Research on a variety of languages has shown that vowel duration is influenced by phonological vowel length as well as syllable structure (e.g., Maddieson, 1997). Further, the phonological concept of a mora has been shown to relate to phonetic measurements of duration (Cohn, 2003; Hubbard, 1993; Port, Dalby, & O'Dell, 1987). In Levantine Arabic, non-final closed syllables that contain a long vowel have been described as partaking in mora-sharing (Broselow, Chen, & Huffman, 1997; Khattab & Al-Tamimi, 2014). The current investigation examines the effect of vowel length and syllable structure on vowel duration, as well as how this interacts with durational effects of prosodic focus. Disyllabic words with initial, stressed syllables that were either open or closed and contained either a long or a short vowel wereexamined when non-focused and in contrastive focus. Contrastive focus was associated with longer words and syllables but not vowels. Short vowels were shorter when in a syllable closed by a singleton but not by a geminate consonant, while long vowels were not shortened before coda singletons. An analysis is proposed whereby long vowels followed by an intervocalic consonant cluster are parsed as open syllables, with the first consonant forming a semisyllable (Kiparsky, 2003), while long vowels followed by geminate consonants partake in mora-sharing (Broselow, Huffman, Chen, & Hsieh, 1995). The results also indicate compensatory shortening for short vowels followed by a singleton coda.
{"title":"Syllable weight, vowel length and focus in Lebanese Arabic","authors":"Niamh E. Kelly","doi":"10.16995/glossa.5727","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5727","url":null,"abstract":"Research on a variety of languages has shown that vowel duration is influenced by phonological vowel length as well as syllable structure (e.g., Maddieson, 1997). Further, the phonological concept of a mora has been shown to relate to phonetic measurements of duration (Cohn, 2003; Hubbard, 1993; Port, Dalby, & O'Dell, 1987). In Levantine Arabic, non-final closed syllables that contain a long vowel have been described as partaking in mora-sharing (Broselow, Chen, & Huffman, 1997; Khattab & Al-Tamimi, 2014). The current investigation examines the effect of vowel length and syllable structure on vowel duration, as well as how this interacts with durational effects of prosodic focus. Disyllabic words with initial, stressed syllables that were either open or closed and contained either a long or a short vowel wereexamined when non-focused and in contrastive focus. Contrastive focus was associated with longer words and syllables but not vowels. Short vowels were shorter when in a syllable closed by a singleton but not by a geminate consonant, while long vowels were not shortened before coda singletons. An analysis is proposed whereby long vowels followed by an intervocalic consonant cluster are parsed as open syllables, with the first consonant forming a semisyllable (Kiparsky, 2003), while long vowels followed by geminate consonants partake in mora-sharing (Broselow, Huffman, Chen, & Hsieh, 1995). The results also indicate compensatory shortening for short vowels followed by a singleton coda.","PeriodicalId":46319,"journal":{"name":"Glossa-A Journal of General Linguistics","volume":"20 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83326576","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
I argue that overt movement cannot always be triggered by a need to create a specifier for the head bearing the Probe, as commonly assumed. In Tagalog, I claim, the best description of the behavior of wh-phrases is that they must become linearly adjacent to C; I show that Tagalog wh-phrases in fact occupy several different structural positions which are consistent with this linear requirement.
