1,720,978 research outputs found
A word in a word: social perceptions of expletive-infixation
No full textDespite being one of the most ‘offensive’ swearwords in the English language, fuck (and its various derivations) is also, paradoxically, one of the most frequently uttered swearwords (Beers Fägersten 2012). A possible reason for this is that fuck can express a range of different pragmatic functions (McEnery & Xiao 2004) and social meanings (see Author 1, 2022 for a review), depending on language-external factors such as speaker gender (DeFrank & Kahlbaugh, 2019). Comparatively underexplored is the role of language-internal factors in the social meanings of fuck. This chapter examines the effect of expressive morphology (Zwicky & Pullum 1987), in the form of infixation, on how fuck is socially evaluated. The research aims to inform our understanding of how the social meanings associated with particular words can depend on their form and integration with other words. The chapter details a visual matched-guise task in which 139 participants rated hypothetical speakers on scales of funny, sarcastic, happy, and rude. Results suggest that the presence and well-formedness of swearing infixation influenced responses across all scales. The chapter discusses these findings in relation to previous work linking the attribution of social meanings like funny to a word’s structural markedness (Dingemanse & Thompson 2020)
The interpretation of ambiguous trimorphemic words in sentence context
Full text linkMany trimorphemic words are structurally and semantically ambiguous. For example, unlockable can either be un-lockable (can’t be locked) or unlock-able (can be unlocked). Which interpretation is preferred and whether prior sentence context affects the initial interpretation is not clear from prior research. The present experiment embedded ambiguous trimorphemic words in sentence context and manipulated whether prior context disambiguated the meaning or not and examined the pattern of fixation durations on the ambiguous word and the remainder of the text. The results indicated that the unlock-able interpretation was preferred; moreover, prior context did not exert a significant effect until the eyes had initially exited from the target word
Swear(ING) ain't play(ING) The interaction of taboo language and the sociolinguistic variable
Full text linkSwearwords influence social evaluation of a speaker in a variety of ways depending on social context (Jay & Janschewitz (2008), The pragmatics of swearing. Journal of Politeness Research. Language, Behaviour, Culture, 4(2), 267–288). Little attention has been paid to the role of linguistic variation in social perceptions of swearing, however. This paper presents two experiments that test the role of sociolinguistic variation in the social evaluation of swearing. Experiment 1 is a variant categorization task, in which participants categorized acoustically ambiguous swearwords and phonetically matching neutral and nonwords as ending in either “-ing” or “-in.” Results suggest that swearwords led participants to hear “-ing” on ambiguous items. Experiment 2 is a matched-guise task in which listeners heard a passage featuring a mix of swearwords and neutral “-ing” words in one of four conditions: fully velar (All-ing), fully alveolar (All-in), only swearwords as velar (Swear-ing), or only neutral words as velar (Swear-in). Participants rated speakers on Likert scales (Schleef et al. (2017), Regional diversity in social perceptions of (ING). Language Variation and Change, 29(1), 29–56). Participants again displayed a tendency towards hearing “-ing” on swearwords. As a result, responses to the Swear-in guises were similar to those for the All-ing guises. The consequences for our understanding of swearing, sociolinguistic perception and cognition, and style, are discussed.</p
British Jews and Antisemitism:A crisis not yet understood
Full text linkThis essay attempts to understand the attitudes held by Jews in the UK towards antisemitism and Israel/Palestine. I critique recent surveys of antisemitism in the UK, asking what stops young Jews in particular from taking a progressive stand on these issues
Nothing much for kinds
Full text linkWhether the kind/object distinction is grammatically encoded or extra-grammatical in nature has been up for debate. This paper reviews a recent grammatical approach by Borik & Espinal (2012) that proposes that grammatical number also encodes a realization operator, a kind-to-object type-shift, with reference to kinds ultimately deriving from numberless definites and subkind interpretations emerging from a predicatedriven object-to-subkind type-shift. I argue that this approach to subkinds suffers faces conceptual and empirical challenges, focusing particularly on the unavailability of subkind interpretations for English mass quantifiers and Dutch mass diminutives which reveals their deep connection to the count system of the grammar. I propose severing grammatical number and realization, with the latter emerging from its own functional structure, DimP. After adopting this analysis, I demonstrate that several other constructions cross-linguistically appear to behave like English mass quantifiers or Dutch diminutives and propose a typology, suggesting that two possible but unattested grammatical patterns fail to emerge because no language has a dedicated functional structure for kind interpretation. Ultimately, this analysis proposed suggests that we are cognitively constituted to think about kinds as types that are independent of their token objects and grammatically structured to encode a kind type inside nominals, even those that are object-referring
