UIC TiL: Chris Kennedy

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Once again we will be having UICTiL tomorrow, October 2nd from 3 to 5.  Our speaker this week is Chris Kennedy from the University of Chicago.  His talk, entitled ‘Aspectual Composition and Scalar Change’, will take place in 1750 University Hall, 601 S. Morgan Street, Chicago IL 60607.  Feel free to join us at 3 for the talk, with light refreshments being served as always.

Abstract:

ASPECTUAL COMPOSITION AND SCALAR CHANGE

Current theories of aspect acknowledge the pervasiveness of verbs of variable telicity, and are designed to account both for why these verbs show such variability and for the complex conditions that give rise to telic and atelic interpretations. Previous work has identified several sets of such verbs, including incremental theme verbs, such as eat and destroy; degree achievements, such as cool and widen; and (a)telic directed motion verbs, such as ascend and descend. As the diversity in descriptive labels suggests, most previous work has taken these classes to embody distinct phenomena and to have distinct lexical semantic analyses. Continue reading →

Spanglish o Ingañol?

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Generally, when we see discussion of English-Spanish code-switching, the discussion itself is often times in English.  Evidence of this can be seen in the colloquial name for this phenomenon:  Spanglish. 

Since code-switching is the meeting of two languages, there should obviously be two discussions–one in each language.  Check out this article from El Mundo, one of Spain’s newspapers, which discusses it from the Spanish language point of view.  At one point they even use a different name for it:  ingañol.

http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2009/09/18/cultura/1253302554.html

UIC TiL: Rafael Núñez-Cedeño & Junice Acosta

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In a special session of UICTiL our very own Professor Nuñez-Cedeño and Junice Acosta will give a talk tomorrow about the Vocalization of Liquids in the Spanish of Cibao in the Dominican Republic.  The talk will take place at 3pm in 1750 University Hall (601 S. Morgan Street, Chicago IL 60607).

Abstract:

EN TORNO AL CONTEXTO REAL DE LA VOCALIZACIÓN CIBAEÑA: UN NUEVO REPLANTEAMIENTO PROSÓDICO

 Junice Acosta y Rafael Núñez-Cedeño (UIC)

 Se ha teorizado que  la  vocalización de líquidas en el español  cibaeño (VLEC) no es tan general.  arris  (1983:47-50) explica que el dominio de la regla que desencadena ese proceso sólo se aplica  líquidas finales de palabras prosódicas (Pp) y no a las de funcionales (Pfunc). De modo que si bien  en la oración él avisa, la líquida del pronombre se vocaliza, resultando en [[ej]Pp [aβísa]]Pp, no le ocurre lo mismo a la del determinante el aviso, la cual al estar estructurada como [e.la.βi.so]Pp, surge intacta.   Continue reading →

UIC TiL: Marisol Garrida

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Our first UIC Talk in Linguistics is coming up Friday September 18th!  Our first speaker will be Marisol Garrida from Western Illinois University.  Her talk is entitled “Diphthongization of Non-High Vowel Squences in Latin American Spanish”.  The talk will take place in 1750 of University Hall (601 South Morgan Street) from 3pm to 5pm.

Abstract:
DIPHTHONGIZATION OF NON-HIGH VOWEL SEQUENCES IN LATIN AMERICAN SPANISH

Adjacent vowels in Spanish may be syllabified either as heterosyllabic
(V.V) or tautosyllabic (VV) sequences, depending on the vowel quality
and/or the position of the stress. As a general rule, sequences of
non-high vowels, or a stressed high vowel in contact with a non-high vowel
are to be articulated as two separate syllables (hiatus); the remaining
sequence combinations are to be parsed as tautosyllabic or diphthong
sequences.

Despite the established syllabification rules, previous studies on Spanish
phonology report on different variation phenomena. The resulting forms of
output include cases as contrastive as the articulation of ‘exceptional
hiatuses’ in Peninsular Spanish (e.g. [kli.én.te] for [kljen.te]
‘customer’) and the tendency to diphthongize hiatus sequences in Latin
American Spanish (e.g. [tja.tro] for [te.á.tro] ‘theater’).

