Mai-Han Nguyen
University of Hawaii at Manoa
<maihan@hawaii.edu>
On Passive Construction in Vietnamese
The grammar of Vietnamese includes
a sentence structure which is very similar to passive in English, as in (1).
(1) a. Lan was punished by her mom.
b. Lan bi phat boi me cua co-ay.
Lan passive punish by mom of she
'Lan was punished by her mom.'
However, (1b) is not a passive sentence since there is (2) below which is considered a more natural paraphrase of (1b).
(2) Lan bi me phat.
Lan passive mom punish
'Lan was punished by mom.'
In (2) the 'passive' marker 'bi'
and the main verb 'phat' 'punish' are separated by the agent 'me' 'mom';
therefore, 'bi' cannot be a passive morpheme. Further, the agent 'me' is
not marked by the preposition 'boi' 'by'. These show that (2) cannot
be a passive sentence.
(3) below illustrates another 'passive' pattern.
(3) Toi bi o nha.
I passive stay home
'I was forced to stay home/ I am not allowed to go.'
In (3) the main verb 'o' 'stay' is an intransitive verb, and the NP 'toi' 'I'is not the direct object of 'o' . This means that there is no demotion of subject and promotion of object in (3). In short, (2) and (3) are examples to show that the language does not have passive sentences.
In this paper, I propose an alternative analysis of these passive-like constructions in Vietnamese. I argue that what appear to be the passive markers 'bi' and 'duoc' are main verbs subcategorizing for two types of complements: a) NP complement, and b) IP complement.
Sentences with a 'boi' phrase such as (1b) and those involving an intransitive verb such as (3) are considered to be examples of the former. The IP complemen structure involves sentences whose the embedded clause contains an overt subject but lacks an internal argument such as (2). I will argue that this argument is the non overt object 'pro', and that the subject of this clause receives Case by the Exceptional Case Marking mechanism (ECM).
(3) below illustrates another 'passive' pattern.
(3) Toi bi o nha.
I passive stay home
'I was forced to stay home/ I am not allowed to go.'
In (3) the main verb 'o' 'stay' is an intransitive verb, and the NP 'toi' 'I'is not the direct object of 'o' . This means that there is no demotion of subject and promotion of object in (3). In short, (2) and (3) are examples to show that the language does not have passive sentences.
In this paper, I propose an alternative analysis of these passive-like constructions in Vietnamese. I argue that what appear to be the passive markers 'bi' and 'duoc' are main verbs subcategorizing for two types of complements: a) NP complement, and b) IP complement.
Sentences with a 'boi' phrase such as (1b) and those involving an intransitive verb such as (3) are considered to be examples of the former. The IP complemen structure involves sentences whose the embedded clause contains an overt subject but lacks an internal argument such as (2). I will argue that this argument is the non overt object 'pro', and that the subject of this clause receives Case by the Exceptional Case Marking mechanism (ECM).
Aya Inoue
University of Hawaii at Manoa
<ainoue@hawaii.edu>
Visual word recognition in Hawai'i Creole English: Bidialectal effects on reading
-- This is a practice talk for 2004 LSA Annual Meeting to be held in Boston in January. Any general and specific questions, comments, and advice will be appreciated after my 15 minutes talk. --
Dijkstra et al. (1999) suggests that in a bilingual language processing system lexical access is affected by stored knowledge of the other language. Whether this effect is also observed in bidialectal situations where one of the dialects has no strongly enforced orthography, however, has not been investigated yet.
This paper investigates the effects of different orthographic and phonological systems as factors in visual word recognition by dialectal speakers. Hawai'i Creole English (HCE), the English lexifier creole spoken in Hawai'i, is phonologically different from Standard English (SE), but like many other creole languages it has no widely accepted orthography. SE-HCE bidialectal speakers and monolingual SE speakers were tested with familiar visual forms (items in SE, loanwords from substrate languages) and unfamiliar visual forms (items in 2 HCE spelling systems, pronounceable nonwords). The experimental results suggest the inhibitory effect of bidialectalism for the processing of unfamiliar visual forms: significantly longer reaction times for bidialectal speakers were observed for unfamiliar visual forms, although the two groups reacted very similarly for familiar visual forms which can be quickly recognized by an orthography to meaning route. Bidialectal speakers arguably have more complex orthography to phonology mappings from the dual phonological systems (HCE, SE) they command.
