Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Keyword
-
- Linguistics (3)
- Phonology (3)
- Language variation (2)
- Pragmatics (2)
- Sociolinguistics (2)
-
- AAVE (1)
- Acoustic phonetics (1)
- African American vernacular english (1)
- Anaphora (1)
- Basic vocabulary (1)
- Brazilian Portuguese (1)
- Case-marking (1)
- Cebuano language (1)
- Coindexation (1)
- Creolization (1)
- Dallas (1)
- Diglossia (1)
- Diphthongization (1)
- Discourse (1)
- Discourse analysis (1)
- English language (1)
- Ergativity (1)
- European Portuguese (1)
- Foreign language instruction (1)
- Gender (1)
- German language (1)
- H and L features (1)
- Historical linguistics (1)
- K?nni language (1)
- Konni language (1)
Articles 1 - 11 of 11
Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network
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 …