Given the reported variation, this research focuses on the tendency to
diphthongization of canonical hiatus sequences (e.g. /ea/> /ja/ as desear
[de.se.ár]>[de.sjár] ‘to want’) observed in two different varieties of
Latin American Spanish (Mexican and Colombian).

Data collected from 39 college students from Bogota and Mexico City were
analyzed with the aim of establishing the different factors constraining
this sound change. Results presented in this talk compare the
pronunciation of the sequences /ea/ and /ia/ in two grammatical categories
(nouns and verbs) and three different stress contexts (pretonic, tonic and
posttonic). The data analyzed come from recorded speech samples (a total
of 2720 tokens) and the participants’ syllabification intuitions.
The overall results confirm that the tendency to diphthongize hiatus
sequences is highly spread in some Latin American varieties (data for the
oral syllabification task from Bogota showed that 52.2% of the words
containing the expected hiatus sequence ‘e.a’ were syllabified as
diphthongs, for Mexico City, 54.6% of the sequences were syllabified as
diphthongs).Additionally results from the acoustic analysis showed that
the articulation of a VV sequence varies from one stress context to
another. The tendency to reduce the hiatus sequence /ea/ to a
tautosyllabic articulation [ja] is more likely to occur in a stress
context other than tonic/initial, with posttonic position being the most
favorable for diphthongization to occur.

Results from this study contribute to the field of Spanish phonology in
three main aspects: they report on dialectal differences and similarities
from two different varieties, they confirm the relevance of proximity to
stress and relative position of the sequence in the word as a constraining
factor in the articulation of adjacent vowels, and they add to
methodological approaches by comparing results from two different
syllabification tasks, and showing that task choice plays an important
role when testing intuitive judgments.

Childhood Bilingualism

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In this month’s issue of Science, an article appeared from two researchers, Ágnes Melinda Kovács and Jacques Mehler, at the Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati–SISSA in Trieste, Italy. They used an eye-tracking study involving speech patterns and toys which found that bilingual infants (12 months) could better distinguish between “two different regularities.” That is, when presented with two different speech patterns of nonce syllables, the bilingual children learned to associate the distinct patterns with the location of the toys. Thus, in the absence of the toys, the bilingual children were statistically more likely than monolingual children to look to the previous location of the toy associated with the pattern they hear. The monolingual children only learned the pattern for one of the locations.

What gives the bilingual infant the advantage? The researchers suggest that a bilingual infant can learn multiple structures simultaneously as a result of the mixed speech they’ve been exposed to. This mixed speech either allows the children to filter out interference possibly due to the development of what the researchers call the “precocious development of control and selection abilities” as documented in other sources.

To see the article and the documented sources:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/325/5940/611

Bilingualism Benefits, Part 2

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Another interesting hit is this question and response in Google Answers. 

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=271995

The question was what were the benefits–in the lifestyle and job market–of being bilingual.  The responder is a very well-informed–to my knowledge anonymous–person who has posted a wealth of interesting links about everything from the statistics of employment and poverty levels of bilinguals to IQs and creativity.

Bilingualism Benefits, Part 1

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If you google ‘bilingualism benefits’ you’ll find a number of interesting hits.  What’s particularly interesting is the way that research in the field is slowly but surely trickling out to the public.

Consider this article from 2004 by the APA about a study that appeared in Psychology and Aging:

http://www.exploringabroad.com/articles/bilingual-benefits.htm

(“Bilingualism, Aging, and Cognitive Control: Evidence From the Simon Task,” Ellen Bialystok, Ph.D., and Mythili Viswanathan, M.A., York University; Fergus I. M. Craik, Ph.D., Rotman Research Institute; Raymond Klein, Ph.D., Dalhousie University; Psychology and Aging, Vol. 19, No. 2.)

You can find the same article discussed in layman’s terms in the Washington Post in the same month in the same year.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39338-2004Jun13.html

In the Washington Post, the following quote appeared:

“The team, led by Ellen Bialystok at York University, hypothesized that the ability to hold two languages in the mind at the same time, without allowing words and grammar from one to slip into the other, might account for the greater control needed to perform well on the Simon task. An alternate hypothesis is that bilinguals have superior working memories for storing and processing information.”