Dr. Hiroyuki Akama
Associate Professor of Tokyo Institute of Technology
Visiting Scholar,University of Hawai'i at Manoa
Probabilistic Language Processing in the Form
of a Decision Tree: Usage of the French Impersonal Subject Pronoun
"on"(or "l'on")
This research aims at examining the methods for inductive learning of datamining in the field of statistical corpus linguistics. We shall examine one of the most typical examples in French, which comprises some complicated probabilistic problems. Therefore, these were not completely reviewed until computational power became a readily available commodity. Let us now attempt to consider the alternative possibilities of using "on" or "l'on" which are nowadays semantically equivalent as impersonal subject pronoun. We may say either "mais il y a peu de chance qu'on detrone le roi des cons" or "mais il y a peu de chance que l'on detrone le roi des cons". But, in fact, there exist some French native speakers -intellectual, perhaps, but over fastidious- who cannot help replacing all instances of "qu'on" by "que l'on". Thus one is entitled to wonder if there might be a somehow visible interference between a given individual or social factor and a purely phonological one.
The point I wish to make is that it is only statistical approaches to processing natural language (with some methods of simulation like Machine Learning, Neural Network, Self-Organizing Map, Association Rule or Bayesian Network) that will permit us to elucidate the intricate mechanism of this decision making.
Dr. Beverly McCreary,
Gender Equity Specialist
Office of the Dean
of Students
University of Hawaii at Manoa
Preventing Sexual Harassment in the Classroom and Workplace
This interactive training helps participants identify
what sexual harassment is and how to effectively respond. Participants learn
the impacts of sexual harassment on the victim, concerned others, and the
university. They will also come to understand the importance of their role
in preventing sexual harassment and the resources available at the university,
and within the community.
Maria Faehndrich
University of Hawaii at Manoa
<faehndri@hawaii.edu>
Investigating larger language families and distant relationships with WordCorr
I will show how the WordCorr
computer program is being used to investigate the relationships among
some Turkic languages, and, one step further, a possible relationship
of Turkic languages to Mongolian. The aim of this presentation is not
to prove that Mongolian and Turkic languages are related, but to show
that WordCorr is a useful tool for investigating the question of possible
relationship.
The WordCorr project, headed by Dr. Joseph Grimes, has been going on since Fall 2002. WordCorr is a computer program developed to help historical linguists with the organization of data to support their hypotheses about sound change, and to explore alternate hypotheses. While the linguist does the analysis, the computer takes care of keeping the data organized and stored. WordCorr's development is made possible by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
For more details about the WordCorr Project, and for the current downloadable version of the program, visit http://wordcorr.sourceforge.net/
The WordCorr project, headed by Dr. Joseph Grimes, has been going on since Fall 2002. WordCorr is a computer program developed to help historical linguists with the organization of data to support their hypotheses about sound change, and to explore alternate hypotheses. While the linguist does the analysis, the computer takes care of keeping the data organized and stored. WordCorr's development is made possible by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
For more details about the WordCorr Project, and for the current downloadable version of the program, visit http://wordcorr.sourceforge.net/
Jason Lobel
University of Hawaii at Manoa
<lobel@hawaii.edu>
Another Look at Philippine Contrastive Stress:
Rinconada Bikol
Contrastive stress is a feature
shown to be reconstructable for Proto-Philippine (Zorc 1979). The
Rinconada dialect of the Southern Bikol language is one of only a handful
of Philipppine languages that shows evidence of having lost contrastive
stress at some point in its history, and it is one of only two (along with
Northern Philippine language Pangasinan) that has subsequently redeveloped
contrastive stress. This paper will explore the evidence for both
stages of development in Rinconada, and some of the implications thereof.
Dr. Jie Zhang
Kansas University
The Irrelevance of Mora Count to Contour Tone
Licensing
Traditionally, the mora is
used to capture the heavy vs. light distinction in weight-relatedphenomena
such as stress assignment, compensatory lengthening, metrics, and word minimality.
It has also been proposed to be the tone-bearing unit, most notably by Duanmu.
Upon observing that the Chinese languages with fewer distributional restrictions
on contour tones (e.g., Mandarin) have generally longer syllable rimes
than those with more restrictions (e.g., Shanghai), Duanmu argues that
a contour tone must be represented as a concatenation of level tones, each
of which needs a mora to be licensed, and the difference in contour tone
restriction between Mandarin and Shanghai stems from the bimoraicity of
syllables in the former and monomoraicity of syllables in the latter.
