Volume 7, Issue 1

Fast Track is a formant tracker implemented in Praat that attempts to automatically select the best analysis from a set of candidates. The best track is selected by modeling smooth formant contours across the entirety of the sound, providing the researcher with rich information about static and dynamic formant properties. Fast Track returns text files containing acoustic information (formant frequencies, formant bandwidths, fundamental frequency, etc.) sampled every 2 ms, generates images showing the winning analysis and comparing alternate analyses, and creates log files detailing analysis information for each file. Fast Track features a modular workflow that allows for analysis steps to be run (and re-run) independently as necessary, and is designed to allow for easy correction of tracking errors by allowing the user to override the automatic analysis, or manually edit tracks where necessary. In addition, Fast Track includes tools to aggregate data across tokens, and to easily create vowel plots of mean values or time-varying formant contours. The design and use of Fast Track are outlined using a re-analysis of the Hillenbrand et al. (1995) dataset, which suggests that Fast Track can be very accurate in cases where signal properties allow for reliable formant estimates.

Spanish dialectology observes that dialects with a preference for velarized variants of /n/ (e.g. Caribbean dialects) include nasalized vocalic allophones in their inventory. Instrumental cross-dialectal comparisons of Spanish anticipatory nasalization, however, remain surprisingly rare. To this end, I compare the time-course of nasality in pre-nasal vowels in Argentine and Dominican Spanish, as well as across a number of linguistic variables described in the phonetic, sociolinguistic and historical literature. Twenty-eight speakers from Santo Domingo and twenty-six from Buenos Aires were recorded with a nasometer, an ideal instrument for data collection in the field. Measurements of nasal energy were extracted to acoustically characterize the time-course of nasality. Results indicate that Dominican speakers present more extensive anticipatory vowel nasalization than Argentine speakers. These findings are consistent with observations of allophonic nasalization (i.e. phonologized) in the Caribbean dialect under study, Dominican Spanish. Regarding the linguistic variables, stressed pre-nasal vowels showed earlier onset of nasalization, particularly among the Caribbean speakers, which further provides support for the phonological differences in vowel nasality.

Phonological alternations often happen to conform to phonotactic regularities, from which a single mechanism for phonotactics and alternations has been claimed. We note, however, that empirical evidence supporting the link between phonotactics and alternations comes only from English native speakers whose first language (L1) does exhibit phonotactically motivated alternation patterns. This article examines whether the link between phonotactics and alternations is universally available. To do so, we test learning of phonotactics and alternations with Cantonese native speakers, whose L1 provides no evidence for or against the link. We address learning of a vowel harmony pattern through the use of three artificial languages; one with a harmony pattern both within and across stems, another with a harmony pattern only across stems; and the other with a disharmony pattern within stems but harmony across stems. Learners successfully acquired harmony phonotactics according to input patterns, but they showed no difference in learning alternation patterns across the three languages. Our results suggest that the link between phonotactics and alternations might be language-specific: Only upon receiving L1 evidence, learners can use a unified mechanism to encode phonotactics and alternations.

Words in utterance-final positions are often pronounced more slowly than utterance-medial words, as previous studies on individual languages have shown. This paper provides a systematic cross-linguistic comparison of relative durations of final and penultimate words in utterances in terms of the degree to which such words are lengthened. The study uses time-aligned corpora from 10 genealogically, areally, and culturally diverse languages, including eight small, under-resourced, and mostly endangered languages, as well as English and Dutch. Clear effects of lengthening words at the end of utterances are found in all 10 languages, but the degrees of lengthening vary. Languages also differ in the relative durations of words that precede utterance-final words. In languages with on average short words in terms of number of segments, these penultimate words are also lengthened. This suggests that lengthening extends backwards beyond the final word in these languages, but not in languages with on average longer words. Such typological patterns highlight the importance of examining prosodic phenomena in diverse language samples beyond the small set of majority languages most commonly investigated so far.

Brand names are a common part of the everyday consumer environment, and can be found on countless visual surfaces such as food packaging. A key characteristic of brand names is their fixed design. Many brand names owe their linguistic form to units that originally did not constitute proper names. They developed into brand names through complex sub-processes of what is commonly referred to as onymisation. These processes include semantic, morphological and phonological/graphemic changes. The aim of this paper is to explore how the specific typographic design of a brand name can be an additional indicator in its process of onymisation. After clarifying the concepts of onymisation and typographic design, an extended multimodal construction model is presented. The basis of the paper is an analysis of a corpus of image data comprising more than 600 photographs of food packaging. In order to get a first impression of how the multimodal constructions of brand names could look, an omission test following a suggestion by Ziem, Alexander. 2017. Do we really need a multimodal construction grammar? Linguistics Vanguard 3(s1). 1–9 is applied to the data.

