional load and complexity of tone systems.

This presentation addresses a number of issues faced when working to document tone in under-documented and un-documented language varieties, for which metalinguistic awareness of tone among speakers of the language is very low. Some of the issues to be addressed include how one goes about determining lexical tone categories and communicating with speakers how prosodic tone may be distinct from lexical tone.

Many Tangsa varieties also do not have the kind of clear citation forms that may be found in some other Sinotibetan varieties. Instead, tone categories may be considered as following a set of contrastive constraints, where the description of a given tone category is significant primarily in the ways it contrasts with the others without a clear idealised target contour. This talk will address the ways in which these equivalents of the so-called citations forms can be described both to an academic audience as well as with speakers. As part of this, the talk also addresses the issue of of allotones which arise with fair regularity, and how those can possibly be interpreted as distinct tonemes by speakers.

The above relates to the issue of tone perception cross-varietally, where contour distinctions made in one variety are not made in others, which in turn often leads to misinterpretation and misjudgement of the tonemic contrast in less familiar varieties. Since contextual pitch changes do not occur across all varieties, the ways in which the pitch may change in those where it does occur can interfere with the listeners expectations.

The talk will also address the issue of tone category shifts of individual lexical items. For most words in most varieties. the category into which certain lexemes falls will be consistent. For example, the word for "head" – *kʰu – will almost always be in the so-called second-tone category. In certain varieties, the word has shifted into the third-tone category. This sort of shift is also a cause of confusion for speakers, and again can lead to misinterpretation of categories.

References

French, Walter Thomas (1983) Northern Naga: A Tibeto-Burman Mesolanguage. City University of New York

203

Quantitative investigation of two linguistic variables in Hohhot, China: exploring attitudes-language correlation

Xuan Wang (University of Canterbury)

The effect of speaker attitudes on language change has been the focus of much work in sociolinguistics. Although qualitative studies often advocate for the role of attitudes (see e.g. Clark & Watson, 2016; Llamas 2007; Haug-Hilton 2010), significant correlations between measures of language attitude and linguistic behaviour are not always found in quantitative research (e.g. Ladegaard, 2000; Stuart-Smith et al, 2013). This paper explores the degree to which people's attitudes influence their speech production by analysing variation and change in two linguistic features in Hohhot, a Chinese immigrant city.

Hohhot is home to a complex mixture of ‘traditional’, local residents, who speak Jìn dialect, and migrants, who arrived in the 1950s and 1960s, encouraged by government policy. Thus, a mixed, new vernacular combining features of Jìn and Mandarin was formed, known locally as "Hohhot Mandarin". Given the complex social conflicts between the local-born and migrant communities, I ask whether speakers vary in the degree to which they adopt various Jìn-features, and whether this variation is conditioned by their attitudes. To explore this, 35 speakers from the migrant community in Hohhot were interviewed, with their attitude information collected from questionnaires using magnitude estimation (Redinger 2010). Principal Component Analysis of the questionnaire responses revealed 4 different attitudinal categories: attitudes towards Jìn dialect, attitudes towards Jìn speakers, emphasis of migrant identity, and emotional attachment to Hohhot.

Language production data were collected from interviews and an elicitation task designed to explore variation in a set of disyllabic words known as "l-words" (Hou, 1999). Two local Jin-features are potentially carried in this set of words: 1) a weak-strong or iambic stress pattern; 2) initial heavily aspirated obstruents (Chao, 1935). About 1500 l-word tokens were manually coded for whether these two features occurred, and these data were separately hand fit into binomial mixed effects models using the lme4 library in R (Bates, Maechler & Bolker, 2011; R Core Team, 2013). The independent variables included were social factors like age group, sex, education, attitudinal scores, social networks; as well as linguistic factors like following vowel, phoneme, etc. Word and speaker were treated as random intercepts.

The results suggest that attitudinal scores are strong predictors for both the stress pattern variable and the obstruents variable: speakers are more likely to use the local Jìn variants if they demonstrate positive attitudes towards the local community. However, the patterns of attitude effects were slightly different for the two variables, which could be related to the different levels of awareness they are subject to. Speakers are less aware of the obstruents variable than the stress pattern variable. The results will be further discussed in terms of speaker attitudes in relation to the social meaning of linguistic features in language change.

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References

Bates, D., Maechler, M., & Bolker, B. (2011). lme4: linear mixed-effects models using S4 classes. R package version 0.999375-39. Available at http://cran.r-project.org (accessed 29 November 2011).

Chao, Y. R. (1935). Types of plosives in Chinese. In D. Jones, D. and D. B. Fry (Eds.), Proceedings of the Second International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, pp.106-110. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Clark, L. and Watson, K. (2016). Phonological leveling, diffusion, and divergence: /t/ lenition in Liverpool and its hinterland. Language Variation and Change, 28(1): 31-62.

Haug-Hilton, N. (2010). Regional dialect levelling and language standards: changes in the Hønefoss dialect. Unpublished PhD thesis. University of York, York, England.

Ladegaard, H. J. (2000). Language attitudes and sociolinguistic behaviour: Exploring attitude behaviour relations in language. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 4(2), 214-233.

Llamas, C. (2007). “A place between places”: language and identities in a border town. Language in Society, 36(4), 579-604.

Stuart-Smith, J., Gwilym P., Claire T., & Barrie G. (2013). Television can also be a factor in language change: Evidence from an urban dialect. Language, 89, 501-536.

R Core Team (2013). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. ISBN 3-900051-07-0, URL: http://www.R-project.org/.

Redinger D. (2010). Language attitudes and code-switching behaviour in a multilingual educational context: The case of Luxembourg. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of York, York, UK.

Hou, J. Y. (2008). Studies of modern Jìn dialect. Beijing: Commercial Press.