Yip's proposal that contour tones in Chinese are phonological units and
properties of the syllable is refuted by Duanmu, precisely on the ground
that the correlation between rime duration and contour tone restrictions
cannot be captured representationally in such an approach. In this
paper, I argue that a careful review of the contour tone typology in the
world's languages in fact suggests that bimoraicity is neither a sufficient
nor a necessary licensing condition for contour tones. The arguments
come from the advantages of syllables in prosodic-final position and shorter
words in contour tone licensing, the levels of distinction that need to
be made regarding contour tone markedness, the differences among contour
tones with the same number of pitch targets, and the long lasting problem
of moraic inconsistency.
I propose a theoretical apparatus that allows more phonetic details in both
the tonal shape and rime duration to enter into phonological representations
and show that it provides a betteraccount for the cross-linguistic behavior
of contour tone licensing.
Dr. Ben Bergen
University of Hawai'i at Manoa
<bergen@hawaii.edu>
Simulation Semantics
There is mounting evidence
from neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and psycholinguistics, that in order
to produce or understand meaningful language, language users run a mental
simulation of (that is, mentally imagine) the content of the utterance. Running
this simulation involves activating the same brain structures that are responsible
for perceiving or performing the events described in the utterance.
Simulation semantics is a theory of meaning based on these findings.
This talk will survey neural and behavioral evidence for simulation semantics and discuss its ramifications for lexical and syntactic representation and processing. Importantly, if language understanding is based on simulation, then we can no longer say that words or other constructions 'have' meaning; rather, they constrain an intended simulation.
This talk will survey neural and behavioral evidence for simulation semantics and discuss its ramifications for lexical and syntactic representation and processing. Importantly, if language understanding is based on simulation, then we can no longer say that words or other constructions 'have' meaning; rather, they constrain an intended simulation.
Dr. Robert Blust
University of Hawai'i at Manoa
<blust@hawaii.edu>
<blust@hawaii.edu>
Reduplicated color terms in Oceanic languages
In many languages belonging
to the Oceanic subgroup of Austronesian the semantically unmarked
forms of color terms are reduplicated. In some cases no simple
base occurs in the language. Inothers both simple and reduplicated
bases occur, but with no clear distinction of meaning. For some
of these languages non-color adjectives are also reduplicated, although
this usually is an active process, and where it is not active it occurs
with markedly lower frequency than reduplication in color terms.
It is argued that Proto-Oceanic or a language that immediately preceded
it used reduplication in color words to mark either intensive (red : red-red
'very red') or attenuative (red : red-red 'kind of red'), and that in either
case pragmatic considerations would have favored the semantic 'bleaching'
of reduplicated color terms so that these often came to replace the simple
bases.
Valerie Guerin
Univeristy of Hawai’i at Manoa
<vguerin@hawaii.edu>
<vguerin@hawaii.edu>
Dr. Hooi Ling Soh
University of Minnesota,
Twin Cities
<sohxx001@umn.edu>
Twin Cities
<sohxx001@umn.edu>
Intervention Effect in Mandarin Chinese and French Wh-in situ
Chomsky (1995) argues that
LF movement involves feature movement only. Recently, Pesetsky (2000)
has shown that LF wh-movement may involve either phrasal or feature
movement. To diagnose feature movement, Pesetsky uses the Intervention
Effect: if the features of a wh-phrase are separated from that wh-phrase
by a quantifier, the resulting sentence is deviant (Beck and Kim 1997).
Applying the Intervention Effect as a test to detect feature movement, we show evidence from French and Mandarin Chinese that there is a contrast between nominal and non-nominal wh-in-situ (Huang 1982, Tsai 1994): wh-nominals do not display Intervention Effect while non-nominals display Intervention Effect thus undergo feature movement.
Applying the Intervention Effect as a test to detect feature movement, we show evidence from French and Mandarin Chinese that there is a contrast between nominal and non-nominal wh-in-situ (Huang 1982, Tsai 1994): wh-nominals do not display Intervention Effect while non-nominals display Intervention Effect thus undergo feature movement.
