We would like to invite all those interested in child language acquisition to visit the Language Acquisition Lab on May 1st from noon-1pm. During that time the primary experimental procedure that is available in the lab will be displayed - the intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm (Hirsch-Pasek & Golinkoff, 1996). In this experimental paradigm, a child is presented with two visual stimuli on a split-screen television while at the same time the child is presented with a single auditory stimulus. The child prefers matching stimuli in the two modes, and thus if the child comprehends the auditory stimulus the child will watch the side of the screen on which the matching visual stimulus is presented. The child's gaze is recorded and coded along several parameters, e.g., head-turn direction, fixation time, etc.  This is a a test of comprehensive ability that overcomes a major impediment of other methods, i.e., it has minimal processing weight.  We will also display some of the software and hardware that are available for students/researchers in language acquisition. There are still several things in the lab that remain unfinished (such as the installation of curtains), but the experimental equipment are ready to showcase, and we would very much enjoy sharing these new resources with everyone.

04/10/03

(THU)

PLACE: MOORE 119

Myth and Memory, and why only SOME dragons breathe fire

Our memories are limited, and when non-literate societies encode important information linguistically to transmit it to future generations, they end up treating it according to many of the same cognitive principles by which our brains deal with language itself.  The results are what we call "myths" - not (originally) silly fictions but pipelines for crucial information. This talk describes the five major linguistic principles that affect the formation of myth and applies them (by way of example) to understanding why only SOME dragons (especially Germanic ones) have fiery breath.

Yurok is a highly endangered language of northwest California, spoken from the mouth of the Klamath River south to Trinidad, and inland along the Klamath to its confluence with the Trinity River. Yurok has a series of glottalized sonorants which contrast with plain non-glottalized sonorants. Glottalized sonorants have interesting phonological properties which distinguish them from other segment types in Yurok, including a restriction to post-vocalic environments, and fission under syllabification. In this paper I analyse sound patterns involving Yurok glottalized sonorants, and discuss their implications for phonological theory.

There is virtually universal agreement that most sound changes are phonetically motivated.  Almost all scholars who have expressed a view on the matter, however, extrapolate from these tractable cases to a claim that true sound change (as opposed to e.g. analogical levelling) must be phonetically motivated.  This is a simplifying assumption, and one which has an undeniable heuristic value.  However, the issue that it raises is an empirical one, and so should be decided by close examination of a wide range of attested historical changes. The focus of the talk will be on three consonant changes in Austronesian languages which at the very least are very difficult to reconcile with the widely-shared assumption that sound change must be phonetically motivated.

People and Machines in Comparative Linguistics

It's exciting to trace the history of language families beyond where history itself can take us. But getting the evidence together takes an awfully long time.

We're doing all the boring stuff by computer. With funds from the National Science Foundation and programming by a professional software house, we've made a tool called WordCorr that is based on some simple observations: Linguists are good at recognizing possible cognates, segment matchings, and relevant environments. Linguists are not good at tabulating everything and finding it again. Computers are good at the very things that drive linguists nuts.

So we've designed WordCorr as a partnership between you, the linguist, and the machine. You do what you're good at, and the computer organizes what you've observed in ways you can come back to. It doesn't lose data. It works so fast that you spend most of your time thinking, not chasing down file slips. It also lets you view your data under more than one hypothesis.

Today's presentation walks you through the main ideas, shown via this week's test version of WordCorr. It's an almost-ready standalone version you can download yourself from <http://WordCorr.SourceForge.net>. We will have the fully working version ready for field use by the end of this semester. You are invited to a WordCorr workshop the week of May 19 to 23, 10 to 12 AM each day in the Linguistics conference room, bring your own laptop.

Next fall we shift gears to do the Internet version. That will make it possible for research teams whose members are located anywhere in the world where there is an Internet connection to work collegially on data bases of any size.

