Search Results (13)

This article presents an updated view of the language history of Vietnamese from its native Austroasiatic roots, including key historical phonological, morphological, and syntactic features and developments; a characterization of its Austroasiatic etyma; and the context of this information in Vietnamese linguistic ethnohistory. It is now possible to make better supported claims and more precise characterizations due to improved understanding of the history of Austroasiatic and Vietic and their reconstructions, the nature and effect of language contact with Chinese, and the process of typological convergence of the ancestral language of Vietnamese. This study shows that, while Vietnamese is not a typologically characteristic Austroasiatic language, the Austroasiatic components of the Vietnamese lexicon and linguistic structure are more prominent than previously supposed. Full article

Mid-vowel contrasts often present perceptual challenges for speakers of languages that lack these distinctions. However, bilingual speakers, who have access to two phonological systems and exhibit greater metalinguistic awareness, might not necessarily encounter such difficulties. In this study, 27 Ukrainian–Russian bilinguals listened to an unfamiliar language, European Portuguese, and completed two tasks: an identification task where they assimilated the seven stressed oral Portuguese vowels to the closest Ukrainian categories and a discrimination task featuring the Portuguese vowel contrasts /ɛ/–/e/, /e/–/i/, /ɔ/–/o/, and /o/–/u/. No bilingual advantage was observed: the discrimination performance on all contrasts was slightly above or near a chance level (A-prime scores varied between 0.55 and 0.20). These perceptual difficulties may be attributed to the acoustic similarities between the vowels within the contrasts rather than to the differences between the phonological inventories of the languages (the most challenging contrast was not a mid-vowel contrast but acoustically similar /o/–/u/). Although with the back mid-vowel contrast, the difficulty seems to also stem from the possibility that both Ukrainian and Russian have only one back mid-vowel, /o/, and this category occupies a wider area in the vowel space of Ukrainian–Russian bilinguals. The results suggest that bilingual advantage does not always manifest itself in the perception of a new language, especially if two typologically close languages are involved. Full article

Mai-Ndombe is one of the southwestern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Ecologically, it can be characterised as a transition zone between a moist, broadleaf rainforest ecotone in the north and shrubland/savannah areas in the south. Linguistically, Mai-Ndombe, along with the rest of southwestern Congo all the way down to the border with Angola, is among the least well-surveyed areas of the planet. Within its borders, several different Bantu (Guthrie’s zones B, C, and H) varieties are spoken, near the newly identified West-Coastal Bantu homeland, itself a hot spot of phonological diversity unlike any other in the West-Coastal Bantu domain. Phonetic and phonological accounts of its languages are particularly lacking (apart from impressionistic “grey literature” reports which seldom comply with the standards of present-day phonetic and phonological inquiry). This gap is particularly concerning as Mai-Ndombe is also an area of great anthropological diversity, with numerous hunter-gatherer Twa communities living deep in its eastern and northern forests. Their lects, collectively known as Lotwa, are severely endangered, as they face the threats of social stigma and the growing use of national and regional linguae francae. As part of the author’s doctoral project (still underway), phonetic data were collected in the area between May and July 2021, specifically in Inongo (the provincial capital) and Nioki. The present contribution is intended as a brief note on the relevant results produced so far, mainly bearing on the analysis of some phenomena of interest in the languages of the region, including Sakata rhotics and labial–velars and the presence of unusual trilling/flapping realisations in Lotwa. The picture yielded by this preliminary exploration is one of striking phonetic and phonological variation, possibly pointing to earlier stages of greater linguistic diversity than previously supposed. It is also tentatively proposed that one of the specific characteristics of the phenomena attested in the present contribution is that they tend to affect more than one language at a time, working rather as areal “phonetic possibilities” than language-bound outcomes of traditional sound change rules; in this sense, it is suggested that in-depth documentation and description can help broaden our understanding of how language contact works in highly multilingual contexts. Full article

This paper discusses extensive language contact and its results in Kazakhstani Gansu Dungan, a divergent variety of Mandarin Chinese. Based primarily on recorded conversational source materials, this study offers a contact linguistic overview of the language, introducing both phonological and morphosyntactic contact phenomena. It is shown that Kazakhstani Gansu Dungan is currently under extensive Russian influence. The influence permeates all layers of the language and exceeds lexical borrowing mentioned in earlier Dungan studies. For instance, clause combining and complex clauses in Dungan have shifted to the direction of a Russian model, which makes the language stand out among other Sinitic varieties. This study demonstrates that, in addition to introducing new structures, extensive Russian influence on Dungan also reinforces earlier development that has led the language further away from the Sinitic prototype. In all, Kazakhstani Gansu Dungan forms its own kind of divergent Russianized Sinitic variety and thus offers a contribution to both researching language contact in the Russophone world and to understanding the typological diversity of Sinitic languages. Full article