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When “We” means “You”: Mitigating directives in rugby coaching through pronominal choice

Nick Wilson (Macquarie University)

This paper examines leadership practices in a New Zealand rugby team from the perspective of clusivity in pronominal use. Taking an approach to socio-pragmatic analysis that draws influence from corpus linguistics and variationist sociolinguistics, the analysis presented in this paper aims to combine ethnographic detail with the quantitative analysis of language in use. It tests the hypothesis that the first person plural is the most frequently used pronoun in the dataset because it can mask the exclusivity of an utterance and help to construct solidarity. It is shown in this paper that the most frequent usage of the second person plural is to perform the function of the second person plural in an indirect, or covert, fashion. This has relevance for the study of leadership discourse because the choice of one pronoun over affects the stance that is taken by a speaker. In the case of leadership discourse, and specifically in the case of directives, the speech act focused on in this paper, the use of the first person plural can be seen as affecting the stance of an utterance in terms of alignment (Kiesling 2004). The data discussed in this paper is drawn from an ethnographic study of a New Zealand rugby team and comprises recorded authentic ritual interactions across six match days. The data has been coded according to speech act, clusivity, and stance, using Kiesling’s (2004) three dimensions of stance: affect, involvement and alignment, and the results are compared with existing work on the mitigation of directives in leadership discourse (e.g. Takano 2005; Vine 2009).

Keywords: leadership; socio-pragmatics; pronouns

References

Kiesling, Scott Fabius. 2004. Dude. American Speech 79: 281–305.

Takano, Shoji. 2005. Re-examining linguistic power: Strategic uses of directives by professional Japanese women in positions of authority and leadership. Journal of Pragmatics 37: 633–666.

Vine, Bernadette. 2009. Directives at work: Exploring the contextual complexity of workplace directives. Journal of Pragmatics 41: 1395–1405.

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Constituent structure in Palauan

John Wormell (University of Sydney)

Palauan is an isolate language in the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian family which has both an SVO and a subject-clitic-VOS word orders. The latter order is underlying (Georgopoulos 1991b), but there is debate about whether the subject clitic or the sentence-final lexical subject is the true subject head, and a number of phenomena largely peculiar to Palauan have mostly been left unexplained in the literature (Georgopoulos 1991b, Bresnan 2001). This paper analyses Palauan in the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar, positing a Philippine-type constituent structure with a flat S: that is, post-verbal constituent structure is flexible and dictated by focal considerations. Under this analysis, the clitic is unambiguously the true subject head. Furthermore, many of the aforementioned phenomena, such as an obligatory pro-drop, unusual extraction patterns and a somewhat flexible word order, are accounted for. This analysis also explains a diachronic shift in Palauan towards intransitive state verbs and SVO word order (Campana 2001): the absence of case marking on the DPs in Palauan leads to ambiguity in sentences with multiple core arguments in the verb.

References

Bresnan, J. (2001). Lexical-functional syntax. Malden, MA: Blackwell

Campana, M. (2001). The evolution of agreement in Palauan. In Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association VIII.

Georgopoulos, C. (1991b). Syntactic variables: resumptive pronouns and A’ binding in Palauan. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

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Lightning plenary presentations

Note: All lightning plenary sessions are held in Building K on the 3rd floor, in room K309, and will be followed by discussion during lunch.

Wednesday 7 December (Day 1 – joint day with ALAA 2016) 12:30pm – 1:00pm

Aboriginal English in the global city: Minorities and language change Celeste Rodriguez Louro (University of Western Australia)

Cocos Keeling Island English: a new emergent variety? Hannah Hedegard (University of Bern)

Playing by the rules?: An exploratory study of the ‘writing games’ of two leading scholars writing for publication Jessica Velásquez (La Trobe University)

Perception of accented speeches and its relationship with processing difficulty: Do Japanese learners have intelligibility benefits over Japanese English? Ken-ichi Hashimoto (Osaka Kyoiku University), Tomoko Takeyama (Kenmei Junior and Senior High School), Kazuhito Yamato (Kobe University)

Thursday 8 December (Day 2) 12.00pm-12.30pm

Predicting complexity of language production from basic mechanisms of information processing in the brain Andrew Corcoran (University of South Australia)

The Neural Dynamics Underlying the Role of Sleep in Language Learning Zachariah Cross (University of South Australia)

Investigating the neural basis of cross-linguistic variability in sentence interpretation strategies Louise Kyriaki (University of South Australia)

Slavic Verbal Modifiers Mark Specificity on the Direct Object: Evidence from Polish Quantifiers Brian Collins (University of Utah)

Automatic identification and visualization of linguistic areas Siva Kalyan (Australian National University)

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Friday 9 December (Day 3) 12.00pm-12.30pm

Zooming in on language endangerment: semi-speakers' perspectives on language learning and language transmission Amy Budrikis (University of Western Australia)

Tense Shift in Native English and Learner English Argumentative Essays Hoda Nawar (University of Western Australia)

Seeing a foreign accent: Perception of accentedness in Asian and Caucasian speakers by Asian listeners Keyi Sun (University of Canterbury), Xuan Wang (University of Canterbury), Ksenia Gnevsheva (University of Canterbury), Kevin Watson (University of Canterbury)

Abstracts in this section are listed in order of presentation.

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Aboriginal English in the global city: Minorities and language change

Celeste Rodriguez Louro (University of Western Australia)

Since colonisation, Australian languages have had to contend with the unstoppable encroachment of English to the detriment of traditional culture and society. Part and parcel of this process has been the rise of Aboriginal English (AbE) as a powerful carrier of ethnic identity and one that has received detailed descriptive attention (cf. Kaldor & Malcolm, 1991; Malcolm, 2000). Yet, the sociolinguistic patterns governing AbE – understood as “those distinctive varieties of English which have been vernacularised in Aboriginal communities” (Rigsby, 1998: 825) – remain vastly untapped. This lacuna is problematic because AbE has now long served as a medium of communication and because it has done so in a host of complex sociolinguistic settings (Eades, 2013). Previous enquiry into AbE has moved from prescriptive studies viewing it as a ‘problem’ for child learners of mainstream English (Malcolm, 2000: 13), to ethnographic treatments of how language acts as a mirror to unique Aboriginal world views (Eades, 1983; Malcolm & Sharifian, 2002). Despite this foundational research, patterns of variation and change – the quantitative modelling of sociolinguistic variation – remain largely unexplored.

A pressing issue for native speakers of AbE is that of contact with mainstream Australian English (AusE) and the systemic variability that this contact brings about. In the last two decades, metropolitan cities around the world have become increasingly global. Linguistically, this trend has seen the rise of multilingualism and – most remarkably – the ingress of linguistic variables which have been readily taken up by metropolitan youth across ethnic and global speech communities (Cukor-Avila, 2012). Are AbE speakers participating in global linguistic change? Recent research by Tagliamonte and colleagues documents overwhelming parallelism in how specific linguistic variables – such as tense/aspect variation and quotation (cf. examples 1-3 below) – are deployed across English varieties. In light of these changes, this project poses two topical questions:

1. Do metropolitan speakers of AbE participate in surrounding language change?

2. Which community norms do AbE-speaking youth orient towards?

Exploring these questions is key to understanding language change in minority urban communities, and to refining educational programs to suit the needs of Indigenous children and youth.