Meylysa Tseng
University of Hawai‘i at Manoa
<meylysa@hotmail.com>
Investigating the Role of Iconicity in Paiwan Reduplication
I will be addressing issues
pertaining to the relation of iconity to the semantics of reduplication,
some of which are addressed in Regier (1994, 1998). Reduplication
can be found in English with patterns such as "very very large", which
shows emphasis, and "better and better", which shows gradual increments.
In these two examples, it can be seen how reduplication seems to create an
emphatic or augmentive meanings. This is not surprising considering
its form consists of increasing the frequency of existing sound segments.
Considered by Moravcsik (1978) to be an "onomatopoeic use of a form device
(p. 330)," reduplication has been regarded as taking its meaning directly
from its form. Thus, reduplication gives us an opportunity to see
how repetition of sound patterns in words can iconically represent meaning.
I will be presenting data from Paiwan, an Austronesian language found in Southern Taiwan, which offers support for the claim that reduplication does iconically represent what it means. First, I show that there are two types of reduplication found in Paiwan, root reduplication and Ca reduplication. Root reduplication consists of reduplicating two moras of the stem, such as in vatu-vatu "toy dog"(note that the reduplicated portion is underlined). Ca reduplication consists of reduplicating the first consonant of the stem and affixing an a as in kesa "to cook" having the reduplicated form ka-kesa-an "kitchen". In my data I find that there seems to be a relationship between the phonological form of reduplication and meaning. Thus, root reduplication, which reduplicates more segments, has many meanings prototypical to reduplication (progressive, facsimile and plural to name a few). However, Ca reduplication, which only reduplicates the first consonant, has only two meanings, one of which is not prototypical to reduplication (individuation and reciprocity).
I will be presenting data from Paiwan, an Austronesian language found in Southern Taiwan, which offers support for the claim that reduplication does iconically represent what it means. First, I show that there are two types of reduplication found in Paiwan, root reduplication and Ca reduplication. Root reduplication consists of reduplicating two moras of the stem, such as in vatu-vatu "toy dog"(note that the reduplicated portion is underlined). Ca reduplication consists of reduplicating the first consonant of the stem and affixing an a as in kesa "to cook" having the reduplicated form ka-kesa-an "kitchen". In my data I find that there seems to be a relationship between the phonological form of reduplication and meaning. Thus, root reduplication, which reduplicates more segments, has many meanings prototypical to reduplication (progressive, facsimile and plural to name a few). However, Ca reduplication, which only reduplicates the first consonant, has only two meanings, one of which is not prototypical to reduplication (individuation and reciprocity).
LAE Labs Open House
12 – 1:30 pm
Attention new and continuing
students! Do you know about one of LLL’s newest resources for
research? The Language Analysis and Experimentation Labs (LAE Labs)
are a research and teaching facility dedicated to human language and the
cognitive mechanisms responsible for it. The LAE Labs house
research on the articulation, acoustics, and perception of speech,
the production and recognition of words, the processing of sentences
and discourse, and the acquisition of language. Tools used by faculty
and student researchers interested in all areas of language in these labs
include audio and video recording hardware, acoustic analysis software,
articulatory measurement devices, eyetracking equipment, language corpora,
tools for building computational models of linguistic and cognitive behavior,
and experiment design and analysis software.
The LAE Labs are hosting an open house on Tuesday September 9, noon – 1:30 pm. Drop by one or more of the labs to see demonstrations of some of the resources available in the labs. (Demonstrations will be short and each will repeat several times during the open house).
- General Lab, TP 107: PsyScope and E-Prime experiment running software
- Phonetics Lab, Moore 162: Digitizing audio and video
- Tracker Lab, Moore 427: Head-mounted eyetracking
- Child Language Acquisition Lab, Kuy 422: Preferential looking task
For more information on the labs, including information on how to become a lab user, see: <http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/lae/>
The LAE Labs are hosting an open house on Tuesday September 9, noon – 1:30 pm. Drop by one or more of the labs to see demonstrations of some of the resources available in the labs. (Demonstrations will be short and each will repeat several times during the open house).
