Volume 28, Fall 2014

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Browsing Volume 28, Fall 2014 by Department "Linguistics"

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    Calgary Working Papers in Linguistics, Volume 28, Fall 2014
    (University of Calgary, 2014-09) Jones, Jacqueline; MacDonald, Danica; Windsor, Joseph W.
    No abstract available.
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    A comparison of Japanese and Blackfoot vowel devoicing
    (University of Calgary, 2014-09) St. Goddard, Rosalind
    This paper compares and contrasts the factors that contribute to devoicing in Japanese and Blackfoot. Japanese vowel devoicing has received rigorous discussion in linguistic literature. Tsuchida (2001) provides a particularly persuasive argument for Japanese vowel devoicing using the Optimality Theory Framework (Prince and Smolensky 2004); she argues that all Japanese voiceless fricatives are specified for [SG] and devoicing occurs when this [SG] feature is shared within a syllable. The notion that voiceless vowels carry the feature [SG] can also be extended to instances of Blackfoot vowel devoicing. Blackfoot voiceless vowels generally occur in two contexts: They occur word finally, and word-medially when they are followed by the palatal/dorsal sounds [x]/[ç], which are orthographically represented as . In contrast to Japanese voiceless fricatives, it appears that not all Blackfoot voiceless fricatives distribute the [SG] feature. The Blackfoot palatal fricative [ç] and the dorsal fricative [x] both trigger devoicing, whereas the fricative [s] does not. To explain this patterning of [x] and [ç], Reis Silva (2008) argues that [x] and [ç] are not fricatives, but rather preaspiration ([SG]) specified on certain obstruents. In this paper, I will discuss the constraints proposed in Tsuchida (2001), and extend/adapt those constraints to Blackfoot word final vowel devoicing. Additionally, In my analysis of Blackfoot word-medial vowel devoicing, I will adopt Reis Silva’s (2008) analysis that [x]/[ç] are not fricatives, but preaspiration specified on obstruents. Lastly, I argue that the word-medial vowel devoicing that occurs with [x] and [ç] is phonological rather than phonetic.
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    A cross-generational investigation of voice quality in women
    (University of Calgary, 2014-09) Greer, Sarah D F; Winters, Stephen J
    This research investigates the use of creaky voice by university-aged women and their mothers in order to answer three main questions: i. is there a specific phonetic environment where this voice quality is more likely to occur, ii. do young women use this voice quality more frequently than older women?, and iii. is creaky voice a register marker? Five mother-daughter pairs were used to help control for social and geographical dialect variation. Participants engaged in five tasks designed to compare the speech patterns of university-aged women and their mothers in different registers. A difference is hypothesized to be found in, both, the use of creaky voice cross-generationally, and between registers. Each participant read i. the Rainbow Passage, ii. a set of Harvard Sentences, and iii. a word list. These tasks were designed to provide an idea of the distribution of creaky voice in a formal discourse situation. Tasks iv. and v. are conversation tasks consisting of: a spot-the-differences picture task, and a route finding map task. These conversation tasks simulate a less formal discourse context. Annotations of the recordings were made which marked both the syllabic context in which creaky voice was produced and the length of time it was sustained at each occurrence. Using these annotations, global measurements of the usage of creaky voice were taken for each participant and compared across generations, registers and phonetic environments.
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    The distribution and use of aahk- modality in Kainai Blackfoot
    (University of Calgary, 2014-09) Lewis, Blake
    This study investigates the distribution and use of modality in Kainai Blackfoot in the presence of the morpheme aahk-. By using utterance in context tasks and judgement tasks, I elicited data from three native speakers. This study is limited to combinations of strong and weak modals of the epistemic and deontic type. Modality that uses aahk- in Kainai Blackfoot consists of the combination of the morpheme aahk- and a second (optional) morpheme, which join as a single lexical item based on negation use and surface order. Kainai Blackfoot makes a four-way modal distinction. One distinction is between strong and weak modals and a second is made between epistemic and deontic type modals. However, the weak modals have a level of overlap and can be ambiguous.
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    The distribution of Irish locatives (seo, sin, siúd): DP, AP, or other?
    (University of Calgary, 2014-09) Windsor, Joseph W
    This paper presents phonological and syntactic evidence from Irish demonstratives to argue for phrasal structure and an addition to the syntactic hierarchy of projections in the nominal domain – the demonstrative phrase (DemP). Previously in the literature, demonstratives have been analyzed as belonging to the same category as adjectives (Leu 2008), or as belonging to the same category as determiners (Wiltschko 2009). In this paper, I explore the predictions made by these analyses by extending them to Irish. The Irish data refutes both of those analyses because of obligatory co-occurrence with determiners, and a lack of adjective agreement. Phonological evidence (consonantal weakening effects) further allow me to argue that, unlike what is proposed by Cinque (2005) or Roberts (to appear), the demonstrative projection is not low in the nominal structure, but is actually external to the determiner projection and very high in the structure. I conclude this paper by making cross-linguistic predictions which are briefly extended to English demonstratives and outlining avenues for future research in applying these hypotheses to unrelated, non-Indo-European languages.
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    Learning questions in an L2: Koreans learning English question intonation
    (University of Calgary, 2014-09) MacDonald, Danica
    Remnants of a speaker’s first language (L1) are often present on features of their second language (L2). This paper investigates how native speakers of Korean acquire English intonational patterns on wh-questions and yes/no questions. English and Korean intonational structures differ on numerous levels. In additional to different intonational structures, English and Korean also differ as to how they distinguish between yes/no and wh-questions. In Korean, yes/no and wh-questions are syntactically the same. The only way in which they differ is in their intonational phrasing. In English, yes/no and wh-questions differ in multiple ways: choice of lexical item, syntactically, and intonationally. I will present preliminary experimental data from native speakers of Korean who are at various stages of acquiring English. I will also compare the intonational patterns to those of native English speakers and Korean L1 speakers. My preliminary results show that two of the native Korean participants do not seem to be aware of English intonational patterns, while the third (more advanced) speaker shows native-like intonational patterns in some English questions.
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    Negative concord in multiple negative constituent configurations in Ukrainian: a minimalist approach
    (University of Calgary, 2014-09) Filonik, Svitlana
    This study provides a minimalist account of derivation and interpretation of Ukrainian multiple negative constituent configurations, which have a Negative Concord (NC) reading. I argue that negative constituents, i.e., n-words, are Negative Quantifiers rather than Negative Polarity mechanisms, and provide an analysis of the mechanisms for checking their uninterpretable [NEG] features against the interpretable [NEG] features of the negative particle in structures with different word order. This analysis led me to the conclusion that both the operations Move/Move F and the operation Attract can adequately account for the considered Ukrainian data, while fitting into the economical mechanism of the Minimalist Program. However, I relied on the analysis of feature checking via the operations Move/Move F in the course of my further discussion on two approaches to interpretation of multiple negative constituents in NC languages. In this discussion, I used Ukrainian data to argue for the approach proposed by Brown (1999), which relies on the notions of indefinites as variables, feature deletion, copies, and reconstruction, as opposed to the approach proposed by Haegeman & Zanuttini (1991) and Haegeman (1995), which relies on the notion of Negative Absorption. Finally, I discovered that while differing in many respects from some NC languages, like Italian and West Flemish, Ukrainian NC configurations are derived and interpreted in the same way as those in other Slavic languages, namely Russian and Serbian/Croatian.