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Interactional Entanglements: A Frame Analysis Of Negotiated Identities In Ethnographic Research On The Language Classroom, Mark A. Ouellette
Interactional Entanglements: A Frame Analysis Of Negotiated Identities In Ethnographic Research On The Language Classroom, Mark A. Ouellette
UTA Working Papers in Linguistics
This study examines interactional entanglements that occurred during ethnographer-participant interactions in a language classroom. It draws upon Goffman's notion of framing to analyze how research participants use deixis to position the ethnographer vis-à-vis themselves within classroom speech events. The analysis shows that the teacher and students negotiated identities by appealing to the researcher's allegiances within an underlying judicial trial frame. As a marginal native, the ethnographer is particularly susceptible to others' social positioning, which raises questions concerning the very personal involvement of the ethnographer conducting research in an educational setting. This article underscores the argument that impression management is not …
Speech Act, Evidentiality, And Implicature In The Korean Topic-Construction, Jung Sun Son
Speech Act, Evidentiality, And Implicature In The Korean Topic-Construction, Jung Sun Son
UTA Working Papers in Linguistics
Is it possible to map pragmatic or discourse-oriented features onto the syntax level? The Korean topic marker -(n)un has a contrastive reading that induces conventional implicature, and is closely associated with a modal morpheme that can be regarded as a kind of agreement with evidentials. This paper attempts to represent such pragmatic features (implicature and evidentiality) as being involved in the topic-construction at the syntax level. To accomplish this, the paper introduces a Speech Act Projection (SAP), whose head encodes illocutionary force, and an Evidentiality Projection (EvidP), which is headed by a modal morpheme or evidential marker. The conventional implicature …
We Shall Be Watching You, You're Going To Die, And Other Threats: A Corpus-Based Speech Act Approach, Natalie Raun Carter
We Shall Be Watching You, You're Going To Die, And Other Threats: A Corpus-Based Speech Act Approach, Natalie Raun Carter
UTA Working Papers in Linguistics
Using a speech act approach, this paper examines the similarities and differences between English-language threats made by terrorists and those made by non-terrorists, with a focus on pronoun use and sentence-type. Both groups employ a variety of sentence-types in their threats, but use declarative statements most often. 1st person nominative pronouns occur as subjects of clauses much more frequently than 2nd person pronouns in both the terrorist and non-terrorist threat data. Non-terrorist threats, however, make significantly more use of the 1st person singular nominative pronoun, while terrorist threats use the 1st person plural nominative pronoun more frequently.
Nous And On In Semi-Formal French: Pragmatic Uses Of Institutionality And Distancing, Deborah King
Nous And On In Semi-Formal French: Pragmatic Uses Of Institutionality And Distancing, Deborah King
UTA Working Papers in Linguistics
French linguists have long noted the substitution of the indefinite pronoun on for the 1st person plural pronoun nous, in both formal and informal situations. Studies of informal conversation have found this replacement to be nearly categorical (Laberge and Sankoff 1980; Coveney 2000). By contrast, this study found a much higher percentage of nous compared to on in interviews and speeches with political or business-related themes (roughly 60% nous to 40% on). The data suggest that many speakers use nous and on in pragmatically distinct ways: nous for institutionality, on for distancing. However, nous can underscore institutionality even in potentially …
A Perception Study On The Third Tone In Mandarin Chinese, Rui Cao, Priyankoo Sarmah
A Perception Study On The Third Tone In Mandarin Chinese, Rui Cao, Priyankoo Sarmah
UTA Working Papers in Linguistics
This experimental study examines the role of the shape of the pitch contour in the perception of the Mandarin Chinese tone 3.2 A set of stimuli was constructed by varying the pitch of tone 3 on two conditions: (1) varying the duration of the dip (or turning point) and (2) varying the timing of the turning point (duration of the slope). The manipulated pitch contours of tone 3 were presented to the native speakers of Mandarin Chinese in two sets: (a) a set of speech stimuli and (b) a set of non-speech stimuli. The participants of the experiment were asked …
Argument Realization Of Chinese Result And Phase Complements, Han-Chun Huang
Argument Realization Of Chinese Result And Phase Complements, Han-Chun Huang
UTA Working Papers in Linguistics
This paper discusses result complements and phase complements in Chinese, both of which are postverbal elements. Despite their surface similarity, they are different with respect to argument realization. While the result complements allow complicated argument realization (in terms of semantic host, verbal transitivity, and subcategorization of objects), the phase complements function as lexical aspect markers, or Aktionsarten, and do not participate in argument realization. I adopt a constructional approach, particularly Boas’s (2003) event-frames and linking rules. Inverted causative resultative constructions in Chinese are also discussed. They are strong evidence for “constructional participants” that interact with event participants in determining syntactic …
Preliminary Tone Analysis Of Possessed Nouns In Chicahuaxtla Trique, Kosuke Matsukawa
Preliminary Tone Analysis Of Possessed Nouns In Chicahuaxtla Trique, Kosuke Matsukawa