In this 3-minute presentation, I introduce the background and research design of this novel research, underscoring its significance and impact for speakers of Aboriginal English across Australia.

Examples

(1) My dad he just goes like that [digging sounds], like about ten minutes later there’s a big hole, he say, ‘Ay cook it in there’. (Malcolm, Konigsberg, Collard, Hill, Grote, Sharifian, Kickett & Sahanna, 2002: 69)

(2) An she reckon, ‘Why you, why you pick me up?’ (Malcolm, 2009)

(3) And we’re like, ‘Oh yeah right whatever’. (Sharifian & Malcolm, 2003: 338)

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References

Cukor-Avila, Patricia (2012). Some structural consequences of diffusion. Language in Society 41(5): 615–640.

Eades, Diana (1983). English as an Aboriginal language in Southeast Queensland. University of New England, PhD thesis.

Eades, Diana (2013). Aboriginal ways of using English. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.

Kaldor, Susan & Ian Malcolm (1991). Aboriginal English – An overview. In Romaine, S. (Ed.), Language in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 67–83.

Malcolm, Ian (2000). Aboriginal English research: An overview. Asian Englishes 3(2): 9–31.

Malcolm, Ian (2009). The representation of interaction in Aboriginal oral narratives. 11th International Pragmatics Conference. Melbourne.

Malcolm, Ian, Patricia Konigsberg, Glenys Collard, Alison Hill, Ellen Grote, Farzad Sharifian, Angela Kickett & Eva Sahanna (2002). Umob deadly: Recognised and unrecognised literacy skills of Aboriginal youth. Report on a project funded by Edith Cowan University and the Department of Education, Western Australia under the Edith Cowan University (Industry) Research Funding Scheme. Mount Lawley, WA.

Malcolm, Ian & Farzad Sharifian (2002). Aspects of Aboriginal English oral discourse: An application of cultural schema theory. Discourse Studies 4(2): 169–181.

Rigsby, Bruce (1998). Aboriginal English: A cultural study (review). Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4(4): 852.

Sharifian, Farzad & Ian Malcolm (2003). The pragmatic marker like in English teen talk: Australian Aboriginal usage. Pragmatics and Cognition 11(2): 327– 344.

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Cocos Keeling Island English: A new emerging variety?

Hannah Hedegard (University of Bern)

This sociolinguistic study is the first to investigate the development of English on the Cocos Keeling Islands, and thereby contributes to existing research into lesser-known varieties of English (Schreier et al. 2010, Williams et al 2015). These varieties provide an opportunity to examine typologically distinctive developments in English that are a direct result of language contact, without the linguistic effects of prescriptive standardisation that we often find in countries like the UK and the US.

The Cocos Keeling Islands are the outermost Australian external territory in the South Indian Ocean, and have a population of approximately six hundred inhabitants. A turbulent colonial history and eventual integration with Australia have resulted in the majority Cocos Malay-speaking inhabitants learning English amid complex language ideology debates and political tension.

The data for this study consists of sociolinguistic interviews conducted in 2016 on the island, as well as in one of the diaspora communities in Western Australia. Systemic features of the islanders’ English are analysed in light of any (extra) linguistic influences. Preliminary results highlight the description of salient features in the islanders’ speech that contribute to the emergence of a new variety of English.

Keywords: World Englishes; Lesser-known varieties of English; Variationist linguistics; Australian minority ethnic groups

References

Schreier, D., Trudgill, P., Schneider, E. and Williams, J. ed., (2010). The lesser-known varieties of English: an introduction. 1st ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Williams, J., Schneider, E., Trudgill, P. and Schreier, D. ed., (2015). Further studies in the lesser-known varieties of English. 1st ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Playing by the rules?: An exploratory study of the ‘writing games’ of two leading scholars writing for publication.

Jessica Velásquez (La Trobe University)

Whilst many studies have highlighted the rules and seemingly settled set of conventions that govern English academic writing, little attention has been paid to the strategies used by writers to negotiate their way through such rules. Drawing on Casanave’s (2002) ‘writing games’ metaphor, I argue in this paper for a view of English academic writing that highlights the strategic nature of this practice in terms of the options available to writers. To explore this perspective, research articles from two leading scholars in the L2 field, who write quite differently, will be analysed to show both the way in which they manoeuver through the rules of English Academic writing and the ‘games’ in which they are involved. In addition, I will discuss the extent to which the strategies deployed align with the games being played when writing for publication. Exploring a view of writing as a game will open up some of the dilemmas that novice students, especially those with English as an additional language, face when dealing with academic English and point to alternate and/or multiple ways of practicing EAP.

Keywords: Writing games, English academic writing, writing for publication

References

Casanave, C. P. (2002). Writing games: Multicultural case studies of academic literacy practices in higher education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

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Perception of accented speeches and its relationship with processing difficulty: Do Japanese learners have intelligibility benefits over Japanese English?

Ken-ichi Hashimoto (Osaka Kyoiku University), Tomoko Takeyama (Kenmei Junior and Senior High School), and Kazuhito Yamato (Kobe University)

Our research project has examined potential influences of foreign accents on L2 listening comprehension performance. In a previous presentation (Hashimoto, Takeyama, & Yamato, 2015), we reported that reaction times — measuring processing difficulty to understand accented speeches — can be a better predictor of the comprehension performance of the accented speeches than a questionnaire-based measure (i.e., comprehensibility).

In the present presentation, we will report the results of a follow-up reaction time study, which aims to a) replicate our previous findings and b) further examine the relationship between the processing difficulty measure (reaction time) and listeners’ perception toward accented speeches. The main experimental task remains the same as Hashimoto, Takeyama, and Yamato (2015). We measured response latencies for Japanese learners of English to make truth-value judgments for sentences produced by L2 English speakers from China, Japan, Korea, and Thailand. Unlike Hashimoto et al.'s study, we asked the participants to make judgments on the likelihood of an L2 English utterance to have been produced by an L2 English learner whose L1 is Japanese. Initial results suggest that Japanese listeners comprehend accented speeches by Japanese and Korean speakers, who also received the equally high degree of "Japanese-English-likeness," better than the other two speakers.