{"title":"Immobile wh-phrases in Tagalog","authors":"N. Richards","doi":"10.16995/glossa.5762","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5762","url":null,"abstract":"I argue that overt movement cannot always be triggered by a need to create a specifier for the head bearing the Probe, as commonly assumed. In Tagalog, I claim, the best description of the behavior of wh-phrases is that they must become linearly adjacent to C; I show that Tagalog wh-phrases in fact occupy several different structural positions which are consistent with this linear requirement.","PeriodicalId":46319,"journal":{"name":"Glossa-A Journal of General Linguistics","volume":"56 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80429102","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Clefts structures show an important asymmetry in interpretation: subject clefts can provide both corrective or new information foci, while non-subjects (objects, adjuncts) are only corrective. According to Belletti (2015), such an asymmetry arises from the fact that movement deriving subject clefts can target two focus positions, but non-subjects can target only one. In both cases a long-distance dependency is created, triggering locality effects. In this paper, we show that intervention effects causing ungrammaticality in certain configurations give rise to lower-than-expected frequencies in corresponding grammatical configurations. Based on sets of features that play a role in the syntactic computation of locality, we compare the theoretically expected and the actually observed counts of features in a corpus of thirteen syntactically annotated treebanks for three languages (English, French, Italian). We find the quantitative effects predicted by the theory of intervention locality. First, subject clefts, where no intervention is at play, are more frequent than object clefts, where intervention is at play. Secondly, object clefts are less frequent than expected in intervention configuration, while subject clefts are roughly as frequent as expected. Finally, we also find that the differential and direction of difference between expected and observed counts is directly proportional to the number of features that establish the intervention, the strength of the intervention. These results provide a three-fold contribution. First, they extend the empirical evidence in favour of the intervention theory of locality. Second, they provide theory-driven quantitative evidence, thus extending in a novel way the sources of evidence used to adjudicate theories. Finally, the paper provides a blueprint for future theory-driven quantitative investigations.
{"title":"Intervention effects in clefts: a study in quantitative computational syntax","authors":"Giuseppe Samo, Paola Merlo","doi":"10.16995/glossa.5742","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5742","url":null,"abstract":"Clefts structures show an important asymmetry in interpretation: subject clefts can provide both\u0000corrective or new information foci, while non-subjects (objects, adjuncts) are only corrective.\u0000According to Belletti (2015), such an asymmetry arises from the fact that movement deriving\u0000subject clefts can target two focus positions, but non-subjects can target only one. In both\u0000cases a long-distance dependency is created, triggering locality effects. In this paper, we\u0000show that intervention effects causing ungrammaticality in certain configurations give rise to\u0000lower-than-expected frequencies in corresponding grammatical configurations. Based on sets of\u0000features that play a role in the syntactic computation of locality, we compare the theoretically\u0000expected and the actually observed counts of features in a corpus of thirteen syntactically\u0000annotated treebanks for three languages (English, French, Italian). We find the quantitative\u0000effects predicted by the theory of intervention locality. First, subject clefts, where no intervention\u0000is at play, are more frequent than object clefts, where intervention is at play. Secondly, object\u0000clefts are less frequent than expected in intervention configuration, while subject clefts are\u0000roughly as frequent as expected. Finally, we also find that the differential and direction of\u0000difference between expected and observed counts is directly proportional to the number of\u0000features that establish the intervention, the strength of the intervention. These results provide\u0000a three-fold contribution. First, they extend the empirical evidence in favour of the intervention\u0000theory of locality. Second, they provide theory-driven quantitative evidence, thus extending in a\u0000novel way the sources of evidence used to adjudicate theories. Finally, the paper provides a\u0000blueprint for future theory-driven quantitative investigations.","PeriodicalId":46319,"journal":{"name":"Glossa-A Journal of General Linguistics","volume":"128 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88088321","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MaxEnt grammar is a probabilistic version of Harmonic Grammar in which the harmony scores of candidates are mapped onto probabilities. It has become the tool of choice for analyzing phonological phenomena involving probabilistic variation or gradient acceptability, but there is a competing proposal for making Harmonic Grammar probabilistic, Noisy Harmonic Grammar, in which variation is derived by adding random ‘noise’ to constraint weights. In this paper these grammar frameworks, and variants of them, are analyzed by reformulating them all in a format where noise is added to candidate harmonies, and the differences between frameworks lie in the distribution of this noise. This analysis reveals a basic difference between the models: in MaxEnt the relative probabilities of two candidates depend only on the difference in their harmony scores, whereas in Noisy Harmonic Grammar it also depends on the differences in the constraint violations incurred by the two candidates. This difference leads to testable predictions which are evaluated against data on variable realization of schwa in French (Smith & Pater 2020). The results support MaxEnt over Noisy Harmonic Grammar.