This article discusses the structural and internal properties of adjectives in Mə̀dʉ́mbὰ, a Grassfield language spoken in the west region of Cameroon. It focuses on material inside the NP with a view towards establishing the structural positions of NP-internal constituents such as adjectives. I analyze adjectives and propose, following Scott, Gary-John. 1998. Stacked adjectival modification and the structure of nominal phrases. School of Oriental and African Studies Working Papers in Linguistics and Phonetics 8. 59–89, Scott, Gary-John. 2002. Stacked adjectival modification and the structure of nominal phrases. In Guglielmo Cinque (ed.), Functional structure in DP and IP: The cartography of syntactic structures , 91–120. New York: Oxford University Press that adjectives pattern within the DP just like adverbs pattern within the clause. In Mə̀dʉ́mbὰ, an adjective can be placed before the noun, after the noun or alternatively before and after the noun. Mə̀dʉ́mbὰ adjectives can further be distinguished as belonging to three classes: pure adjectives, verbal adjectives and nominal adjectives. In this paper I focus principally on the position in which attributive adjectives are generated inside the DP. However, issues relating to the internal structure of adjectives will also be mentioned. I show that Cinque, Guglielmo. 1994. On the evidence for partial N-movement in the Romance DP. In Guglielmo Cinque, Jan Koster, Jean-Yves Pollock, Luigi Rizzi & Raffaella Zanuttini (eds.), Paths towards universal grammar , 85–110. Georgetown: Georgetown University Press, Cinque, Guglielmo. 2003. The dual source of adjectives and XP-vs. N-raising in the Romance DP. Incontro annuale di dialettologia, Padua, 26 , Cinque, Guglielmo. 2010. The syntax of adjectives: A comparative study. Linguistic Inquiry Monographs. Cambridge: MIT Press), and Laenzlinger, Christophe. 2005. French adjective ordering: Perspectives on DP-internal movement types. Lingua 115 views are both necessary to fully capture adjectival placement facts in Mə̀dʉ́mbὰ. Building on and refining the analysis given by these authors, I demonstrate that the type of mechanism involved in introducing adjectival modification correlates with the syntax of the adjective. On the proposal advanced here, depending on their syntactic distribution, adjectives are generated in specifier positions directly and NumP versus FP movement yields the surface structure.

Object-extracted relative clauses (ORCs) can occur in English either with a lexical complementizer or with no complementizer. This paper seeks to investigate constraints on when the complementizer is lexicalized in ORCs, within the theoretical framework of dependency grammar. In an analysis of one hundred ORCs, we find that: (a) the mean dependency distance (MDD) of lexicalized ORCs is longer significantly than that of non-lexicalized ORCs; (b) there is no significant difference in mean hierarchical distance (MHD) for lexicalized versus non-lexicalized ORCs; and (c) hierarchical number (HN) influences mean hierarchical distance significantly, and when HN is 1, the MHD of lexicalized ORCs is significantly longer than that of non-lexicalized ORCs. However, there are no significant difference when HN is 2–5, indicating that HN = 1 may be a key point in the ellipsis of relativizers.

Principles of morphotactics are a major source of morphological diversity amongst the world’s languages, and it is well-known that languages exhibit many different types of deviation from a canonical ideal in which there is a unique and consistent mapping between function and form. In this paper we present data from Murrinhpatha (non-Pama-Nyungan, northern Australia) that demonstrates a type of non-canonical morphotactics so far unattested in the literature, one which we call positional dependency . This type is unusual in that the non-canonical pattern is driven by morphological form rather than by morphosyntactic function. In this case the realisation of one morph is dependent on the position in the verbal template of another morph. Thus, it is the linearisation of morphs that conditions the morphological realisation, not the morphosyntactic feature set. Positional dependency in Murrinhpatha thus expands our typology of content-form interactions and non-canonical morphotactics with implications for our understanding of morphological structure cross-linguistically.

The paper presents the emerging alternative to the field of Information Structure, termed here Multifactorial Information Management (MIM). This framework regards the process of information structuring as an interplay of diverse language-specific categories and discourse strategies, belonging to various areas of linguistic inquiry. The paper illustrates the application of this approach to cross-linguistic findings and suggests perspectives for future research. It also demonstrates how a multifactorial approach to information management eliminates the need for idiosyncratic concepts such as topic, focus and dedicated cognitive models associated with them.