UTA Working Papers in Linguistics
Chicahuaxtla Trique is one of the Trique languages spoken in Oaxaca, Mexico. Among three Trique languages, Chicahuaxtla Trique has the most complicated tone system and its tone system has not been fully understood yet. When a noun is possessed, a contrastive tone on the final syllable of a noun stem is often changed with a post-clitic pronoun and, less frequently, with an independent pronoun in Chicahuaxtla Trique. In this paper, I will analyze the tone patterns for possessed nouns in Chicahuaxtla Trique based on my fieldwork data. Although the analysis is still at the preliminary stage and more comprehensive data …
F1 And Center Of Gravity Interplay In The Maintenance Of Phonological Height Within A Statistical Model Of A Communal Grammar: The Case Of Foodo [Atr] Acoustics, Colleen G. Anderson
F1 And Center Of Gravity Interplay In The Maintenance Of Phonological Height Within A Statistical Model Of A Communal Grammar: The Case Of Foodo [Atr] Acoustics, Colleen G. Anderson
UTA Working Papers in Linguistics
This paper presents the notion of an idealized or communal grammar as a statistical model of mode, mean or median as emerging from a representative number of a population, rather than in individual speech, per se. Like other languages with a 9-vowel Cross Height Vowel Harmony (CHVH) system, the most reliable correlate of ATR is F1; [+ATR] vowels have lower F1 values than their [-ATR] counterparts, while F2 differences show considerable variation across speakers. F1, however, fails to maintain phonological height differences as the [+ATR] mid vowels of level 3 overlap in acoustic space with the [-ATR] high vowels of …
Language And The Shaping Of The Arab-American Identity, Dalal Saleh Almubayei
Language And The Shaping Of The Arab-American Identity, Dalal Saleh Almubayei
UTA Working Papers in Linguistics
This study is an attempt to shed light on the interaction between language and the ethnic, cultural, and religious identities of Arab-Americans. It employs two focus groups consisting of Arab-Americans who share a group dialogue about the aspects of language and identity. The groups differ in terms of two variables: age and generation. Participants shared their experiences, life stories, feelings, and perspectives about the role of Arabic and English in their lives. The older participants emphasized a concern of language and ethnic identity loss among their U.S. born children, while younger participants talked about the importance of Arabic to belong …
Lexical Borrowing, Creolization And Basic Vocabulary, George L. Huttar
Lexical Borrowing, Creolization And Basic Vocabulary, George L. Huttar
UTA Working Papers in Linguistics
This paper is concerned with two sets of questions, one from semantics and cognitive linguistics, one from diachronic linguistics and in particular creole studies. From the cognitive-semantic side, we are dealing with issues of “basic” vocabulary: what sorts of lexical items, or, more precisely, what sorts of concepts, are, in some useful sense or other (say, psychologically more salient), more “basic” than others? From the diachronic linguistics side, the issues concern likelihood of change through contact: “For what sorts of concepts are lexical items most readily replaced by items from new sources, and which ones are more resistant to such …
Primary Stress Assignment In Brazilian Portuguese, Susan Gary Walters
Primary Stress Assignment In Brazilian Portuguese, Susan Gary Walters
UTA Working Papers in Linguistics
Brazilians display a great interest in the prosody of their own language. Much classroom time is spent counting syllables, enumerating detailed rules for stress assignment and memorizing rules of diacritics used in the orthography (e.g., Cegalla 1991). Stress assignment and its rules are one of the topics covered on the vestibular, the nationwide university entrance exam (Savioli 1991:131ff). Students in elementary schools study syllable structure and division. Even by the second grade they know such words as paroxítono ‘a word whose stress falls on the next to last syllable’ and antepenúltimo ‘antepenultimate’. The problem is that many of the rules …
Subjectless Sentences In English, Patricia Willess Reiman
Subjectless Sentences In English, Patricia Willess Reiman
UTA Working Papers in Linguistics
One of the goals of modern linguistics is to develop a model of Universal Grammar which captures natural language features that are universal, while also accounting for variation among languages. Thus a much-discussed phenomenon in Government and Binding theory is pro-drop (Jaeggli and Safir 1989). Pro-drop is the parameter which determines whether the subject of an independent clause must be overt or may be left empty (Crystal 1991:279). According to the definition given above, it would appear that English is a pro-drop language. However, Crystal (1991:279) cites English as an example of a non-pro-drop language. If this is correct and …
Discourse-Based Evidence For An Ergative Analysis Of Cebuano, Dennis Walters
Discourse-Based Evidence For An Ergative Analysis Of Cebuano, Dennis Walters
UTA Working Papers in Linguistics
The case-marking systems of Philippine languages have been difficult to classify as either nominative-accusative (NOM-ACC) or ergative-absolutive (ERG-ABS). The question hinges on the status of the “object-focus” clause type. Is it a passive voice clause as traditional analyses (beginning with Bloomfield 1917) suggest? Or is it active voice — the basic transitive clause type — as an ergative analysis would conclude? While purely structural clues at clause-level cannot tell us unambiguously which analysis is appropriate for this group of languages, a discourse-functional approach offers an escape from this dilemma. Cebuano is spoken as a first language by about seventeen million …