MaxEnt语法是谐波语法的概率版本，其中候选人的和谐分数被映射到概率上。它已成为分析涉及概率变化或梯度可接受性的语音现象的首选工具，但也有一种竞争性的建议，即使谐波语法具有概率性，即噪声谐波语法，其中通过在约束权重中添加随机“噪声”来导出变化。本文对这些语法框架及其变体进行了分析，将它们重新表述为一种格式，在候选和声中添加噪声，框架之间的差异在于噪声的分布。这一分析揭示了模型之间的一个基本区别:在MaxEnt中，两个候选词的相对概率仅取决于它们的和谐分数的差异，而在Noisy Harmonic Grammar中，它还取决于两个候选词违反约束的差异。这种差异导致了可测试的预测，这些预测是根据法语弱读音的可变实现数据进行评估的(Smith & Pater 2020)。结果支持MaxEnt胜过嘈杂的谐波语法。
{"title":"Comparing MaxEnt and Noisy Harmonic Grammar","authors":"Edward Flemming","doi":"10.16995/glossa.5775","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5775","url":null,"abstract":"MaxEnt grammar is a probabilistic version of Harmonic Grammar in which the harmony scores of candidates are mapped onto probabilities. It has become the tool of choice for analyzing phonological phenomena involving probabilistic variation or gradient acceptability, but there is a competing proposal for making Harmonic Grammar probabilistic, Noisy Harmonic Grammar, in which variation is derived by adding random ‘noise’ to constraint weights. In this paper these grammar frameworks, and variants of them, are analyzed by reformulating them all in a format where noise is added to candidate harmonies, and the differences between frameworks lie in the distribution of this noise. This analysis reveals a basic difference between the models: in MaxEnt the relative probabilities of two candidates depend only on the difference in their harmony scores, whereas in Noisy Harmonic Grammar it also depends on the differences in the constraint violations incurred by the two candidates. This difference leads to testable predictions which are evaluated against data on variable realization of schwa in French (Smith & Pater 2020). The results support MaxEnt over Noisy Harmonic Grammar.","PeriodicalId":46319,"journal":{"name":"Glossa-A Journal of General Linguistics","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91257774","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
We suggest here a Growing Trees approach for the description of the acquisition of various syntactic structures in Hebrew, based on the main results reported in Friedmann and Reznick (this volume) and on our own research on a corpus of natural productions. The heart of our account is that stages of acquisition follow the geometry of the syntactic tree, along the lines of the cartographic analysis of the clause, with early stages of acquisition corresponding to small portions of the adult syntactic tree, which keeps growing with the growth of the child. The lower parts of the tree are acquired first, and higher parts are acquired later. We propose three stages of acquisition connected to the development of functional layers of the syntactic tree. In the first stage, the IP is acquired, including the lexical and inflectional layers. This allows for the appearance of A-movement structures, including SV/VS alternations with unaccusative verbs, alongside SV sentences with unergative/transitive verbs. The second stage involves the acquisition of the lower part of the left periphery, up to QP, which allows for the acquisition of subject and object Wh questions, some adjunct questions, yes/no questions, and sentence-initial adverbs. In the third stage, the rich structure of the left periphery is completely acquired, including the higher CP field. This is the stage in which sentential embedding (of finite declarative and interrogative clauses), subject and object relative clauses, why questions, and topicalization appear. A further, different type of stage, which occurs on the already-grown tree and which is independent of structure building, is the acquisition of intervention configurations, allowing for the mastery of structures involving movement of a lexically-restricted object across an intervening lexically-restricted subject. The paper illustrates the fruitful dialogue between the science of syntax acquisition and the cartography of syntactic structures.