Over the last few decades, there has been a tremendous increase in the production of descriptive grammars for languages that had previously been poorly described or lacked description altogether. In most cases, these are minority languages, and many of them are endangered. To enhance the dialogue between grammar-writers and typologists, the conference Descriptive Grammars and Typology was held at the University of Helsinki (Finland) at the end of March, 2019. In this paper, we discuss three current trends in grammar writing that emerged from the conference plenaries as well as from many other presentations: (i) the target audience of grammars and the role of language communities in grammar writing, (ii) the digitalization of grammaticography and (iii) themes that have earlier been more or less neglected in grammars but that would bring more insight into typological research as well as into understanding the structures of individual languages: discourse, variation, diachrony and contact effect of languages.

Including fillers or distractors in psycholinguistic experiments has been standard for decades; yet, relatively little is known how the design of these items interacts with critical manipulations. In this paper, we ask about the role that contextual statistical information in filler items plays in determining if and how to correct a given error, and how grammatical expectations interact with context. We first replicate a speech restoration experiment conducted by Mack, J. E., C. Clifton, L. Frazier & P. V. Taylor. 2012. (Not) hearing optional subjects: The effects of pragmatic usage preferences. Journal of Memory and Language 67. 211–223, measuring usage preferences of null-subject constructions. Then we report two additional experiments in which we manipulated only the filler items, either having noise appear uniformly at random, or with a particular bias. Our results (1) demonstrate that listeners are sensitive to statistical patterns in the distribution of noise within the experiment, and (2) suggest that this paradigm can be used to investigate interaction between the mechanisms that govern grammatical preferences, and those that govern error correction processes.

This study investigated how the perception of a sound is affected by its phonological and morphological roles within a word. We asked American English listeners ( n  = 24) to judge differences among phonetic variants of sounds [l], [n], [ɹ] in three word conditions: 1) at morpheme boundaries with a phonological process, such as [n] in down - ed , which triggers voicing agreement on the suffix, 2) internally without a process, such as [n] in mound , and 3) at morpheme boundaries alone, such as [n] in town-ship . We used Praat synthesis with different acoustic settings to create variants, e.g., [n] a, [n] b, [n] c, which were spliced into a base to produce three tokens, dow [n] a ed , dow [n] b ed , dow [n] c ed . Identical variants were used across conditions (e.g., in condition 2: mou [n] a d , mou [n] b d , mou [n] c d ) . On each trial, participants heard two tokens of the same word (e.g., dow [n] a ed  – dow [n] b ed ) and rated the difference between the target sound using a sliding scale with endpoints “0% (totally identical)” and “99% (totally different)”. Analysis with linear mixed-effects model revealed significant differences between ratings among all conditions, with the pattern township  <  downed  <  mound . These results suggest that a sound’s phonological and morphological roles within a word affect how people perceive it. We evaluate this finding in light of the differing predictions made by phoneme-based theories, which incorporate phonemes as a fundamental unit, versus exemplar theories, which argue that phonological units are emergent.

While nativist linguistic theory readily captures the regular processes of adult language, it struggles to account for often-unwieldy data collected from children. Any theory of language must house both the predictable and unpredictable turns a linguistic system takes. Some usage-based theories make strides in accounting for connections between multiple linguistic factors contributing to linguistic representation. Dynamic systems theory (DST) is capable of describing the interaction between numerous factors both linguistic and extra-linguistic. Grounded in embodiment, DST accounts for continuity between bodily and cognitive processes, which together are crucial in understanding the development of language. Conceptualizing systems as self-organizing, DST allows for the emergence of novel forms alongside the predictable. Furthermore, DST explains both continuity between unexpected child forms and eventual target forms and also apparent discontinuity that gives the illusion of discrete developmental stages. To illustrate the advantages of DST in describing language processes, this paper presents data from one American English-acquiring child, which comes from a larger study investigating phonological development beginning at the onset of word production. The data demonstrate the role of phonological templates in development as part of a dynamic system, entailing the interaction between developing phonological categories, lexical representation, and linguistic environment.