Xiang (hsn) remains a poorly understood grouping within Sinitic, with no satisfactory conclusions on how to demarcate its boundaries or define its subgroupings. One general observation is that there is a rough typological split between the Northeast and Southwest related to contact from northern- and southern-type Sinitic varieties, respectively, which can be supported with phonological, lexical, and syntactic evidence. It is predicted here that an additional source of evidence can be found in the phonetic features of hesitation markers (HMs; ‘fillers’, ‘speech disfluencies’, etc.), which tend towards the central area of the vowel space (approaching [ə], [ɤ], [e], etc.) but still conform to the phonologies of the languages in which they occur. This study introduces a novel three-way division of Xiang in terms of phonemic central vowels found in open syllables (either [ə/ɤ], [e/ɛ], or both) which is then evaluated against the vocalic quality found in HMs to determine whether they can be used as evidence for Xiang internal typology. Data are gathered from 47 speakers representing 16 Xiang localities, distributed across Hunan province, recorded performing the Pear Stories paradigm, with 304 hesitation markers extracted. Features reported on include vowel quality (F1-F2), tonal contour (F0), and duration (ms). It is found that Xiang HMs demonstrate four distinct vowel qualities, but that their distribution does not neatly fit established taxonomic schemes; however, the evidence does support the transitional status of Xiang varieties as a site of mixture of northern and southern Sinitic features. Full article

We investigated a technology-based tool for teaching English letter-sound correspondences with bilingual children learning phonologically and typologically distant languages: English and Chinese. We expect that learning about print at the phoneme level may be particularly challenging, given children’s experience with the morphosyllabic language of Chinese. This randomized-controlled study with 90 kindergarteners examined the effects of an iPad-based supplementary reading program compared with a control condition. The See Word Reading^® program utilized picture-embedded cues for teaching phonics within lessons directed at the letter, word, and text levels. Measures of decoding, word reading, and spelling were taken at the pretest, posttest, and follow-up for both groups. Results showed better gains in word reading for the reading group, indicating the positive impact of this supplementary reading tool. Further, data collected online from the app showed that different types of letter-sound pairings were more challenging to learn, including pairings that are inconsistent and with phonemes that are specific to English. Full article

This paper focuses on prosodic adjunction at the Prosodic Word level in a polysynthetic language. I argue that recursion at a depth of more than two levels can only be generated by a theory which requires exact correspondence between certain syntactic phrases and Prosodic Words. Such a theory is similar to Phonological Phrase correspondence in Match Theory, suggesting there is an underlying shared property between correspondence at the Prosodic Word and Phonological Phrase levels. In addition, this theory must include a constraint which prohibits recursive prosodic constituents in order to generate the attested typology of clitics across languages. The empirical focus is the prosodic structure of the verbal complex in Blackfoot (Algonquian; ISO 639-3: bla). Using phonotactic evidence I argue that the vP phase corresponds to a Prosodic Word, and that each prefix to the stem is a Prosodic Word adjunct. I then compare several theories of the syntax-prosody interface, including versions of Alignment Theory, Wrap Theory, and Match Theory. A subset of schematic candidates with one or two prefixes to a stem are used to determine which theories generate the attested typology of clitics as well as a multiply recursive Prosodic Word structure. Full article

This paper aims to demonstrate the reliability of morphosyntactic versus morphophonological features in the acquisition of L2 gender of inanimate nouns across languages. Based on Anna Kibort study “Towards a typology of grammatical features”(2010), the current research proposes that the presence of a gendered determiner is more reliable than gendered noun-final morphemes in the process of adjective agreement within the Determiner Phrase (DP) across two gender transparency system languages. To test this hypothesis, the current research compares English second-language (L2) learners of Hebrew and Spanish. Both languages have a binary gender system for nouns; however, Hebrew lacks a determiner with gender value, but provides a plural ending morpheme that encodes both number and gender. In contrast, Spanish has a gendered article that facilitates gender acquisition, but lacks a plural ending morpheme that indicates gender. Thirty-two L1 English–L2 Spanish learners and thirty-two L1 English–L2 Hebrew learners with different proficiency levels completed an adjective-agreement forced-choice task and an adjective-agreement elicited-production task—in their respective target languages. The tasks contained Spanish opaque plural nouns and Hebrew plural transparent nouns, highlighting the role of the determiner in Spanish and the role of transparency plural-ending morphemes in Hebrew. The results revealed that Spanish L2 learners performed better on the tasks than L2 Hebrew learners, offering evidence for the relevance of syntactic agreement knowledge over phonological cues in gender acquisition. Full article

