Saturday
Elena Savinova
Mickeal van der Haar
Tinatin Tskhadadze
Jérémy Genette
Vinicio Ntouvlis
Nadine Bayer
Mare van Welzenis
Lorenzo Oechies & Suze Geuke
Selin Altunsoy
Ngan Nguyen
Layla Chabhar
Melle Groen
Elena Savinova
Utrecht UniversitySaturday 18 April, 11:25 - 11:45 | LUMC J1-116 / ROUTE 554
Lost in lexical retrieval: the role of naming probe and cue type in compensation of negative age-related changes
Paper (MA)There is ample evidence of negative age-related changes in lexical retrieval, which are reflected in longer times needed to recall words and even failures in recalling them. However, the question of whether and how these changes can be mitigated remains only marginally addressed. The present research combined referential (picture) and inferential (definition) naming tasks and two types of cueing in order to study their possible compensatory effects for age-related changes in lexical retrieval. Referential and inferential naming tasks were combined to test if referential and inferential prelexical processes of word retrieval are equally affected by age. Letter cues and a novel type of collocational cues were implemented in order to compare their efficiency across naming tasks and ages. The experiment consisted of picture naming (referential retrieval) and naming from definition (inferential retrieval) in cued and non-cued conditions. The participants were 18 younger and 18 older healthy speakers of Russian. Analysis of reaction times and an additional analysis of accuracy data was conducted using linear and generalized linear mixed-effect models respectively. The results revealed no interaction between naming task and age, meaning that referential and inferential naming abilities are similarly affected by age and there seems to be no compensatory effect in reliance on visual or verbal semantical information in lexical retrieval. The results also showed a main positive effect of letter cues on reaction times and accuracy rates, which was universal across tasks and ages. Collocational cues were found to impede participants’ performance in terms of reaction times. However, collocational cueing assisted in eventual correct word retrieval in the inferential task. The results suggest that additional phonological information is helpful in mitigating age-related changes regardless of the way the concept is triggered in lexical retrieval. Additional contextual information about a word appears to be helpful only in its inferential retrieval.
Mickeal van der Haar
Leiden UniversitySaturday 18 April, 11:25 - 11:45 | LUMC J1-117 / ROUTE 554
The Luang -a compared to the Leti Indexer
Paper (BA)In the descriptive grammar of the Central Malayo-Polynesian language Luang, the morpheme -a seems inexplicable in how varied its usage is. It is such a problem for analysis, that the authors of Luang’s grammar have opted to consider the occurances of -a either as separate morphemes, or as unsolved problems altogether. In this paper, I will show that the -a is one trans-categorial morpheme with core and peripheral functions that explain its many uses. I will first show this simply by making an inventory of the uses of -a and make language-internal arguments for the consideration of -a as a single morpheme. Next, I will look at another rare and challenging morpheme, the ‘indexer’ of Leti, a sister language to Luang, which I consider having the same origin as the Luang -a. The broader comparative perspective gained from looking at the Leti indexer allows us to better understand the elements of these morphemes that have previously been too challenging to analyse, helping us understand these morphemes in both languages.
Tinatin Tskhadadze
Tbilisi State UniversitySaturday 18 April, 11:50 - 12:10 | LUMC J1-116 / ROUTE 554
Characteristics of the speech act of thanking in Georgian
Thesis: BA / undergraduateThe purpose of the research is to identify functions, formulas, and specific terms and expressions that are characteristic of speakers of the Georgian language in terms of Speech act of thanking.The objectives of the research are to highlight the functions of the Speech act of thanking by observing the environment in Georgian society, to reveal formulas of appreciation by politicians, journalists, social network users, which is the novelty of the paper.The research is conducted by theoretical and empirical methods, particularly observation, description, comparison, survey.167 participants participated in the research. 143 (109 female;34 male) took part in the first questionnaire. 24 (20 female; 4 male) completed the second questionnaire (situational tasks).The research shows that representative methods of thanksgiving are more or less universal for Georgian language. It depends on the level of literacy, social status and socio-cultural characteristics of the language users. The formulas of the Speech act of thanking also vary depending on whether the situation is familial or official. The research reveals that characteristics such as: softening, expressiveness, reduplication, intensity is mostly featurable of Georgian societies and are naturally reflected in appropriate language formulas as well. Functions of the Speech act of thanking in Georgian language are: 1. Indication of certain (context-oriented) benefits; 2. The function of starting, stopping, ending and changing a topic; 3. The function of leaving any place and saying goodbye; 4. Positive or negative response function; 5. The function of expressing negative emotional states; 6. Thanks for the wide context; 7. reduplication, expression of expressiveness; 8. Thanks for the compliment, indirect thanks; 9. Language aberrations; 10. Required or incomplete request reaction; 11. Thanks for the compliment, along with the interjection/exclamation; 12. Thanks-sorry; 13. Expressiveness. The paper also discusses the main formulas of speech act of thanking.
