The 65th Language Lunch
Date: 2018-12-13
Location: G.07 Informatics Forum
Why do-support in Scots is different
Lisa Gotthard; s1242025@sms.ed.ac.uk
Previous work on Scots syntax tends to assume that do-support follows the English pattern (e.g. Görlach, 2002) despite the fact that Scots exhibited variability between do-support and verb-raising for much longer than English (e.g. Jonas, 2002). Do-support is still not categorical in all dialects of Modern Scots, and this variability highly correlates with a phenomenon present in Scots but not in (Standard) English: the Northern Subject Rule (NSR) (e.g. Smith, 2000). This paper builds on de Haas’s (2011) claim that the -(i)s inflection, employed in Scots NSR varieties to establish subject-verb agreement in environments where Standard English would employ do-support, is in fact a default inflection, while the ø-inflection found where plural pronouns are immediately adjacent to the finite verb is true subject-verb agreement. It will argue that do-support in Scots is more likely to be a transfer from English than an independent development. The variability in the development of Scots do-support is argued to be due to Scots retaining other means of establishing subject-verb agreement, the NSR and verb-raising. Thus, do-support was either acquired for a different function, i.e. as a negation or question marker, or the variability is due to do-support entering a three-way grammar competition to express the same function as the NSR and verb-raising.
Who is “ziji”(self)? Pronoun resolution among Mandarin-English late bilingual speakers during on-line processing
Wenjia Cai; s1342561@sms.ed.ac.uk
During a conversation, tracking and understanding the reference of pronouns is crucial to fully comprehendingrninterlocutors’ intention. As native speakers of a language, we can locate antecedents tornpronouns with much ease and often immediately, that we overlook the fact that pronoun resolutionrnis a complex cognitive process that involve not only linguistic knowledge, but also general cognitivernfunctions such as monitoring, integration and updating.rnFor bilingual speakers, whose two languages are both active and constantly interacting with eachrnother (Costa & Navarrete, 2006; Hatzidaki, Branigan, & Pickering, 2011), this task could be morernchallenging. In the current study, we want to see how mandarin-English bilingual speakers processrnreflexive pronouns on-line, and whether their comprehension deviate from their monolingual peers.rnEnglish and mandarin Chinese has different rules in terms of reflexive-antecedent binding, it wouldrnbe interesting to see how the discrepancies influence bilinguals speakers’ pronoun resolution in realrntime.rnResults from a speeded comprehension task showed that compared to their monolingual peers,rnbilingual speakers took longer time to process reflexive pronouns, however their answers were morernaccurate. In addition to the speeded acceptability judgment task, a battery of tasks measuring workingrnmemory (see Foster et al., 2015) and cognitive control abilities (see Robertson, Ward, Ridgeway, &rnNimmo-Smith, 1994) were also conducted. Some of the cognitive components are correlated withrnparticipants’ performance in the judgment tasks, either in reaction time, or in acceptability judgment,rnor both. We believe that general cognitive functions play a significant role during on-line processing,rnparticularly under the effect of L1 attrition. The results will be discussed in relation to cognitive loadrnof the tasks and individual differences in working memory capacity.
Katuic Presyllables and Derivational Morphology in Diachronic Perspective
Ryan Gehrmann; R.M.Gehrmann@sms.ed.ac.ukt
The phonological history of the Katuic language family, an Austroasiatic sub-group ofrnmainland Southeast Asia, is fairly well understood today (Ferlus 1971, 1974b, 1979; Huffmanrn1976; Diffloth 1982, Sidwell 2005, Gehrmann 2015, 2016). However, there are two topicsrnwhich have received relatively little attention in the historical linguistic literature on Katuic: 1)rnthe diachrony of the unstressed, penultimate syllable (presyllable) of Proto-Katuic and 2) thernmorphophonology of Proto-Katuic. This paper aims to make a contribution in both of thesernareas by discussing the various structural and sound changes which have affected thernpresyllables of modern Katuic languages and by reconstructing the morphophonologicalrntemplate and derivational affixes of Proto-Katuic. Changes to the modern Katuic presyllablesrninclude the development of presyllable vowel quality contrasts, reanalysis of coda nasals asrnmain syllable onset prenasalization, simplification of geminates or their reanalysis as longrnconsonants, metathesis of coda liquids and simple deletions of coda consonants. Three formalrnaffix types (prefixes, rime-onset infixes and rime infixes) and four morphological processesrn(nominalization, reciprocation, anticausation and causation) are reconstructed for Proto-Katuic.
Saudi Attitudes towards Native and Non-Native Accents of English
Abeer Alshehri; A.A.Alshehri-1@sms.ed.ac.uk
This study investigated 36 Saudi attitudes towards seven English accents: General AmericanrnEnglish, Southern Standard English, Scottish English, Singapore English, Indian English,rnSaudi English and Chinese English. The study addresses three research questions: 1)What arernthe attitudes of Saudi learners towards different English accents from the three circles ofrnKachru’s World English Model (1985, 1992)? 2)Are Saudis able to identify different Englishrnaccents? 3)Do Saudis prefer certain English accents? To examine these attitudes two methodsrnwere employed: verbal guise techniques (VGT), as an indirect method, and questionnaires asrna direct approach. The overall findings reveal that Saudi participants have positive attitudesrntowards native accents, particularly General American English and Scottish English. SouthernrnStandard English was rated low in the VGT, however, it was chosen as a second preference inrnthe direct approach. Furthermore, Saudi participants showed positivity towards their ownrnaccent in solidarity dimensions. The findings also indicated that the Saudis were not aware ofrnall English accents and faced considerable difficulties in recognition questions. This studyrnsuggests that further research is necessary to validate the results obtained in the current study.rnThere would be benefits in conducting longitudinal studies to identify the direction ofrnattitudinal shifts towards specific accents of English among the population in Saudi Arabia.
Got thingmabobbed in the blitz: differences between SCOTS and DECTE in grammatical uses of get
John Rice-Whetton; johnwrw@gmail.com
As laid out in Gronemeyer (1999), in the history of English, the word get has followed a grammaticalization pathway that has led to it being used in a wide range of different ways. Some work has been done on the use of get in various world Englishes (Bruckmaier, 2016, 2017; Coto-Villalibre, 2014), but there has been little research investigating any variation in regional varieties of Britain. This poster presents a comparison between the use of get in a conversational subset of Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech (SCOTS) and a comparable subset of the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (DECTE). No categorical differences between these two corpora are found in terms of get-constructions found in one that are entirely absent from the other. However, there are significant differences found in the relative frequencies of certain constructions. Specifically, the English of Tyneside displays significantly higher frequencies of inchoative (get angry), motion (get home) and stative possessive constructions (I’ve got blue eyes), when compared with what is found in SCOTS. By contrast, SCOTS shows a significantly higher frequency of causative uses (get things done, get it ready, get your coat on). Furthermore, although there is a similar overall frequency of get-passive examples (get killed) in the two corpora, a difference appears in terms of what conditions its use: inanimate subjects are much more likely to be found with get-passives in SCOTS compared to DECTE.
