| Date |
Presenter |
Title & Abstract |
| Tue,
Sep
14 |
Dr. Tim Hoffman Takasaki University, Musashino Academy of Music, Indo-Japanese Music Exchange Association |
Musico-linguistics
in India, Japan and beyond - cross-cultural application of
theoretical constructs and classification systems in language and
music Language utilizes phonemes (sound) and graphemes (script) for reativity and communication, and each language is distinguished by its unique soundscape and corresponding written forms. Music, likewise, uses pitch and duration of tones (sound) and notational signs and conventions (script) to produce and interpret culturally unique modes of expression. Practical and theoretical studies in 'sound culture' from an audio-visual/cross-cultural/inter-disciplinary posture reveal features of a language operating in the music of its practitioners. These include parallels in the ordering of phonemes and of musical tones, and classification of instruments in accordance with linguistic conventions. Furthermore, a wholistic view of sound culture identifies similar principles underlying presumably disparate musical and linguistic cultures, and suggests interesting possibilities for collaboration in research and creative activity, some of which will be demonstrated in brief recorded and performed examples. |
| Tue, Sep 28 |
Department of Linguistics |
On musical genre: acquisition, dialect, and linguistic parallelism In this presentation I will explore the
parallels between musical genre and language. More specifically, I will
talk about the idea of "acquiring" a musical genre (or form), in
comparison to acquiring a human language. While many people have studied
the acquisition of music and language by children, as well as L2 language
acquisition, studies on the acquisition of specific musical genre have
been severely neglected. I will address this oversight by giving examples
of my own experience of acquiring a genre of music created by a British
composer named Neil Halstead on his 1994 work "Pygmalion". I
will play recordings of compositions by Halstead to illustrate the
features of his genre, and then I will play some recordings of my own
compositions which illustrate my gradual acquisition of Halstead's genre
stage-by-stage. Importantly, I will show how similar processes are
involved in acquiring musical genre as are in acquiring human language,
and raise questions about the implications of this parallelism. |
| Tue, Oct 05 |
Department of Linguistics |
Spatial imagery in language understanding Embodied approaches to language view meaning as critically involving real-world perceptual and motor knowledge accrued through world experience (Lakoff 1987). A recent development of embodied views proposes that understanding language entails internally imagining, or simulating, the content of utterances, using brain mechanisms responsible for performing the described actions or perceiving the described percepts. Experimental evidence supports this notion (Zwaan et al. 2002, Richardson et al. 2003). This paper builds on existing results, investigating several linguistic questions. First, while it's known that concrete, literal language results in spatial imagery, is the same true for abstract or metaphorical language? Second, which sentential constituents yield spatial imagery? Subjects? Verbs?
Lakoff, G. 1987. Women, fire, and dangerous things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Richardson, D. C., Spivey, M. J., McRae, K., & Barsalou, L. W. 2003. Spatial representations activated during real-time comprehension of verbs. Cognitive Science.
Zwaan, R.A., Stanfield, R.A., Yaxley, R.H. (2002). Do language comprehenders routinely represent the shapes of objects? Psychological Science, 13, 168-171.
