Plant Series, No. 1. Manuscript MS408. Gerard Cheshire
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004797
September 2019
The plants individually described in Manuscript MS408 have all been identified as species from the environs of the Mediterranean Basin, in accordance with the location of origin for the manuscript. This series of papers presents each plant species separately with a translation of its accompanying text and any relevant cross-reference information. In addition to the linguistic value, there is plenty of historical, cultural and scientific knowledge to be gleaned from each of these manuscript pages, so they will be of interest to scholars from various disciplines.
Domains and Prominence in Nasal Harmonization of Maxakalí Loanwords Mário Coelho da Silva, Andrew Ira Nevins, James White
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004795
September 2019
We examine the patterns of loanword adaptation in Maxakalí, a Macro-Jê language of Brazil, in importing loans from Brazilian Portuguese, with respect to the introduction of nasality and nasal harmony, based on a corpus of 18 speakers. Employing MaxEnt modeling of quantitative trends enabled the comparison and analysis of certain recurrent trends, even if not exceptionless, and the potentially additive effects of their interaction. The results reveal that nasal harmonization, modeled as set of markedness constraints, is greatly enforced within syllable rimes, and strongly enforced within syllables, but shows little role for syllable-to-syllable harmony, demonstrating that harmonization is preferred within tighter prosodic domains. Word-initial consonants always retain their nasality or orality from Portuguese, and stressed vowels always preserve their nasality. These latter effects uphold the role of prominent positions in maintaining contrasts within loanword phonology. The overall patterns of loanword harmonization find convergence with certain characteristics within Maxakalí phonology itself.
A Note on the Exclusivity of Human Language Sibansu Mukherjee
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004794
September 2019
Human language is exclusive among all primary vocal communicating tools used in the kingdom animalia. However, there are debates on what makes human language exclusive. Among these debates, the most persuasive view is that human language is unique by the virtue of infinite syntactic recursion, which is universal to all human languages. The latest development of this view is backed by certain biological investigation and duly criticized by other scholars. In this paper, I argue that language is not a single product of a solitary process of evolution of the so-called linguistic species Homo sapiens. Thus, syntactic recursion may not be the universal aspect of all human languages. Syntactic recursion can be imagined only as an essential property of some developed languages that may not always be empirically observable. To consider human language as exclusive, I argue that human language in-itself is such a field where context-specific choice-based linguistic expressions are made up of certain syntagmatic relationships. These are substituted paradigmatically, instead of imagining language as a result of syntactic recursiveness, the fundamental function of universal grammar.
Tsimshianic Clarissa Forbes
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004784
June 2019
[This is a language sketch of the Tsimshianic family oriented toward non-specialists, with reference to topics in phonetics, phonology, syntax, and semantics.] Languages of the Tsimshianic family, spoken in the Skeena River watershed of British Columbia, share a number of properties with other languages of the Pacific northwest region. Their sound inventories feature glottal consonants, and they permit clusters of consonants without vowels. Their word order is verb-first (VSO), and a central property of the grammar is a robust system of plural marking on both nouns and verbs. This chapter reviews topics in the sound system, word formation, and sentence building. In particular, I review two topics that commanded the majority of linguists’ attention until about a decade ago: glottalized sounds, and the agreement/pronoun system. This second is a complicated core area of the grammar, particularly for an L1 English learner, and is perhaps unique to Tsimshianic: linguists have described the pattern as one of ‘pivoting ergativity’ across two types of clauses. In the course of discussing sounds, words, and sentences, I also briefly review some more recent lines of linguistic work of interest to language learning and teaching: the placement of stress, mismatches between words and syntactic units, plural marking, tense and perspective, and ways to form questions and convey emphasis.
