Language and Linguistics Compass最新文献

Within the past 2 decades, probabilistic grammars have been put forward in the study of phonotactics as a necessary device to model gradient acceptability of lexical forms. This implicitly suggests that categorical grammars cannot even in principle account for such gradience. Most importantly, influential research has proposed that grammatical forms described by categorical grammars could be simply understood as by-products of probabilistic thresholds. Therefore, either implicitly or explicitly, categorical grammars are painted as not only empirically insufficient but also theoretically and formally redundant by this interpretation of probabilistic grammars in the domain of phonotactics. This paper provides a general overview of this recent debate and argues against the standard threshold interpretation for probabilistic grammars based on mathematical results, explicit axiomatic principles, and recent experimental evidence. In its place, I propose an interpretation for gradient grammars that solves apparent inconsistencies, combines the two types of grammar, accommodates previous technical contributions and data, and establishes a clear theoretical role that opens up further research directions.

Communicating linguistics to broader audiences (lingcomm) can be achieved most effectively by drawing on insights from across the fields of linguistics, science communication (scicomm), pedagogy and psychology. In this article we provide an overview of work that examines lingcomm as a specific practice. We also give an overview of the Lingthusiasm podcast, and discuss four major ways that we incorporate effective communications methodologies from a range of literature in the production of episodes. First, we discuss how we frame topics and take a particular stance towards linguistic attitudes, second, we discuss how we introduce linguistic terminology and manage audience cognitive load, third, we discuss the role of metaphor in effective communication of abstract concepts, and fourth, we discuss the affective tools of humour and awe in connecting audiences with linguistic concepts. We also discuss a 2022 survey of Lingthusiasm listeners, which highlights how the audience responds to our design choices. In providing this summary, we also advocate for lingcomm as a theoretically-driven area of linguistic expertise, and a particularly effective forum for the application of linguistics.

The field of third language acquisition has gathered increased attention over the last three decades. However, phonological acquisition in an L3 is still relatively understudied within the field, despite there likely being over a billion people regularly using an L3 worldwide. In this paper, we review experimental and theoretical studies of sequential L3 acquisition to date and aim to give implications for future L3 phonological acquisition research, laying the groundwork for advances in this area. According to the reviewed studies, it is necessary to adapt previous second language phonology models (i.e. SLM/SLM-r, PAM/PAM-L2, L2LP) into future L3 phonological research. Additionally, it is essential to expand the research scope and time scale to reflect linguistic diversity, age and education background of participants, and the processes of learning.

Thematic relations are traditionally analysed as projecting into derivations of sentence meanings from the lexical content of verbs. Thematic separation, a natural outgrowth of event semantics, proposes an alternative to this tradition: thematic relations are introduced into derivations by verb-independent elements and are, therefore, grammatically separate from the lexical content of verbs. Although critical to theories of meaning and lexical representation, the evidence for thematic separation has not been reckoned with widely in linguistic theory, and the consequent implications for psycholinguistic theories have not received proper consideration. This is surprising as the representations permitted by thematic separation comport quite well with evidence for pre-verbal thematic interpretation during real-time sentence comprehension. Psycholinguistic theories, therefore, stand to benefit from engagement with separationist alternatives to thematic relations, and may, in turn, shed light on the representations semantic theory should provide. After briefly defending the utility of events in semantic representation, this paper motivates thematic separation with evidence from the cumulative interpretations and adnominal modal adverbs; two cases where a semantic operator intervenes between a thematic relation and a verbal predicate. Psycholinguistic results investigating pre-verbal thematic interpretation then follow, where thematic separation is argued to furnish theories with coherent incremental representations without commitment to specific verbal predicates. The timecourse of verb predictability is also shown to intersect with ongoing debates on the granularity of thematic relations, suggesting further connections between semantic and psycholinguistic theory to be explored.

Atchan is a Kwa language spoken by approximately 150,000 people in and around Abidjan in southern Côte d’Ivoire. In this paper, I describe aspects of the phonology of Atchan, including its consonant and vowel inventory, syllable structure, patterns of nasalisation, and lexical and grammatical tone. I provide examples from primary data collected in collaboration with native speakers of Atchan. This article offers the first comprehensive sketch of Atchan phonology in the literature.

Researcher positionality has come into focus in a number of fields, as scholars increasingly acknowledge the impact of their lived experiences and identities on all aspects of the research process. In most areas of linguistics, however, researcher positionality remains underdiscussed, even as many linguists from dominant groups conduct research on the language of subordinated groups without community self-determination regarding the research direction and goals. While the growing emphasis on collaborative community-centered research overcomes some inequities, another key step toward a more inclusive linguistics is the involvement of undergraduate researchers who are members of the partner community or whose backgrounds, experiences, and identities overlap with those of community members. Such undergraduate team members can contribute special insight and knowledge to the research. This article describes the role of a mostly Latinx team of undergraduate research interns in a community language maintenance survey project as part of a collaboration between a Hispanic Serving Institution and a nonprofit organization supporting the Mexican Indigenous community on California’s Central Coast. Undergraduate interns strengthened the project by drawing connections between their own linguistic experiences and those of the survey respondents, thus enabling the research team to better support community goals. The article concludes with recommendations for centering researcher positionality in linguistics in order to produce more inclusive, just, and rigorous linguistic science.

Along with its focus on foundational research, one of the enduring concerns of variationist sociolinguistics over the past half-century has been a tradition of application and engagement. As research paradigms have developed in variation studies, so have traditions of engagement with issues of social and educational language equality. In the formative era of the field, the primary concern of engagement was one in which sociolinguists took a strong, united stance on language variation as simply ‘different’ rather than ‘deficient’. This stance has had a strong impact on language assessment in determining language normalcy in early child development and beyond. In the period of ‘proactive engagement’, sociolinguists aligned with technological development, producing sociolinguistic audiovisual materials, physical and digital museums, social media, and other venues for raising language awareness consonant with the age of digitisation. The current period of raciolinguistics examines more critical, systemic issues of colonialism and structural racism confronting the field, ranging from the significant under-representation of minority scholars in sociolinguistics to confronting sociolinguistic inequality in institutions of higher learning where most sociolinguists reside. The essay further addresses the devaluation of engagement in the academic meritocracy, despite recent attempts to legitimise engaged research, arguing that engagement provides social meaning and personal gratification for the professional sociolinguist.

As technology (particularly smartphone and computer technology) has advanced, sociolinguistic methodology has likewise adapted to include remote data collection. Remote methods range from approximating the traditional sociolinguistic interview via synchronous video conferencing to developing new methods for asynchronous self-recording (Boyd et al., 2015; Leeman et al., 2020). In this paper, we take a close look at the question prompts sent to participants in an asynchronous, remote self-recording project (“MI Diaries”). We discuss how some of the techniques initially developed for obtaining a range of styles in a traditional in-person sociolinguistic interview can be fruitfully adapted to a remote context. Of this range of styles, we give particular focus to Narratives of Personal Experience (Labov & Waletzky, 1967), and provide an analysis of how the theme, style, and development of prompts can encourage narratives from participants. We end with a short discussion of prompts that have successfully elicited other speech styles, and prompts that are especially fruitful with child participants.

Shin (2022) argues that research on heritage language development in children can profit greatly by incorporating insights from Variationist Sociolinguistics. In particular, attention should be paid to structured variation so as to advance our understanding of heritage language development, which in turn can help us move beyond a deficit view of bilingualism. This teaching and learning guide accompanies Shin's (2022) article, and includes an annotated bibliography consisting of 10 relevant articles, a description of four websites to consult, and five sample lesson plans with student learning outcomes and activities to implement with students.