Leeds Working Papers in Linguistics and Phonetics
ISSN 1747-9339
Edited by Barry Heselwood and Cécile De Cat
CONTENTS
- Editorial preface
- Bethan Davies
Least collaborative effort or least individual effort: Examining the evidence
abstract - full text - pp. 1-20 - Sally Johnson and Tommaso Milani
To legislate or not to legislate? Language politics and legitimation crises in Germany and Sweden
abstract - full text - pp. 21-43 - Julia Snell
'Give us my shoe back': The pragmatic functions of singular us
abstract - full text - pp. 44-60 - Mark J. Jones
Glottals and grammar: Definite article reduction and morpheme boundaries
abstract - full text - pp. 61-77 - Esther Asprey
Investigating residual rhoticity in a non-rhotic accent
abstract - full text - pp. 78-101 - Sujunya Wilawan
Lexical cohesion and metacognitive strategy training: An integrated approach to main idea comprehension
abstract - full text - pp. 102-124 - Barry Heselwood and Zahra Mahmoodzade
Vowel onset characteristics as a function of voice and manner contrasts in Persian coronal stops
abstract - full text - pp. 125-142 - Melinda Whong
Seeking consensus: Generative linguistics and language teaching
abstract - full text - pp. 143-155 - Wei Zhang
Alternation of [n] and [l] in Sichuan dialect, Standard Mandarin and English: A single-case study
abstract - full text - pp. 156-173
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 former students, colleagues in other departments at the University of Leeds and from other institutions, from visiting scholars, and from those who have made presentations in our research seminar series. All submissions have been subject to peer review.
Because of rising production costs, last year we decided no longer to produce the Working Papers in hard copy. We hope that the electronic on-line version will continue to reach a wide readership.
The contributions in volume 12 are arranged in the order of receipt of the revised text. They cover pragmatics (Davies; Snell), dialectal phonology (Jones; Asprey), language politics (Johnson & Milani), second-language comprehension (Wilawan), instrumental phonetics (Zhang; Heselwood & Mahmoodzade), and theoretical linguistics in relation to language teaching (Whong), Many thanks to all the contributors and reviewers.
Barry Heselwood and Cécile De Cat (Editors)
Least collaborative effort or least individual effort: Examining the evidence
Bethan L. Davies
In Clark’s Collaborative theory, least collaborative effort is seen as one outcome of the joint production of language. This assumption is problematic in three respects. Firstly, the claim for least collaborative effort is made in contrast to rather idealised conceptions of ‘least effort’. Secondly, the way in which effort is often measured seems somewhat simplistic: utterance length does not necessarily equate to utterance effort. Finally, assuming that shifts in language behaviour and changes in modality necessarily lead to overall least effort fails to engage with the complexity of the situation. It is argued that the experimental evidence can be more effectively explained by seeing the reduction of effort being an individual motivation rather than a jointly conceived one: the shifts in behaviour often cause more work for one participant than another, and can even have deleterious effects on another individual’s performance.
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To legislate or not to legislate? Language politics and legitimation crises in Germany and Sweden
Sally Johnson and Tommaso Milani
Since the late 1990s the question of whether to ratify the status of Swedish as the “principal” language by means of a language law has been subject to considerable public dispute in Sweden. Drawing on Blommaert’s (1999a) concept of a “language ideological debate”, we explore how and why this particular debate recently appeared to reach a dead end without achieving any kind of tangible “closure”. In order to do so, we introduce Habermas’s (1975, [1973]) notion of “legitimation crisis”, as recently applied by Johnson (2005a, 2005b) in her discussion of language ideological debates surrounding the 1996 reform of German orthography. We describe how, according to Habermas, legitimation crises are underpinned by one or more “rationality deficits”, i.e. discursive paradoxes that typically emerge in a given historical, cultural, social and economic context. We propose that the concept of “legitimation crisis” not only helps to explain why some language ideological debates seemingly reach a stalemate as in the Swedish case, but also constitutes a theoretical framework that could be productively incorporated into the study of language politics more generally.