Keywords: Foreign accents, listening, processing difficulty

References

Hashimoto, K., Takeyama, T., & Yamato, K. (2015). What "time" tells us about L2 comprehension of accented speeches: A reaction time study. Paper presented at the 4th combined conference of ALAA/ALANZ/ALTAANZ, Adelaide, Australia.

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Predicting complexity of language production from basic mechanisms of information processing in the brain

Andrew Corcoran (University of South Australia)

Aspects of written or spoken language production are demonstrably powerful predictors of cognitive performance across the lifespan. The perhaps best-known example stems from the Nun study (1), a longitudinal ageing study that tested 678 North American nuns. In the Nun study, grammatical and semantic complexity metrics extracted from autobiographical texts written in young adulthood (mean age: 22) were shown to predict cognitive performance and neuropathological indicators of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) in a sample of 180 participants about 60 years later (2, 3). Measures of grammatical complexity (GC; e.g. utterance length; use of embedded clauses or passives) and idea density (ID; the number of propositions or ideas expressed relative to the number of words used) have proven particularly effective in this regard. What remains unknown, however, is how linguistic complexity metrics are related to cognitive performance and why they predict age-related cognitive decline.

The research in progress presented here examines the hypothesis that linguistic complexity metrics reflect basic aspects of information processing in the human brain. Specifically, it investigates whether complexity scores reflect individual alpha frequency (IAF). IAF, the peak frequency in the alpha band of the human electroencephalogram (EEG; 8-12 Hz), varies between individuals and correlates with memory performance and intelligence (4), as well as individual differences in language comprehension (5). Though IAF declines with age, its association with cognitive performance remains stable across the lifespan (6) and is unaffected by intensive cognitive training interventions (7). IAF has thus been discussed as a possible trait-like marker of cognitive processing capacity (7).

In the present study, healthy adult native speakers of two different languages – English and German – are asked to produce an oral language sample in response to the elicitation question "Describe an unexpected event that happened to you" (8). Individual GC and ID scores are estimated from the first 50 utterances produced. In addition, participants undergo a resting-state EEG recording, from which their IAF is calculated. To determine whether IAF predicts linguistic complexity scores, we calculate multiple regression models using IAF and other potential explanatory variables (e.g. language, age) as predictors and the linguistic complexity score of interest (e.g. ID, different measures of GC) as the dependent variable.

Preliminary results from 39 participants (20 speakers of German and 19 speakers of English) suggest that IAF predicts a simple measure of GC, mean length of utterance (F(1,36) = 5.44, p < 0.03; R2 = 0.13). If this result holds, it would suggest that participants with a higher IAF tend to produce more complex (i.e. longer) utterances, an observation that appears plausible in view of the know association of both IAF and GC with memory performance (4, 8, 9). However,further potential influencing factors remain to be explored.

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We will present more comprehensive results on a larger sample of participants and a wider range of linguistic complexity metrics, thus allowing for more definitive conclusions regarding the potential relation between IAF and linguistic complexity metrics.

References

1. D. A. Snowdon, Aging and Alzheimer’s disease: Lessons from the Nun study. Gerontologist. 37, 150–156 (1997).

2. D. a Snowdon et al., Linguistic ability in early life and cognitive function and Alzheimer’s disease in late life. Findings from the Nun Study. JAMA : the journal of the American Medical Association. 275, 528–532 (1996).

3. K. P. Riley, D. a. Snowdon, M. F. Desrosiers, W. R. Markesbery, Early life linguistic ability, late life cognitive function, and neuropathology: Findings from the Nun Study. Neurobiology of Aging. 26, 341–347 (2005).

4. W. Klimesch, EEG alpha and theta oscillations reflect cognitive and memory performance: A review and analysis. Brain Research Reviews. 29, 169–195 (1999).

5. I. D. Bornkessel, C. J. Fiebach, A. D. Friederici, M. Schlesewsky, “Capacity” reconsidered: Interindividual differences in language comprehension and individual alpha frequency. Experimental Psychology. 51, 279–289 (2004).

6. T. H. Grandy et al., NeuroImage Individual alpha peak frequency is related to latent factors of general cognitive abilities. NeuroImage. 79, 10–18 (2013).

7. T. H. Grandy, M. Werkle-Bergner, C. Chicherio, F. Schmiedek, Peak individual alpha frequency qualifies as a stable neurophysiological trait marker in healthy younger and older adults. Psychophysiology. 50, 570–582 (2013).

8. S. Kemper, M. Thompson, J. G. Marquis, Longitudinal change in language production: Effects of aging and dementia on grammatical complexity and propositional content. Psychology and Aging. 16, 600–614 (2001).

9. H. Cheung, S. Kemper, Competing complexity metrics and adults’ production of complex sentences. Applied Psycholinguistics. 13, 53 (1992).

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The Neural Dynamics Underlying the Role of Sleep in Language Learning

Zachariah Cross (University of South Australia)

Research highlights the enduring plasticity of human language processing, as evidenced by the ability to learn new languages [1, 2], novel words [3], and to adapt to the constraints of typologically diverse phoneme combinations [4]. Studies suggest that language plasticity is supported by memory consolidation processes that occur during sleep [5]. In line with a broader literature on sleep and memory (for review: [6]), sleep has been shown to consolidate novel word meanings and their respective phonological forms by integrating them with the existing mental lexicon [7, 8]. In particular, slow wave sleep promotes novel speech production and recognition [7], and grammar generalisation [9], over and above that of time spent awake. However, it is currently unknown how sleep-dependent memory consolidation may extend to the complex combinatorics underlying sentence comprehension.