Jérémy Genette
Université Libre de BruxellesSaturday 18 April, 11:50 - 12:10 | LUMC J1-117 / ROUTE 554
When Metalinguistic Discourse Paves the Way for Self-Identification: The Case of Calabrian Greek
Paper (MA)In this research, I suggest that not only linguistic features play a role in self-identification processes, but also metalinguistic discourse. Through the analysis of the Calabrian Greek situation (henceforth CG), it is possible to unveil how the latter could underpin self-identification. Apropos CG, there is still an ongoing debate among linguists about whether the presence of that Greek variety in a Romance territory comes from the Classic and/or Byzantine Greek domination period. When even linguists cannot agree on a single hypothesis, it is easy for laypeople to be lost and consequently, adopting one hypothesis looks like a free choice. The pros and cons of each of them can be described in terms of (i) prestige, (ii) socio-cultural identity, (iii) the evidence used, and (iv) the importance of Gerhard Rohlfs’s work for the inhabitants. Thus, it is possible to hypothesize why some prefer adopting one hypothesis rather than the others according to what fits their interests better since there is no consensus among linguists. Actually, the local authorities sometimes assert the validity of the Classic hypothesis; the first results of an on-line survey (29 participants) realized for this research exhibit impressionistically a relation between the hypothesis favored and the ability to speak CG (not statistically significant: p-value=0.174), and a nearly statistically significant relation (p-value=0.059) between the hypotheses and the declared interest in CG. It reveals that, when one is lost in the linguistic debate, choosing what fits one’s interests better is feasible. The criteria mentioned earlier help understanding the refusal of the Byzantine hypothesis by some, and the preference for the Classic or mixed alternatives by others according to what suits their self-identification needs. This research gives insights into the relation between self-identification and metalinguistic discourse, and suggests further research might lead to interesting considerations.
Vinicio Ntouvlis
Radboud UniversitySaturday 18 April, 14:00 - 14:20 | LUMC J1-116 / ROUTE 554
Lost in linguistic landscapes: Towards a new sociolinguistics?
Paper (MA)This review paper provides an overview of how Linguistic Landscape Studies (LLS) emerged and developed as a field of inquiry in recent decades. Through this overview, it is argued that LLS are an advantageous pursuit for promoting a paradigmatic change that is currently underway in the field of sociolinguistics. First, the gradual growth of LLS as a field is illustrated by examining its publication history, which is marked by substantial shifts in empirical, theoretical, and methodological concerns. These shifts justify a distinction between “first wave” and “second wave” LLS based on substantial differences in theory, methods, and focus. This dichotomy is further elaborated, leading to a tripartite distinction between “LLS 1.0”, “LLS 1.1” and “LLS 2.0”. Second, the paper argues that LLS comprise an inherently innovative sociolinguistic pursuit (e.g., due to their concern with written as opposed to spoken language), which calls for substantial changes in our ontological and epistemological assumptions for the study of language in society. These changes relate to the notions of superdiversity and languaging, which have been recently introduced in sociolinguistics and are essential for analyzing linguistic meaning-making in the current stage of globalization. These new conceptual tools are embraced in second wave approaches, thereby rendering second wave LLS a driving force behind a paradigmatic change in sociolinguistics. Ultimately, it is argued that LLS provides fertile ground for embracing the recent “ethnographic pull” in sociolinguistics (Lillis, 2013) and contributing to the new paradigm of “sociolinguistics of globalization” (Blommaert, 2010).
