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Prosody and attention orienting: The role of rising intonation in speech processing
No full textHumans are confronted everyday with an influx of sounds coming from several sources. In a given auditory environment, some of the sound events might be unexpected, rare, or new. Our cognitive system has the ability to detect such sounds, and consequently activate an attention orienting response.
This book provides an in-depth investigation of the interplay between prosody and attention orienting during online speech processing by using two complementary experimental methods, electrophysiology and pupillometry. In particular, it examines the cognitive and functional relevance of intonation for the orienting response in speech, emphasising the crucial role of rising contours. More specifically, it investigates the influence of prosodic structure, showing that rising tones at constituent edges attract attention similarly to accentual rising tones, challenging important tenets of prosodic theory and typology.
The book shows that contextual expectations shape the orienting response, extending insights beyond purely acoustic cues to pragmatically meaningful linguistic signals. Finally, much like cues from auditory cognition, rising tones activate both involuntary and voluntary attentional mechanisms – the former driven by signal-based acoustic cues, while the latter arise from contextual influences guiding voluntary attention orienting.
Taken together, the findings in this book enhance our understanding of the role of intonation in attention orienting, emphasising the significance of rising tones. The book establishes key connections to general cognition and individual variability while exploring potential extensions for an architecture of attention orienting in spoken language
Bewertung und Variation der Präpositionalkasus im Deutschen: Der Einfluss metapragmatischer Urteile auf die Rektion von Präpositionen
No full textDie Arbeit untersucht den Einfluss der metapragmatischen Bewertung von Genitiv und Dativ auf die Nutzung der Kasus in Präpositionalphrasen. Die Variation zwischen Genitiv- und Dativrektion betrifft insbesondere Präpositionen, die noch nicht vollständig grammatikalisiert sind. Daher wurde das Phänomen bisher vor allem aus grammatikalisierungstheoretischer Sicht betrachtet. Dies greift jedoch zu kurz – vielmehr hat die metapragmatische Bewertung der Kasus entscheidenden Einfluss auf die Kasuswahl. Genitiv und Dativ werden von SprecherInnen sehr unterschiedlich bewertet: Der Genitiv gilt als Prestigekasus, der Dativ wird mit geringer Bildung und Umgangssprachlichkeit verbunden.
Die Arbeit untersucht daher einerseits Sprachideologien zu Dativ und Genitiv genauer und andererseits den Einfluss der metapragmatischen Bewertung auf die Kasuswahl. Hierfür wurden exemplarisch die ursprünglichen Genitivpräpositionen wegen und während sowie die ursprünglichen Dativpräpositionen dank und gegenüber untersucht. Zusätzlich wurde die Primärpräposition seit in die Studie aufgenommen. Die metagpragmatische Bewertung der Kasus wurde mitihlfe eines Akzeptabilitätstest und Abfragen freier Assoziationen untersucht, der Einfluss auf die Kasuswahl mithilfe von Produktionsdaten. An der umfangreichen Onlinestudie nahmen 400 Muttersprachler:innen des Deutschen teil. Die Arbeit ist damit die erste, die die metapragmatische Bewertung von Genitiv und Dativ in den Mittelpunkt stellt, systematisch erhebt und im Rahmen der Sprachideologieforschung diskutiert.
In der Studie zeigt sich deutlich, dass den untersuchten Rektionsvarianten eine ganze Reihe unterschiedlicher indexikalischer Bedeutungen zugeschrieben werden: Der Genitiv wird als formell angesehen und steht für hohe Bildung, gute Sprachkenntnisse, Arroganz, Professionalität und Verkrampftheit. Der Dativ gilt als informell und steht für geringe Bildung, mangelnde Sprachkenntnisse und Schlampigkeit. Die im Fragebogen erhobenen Produktionsdaten verdeutlichen den Einfluss dieser metapragmatischen Bewertungen und bestätigen das mangelnde Erklärungspotenzial der Grammatikalisierungstheorie: Sowohl bei ursprünglichen Genitiv- als auch bei ursprünglichen Dativpräpositionen lässt sich eine Tendenz zum Genitiv erkennen, insbesondere im formell gehaltenen Produktionsteil. Diese Ergebnisse sprechen dafür, dass die Variation der präpositionalen Rektion in hohem Maße von der metapragmatischen Bewertung der Kasus beeinflusst wird und die Varianten entsprechend ihrer sozialen Bedeutung genutzt werden.
Der Preis der gebundenen Ausgabe ist in Deutschland auf 45,00€ festgesetzt
Word stress in prosodic theory
No full textThis book is composed of four studies that all investigate different aspects of word stress in Papuan Malay, an Austronesian language spoken in eastern Indonesia. These aspects, in order of presentation, include acoustic realisation, auditory perception, lexical analyses and word disambiguation. The introduction provides the theoretical background against which the studies are undertaken. All studies are empirical in nature; they either report acoustic analyses, production or perception experiments, or corpus-based analyses. Taken together, the results of all studies pose a challenge to maintaining a stressless analysis of Papuan Malay. At the same time, the type of word stress that emerges from the reported results is unlike its common theoretical conception and therefore requires more work to be integrated in prosodic theory. Given the controversy on word stress in Indonesian languages, the results are always discussed and carefully interpreted in a cross-linguistic context. In this way, the current thesis extends and deepens our knowledge and understanding of word stress in prosodic theory
Teacher education for working in linguistically diverse classrooms: Nordic perspectives
No full textThis volume presents studies on aspects of teacher education that prepare teachers for working in linguistically diverse classrooms and schools in five Nordic countries; Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. This twin focus (teacher education in linguistically diverse contexts; and Nordic perspectives) makes the volume unique in its field, and contributes to international discussions on how teacher education can prepare preservice and in-service teachers for working with linguistically diverse student groups.
