Language and Linguistics Compass最新文献

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.

Sociolinguistic study of variation and change has a long-standing bias towards speech communities in Western and especially Anglophone societies. We argue that our field requires a much wider scope for variation studies, which puts more emphasis on culturally contextualised social meaning in the full range of human societies. The pursuit of understanding, generalizations, and even universals in the study of the social life of human language demands a global empirical base. In a meta-analysis of studies appearing in major sociolinguistic journals and conferences, we find little broadening of the language and cultural scope in the last 30 years. English alone and a few Western societies continually account for the great majority of studies. We propose several ways for going forward: testing and rethinking existing theories using data from understudied languages and regions, engaging with sociolinguistic scholarship in languages other than English, learning from other disciplines that incorporate cross-cultural approaches, engaging the dimensions of social organization and practice instantiated in cultures of the Global South, and moving towards research designs that compare different places and languages.

The theory of language change has worked primarily with four basic language change profiles: generational change, age-grading, communal change, and stability. This paper focuses primarily on age-grading, the process whereby each generation undergoes a specific language change at the same age-related stage within their lifespan. Despite the necessary influence of biological change on the ageing body, the explanations put forward to explain why and how age-grading occurs have been primarily social. Previous work also often relies on the study of adolescents. Following the distinction between chronological, social, and biological ageing, this study provides an overview of biological factors which may also provide explanatory power, with a focus on phonetic variation. Considering biological factors can be important in order to avoid interpreting cases of biological age-grading as (solely) social in nature, and as cases of generational change rather than age-grading.

Involving speakers in research on their linguistic practices has been at the core of sociolinguistics since the inception of the field. In contrast to social sciences, however, sociolinguists have rarely addressed the issues surrounding the participation of those involved and engaged in the research process. This paper aims at reviewing the state of the art and outlining critical dimensions and aspects with relation to participation. We explore previous studies and study designs with the help of the following questions: Who has been involved? How and with what impact have stakeholders participated in different strands of sociolinguistic research? Current developments are presented and reviewed with particular reference to language expertise of those outside academia, as manifested in everyday talk about language, and the link between the production of this knowledge and social inequalities. We point out that the interconnectedness of everyday language expertise and social (in)equality can only be interpreted in highly localised contexts, whose diverse understandings and conceptualisations provide and, at the same time, limit the possibilities of social transformation.

This article has two main purposes: (i) to review the placement and function of the tongue and suprahyoid muscles concerning speech articulation, and (ii) as a biomechanical simulation tool to study how those muscles are involved in articulation, to introduce a 3D tongue model distributed by a 3D modelling platform called ArtiSynth. The 3D tongue model can be combined with other structural models to provide the outline of the oral cavity. This article presents examples of muscular simulations for/i/and/ɑ/using the jaw-hyoid-tongue model in ArtiSynth.

This article introduces micro-prosody as the study of the duration and timing of speech events. We present a descriptive framework, formalising micro-prosody in terms of gestural landmarks and coordination relations between them, and we use the framework to illustrate different patterns of micro-prosody across languages. We show that potential ambiguity between coordination relations can be resolved by considering how they structure natural variation in speech. The framework presented here is intended to offer effective tools for phonetic documentation. We end with some considerations for a theory of micro-prosody, including how micro-prosody relates to other levels of phonological structure, and a brief discussion of different data types that can be used to infer aspects of micro-prosody.