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Punctuation is prosody: Making historic transcriptions of Karuk accessible for revitalization and research
No full textTranscription of utterance-level prosody is difficult; historically, many field linguists have employed standard punctuation of their own language to represent prosodic boundaries in the language of study, with varying degrees of consistency within and across languages. A standardized system such as ToBI (Beckman et al. 2005) is appropriate for phonetic analysis, but requires a level of detail and knowledge of a language's structure that is impractical in many fieldwork situations, and is not accessible to language learners.
In the case of Karuk, a highly endangered language of northern California, a great deal of historic transcriptions of textual material in the language exists. Because few first-language speakers of Karuk remain, historic records of the language are an important resource for ongoing language revitalization efforts by the Karuk tribe, as well as for theoretical linguistic research on the language. However, differing methods of transcribing utterance boundaries and prosody by past researchers has made extracting this type of data from the archival materials a challenge. For instance, Harrington (1930; 1932b) transcribed much larger units as single sentences than Bright (1957) did, and while Bright was explicit about the intonational types his punctuation represented, how Harrington used punctuation was unclear. In this paper, we ask first whether the speakers recorded by these two linguists were, in fact, using equivalent intonation and groupings of utterances. Confirming that their speech is indeed comparable, we then strive to relate the two transcription systems to each other and to current speakers' language. Utilizing archival recordings and transcriptions, we create a key that allows us to translate between the two historical transcription systems and modern transcription conventions.
Gaining a better understanding of the phonetics of prosody represented in historic materials will be helpful in language revitalization efforts. It is obvious that the prosody of Karuk is significantly different from that of English. However, without a vibrant speech community, it is difficult to transmit this aspect of a language, and even to determine what the patterns to be taught are.
A better understanding of prosodic boundaries in Karuk is also expected to shed light on theoretical questions regarding Karuk word order. It is not clear which word orders are permissible, and results of elicitation have been confounding due to conflicting judgments, especially in the post-verbal position. It is likely that conflicting judgments are related to different prosodic boundaries which have been previously overlooked.
References
Beckman, M. E., Hirschberg, J., & Shattuck-Hufnagel, S. (2005). The original ToBI system and the evolution of the ToBI framework. In S.-A. Jun (ed.) Prosodic Typology -- The Phonology of Intonation and Phrasing
Bright, William. 1957. The Karok language. University of California Publications in Linguistics 13. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Harrington, John P. 1907-1959. The papers of John Peabody Harrington. Ms., National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Microfilm.
Harrington, John P. 1930. Karuk texts. International Journal of American Linguistics 6(2). 121-161.
Harrington, John P. 1932a. Tobacco among the Karuk Indians of California. Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 94.
Harrington, John P. 1932b. Karuk Indian myths. Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 107
Documenting, analyzing, and teaching the grammar of direction in Karuk
Get PDFWe are developing an online resource to support research, teaching, learning, and revitalization of Karuk (Hokan, northern California). To illustrate the value of integrating a morphologically analyzed lexical and text database with a syntactically parsed text corpus, we discuss how research on the morphosyntax of directional suffixes can inform pedagogy
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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Because Meaning: Language Change through Iconicity in Internet Speak
Get PDFVariations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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Association with Foci
Get PDFAssociation with focus has, since Jackendoff's (1972) dissertation, been the object of intense study. Most researchers, however, have concentrated on explaining the semantic variability of only and even, whose truth conditions vary with the position of focus. I take as my starting point another property of associating expressions. Both only and even restrict the distribution of focus, a property that, I argue, they share with a range of other lexical items. But, while only and even take a single argument and require there to be a focus somewhere inside that argument, expressions like adversative but and let alone take two arguments, thereby associating with two foci.Associating expressions, of both the one- and two-place varieties, have two things in common. First, they are crosscategorial in their syntax, taking arguments of a variety of different types. Second, they evoke multiple alternatives—different possible answer to a question. Together, these two independent properties of associating expressions interact with the question under discussion (Roberts 1996, 2004) to give rise to the restriction on the distribution of focus. My approach to association with focus departs from previous ones in important ways. Associating expressions neither make reference to focus in their lexical entry (Rooth 1985, 1992, 1996) nor to the question under discussion (Beaver and Clark 2008), providing a more satisfying answer to the question of why only some expressions associate with focus
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The Syntax and Semantics of Do So Anaphora