The volume includes contributions on:
Teacher education policies
Teacher educators’ perspectives on teacher education
Pre-service teacher perspectives on teacher education.
The ways in which teacher education prepares educators for working with newcomers and multilingual students has attracted considerable attention in recent years. This reflects the increasingly linguistically diverse nature of classrooms that teachers around the world meet, that is in turn, a direct result of intensified globalisation and transnational migration. Clearly, teacher education is crucial for successful implementation of educational provisions for multilingual students. Teacher knowledge, gained partly through teacher education, plays a central role in creating educational environments where multilingual students can thrive.
This volume focuses specifically on teacher education in a Nordic context, a region traditionally associated with progressive approaches in education based on principles of inclusivity, social justice and equal opportunity. In the twenty-first century, most Nordic countries have experienced increasing levels of migration. While neither multilingualism nor transnational migration are new phenomena in the region, geographical and social factors, as well as the ways humans communicate have helped make multilingualism more visible in the twenty-first century. Schools in the Nordic countries have had to act quickly and think flexibly to meet the needs of an increasingly linguistically and culturally heterogenous group of students. The ability of the Nordic countries to provide these students with “inclusive, equal education and a fair chance to start a new life” constitutes in some ways the ultimate test of the “Nordic model” of education. Investigating how this challenge is addressed in different forms of teacher education is the topic to which this volume turns its attention
The licensing and usage of topic drop in German
No full textThis book is concerned with the licensing and usage of the elliptical construction topic drop in German. The term topic drop refers to the omission of the preverbal constituent in declarative verb-second sentences, for example, the omission of the subject ich (‘I’) in the sentence Bin gleich zurück (‘Am right back’). Topic drop exists in most of the Germanic verb-second languages and typically occurs in spoken language and text types such as SMS, chats, notes, etc.
While much of the previous research has focused on individual specific properties of topic drop, often adopting a purely theoretical perspective, this book presents a systematic investigation of both the syntactic properties and usage conditions of topic drop based on empirical evidence from a corpus study and 12 acceptability rating studies.
The first part of the book investigates the licensing of topic drop, in particular its restriction to the preverbal ‘prefield’ position. The results of four rating studies on topic drop in different prefield configurations lead to a refined prefield condition based on proposals by Rizzi (1994) and Freywald (2020) that is independent of topicality. Moreover, they inform the discussion on the most suitable syntactic analysis of topic drop, supporting a PF-deletion approach.
The second part of the book presents and tests an information-theoretic account of topic drop usage that builds on the Uniform Information Density hypothesis (Levy & Jaeger 2007). In a corpus study and seven rating studies, several potential usage factors are investigated, including grammatical person and verb predictability. The results provide initial evidence suggesting that topic drop usage can be explained by general processing principles: The prefield constituent is omitted when it is redundant and realized overtly when it facilitates the processing of the following verb. This information-theoretic explanation is based on independently evidenced processing mechanisms, bundles isolated claims from the theoretical literature, and allows for a unified analysis of topic drop with other types of ellipsis and reduction
Rarities in phonetics and phonology: Structural, typological, evolutionary, and social dimensions
No full textRare phenomena play a key role in forming and challenging linguistic theory. This volume presents multi-faceted analyses of rarities in phonetics and phonology, from a wide variety of theoretical standpoints. Some contributions to the volume analyse language-specific rare features, placing them in a broader cross-linguistic context and looking at a sum of their phonological, phonetic, and evolutionary properties, at times also making connections to sociolinguistic factors. Others consider the same (or similar) phenomena from different analytical angles, with extensive cross-referencing, or take a broad analytical or typological stance towards rare phenomena and discuss what it means to be rare.
The volume provides a nuanced picture of phonetic and phonological rarities in genealogically diverse languages, mostly lesser-studied, from around the globe. Authors were encouraged to attempt to strike a middle ground between radical exoticisation of the rarities at hand (describing them in idiosyncratic terms) and radical normalisation (underplaying the rarity of the phenomena at hand). Highly theory-specific or technical terminology is avoided or explained carefully, in order to make the book maximally accessible for a wide typologically-minded audience
Rarities in phonetics and phonology: Structural, typological, evolutionary, and social dimensions
No full textRare phenomena play a key role in forming and challenging linguistic theory. This volume presents multi-faceted analyses of rarities in phonetics and phonology, from a wide variety of theoretical standpoints. Some contributions to the volume analyse language-specific rare features, placing them in a broader cross-linguistic context and looking at a sum of their phonological, phonetic, and evolutionary properties, at times also making connections to sociolinguistic factors. Others consider the same (or similar) phenomena from different analytical angles, with extensive cross-referencing, or take a broad analytical or typological stance towards rare phenomena and discuss what it means to be rare.
