The Tense, Mood, and Aspect System of Haitian Creole and the Problem of Transmission of Grammar in Creole Genesis

1996 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-311 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Lefebvre
Keyword(s):  
Phonological Representations ◽  
Haitian Creole ◽  
Phonological Form ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Syntactic Properties ◽  
Semantic Properties

It is often assumed that creolization involves a break in the transmission of grammar. On the basis of data drawn from the TMA system of Haitian creole, as compared with those of its source languages — French, the superstratum language, and Fongbe, one of the substratum languages — this paper argues that creolization does not involve a break in transmission of grammar. The properties of the Haitian creole TMA system are shown to reflect in a systematic way those of its contributing languages. While the syntactic and the semantic properties of the TMA markers of the creole parallel those of Fongbe, the markers' phonological form appears to be derived from phonetic strings found in the superstratum language. This systematic division of properties is predicted by the hypothesis that relexification has played a major role in the formation of the creole. The fact that the lexical entries of the creole have phonological representations which are derived from phonetic strings found in the superstratum language is the visible signal that creolization involves the creation of a new language. The fact that the lexical entries of the creole show semantic and syntactic properties that parallel those of the languages of the substratum argues that there has been no break in the transmission of grammar in the formation of the creole.

scholarly journals Subversion of Language Structure in Heterogeneous Speech Communities: the Work of Discourse and the Part of Contact

2008 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 249-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katja Ploog
Keyword(s):  
Ivory Coast ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Human Language ◽  
Speech Community ◽  
Language Structure ◽  
Speech Communities ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Phonological Form ◽  
Bilingual Speaker ◽  
Actual Speech

AbstractChange is an ongoing process constitutive of human language to which will be refered by the term of dynamics. It will be worked out how mere interaction conditions the language dynamics and how the disposable structural resources will be coordinated in microsystems. Since from this point of view grammar exists as a process, it will be of interest to work out by what type of mechanisms a bilingual speaker elaborates his/her discourse. It will be discussed what can be called a (more) 'useful' construction and through what type of mechanisms the constructions get coordinated. We will argue that all discursive mechanisms are bound to satisfy the pragmatic demands of an actual speech production and that the most useful items are those which best satisfy these pragmatic demands.One of the most characteristic phenomena of the linguistic dynamics in Ivory Coast is the microsystem of LA: In a highly heterogeneous context of social interaction, LA is used in (the locally dominant) discursive traditions of French and Mande languages, undergoing a grammaticalization process separately in each of them and used - consequently - in various constructions. The wide range of its referential values, the very importance of the negotiation of discourse referents between speaker and hearer and its simple phonological form seem to predestine LA to get reappropriated and to become a 'favorite' form in the emergent speech community.

scholarly journals Measurement for accentedness, pause frequency/duration and nuclear stress placement in the EFL classroom

2017 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
pp. 185-200
Author(s):  
Pedro Luis Luchini
Keyword(s):  
Multivariate Analysis ◽  
Experimental Research ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
The Other ◽  
Speaking Test ◽  
Phonological Form ◽  
Group B ◽  
English Native Speaker ◽  
Teacher Centered ◽  
Stress Placement

This study reports on an experimental research carried out with 50 Spanish-L1 trainees, divided into 2 groups: A & B. Both groups were presented with a traditional-teacher centered approach based on controlled exercises (repetition, imitation), but group B added a communicative component in which students completed a battery of sequenced tasks with a focus on phonological form. Both groups recorded a speaking test before & after instruction which was used to measure and compare degrees of accentedness, frequency & duration of pauses and nuclear stress placement. Ten English-native-speaker-raters judged the recordings to determine the speakers’ degree of perceived accentedness. Two specialists, using inter-marker reliability, segmented the transcriptions of recordings and identified nuclear stress placement. Another two specialists identified empty pauses. Multivariate analysis was used to measure results. Overall, group B (learners exposed to the communicative component) obtained better results in all 3 parameters than the other group. Finally, some pedagogical implications for the teaching of L2 pronunciation in ELT contexts will be discussed. 

On the etymology of the Japanese plural suffix and its possible connection to Korean

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-35
Author(s):  
Alexander Francis-Ratte
Keyword(s):  
Phonological Form ◽  
Old Japanese ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
Middle Korean

Abstract This paper presents an etymological analysis of the Japanese plural suffix tachi, Old Japanese tati. I propose that tati originates from a grammaticalization of an earlier Pre-Old Japanese phonological form *totwi, the non-bound reflex of which is the Old Japanese quasi-collective marker dwoti ‘fellow (person), everyone, together’. The reconstruction of a Pre-Old Japanese stem *totwi (Pre-Proto-Japanese /*tətəj/) with quasi-collective and plural function clarifies the possible connection of the Japanese plural suffix to the Korean plural suffix tul (Middle Korean tólh), which Whitman (1985, p. 217) proposed to be cognates but which has since been criticized on phonological and distributional grounds. I show that reconstructing the earliest form of the Japanese plural suffix as /*tətəj/ resolves each of the three phonological issues with the Japano-Koreanic comparison, creates a better morphosyntactic match between the two languages, and rules out a loanword relationship of the Japanese and Korean forms.