Advances in sociophonetic research resulted in features once sorted into discrete bins now being measured continuously. This has implied a shift in what sociolinguists view as the abstract representation of the sociolinguistic variable. When measured discretely, variation is variation in selection: one variant is selected for production, and factors influencing language variation and change are influencing the frequency at which variants are selected. Measured continuously, variation is variation in execution: speakers have a single target for production, which they approximate with varying success. This paper suggests that both approaches can and should be considered in sociophonetic analysis. To that end, I offer the use of hidden Markov models (HMMs) as a novel approach to find speakers’ multiple targets within continuous data. Using the lot vowel among whites in Greater St. Louis as a case study, I compare 2-state and 1-state HMMs constructed at the individual speaker level. Ten of fifty-two speakers’ production is shown to involve the regular use of distinct fronted and backed variants of the vowel. This finding illustrates HMMs’ capacity to allow us to consider variation as both variant selection and execution, making them a useful tool in the analysis of sociophonetic data.

This study focuses on listener perceptions of African American English (AAE) on Twitter, examining both grammatical and ungrammatical usages, as well as how these perceptions may be affected by the race of the speaker and rater. We conducted an experimental survey designed to address the following questions: 1. Does avatar race affect perception of the grammaticality of AAE? 2. Are differences between grammatical and ungrammatical AAE discernible to naive raters of different races? 3. How are various social attributes evaluated for avatars of different races and different linguistic varieties? Results indicate that participants generally do not downgrade avatars who use grammatical AAE on ratings of grammaticality or personal characteristics. However, participants of all races disprefer ungrammatical uses of AAE, with black raters being especially sensitive to ungrammatical AAE. These findings have implications for sociolinguistics in that they demonstrate that participants across racial backgrounds may differentiate grammatical versus ungrammatical AAE online, and that contrary to expectations based on previous literature, AAE is not universally downgraded in these contexts. However, results also indicate that the use of AAE still negatively impacts listeners’ perceptions of speakers as educated, demonstrating that some widespread biases against AAE-speakers persist in an online context.

This paper presents a study of sociophonetic variation in the lateral approximant /l/ in Manchester, UK. We know little about how English laterals pattern sociolinguistically, despite them having been subject to extensive investigation in the phonetic literature. We present acoustic measures taken from interviews with 96 speakers from the city, stratified across five socioeconomic classes, spanning 99 years of birthdates (1907–2006). We demonstrate that word-initial /l/ is becoming darker in apparent time: younger speakers have darker /l/s. There is, however, no evidence that the allophonic status of /l/ is changing, with /l/ in all positions becoming darker. There is a monotonic relationship with social class: the higher the social class, the lighter the /l/, with some middle-class speakers showing potential of an allophonic distribution. We find an effect of ethnicity, with white speakers having darker /l/s in comparison to Black and Pakistani Mancunians. Overall, our findings are a novel contribution to the understanding of the sociophonetics of English laterals and provide new evidence of social patterning and the allophonic status of /l/ in this variety.

This study conducts an experimental evaluation of two hypotheses about the contributions of formal and semantic features to the grammatical gender assignment of nouns. One of the hypotheses (Corbett and Fraser 2000) claims that semantic features dominate formal ones. The other hypothesis, formulated within the optimal gender assignment theory (Rice 2006), states that form and semantics contribute equally. Both hypotheses claim that the combination of formal and semantic features yields the most accurate gender identification. In this paper, we operationalize and test these hypotheses by trying to predict grammatical gender using only character-based embeddings (that capture only formal features), only context-based embeddings (that capture only semantic features) and the combination of both. We performed the experiment using data from three languages with different gender systems (French, German and Russian). Formal features are a significantly better predictor of gender than semantic ones, and the difference in prediction accuracy is very large. Overall, formal features are also significantly better than the combination of form and semantics, but the difference is very small and the results for this comparison are not entirely consistent across languages.

This paper introduces a novel methodology for extracting semantic frames from text corpora. Building on recent advances in computational construction grammar, the method captures expert knowledge of how semantic frames can be expressed in the form of conventionalised form-meaning pairings, called constructions. By combining these constructions in a semantic parsing process, the frame-semantic structure of a sentence is retrieved through the intermediary of its morpho-syntactic structure. The main advantage of this approach is that state-of-the-art results are achieved, without the need for annotated training data. We demonstrate the method in a case study where causation frames are extracted from English newspaper articles, and compare it to a commonly used approach based on Conditional Random Fields (CRFs). The computational construction grammar approach yields a word-level F 1 score of 78.5%, outperforming the CRF approach by 4.5 percentage points.