The volume provides a nuanced picture of phonetic and phonological rarities in genealogically diverse languages, mostly lesser-studied, from around the globe. Authors were encouraged to attempt to strike a middle ground between radical exoticisation of the rarities at hand (describing them in idiosyncratic terms) and radical normalisation (underplaying the rarity of the phenomena at hand). Highly theory-specific or technical terminology is avoided or explained carefully, in order to make the book maximally accessible for a wide typologically-minded audience
West meets East: Papers in historical lexicography and lexicology from across the globe
No full textLexicography, in its many forms, is a very old, practical discipline solving practical problems concerning word usage. The term “word” seems more appropriate than “language” in this context, as lexicography addresses more questions relating to what we now call lexicology. As with all areas of human endeavour, what developed gradually through trial and error has eventually been subjected to a theoretical framework. The role of historical lexicography is to look back on the development of these highly varied word lists to understand how we arrived at the tremendous variety that characterises practice throughout the world.
This volume is both a selection of expanded papers from one conference on historical lexicography and lexicology, held under the aegis of the International Society for Historical Lexicography and Lexicology (ISHLL) in Lorient, France, in May 2022, and also the first in a new book series dedicated to the field. The new series represents a collaboration between two sister associations, ISHLL and the Helsinki Society for Historical Lexicography (HSHL). The volume contains texts in both English and French that provide insights into dictionaries, their compilers and users using evidence from numerous languages across the globe. It is also diachronic, moving from topics on medieval usage to contemporary issues concerning open access and digital publishing in historical lexicography. The title reflects the global scope of its authors and content, encompassing Japan to the United States, Eastern Europe to the United Kingdom, and Portugal
Intensive language contact in the Caucasus: The case of Tsova-Tush
No full textTsova-Tush is an East Caucasian language spoken in one single village in Eastern Georgia by approximately 300 speakers. Since its early description, scholars have been intrigued by the high degree of linguistic influence from the Georgian language. This book has a threefold goal: (1) To contribute to the overall description of the Tsova-Tush language, by filling gaps in the previous literature in absence of a reference grammar. (2) To contrast Tsova-Tush constructions with functionally equivalent constructions in Chechen and Ingush, its closest relatives, and with Georgian, the language of wider communication which all Tsova-Tush speakers speak as a second language, in order to form hypotheses concerning which Tsova-Tush construction is inherited, and which has arisen under influence of Georgian. (3) To provide the most probable diachronic scenario of language contact, by looking at historical Tsova-Tush language data, as well as at its historical sociolinguistics.
This book provides a basic description of Tsova-Tush, in particular in the domain of spatial cases (which exhibit a two-slot system similar to Daghestanian languages), TAME categories (indentifying a Iamitive and a Past Subjunctive developing indirect evidential semantics), complex verbs, and subordination and clause-chaining (which in Tsova-Tush is finite).
In terms of language contact, this book concludes that (1) Tsova-Tush conforms to most established borrowing hierarchies and theories surrounding intensity of contact, except for the borrowing of a verbal inflection marker in a remarkably early stage of contact; (2) The Georgian influence that Tsova-Tush shows in sources from the 1850 suggest that a notable increase in bilingualism occured already at a point where there was little institutional or numeral dominance of surrounding the Georgian-language population. A change in ethnic self-identification can be the underlying factor for the early instances of contact-induced change
Negation in the world's languages II: Eurasia
No full textThe three-volume work Negation in the world's languages constitutes a major step forward in the comparative study of negation. It includes 43 chapters describing the negation system of one language each, following a typologically and functionally oriented questionnaire. The questionnaire is a comparative tool organized according to functional subdomains of negation. It highlights aspects of negation that have been found salient in typological research, such as standard negation, negation in non-declaratives, negation of stative predications and negative indefinite pronouns. At the same time it aims at a comprehensive coverage of the domain of negation and also allows room for language specific features to be highlighted. By using the questionnaire, the chapters have produced comparable datasets of the negation systems of a wide variety of languages from different families and areas. The contributions are also good examples of the fruitful cooperation between typologists and descriptive linguists in the context of diversity linguistics. On the one hand, typological knowledge is essential for language description as it helps descriptive linguists see their data in a broader perspective, ask new questions and come up with new analyses. On the other hand, typologists are crucially dependent on work done by descriptive linguists for their data collection.
The selection of languages is mainly a result of the response to an open call for papers, originally launched for the workshop on negation organized in connection with the Syntax of the World's Languages VIII conference in Paris in 2018. To balance the representation of different continents, authors working on languages from the areas that were initially least covered were invited to take part. The languages are distributed across the three volumes according to geography, following the macroareal divisions in the Glottolog. The first volume includes languages from Africa, the second one covers languages from Eurasia, and the third one brings together languages from Papunesia, Australia, North America and South America.
This book is complemented by volume I available at https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/495 and volume III available at https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/497