{"title":"Growing trees: The acquisition of the left periphery","authors":"N. Friedmann, A. Belletti, L. Rizzi","doi":"10.16995/glossa.5877","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5877","url":null,"abstract":"We suggest here a Growing Trees approach for the description of the acquisition of various syntactic structures in Hebrew, based on the main results reported in Friedmann and Reznick (this volume) and on our own research on a corpus of natural productions. The heart of our account is that stages of acquisition follow the geometry of the syntactic tree, along the lines of the cartographic analysis of the clause, with early stages of acquisition corresponding to small portions of the adult syntactic tree, which keeps growing with the growth of the child. The lower parts of the tree are acquired first, and higher parts are acquired later. We propose three stages of acquisition connected to the development of functional layers of the syntactic tree. In the first stage, the IP is acquired, including the lexical and inflectional layers. This allows for the appearance of A-movement structures, including SV/VS alternations with unaccusative verbs, alongside SV sentences with unergative/transitive verbs. The second stage involves the acquisition of the lower part of the left periphery, up to QP, which allows for the acquisition of subject and object Wh questions, some adjunct questions, yes/no questions, and sentence-initial adverbs. In the third stage, the rich structure of the left periphery is completely acquired, including the higher CP field. This is the stage in which sentential embedding (of finite declarative and interrogative clauses), subject and object relative clauses, why questions, and topicalization appear. A further, different type of stage, which occurs on the already-grown tree and which is independent of structure building, is the acquisition of intervention configurations, allowing for the mastery of structures involving movement of a lexically-restricted object across an intervening lexically-restricted subject. The paper illustrates the fruitful dialogue between the science of syntax acquisition and the cartography of syntactic structures.","PeriodicalId":46319,"journal":{"name":"Glossa-A Journal of General Linguistics","volume":"94 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72523036","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
All changes to the internal structure of phonological segments arise from combinations of rules based on two set-theoretic operations: feature deletion by set subtraction and feature insertion by unification. Apparent cases of rules targeting underspecified segments reflect two kinds of vacuous rule application, one due to unification failure and the other due to vacuous unification. Despite this reduction of all segment-internal changes to two basic mechanisms we can account for a wide variety of patterns, including the reciprocal neutralization and apparent exceptional behavior seen in Hungarian voicing assimilation.
{"title":"Towards a complete Logical Phonology model of intrasegmental changes","authors":"C. Reiss","doi":"10.16995/glossa.5886","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5886","url":null,"abstract":"All changes to the internal structure of phonological segments arise from combinations of rules based on two set-theoretic operations: feature deletion by set subtraction and feature insertion by unification. Apparent cases of rules targeting underspecified segments reflect two kinds of vacuous rule application, one due to unification failure and the other due to vacuous unification. Despite this reduction of all segment-internal changes to two basic mechanisms we can account for a wide variety of patterns, including the reciprocal neutralization and apparent exceptional behavior seen in Hungarian voicing assimilation.","PeriodicalId":46319,"journal":{"name":"Glossa-A Journal of General Linguistics","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83442718","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In the linguistics literature, it is generally accepted that the non-local use of the bare reflexive ziji in Mandarin Chinese is sensitive to perspective centers. The introduction of a local first-person pronoun encoding the comprehender’s perspective is assumed to block non-local binding (i.e. make it unavailable), a phenomenon called the blocking effect. However, it is not yet clear whether the blocking effect is absolute, nor whether the syntactic prominence of the blocking pronoun influences the strength of blocking. In this study, we report two sets of offline and online experiments to examine the blocking effect associated with ziji. By comparing the forced choice judgment results in Experiments 1 and 2, we find that syntactically prominent subject blockers lead to stronger blocking compared to object blockers, and that the strength of the blocking effect can be modulated by verb semantics. Furthermore, only subject blockers caused blocking during incremental real-time processing while object blockers did not. The results of these experiments have implications for both the linguistic formulation of the blocking effect and for sentence processing models.