The present article aims at questioning the status of the šāwi dialect of the Bani ^ʕAbbād tribe by providing a new analysis of the main distinctive phonological, morphological, and syntactical traits which may hint at dialect mixing. The data provided by the field research, based on a functional framework that relies on descriptive linguistics and a typological approach, show that this dialect is deeply affected by a koineizing tendency due to increasing contacts with the populations of the neighboring areas (especially ^ʕAmmān and Salṭ) which, in turn, leads to the gradual loss of its authentic features. Finally, this paper discusses whether the dialect of the Bani ^ʕAbbād should still be considered as belonging to the yigūl group (recently renamed Central Bedouin ygūlu) of the Syro-Mesopotamian sheep-raising tribes or if a new typology of mixed type dialects should eventually be adopted for the dialects displaying important markers of both Bedouin and sedentary types. Full article

Optimal coding theories of language predict that speakers will keep the amount of information in their utterances relatively uniform under the constraints imposed by their language, but how much do these constraints influence information structure, and how does this influence vary across languages? We present a novel method for characterizing the information structure of sentences across a diverse set of languages. While the structure of English is broadly consistent with the shape predicted by optimal coding, many languages are not consistent with this prediction. We proceed to show that the characteristic information curves of languages are partly related to a variety of typological features from phonology to word order. These results present an important step in the direction of exploring upper bounds for the extent to which linguistic codes can be optimal for communication. Full article

Attempts to classify spoken Arabic dialects based on distinct reflexes of consonant phonemes are known to employ a mixture of parameters, which often conflate linguistic and non-linguistic facts. This article advances an alternative, theory-informed perspective of segmental typology, one that takes phonological properties as the object of investigation. Under this approach, various classificatory systems are legitimate; and I utilize a typological scheme within the framework of feature geometry. A minimalist model designed to account for segment-internal representations produces neat typologies of the Arabic consonants that vary across dialects, namely qāf,ǧīm,kāf, ḍād, the interdentals, the rhotic, and the pharyngeals. Cognates for each of these are analyzed in a typology based on a few monovalent contrastive features. A key benefit of the proposed typologies is that the featural compositions of the various cognates give grounds for their behavior, in terms of contrasts and phonological activity, and potentially in diachronic processes as well. At a more general level, property-based typology is a promising line of research that helps us understand and categorize purely linguistic facts across languages or language varieties. Full article

Spoken languages make up only one aspect of the communicative landscape of Indigenous Australia—sign languages are also an important part of their rich and diverse language ecologies. Australian Indigenous sign languages are predominantly used by hearing people as a replacement for speech in certain cultural contexts. Deaf or hard-of-hearing people are also known to make use of these sign languages. In some circumstances, sign may be used alongside speech, and in others it may replace speech altogether. Alternate sign languages such as those found in Australia occupy a particular place in the diversity of the world’s sign languages. However, the focus of research on sign language phonology has almost exclusively been on sign languages used in deaf communities. This paper takes steps towards deepening understandings of signed language phonology by examining the articulatory features of handshape and body locations in the signing practices of three communities in Central and Northern Australia. We demonstrate that, while Australian Indigenous sign languages have some typologically unusual features, they exhibit the same ‘fundamental’ structural characteristics as other sign languages. Full article

This paper investigates the role recursive structures play in prosody. In current understanding, phonological phrasing is computed by a general syntax–prosody mapping algorithm. Here, we are interested in recursive structure that arises in response to morphosyntactic structure that needs to be mapped. We investigate the types of recursive structures found in prosody, specifically: For a prosodic category κ, besides the adjunctive type of recursion _κ[κ x], _κ[x κ], is there also the coordinative type _κ[κ κ]? Focusing on the prosodic forms of compounds in two typologically rather different languages, Danish and Japanese, we encounter three types of recursive word structures: coordinative _ω[ω ω], left-adjunctive _ω[f ω], right-adjunctive _ω[ω f] and the strictly layered compound structure _ω[f f]. In addition, two kinds of coordinative φ-compounds are found in Japanese, one with a non-recursive (strictly layered) structure _φ[ω ω], a mono-phrasal compound consisting of two words, and one with coordinative recursion _φ[φ φ], a bi-phrasal compound. A cross-linguistically rare type of post-syntactic compound has this biphrasal structure, a fact to be explained by its sentential origin. Full article