1,721,144 research outputs found
Pronominal anaphoric strategies in the West Saxon dialect of Old English
Full text linkBuilding on previous studies that have discussed pronominal referencing in Old English (Traugott 1992; van Gelderen 2013; van Kemenade & Los 2017), the present study analyses the pronominal anaphoric strategies of the West Saxon dialect of Old English based on a quantitative and qualitative study of personal and demonstrative pronoun usage across a selection of late (post c. AD 900) Old English prose text types. The historical data discussed in the present study provide important additional support for modern cognitive and psycholinguistic theory. In line with the cognitive/psycholinguistic literature on the distribution of pronouns in Modern German (Bosch & Umbach 2007), the information-structural properties of referents rather than the grammatical role of the pronoun's antecedent most accurately explain the personal pronoun vs demonstrative pronoun contrast in the West Saxon dialect of Old English. The findings also highlight how issues pertaining to style, such as the author–writer relationship, text type, subject matter and the conventionalism propagated by text tradition, influence anaphoric strategies in Old English
The Lexical Effects of Anglo-Scandinavian Linguistic Contact in Old English by Sara M. Pons-Sanz. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013.
Full text linkDo degree adverbs guide adjective learning cross-linguistically? A comparison of Dutch and Russian
No full textA fundamental question in language acquisition research is how language-specific input interacts with (pre-linguistic) universal concepts. In order to shed more light on this issue, the present paper reports the results of two experiments, set up as a modified version of Syrett, Kristen & Jeffrey Lidz. 2010. 30-month-olds use the distribution and meaning of adverbs to interpret novel adjectives. Language Learning and Development 6(4). 258–282. Their study has revealed that English-speaking 30-month-olds use degree adverbs for interpreting novel adjectives; the participants were more likely to assign a relative meaning (e.g., tallness) to a novel adjective if the adjective was modified by the booster very and to select an absolute interpretation (e.g., straightness) if the adjective was preceded the maximizer completely. The distribution in Dutch, although typologically similar to English, is obscured by phonological, morphological and semantic factors, which makes the Dutch degree adverbs heel ‘very’ and helemaal ‘completely’ less reliable cues to a language learner. In Russian, the booster očen’ ‘very’ is a reliable cue and the maximizer sovsem ‘completely’ is not, since it can be used with both absolute and negative-pole relative adjectives. The results demonstrate that children’s performance is related to the reliability of cues in their input. Russian-speaking toddlers only relied on the booster očen’, but not on the maximizer sovsem for assigning novel adjectives to semantic classes, and their Dutch-speaking peers did not show evidence of using degree adverbs for adjective learning at all. No evidence of interfering universal predispositions was found
A Native Origin for Present-Day English they, their, them
Full text linkIt is commonly held that Present-Day English they, their, them are not descended from Old English but derive from the Old Norse third-person plural pronouns þeir, þeira, þeim. This paper argues that the early northern English orthographic and distributional textual evidence agrees with an internal trajectory for the ‘þ-’ type personal pronouns in the North and indicates an origin in the Old English demonstratives þā, þāra, þām. The Northern Middle English third-person plural pronominal system was the result of the reanalysis from demonstrative to personal pronoun that is common cross-linguistically in Germanic and non-Germanic languages alike
The Design of Semi-lexicality: Evidence from Case and Agreement in the Nominal Domain
No full textThis dissertation tackles the topic of semi-lexicality, a term used to describe elements which show a mix of lexical and functional properties (Corver and van Riemsdijk 2001). Often, semi-lexical elements have a surface similarity to some lexical category (noun, adjective, verb), but have certain properties, usually functional, which prevent them from being treated with that category. Numerals present a classic example. In many languages, numerals show a similar morphosyntax to nouns or adjectives (Corbett 1978), but also have a number of idiosyncrasies which make the label “noun” or “adjective” unsatisfactory. This has led to many debates on how to treat the category of a numeral within and between languages. Examples of semi-lexicality challenge the traditional division of categories into nouns, verbs, and adjectives, and it is the aim of this dissertation to understand how semi-lexicality arises. This dissertation adopts an exoskeletal skeletal approach to categories (Borer 2005) and assumes that lexical categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives) are built from a root and the set of functional projections associated with that category. It argues that semi-lexicality is the special case where some root is also lexically specified for syntactic features, termed the Semi-Lexicality Hypothesis. The syntactic features act as instructions for the syntax, constraining how syntactic structure is built above and around the root. This, in turn, has consequences for how processes such as case and agreement are computed, producing semi-lexical effects. Under the Semi-Lexicality Hypothesis, semi-lexicality is the not-so-special case in which a root does not behave how a “lexical” root is expected to behave. The approach is defended through three case studies: Polish numerals, English quantificational nouns (lot, ton, bunch, number) and English kind-words (kind, type, sort). These case studies address phenomena of case and agreement in the nominal domain with binominal constructions (N1 (of) N2, e.g. a lot of people, these kinds of trophies). These case studies provide evidence for three “ways” of being semi-lexical, depending on what the syntactic feature of the root requires. Some semi-lexicality constrains the functional structure of the root. Pluralia tantum nouns, for example, require the projection of a plural #P (Number Phrase), while Polish numeral 1000 requires the absence of a γP (Gender Phrase). This affects their morphosyntax. Another type of semi-lexicality constrains the contexts where the semi-lexical root and its functional structure can be inserted. The English quantificational nouns lot and bunch, for example, only surface in indefinite environments, showing an incompatibility with definiteness. This affects their distribution. The final type of semi-lexicality interacts with how other roots in the environment project. In the English kind-construction, the second noun is prevented from projecting further functional structure once the kind-word is inserted (similar to restructuring in the verbal domain). This thesis predicts that a study of other examples of semi-lexicality should find similar types of patterns to the ones identified here. Once we understand what the canonical structural of a noun, verb, or adjective would be, it will be possible to explore how the specification of a functional feature interacts with the syntax
The binary-to-ternary rhythmic continuum in stress typology: layered feet and non-intervention constraints
Full text linkThis article presents a novel OT analysis of ternary rhythm, using the restrictive format of McCarthy (2003)'s categorical alignment constraints, which we will refer to as ‘non-intervention constraints’, using the terminology of Ellison (1994), and argues for the rehabilitation of internally layered feet in metrical representations (i.e. feet with one layer of recursion). By means of a computer-generated factorial typology, we demonstrate that the constraint set proposed here generates the full typology of binary and ternary rhythm. The resulting typology suggests that there is no absolute boundary between binary and ternary systems; rather, a continuum emerges, such that binary and ternary feet may coexist in rhythmic stress systems
How do infants disaggregate referential and affective pitch?