Diphthongization And Underspecification In Kɔnni, Mike Cahill
Diphthongization And Underspecification In Kɔnni, Mike Cahill
UTA Working Papers in Linguistics
The problems of analyzing vowels of Gur languages are well-known to those who work among them. The bulk of the difficulty in K?nni comes in the analysis of the mid vowels, which manifest themselves in diverse and initially confusing ways. In this paper, I demonstrate that phonetic vowel sequences in K?nni can be analyzed as a diphthongization of long mid vowels. Evidence from phonetics, phonological rules, and tone is cited to support this conclusion. In the remainder of Section 1, I present the vowel harmony system of K?nni. In Section 2, I introduce the question of how putative vowel sequences …
The Variable (Th) In Dallas African American Vernacular English, Virginia C. Vinton
The Variable (Th) In Dallas African American Vernacular English, Virginia C. Vinton
UTA Working Papers in Linguistics
It is well-known that African American Vernacular English (hereafter AAVE) displays regional variation. In the case of the (th) variable, Wolfram (1969) found that AAVE speakers in Detroit used the nonstandard variants [f], [t], and Ø. In New York City, Labov (1972a) observed the use of [t] and [t?] as the nonstandard variants. In both of these studies conducted in the northern U.S. the variants used by speakers were stratified differently with regard to social factors. Given regional variation of this sort, we might well expect further interesting differences in southern cities of the U.S. The present study, conducted in …
Predicting Near-Native Pronunciation In Spanish As A Foreign Language, A. Raymond Elliott
Predicting Near-Native Pronunciation In Spanish As A Foreign Language, A. Raymond Elliott
UTA Working Papers in Linguistics
The objective of the present study is to examine the acquisition of pronunciation by 66 undergraduate students enrolled in three sections of an intermediate Spanish course. The data were collected during the Fall semester of the 91-92 academic year at Indiana University, Bloomington. Thirty-two males and thirty-four females served as the subjects. Using a control and two experimental groups, three separate regression analyses examined: 1) variables related to the subjects’ accuracy of pronunciation, 2) the effect of formal instruction in pronunciation, and 3) the relationship between “production” or pronunciation and the subjects’ knowledge of formal pronunciation rules, termed “metalinguistic awareness.” …
The Variable Elision Of Unstressed Vowels In European Portuguese: A Case Study, David J. Silva
The Variable Elision Of Unstressed Vowels In European Portuguese: A Case Study, David J. Silva
UTA Working Papers in Linguistics
European varieties of Portuguese exhibit a process whereby unstressed vowels, particularly schwa, optionally undergo elision: an item such as idade ‘idea’ can be realized as [ida'd] and para Maria ‘for Maria’ may surface as [pr?m?rí'?]. While previous research in the study of phonological variation of this sort has typically focused on syntactic, morphological, functional, and segmental factors as the primary linguistic conditions for accurately characterizing variable processes (Guy 1980; Poplack & Walter 1986, among many others), less work has been done investigating the role of prosodic factors in this respect. Yet if one believes (along with Nespor and Vogel 1986, …
Finding The "Two" In Diglossia, John C. Paolillo
Finding The "Two" In Diglossia, John C. Paolillo
UTA Working Papers in Linguistics
Sociolinguists generally agree that a diglossic situation is one in which a single speech community employs two or more varieties of language, a H(igh) variety and a L(ow) variety, for different communicative purposes. Ferguson’s (1959) classic definition also includes a structural component: the two forms of language are varieties of the same language, and hence related, but “highly divergent” from one another, more so than a dialect in relation to its standard language. However there is little agreement on this point, and different researchers give different characterizations of how divergent H and L must be. The theoretical status of intermediate …
Phonetic Emphasis In Tamil, James E. Vinton
Phonetic Emphasis In Tamil, James E. Vinton
UTA Working Papers in Linguistics
The present paper is based on a study conducted following Balasubramanian’s (1981) method: a native speaker was asked to emphasize a given item in a sentence and instrumental measurements were made as to which phonetic cues the speaker used to accomplish that task. While Balasubramanian asserted that emphasis is marked mainly by an increased length of certain segments, the findings in the present paper indicate that Tamil emphasis is marked by a combination of several phonetic correlates. Some of the confusion about Tamil stress arises from a failure by several authors to distinguish clearly between word-level stress, sentence-level emphasis, and …
Anaphora, Pragmatics And Style In German, Helga H. Delisle
Anaphora, Pragmatics And Style In German, Helga H. Delisle
UTA Working Papers in Linguistics
German uses two sets of anaphoric pronouns, the personal pronoun set (PP) er, sie, es and the demonstrative pronoun set (DP) der, die, das. The latter set has been largely neglected in the literature, possibly because it mainly occurs in informal conversations. In this paper, I will investigate how a basic concept like the deictic one is exploited for various functions, and to what extent these functions are integrated into the different styles of spoken and written German. It will be shown that the DP is used by the speaker to signal to the hearer not only referential but also …