Leeds Working Papers in Linguistics and Phonetics
ISSN 1747-9339
Edited by Barry Heselwood
CONTENTS
- Editorial preface
- NATALIE BRABER
Langage and intercultural communication problems
abstract - full text - BETHAN L. DAVIES
Communities of practice: legitimacy, membership and choice
abstract - full text - LAWRENCE M. DAVIS, CHARLES L. HOUCK & CLIVE UPTON
Leeds 1966: some early evidence of “new RP”?
abstract - full text - SABINA GRAHEK
Reflexivity and argument-demotion marking in Slovene
abstract - full text - LISA HAMBURGER
The main motivating factors dictating language choices in three Jewish women
abstract - full text - KATRIN HIIETAM
Case marking in Estonian grammatical relations
abstract - full text - MIHO KAMATA
Acoustic investigation of English and Japanese [s] and [Θ] by English and Japanese speakers
abstract - full text
Editorial Preface
Leeds Working Papers in Linguistics and Phonetics is a series
produced by the Department of Linguistics and Phonetics at
the University of Leeds. Its aim is to publicise ongoing research
by staff and students of the Department. We are also pleased
to include contributions from colleagues in other departments
at the University of Leeds, from other institutions and from
visiting scholars who have made presentations in our research
seminar series. All submissions have been subject to peer
review.
The contributions in volume 10, covering the academic years 2003-04, are ordered alphabetically. The areas covered include dialectology (Davis, Houck & Upton), the morphology-syntax interface (Grahek, Hiietam), the phonetics of bilingualism (Kamata) and sociolinguistics (Braber, Davies, Hamburger).
Many thanks to all the contributors and reviewers.
Thanks also to Cécile De Cat for preparing the on-line version.
Barry Heselwood (Editor)
Language and
Intercultural Communication Problems
Natalie Braber
Intercultural communication problems can occur as a result
of the interaction between people from different cultures.
This article describes the difficulties encountered within
the German speech communities after unification in 1989. These
two speech communities, although sharing a language, found
that the separation of the countries led to unexpected problems
in unified Germany. Language was being used both consciously
and subconsciously to emphasise perceived and real problems
and to illustrate group identity and this was hampering the
building of new relationships.
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Communities of practice: Legitimacy, membership and choice
Bethan L. Davies
Communities of practice has emerged as a challenger to previous
sociolinguistic models such as speech communities and social
networks. The valorization of non-linguistic behaviours as
adding further explanatory power to sociolinguistic models
is timely. However, the types of self-constituting communities
of interest to sociolinguists are not the same as the communities
of learning studied by Lave & Wenger (1991) and Wenger (1998).
If this model is to become dominant, then the mechanisms by
which it models access, gate-keeping and its internal hierarchy
need development. Using Eckert's (1999) Belten High data,
and other work on adolescent talk, it is argued that gaining
legitimate peripheral participation is a matter of sanction
from within the hierarchy. Individuals do not have open access
to the communities based solely on their desire to be part
of that community and to take part in its practices. While
practices may define the community, the community determines
who has access to that practice. (Community of practice, speech
community, social networks, adolescents, nerds)
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Leeds 1966: Some early evidence of "new RP"?
Lawrence M. Davis, Charles L. Houck, and Clive Upton
A number of linguists have noted that Received Pronunciation
(RP) has changed during the last half century; however, they
have not always agreed on nature of this development. Phonological
data collected by Charles Houck in 1966-67 from residents
of Leeds might shed some light on this change. Of Houck's
twenty two subjects, two were born in and/or spent their formative
years in Durham, fourteen were from Yorkshire, one was from
Derbyshire, two were from Buckinghamshire and three from London.
In other words, with only five exceptions, all of the subjects
were northerners. The seventy-one item questionnaire used
by Houck elicited single word responses, from which tokens
of three vowels, SQUARE, PRICE and TRAP, are extracted for
examination. Houck's randomly sampled speakers exhibit a striking
lack of the most marked RP and regional speech characteristics.
It is suggested that the 1960s Leeds data, for the variables
observed, provide definite hints of today's modern RP in an
urban population of the period. These real time data raise
questions about what might be overly simplistic notions regarding
the development of RP, and the direction of its spread.
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Reflexivity and argument-demotion marking in Slovene
Sabina Grahek
This paper investigates Slovene constructions with the reflexive
morpheme se, which, despite their apparent diversity, can
be divided into only four major classes, corresponding to
four different uses of se (reflexive/reciprocal se, inherent
se, middle se and anticausative se). It is argued that these
four uses follow from the interaction of two features: whether
se is an internal argument or a demotion marker, and whether
se is attached to the verb in the syntax or the lexicon. The
paper attempts to systematically analyse all four types of
Slovene constructions with se in order to identify their distinctive
properties. The analysis reveals that each use of se has at
least one property not shared by other uses, thus providing
the evidence in support of the proposed classification. Moreover,
it is shown that several semantic and aspectual properties,
such as delimitedness, internal and external causation and
spontaneous occurrence of an event, play an important role
in the syntactic realisation of arguments in Slovene. In order
to account for the full range of uses of se, future research
will have to provide an explanation of how these properties
interact with other features of Slovene predicates with se.
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The main
motivating factors dictating language choices in three Jewish
women
Lisa Hamburger
This is an investigation into the motivating factors behind
the language choices of three Jewish women living in the Diaspora
community of Manchester. Interviews were carried out to assess
their various attitudes towards Yiddish, the heritage language
of Eastern European Jewry as well as other Jewish languages.
The findings of this study suggest that perpetuation of religion,
the Holocaust, assimilation and nationalism are all significant
factors influencing the diverse language choices of the three
women interviewed.
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Case marking
in Estonian grammatical relations
Katrin Hiietam
This paper takes a typological approach to the case marking
on subjects and objects in Estonian. The aim of the study
is to establish whether case marking can be seen as a straightforward
indicator of definiteness in Estonian grammatical relations.
The discussion is based on the Transitivity Hypothesis put
forward by Hopper & Thompson (1980). Hopper and Thompson see
transitivity as a cover term for various characteristics of
a clause that specify its degree of effectiveness. The current
paper illustrates that the Transitivity Hypothesis in broad
terms is able to account for the case variation of Estonian
subjects and objects. It also shows that the hypothesis needs
to make a more subtle distinction of possible noun phrases
constituting the subject relation in terms of Individuation.
In Hopper and Thompson's theory this characteristics has been
assigned to object arguments only. In conclusion, the current
study states that in Estonian case marking reflects the transitivity
of a clause, but is not a transparent indicator of grammatical
relations.
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Acoustic investigation of English and Japanese [s]
and [Θ] by English
and Japanese speakers
Miho Kamata
This paper is trying to reveal the differences/similarities of the acoustic characteristics of English and Japanese voiceless alveolar fricatives in their L1 and L2 speech and to know how the articulatory differences and the auditory impression would be reflected in acoustical properties such as their amplitude, duration, formant frequency, and spectral shape.
Three native British English speakers whose L2 is Japanese, and three native Japanese speakers whose L2 is English were asked to read out word lists in their first and second languages. As a result, it was found that there was an interesting prominence in the lower frequency region of the spectral shape that can be seen only in the spectra of alveolar fricatives uttered by the English speakers but not in those uttered by the Japanese speakers.
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