Leeds Working Papers in Linguistics and Phonetics
No. 9, 2002
Edited by Diane Nelson
1.
The Pollyanna Principle in English and French lexis: Some results and issues of methodology
Nigel Armstrong & Clare Hogg
2.
Intertextuality as discourse strategy: The case of no-confidence
debates in Thailand
Savitri Gadavanij
Abstract - Full text
as pdf file (345K)
3.
Alternating unaccusative verbs in Slovene
Sabina Grahek
4.
S-adverbs in Icelandic and the feature theory of adverbs
Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson
5.
/r/ Production in
English and Arabic bilingual and monolingual speakers
Ghada
Khattab
6.
Prelinguistic primitives and the evolution of argument
structure: Evidence from Specific Language Impairment
Diane Nelson & Vesna Stojanovik
7.
A study of dialect levelling in some fifteenth-century
Yorkshire documents
Reiko
Takeda
8.
Evaluation of a technique for improving the mapping
of multiple speakers’ vowel spaces in the F1 ~
F2 plane
Dominic
Watt and Anne Fabricius
9.
Speech rhythm production in three German-English bilingual
families
Nicole
Whitworth
Abstracts
The
Pollyanna Principle in English and French lexis:
some results and issues of methodology
Nigel Armstrong & Clare Hogg
Abstract
This article reports on a comparison of
variable lexis in English and French through a questionnaire
study. The study was designed to investigate the different
rates at which young speakers of English and French introduce
non-standard adjectives that have negative and positive reference
(e.g. ‘pathetic’ and ‘cool’). The research issues studied
are twofold. We wished to test the validity of the ‘Pollyanna
Principle’, a concept in linguistic pragmatics adapted from
the ‘Pollyanna Hypothesis’ of psychology, and designed to
account for the preference on the part of speakers for avoiding
and/or mitigating negative terms and expressions. We examine
critically here the hypothesis suggested by I. Opie and P.
Opie (1959) that negative terms used by children and adolescents
tend to be relatively stable, in contrast to the rapid turnover
of terms of approval. Against this however, more recent research
into sociolinguistic variation in French suggests that contrary
to what has been reported for many languages (notably English,
the most intensively studied language from a sociolinguistic
viewpoint), variation in the lexis of French is more prominent
than in its pronunciation (Armstrong 2001). If true, this
might imply that French speakers coin lexical items (both
negative and positive) more frequently than speakers of English.
The objective of the study was therefore to test the cross-linguistic
validity of the Pollyanna Principle, by comparing reported
rates of lexical innovation in English and French. The results
presented here suggest that Pollyanna does indeed have validity
across the two languages, but that recent social mutations
in the direction of greater informality have made possible
the readier expression of negative emotions, especially through
the increased acceptability of taboo terms.
Full text
as pdf file (1,659K)
INTERTEXTUALITY AS DISCOURSE STRATEGY: THE
CASE OF
NO-CONFIDENCE
DEBATES IN THAILAND
Savitri Gadavanij
Abstract
The
discourse of Thai parliamentary no-confidence debates is intended
to be formal in nature, and is defined as such by the constitution
and relevant parliamentary regulations. However, the reality
of this ‘parliamentary’ discourse does not always meet this
idea. There is evidence of mixed genres and the combination
of the language user’s (henceforth S) voice and other’s throughout
the discourse of the debate. The combination of genres and
voices in the discourse represents two levels of intertextuality
(Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999: 49).
This
paper argues that intertextuality is part of the in-built
structure of the no-confidence debate discourse which operates
in the face of three competing conjunctures: the debate’s
purpose, its multiple audiences and its code of behaviour.
Intertextuality reflects the struggle of the members of the
Thai parliament to balance three purposes: the desire of highly
partisan debaters to cause maximum damage to the opposing
side, their need to seek public support and the need to stay
within the parliamentary codes of behaviour. In this light,
intertextuality can be seen as a strategy enabling MPs to
produce a kind of discourse that can serve these competing
social and political purposes, and to do so within the constraints
of its three conjunctures.
ALTERNATING
UNACCUSATIVE VERBS IN SLOVENE
Sabina Grahek
Abstract
According
to the Unaccusative Hypothesis (Perlmutter 1978) not all intransitive
verbs share the same syntactic and argument structure, and
can therefore be divided into two classes, unergative verbs
and unaccusative verbs. This paper shows that in Slovene,
like in many other languages, there exists a special class
of unaccusatives which can participate in the causative alternation
under certain conditions (when an externally caused event
can come about spontaneously). These verbs always come in
two variants, transitive (Peter odpre okno ‘Peter opens the window’) and intransitive (Okno se odpre ‘The window opens’). The
comparison with other languages reveals that Slovene alternating
causative verbs exhibit all the crucial properties of this
class of verbs. In Slovene the detransitivisation of causative
verbs can be indicated by the cliticisation of the morpheme se (odpreti – odpreti se ‘open’), by the change of the vowel ‑i‑ into ‑e‑ in the infinitive stem (počrniti – počrneti ‘blacken’)
or by the use of identical form of the verb (zmrzniti – zmrzniti ‘freeze’). The data, however, provide evidence
that only reflexivisation is still productive in modern Slovene,
while the other two processes are no longer employed to form
new intransitive verbs from transitive causative verbs.
S-ADVERBS
IN ICELANDIC AND THE FEATURE THEORY OF ADVERBS
Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson
Abstract
This paper
examines the distribution of five classes of S-adverbs in
Icelandic and concludes that the adjunction theory of adverbs
is superior to Cinque's (1999) feature theory in accounting for the
data. In particular, the relative freedom in the order of
S-adverbs and the thematic subject in the double subject construction
is expected if the subject occupies a unique position and
the adverbs can adjoin recursively to maximal projections
preceding or following the subject. By contrast, the feature
theory necessitates an excessive functional architecture with
multiple subject positions in between the adverb-related projections
and this is both theoretically problematic and unmotivated.
