Language and Linguistics Compass最新文献

This article presents an overview of several significant aspects of the phonology of Uyghur (ISO: uig; pronounced [ʊjˈʁʊr]; Turkic: China). In addition to summarising previous research, we present new data and highlight its relevance for phonological theory. The paper focuses primarily on the processes of backness harmony, rounding harmony, and vowel reduction. Particular attention is paid to the complex, and sometimes opaque, interactions between these processes, as well as the role of phonological exceptionality.

Research on heritage language development in children can profit greatly by incorporating insights from analyses of structured variation, which is defined as the interchange of linguistic forms where the choice to use one form over the other is probabilistically conditioned by linguistic and social factors. This article reviews the limited research on bilingual children's structured variation, focussing specifically on child heritage speakers of Spanish. It is argued that careful attention to structured variation advances our understanding of heritage language development in childhood and can help us move beyond a deficit view of bilingualism.

Middle class African American English (AAE) has remained largely invisible to the sociolinguistic lens despite the fact that over 50 years of research has made it one of the most examined varieties of American English. This gap in the sociolinguistic literature is largely reflective of a strategic effort on the part of linguists to dismantle the stigma associated with working class vernacular varieties and improve outcomes for working class speakers who face linguistic discrimination in schools. An unfortunate by-product of this laudable effort, however, has been the erasure of middle-class speakers from our conceptualisations of the AAE speech community and a virtual obsession with the vernacular end of the AAE continuum. By interrogating the concept of the linguistic lame and giving greater attention to patterns of code-switching and the ways in which talking Black or sounding Black get defined at the more standard end of the continuum, sociolinguists have an opportunity to broaden our understanding of AAE and its community of speakers and, in so doing, possibly extend our reach to a more diverse and inclusive audience of budding linguists.

Adjectives are a powerful tool for enriching vocabulary and developing conceptual understanding. In early elementary and primary classrooms, across core and foundation subjects, children are expected to describe, measure, classify, and compare objects and events—all processes that require a mastery of adjective meanings and use. While teachers are trained in vocabulary learning, they may be less familiar with: (i) the psychological processes by which children learn adjectives, and (ii) how a focus on adjectives can support learning in domains beyond language and literacy lessons. To address these gaps, we have collaborated as a unique interdisciplinary team with linguistic, psychological, and pedagogical expertise. We synthesise research across our disciplines to provide an accessible, practical, evidence-based primer of research findings on adjective development. We then provide guidance on how these findings can be used to enhance teaching and learning practices across subjects for children aged five to seven.

Although many studies in world Englishes research have examined the sociocultural and political factors that shape the development of varieties of English in non-native contexts, there has been limited work on the range of codificatory instruments that engender the standardisation of these ‘new’ Englishes, especially in specific reference to Nigerian English (NE). Examining the extent of the codification of new Englishes is particularly critical in terms of their institutionalisation and eventual acceptance, both locally and internationally. In light of this, this article draws evidence from existing research and institutional efforts and policies to show where NE lies in the process of codification. The analysis indicates that, while there is an avalanche of evidence of (socio)linguistic indices showing that NE is being radically codified, the range of codificatory instruments (e.g., dictionaries, style manuals, grammars, pedagogies, language policies) remain limited.

Uspanteko is an endangered Mayan language spoken by up to 6000 people in the Guatemalan highlands. We provide an overview of the phonetics and phonology of Uspanteko, focussing on phenomena which are common in Mayan languages and/or typologically interesting. These include glottalised consonants (ejectives, implosives, and glottal stop), uvular consonants, vowel length contrasts, syllable structure, stress, and lexical tone. Tone is unusual among Mayan languages, especially in Guatemala, and the phonetic description here complements the small handful of existing descriptions of tone in Uspanteko and within the Mayan family.

This paper presents an overview of Harmonic Grammar with gradient symbolic representations (a.k.a. Gradient Harmonic Grammar), a weighted-constraint model of grammatical computation in which language structures are mentally represented with numerically continuous levels of activity, or degree of presence. In this system, the penalty of each constraint violation is proportional to the activity of the structure that incurs it. The adoption of gradient activity permits unique advances in generative approaches to key types of idiosyncratic patterns in language. I review the main proposals that have been made in the framework, and outstanding issues such as the existence of gradient activity in output structures.

Recent years have seen numerous advances in natural language processing that can help accelerate sociophonetic work. These include software to align speech recordings with their transcriptions, as well as to transcribe audio automatically. This solves a major bottleneck and will help process larger datasets and test hypotheses more efficiently. This paper will summarise recent progress, highlight relevant examples of sociophonetic research, and comment on the technical and ethical issues at the cutting edge of natural language processing.

We describe guest speaker presentations that we developed to bring language science to elementary school students via videoconference. By using virtual backgrounds and guided discovery learning, we effectively engage children as young as 7 years in in-depth explorations of language science concepts. We share the core principles that guide our presentations and describe two of our outreach activities, Speech Detectives and Bilingual Barnyard. We report brief survey data from 157 elementary school students showing that they find our presentations interesting and educational. While our pivot to virtual outreach was motivated by the Covid-19 pandemic, it allows us to reach geographically diverse audiences, and we suggest that virtual guest speaker presentations will remain a viable and effective method of public outreach.

This paper reviews some basic elements of musical structure, drawing from work in traditional and cognitive musicology, ethnomusicology, psychology, and generative textsetting. Music features two different hierarchical representational components that can both be visualised in grid notation: metrical structure and event hierarchies (also referred to as Time-Span Reduction). Metrical structure is an abstract pattern of stronger and weaker points in time that form a temporal ‘scaffold’ against which auditory events occur, but is partly independent from those occurring events. Event hierarchies encode the constituency (referred to as grouping) and prominence of actually-occurring musical events. Basic principles of these components are illustrated with examples from Western children's, folk, and popular song. The need for both metrical hierarchy and event hierarchy is illustrated using mismatches between metrical and rhythmic structure. The formal, conceptual, and empirical features of musical metre are quite different from linguistic stress and prosody, despite the frequent analogies drawn between them. Event hierarchies, on the other hand, are shown to resemble linguistic prosodic structure with regard to all of these features.