Leeds Working Papers in Linguistics

ISSN 1747-9339

No. 13, 2008

Edited by Barry Heselwood and Cecile De Cat

CONTENTS

1. Editorial preface



2. Marilyn M. Vihman, Tamar Keren-Portnoy and Susi Schiemenz
   The development of phonological systematicity: Late talkers and typically developing children
   abstract - full text pp. 1-21



3. Natalie Braber and Zoe Butterfint
   Local identity and sound change in Glasgow A pilot study
   abstract - full text pp. 22-43



4. Sabina Grahek
   Middles in Slovene
   abstract - full text pp. 44-75



5. Cecile De Cat
   Experimental evidence for preschoolers' mastery of 'topic'
   abstract - full text pp. 76-84.



6. Barry Heselwood
   Features of tablature notation in the current International Phonetic Alphabet chart
   abstract - full text pp. 85-94.



7. Yasutaka Hiwatari
   Anglicisms, Globalisation, and Performativity in Japanese Hip-Hop
   abstract - full text pp. 95-108.



8. Ester Asprey
   The sociolinguistic stratification of a connected speech process - The case of the T to R rule in the Black Country
   abstract - full text pp. 109-140.

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 this volume cover language acquisition (Vihman et al. and De Cat), Socio-phonetics (Braber and Butterflint, and Asprey), Syntax (Grahek), Phonetics (Heselwood) and Sociolinguistics (Hiwatari). Many thanks to all the contributors and reviewers.

Barry Heselwood and Cecile De Cat (Editors)

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The development of phonological systematicity: Late talkers and typically developing children
Marilyn M. Vihman, Tamar Keren-Portnoy and Susi Schiemenz

Preliminary findings are reported from an ongoing study investigating the relationship of phonological systematicity to language delay or disorder in children who make a late start on word production. Based on formal testing at 2.6 years, we divided these children into `true' (expressive) late talkers (LTs) and `transitional' LTs (TLTs), depending on whether or not their expressive language falls at least 4.5 months below the norm at that age. An existing sample of 11 typically developing children (TDs) served as a comparison sample. All children are seen again one year after the first developmental milestone, with both naturalistic recordings and formal tests to assess linguistic advance.

Our hypothesis is that the LTs will fall into two groups identifiable from the earlier recordings: (i) children who are slow to make a start on word production but who show the same kind of systematization in their early word production as is found in the typically developing children and (ii) children whose word production displays little evidence of systematization. The prediction is that in the one-year follow-up recordings Group (i) will have caught up with the TDs, with their naturalistic recordings showing normal linguistic levels for their developmental level (i.e., a year after the first developmental milestone), as assessed for phonology, morphosyntax and lexical diversity as well as in age-based formal tests, while Group (ii) will continue to show language delay and will thus prove to be at risk of having Specific Language Impairment (SLI).

We have so far recorded only a few of the one-year follow-up sessions for the LTs, so that final outcomes cannot yet be reported. However, we have identified several differences in production between the (T)LTs and the TDs. In addition, the small sample of LTs do appear to fall into the two groups we expected to find, differing from the TDs in ways that correspond roughly to what we had predicted.

Local identity and sound change in Glasgow. A pilot study
Natalie Braber and Zoe Butterfint

This paper outlines a pilot study investigation into the potential link between local identity and language change in Glasgow. Results are presented from part of the pilot study, specifically the variation noted in two phonological variables - the realisation of the alveolar lateral approximant /l/, and the occurrence of so-called T-glottalling - and are discussed in the light of local identity. Glasgow is historically a heavily stigmatised, often stereotyped city and home to an equally stigmatised linguistic variety: Glaswegian. Recent investigations have highlighted processes of linguistic change occurring in this linguistic variety (most notable Stuart-Smith, 1999a, 2003; Stuart-Smith et al., 2006, 2007), and this study sets out to investigate the potential link between these changes, speaker attitudes to Glasgow and their sense of Glaswegian identity.

The data elicitation method employed is an extended version of that used by Stuart-Smith and Tweedie (2000): semi-structured interviews supplemented by a read word list. Methodological issues and considerations for future investigation are discussed on the basis of the findings of this pilot study.

