Language and Linguistics Compass最新文献

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.

This paper reports on an investigation of adults' level of endorsement of 18 language myths, including myths about non-mainstream dialects of English, children's language development, bilingualism, linguistic diversity across the world, the use of English in the language arts, and the job of a linguist. Participants (N = 187) read short vignettes of situations related to each misconception and were asked to justify their assessment of the situation. Responses were coded according to whether they endorsed the myth within the situation. Results showed that endorsement of language myths was highly dependent on the specific myth. Some myths were strongly endorsed (e.g. myths related to linguistic prejudice and children's language development), others were strongly rejected (e.g. myths related to the harmful nature of bilingualism), and others received a mixed pattern of endorsement and rejection. We discuss how this snapshot of public understanding can help linguists target their efforts at public education.

Human self-domestication refers to a new evolutionary hypothesis about human origins. According to this view, humans have experienced changes that are similar to those observed in domesticated mammals and that have provided us with many of the behavioural, and perhaps cognitive pre-requisites for supporting our complex social practices and advanced culture. At the core of this hypothesis is the claim that self-domestication is triggered by (and entails) a reduction in reactive aggression responses. The human self-domestication hypothesis has been recently used to explain how grammars became more sophisticated via a cultural mechanism. Nonetheless, less research has been done in the domain of phonology, even though animal evidence suggests that domestication favours call complexity too. In this paper, we hypothesise about the effects of our increased self-domestication on human prosody. We argue for a progressive complexification of prosody that parallels (and might be involved in a positive feed-back loop with) the complexification of grammar in response to a reduction in reactive aggression. We build on evidence of diverse nature, from language typology to brain function to language acquisition studies.

In order to develop effective strategies of science communication and public outreach in linguistics, one needs to choose what topics to prioritise in such efforts. We carried out a global online survey study among experts in linguistics (n = 538) asking what they perceive as the most important facts about language that the general public should be aware of. We used two distinct methods to collect the respondents' opinions: open-ended text responses and rating questions. In this paper, we compare the findings from the two tasks and we discuss the differences between them. Thus, the paper constitutes a methodologically-laden commentary on the nature of linguists' opinions on what everyone should know about language. We argue that both open-ended responses and rating questions provide valuable information about linguists' views, but from different perspectives. In particular, we see a need to distinguish between what issues are the most salient to linguists, and what issues are perceived as the most important. The aim of our study is to provide a starting point for a rich and methodologically diverse line of research—and, consequently, for an empirically-based debate—on the public relevance of language-related knowledge and the role of linguists as science communicators in disseminating that knowledge.

It is well established that people adapt to statistical regularities at phonological, lexical, and syntactic levels. Much less is known about adaptation to discourse-level structures, such as adaptation to structures defined as the relationship between a pronoun and its antecedent. To fill this gap, this paper reviews studies on the learning of referential patterns by asking (1) do people represent referential structures, (2) how long do discourse-level representations last, (3) how specific are representations that are used for referential adaptation, (4) what mechanisms underlie this adaptation, and (5) what the current methods are used to test referential adaptation. This paper also briefly summarises the work on adaptation at other linguistic levels. This line of work extends adaptation to higher-level structures and demonstrates how people learn language patterns that drive successful communication and reading skills.