Proceedings Published by the LSA (Linguistic Society of America)
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Identifying, understanding, and supporting diverse first-generation scholars in linguistics
Get PDFOne in three college graduates is in the first generation of their family to complete a bachelor’s degree (NCES 2016), including 27% of doctoral students (CGS 2022) and 28% of tenure-track faculty (Morgan et al. 2022). Although there exists ample diversity of perspective and experience among first-generation students, relative to continuing-generation students, they are more likely to work full-time, care for dependents, and/or contribute to the income of their households. They are also more likely to be older, lower-income, racially minoritized, and to have graduated from community colleges. These factors provide first-generation linguists with unique forms of cultural and symbolic capital that often go undervalued in academia. We demonstrate how faculty can establish effective and nurturing mentoring relationships with first-generation students, how first-generation graduate students and faculty can maintain a work-life balance, and how to use tailor-made case studies to increase the visibility of generation-based educational inequity. Our perspective emphasizes structural barriers over individual shortcomings and uplifts first-generation voices in a variety of academic roles and institutional contexts within linguistics and allied disciplines
Indirect reciprocity in Japanese
Get PDFI shall discuss a special usage of the Japanese reciprocal expression otagai. In this usage, otagai does not occur as the object of a transitive verb and does not induce a reciprocal interpretation. Rather, it seems to modify the nominal in the subject position. I argue that otagai in such examples expresses reciprocity only indirectly in that the relation is not expressed overtly in the sentence in question. The relation is a psychological one in that the sentence as a whole says that each participant of the speech context knows that the other participant(s) have the property given by the overt predicate in the sentence. This, then, entails that each of them has this same property since know is a factive predicate. Since each participant has to be in a position to assess what the other member(s) are thinking of, the group of people in question must know each other well. This means that the nature of reciprocity is essentially the same in English and Japanese except that otagai could introduce a covert psychological relation to satisfy the reciprocity requirement. The article also discusses the similarity between the indirect use of otagai and the indirect passive in Japanese
Representation of the history of linguistics in American college textbooks, 1950–2020
Get PDFMany students of linguistics get their first classroom exposure to the field in courses with titles like Introduction to Linguistics or Survey of Linguistics. Such courses commonly employ textbooks that communicate the scope and methods of the discipline, and tacitly set students’ standards for what the discipline values. This article examines textbooks that have been employed from the 1950s to the early 21st century in U.S. college courses that introduce students to linguistics. The goal is to bring to light how the how the presence—or absence—of historical material shapes students’ assumptions about the value of the history of linguistics.
Note: A video of the session in which this was presented and the associated slide deck are available in the foreword to this issue.
Introducing linguistics to Atlanta high school students by opening linguistics talks through Zoom for everyone
Get PDFIn this paper, we detail our practice in promoting linguistics to high schools through a sustainable and efficient approach. By considering the interests of high school students and educators in the planning of our university’s linguistics colloquium, and by providing access to these colloquiums via Zoom, we aimed to enhance engagement and outreach. In the Spring of 2023 and 2024, we hosted colloquium talks accessible to high school students and educators that focused on different topics, such as linguistics in the tech industry, linguistics in curriculum design, and language acquisition of sign languages. The initiative proved successful, as demonstrated by the high demand for these events and the enthusiastic feedback from participants. This approach offered high school students and educators a unique opportunity to explore linguistics and its practical applications without the need to travel to university campuses or plan additional events, while also allowing college educators to gain valuable insights into the perspectives of high school educators and students on linguistics education
Bidialectal acoustic realization of tones is influenced by dialect experience and homophone status
Get PDFWhile evidence shows that interlingual cognates can enhance cross-language phonetic assimilation in production, it is reasonable to assume that interlingual homophones can enhance cross-language phonological interference. Distinct from cognates, interlingual homophones do not share semantic content, which may affect the degree of co-activation observed across languages. The present study examines this hypothesis in a group of bidialectal speakers, whose lexicon consists of a large number of inter-dialectal homophones. Productions of Chengdu Mandarin tones by Chengdu Mandarin and Standard Mandarin speakers were examined in a word naming task. The results showed that bidialectal speakers’ native tone productions were influenced by their experience in speaking Standard Mandarin as well as the inter-dialectal homophone status of the lexical item. Additionally, both of these influences were modulated by the structure of the inter-dialect tone categories. The findings support the similarity between bidialectal and bilingual speech processing and provide novel evidence for bilingual speech models from the level of suprasegmental processing.
Turning night into day: Milieu and semantic change in Albanian
Get PDFWe bring to light here two case studies from Albanian that show interesting semantic change, and we argue that in order to understand the particular changes involved, the concept of “milieu” (Christiansen and Joseph 2016: 56-7) should be invoked
A parallel corpus-based exploration of deflected agreement in Arabic varieties
Get PDFAgreement in modern Arabic varieties exhibits much variation despite sharing similar features, such as feminine singular (deflected) agreement with plural controllers. The presence of deflected agreement has been attributed both to retention (Bettega and D’Anna 2022) and to a process of loss and reborrowing from Modern Standard Arabic (Al-Sharkawi 2014; Versteegh 1984}. Using evidence from a multi-dialectal parallel corpus, I argue that neither of these accounts adequately explains the variation present in the dialects. This study highlights the need to understand the language-specific changes in modern Arabic varieties and the utility of parallel corpora for exploring morphosemantic variation
Graded complementarity in the resolution of pronouns and reflexives
Get PDFThis paper presents an experimental evaluation of how pronoun and reflexive resolution preferences in English vary across different syntactic environments. Five structures were tested: coarguments, picture noun phrases, prepositional phrases, coordination, and comparatives. Results show that reflexives display a general preference for structurally local antecedents, but the strength of the preference varies significantly by environment; pronouns display a similarly variable, but stronger preference for nonlocal antecedents. Our findings suggest that complementarity between pronouns and reflexives may be a gradient phenomenon, with the robust complementarity observed in coargument anaphora occupying the endpoint of a graded continuum
Foreword: Special issue of Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 2024
Get PDFThis special issue highlights presentations from an organized session at the 2024 annual meeting of the LSA celebrating the LSA’s Centennial. The goal of the session, and consequently of this issue, was to provide a vision for what the future of linguistics pedagogy can be like by featuring evidence-based instructional approaches already in use by linguists, reflecting on these approaches and the challenges that they aim to address, and building capacity for more linguists to engage in these practices and improve our students’ learning experiences
On the modeling of live possibilities
Get PDFIn this paper, I evaluate two ways to model the notion of live possibilities: the supervaluation-based approach, and the alternative-based approach. I argue that the alternative-based approach is more promising in fulfilling certain desirable constraints governing live possibilities. However, the existing alternative-based accounts fail to be fully satisfactory. To address this inadequacy, I devise a new alternative-based framework and explore its logical features