|
| Tue, Oct 12 |
Department of Linguistics |
Consequential 'o-clauses in Tongan and licensing of a null anaphor Tongan shows an ergative (ERG) pattern with respect to certain syntactic operation: e.g., only absolutive (ABS) can undergo relativization by the gap strategy and Equi-deletion under pea-coordination. Otsuka 2002, 2003 proposes that syntactic ergativity should be understood as a consequence of morphological ergativity, arguing that the relevant syntactic operations require that the gap be licensed by Case feature matching. Equi-deletion under 'o-coordination also shows an ERG pattern in that ERG is distinguished from ABS: the antecedent must be ABS. At first glance, this condition cannot be explained in terms of Case matching. I argue, however, that this condition can also be viewed as a by-product of morphological ergativity. Specifically, I propose that the empty category in 'o-clauses is a null anaphor (proSE) and that the binding condition for proSE is Case-sensitive. In this talk, we first put forward the claim that syntactic ergativity results from morphological ergativity by examining relativization and pea-coordination in Tongan. Then, we compare 'o-constructions with pea-constructions to conclude a) that unlike pea, 'o should be regarded as a complementizer rather than a conjunction; and b) that the gap in 'o-clauses is not an outcome of deletion, but a null anaphor. We will then discuss a Minimalist approach to binding proposed by Reuland (2001) and see how it accounts for the distribution and behavior of proSE in Tongan. The current analysis not only explains how the null argument in 'o-clauses is interpreted as coreferential with the ABS-marked NP of the matrix clause, but also correctly predicts that coreference between proSE and the ERG-marked NP is impossible. Furthermore, it also accounts for the well-known fact that long distance (SE) anaphors in accusative languages are subject-oriented. |
| Tue, Oct 19 | 
Kevin M. Roddy
Department of Linguistics
|
Best Practices for the Recording, Processing, and Archiving of Endangered Languages Data Traditional scholarly publishing has been profoundly affected by technology. Print publishing is currently augmented, and will perhaps one day be replaced, by publishing research findings and data directly to the World Wide Web. The bibliographic science of description, access, and preservation is no longer the exclusive purview of librarians and curators - technology has empowered us to select our own metadata standards, and classify our data using to eXtensible Markup Language (XML), a rapidly emerging markup language that is changing how data is described and retrieved. Dozens of propriety software programs (WordPerfect, MS-Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Windows Media Player, to name a few) running on multiple operating systems (Linux, Macintosh, Windows, Lindows, HyperOS and others) producing a staggering number of different text, audio and visual files (.pdf, .doc, .ppt, .wpd, .xls, .gif, .tiff, .jpg, .wav, .aiff, .wma and many others) threaten to jeopardize the integrity and accessibility of new and archived data for present and future researchers. Moreover, steady computer hardware and software obsolescence will forever imprison archival data and render it useless (e.g., wire and wax recording media, 5-1/4 floppy disks, Betamax are some exampes) unless data are regularly migrated to currently readable formats, an expensive and time-consuming process. Field linguists working with endangered languages can now 1) record data in any format they wish; 2) assign metadata and XML tags to it so can be searched in local databases or on the Web, and 3) make all research findings, including raw and processed data, available to anyone with a Web browser, bypassing traditional scholarly publishing channels. To ensure that all of us can read the linguistic data we collect now and in the future, standard practices must be developed and followed. Electronic Metastructure for Endangered Languages Data (EMELD -http://www.emeld.org), a five-year project funded by the National Science Foundation, is a group of concerned field linguists, archivists, language engineers and librarians who are working to develop 'best practices' for the creation, description, storage, and dissemination of text, audio, and visual linguistic data to ensure that they may be easily accessed now and in the future. I attended EMELD’s “Workshop of Linguistic Databases and Best Practice” at Wayne State University in Detroit this past summer. My talk will review EMELD's goals and objectives, and suggest best practices that linguists can employ in the creation, description, processing and archiving of field data. I will use examples from Satawalese, a Trukic language spoken on Satawal Island, Yap State, Federated States of Micronesia, that I am currently documenting for my Master's thesis. See more |