One aspect of incremental sentence comprehension is the assignment of semantic roles to noun phrases [10, 11]. Semantic role assignment strategies vary between languages [12]. Native speakers of English typically interpret the initial noun phrase (NP) as the actor and the second NP as the undergoer, irrespective of semantic cues. By contrast, in languages such as German and Turkish, semantic role assignment is based more strongly on other cues (e.g. case marking and/or semantic information such as animacy) [13]. These cross-linguistic dissociations with regard to incremental sentence comprehension are in line with proposals that assume qualitatively distinct combinatory mechanisms in the brain, namely sequence-based and dependency-based (sequence-independent) combinatorics [10, 14]. From this perspective, speakers of sequence-independent languages (e.g., German and Turkish) interpret sentences by combining features into successively more complex representations, facilitating the unification of relations between elements in a sentence. Conversely, speakers of sequence-dependent languages (e.g., English and Dutch) are posited to rely primarily on predictive sequence processing mechanisms for sentence interpretation [14, 15]. In this view, sequencing- and dependency-based combinatorics are basic components of the neurobiology of human language, which may be underpinned by the generalisation of linguistic sequence patterns and associative memory traces of schemata established during sleep [14, 16, 17].

Modified miniature language (MML) models are useful for examining the effect of sleep on language learning. In MMLs, participants learn the meaning of individual words via picture-word pairs, and then complete a recognition memory test of word-meaning [8, 18]. Participants with accuracy scores above a set threshold (e.g., >80%) are then exposed to a sentence-learning phase, in which they are presented with grammatical picture-sentence combinations. Sentence structures are based on a limited set of grammatical rules (hence: “miniature language”). After a delay period, participants are then tested on their ability to discriminate grammatical from ungrammatical sentences.

This study in progress aims to determine whether the role of sleep in language learning extends to the combinatorics underlying sentence comprehension in a modified miniature language (MML) modelled on Mandarin Chinese. Mandarin was chosen because: (a) it allows for a comparison of sequence-dependent and sequence-independent combinatorics via the use of word order restrictions and classifiers, respectively, and (b) typical study participants (Australian undergraduate university students) are unlikely to have had exposure to it. We will examine whether dissociable aspects of

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sleep neurophysiology underpin the consolidation of sequence-dependent and sequence-independent combinatory mechanisms, respectively. Effects of sleep will be examined using combined behavioural (response times and acceptability ratings) and electroencephalographic (EEG) measures (event-related brain potentials and oscillatory neuronal dynamics recorded during sentence learning and comprehension tasks).

References

1. Prat, C.S., et al., Resting-state qEEG predicts rate of second language learning in adults. Brain Lang, 2016. 157-158: p. 44-50.

2. Li, P., J. Legault, and K.A. Litcofsky, Neuroplasticity as a function of second language learning: anatomical changes in the human brain. Cortex, 2014. 58: p. 301-24.

3. Davis, M.H. and M.G. Gaskell, A complementary systems account of word learning: neural and behavioural evidence. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci, 2009. 364(1536): p. 3773-800.

4. Earle, F.S. and E.B. Myers, Building phonetic categories: an argument for the role of sleep. Front Psychol, 2014. 5: p. 1192.

5. Schreiner, T. and B. Rasch, The beneficial role of memory reactivation for language learning during sleep: A review. Brain Lang, 2016.

6. Rasch, B. and J. Born, About sleep's role in memory. Physiol Rev, 2013. 93(2): p. 681-766.

7. Gaskell, M.G., et al., Sleep underpins the plasticity of language production. Psychol Sci, 2014. 25(7): p. 1457-65.

8. Mirkovic, J. and M.G. Gaskell, Does Sleep Improve Your Grammar? Preferential Consolidation of Arbitrary Components of New Linguistic Knowledge. PLoS One, 2016. 11(4): p. e0152489.

9. Batterink, L.J. and K.A. Paller, Sleep-based memory processing facilitates grammatical generalization: Evidence from targeted memory reactivation. Brain Lang, 2015.

10. Bornkessel, I. and M. Schlesewsky, The extended argument dependency model: a neurocognitive approach to sentence comprehension across languages. Psychol Rev, 2006. 113(4): p. 787-821.

11. Dominey, P.F., T. Inui, and M. Hoen, Neural network processing of natural language: II. Towards a unified model of corticostriatal function in learning sentence comprehension and non-linguistic sequencing. Brain Lang, 2009. 109(2-3): p. 80-92.

12. MacWhinney, B., E. Bates, and R. Kliegl, Cue validity and sentence interpretation in English, German, and Italian. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1984. 23(2): p. 127-150.

13. Droge, A., et al., Neural mechanisms of sentence comprehension based on predictive processes and decision certainty: Electrophysiological evidence from non-canonical linearizations in a flexible word order language. Brain Res, 2016. 1633: p. 149-66.

14. Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, I., et al., Neurobiological roots of language in primate audition: common computational properties. Trends Cogn Sci, 2015. 19(3): p. 142-50.

15. Saur, D., et al., Ventral and dorsal pathways for language. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 2008. 105(46): p. 18035-40.

16. Durrant, S.J., S.A. Cairney, and P.A. Lewis, Cross-modal transfer of statistical information benefits from sleep. Cortex, 2016. 78: p. 85-99.

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17. Lewis, P.A. and S.J. Durrant, Overlapping memory replay during sleep builds cognitive schemata. Trends Cogn Sci, 2011. 15(8): p. 343-51.

18. Mueller, J.L., L2 in a Nutshell: The Investigation of Second Language Processing in the Miniature Language Model. Language Learning, 2006. 56: p. 235-270.

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Investigating the neural basis of cross-linguistic variability in sentence interpretation strategies

Louise Kyriaki (University of South Australia)

Several neurobiological models of language assume that linguistic processing draws upon two functionally distinct (dorsal and ventral) streams of information processing in the brain. One of these models, the extended Argument Dependency Model (eADM) Bornkessel-Schlesewsky and Schlesewsky [1], explicitly takes into account cross-linguistic variability in online sentence interpretation strategies. It posits that the dorsal stream supports sequence-dependent processing (as is prevalent in languages with a strict word order such as English), while the ventral stream supports sequence-independent sentence interpretation (more strongly required in languages with a flexible word order such as German, Turkish or Hindi) [1].

The assumption that the brain adopts qualitatively distinct sentence processing strategies depending on the particular language under consideration is supported by findings on so-called “semantic reversal anomalies” (SRAs), which have been found to elicit differential brain responses as a function of language [2]. An example of an SRA is “The fries have eaten the boys too quickly”. Here, the syntax requires the comprehender to assign “fries” the Actor role and “boys” the Undergoer role, but this is incongruent with the most plausible interpretation of the sentence [3]. The SRA arises due to a reversal of NP roles: if the nouns were switched, the sentence would be plausible (i.e. “The boys have eaten the fries too quickly”) [4]. In sequence-dependent languages such as English and Dutch, SRAs elicit a particular electrophysiological marker (P600) [3, 5, 6]. In sequence-independent languages, such as German, Turkish and Mandarin Chinese, by contrast, they engender a qualitatively different electrophysiological response (N400)[2, 7].

