Volume 50, Issue 3

Recently, many studies have examined the phonological parameters in sign languages from various research perspectives, paying close attention in particular to manual parameters such as handshape, place of articulation, movement, and orientation of the hands. However, these studies have been conducted on only a few sign languages such as American and British Sign Languages, and have paid little attention to nonmanual features. In this study, we investigated yet another sign language, Turkish Sign Language (TİD), focusing on both manual and nonmanual features to examine "minimal pairs", a cornerstone concept of phonology. We applied Brentari's (2005) feature classification and Pfau and Quer's (2010) phonological (or lexical) nonmanual categorization. Our analysis showed that both phonological features and constraints on TİD sign formation have a phonological structure similar to other well-studied sign languages. The results indicate that not only are phonological features a necessary notion for the description of both manual and nonmanual parameters at the lexical level in TİD, but also that nonmanuals have to be considered an essential part of sign as a way of better understanding their phonological roles in sign language phonology.

This paper is an attempt to develop an analysis of ergativity syntax, focusing on the past transitive structures in Kurdish where ergativity manifests itself. Adducing evidence from a diverse array of structures that share formal characteristics with the past transitive structure in Kurdish, I will argue that ergativity emerges in transitive structures where (a) the transitive verb, subcategorizing for a complement DP, is defective in terms of accusative case assignment (i.e. unaccusative) and (b) the external argument, i.e. the subject DP, is licensed as the specifier of a high applicative head that takes vP as its complement. Thus analyzed, ergativity is construed as a natural computational corollary deriving from the interaction of independently motivated operations of the narrow syntax.

Data collected from one Korean child in a longitudinal diary study present novel patterns of consonant harmony in that labials, coronals, and velars can be triggers and targets of both progressive and regressive non-local place assimilation in an early stage of development. The same child also shows some cases of local regressive place assimilation. In another study where 4 children's data were gathered from a naturalistic longitudinal study, local regressive place assimilation as well as conso-nant harmony is witnessed regardless of place features. In adult Korean, however, only coronal to labial/velar and labial to velar local regressive assimilation occurs. This paper argues that the non-local and local place assimilation is connected and shows that the connection can be accounted for in terms of different constraint rankings within the Optimality-theoretic framework. More specifically, it is shown that the Ident-Onset(place) constraint plays a decisive role even in the early stage of acquisition, unlike child English, accounting for the predominant regressive assimilation. Also, the Agree-Place constraint is exploded into two sub-constraints in Stage 3, capturing the asymmetrical behavior of assimilation. Further, the unranking of place features in early development gradually evolves to the fixed ranking which reflects the universal markedness hierarchy in adult Korean.

This paper reports a unique state of affairs of "causatives" and "passives" in Korean. The two grammatical notions have long remained unstable due to the fact that certain morphological causatives and passives are formally identical and that these two no-tions are conceptually closely related. The paper also analyzes the processes involved in their development by tracing their paths to Middle Korean. In addition, it describes their recent change in Modern Korean, which has further complicated their usage, i.e. some of them have acquired an extended function as markers of the speaker’s attenuative stance to show politeness. This extension is motivated at the conceptual level by the demotion of agent to promote humility and the functional reinterpretation of existing forms; and, furthermore, at the socio-cultural level by political influence and language contact, among others. The current paper argues that this development involves diverse participating factors, i.e. discursive strategies, subjectification, inter-subjectification, and functional extension, and that linguistic variability may persevere over a long period of time.

The article presents a notion of Probabilistic Tree-generating Binary Grammar (PTgBG), a probabilistic extension of Tree-generating Binary Grammars (TgBG). TgBG is a for-malism developed to describe languages with syntactic discontinuities, designed with two practical goals in mind: (1) efficient parsing; (2) representation of results in the form of flat, easily processable phrase-structure trees. Here, we introduce rule probabilities for TgBG, thus creating PTgBG. We compare PTgBG to standard Probabilistic Context-Free Grammar (PCFG) in terms of parse tree probabilities and sentence probabilities. We conclude that PTgBG may be effectively parsed by the methods developed for PCFG, while allowing for convenient expression of some linguistic phenomena, specific for non-configurational languages.

The aim of our study was to test whether and how the proficiency level in L2 affects the amount of within-language interference in Stroop colour word test (Polish as L1, English as L2); as well as to test whether and how the proficiency level in L2 affects colour naming speed in this L2, based on a study on 50 Polish students (age M = 20.8, SD = 1.6) at varying levels of English proficiency and age of acquisition > 7. The English version of Golden et al. (2002) Stroop Colour and Word Test and its Polish counterpart were used. The results show that in late unbalanced bilinguals the within-language interference was smaller in L2 than in L1 and its amount was not affected by L2 proficiency level; and that colour naming was slower in L2 than in L1, and the scores were not affected by L2 proficiency level. The implications of the study are discussed, concerning, among others, L2 processing in late unbalanced bilinguals. The popular claim that the pattern of the interplay between inter- and intra-linguistic interference in Stroop colour word test relates to proficiency level in L2 is challenged.