| Tue, Oct 26 |
Jennie Tran
Department of Linguistics
Kyung Sook Shin
Department of Linguistics
|
## Two Papers for BUCLD 29, Boston, 2004 ## Verb position and verb form in English-speaking children’s L2 acquisition of German Jennie Tran One issue guiding research on child L2 acquisition concerns the extent to which it patterns like child L1 acquisition. Comparing the two, one hypothesis maintains fundamental similarity (e.g. (A)), another proposes nontrivial distinctions (e.g. (B)): Haznedar, B. & B,D. Schwartz. 1997. Are there Optional Infinitives in child L2 acquisition? In E. Hughes, M. Hughes & A. Greenhill, eds., Proceedings of the 21st Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Vol. 1. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. pp. 257-68. Poeppel D. & K. Wexler. 1993. The Full Competence Hypothesis of clause structure in early German. Language 69: 1-33. Prévost, P. 1997. Truncation and root infinitives in second language acquisition of French. In Prévost, P. & L. White. 2000. Missing Surface Inflection or Impairment in second language acquisition? Second Language Research 16: 103-33. Rizzi, L. 1993/94. Some notes on linguistic theory and language development: The case of root infinitives. Language Acquisition 3: 371-393. Vainikka, A. & M. Young-Scholten. 1994. Direct access to X’-theory: Evidence from Korean and Turkish adults learning German. In T. Hoekstra & B.D. Schwartz, eds., Language Acquisition Studies in Generative Grammar. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. pp. 265-316. The Development of Tense and Aspect in Child Korean Kyung Sook Shin This study investigates how Korean children acquire tense and aspect by addressing two research questions: (1) whether Korean children initially use tense morphology to encode grammatical aspect rather than tense (Grammatical Aspect Hypothesis, Wagner 2001) or inherent lexical aspect (the Aspect Hypothesis, Shirai & Andersen 1995), and (2) why such patterns may occur in child Korean. Two hypotheses are considered: (a) the Distributional Bias Hypothesis, which attributes the aspect before tense phenomenon to input (Li 1989), and (b) the Cognitive Limitation Hypothesis, which attributes the phenomenon to underdevelopment of temporal concepts (Bronckart & Sinclair 1973). The Korean tense marker –ess refers to a past eventuality or a perfective eventuality, depending on the inherent lexical aspect of the predicate. When used with non-punctual atelic verbs (such as adjectival verbs, states and durative activities), it refers to past events. When used with punctual or telic verbs (such as punctual activities, accomplishments and achievements), it indicates perfective aspect as well as past tense. Korean presents an interesting case to test whether children initially develop tense morphology to encode aspect or tense. My study of the early use of -ess came from the naturalistic speech of two Korean children (1;7-2;5) and the speech directed to them from their mothers. All predicates on which –ess occurred were identified and then coded for the inherent lexical aspect of the predicate as well as the grammatical aspect (if any). The results show that the children initially encoded –ess on punctual activity verbs as well as telic verbs, contrary to the Aspect Hypothesis. That is, telicity was not a factor in determining whether –ess occurred or not. Importantly, the children initially used the tense marker –ess to refer to perfective aspect rather than past tense, which supports the Grammatical Aspect Hypothesis since grammatical aspect is being encoded by a tense marker. It was further found that this pattern of usage was not attested in the child-directed speech: the mothers tended to use the tense marker primarily with durative activity verbs to encode past tense (and not perfective aspect). This contradicts the Distributional Bias Hypothesis. Finally, it was found that the children started to use time adverbs when they began to use the tense marker to refer to past events, which supports the Cognitive Limitation Hypothesis. This provides evidence supporting that the children acquire aspect earlier than past tense and develop the temporal concepts in the following steps: pre-temporal stage > aspect stage > past tense stage.
