"'Girrrl, my car needs warshed!' Regional dialect accommodation by African American English speakers in the Lower Susquehanna Valley"

Friday, October 17 at 1pm
Department Conference Room

Abstract:

When members of minority groups migrate to majority communities, their rates of assimilation (or non-assimilation) to the majority culture are dependent on several factors including, but not limited to, the following: 1) the degree of physical, social, and economic isolation experienced by the migrants in their new location, 2) the history of the migration and ways in which the newcomers are received by the members of the established community, 3) the construction of a new community identity, and 4) the strength of the connection the migrants maintain to their former community.

This study examines the socio-historical acquisition and non-acquisition of the regional dialect by African Americans who are at least second generation residents (i.e., natives) of Pennsylvania's Lower Susquehanna Valley (the area that includes Harrisburg, York, and Lancaster) and investigates the reasons contributing to differences found among these speakers in terms of the degree to which they have acquired the local variety. The linguistic factors that are considered are region-specific elements of lexicon, syntax, and phonology; social and historical factors involve the migrant African Americans' relationships to the European American community including physical location (rural vs. urban, integrated vs. segregated), socio-economic status, rates and types of contact among speakers, and the connections maintained by the relocated members to their home communities.

Findings suggest that while rates of dialect accommodation are somewhat location specific (rural vs. urban), they are also influenced by the ways in which members of each community identify (or resist identifying) both locally and with larger, nearby African American communities. The results also challenge long held assumptions regarding the supra-regionality of African American English and the ways in which regional varieties have influenced the development of
AAE.

"On the Semantics of Genitive Objects"

Friday, October 10 at 1:30pm
Department Conference Room

Abstract:

In this talk, I will investigate the semantics of Intensional Genitive Case in Russian, a phenomenon whereby certain intensional verbs may take genitive objects, as well as accusative ones, as is illustrated in (1):

(1) On ždal čuda / Dimu.
he waited miracle.GEN Dima.ACC
He was waiting for a miracle / for Dima.

Two puzzles arise in connection with the distribution of Intensional Genitive: first, it is licensed only by strong intensional verbs in Farkas' (1985) terminology (e.g. ždat' (wait for), zasluživat' (deserve), trebovat' (demand)) and not by weak intensional verbs (e.g. predstavljat' (sebe) (imagine), predvidet' (foresee), izobražat' (draw, depict)). The second question concerns the choice of Case for objects of strong intensional verbs. As has been noted in the literature (Neidle 1988, Bailyn 2004, Kagan 2005), the choice of Case is dependent on a number of semantic properties. For instance, the genitive tends to be assigned to non-specific, indefinite, narrow scope NPs. At the same time, none of these properties is sufficient to account for the alternation.

I will propose a semantico-pragmatic analysis of Intensional Genitive that is based on the notion of existential commitment, i.e. existential entailment and/or presupposition. It will be argued that Intensional Genitive can only be assigned in the absence of commitment to existence in the reference world, as well as in the set of worlds that is introduced by the intensional predicate (and forms the embedded context set). I will also discuss the relation between existential commitment and individuation, a property that has been argued to affect Case-assignment to objects in a wide range of languages (e.g. Hopper and Thompson 1980, Grimm 2005).

"The role of markedness in generalizing over lexical exceptions"

Friday, October 10 at 4pm
Silver Center Room 414

Joint work with Lena Fainleib (Tel Aviv University)

Lexical exceptions have been repeatedly shown to influence speakers’ treatment of novel items (Bybee & Moder 1983 and many others since), which was taken to mean that lexical exceptions have an impact on the grammar. With the advent of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004), lexical exceptions have been modeled using markedness constraints (Zuraw 2000, Albright & Hayes 2003, Hayes & Londe 2006, Pater 2006, Becker 2008, among others). These OT accounts share the prediction that speakers will generalize over the output properties of lexical exceptions, since by definition, markedness constraints only assess output forms. I claim that this prediction is correct, and show that Hebrew speakers prefer output-based generalizations to input-based generalizations even in the absence of evidence for it in the source language.

In Hebrew, masculine nouns regularly take the suffix [-im]. Of the irregular nouns that take [-ot], most have [o] in their stem, i.e. the affix agrees with the stem vowel. Since the stem [o] stays unchanged, speakers can’t tell whether [-ot] agrees with the singular stem [o] or the plural stem [o].

In an artificial input-output mapping experiment, 60 Hebrew speakers were assigned to learn one of two artificial languages. In both languages, singulars were the same plausibly native novel nouns. In the plural stems, [o] was switched with [i] (1) and [i] with [o] (2) — changes that are absent from real Hebrew. In the “surface” language, the plural suffixes [-im] and [-ot] were selected to agree with the vowel in the plural stem, whereas in the “deep” language, the plural suffixes were selected to agree with the vowel in the singular stem.

