Two Papers for SEALS 14, Bangkok 2004

Donegan
The Phonological Adaptation of French Loan Words in Khmer

Stampe
Was Proto-Austroasiatic like Munda or like Mon-Khmer?

Writing Direction Influences Spatial Cognition

   The world's languages make use of different writing system orientations, running from left to right, from right to left, or from top to bottom. Interacting with writing systems is an important component of how literate humans gain and convey information, and as such the spatial routines we engage in while reading and writing may well have an impact on the spatial organization of other cognitive functions, like memory, visual attention, expectations about the orientations of processes, and so on.
   Three experiments tested for effects of writing system orientation on spatial cognition, using literate speakers of English, Mainland Chinese, and Taiwanese. The first experiment addressed memory for information in different parts of the visual field; the second, the differences in visual attention; and the third, the arrangement of sequential events in space. The results suggest that the orientation of a writing system is engrained in speakers' perceptual and motor routines to the point that it surfaces when they perform these other spatial tasks. More generally, the findings reported here support the idea that idiosyncratic characteristics of particular languages can influence general cognition.

How old are Indo-European Languages?
Can biological methods help solve linguistic problems?

   Languages like genes, provide vital clues about human history. The origin of the Indo-European language family is "the most intensively studied, yet still most recalcitrant, problem of historical linguistics". Numerous genetic studies of Indo-European origins have also produced inconclusive results.
  In this talk I will discuss work my students and I have conducted analysing lexical data using computational methods derived from evolutionary biology. We have recently tested two theories of Indo-European origin - the 'Kurgan expansion' and the 'Anatolian farming' hypotheses. The former centres on possible archaeological evidence for an expansion into Europ and the near-East by Kurgan horsemen beginning in the sixth millennium BP. The latter claims that Indo-European languages expanded with the spread of agriculture from Anatolia around 8,000 to 9,500 BP. In striking agreement with the Anatolian hypothesis, our analysis of a matrix of 87 languages produced an estimated age range for the initial Indo-European divergence of between 7,800 BP and 9,800 BP. Our results were robust to changes in coding procedures, calibration points, rooting of the trees and priors in the Bayesian analysis.
   I will conclude the talk by discussing the critical responses our work has provoked from some linguists.

Reference: Gray, R.D. and Atkinson, Q. (2003). Language-tree divergence times support the Anatolian theory of Indo-European origins. Nature, 426, 435-439.

   In spite of long history of research on possible genetic relationship between Korean and Japanese, the issue remains controversial, with problematic sound correspondences and very few grammatical and lexical parallels that could support the genetic relationship. Japanese (but not Japonic) was influenced heavily by Old Korean or a language closely related to Old Korean (Paekche ?) during the Kofun and Asuka periods. That influence manifests itself most of all in Western Old Japanese, much less so in Eastern Old Japanese, and does not show up in Ryukyuan. Modern Korean was influenced by Japanese in modern times, too, albeit to a considerable less extent.
   I will demonstrate that the majority of accepted today genetic comparisons between Japanese and Korean can be treated mostly as loans from Korean into Central Japanese or chance resemblances upon the close inspection, due to insurmountable problems plaguing these comparisons from the view point of either philology, or regularity of correspondences, or semantic or functional problems, or a combination of several or all of these. Present-day similarities between Korean and Japanese are the product of convergence that took place approximately in the last 16 hundred years, and they are not residues remaining from the several thousand years of divergence from some common source.

Gomplementary Coals – Historical Linguistics and Acoustic Phonetics

Dr. Kenneth Rehg

<rehg@pop-server.hawaii.edu>

Department of Linguistics
University of Hawaii Manoa

   The phonology of the Hawaiian dialect spoken on Ni`ihau differs from that of Standard Hawaiian in several ways. One phenomenon that has  been touched upon without having been investigated in depth is the  alternation of [t] and [k] for phonemic /t/. This alternation is present in Ni`ihauan Hawaiian but not in Standard Hawaiian. In this talk, I will present data that I have collected from a native speaker of Ni`ihauan Hawaiian, and will introduce a few rules which account for them. I will argue that the alternation is not a settled matter yet. Although clear patterns can be found, exceptions are frequent.

Evolutionary game theory and the typology of case marking

 Where do 'constructional meanings' come from?

   One justification for positing constructions as meaning-bearing morphemes, as in Adele Goldberg's book on constructions, is to explain how certain constructions (in an atheoretical sense) are standardly interpreted.  I find Goldberg's proposals for English constructions unsatisfactory, and in this talk I propose to look closely at a couple of those constructions, and to try to articulate and justify my dissatisfaction. 
   I will suggest that one source of difficulty for proposals like Goldberg's is that they underestimate the role of abductive inferencing in interpreting utterances.

Dr. Blaine Erickson

Kumamoto Gakuen University

   The English spoken in the Hawaiian Islands has a number of features that distinguish it from other varieties. In this talk, I will describe how it differs phonologically from Standard North American English, with emphasis on the phonological processes active in Hawai'i.

Diana Stojanovic et al.
 <stojanov@hawaii.edu>
Department of Linguistics
University of Hawaii Manoa

Spring 2004 Web Design Workshop

   This workshop will focus on basic web page design. First part of the Workshop 1 (Feb 17) will consist of a presentation by Kevin Roddy, followed by the "hands on" part during which participants will be building their webpage. Assistance during this period will be provided by Kevin, Ben, Sachie, and Diana. Workshop 2 will cover some topics that can help enhance the look of the webpage. Topics suggestions given at the end of Workshop 1 will be incorporated in the content of Workshop 2 (Feb 24). Please bring all the material you would like to include on your web page in electronic form. This may include a picture, list of publications, your resume, etc.