From a neuroanatomical perspective, the eADM predicts that the dorsal stream (posited to support sequence-dependent processing) plays a crucial role in the processing of SRAs in sequence-dependent languages [2]. In other words, it is critically involved in determining that native speakers of English must arrive at an implausible interpretation of “The fries have eaten the boys too quickly”. However, no study to date has used causal methods to connect the dorsal-ventral streams architecture to sequence-dependent or –independent processing in relation to the processing strategies of a particular language. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a non-invasive brain stimulation technique with the ability to investigate the causality of cortical regions in cognitive tasks [8, 9]. TMS can temporarily disrupt function in a focal brain region, allowing an insight into the role that region plays in a certain function or process [9].

This research in progress aims to test the hypothesised causal link between dorsal stream function and sequence-based processing. We will use TMS to temporarily disrupt dorsal stream function as English comprehenders listen to SRAs. Participants will perform a comprehension task (sentence-picture-matching) and will additionally have their electroencephalogram (EEG) recorded. We predict that disruption of dorsal stream function will lead native speakers of English to adopt a non-sequence-based processing strategy during the comprehension of SRAs. This processing strategy change is hypothesised to manifest in two dependent variables: altered behavioural responses in a sentence-picture-matching task and altered electrophysiological responses during SRA comprehension (i.e. a switch to a German/Turkish-type N400 pattern from the typical English/Dutch-type P600 pattern).

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References

1. Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, I. and M. Schlesewsky, Reconciling time, space and function: a new dorsal–ventral stream model of sentence comprehension. Brain and language, 2013. 125(1): p. 60-76.

2. Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, I., et al., Think globally: Cross-linguistic variation in electrophysiological activity during sentence comprehension. Brain and Language, 2011. 117(3): p. 133-152.

3. Kim, A. and L. Osterhout, The independence of combinatory semantic processing: Evidence from event-related potentials. Journal of Memory and Language, 2005. 52(2): p. 205-225.

4. Bourguignon, N., et al., Decomposing animacy reversals between agents and experiencers: An ERP study. Brain and language, 2012. 122(3): p. 179-189.

5. Hoeks, J.C., L.A. Stowe, and G. Doedens, Seeing words in context: the interaction of lexical and sentence level information during reading. Cognitive brain research, 2004. 19(1): p. 59-73.

6. Kuperberg, G.R., et al., Electrophysiological distinctions in processing conceptual relationships within simple sentences. Cognitive Brain Research, 2003. 17(1): p. 117-129.

7. Schlesewsky, M. and I.D. Bornkessel-Schlesewsky. When semantic P600s turn into N400s: On cross-linguistic differences in online verb-argument linking. in Papers from Brain Talk. The 1st Birgit Rausing Language Program Conference in Linguistics. 2009. Lund University, Media Tryck.

8. Flöel, A., Non-invasive brain stimulation and language processing in the healthy brain. Aphasiology, 2012. 26(9): p. 1082-1102.

9. Hartwigsen, G., The neurophysiology of language: Insights from non-invasive brain stimulation in the healthy human brain. Brain and language, 2015. 148: p. 81-94.

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Slavic Verbal Modifiers Mark Specificity on the Direct Object: Evidence from Polish Quantifiers

Brian Collins (University of Utah)

In Slavic languages verbal prefixes, or verbal modifiers (VMs), attach to most verbs to form ‘perfective’ actions (see (1)). The function of Slavic VMs has been commonly argued to be perfective (for more see Młynarczyk (2004), Labenz (2004), Schoorlemmer (1995), Verkuyl (1993), Smith (1991), Bogdan & Sullivan (2009)). To complicate matters, many VMs cause a change of meaning, or in some cases a complete change of meaning, in addition to creating a perfective action (see (2)).

Młynarczyk (2004) & Labenz (2004) take this as far as to essentially claim that Polish VMs are only perfective (except for in cases where the verbal modifier causes a change in meaning). Verkuyl (1993; 1999) and Schoorlemmer (1995) however, claim that Slavic verbal modifiers function similarly to Germanic determiners. Młynarczyk (2004) provides numerous arguments against this analysis, mostly through empirical observations from her own native-speaker judgments, as well as observations made by other native-speaker Polish authors.

On an avenue of neglected research however, we see that, while using quantifiers such as “two times”, there are contrasts between verbs without a VM and verbs with a VM (see 3); the contrast seems to be specific vs. non-specific, or perhaps even definite indefinite on the DP object. Most marked are examples where the DP object is destroyed, or implied to be destroyed by the action (e.g., eat). The markedness of 3b parallels the markedness of the utterance in English when a definite article is used. Like in English with the definite article, a plausible interpretation of 2b is a generic one, where it is implied that the same type of sandwich was eaten twice.

1) The basic paradigm

a) pisa-ł-em list

write-P-1sg.MASC letter

‘I wrote (impf) the letter’

b) na-pisa-ł-em list

VM-write-P-1sg.MASC letter

‘I wrote (perf) the letter’

2) Change in meaning

a) spać~do-spać

‘sleep (impf)’~‘sleep enough (perf)’

b) pisać~o-pisać

‘write’~‘copy (perf)’

3) Quantifiers

a) dwa razy jad-ł-em kanapk-ę

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two times eat-P-1sg.MASC sandwich-FEM.ACC

‘I ate (impf) a sandwich two times’

b) #dwa razy z-jad-ł-em kanapk-ę

two times VM-eat-P-1sg.MASC sandwich-FEM.ACC

‘I ate (perf) #the sandwich two times’

References

Bogdan, D. R., & Sullivan, W. J. (2009). The tense-aspect system of Polish narrative: a discourse and cognitive approach (Vol. 35). Lincom Europa.

Labenz, P. (2004, August). Event-calculus semantics of Polish aspect. (Master’s thesis). Retrieved from University of Amsterdam Institute for Logic, Language and Computation.

Młynarczyk, A. K. (2004). Aspectual pairing in Polish. (Doctoral Dissertation). Retrieved from the University of Utrecht Repository.