Magnetoencephalographic investigations of morphological identity and irregularity
No full textThesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 2004.Includes bibliographical references (p. 105-111).This thesis addresses the longstanding debate in the psycholinguistics literature about the correct way to characterize the psychological status of morphological relatedness and irregular allomorphy. The model argued for here is one in which the mental lexicon consists of lexical roots (sound -meaning pairs that are arbitrary in the Saussurian sense, such as CAT: 'feline'/kaet/) and functional morphemes (affixes such as the plural marker -s, that carry purely grammatical information). Complex words are assembled by the grammar out of these roots and affixes. We argue that this is true even for words like "gaze" which don't clearly separate into two pieces, but are abstractly parallel to "walked," which does. Evidence for this full, across the board decomposition model is provided in a series of priming experiments that use magnetoencephalography to measure the earliest stages of lexical processing. Both regular and irregular allomorphs of a root are shown to access their root equally. These results, then, are incompatible both with connectionist models which treat all morphological relatedness as similarity, and with dual mechanism models which argue that regular allomorphy and irregular allomorphy arise from completely different systems, and only regular allomorphy involves root activation and composition. In this model, morphological relatedness is argued to be an identity relation between various allomorphs of a single, shared root, and is therefore clearly distinguished from semantic and phonological relatedness, which merely involve similarity between the meaning, or form, of different roots. The experiments reported in this dissertation support this model: the neural responses evoked by identity are significantly distinct from(cont.) the neural responses evoked by similarity.by Linnaea C. Stockall.Ph.D
Processing (the) events: Lexical and structural ingredients of inner aspect
Full text linkWhat is the aspectual representation of verbs and how is that representation used to construct the aspectual interpretation of a sentence during online sentence processing? In this paper we use psycholinguistic techniques to address both these questions. In the first experiment, a processing correlate of telicity is identified by manipulating verbal telicity (inherently telic vs. unspecified verbs) and direct object quantization, finding a principled delay in the use of these verbs’ aspectual representation in which both the verb and its internal argument are required before the comprehension system can commit to a telic or atelic interpretation. In the second experiment, this processing correlate reveals no differences in processing between inherently atelic and unspecified verbs, delayed or otherwise. We argue that together these experiments support theories that distinguish between two verb classi- fications, a class of inherently telic verbs and a class of unspecified verbs, but not those that include a class of inherently atelic verbs
British Jews and Antisemitism:A crisis not yet understood
Full text linkThis essay attempts to understand the attitudes held by Jews in the UK towards antisemitism and Israel/Palestine. I critique recent surveys of antisemitism in the UK, asking what stops young Jews in particular from taking a progressive stand on these issues
Genericity, exceptions and domain restriction: experimental evidence from comparison with universals
No full textGenericity, exceptions and domain restriction: experimental evidence from comparison with universals
Full text linkGeneric statements are characteristically associated with two features that distinguish them from universally quantified statements: first, they are tolerant of exceptions, and, second, they are not associated with any overt quantifier or determiner. We present data from a timed Truth Value Judgement Task (TVJT) that investigates the consequences of these two features for processing. We discuss these results in the context of recent proposals that generic interpretations are a more \u27default\u27 or \u27basic\u27 kind of interpretation than universal quantification and argue that our results do not support these proposals
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