Volume 31, 2020
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Browsing Volume 31, 2020 by Department "School of Languages, Linguistics, Literatures and Cultures"
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Item Open Access Acquisition of Tense and Lax Vowels by Persian Learners of English(2020-11-19) Abdollahnejad, EliasThis study investigates the qualitative and quantitative features of English tense (/i: & u:/) and lax (/ɪ & ʊ/) vowels in the L2 production of advanced L1 Persian speakers. The first two formants (F1 & F2) are used to determine the spectral quality of vowels, while the vowel length (in milliseconds) represents the vowel quality. Unlike English, which has two high front (/i:/ & /ɪ/) and back (/u:/ & /ʊ/) vowels, Persian has only one high front vowel /i/ and one high back vowel /u/. Considering this difference, the main questions of this study are whether L1 Persian speakers have separate representations of English tense and lax vowels in their L2 phonological inventory and, if yes, whether they differentiate these vowels based on their qualitative and/or quantitative features. According to the Equivalence Classification Hypothesis (Flege, 1987), L1 Persian speakers are expected to assimilate/merge English front vowels /i: & ɪ/ to their existing L1 single front vowel /i/ and English /u: & ʊ/ to their existing single Persian back vowel /u/. A group of ten female advanced L1 Persian speakers of English are compared with a control group of ten female native English speakers in their production of these vowels in open and closed syllables. Results show that while both quality and quantity are used by English speakers, the Persian speakers have difficulties in acquiring this distinction in their L2 English on both measures. However, the difficulty seems to be mostly in the acquisition of L2 phonetic features (i.e. gradual) than phonological ones (i.e. categorical).Item Open Access Calgary Working Papers in Linguistics, Volume 31, Fall 2020(2020-11-19) Nikolić, Dušan; Daniel, Adam D.; Nelson, Brett C.; Oguz, Metehan; Xu, KangThe editors of this issue, Dušan Nikolić, Adam D. Daniel, Brett C. Nelson, Metehan Oguz, and Kang Xu, are pleased to present the thirty-first issue of the Calgary Working Papers in Linguistics published by the Department of Linguistics in the School of Languages, Linguistics, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Calgary. The papers published here represent works in progress and as such should not be considered in any way final or definitive.Item Open Access Case Assignment on Bare Direct Objects in Turkish(2020-11-19) Oguz, MetehanBare direct objects (BDOs) in Turkish have attracted the interest of many researchers (Aydemir, 2004; Enç, 1991; Kamali, 2015; Kornfilt, 1994, 2003; Öztürk, 2005, 2009; Travis, 2010; among others). Studies so far mostly agree that BDOs in Turkish get into a relationship with the verb, however, the hypotheses for the type of the relationship and the data provided are inconsistent. Kornfilt (1994) suggests that head of the BDO incorporates into the verb and creates a new verb head, following Baker’s (1988) proposal. Aydemir (2004) proposes that BDOs in Turkish are not syntactic arguments and that they do not occupy object position, while Öztürk (2005) proposes that BDOs pseudo-incorporate with the verb, following Massam’s (2001) proposal. Kamali (2015) disagrees with some Turkish data provided by Öztürk (2005), but still agrees with her pseudo-incorporation proposal for Turkish. Kamali (2015) concludes that lack of overt case in BDOs is due to a weak accusative feature, which leads to either pseudo-incorporation or an indefinite reading of the BDO. This paper suggests that the evidence put forward to support both incorporation and pseudo-incorporation analyses could be explained by adopting Karimi’s (2005) Two Object Position Hypothesis (TOPH) to Turkish.Item Open Access Distribution of PRO in Serbian Subjunctives(2020-11-19) Nikolić, DušanThe paper investigates distribution of PRO in Serbian subjunctives by following the tenets of Landau’s (2000, 2004) theory of control. The goal of the paper is to present theoretically-based and empirical evidence for two types of Serbian subjunctives: Type I and Type II, and to argue that PRO is generated and motivated independently of Case or Binding Theory. I make three main claims in this study. First, PRO in Serbian subjunctives depends on the interaction of Tense [T], Agree [Agr], and Reference [R]. Second, Type I subjunctives allow only PRO, which is anaphoric, or [-R], while Type II subjunctives allow a lexical DP or pro, which is [+R], or an independent reference. In addition, I argue that Type I subjunctives are untensed, whereas Type II subjunctives are tensed. Third, Landau (2004) assumes that [-R] prohibits PRO from being dispatched to the spell-out immediately, and that PRO enters Agreement with the matrix functional head. I argue that his theory has fallen short of providing conceptually strong arguments for such a stipulation. Instead, I propose Harwood’s (2015) variable phase approach that heeds to more dynamic phase structure. By ‘shifting’ the phase to a higher level domain, that is to the matrix clause vP, PRO becomes accessible to the probe, and the derivation of subjunctives converges.Item Open Access Expletive Pronoun Deletion Elicitation(2020-11-19) Weir, JesseUnder the current minimalist program, most spoken English sentences are required to have an overt subject by virtue of the strong EPP feature at T. In informal spoken English however, it is possible to omit an expletive or referential pronoun before the raising verb seems. In sentences with a referential pronoun subject, participants will take notice of referential pronoun constructions and assign stress to the subject pronoun, even if it is absent in what they are reading aloud (Weir, 