Middles in Slovene
Sabina Grahek

In the current Slovene literature, sentences with the morpheme se which have an understood human generic or indefinite argument in their interpretation are treated as passives if they display a nominative (e.g. Šola se obnavlja `The school.NOM is being renovated') or as impersonal actives if they have no syntactic or morphological nominative - either intransitive (e.g. Živi se samo enkrat `You only live once') or transitive with an overt object (e.g. Šolo se obnavlja `The school.ACC is being renovated'). This paper proposes a reanalysis of the above Slovene sentences as middles, i.e. a class of sentences which lie between the active and the passive because they display the active verb and have a demoted human argument. I show that Slovene personal middles (with a nominative) are not passives because they differ from (periphrastic) passives not only morphosyntactically but also in the interpretation of their understood argument, which must always be human. In addition, I demonstrate that impersonal middles (without a nominative) are not actives because they involve the demotion of a subject role. I argue that Slovene personal and impersonal middles form a single class of middles, sharing unique semantic and syntactic properties which set them apart from passives on the one hand and from actives on the other. On my analysis, both personal and impersonal middles contain the same type of se which reduces the human subject role during their derivation.

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Experimental evidence for preschoolers' mastery of 'topic'
Cecile De Cat

This study investigates the acquisition of the discourse/pragmatic notion of Topic, based on an experimental task eliciting topic vs. focus subjects. In spoken French, these are obligatorily realised as dislocated vs. non-dislocated noun phrases. The results provide overwhelming evidence for the early mastery of topic, even by the youngest children (2;6). The only difficulty was in the evaluation of finegrained salience distinctions, leading to the under-use of full noun phrases in ambiguous contexts. A Theory of Mind test revealed that the ability to assess their listener's knowledge state is not sufficient to explain this under-use. Instead, children's over-reliance on the physical context as a source of complimentary information to disambiguate their utterances is argued to have a major impact on how explicit they are.

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Features of tablature notation in the current International Phonetic Alphabet chart
Barry Heselwood

Musical tablature notation typically 'directed the player what to do with his fingers than what notes to play' (Scholes, 1970: 1004, original italics). In this paper, parallels are drawn between tablature notation and the symbolisation of consonants and vowels on the IPA chart by pointing out that they denote what speakers do with their lips and tongues, not what sounds they make. It is argued that while these parallels have probably always been present in phonetic notation, they became definitive when the International Phonetic Association revised its principles after the Kiel Convention in 1989. The effect of the new second principle is to circumscribe the relationship between a speech sound and the symbol representing it, limiting that relationship to one which is much more theoretically-defined and physiologically based where the importance of ostensive definition and experiential knowledge of sound is relegated. As a consequence, what an IPA symbol represents is by definition a specification of what a speaker does, not the sound that is made. This specification is more direct with regard to place of articulation than with regard to manner of articulation. There is an iconic element to the notation as well, which is greater in the case of the vowel chart than the consonant chart. The implications of defining symbols as intersections of articulatory categories are, it is claimed, disadvantageous to the practice of impressionistic phonetic transcription unless it is explicitly acknowledged that a symbol can be used without independent evidence that the articulatory configuration it purports to denote was the one responsible for producing the sound-as-heard. The paper concludes with the suggestion that the second of the seven current principles of the Association may need to be revised so that impressionistic transcription does not have to be carried out using IPA symbols in ways at variance with their definitions. Phoneticians engaged in impressionistic transcription want to be able to acknowledge the IPA as their principal resource without feeling they are deviating from IPA official policy.

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Anglicisms, Globalisation, and Performativity in Japanese Hip-Hop
Yasutaka Hiwatari

This paper explores anglicisms in Japanese popular culture in the light of recent theoretical development of globalisation and performativity. The study of language contact in Japan is far from new in sociolinguistics, where the contact between Japanese and English has been mainly examined in terms of borrowings. However, this work historically focused on the categorisations and stylistic functions of loan words, and so foreclosed any appreciation of how anglicisms are produced to construct new meanings. Pennycook's treatment on hip-hop music (2003), based on globalisation and performativity, opens up a new way of viewing the phenomenon of borrowing. This paper builds on Pennycook's research, aiming to identify 1. how anglicisms project multidimensional identities in Japanese hip-hop music, 2. what relationships pertain between globalisation and the process of constructing identities through anglicisms, and 3. what the characteristics of language as a transmodal performance in popular culture are. This paper suggests that use of anglicisms refashions identities in Japanese popular culture, and draws attention to the way that globalisation becomes a force to provoke such refashioning.

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The sociolinguistic stratification of a connected speech process - The case of the T to R rule in the Black Country
Esther Asprey