- General Lab, TP 107: PsyScope and E-Prime experiment running software
- Phonetics Lab, Moore 162: Digitizing audio and video
- Tracker Lab, Moore 427: Head-mounted eyetracking
- Child Language Acquisition Lab, Kuy 422: Preferential looking task
For more information on the labs, including information on how to become a lab user, see: <http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/lae/>
Mie Hiramoto
University of Hawai‘i at Manoa
<mies@hawaii.edu>
Seiji Fukazawa
Hiroshima University, Japan
Becoming and Being "Local":
Change of Identity and Language Use by Japanese Americans in Hawaii
Change of Identity and Language Use by Japanese Americans in Hawaii
In Sato’s (1991:647) words, “Hawaii’s cultural diversity is largely the result of massive labour importation, triggered by the development of sugar plantation by North Americans during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.” The Japanese language that was brought by plantation immigrants contributed largely to creation of Hawaii Creole English (HCE). Between 1885 and 1893, the period of government contract labor immigration, about 29,000 Japanese laborers migrated to Hawaii as sugar plantation workers (Okihiro 1991:24). By the end of Japanese immigration in 1924, the prefectural demographics of the immigrants were 24.3%, largely from Hiroshima followed by 20.6% from Yamaguchi. This means that nearly half of the total Hawaii Japanese population originated in the Chûgoku region (Kimura 2001:1). In less than 40 years, the Japanese population became a major ethnic group in Hawaii.
This paper will focus on the language used among the Japanese diasporas during the plantation period and its attrition rates among the Japanese Americans in Hawaii. The language focused on in this paper will be Chûgoku-ben, i.e. the Hiroshima and Yamaguchi dialect, brought to Hawaii by the majority of the Japanese immigrants during the plantation period. In the beginning, we hypothesized that the speakers’ age influenced the rates of attrition based on our social contacts with Japanese Americans in Hawaii. Thus, a linguistic survey was conducted to study how much of the Chûgoku-ben vocabulary has been retained in Hawaii today.
We will first discuss the formation of Hawaiian Japanese, a common language spoken among Japanese immigrants. Second, we will report one part of our results of our survey regarding some of the Chûgoku-ben vocabulary. Based on our data collected from people of different generations (the second, third, and fourth generation Japanese immigrants) and ages (20 to 86), we learned that the attrition rates of the Chûgoku-ben terms are separated by the speakers’ generation groups rather than their age groups. We will then introduce some of the terms that diffused into today’s HCE from Hawaiian Japanese. After that, possible reasons to account for the different attrition rates of the Hawaiian Japanese terms will be addressed. Lastly, use of Japanese language in Hawaii today and the future of Hawaiian Japanese will be discussed. Our study contributes to gaining an understanding of Hawaii’s unique sociolinguistic variations that were enhanced by the plantation immigrants, including a large group from Japan.
Yukihiro Nakayama
Setsunan University,
Osaka, Japan
<nakayama@kansaigaidai.ac.jp>
Anglo-American English (AAE) or Multicultural Englishes (ME)?
I will discuss aspects of Multicultural Englishes
(ME) from a pedagogical perspective, and advocate that native
speakers as well as non-native speakers should learn to interact
effectively with one another. Recognizing that English is used
between native speakers, between native speakers and non-native speakers,
and also between non-native speakers, cultural emphasis should be
placed on the cultures of specified countries or areas in which the
students have a focused interest or for which they have encountered specific
needs. The recognition model can be any valid English, either native
or non-native, while the production target cannot, need not, and should
not be Anglo-American English, but it should be an indigenous and /
or ethnic variety of valid English.
Yukihiro NAKAYAMA, a graduate of K(w)ansei Gakuin University, was formerly a professional associate at the Culture Learning Instututeof the East-West Center, Hawaii, where he conducted research on language for international communication. He is currently an associate professor of sociolinguistics at Setsunan University (Osaka, Japan). Professor NAKAYAMA has published many papers and academic texts on the themes of “English as an international Laguage” and“Intercultural Communication.” He has recently coined the acronym ME (Multicultural Englishes), and this is his main philosophy of the English language for intercultural communication.
---
Yukihiro NAKAYAMA, a graduate of K(w)ansei Gakuin University, was formerly a professional associate at the Culture Learning Instututeof the East-West Center, Hawaii, where he conducted research on language for international communication. He is currently an associate professor of sociolinguistics at Setsunan University (Osaka, Japan). Professor NAKAYAMA has published many papers and academic texts on the themes of “English as an international Laguage” and“Intercultural Communication.” He has recently coined the acronym ME (Multicultural Englishes), and this is his main philosophy of the English language for intercultural communication.