Prominence Augmentation via Nasalization in Brazilian Portuguese Andrew Ira Nevins, Paula Pinheiro Costa
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004769
August 2019
This article aims to demonstrate that dialectal and idiolectal variants of Brazilian Portuguese that exhibit rhotic metathesis (e.g. vidro > vrido ‘glass’), spontaneous nasalization of high vowels (as in diachronic hibernum > inverno ‘winter’ and non-standard ingreja ‘church’), and pretonic vowel lowering of mid-vowels are all instantiations of the same process: prominence-boosting in stressed, secondary-stressed, or word-initial positions.
Cumulativity by default in phonotactic learning Canaan Breiss
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004747
August 2019
An ongoing debate in phonology concerns whether the grammar is better characterized by frameworks which use strictly-ranked constraints (such as Optimality Theory, “OT”) or weighted constraints (Harmonic Grammar, “HG”). This paper uses a series of Arti^Lcial Grammar Learning experiments focused on static phonotactics to probe an empirical domain where OT and HG make different empirical predictions: cumulative constraint interactions, also known as “gang effects”. OT does not allow gang effects by default, while HG permits ganging automatically. I show that learners exhibit spontaneously emerging ganging behavior in a poverty-of-the-stimulus environment, providing experimental data supporting weighted-constraint theories of phonological grammar.
Language Development during Interstellar Travel Andrew Mckenzie, Jeffrey Punske
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004743
April 2019
This paper explores the consequences that language change might trigger in the languages of crew members during a long journey in space or interplanetary settlement. Languages drift apart as communities grow more isolated from each other, so the long isolation of a traveling community may lead to enough difference to render its language unintelligible to the original community it left. This problem may compound as later vessels bring new crews with their own changed languages to mix with those from earlier crews. We discuss various aspects that contribute to language change, through comparison to historical Earthbound cases involving some of these aspects, such as the Polynesian settlement of far-flung Pacific islands, and dialect development in relatively isolated European colonies. We also weigh the effects of multilingualism amongst the crew, with or without a common lingua franca in use, as well as the effects of time and the role that children play in language change and creation. As we lay out possible outcomes, we also suggest possible methods of shaping this development within limits.
Phonological Variation and Prosodic Representation: Clitics in Portuguese-Veneto Contact Natália Brambatti Guzzo, Guilherme Duarte Garcia
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004726
August 2019
In a variety of Brazilian Portuguese in contact with Veneto, variable vowel reduction in clitic position can be partially accounted for by the phonotactic profile of clitic structures. We show that, when phonotactic profile is controlled for, vowel reduction is statistically more frequent in non-pronominal than in pronominal clitics, which indicates that these clitic types are represented in separate prosodic domains. We propose that this difference in frequency of reduction between clitic types is only possible due to contact with Veneto, which, unlike standard BP, does not exhibit vowel reduction in clitic position. Contact thus provides speakers with the possibility of producing clitic vowels without reduction, and the resulting variation is used to signal prosodic distinctions between clitic types. We show that the difference in frequency of reduction is larger for older speakers, who are more proficient in Veneto and use the language regularly.
Cross-linguistic and language-specific sound symbolism: Pokémonastics Stephanie Shih, Jordan Ackerman, Noah Hermalin, Sharon Inkelas, Hayeun Jang, Jessica Johnson, Darya Kavitskaya, Shigeto Kawahara, Miran Oh, Rebecca Starr, Alan Yu
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004725
August 2019
The cross-linguistic prevalence of sound symbolism raises key questions about the universality versus language-specificity of sound symbolic correspondences. One challenge to studying cross-linguistic sound symbolic patterns is the difficulty of holding constant the real-world referents across cultures. In this study, we address the challenge of cross-linguistic comparison by utilizing a rich, cross-linguistic dataset drawn from a multilingual entertainment franchise, Pokémon. Within this controlled universe, we compare the sound symbolisms of Pokémon names (pokemonikers) in six languages: Japanese, English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, and Russian. Our results show that the languages have a tendency to encode the same attributes with sound symbolism, but crucially also reveal that differences in sound symbolism are rooted in language-specific structural and lexical constraints.