Morpheme recognition and the learning of rules for derivational morphology

1976 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce L. Derwing
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Language Learner ◽  
Derivational Morphology ◽  
Lexical Representations ◽  
Linguistic Description ◽  
Phonological Form ◽  
The Common ◽  
Morphological Relationship

Derivational morphology is one of the most difficult and least studied of all the areas of linguistic description (cf. Lightner, 1968:71). There are two main problems which are largely responsible for this. The first is the question of morpheme recognition or lexical identity: how similar in meaning or in sound do two words have to be in order for the linguist or language learner to identify a common morphemic unit and thus to see a morphological relationship between the words? (This problem is discussed in detail in Derwing, 1973: 122-6.) Many of the morphological rules which are proposed by linguists, whether morphophonemic or phonotactic in presumed character, are posited primarily, if not solely, in order to capture certain kinds of supposed ‘lexical redundancies,’ i.e., systematic variations which appear in the phonological form of the same morpheme when the morpheme occurs in different syntactic constructions. The viability of all such rules is thus directly contingent upon the assumption that the words involved do, in fact, share a common morpheme. Consider, for example, the morphophonemic rule which Chomsky proposes for English which changes a /d/ to an /s/ before the suffix /lv/, and the phonotactic rule which changes a /d/ plus /i/ or /y/ into a /ž/ before a vowel (1964:90); both of these rules are motivated by the presumed fact that the English words decisive and decision, for example, contain in their ‘underlying’ or ‘lexical’ representations the common morpheme decide. But how does one decide whether this claim is justified for ordinary native speakers of the language, particularly in some of the more problematical cases discussed in Derwing (1973)?

Dispersion Theory and Phonology

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Flemming
Keyword(s):  
Theoretic Model ◽  
Perceptual Space ◽  
Dispersion Theory ◽  
Phonological Constraints ◽  
Perceptual Differences ◽  
Proper Formulation ◽  
Phonological Form ◽  
Word Forms ◽  
Open Question ◽  
Phonetic Realization

Dispersion Theory concerns the constraints that govern contrasts, the phonetic differences that can distinguish words in a language. Specifically it posits that there are distinctiveness constraints that favor contrasts that are more perceptually distinct over less distinct contrasts. The preference for distinct contrasts is hypothesized to follow from a preference to minimize perceptual confusion: In order to recover what a speaker is saying, a listener must identify the words in the utterance. The more confusable words are, the more likely a listener is to make errors. Because contrasts are the minimal permissible differences between words in a language, banning indistinct contrasts reduces the likelihood of misperception. The term ‘dispersion’ refers to the separation of sounds in perceptual space that results from maximizing the perceptual distinctiveness of the contrasts between those sounds, and is adopted from Lindblom’s Theory of Adaptive Dispersion, a theory of phoneme inventories according to which inventories are selected so as to maximize the perceptual differences between phonemes. These proposals follow a long tradition of explaining cross-linguistic tendencies in the phonetic and phonological form of languages in terms of a preference for perceptually distinct contrasts. Flemming proposes that distinctiveness constraints constitute one class of constraints in an Optimality Theoretic model of phonology. In this context, distinctiveness constraints predict several basic phenomena, the first of which is the preference for maximal dispersion in inventories of contrasting sounds that first motivated the development of the Theory of Adaptive Dispersion. But distinctiveness constraints are formulated as constraints on the surface forms of possible words that interact with other phonological constraints, so they evaluate the distinctiveness of contrasts in context. As a result, Dispersion Theory predicts that contrasts can be neutralized or enhanced in particular phonological contexts. This prediction arises because the phonetic realization of sounds depends on their context, so the perceptual differences between contrasting sounds also depend on context. If the realization of a contrast in a particular context would be insufficiently distinct (i.e., it would violate a high-ranked distinctiveness constraint), there are two options: the offending contrast can be neutralized, or it can be modified (‘enhanced’) to make it more distinct. A basic open question regarding Dispersion Theory concerns the proper formulation of distinctiveness constraints and the extent of variation in their rankings across languages, issues that are tied up with the questions about the nature of perceptual distinctiveness. Another concerns the size and nature of the comparison set of contrasting word-forms required to be able to evaluate whether a candidate output satisfies distinctiveness constraints.

Morphological integration of Russian and Turkish nouns in Pontic Greek

2016 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Svetlana Berikashvili
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Morphological Type ◽  
Morphological Integration ◽  
Type I ◽  
Phonological Form

AbstractThis article presents an empirical study on morphological integration of borrowed nouns in Pontic Greek. The data have been elicited from a corpus drawn from original fieldwork in Georgia. The aim of the paper was to identify whether there was an advantage associated with borrowing between languages of the same morphological type, i. e. non-concatenative (Russian) to non-concatenative (Pontic Greek). However, the research revealed that the phonological form of the loanword is decisive for the integration of Russian and Turkish nouns into PG, and not the morphological type. Additionally, we discuss some strategies of transfer which reveal the interaction between languages of different morphological types.

A production limitation in syllable number: a longitudinal study of one child's early vocabulary

1997 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 327-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
JACQUELINE S. JOHNSON ◽  
LAWRENCE B. LEWIS ◽  
JAY C. HOGAN
Keyword(s):  
Longitudinal Study ◽  
Large Percentage ◽  
Sentence Production ◽  
Target Size ◽  
Speech Stream ◽  
Phonological Form ◽  
Primary Focus

The present paper reports on the phonological form of one child's productive vocabulary from age 0;10 to 1;8 with primary focus on his production of multisyllabic targets. A large percentage of his multisyllabic vocabulary was produced as one syllable until the age of 1;6. This limitation was not due to a tendency to extract only single syllables from the speech stream, but rather due primarily to a limitation on production. While some portion of his one-syllable productions could be interpreted as the result of single syllable extraction, a sizeable portion affirmed that he extracted the target size correctly by his inclusion of first and final target phonemes in his productions (e.g. [po] for piano and [kiz] for candies). The resolution of this limitation coincides with his move toward two-word speech. We conclude that there is a developmental and perhaps maturational limitation in the capacity to carry out the processes underlying word and sentence production.

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