Schoorlemmer, M. (1995). Participial passive and aspect in Russian. Doctoral

Dissertation, Utrecht University, UiL OTS, Utrecht.

Smith, C. (1991). The parameter of aspect. Dordrecht: Kluwer Publishers.

Verkuyl, H. J. (1993). A theory of aspectuality. The interaction between temporal and atemporal structure, volume 64 of Cambridge Studies in Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Automatic identification and visualization of linguistic areas

Siva Kalyan (Australian National University)

When searching for language universals in linguistic typology, it is important to choose a sample of the world’s languages that is representative of many different linguistic areas; otherwise, one risks mistaking properties that have spread by contact or inheritance for genuine universal tendencies in human language. In order to avoid this problem, one needs to be able to identify linguistic areas in a consistent and objective manner. This has never been done: as Hammarström & Güldemann (2014: 95–96) note, “Unfortunately, there is no (near-complete) list of established areas…and even partial lists contain uncertainties concerning their delimitation”. This presentation proposes one way of addressing this issue.

The dataset used for this project was the WALS subset of the World Phonotactics Database (Donohue et al. 2013), which contains the 257 morphosyntax features from the World Atlas of Language Structures (Dryer & Haspelmath 2013), coded for 1601 languages, 943 of which have non-blank values for more than 50% of the features. The first step was to compute pairwise typological distances among these 943 languages; this was done using the Gower coefficient, weighting the features in a way that accounts for feature dependencies (following the procedure suggested in Hammarström & O’Connor 2013). Figure 1 shows the resulting typological distances, transformed into a 3D MDS solution which is then interpreted as RGB vectors (as in dialectometric studies such as Goebl 2006 and Szmrecsányi 2011), and displayed on a map using a Voronoi tessellation.

The next step in the identification of linguistic areas was to define a measure of “distance” between languages that would reflect typological distance for languages that are close together, and geographic distance for languages that are far apart; this would ensure that geographically close languages are clustered together only if they are also typologically similar, and geographically distant languages are rarely clustered together, regardless of typological similarity. This new distance measure was constructed as follows: First, a geographic adjacency graph was computed, where two languages A and B are linked if and only if there is no third language C which is closer to A and B than they are to each other (following the procedure in Hammarström & Güldemann 2014: 101–102). Then, the “areal distance” between A and B was defined as equal to their typological distance if they were either immediately adjacent or 2 steps apart; if they were more than 2 steps apart, then their areal distance was equal to the sum of typological distances along the shortest path between A and B that connects only geographically-adjacent languages.

These areal distances were used to cluster the 943 languages into 47 clusters with an average of about 20 languages each; these clusters were then displayed within the Voronoi tessellation computed earlier. Figure 2 shows a sample cluster, which is clearly a highly plausible candidate for a linguistic area. Likewise, all the clusters that were found are geographically contiguous (by construction), and most of them can be readily identified with established linguistic areas, or with language families or subgroups.

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References

Donohue, Mark, Rebecca Hetherington, James McElvenny and Virginia Dawson. 2013. World phonotactics database. Department of Linguistics, The Australian National University. http://phonotactics.anu.edu.au.

Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) 2013. The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Available online at http://wals.info

Goebl, Hans. 2006. Recent Advances in Salzburg Dialectometry. Literary and Linguistic Computing 21(4): 411–435.

Hammarström, Harald, & Güldemann, Tom. 2014. Quantifying geographical determinants of large-scale distributions of linguistic features. Language Dynamics and Change, 4(1), 87–115.

Hammarström, Harald, & O'Connor, Loretta. 2013. Dependency sensitive typological distance. In Lars Borin & Anju Saxena (eds.) Approaches to measuring linguistic differences (pp. 337-360). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Szmrecsányi, Benedikt. 2011. Corpus-based dialectometry: a methodological sketch. Corpora 6(1):45–76.

Figure 1. Typological distances among 943 of the world’s languages, transformed into colours using a 3D MDS solution, and displayed using Voronoi tessellation.

Figure 2. Mainland (South-)East Asia as a linguistic area. Nearly all of these languages are “isolating”, i.e. lack inflectional morphology, whereas their neighbours are morphologically rich.

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Zooming in on language endangerment: Semi-speakers’ perspectives on language learning and language transmission

Amy Budrikis (University of Western Australia)

According to Fishman (1991), intergenerational language transmission is the critical stage of language vitality – without it, language communities are doing little more than ‘biding time’ – and of the estimated 6000 languages spoken worldwide, at least a third are no longer spoken by all generations (Moseley, 2010). On the other hand, language communities, centres, and individuals on the ground continue to engage in language revitalization efforts to support the development of new language learners and speakers.

If intergenerational transmission is important, then, the task would seem to fall to the parents and grandparents who are themselves still learning their traditional language to pass language on to their children. Given this, what are the personal cognitive and affective factors that influence the choices that these semi-speakers make about language learning and language transmission?

At this inception stage of my project, I propose through a series of qualitative interviews in a number of West Australian Aboriginal communities to explore the range of people’s attitudes towards languages, language learning, and child bilingualism; beliefs about adult second language acquisition, the nature of language knowledge, and how children acquire languages; and motivations both for learning language as an adult and for raising children bilingually. I also examine how these factors are mediated by situational supports and barriers (e.g. language teaching resources, availability of information about child bilingualism). Through understanding individual perspectives on language learning and language transmission, language revitalization efforts can be better adapted and contextualised to support communities to keep their languages strong.

References

Fishman, J. A. (1991). The Intergenerational Transmission of ’ Additional ’ Languages for Special Purposes. In Reversing Language Shift: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of Assistance to Threatened Languages (pp. 355–367). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Moseley, C. (Ed.). (2010). Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger (3rd edn). Paris: UNESCO Publishin. Retrieved from http://www.unesco.org/culture/en/endangeredlanguages/atlas

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Tense Shift in Native English and Learner English Argumentative Essays

Hoda Nawar (University of Western Australia)

Tense plays an important role as a cohesive device in written discourse (Brown and Yule, 1988, Granger 1999; Hinkel, 2004). Emphasizing the role of tense in textual cohesion, Godfrey (1980: 94) warns EFL learners that they must "retain and attend to the identity of tense continuities they establish if their production is to be judged acceptable".