Full text linkInfants are faced with a challenge of disaggregating functions of pitch in the ambient language into affective, pragmatic or referential (the latter in tone languages only). This mini review discusses several factors that might facilitate the disaggregation of referential and affective pitch in infancy: acoustic characteristics of infant-directed speech, recognition of vocal affect, facial cues accompanying affective prosody, and lateralization of affective and referential prosody in the brain. It proposes two hypotheses concerning the role of audiovisual cues and brain lateralizatio
Listen to the beat: A cross-linguistic perspective on the use of stress in segmentation
No full textThe purpose of this thesis is to investigate the relation of word stress to word segmentation in a cross-linguistic perspective. While many studies have addressed this issue before, the current one takes a typologically broad cross-linguistic approach to the use of edge-aligned word stress in processing. The investigation is concerned with language-specificity, the direction of processing and the language-specific abstract nature of stress as a leading beat. The thesis concludes with an excursion into first language acquisition, regarding the issue of whether word stress can be inferred from the distribution of stress patterns in continuous speech. Word segmentation is the division of continuous speech into words. It is a non-trivial task, since spoken language is fast and words are not divided by pauses, despite listeners’ strong intuition to the contrary. This intuition originates in the listener’s use of language-specific means for segmentation. Word stress is likely one of these. The idea that stress can function to mark word boundaries dates back to a distinction made by Trubetzkoy (1939/1969) and the role of word stress in processing has been tested since some decades later (Taft 1984, Cutler & Norris 1988, and many more). However, the results do not disentangle language-specific from universal segmentation strategies. In the current thesis, a non-word-spotting experiment with a typologically broad selection of languages confirms the Language-Specific Metronome Hypothesis: listeners have unidirectional language-specific stress-based expectations in segmentation. An offline experiment in turn shows that the elimination of time pressure leads listeners to make bidirectional and optimized segmentation decisions, as articulated in the Language-Specific Metrical Grouping hypothesis. Word segmentation without any knowledge of words, as in first language acquisition, has a paradoxical relation to word stress. Word stress could be useful in the task, but how is the word stress system acquired without words? This part of the dissertation is concerned with the question whether it is in principle possible to acquire word stress from unsegmented speech. It is found that statistical relations between adjacent elements fail to capture word stress regularities and the relation of stress to the phrase boundary is more informative, although this differs between languages. Conservatively, it is difficult to acquire the word stress system from unsegmented speech
Pitch properties of infant-directed speech specific to word-learning contexts: A cross-linguistic investigation of Mandarin Chinese and Dutch
Full text linkThis study investigates the pitch properties of infant-directed speech (IDS) specific to word-learning contexts in which mothers introduce unfamiliar words to children. Using a semi-spontaneous story-book telling task, we examined (1) whether mothers made distinctions between unfamiliar and familiar words with pitch in IDS compared to adult directed speech (ADS); (2) whether pitch properties change when mothers address children from 18 to 24 months; and (3) how Mandarin Chinese and Dutch IDS differ in their pitch properties in word-learning contexts. Results show that the mean pitch of Mandarin Chinese IDS was already ADS-like when children were 24 months, but Dutch IDS remained exaggerated in pitch at the same age. Crucially, Mandarin Chinese mothers used a higher pitch and a larger pitch range in IDS when introducing unfamiliar words, while Dutch mothers used a higher pitch specifically for familiar words. These findings contribute to the language-specificity of prosodic input in early lexical development
Regional differences in the perception of a consonantal change in progress
Full text linkThis study aims at testing whether there are regional differences in the perception of the labiodental fricative contrast in Dutch. Previous production studies have shown that the devoicing of initial labiodental fricatives is a change in progress in the Dutch language area. We present the results of a speeded identification task in which fricative stimuli were systematically varied for two phonetic cues, voicing and duration. Listeners (n=100) were regionally stratified, and the regions (k=5) reflect different stages of this sound change in progress. Voicing turned out to be the strongest categorization cue in all regions; duration only played a minor role. Regional differences showed up in the perception of the consonantal contrast that matched regional differences in production reported in previous studies. The addition of random slopes in the mixed model regression showed the importance of within-regional variation
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