This talk will introduce Embodied Construction Grammar (ECG), a recent theory of what people know about language (linguistic structure) and how they use it (linguistic processing). ECG also comes with an explicit formalism that permits the encoding of a wide range of types of morpho-syntactic and semantic knowledge. It differs from other formal theories of language in that it (1) is construction-based, meaning that it allows linguistic units other than words (e.g. phrasal patterns) to have meaning; (2) it places an equal emphasis on the form and the meaning of linguistic structures; (3) it is based on results from neuroscience, psychology, and psycholinguistics; and (4) it is inextricably embedded in a larger theory of language processing.

In the talk, I will present a brief overview of ECG and then introduce its formalism through example analyses of some lexical and phrasalconstructions in English.  <Link to the original paper>

Phonological Coding In Chinese Characters:
Evidence from Japanese Errors and Alternations

Although the erroneous belief that Chinese characters somehow directly represent ideas persists, a growing body of literature shows they represent sounds. Spelling errors by native Japanese writers are best understood if analyzed phonologically. Similarly, certain words may be written in more than one way; alternative spellings always use characters with identical pronunciations. Data from both sources are presented and analyzed.

Verbs and argument structures in aphasic comprehension

This study investigates three factors that have been argued to define "canonical form" in sentence comprehension: syntactic structure, semantic role, and frequency of usage. We first examine the claim that sentences containing unaccusative verbs present difficulties analogous to those of passive sentences. Using a plausibility judgment task, we show that a mixed group of aphasics performed significantly better on unaccusatives than on passives. We then turn to the observation that passives are generally harder than actives for aphasics. We show that this effect is modulated by lexical bias, i.e. the likelihood that a verb appears in a given syntactic structure: Passives of passive-bias verbs are significantly easier than passives of active-bias verbs. More generally, sentences whose structure matches the lexical bias of the main verb are significantly easier than sentences in which structure and lexical bias do not match. These findings suggest that "canonical form" reflects frequency and lexical biases.

Focusing on the on-going change in meaning of tongzhi from 'comrades' to 'sexual minorities' in Hong Kong, this talk will examine the role of ideology in semantic change.  Based on participant-observation and face-to-face interviews, it will investigate the extent to which this semantic change has spread from gay rights activists to other lesbians and gay men, and how these two groups of speakers use tongzhi and other labels that refer to sexual minorities in discourse.  I will argue that: (1) what underlies a label such as tongzhi is not so much a definition but rather a set of ideologies about the concept that the label denotes; (2) semantic change often occurs when speakers exploit and rework old ideologies associated with a given label and use the label in novel ways to achieve expressive and social goals; and (3) the extent to which semantic change spreads depends on whether these reworked ideologies are compatible with other speakers' ideologies about the same concept.

In this talk, I will examine some of the difficulties faced by the linguistic fieldworker who is attempting to observe and record 'natural' conversations, and I will reconsider the long-held sociolinguistic notion of the observer's paradox by recasting it within Bell 1984's framework of audience design theory. Using data gathered during my own fieldwork, I will once again call into question the idea of a single, unmarked, unperformed vernacular, the access to which is supposedly blocked by the observer's paradox. Finally, I will demonstrate that 'performed' or 'self-conscious' speech produced for the fieldworker can be useful in systematic linguistic analysis, and in gaining insights into local language ideologies and linguistic norms.

This paper will examine the linguistic situation in two aboriginal communities in contemporary Taiwan, where elderly people typically speak one or more indigenous languages plus Japanese, while younger speakers tend to be monolingual in Mandarin.  After outlining the relevant political and social history, I will describe some of the observed effects of contact between these languages and note their connection with that history.  I will also look at the state of language attrition, addressing in particular the situation of the roughly simultaneous death of the former colonial language (Japanese) and the indigenous languages.

This paper explores how children in a bilingual Northern Thai community are socialized through participation in routine activities at home and school into the use of their community vernacular, Kam Muang, and the national language, Standard Thai. In this community, speakers' practices of code-mixing and code-switching lead to an increasing use of Standard Thai in a number of domains. Muang community members associate this shift in language use with younger speakers and urban contexts in particular. This talk examines how local socialization practices and the cultural ideologies underlying them are linked to processes of language convergence and language shift in this community.