Tense shift, however, is not always negative. There are a number of studies that report on pragmatically motivated tense shifts. It has been found that temporal references and the basic meanings and uses of tenses can be linked to rhetorical functions (Taylor, 2001). Knowledge of the relationship between tense and rhetorical functions can help non-native speakers learn to differentiate between tense shifting that is problematic and that which is pragmatically motivated and acceptable. This, in turn, will help them write more cohesive and effective essays.

The present study is part of a work-in-progress PhD research that aims at investigating tense, aspect and modality in argumentative essays. The present study compares and analyses tense shift in argumentative essays as used by Native speakers and EFL learners. Results show that there is a strong relationship between rhetorical factors and tense choice. Such finding confirms previous argument that “tense grammar is not a rigid unitary system where only one correct form is possible for a given situation. Rather it has great flexibility” (Taylor, 2001).

References

Brown, G. and Yule, G. 1983. Discourse analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

Godfrey D. L. 1980. ‘A discourse analysis of tense in adult ESL monologues’. In D. Larsen-Freeman (ed.), Discourse analysis in second language research. Rowley: Newbury House, 92-110.

Granger, S. 1999. ‘Use of tenses by advanced EFL learners: Evidence from an error-tagged computer corpus’. In Hasselgard, H. &Oksefjell, S (eds). Out of Corpora. Studies in honour of Stig Johansson. Studies in Practical Linguistics 26. Amesterdam: Rodopi, 191-202.

Hinkel, E. 2004. ‘Tense, aspect, and the passive voice in L1 and L2 academic texts’. Language Teaching Research, 8/1: 5-29.

Taylor, V. 2001. Tense usage in Academic writing: A cross-disciplinary study. Unpublished MA thesis. Victoria: University of Victoria.

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Seeing a foreign accent: Perception of accentedness in Asian and Caucasian speakers by Asian listeners

Keyi Sun (University of Canterbury), Xuan Wang (University of Canterbury), Ksenia Gnevsheva (University of Canterbury), Kevin Watson (University of Canterbury)

Studies on speech perception have found mutual effects between social and linguistic information (e.g., Campbell-Kibler, 2007; Hay & Drager, 2010; Niedzielski, 1999). The effect may be explained by usage-based models of speech perception. For example, exemplar theory (Johnson, 1997) suggests that sociolinguistic information such as sex, age, origin and contextual information are stored together with exemplars and are updated through placing newly encountered information collected from speech perception and production.

One area of research exploring the mutual effect between social and linguistic information is accentedness perception tasks involving Asian speakers. Previous research on speech perception has found that audio clips of native English are rated more accented when being presented with an Asian face, such an effect was described as an effect of negative bias towards Asian speakers (Rubin, 1992). It was argued that a negative bias on the part of the listener made them pay less attention to the speech (Kang & Rubin, 2009). However, such an explanation is not sufficient to account for the results from an accentedness rating task when using audio clips from Caucasian non-native English speakers. Anonymous (2015) found that when being presented with speech from Asian non-native English speakers (Korean) and Caucasian non-native English speakers (German), native New Zealand English (NZE) listeners rated Korean speakers equally accented in video-only, audio-only and audiovisual conditions. However, German speakers were rated less accented in visual-only condition than in audio-only condition, and in audio-only condition than in audiovisual condition. Such a result can be explained by an expectation mismatch effect (McGowan, 2015). The listeners did not expect Caucasian faces to match with accented speech, and as a result, when accented speech and Caucasian faces were presented together, it made the accent more salient (Anonymous, 2015).

Asian listeners are rarely used in accentedness rating tasks. Previous research on Asian listeners’ perception of accented speech (e.g., McGowan, 2015) found that compared with Caucasian Americans, Chinese Americans found Chinese-accented speech more intelligible, which may be a result of a matched-accent speech intelligibility benefit (Bent & Bradlow, 2003). However, McGowan (2015) did not tease apart the effects of ethnicity from accent familiarity. It may be that Asian speakers of non-Chinese descent would have reacted to the Chinese-accented speech differently.

The current study will address the issue of familiarity with an Asian accent through employing Asian listeners from different language backgrounds, which will be the first study of accent perception that employs different types of Asian listeners in an accentedness perception task. 90 native English speakers of Asian descent are recruited for the study. 45 of them are of Korean descent, and the other 45 are non-Korean native English speaking East Asian listeners (Chinese or Japanese descent). The current study reuses the methodology and stimuli from Anonymous (2015), which are to give accentedness scores to audio and video clips of English speech from 9 L1 Korean speakers, 9 L1 German speakers and 6 L1 speakers of English. The hypotheses are that Asian listeners may be expected not to have negative bias against Asian speakers, and speakers familiar (Korean descent) and unfamiliar (Chinese or Japanese descent) with Korean accent may behave differently. We also

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compare Asian native English listeners’ reactions with those from Caucasian native NZE listeners found in Anonymous (2015), and see if native English speakers of Asian descent will show different reactions from Caucasian listeners.

Given that the current study is built on existing studies and methodologies, it is likely that we are going to observe different behaviours in Asian listeners with different language backgrounds, and between Asian listeners and Caucasian listeners. The results could help us understand speech perception from listeners with various language backgrounds and contribute to the understanding of the relationship between experience of sociolinguistic information and accentedness perception.

References

Bent, T. & Bradlow, A. R. (2003). The interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 114(3), 1600-1610.

Campbell-Kibler, K. (2007). Accent, (ING), and the social logic of listener perceptions. American Speech, 82(1). 32-64.

Hay, J. & Drager K. (2010). Stuffed toys and speech perception. Linguistics, 48(4), 865-892.

Johnson, K. (1997). Speech perception without speaker normalization: An exemplar model. In K. Johnson & J. W. Mullennix (Eds.), Talker variability in speech processing, pp.145-165. San Diego: Academic Press.

Kang, O. & Rubin, D. L. (2009). Reverse linguistic stereotyping: Measuring the effect of listener expectations on speech evaluation. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 28, 441-456.

McGowan, K. B. (2015). Social expectation improves speech perception in noise. Language and Speech. Advance online publication.

Niedzielski, N. (1999). The effect of social information on the perception of sociolinguistic variables. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 18(1), 62-85.

Rubin, D. L. (1992). Nonlanguage factors affecting undergraduates’ judgments of nonnative English-speaking teaching assistants. Research in Higher Education, 33(4), 511-531.