Singular_____“Surface” language plural_____“Deep” language plural
(1) apóz____________apiz-ím___________________apiz-ót
_____agóf_____________agif-ím___________________agif-ót
(2) amíg_____________amog-ót_________________amog-ím
_____axís______________axos-ót__________________axos-ím

When asked to generate plurals for novel items, the “surface” language participants were significantly more successful in applying the required vowel changes and affix selection, demonstrating a universal bias toward output-based generalizations.

I show that the results follow nicely from a model in which speakers assign an Optimality Theoretic grammar to the artificial languages, using the same constraints they use in real Hebrew. Models that make input-based generalizations by learning from input-output mappings fail to capture the results. Interestingly, models that rely on raw phonotactics of the language, without deriving these phonotactics from universal principles, fail as well.

"Predicting syntax: Processing dative constructions in American and
Australian varieties of English"

Friday, October 3 at 4pm
Silver Center, 414

Joan Bresnan (Stanford University & Marilyn Ford (Griffith
University, Australia)

Traditionally, linguistic variation within different time scales has
been the province of different disciplines, each with a distinctive
suite of techniques for obtaining and analyzing data. For example,
historical linguistics, sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics study
variation between different speaker groups over historical time and
across space, while psycholinguistics, phonetics, and computational
speech recognition and synthesis study the dynamics of producing and
comprehending language in the individual on a scale of milliseconds.
Yet there is evidence that linguistic variation at these different
time scales is linked, even in the domain of higher-level syntactic
choices. This is a primary finding in the present study of dative
constructions, illustrated by (1a,b), in Australian and American English.

1a) Who gave you that wonderful watch? (V NP NP)
b) Who gave that wonderful watch to you? (V NP PP)

We use a very accurate multilevel probabilistic model of corpus dative
productions (Bresnan, Cueni, Nikitina, and Baayen 2007) to measure the
predictive capacities of both American and Australian subjects in
three pairs of parallel psycholinguistic experiments involving
sentence ratings (Bresnan 2007), decision latencies during reading
(Ford 1983), and sentence completion. The experimental items were all
sampled together with their contexts from the database of corpus
datives, stratified by corpus model probabilities.

We find that the Australian subjects share with the American subjects
a sensitivity to corpus probabilities. But they also show covarying
differences, notably a stronger end-weight effect of the recipient in
the ratings task and the absence of a dependency-length effect of the
theme argument in the decision latency task (cf. Grodner and Gibson
2005). A unifying explanation for these differences is that decision
latencies for `to' are reduced and naturalness ratings are increased
when a PP is consistent with expectation. The Australian group would
then be predicted to have a higher expectation of PP than the US
group. This prediction is borne out by the sentence completion tasks,
which showed that the Australians produced NP PP completions more than
the American subjects in the same contexts. These findings suggest
that subtle variations in the experiences of the dative construction
by historically and spatially divergent speaker groups can create
measurable differences in internalized expectations in individuals
at the millisecond level.

Bresnan, Joan, Anna Cueni, Tatiana Nikitina, and R. Harald
Baayen. 2007. Predicting the dative alternation. In
_Cognitive Foundations of Interpretation_, ed. by G. Boume,
I. Kraemer, and J. Zwarts. Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy
of Science, pp. 69--94.

Bresnan, Joan. 2007. Is syntactic knowledge probabilistic?
Experiments with the English dative alternation. In _Roots:
Linguistics in search of its evidential base. Series: Studies in
Generative Grammar_, ed. by Sam Featherston and Wolfgang
Sternefeld, pp. 75--96. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Ford. Marilyn. 1983. A method for obtaining measures of
local parsing complexity throughout sentences. Journal of
Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 22: 203--218.

"Recursivity of the Phonological Word as the Result of the Interface"

Thursday, October 2 at 12:30pm
726 Broadway, 7th floor
Conference room

In this talk, we will address the notion of recursivity (REC) in the
phonological word (PW). We start with the question of whether such a
constituent is necessitated in phonological theory and explore alternatives
that have recently been proposed against recursion (e.g. Vogel?s (2006, in
press) Composite Group). We will also demonstrate that much of the confusion
surrounding the notion of phonological recursion in the literature arises from
the fact that inconsistent arguments have been put forward in support of
PW-REC, in which the burden of proof primarily falls on showing that an element
is not part of a certain prosodic category rather than on establishing its REC
status. Following Kabak & Revithiadou (in press), we will argue that recursion
is not an inherent property of phonology, but rather the by-product of its
interface with morpho-syntax as reflected in two types of structures: (a)
Inherently recursive morphosyntactic structures such as certain types of
compound constructions and (b) certain types of clitics which adjoin to their
host after moving from their base-generated position (Spyropoulos 1999). The
present proposal will be substantiated with empirical evidence from Greek and
Turkish.