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'Give us my shoe back': The pragmatic functions of singular us
Julia Snell
This paper is based on the results emerging from an ethnographic study of the language practices of 10-year-old children in two primary schools in Teesside, in the north-east of England. It focuses on the children’s use of us for the objective singular first person pronoun. Investigation of the occurrences of singular us in a corpus of radio-microphone recordings indicates that this variant of the objective singular appears to have a pragmatic function associated with degrees of politeness, power and social distance. At the same time, this paper raises methodological concerns about the importance of combining quantitative with qualitative analysis, and by doing so, articulates a new approach to the study of sociolinguistic variation.
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Glottals and grammar: Definite article reduction and morpheme boundaries
Mark J. Jones
Definite Article Reduction (DAR) involves vowel-less forms of
the definite article, usually a ‘glottal stop’
[ʔ], and is found
across large parts of northern England. The present acoustic
analysis of DAR investigates the acoustic correlates of the
glottal form of DAR in the context high vowel +
/s/. However, the glottal stop is also the realisation of a
word-final /t/ before a following consonantal onset. A
second part of the experiment investigates whether there are
production differences between the two kinds of glottal stop
– one a realisation of the definite article preceded
and followed by a morpheme boundary, and one a realisation
of word-final /t/ followed by a morpheme boundary. The
results show that speakers do distinguish the two sequences
in production, but the effects are subtle and highly
variable, both within and across speakers.
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Investigating residual rhoticity in a non-rhotic accent
Esther Asprey
This paper reports on preliminary findings of a study
conducted in the Black Country area of the west midlands of
England. The small number of linguistic studies carried out
in this region in the last 40 years have not found evidence
of the continuing existence of variable rhoticity in the
local speech variety. The Survey of English Dialects in the
1950s found low levels of rhoticity among speakers in the
location closest to the Black Country, and I examine here
similar findings from a detailed study of the variety,
carried out between 2003-2006.
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Lexical cohesion and metacognitive strategy training:
An integrated approach to main idea comprehension
Sujunya Wilawan
This study was performed to investigate the degree to which
three different types of instructional procedure affected Thai
EFL students’ main idea comprehension. In particular, it
aimed to explore the combined effect of lexical cohesion and
metacognitive strategy training on the improvement of
students’ main idea performance. The participants of the
study consisted of sixty undergraduate students at Kasetsart
University in Thailand. The students were randomly assigned to
one of three teaching conditions over a 15-hour
period. Treatments involved the use of lexical cohesion and
metacognitive strategy training, metacognitive strategy
training alone, and traditional skill-based instruction as a
control.
The study included both quantitative and qualitative approaches. The main idea comprehension test was used to assess students’ performance on main idea comprehension. Think-aloud protocols and strategy interviews were employed to examine the strategy use during main idea processing. Post-intervention questionnaires were also applied in order to investigate the students’ attitudes towards the instructional procedures.
The research outcomes, on the whole, indicated that students receiving instructional treatment which incorporated lexical cohesion and metacognitive strategies outperformed participants in the other two groups on the main idea comprehension post-test although the results were not statistically significant. The findings suggested that the students’ enhancement in main idea comprehension was related to their integrative application of bottom-up, top-down, and metacognitive strategic processes. Both quantitative and qualitative results also revealed that the use of lexical relations played a significant role in helping EFL students establish mental representations of English reading passages.
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Vowel onset characteristics as a function of voice and manner contrasts in Persian coronal stops
Barry Heselwood and Zahra Mahmoodzade
Results show that VOT distinguishes between voiced and voiceless stops, and between plosives and affricates. Pitch at vowel onset, as measured electrolaryngographically, distinguishes voiced from voiceless plosives but not voiced from voiceless affricates; it does, however, distinguish the plosives from the affricates. Closed quotient also distinguishes voiced from voiceless plosives but not voiced from voiceless affricates; it distinguishes /d/ from /ʤ/ but not /t/ from /ʧ/. The spectral tilt measure distinguishes voiced from voiceless stops but not plosives from affricates.
Closed quotient and spectral tilt were found to be closely positively correlated but with some evidence that they are at least partially independent. This independence may enable variation between whispery voice and breathy voice at the onset of vowels after phonologically voiceless stops, and variation between whispery voice and modal voice at vowel onset after phonologically voiced stops, particularly /ʤ/.
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Seeking consensus: Generative linguistics and language teaching
Melinda Whong
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Alternation of [n] and [l] in Sichuan dialect, Standard Mandarin and English: A single-case study
Wei Zhang
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