The topic of the “negative end” of change is, unlike the fields of innovation and emergence, largely under-researched. Yet, it has lately started to increasingly gain attention from language scholars worldwide. The main focus of this article is threefold, namely to discuss (i) the terminology, (ii) the concepts, and (iii) the causes associated with the “negative end” of change in grammar. The article begins with an overview of research conducted on the topic. It then moves to situating phenomena referred to as loss , decline or obsolescence among processes of language change before elaborating on the terminology and concepts behind it. The last part of the paper looks at possible causes for constructions to display a gradual or rapid, but very consistent decrease in the frequency of use over time, which continues until the construction disappears or until there are only residual or fossilised forms left.

This paper is an empirical case study of grammatical obsolescence in progress. The main variable of study is the English purpose subordinator in order that , which is shown to be steadily decreasing in its frequency of use, starting from the beginning of the twentieth century. This work applies a data-driven approach for the investigation and description of obsolescence, recently developed by Rudnicka, Karolina. 2019. The Statistics of obsolescence: Purpose subordinators in Late Modern English . NIHIN: New Ideas in Human Interaction: Studies. Freiburg: Rombach. The methodology combines philological analysis with statistical methods used on data acquired from mega-corpora. Moving from the description of possible symptoms of obsolescence to different causes for it, the paper aims at presenting a comprehensive account of the studied phenomenon. Interestingly, a very significant role in the decline of in order that can be ascribed to the so-called higher-order processes, understood as processes influencing the constructional level from above. Two kinds of higher-order processes are shown to play an important role, namely i) an externally-motivated higher-order process exemplified by the drastic socio-cultural changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and ii) an internally-motivated higher-order process instantiated by the rise of the to -infinitive (rise of infinite clauses).

This paper reviews recent research using participant ratings to measure the iconicity (form-meaning resemblance) of words and signs. This method, by enabling wide coverage of lexical items and cross-linguistic comparison, has revealed systematic patterns in how iconicity is distributed across the vocabularies of different languages. These findings are consistent with established linguistic and psychological theory on iconicity, and they connect iconicity to factors like learning and acquisition, semantics, pragmatic aspects of language like playfulness, and to the semantic neighborhood density of words and signs. After taking stock of this research, we look critically at the construct validity of iconicity ratings, considering an alternative account of iconicity ratings recently put forward by Thompson, Arthur Lewis, Kimi Akita & Youngah Do. 2020a. Iconicity ratings across the Japanese lexicon: A comparative study with English. Linguistics Vanguard 6. 20190088. They propose that, for most vocabulary, participants might rate the iconicity of different words based on their meaning alone – specifically the degree to which it relates to the senses – independently of actual form-meaning resemblance. We argue that their hypothesis cannot account for many of the various, theory-driven results from this line of research, which strongly support the conclusion that the ratings really do measure iconicity.

This paper reviews recent research using participant ratings to measure the iconicity (form-meaning resemblance) of words and signs. This method, by enabling wide coverage of lexical items and cross-linguistic comparison, has revealed systematic patterns in how iconicity is distributed across the vocabularies of different languages. These findings are consistent with established linguistic and psychological theory on iconicity, and they connect iconicity to factors like learning and acquisition, semantics, pragmatic aspects of language like playfulness, and to the semantic neighborhood density of words and signs. After taking stock of this research, we look critically at the construct validity of iconicity ratings, considering an alternative account of iconicity ratings recently put forward by Thompson, Arthur Lewis, Kimi Akita & Youngah Do. 2020a. Iconicity ratings across the Japanese lexicon: A comparative study with English. Linguistics Vanguard 6. 20190088. They propose that, for most vocabulary, participants might rate the iconicity of different words based on their meaning alone – specifically the degree to which it relates to the senses – independently of actual form-meaning resemblance. We argue that their hypothesis cannot account for many of the various, theory-driven results from this line of research, which strongly support the conclusion that the ratings really do measure iconicity.

In forty child-to-child dialogs in Mandarin retrieved from CHILDES, 74.23% of the total utterances contain the phenomenon of repetition, with self-repetitions (64.85%) occurring more frequently than other-repetitions (35.15%). Based upon the distribution of the various types of repetitions in the database, this paper also discusses the structural dimensions of repetition at different grammatical levels, concluding that self-repetition and other-repetition in child conversation are not merely copies of previously used linguistic material, but key strategies that children apply to construct their utterances and dialogic interactions. Children’s discourses develop from self-repetitions to other-repetitions, and by doing this, cohesion in discourse is achieved.