References Bronckart, J. P., and H. Sinclair. 1973. Time, tense, and aspect. Cognition 2. 107-30. Li, Ping. 1989. Aspect and tense in child Mandarin. Leiden, Netherlands: University of Leiden dissertation. Shirai, Y and Anserson, R. 1995. The acquisition of tense-aspect morphology: A prototype account. Language 71. 743-762. Wagner, Laura. 2001. Aspectual influences on early tense comprehension. Journal of Child Language 28. 661-681. |
| Tue, Nov 02 | Election Day | |
| Thu, Nov 09 |
Fabiana Piccolo
Department of Linguistics |
Where is the Hawaiian language headed? A phonetic study
The present study compares the realization of Hawaiian vowels and diphthongs by a native speaker of Hawaiian (NS) with that of a non-native, albeit very fluent, Hawaiian language speaker (NNS) whose first language is American English. After showing the major differences and similarities in the vowels of the two speakers, and the important role played by American English in the articulation of the non-native speaker's Hawaiian vowels, I will present acoustic vowel charts of the Hawaiian vowels for both speakers. If these results can be generalized to other native and non-native speakers, they support recent claims by NeSmith (2003) and others that at least two Hawaiian dialects exist: the Ni'ihauan dialect (spoken by NS) and the UH dialect (spoken by NNS). The name for the latter dialect is not optimal; I use this label only because it indicates the form of Hawaiian taught here at UH and at other institutions. The theory about the existence of two dialects is nothing new. Both forms of the Hawaiian language have emerged from different dialects, as I will explain in my talk. The results of my study will uphold the position of the few scholars who have currently recognized the existence of two separate dialects of the Hawaiian language: the Ni'ihauan Hawaiian (which is a pre-existent dialect of Hawaiian, and the only one, to my knowledge, to be spoken by native speakers) and the UH dialect (which derived by the Big Island dialect, but which, to my knowledge, has virtually no native speakers left. Such dialect is spoken primarily by non native speakers and, at least phonetically, has changed due to the pronunciation of such non-native speakers).
|
| Tue, Nov 16 |
Dr. Jie Xu National University of Singapore
|
Two Types of Focus Devices in the Historical Development of Chinese Grammar
Following Culicover and Rochemont (1983, 1990) and Horvath (1986), we assume that the essentially semantic conception of ‘Focus’ can be characterized as a formal syntactic feature [+F], and this feature, once associated with a certain syntactic constituent, may trigger various syntactic operations. Cross-linguistically, there are two types of Focus devices, one is to insert a Focus Mark before the focused constituent (Focus-Marking, Insert-α) as is attested in Malay, and another is to move the focused constituent to a more prominent position (Focus-Fronting, Move- α) as observed in Hungarian. Interestingly, modern Chinese contrasts sharply with Archaic Chinese in the choice between two general Focus devices: Modern Mandarin Chinese is a typical Focus-Marking language with shi (是) as a Focus Mark whereas Archaic Chinese is a Focus-fronting language in which the focused constituents are usually moved to a position between the subject and the main verb. Obviously, the Chinese language has undergone a typological shift with respect to focus devices in its historical development. The questions are simply ‘why’ ‘when’ and ’how’. In this talk, I will review some historical data, and argue that the development of shi itself has played the key role in this typological shift. Originally, shi is a regular pronoun meaning ‘this’ or ‘these’ in Archaic Chinese, which has neither a copular verb nor a Focus Mark. Archaic Chinese has no choice but appeals to the option of Focus-Fronting. As shi later developed to become a copular verb and then a Focus Mark, the Chinese language has shifted to the option of Focus –Marking. Just as our proposal predicts, the emergence of Focus Mark shi coincides exactly with the end of the fronting of focused constituents (around 500 A.D.). |
| Tue, Nov 23 |
John Kupchik
Department of Linguistics
|
On the variation of morpheme order in Mari declension: variable morphotactics or morpheme scrambling?