"Independence of Focus from Prosodic Phrasing: Evidence from Japanese"

Focus intonation (FI) in Tokyo Japanese has often been analyzed in terms of prosodic phrasing (Pierrehumbert and Beckman 1988, Nagahara 1994, Truckenbrodt 1995, among others). In this line of analysis, an FI is analyzed
as a large MaP created by manipulating (i.e., inserting and deleting) MaP boundaries.

In this talk, I will present phonetic differences between FI and MaP boundaries, based on an experiment which examines phonetic effects of focus and syntactic boundaries independently. I will propose that MaP and FI are computed according to independent mechanisms: MaP phrasing according to a syntax-prosody mapping principle, and FI according to relative prominence.

The experimental results also indicates that MaP phrasing, which would be assumed to be non-recursive under the Strict Layer Hypothesis, shows recursivity.

K. David Harrison DISCUSSING

When Languages Die: The Extinctions of the World’s Languages and The Erosion of Human Knowledge

Monday, September 22nd, 2008

6:30 p.m.
on the 6th floor
Mid-Manhattan Library
The New York Public Library
40th Street and 5th Avenue
New York, NY 10016
212-340-0873

Speakers of thousands of the world’s languages are now abandoning their ancestral tongues at an unprecedented rate. What exactly is lost when speakers of indigenous languages switch to speaking English, Hindi, Russian, or other global tongues? Why should we care if small languages vanish?

Languages are the repository of thousands of years of people’s science and art – from observations of ecological patterns to creation myths. The disappearance of a language is not only a loss for the community of speakers itself, but for our common human knowledge of mathematics, biology, geography, philosophy, agriculture, and linguistics. In this century, we are facing a massive erosion of the human knowledge base.

David Harrison is assistant professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College.

Elevators access the 6th floor after p.m.
All programs are FREE.

Entrainment in the vocalic system and in speech breathing: Evidence
from conflictive speech.

Entrainment is the phenomenon of synchronization/imitation of action on
the part of separate agents (in the physical sciences:
entrainment=sharing periodicity, either on- or off-phase). For
instance, lexical entrainment means that speakers who routinely talk
about the same topic come to share the same vocabulary for it. This
presentation examines vocalic and speech breathing entrainment in
congressional town hall meetings (THMs) held by Republican Congressman
Jim Kolbe (R-5th district, AZ). Kolbe agreed to be taped as part of a
nonpartisan research project, and allowed the presence of our cameras
at 10 THMs over a period of 14 months during 2000-2001. I focus
specifically on the sociophonetic aspects of entrainment in the context
of face-threatening behavior by constituents. Face-threatening behavior
comes in the form of opinions, challenges or questions that
constituents deliver which threaten Kolbe's control of the structure
of the THM. Gestural, intonational, and vocalic as well as speech
breathing evidence are joined with conversational analysis to address
questions of convergence and divergence in linguistic behavior.

An exploration of the status of linking /r/ and intrusive /r/ via a series of phoneme-monitoring experiments on New Zealand English.

This talk describes three studies designed to follow up on Niedzielski's (1999) work which seems to show that the perceived dialect area of a speaker can affect a listener's perception of their vowels. Experiment 1 replicates this general effect with New Zealand listeners - the labels 'New Zealander' or 'Australian' on an answer sheet affect vowel perception. Experiment 2 demonstrates that this effect is not, in fact, driven by listeners' overt beliefs about the speaker. It can be replicated by placing stuffed toys in the experiment room (kiwis in one condition, or kangaroos and koalas in the other). Experiment 3 explores the degree to which listener attitudes can affect perception - demonstrating that exposing participants to 'good' facts about Australia shifts their perception in a different direction from exposing them to 'bad' facts about Australia. Together, the results demonstrate subtle but robust effects of sociolinguistic 'style-shifting' in perception, and illustrate that these effects are, in fact, relatively automatic.

Abstract:

Final coronal stop deletion (as in, e.g. jus(t) yesterday or ol(d) man) has perhaps received more attention in the literature than any other sociolinguistic variable. This talk takes a new look at the phenomenon by exploring a data-set drawn from early New Zealand English. We have explored a number of potential predictive factors which are not traditionally considered. This talk focuses on three in particular: lexical frequency, phonological neighbourhood density, and the force exerted by the complete distribution of environments in which a given lexical item tends to occur. The resulting picture lends strong support to exemplar-based models of the lexicon. It also casts important new light on factors which previous studies have identified as robust predictors of deletion rates.

Sept. 26 Arhonto Terzi
Oct. 24 Gabriela Alboiu
Oct. 29 Ivona Kucerova, (Wed., 5:30pm)
Nov. 14 Svitlana Antonyuk-Yudina

Norma Mendoza-Denton, University of Arizona: Sept. 19
Michael Becker, Reed College: Oct. 10
Joan Bresnan, Stanford University: Oct. 3
Lisa Matthewson, University of British Columbia: Oct. 24
Norbert Hornstein, University of Maryland: Oct. 31
Janet Pierrehumbert, Northwestern University: Dec. 5