The APA’s article, on the other hand, discusses “distractability” and says that bilingualism curbs the “age-related decline in the efficiency of inhibitory processing.”

Hopefully articles like the one in the Washington Post will help inform those who are in a position to affect language policy.  The challenge, then, will be continuing the dialogue.

UIC TiL: Dennis Ott

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This Friday, April 10th, Dennis Ott from Harvard will give his talk entitled, “Stylistic fronting as remnant movement”. 

Join us in University Hall room 1750 from 2 until 4pm and, as always, light refreshments will be provided.

Abstract

In this paper, I discuss a peculiar movement type found in Icelandic, known since Maling’s (1980) seminal work as *stylistic fronting* (SF), which shifts a postverbal constituent to the left of the finite verb. SF poses nontrivial problems for syntactic theory, as it appears to contradict a number of widely-held theoretical assumptions (see Holmberg 2006 for a survey); in particular, it appears to move heads (adverbs, participles, particles) into a specifier position (Spec-T), which in addition should be occupied by a trace/copy. SF only applies in clauses with a “subject gap” (basically, embedded clauses with relativized/extracted subjects and impersonal constructions); it is  semantically vacuous, optional and (for the most part) in complementary distribution with expletive-insertion. I will show that my account can derive all of these properties while relying on a minimal set of assumptions. Previously, SF in Icelandic has been analyzed as head movement (Jónsson 1991), as a subcase of topicalization (Rögnvaldsson & Thráinsson 1990), or as movement of phonological features (Holmberg 2000). I argue that these approaches are  empirically and conceptually problematic and propose instead to analyze SF as EPP-driven phrasal A-movement of a (potentially remnant) XP to Spec-T. This novel approach to Icelandic SF not only allows for a unified treatment of its  various manifestations but is also shown to make a number of desirable predictions concerning the observed properties and restrictions. Thus, SF turns out to be yet another phenomenon in Germanic syntax for which a  remnant-movement analysis proves superior to alternative accounts.

International Conference on Minority Languages in Estonia

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In May (28th-30th) there will be the 12th International Conference on Minority Languages (ICML XII) in Tartu, Estonia.  The ICML is hosted by the University of Tartu, but there are colloquia being held by affiliate departments.  One such department is the Department of Modern Philology at the Universitá degli Studi di Firenze, which will be holding a colloquium (themed session) entitled “Language contact and change in multiply and multimodally bilingual minority situations.”

The colloquium deals with bimodal bilingualism approached as a minority language in need of typological standardization and contact-induced grammatical change.

The colloquium’s homepage:

http://www.dipfilmod-suf.unifi.it/CMpro-v-p-236.html?newlang=eng

The ICML XII website:

http://www.icml.ut.ee/

UIC TiL: Shahrzad Mahootian

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Shahrzad Mahootian of Northeastern Illinois University will be presenting this Friday at UIC Talks in Linguistics.  The talk will take place in 1750 University Hall (601 S. Morgan Street) from 2-3.

Abstract:

The Medium and the Message: Codeswitching in written discourse

“I am always the other but I get to choose my identity depending on context”

(Guillermo Gomez-Pena, 1993)

“Are you an independent *chica *or a cling-on?” (Latina 2001)
A variety of reasons and explanations have been put forth for why bilinguals codeswitch. Nearly all the data  considered has come from spoken, unscripted discourse, with very little attention paid to written texts.  Using data
from a variety of sources, I examine the motivations behind codeswitching in written texts. I employ Fairclough’s discourse model  (1995) in which he proposes a three dimensional approach for critical discourse analysis. The model is based on the interrelationship between *text, discourse practice * and* sociocultural practice*. He claims  that “social-identity struggles” are worked out through “new configurations of genres and discourse” (pg 8). An analysis of the “texture” (form, organization and content) of code mixing in written texts leads me to conclude that* *the use of mixed language is one *discourse practice* through which a ‘bicultural identity’ is defined and promoted (*sociocultural practice*). Specifically, the intentional use of mixed code in printed media serves as an identity marker for the bilingual speech community associated with this data (Mahootian 2005). The use of mixed code in the context of a national publication for example, such as *Latina*, is one way that the social-identity struggles of Latinos in the United States are expressed, and to a certain extent, resolved.