The ordering of inflectional affixes is largely held to be
universally fixed in the sense that with a particular polyaffixal
construction the morpheme order is unchangeable, or if there is an
alternate order it co-occurs with a different meaning and thus has a
different underlying representation. Exceptions to this rule are so rare
as to be widely considered non-existent, and indeed linguists have often
stated the fixedness of morpheme order as a universal (cf. Perlmutter
1970). |
| Tue, Nov 30 |
Dr. Hoskuldur Thrainsson University of Iceland, Reykjavik |
Writing in Your Own Language Linguists
are familiar with innumerable instances where some outsider, like a
missionary or a linguist or both, has designed a writing system for a
language where no writing tradition existed. In most cases we do not
really know how the original decisions about spelling were made or
what the considerations were C
and they may very well have been unconscious, based on some sort of
linguistic intuition (such as it was) of those who set the standard. For
(Old) Icelandic and (Modern) Faroese, on the other hand, we know quite a
bit about how such decisions were made. In the so-called First
Grammatical Treatise a 12th century Icelandic linguist describes in
some detail how Old Icelandic should be spelled and why. Some 700 years
later there was a considerable discussion among Scandinavian scholars,
including some native Faroese, how Faroese should be spelled, since
virtually nothing had been written in Faroese before that time, or at
least not for some 400 years. In will describe this discussion in my talk
and try to analyze the arguments in linguistic terms. I will show that
some of the arguments were purely historical or etymological, others were
morphophonemic in nature, still others phonetic and a few had to do with
educational policy or even politics rather than linguistics. I will
compare the Faroese discussion to some extent to the arguments offered in
the First Grammatical Treatise and then try to evaluate modern
Faroese spelling (which has remained virtually unchanged for some 150
years) in the light of the original discussion: How wise were the
conscious decisions made in the 19th century about how the Faroese should
write in their own language C
or how can one tell?
|
| Tue, Dec 07 |
Sharon Unsworth Utrecht University |
On the L2 acquisition of an interpretive constraint on form When
an indefinite NP object in Dutch is 'scrambled' from its preverbal base
position (1) to a (traditionally) VP-adjoined position (2), it is
generally associated with a 'specific' interpretation. (1) Het meisje heeft twee keer [een bal] gegooid [specific/non-specific]
the
girl
has two
times a
ball thrown
'The girl threw a(ny) ball twice.'
(2) Het meisje heeft [een bal] twee keer ti gegooid [specific/*non-specific]
'The girl threw
a (certain) ball twice.' For
the English-speaking non-native acquirer (L2er) of Dutch, acquiring the
interpretive difference between (1)/(2) presents a so-called
‘poverty-of-the-stimulus’ problem. In this talk, I show how this
interpretive constraint on form cannot be derived from the learners’ L1
grammar, the L2 input which they hear or from instruction.
Nevertheless, almost half of the L2ers tested (8/19) demonstrated
knowledge of the interpretive distinction in question. I consider (i) how
the L2 grammar must be constrained in order for this to be possible, and
(ii) why it is that many L2ers do not know this constraint. |
| Tue, Dec 14 |
University of Kitakyushu
|
Licensing and
Representation of Aspect: Interaction between Lexical and Based on the observation of progressive and perfect forms in English, two dialects of Japanese, and Korean, I first argue that aspectual properties of verbs/clauses are computed in the lexicon-syntax interface by combining specifications for boundedness/telicity and eventhhood from two sources: inherent specification for each verb given in the lexicon and specification(s) associated with other constituents in the syntax. The computed aspectual properties project functional projections responsible for aspect. One example comes from grammaticality of progressive and perfect forms of ar-u ‘exist’ ar-i-yor-u and at-too in the Hakata dialect when the subject is an event nominal. Second, there are correlations between auxiliary selection, participial forms, and aspectual interpretation of verb classes. Specifically, so-called “near-future” reading of the progressive form of achievement verbs is available iff the language in question has two distinct auxiliary verbs/participial forms for progressive and perfect. This fact is also derived from the proposed representation of aspect.
|
| Wed, Dec 15 |
Dr. Christer Platzack Lund University <Location: Center for Korean Studies> <Time: noon - 1:15> |
Cross-Germanic Promotion to Subject in Ditransitive Passives |
| Thu, Dec 16 |
Dr. Joan Maling Brandeis University, Linguistics Program Officer at the NSF, <Location: St John R11> <Time: noon - 1:15> |
From Passive to Active: syntactic change in progress in Icelandic
I
will discuss the results of an extensive study of a syntactic change
currently underway in Iceland. This study was conducted with Sigríður Sigurjónsdóttir, University of Iceland, and the
results were reported in Íslenskt mál; the English version,
“The ‘new impersonal’ construction in Icelandic,” appeared in J.