{"title":"Unpacking the blocking effect: Syntactic prominence and perspective-taking in antecedent retrieval in Mandarin Chinese","authors":"Jun-Hyun Lyu, E. Kaiser","doi":"10.16995/glossa.5781","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5781","url":null,"abstract":"In the linguistics literature, it is generally accepted that the non-local use of the bare reflexive ziji in Mandarin Chinese is sensitive to perspective centers. The introduction of a local first-person pronoun encoding the comprehender’s perspective is assumed to block non-local binding (i.e. make it unavailable), a phenomenon called the blocking effect. However, it is not yet clear whether the blocking effect is absolute, nor whether the syntactic prominence of the blocking pronoun influences the strength of blocking. In this study, we report two sets of offline and online experiments to examine the blocking effect associated with ziji. By comparing the forced choice judgment results in Experiments 1 and 2, we find that syntactically prominent subject blockers lead to stronger blocking compared to object blockers, and that the strength of the blocking effect can be modulated by verb semantics. Furthermore, only subject blockers caused blocking during incremental real-time processing while object blockers did not. The results of these experiments have implications for both the linguistic formulation of the blocking effect and for sentence processing models.","PeriodicalId":46319,"journal":{"name":"Glossa-A Journal of General Linguistics","volume":"68 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87180571","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper examines overt and covert speaker/addressee pronouns with the cognitive verbs creer ‘think/believe’ and saber ‘know’ in a corpus of spoken peninsular Spanish – the Madrid and Alcalá samples of PRESEEA (2014– ) – with a focus on 1st person singular (yo) creo que ‘(I) think that’. Departing from the observation made in the literature that overt pronouns are highly frequent with creer and that topic shift cannot account for all of them, it will be argued that perspectival factors related to evidentiality/epistemicity and subjectivity influence overt pronoun realization. A corpus study was conducted to investigate whether (i) [person] and [polarity] and (ii) the type of complement affect overt pronoun realization with the cognitive verbs creer and saber. The results indicate that the type of belief expressed in the embedded clause should be taken into account, as well as person and polarity. The ultimate trigger for phonetic realization of speaker/addressee pronouns will be argued to be the notion of contrast: cognitive verbs whose embedded complement encodes evaluations and non-visual, abstract information have high frequencies of overt pronoun realization because these contexts favor the evoking of alternative perspective holders. Overt pronouns will be analyzed as the result of a [+contrast] feature which is assigned to the specifier of a functional category encoding perspective in the split IP.
本文用认知动词creer ' think/believe '和saber ' know '在半岛西班牙语口语语料库(PRESEEA(2014 -)的马德里和alcal样本)中考察了显性和隐性说话者/受信者代词，重点关注第一人称单数(yo) creo que ' (I) think that '。从文献中观察到的显性代词频繁出现，并且话题转移不能解释所有这些，我们将认为与证据性/认识性和主观性相关的视角因素影响着显性代词的实现。通过语料库研究，探讨了(i)[人]和[极性]以及(ii)补语类型是否影响认知动词creer和saber的显性代词实现。结果表明，嵌入子句中所表达的信念类型，以及人与极性都应考虑在内。说话人/收件人代词语音实现的最终触发因素将被认为是对比的概念:认知动词，其嵌入的补语编码评价和非视觉、抽象信息具有高频率的显性代词实现，因为这些上下文有利于唤起替代视角持有者。显性代词将作为[+对比]特征的结果进行分析，该特征被分配给拆分IP中功能类别编码透视图的说明符。
{"title":"Perspectival factors and pro-drop: A corpus study of speaker/addressee pronouns with creer ‘think/ believe’ and saber ‘know’ in spoken Spanish","authors":"Peter Herbeck","doi":"10.16995/glossa.5873","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5873","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines overt and covert speaker/addressee pronouns with the cognitive verbs creer ‘think/believe’ and saber ‘know’ in a corpus of spoken peninsular Spanish – the Madrid and Alcalá samples of PRESEEA (2014– ) – with a focus on 1st person singular (yo) creo que ‘(I) think that’. Departing from the observation made in the literature that overt pronouns are highly frequent with creer and that topic shift cannot account for all of them, it will be argued that perspectival factors related to evidentiality/epistemicity and subjectivity influence overt pronoun realization. A corpus study was conducted to investigate whether (i) [person] and [polarity] and (ii) the type of complement affect overt pronoun realization with the cognitive verbs creer and saber. The results indicate that the type of belief expressed in the embedded clause should be taken into account, as well