Nadine Bayer
Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-NürnbergSaturday 18 April, 14:00 - 14:20 | LUMC J1-117 / ROUTE 554
Peculiarities of the two Judaeo-Arabic varieties of Sudan
Paper (MA)It is only relatively recently that research has emerged on the two Judaeo-Arabic varieties of the Sudan. Geva-Kleinberger did pioneering work on this topic by recording speakers of each variety and publishing a few articles, but his analysis also contains some inaccuracies. This concerns the transcription and translation, but most importantly he does not relate to the current sociolinguistic setting of the speakers. While he does write about the history of the Jews in Sudan and explains how the two different varieties came into being, he only mentions in passing that both speakers of his recordings have been living in Israel for a long time. He does not relate to contact phenomena, such as code-switching and borrowings from Hebrew, which are observable in the recordings. He rather gives the impression of tracing the Hebrew elements in the speech of his interviewees back to their Jewish origin. This also holds for features that obviously stem from other Arabic varieties, which he attributes unconditionally to the Sudanese Jews’ immigrant origin, while the speakers surely have been in contact with other Arabs in Israel as well.While peculiarities of some Arabic forms would need further comprehensive investigation to make a decision about their origin, one case has to be mentioned. One speaker uses the uncommon form ʾana štaġalna “I worked”, where the verb form corresponds to 1.pl., but the pronoun and the meaning refers to 1.sg. Geva-Kleinberger describes it as a „peculiar -a ending analogous to the independent personal pronoun ana”. However, I argue that it is rather formed analogously to the imperfect of the Western Arabic dialect group, whose 1.sg. imperfect form corresponds to the 1.pl.impf. form of the Eastern group. This is supported by the fact that both Eastern and Western 1.sg. imperfect forms occur in the transcription.
Mare van Welzenis
Leiden UniversitySaturday 18 April, 14:25 - 14:45 | LUMC J1-116 / ROUTE 554
Constructed dialogue in Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT)
Thesis: BA / undergraduateMy thesis will be about quotative use of constructed action in the Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT). Constructed action (CA) is taking on roles of different characters in a narrative. In some sign languages, research shows that CA is marked by the direction of the body, facial expressions and signs marking the character’s perspective. Constructed dialogue (‘quoting’ a certain character) is one of the main functions of CA (Cormier et al 2015). These have not been found in Cormier’s research on British Sign Language, probably because only retellings of cartoon videos were used for this research. I will investigate if and in which way constructed dialogue is present in the Sign Language of the Netherlands by looking at various types of discourse in the corpus NGT (Crasborn et al 2008). The videos in this corpus already contain lexical glosses in ELAN. To locate the instances of constructed dialogue in the corpus, I will search the corpus for the verb ‘say’ (zeggen) with the search function of ELAN, because this is an indicator for a direct or indirect quote (Stec et al 2016, 5). I will then proceed to annotate the files in which this verb occurs, using the CA annotation guidelines provided by Cormier et al (2015). Using this procedure, I will describe which articulators are characteristic to indicate constructed dialogue in NGT, and how they are typically combined.
Lorenzo Oechies & Suze Geuke
Leiden UniversitySaturday 18 April, 14:25 - 14:45 | LUMC J1-117 / ROUTE 554
How Chinese is The Hague's Chinatown?
Paper (MA)The Hague's Chinatown is located right in the city centre. The neighbourhood clearly communicates a Chinese identity, visible from the two Chinese archways at both ends of the Wagenstraat, Dutch-Mandarin street name signs, Chinese lanterns, and an abundance of Chinese or otherwise Asian establishments.In November 2019, Suze Geuke and Lorenzo Oechies conducted fieldwork in the neighbourhood, focusing on its linguistic landscape. The term linguistic landscape was first defined by Landry and Bourhis (1997: 23) as "the visibility and salience of languages on public and commercial signs in a given territory or region". We made a list of all of Chinatown's establishments and labeled these according to several characteristics from Landry and Bourhis (1997), Reh (2004), and Gaiser and Matras (2016), including informational or symbolic function, type of multilingualism, and visual dominance. Because many signs featured Chinese characters, we also distinguished between traditional and simplified Chinese characters (Wiedenhof 2015: 359-401).We found a total of 100 establishments, ranging from restaurants to churches, nearly half of which communicated a Chinese orientation. The often creative language choices in the neighbourhood can be regarded as a form of translanguaging, as described by Gorter and Cenoz (2015). Informational Dutch occurred most frequently in all signs. Strangely enough, we found only 38 establishments showing Chinese characters, indicating a discrepancy between the identities that the owners of establishments communicate and the languages they display. As for the use of Chinese characters, we found an association between the functions of signs and whether they featured traditional or simplified characters: most informational signs featured traditional characters and most symbolic signs features simplified characters. This difference can be linked to the different waves of Chinese immigrants in The Hague (Willems et al. 2010).This research will result in a paper written by Tieken, Geuke & Oechies.