Comparative Germanic Linguistics 5:97-142 (2002). The new construction,
illustrated in (1a), appears to contain a passive auxiliary and a passive
participle which is able to assign accusative case to a postverbal
argument (Note that the expletive in (1a) is not a grammatical subject,
and occurs in declarative clauses only as needed to satisfy the
verb-second constraint). (1) a. Það var beðið mig að vaska upp. Innovative Construction itEXPL was asked-neut.sg. me.ACC to wash up ‘I was asked to do the dishes’ or ‘they asked me to do the dishes’ b. Ég var beðinn að vaska upp. Canonical passive I was asked-masc.sg to wash up
‘I was asked to do the dishes’ In
the fall and winter of 1999-2000, we distributed a questionnaire to 1,731
tenth-graders (age 15-16) in 65 schools throughout Iceland; this number
represents 45% of the 3861 tenth-graders who took the national exams in
the spring of 2000. The questionnaire was also given to 205 adult controls
in various parts of the country. The
study was designed to track the development of this ongoing change and to
test the hypothesis that the innovative construction in fact involves the
reanalysis of a construction with passive morphology as a syntactically
active construction with a null impersonal subject.
Our study documented the widespread acceptance of the innovative
constructive everywhere throughout Iceland with the exception of the
innermost areas of Reykjavík. Adolescents in Inner Reykjavík were only
half as likely to accept the new construction as adolescents in the rest
of the country. I
begin by observing that we cannot always rely on surface morphology to
identify grammatical voice. Verbal morphology can be ambiguous between
passive and active voice, as illustrated by the italicized verb forms in
(2), taken from two Jane Austen novels, published in 1818. (2)
a. “The clock struck ten
while the trunks were carrying down.”
(Jane Austen) b.
“She only came
on foot, to leave more room for the harp, which was bringing in the
carriage.”
Until
the 19th century, a verb phrase could contain only one
auxiliary be; as a result, progressive passives like “were
being carried” were ungrammatical. If we cannot rely on surface
morphological properties, we need to develop syntactic diagnostics to
distinguish between two possible analyses of the new construction.
(3) Two Hypotheses a. [IP e [I Tns,Agr,Pass] [VP V NP]] Passive w/o NP-movement
b. [IP pro [I
Tns,Agr] [VP V NP]]
Active Impersonal The
[e] in (3a) denotes an empty subject position; the pro in (3b)
denotes the phonologically null counterpart to the overt impersonal
pronoun on in French. This
pro is [+human], bears the thematic role assigned by the verb to
its subject argument, and can therefore serve as antecedent for a bound
anaphor. Four syntactic criteria are identified which distinguish between
active and passive voice constructions: (i) occurrence of an agentive
by-phrase; (ii) occurrence of bound anaphors; (iii) occurrence of
subject-oriented participial adjuncts; and (iv) occurrence of
“unaccusative” (nonagentive) verbs.
This
on-going syntactic change in Icelandic parallels the completed development
of the -no/to construction in Polish and the autonomous form in
Irish. Despite its historical
origin as a morphological passive, the innovative -no/to construction
in Polish behaves syntactically like French on-sentences except
that the impersonal pronoun subject is null.
On the other hand, the Ukrainian -no/to construction, which
is cognate with the Polish construction, and which shares the superficial
morphological properties of accusative case and the consequent lack of
agreement, has diametrically opposite behavior for each of these four
syntactic criteria. The
obvious question, then, is this: which of the two polar opposites does the
innovative Icelandic construction most resemble? I discuss the results of
our survey with respect to the four syntactic criteria, and speculate on
why this change is occurring in Icelandic but not in any of the other
Germanic languages.
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