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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Tonal Alignment And Segmental Timing In English-Speaking Children, Afua Blay Sep 2015

Tonal Alignment And Segmental Timing In English-Speaking Children, Afua Blay

Purdue Linguistic Association Symposium

Tonal alignment has been shown to be sensitive to segmental timing. This suggests that development of the former may be influenced by the latter. The developmental literature reports that English-speaking children do not attain adult-like competence in segmental timing until after age 6. While this suggests that the ability for alignment may be mastered after this age, this possibility is speculative due to paucity of data. Accordingly, the present study sought to determine whether 7- and 8-year old English-speaking children exhibit adult-like alignment and segmental timing in their speech. Seven children (ages 7 and 8) and 10 adults (ages 19 …


Dialect Influence On California Chicano English, Laura Kompara Apr 2015

Dialect Influence On California Chicano English, Laura Kompara

Purdue Linguistic Association Symposium

Chicano English is a distinct U.S. English dialect common in California and the Southwestern United States. As Spanish immigrants from Mexico moved to the United States, especially throughout the 1990s, they learned English but carried some of the sounds and grammatical constructions from Spanish with them. Chicano English has become its own variety of English with organized linguistic patterns and must not be confused with English of second-language learners. This paper offers an accessible background piece to Chicano English in California and the ways that this dialect is changing due to contact with the surrounding dialects. The linguistic patterns of …


The Interaction Of Palatal Coarticulation And Palatal Harmony In Kazan Tatar, Jenna Conklin Apr 2015

The Interaction Of Palatal Coarticulation And Palatal Harmony In Kazan Tatar, Jenna Conklin

Purdue Linguistic Association Symposium

Vowel harmony and vowel-to-vowel coarticulation are long-distance assimilatory processes wherein certain vowels trigger systematic changes in adjacent vowels; harmony effects phonological change, resulting in phonemic alternation, while coarticulation effects phonetic change. This study examines the coarticulatory processes present in disharmonic words in Kazan Tatar, a language with left-to-right palatal harmony. While right-to-left palatal coarticulation is found to be widespread, left- to-right palatal coarticulation is virtually nonexistent in Tatar. It is hypothesized that gradient and categorical processes sharing the same triggers, targets, target feature, and direction cannot coexist; the diachronic implication for Tatar is that, once coarticulation was phonologized into harmony …


Uses Of Someone: Beyond Simple Person Reference, Yu-Han Lin Apr 2015

Uses Of Someone: Beyond Simple Person Reference, Yu-Han Lin

Purdue Linguistic Association Symposium

This study looks at how the non-recognitional reference form “someone” is used to refer to a known referent when a recognitional, such as a first name or a descriptive recognitional (Stiver, 2007), is available (Sacks & Schegloff, 1979). In a conversation, when participants have shared knowledge about who a referent is, the occurrence of “someone” connotes more than a simple reference to the referent. While there is little previous research concerning the use of a non-recognitional to complete particular social actions, in this study, I show how “someone” can be employed to accomplish disaffiliative actions such as complaints, accusations and …


The Role Of Antonymy On Semantic Change, Ashley M. Kentner Apr 2015

The Role Of Antonymy On Semantic Change, Ashley M. Kentner

Purdue Linguistic Association Symposium

The role of antonymy in semantic change is investigated via the etymology of sets of English antonyms. The results show a developmental pattern wherein two words sharing an antonym tend to exhibit similar trajectories of semantic development. Metaphorical extension is proposed as the primary mechanism that produces this regularity with antonymy playing a secondary role. These results further support semantic change as regular, even in contexts not involving grammaticalization, and that furthermore, metaphor is not peripheral to language use. (See Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Traugott & Dasher, 2002; Hopper & Traugott, 2003.) There are also implications for formal and cognitive …