as person and polarity. The ultimate trigger for phonetic realization of speaker/addressee pronouns will be argued to be the notion of contrast: cognitive verbs whose embedded complement encodes evaluations and non-visual, abstract information have high frequencies of overt pronoun realization because these contexts favor the evoking of alternative perspective holders. Overt pronouns will be analyzed as the result of a [+contrast] feature which is assigned to the specifier of a functional category encoding perspective in the split IP.","PeriodicalId":46319,"journal":{"name":"Glossa-A Journal of General Linguistics","volume":"2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79085017","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
We argue that Chinese Sign Language (CSL) provides new insights into temporal anaphora, as well as new puzzles. Partee 1973 showed that temporal talk in English involves abstract anaphoric mechanisms akin to pronouns, although with a very different form. Schlenker 2013 argued that in American Sign Language (ASL), one and the same overt pronominal form, the pointing sign, can have individual and temporal uses, but his data involved the same loci across domains: no formal property distinguished temporal from individual anaphora. We replicate ASL temporal anaphora data in CSL, but we also display a new finding: CSL allows for locus establishment and anaphoric pointing on two specifically temporal timelines, a sagittal one (past is backwards) and a vertical one (past is up). Not only can temporal anaphora be overt in CSL; it can also be morphologically distinguished from nominal anaphora (various interesting restrictions on the timelines are also described).
{"title":"Timelines and Temporal Pointing in Chinese Sign Language","authors":"Hao Lin, J. Kuhn, Huan Sheng, Philippe Schlenker","doi":"10.16995/glossa.5836","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5836","url":null,"abstract":"We argue that Chinese Sign Language (CSL) provides new insights into temporal anaphora, as well as new puzzles. Partee 1973 showed that temporal talk in English involves abstract anaphoric mechanisms akin to pronouns, although with a very different form. Schlenker 2013 argued that in American Sign Language (ASL), one and the same overt pronominal form, the pointing sign, can have individual and temporal uses, but his data involved the same loci across domains: no formal property distinguished temporal from individual anaphora. We replicate ASL temporal anaphora data in CSL, but we also display a new finding: CSL allows for locus establishment and anaphoric pointing on two specifically temporal timelines, a sagittal one (past is backwards) and a vertical one (past is up). Not only can temporal anaphora be overt in CSL; it can also be morphologically distinguished from nominal anaphora (various interesting restrictions on the timelines are also described).","PeriodicalId":46319,"journal":{"name":"Glossa-A Journal of General Linguistics","volume":"34 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78762430","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
H. Lutzenberger, Connie de Vos, O. Crasborn, P. Fikkert
Sign language lexicons incorporate phonological specifications. Evidence from emerging sign languages suggests that phonological structure emerges gradually in a new language. In this study, we investigate variation in the form of signs across 20 deaf adult signers of Kata Kolok, a sign language that emerged spontaneously in a Balinese village community. Combining methods previously used for sign comparisons, we introduce a new numeric measure of variation. Our nuanced yet comprehensive approach to form variation integrates three levels (iconic motivation, surface realisation, feature differences) and allows for refinement through weighting the variation score by token and signer frequency. We demonstrate that variation in the form of signs appears in different degrees at different levels. Token frequency in a given dataset greatly affects how much variation can surface, suggesting caution in interpreting previous findings. Different sign variants have different scopes of use among the signing population, with some more widely used than others. Both frequency weightings (token and signer) identify dominant sign variants, i.e., sign forms that are produced frequently or by many signers. We argue that variation does not equal the absence of conventionalisation. Indeed, especially in micro-community sign languages, variation may be key to understanding patterns of language emergence.Appendices: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/FN4XE
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