The ordering relations among S-adverbs in Icelandic are also discussed in
this paper and shown to be much freer than the feature theory
would predict. Conjunctive adverbs are especially problematic
as they do not behave as specifiers of any functional projection.
/r/ PRODUCTION IN ENGLISH AND ARABIC BILINGUAL AND MONOLINGUAL SPEAKERS
Ghada Khattab
Abstract
This
paper reports an analysis of /r/ production by English-Arabic
bilingual children. It addresses the question of whether the
bilingual develops one phonological system or two by calling
for a refinement of the notion of a system using insights
from recent phonetic and sociolinguistic work on variability
in speech. The bilingual subjects that were chosen for the
study are three Lebanese children aged 5, 7 and 10, all born
and raised in Yorkshire, England. Monolingual friends of the
same age were chosen as controls, and the parents of all bilingual
and monolingual children were also taped to obtain a detailed
assessment of the sound patterns available in the subjects’
environment. The bilinguals were taped in different language
sessions with different interlocutors. /r/ was chosen due
to the existence of different patterns for its production
in English and Arabic that vary according to contextual and
dialectal factors. Results show that (i) the bilinguals have
developed separate /r/ production patterns for each of their
languages that are similar to those of monolinguals, and (ii)
the interaction between their two languages is mainly restricted
to the bilingual mode and is a sign of their developing sociolinguistic
competence.
Full text
as pdf file (2,801K)
PRELINGUISTIC
PRIMITIVES AND THE EVOLUTION OF
ARGUMENT
STRUCTURE:
EVIDENCE
FROM SPECIFIC LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENT
Diane Nelson & Vesna Stojanovik
Abstract
Recent
research in the evolution of language has focused on a search
for prelinguistic cognitive abilities which may have been
co-opted by the emerging language faculty. One recent suggestion
is that subitizing, or the primate and infant human ability
to identify and keep track of small sets of participants without
counting, may have played a role in the evolution of syntax
(Hurford in press, Hauser et al 2000). If this is indeed the
case, we may expect to find populations with linked impairments
both in the processing of syntactic argument structure and
their ability to subitize. This paper reports the results
of a pilot study which seeks to test this hypothesis. A small
cohort of children diagnosed with Specific Language Impairment
and showing syntactic deficits were tested for their ability
to subitize. The results for the group as a whole were inconclusive,
but one of the subjects showed marked difficulties with both
the syntactic and subitizing tasks. We conclude that while
further experiments are needed with a larger subject pool,
the initial results may support a neural (and therefore evolutionary)
link between the processing of argument structure and the
ability to subitize.
A STUDY OF DIALECT LEVELLING IN SOME FIFTEENTH-CENTURY YORKSHIRE DOCUMENTS
Reiko Takeda
Abstract
The
present paper analyses some patterns of linguistic change
found in fifteenth-century Yorkshire documents. It reconsiders
the widely held view that the loss of dialectally marked features
in written English during this period was the result of language
standardisation implemented by the Chancery. This paper presents
an alternative view, suggesting that variation and change
of the language in the selected documents demonstrate the
occurrence of dialect levelling as a result of dialect contact
rather than an imitating of a ‘standard’ model of English.
EVALUATION OF A TECHNIQUE FOR IMPROVING THE MAPPING OF MULTIPLE SPEAKERS’
VOWEL SPACES IN THE F1 ~ F2 PLANE
Dominic Watt
& Anne Fabricius
Abstract
We evaluate
a vowel formant normalisation technique that allows direct
visual and statistical comparison of vowel triangles for multiple
speakers of different sexes, by calculating for each speaker
a ‘centre of gravity’ S in the F1 ~ F2 plane. S is calculated on the basis of formant frequency measurements
taken for the so-called ‘point’ vowel [i], the average F1 and F2 for the vowel category with the highest
average F1 (for English, usually the vowel of the TRAP or START lexical sets), and hypothetical minimal F1 and F2 values (coordinates we label [uÈ]) extrapolated from the other two points. Expression
of individual F1 and F2 measurements
as ratios of the value of S for that formant permits direct
mapping of different speakers’ vowel triangles onto one another,
resulting in marked improvements in agreement in vowel triangle
(a) area and (b) overlap, as compared to similar mappings
attempted using linear Hz scales and the z (Bark) scale.
SPEECH RHYTHM PRODUCTION IN THREE GERMAN-ENGLISH BILINGUAL FAMILIES
Nicole Whitworth
Abstract
Rarely, if
ever, in studies of the acquisition of more than one phonology
has the speech of all the members of a bilingual family been
examined within the same experiment. Rather it has been tacitly
assumed that the parents’ speech complies with the phonetic
or phonological characteristics of their respective native
languages. For example, the impact of the parents’ second
language on their native language, and regional and/or idiosyncratic
features of the parents’ speech have not been taken into account,
when evaluating the children’s production. However, these
possible discrepancies from the standard pronunciation might
explain the children’s performance, particularly in the non-dominant
language. An examination of the speech of parents and children
will also provide the opportunity to compare L2 phonology
with (developing) bilingual phonology. The experiment reported
here compares the speech rhythm of utterances produced by
the members of three German-English bilingual families. The
children and adults were recorded during a story-telling task.
The recordings were then analysed auditorily and acoustically.
Rhythmic variability (Pairwise
Variability Index) was calculated for intervocalic and
vocalic intervals of the children’s utterances in both languages.
The results show that bilingual children are in fact aware
of fine-grained rhythmic variability in the linguistic input
they receive, and are able to produce corresponding patterns
which are, however, not necessarily identical with adult targets.