Language and Linguistics Compass最新文献

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.

This paper presents a methodology for exploring systematic co-variation of vowels using Principal Component Analysis (PCA). As a case study, we examine and build on Brand et al.'s (2021) study of systematic co-variation amongst the monophthongs of New Zealand English (NZE) across speakers born over a 118-year time period. We present PCA as a methodology, with information aimed at readers who may themselves want to use it in a related context. We consider tests for the appropriateness of PCA, how to select Principal Components, and how to interpret them once they have been found. At each stage, we provide code in the R programing language to enable readers to both follow our analysis and apply the same methods to their own data.

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.