Get PDFDo so anaphora is a fairly widely used in English, but has received relatively little treatment in the literature (especially when compared with verb phrase ellipsis). There are, how- ever, two aspects of this anaphor that have gained prominence: i) its use as a test for constituency within the verb phrase, and ii) the semantic restriction it places on its antecedent. Though these two properties have been the most prominent, their analyses have not been uncontroversial. In this dissertation, I investigate these properties and give them a more complete analysis. The first part of the dissertation is devoted to a discussion of the the use of do so as a test for constituency in the verb phrase, and the second part is devoted to understanding the semantic restriction that do so places on its antecedent.The behavior of do so anaphora has been used to argue both hierarchical structure (Lakoff and Ross 1976) and flat structure within the verb phrase (Culicover and Jackendoff 2005). In chapter 2, however, I argue that do so does not have any bearing on the debate about the internal structure of the verb phrase. The arguments put forth by these authors are predicated on do so being a surface anaphor in terms of Hankamer and Sag (1976). Instead I argue that do so is in fact a deep anaphor and that its purported surface anaphor properties fall out from independent semantic and pragmatic properties of the anaphor. As a deep anaphor, do so does not replace any structure in the verb phrase, but rather forms a verb phrase in its own right from the beginning of the derivation. Therefore, the use of do so to argue for or against hierarchical structure in the verb phrase has been misguided.I approach the semantic restriction that do so places on its antecedent from two angles. In chapter 3, I review the previous analyses of this restriction, and test their claims against a corpus of over 1000 naturally occurring examples extracted from the American National Corpus. None of the previous analyses are supported by the data, and I present a novel analysis that utilize three semantic parameters (agentivity, aktionsart, stativity) to predict which antecedents are possible with do so. One striking property of the counterexamples found in the corpus is that they instantiate particular syntactic structures. The majority of them contain do so in a nonfinite form (usually in the infinitive), and in others, the antecedent is contained in a relative clause modifying the subject of do so. In chapter 4, I present experimental evidence that shows that these two syntactic environments lessen the effects of the restriction that do so normally places on its antecedent. I attribute this amelioration of the semantic restriction to the unavailability of verb phrase ellipsis in these syntactic environments. The analysis falls out from the nonmonotonic interaction of the two restrictions: the syntactic restrictions on ellipsis force the use do so to the detriment of the semantic restriction that do so normally places on its antecedent. I then situate this amelioration effect into the typology of coercion effects in general and argue that do so displays a novel type of coercion: subtractive coercion
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Aspect, Modality, and Tense in Badiaranke
Get PDFMost formal analyses of the semantics of tense, aspect, and modality (TAM) have been developed on the basis of data from a small number of well-studied languages. In this dissertation, I describe and analyze the TAM system of Badiaranke, an Atlantic (Niger-Congo) language spoken in Senegal, Guinea, and Guinea-Bissau, which manifests several cross-linguistically unusual features. I develop a new semantic proposal for Badiaranke TAM that explains its distinctive properties while also building on the insights of earlier analyses of TAM in more commonly studied languages.Aspect in Badiaranke has two initially surprising features. First, the perfective is used to talk not only about past events (as expected), but also about present states (not expected). Second, the imperfective is used to talk not only about ongoing or habitually recurring eventualities (as expected), but also about future and epistemically probable eventualities, as well as in consequents of conditionals and counterfactuals (not expected). I develop a modal explanation of these patterns, relying on the distinction between settled pasts and branching futures (Dowty 1977, Kaufmann et al. 2006) as well as Kratzer's (1981, 1991) proposal for contextually varying modal bases and ordering sources. I also describe and analyze a number of other aspects in Badiaranke whose distribution and semantics are affected by those of the perfective and imperfective. On my treatment, Badiaranke aspect is inextricably with modality.Tense is less central to Badiaranke than aspect, in the sense that all Badiaranke sentences are marked for aspect, but not all are marked for tense. Nonetheless, Badiaranke has two distinct past tense suffixes. I argue that both suffixes express a type of discontinuous past tense (in the sense of Plungian and van der Auwera (2006)); specifically, they shift perspective time into the past and implicate that the eventuality is no longer relevant at some later time. The difference between the two is modal: one appears in irrealis environments (where the eventuality is not necessarily realized in the matrix world of evaluation) while the other appears in realis environments.Because of the modal nature of Badiaranke aspect, aspect interacts in interesting ways with modal verbs, which themselves take aspect marking in this language. For epistemic modals, aspect on the modal itself makes no detectable semantic difference, while aspect on the modal's complement affects modal orientation (in the sense of Condoravdi (2002)). For deontic modals, perfective marking triggers the presupposition that the subject is capable of carrying out the action, while imperfective marking expresses simple permission (or obligation). I show that my semantics for Badiaranke aspect, together with well-founded assumptions about the relative scopes of aspect and modality, successfully accounts for these interactions between modal verbs and aspect.The dissertation is intended to be of interest both to formal semanticists, in that it contributes evidence about the semantics of TAM cross-linguistically, and to Africanists and typologists, in that it describes in detail part of the grammar of an under-described African language
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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