Language and Linguistics Compass最新文献

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.

Guébie is an Eastern Kru language spoken by about 7000 people in the Gagnoa prefecture of Côte d’Ivoire. This paper provides an overview of the phonology of Guébie, including the complex tone system with four contrastive pitch heights, multiple types of vowel harmony, reduplication in multiple morphosyntactic contexts, CVCV/CCV alternations, and the phonotactic behaviour of implosives as sonorant-like rather than obstruent-like. Comparisons with other Kru and West African languages are made along the way.

In the last 35 years, ‘reallocation’ has come to be widely used to describe how structural linguistic features in contact settings may remain as part of a new language variety and take on new functions as sociolinguistic variables rather than be lost over time, as is typically expected in koineization contexts. Classic examples involve originally regional differences that come to carry social, grammatical, or stylistic rather than regional meanings. We define and illustrate reallocation and then explore how it has been used in different ways and applied to various contact settings. Along the way, we also put reallocation into the context of notions like focussing and accommodation, and observe a shift from looking at dialect contact to language contact as a trigger of reallocation. Reallocation increasingly connects with enregisterment, and we consider these notions in cultural as well as strictly linguistic terms. We conclude briefly with paths for future investigation.

Theories of phonological encoding are centred on the selection and activation of phonological segments, and how these segments are organised in word and syllable structures in online processes of speech planning. The focus on segments, however, is due to an over-weighting of evidence from Indo-European languages, because languages outside this family exhibit strikingly different behaviour and require the processing of additional phonological structures. We review evidence from speech error patterns, priming and form encoding studies, and re-syllabification in several non-Indo-European languages, including Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Arabic, Hindi, Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese. We argue that these languages deepen our understanding of the nature of phonological encoding because they require recognising language-particular differences in: the first selectable (proximate) units of phonological encoding, the phonological units processed as word beginnings, the dynamics of syllable emergence during encoding, and the varied manifestations of re-syllabification. A satisfactory and general account of phonological encoding must incorporate these rich phenomena.

Some reference grammars and cross-linguistic works describe all elements that are not clear-cut words as “clitics.” As a consequence of this practice, the class of suggested clitics is highly heterogeneous, which reduces the usefulness of the “clitic” label as a whole. In response to this situation, a more nuanced typology of grammatical forms is proposed here. The argument crucially relies on the notion of formal “dependence,” which is essentially a synchronic indicator of grammaticalisation status. The resulting system limits the term “clitic” to its prototypical manifestation, which combines a syntactic distribution with some degree of prosodic dependence on a host. Meanwhile, the class of “weak words” subsumes elements that are independent words in every regard except that they do not bear stress and/or tone, whereas “anti-clitics” are affixes except that they share some behaviour with phonological words. Lastly, there are “mobile” and “suspended” affixes, which show types of syntagmatic freedom not found with prototypical affixes. All form classes proposed in this typology are attested across unrelated languages and are thus of relevance to typology and language-specific analyses alike.