Selin Altunsoy
Université Libre de BruxellesFriday 17 April, 15:05 - 15:25 | LUMC J1-116 / ROUTE 554
How Syrian Refugees may get lost in the Turkish Language
Thesis: MA / graduateFor my MA thesis at the Free University of Brussels (ULB), I analyze the speech of Syrian refugees who now live in Kayseri, Turkey. Therefore, I have recorded last summer male and female informants speaking Turkish from different social backgrounds. I transcribe their audio recordings with ELAN, a computer software. It has a tier-based data model that supports multi-level, multi-participant annotation of time-based media.I am currently working on these recordings to analyze various aspects while they talk in Turkish. I focus on the possible influence of Syrian Arabic as well as Kayseri Turkish dialect on the manner they learn Standard Turkish, in terms of phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon. I will also analyze the difference between male and female learners. The culture and codes vary in Middle East countries, and the freedom that women are enjoying in Western culture or in Turkey is not the same in Syria. As the majority of the female informants is not working, and continues to follow that pattern in Turkey, there truly is a gap between a male and female Syrian learning Turkish, women being less exposed to interactions in Turkish, outside of their homes.
Ngan Nguyen
Vrije Universiteit AmsterdamSaturday 18 April, 15:05 - 15:25 | LUMC J1-117 / ROUTE 554
Men speak Martian and women speak Venusian: A study in gender and language
Paper (MA)This study compares the informativeness and usefulness of three different types of feature: stylometric features, word embedding features and document embedding features in the task of gender classification with the application of different machine learning models. The best result of 63% accuracy is achieved using word embedding features and Stochastic Gradient Descent classifier suggesting the power of word embeddings in describing the different language of men and women.
Layla Chabhar
Leiden UniversitySaturday 18 April, 15:30 - 15:50 | LUMC J1-116 / ROUTE 554
Against Creissels' cross-linguistic existential framework: existential constructions in Finnish
Thesis: BA / undergraduateThis talk will focus on the part of my thesis that describes existential constructions in Finnish. This was done with the help of Denis Creissels' seven types of existentials (2014). The findings are that this language does not fit neatly within Creissels’ types, firstly because the language shows multiple constructions and secondly because some of them cannot be categorised within any of Creissels' existential types. Finnish has three distinct ways of forming existentials: with a form of olla + locative, a form of olla + the agent participle of olla+ locative, or a ‘copula only’ construction. Not every construction is grammatical in every context. Often existentials cannot be clearly separated from locatives and possessives. Generally, word order and context work together with a specific construction to somewhat differentiate it from other constructions. However, multiple interpretations of a single construction are often possible, so this is not absolute. This goes against the findings of Creissels' who posits that it is only word order that distinguishes a locative from an existential in Finnish.
Melle Groen
Leiden UniversitySaturday 18 April, 15:30 - 15:50 | LUMC J1-117 / ROUTE 554
Greek aspirates, breathy voice and the Glottalic Theory
Paper (BA)Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the ancestor of all Indo-European languages, had three series of stop consonants, which are traditionally reconstructed as voiceless, voiced and voiced aspirated. According to the Glottalic Theory, the voiced stops were actually glottalized, and in most versions of the theory the voiced aspirated stops were actually only voiced. There are several arguments that make the Glottalic Theory plausible, but one problem is the behaviour of 'voiced aspirated' stops. In some of the daughter branches of PIE, the reflexes of the 'voiced aspirated' stops are difficult to account for if they were only voiced without aspiration in PIE. In Greek for example, the reflexes of these stops are voiceless aspirated, which is hard to explain if the stops were originally only voiced without aspiration. The Armenian and Indo-Iranian branches show evidence for originally voiced aspirated stops as well.In my talk, I will try to reconcile these observations with the Glottalic Theory by proposing a scenario of how voiceless aspirated stops in Greek, as well as the voiced aspirated or 'breathy voiced' stops of Sanskrit and some Armenian dialects, may have evolved from stops that were originally voiced without aspiration. Typological data from other language families, including Chinese, Bantu and Austronesian, shows that there are several cross-linguistic parallels to the proposed development.