2019). When listening to degraded audio, interspeaker phonological variation plays a significant role in determining the likelihood of reproducing a sentence with the subject pronoun absent. Previous research on the topic of subject pronoun deletion in spoken English has been approached from both a pragmatic approach (Mack et al. 2012) and a phonological approach. The results of the present study suggest a combination of these two approaches which explains the interspeaker variation in the audio recreation data of the present study. This paper also argues that the phonetic patterns that appeared in Weir (2019) are the result of participants adjusting based on the syntactic differences in sentences based on the referentiality of the pronoun subject.Item Open Access Exploring L2 English Learners’ Articulatory Problems Using a Read-Aloud Task(2020-11-19) Kang, ShuoAlthough the irregular pause in oral production is a common problem in the speech of language learners, it is unclear what factors cause the pauses and to what extent learners’ native language affects the oral fluency of their target language. This study investigated the anomalous pauses made by English learners who speak Mandarin Chinese as their mother tongue, with attempts of finding out why these pauses occur in the articulation process of their speech productions. 36 learners and 36 native English speakers participated in a read-aloud task (124 English texts with 26081 words for each participant), which was recorded for further analysis. Based on previous research into oral fluency, the anomalous pause in this study is operationalized to have a long duration (over 1s) and occur in the formulaic sequences or in a single sentence. That is, any pauses that conform to both long silent intervals in formulaic sequence and long silent intervals in a sentence where there is no formulaic sequence, count as anomalous pauses in this study. The results demonstrated that L2 learners made significantly more anomalous pauses when reading aloud English texts and they had difficulty articulating the phonemes /b/, /d/, /g/, /dʒ/, /z/ and /ð/. More importantly, no difference was found in the frequency of anomalous pauses between advanced and less advanced learners, indicating that even proficient learners have difficulties in L2 pronunciation. The reasons why these articulatory problems cause irregular pauses and related pedagogical implications are discussed.Item Open Access The Lives of Coordinate Structures: Evidence from Distribution and Cases of Three (Or More) Conjuncts(2020-11-19) Sheppard, BrooklynCoordination has long been ignored in much of the previous syntactic literature. The goal of this article is to begin the task of explaining a variety of phenomena involving coordinate structures, such as their distribution and cases where there are three (or more) conjuncts. I begin by comparing two previous accounts of coordinate structures and investigate if and how each approach could account for the phenomena of the distribution of coordinate structures and cases where there are three (or more) conjuncts. I then conclude that these structures are best analyzed as being headed by the conjunction itself. Finally, I propose a set of minimalist features on the conjunction itself that can help us account for both the distribution and selectional properties of coordinate phrases.Item Open Access Plurality as a Phi-Feature in Non-Inflectional Plurals(2020-11-19) McDonald, BrittanySome languages, such as Pirahã, express plurality through means other than plural inflectional morphology. Wiltschko (2008) calls these alternative plural marking strategies non-inflectional plurals and develops several diagnostic criteria for determining whether or not a language is an inflectional plural-marking language, illustrated with examples from English (an inflectional plural-marking language) Halkomelem (a non-inflectional plural language). These criteria pertain to obligatoriness, agreement, compounding, and derivational morphology. This paper expands on these criteria, drawing two more from Greenberg’s (1963) Universals, to answer the following research question: Do non-inflectional plurals possess a plural phi-feature? This paper explores this question by looking at certain properties of Khmer and Thai, two languages which appear to have non-inflectional plurals, to look for any evidence of the presence of phi-features in their respective plural-marking strategies.Item Open Access Right-Edge Phonological Phenomena in Kaqchikel(2020-11-19) Nelson, Brett C.This paper examines a slew of phonological phenomena that occur at the right edge of the prosodic word in Kaqchikel (cak), a Mayan language of Guatemala spoken by about 400,000 people (Heaton & Xoyón, 2016). Based on previous phonological work by Brown, Maxwell, & Little (2006) and Bennett (2018), I first introduce the phonemic inventory (22 consonants, 10 vowels) and prosodic structure of Kaqchikel, with the latter being composed of primarily stress-final, recursive prosodic words, and intonational prominence on the right-edge of the phrase. This is followed by a review of Bennett’s (2016b) discussion of the Kaqchikel tense-lax distinction in vowels, which only surfaces in stressed (word-final) syllables. Thus, an underlying lax vowel { ɪ ɛ ǝ ɔ ʊ } surfaces as its corresponding tense vowel { i e a o u } in any unstressed syllable. I next discuss final aspiration of stops, and then spirantization of final sonorants, unifying them as a process of epenthesis of a [spread glottis] feature at the right edge of the word. Each phenomenon individually shows that the right-edge is a position of particular prominence in Kaqchikel; all together they demonstrate it is one ripe for future (and current) exploration into their acoustic correlates and their higher-level prosodic and morpho-syntactic implications.