Systemic Typology and Crosslinguistic Regularities

   The aim of linking phonological parameters of crosslinguistic variation with morphological and syntactic parameters is the demanding program of systemic or holistic typology, or, according to von der Gabelentz (1901), of "typology as such".
    In this talk I will present a set of statistically significant crosslinguistic correlations found in a sample of 34 languages (18 Indoeuropean, 16 non-Indoeuropean) between the four variables number of phonemes per syllable, number of syllables per word, number of syllables per clause, and number of words per clause. One of these correlations: The more syllables per clause, the fewer phonemes per syllable. The whole set of correlations found seems to reflect time related constraints. Additional results: languages with simple syllables showed a tendency to OV order, syllable-timed rhythm, and agglutinative morphology, while languages with more complex syllables tended to VO order, stress-timed rhythm, and fusional morphology. Constraints of our cognitive apparatus involved in speech perception and production are discussed as a possible explanation for constraints of language variation.

Tokyo University of Foreign Studies

“Drift” from Ergative- to Accusative-pattern Clitic Pronoun Systems: A Case in Austronesian Languages

   It is known that a change from an ergative clitic pronoun system to an accusative system took place in many Austronesian languages, including Oceanic languages (Lynch, Ross and Crowley 2002, Kikusawa 2002). Internal and external evidence suggests that this was the result of independent parallel innovations, rather than a single change that took place in their commonly shared parent language (Kikusawa 2003). In this paper, I will illustrate the basic mechanisms that operated in this “drift.” I will show that a change in clitic pronoun positions resulted in the proliferation of accusative systems found today, changing the case-marking system in languages from a morphologically marked one to those that are case-marked by word order.

University of Hawaii Manoa

Reduplication as Affixation in Paiwan

   In this talk I will be using Optimality Theory (OT) (Prince and Smolensky 1993) to analyze reduplication in the Formosan language, Paiwan.  I will be making the argument that Ca reduplication is similar to prefixes in the grammar since it can be made to follow the same alignment constraints as prefixes.  I will also be showing that Root reduplication is similar to suffixes for the same reason.  This would be support for Marantz’s (1982) claim that reduplication is really just affixation.
   For those uninitiated to OT, I will begin the talk with a brief tutorial and then go step by step through selected portions of my analysis.  The study which I will be presenting is unusual in that it is an attempt to create a constraint ranking for all reduplication and affixation in the language, as opposed to small constraint rankings for one or two phenomena in various languages (cf. McCarthy and Prince 1995, Spaelti 1999).  This is theoretically important since OT claims that there is only one grammar in a language, ranked in such a way to account for all phonological phenomena.  Since I rank constraints to account for all reduplication and affixation in the language, I will not be going through the entire analysis.  However, points about extraprosodic word final codas, fixed segmentism and templates will be addressed.  It will be shown that extraprosodic word final codas are hard to analyze within OT.  In addition, recent attempts to use the "emergence of an unmarked vowel" hypothesis to explain the fixed vowel in Ca reduplication are inadequate (Alderete et al. 1999).  Finally, even with recent trends in OT to eliminate templates (McCarthy 1997, Gafos 1998, Spaelti 1999), this analysis requires the use of a template for Root reduplication.

 
Tomoko Kozasa
<kozasa@hawaii.edu>

Department of Linguistics

University of Hawaii Manoa

   There are two dimensions in the prosodic organization of speech. One is the quantitative or temporal organization, and the other is the qualitative organization, which involves the accentuation/stress system of the language. The categories of quantitative dimension of prosody at the prosodic-word level used to classify languages are mora-, syllable-, and stress-/foot- timed. Isochronous distribution of these units in a language has been challenged for several decades; however, the temporal dimension of speech prosody can be measured in phonetic terms as duration. The categories of qualitative dimension of prosody at the prosodic-word level used to classify languages are pitch-accent, tone, and stress. They are captured as the movement of pitch, or the movement of fundamental frequency (F0) in phonetics. Temporal and accentual dimensions of prosody are bound together in a complex way; however, they can be analyzed as two distinct phonetic properties: duration and F0. In order to fully understand the prosodic organization of a language, we must investigate how these two phonetic signals interact with each other in natural speech.
   This talk examines the functions of durational cues and pitch cues in Japanese long vowels. Two production experiments were conducted. One involved both duration and pitch. The other involved only duration. The results from these production experiments show that these two phonetic signals influence each other when native speakers of the Tokyo dialect of Japanese produce phonologically long vowels.

Department of ForeignLanguage
FukuokaUniversity of Education

   The purpose of this study is to compare prototypicality judgments of nouns that go with Japanese classifier hon by Chinese learners and Japanese L1 speakers. The data were collected by forced-choice preference tests used by Kellerman (1986) and Kao (1993). The results obtained in a pilot study guided the selection of the category members used in the preference test. Based on the obtained prototypicality ranking, 10 items were selected: 5 concrete members and 5 less representative but cognitively motivated extensions. The subjects consist of 70 Chinese learners of Japanese and 86 Japanese L1 speakers.  In the experiment, the 10 category members (i.e.,nouns) were arranged in all 45 possible pair combinations. The subjects judged which of the paired nouns was the better example for the use of the classifier hon. The preliminary analyses resulted in several findings. Both L1 & L2 subjects considered concrete objects more typical examples than abstract items. 
   Both groups also judged enpitsu 'pencil' the most prototypical case of the classifier hon. The L1 subjects' prototypicality judgment showed a greater range than that of L2 subjects. This suggests that the L2 speakers' semantic categories are less differentiated with all items clustering together while the L1 speakers' judgments are more distinct and widely spread out.