Language Contact and the Directionality
of Internal Drift: The Development of Tones and Registers in Chamic.
Graham Thurgood
California State University, Fresno
The Chamic languages of Vietnam have undergone phonological restructuring in the last two thousand years. In contact with the Mon-Khmer languages, all have developed final stress with consequent phonotactic restructuring. Since then, some languages have remained essentially unchanged (Roglai, Rade, and Jarai), but others have undergone radical restructuring: in contact with register languages, Western Cham has become a register language; in contact with the phonology of Bahnar, Haroi has become a restructured register language; in contact with the tonal Vietnamese, Phan Rang Cham has become incipiently tonal; and, in contact with the fully tonal languages of Hainan, Tsat has become fully tonal. The internal pattern of change are relatively clear, because of their shallow time depth combined with the richness of the comparative data. However, despite the existence of phonetically plausible internal paths of development, the available evidence makes it clear that external contact set the changes in motion and determined their direction.
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Magnitude Estimation of Linguisitc Acceptability
Ellen Gurman Bard, Dan Robertson, Antonella Sorace
University of Edinburgh
Judgements of linguistic acceptability constitute an important source of evidence for theoretical and applied linguistics, but are typically elicited and represented in ways which limit their utility. This paper describes how Magnitude Estimation , a technique used in psychophysics, can be adapted for eliciting acceptability judgements. Magnitude estimation of linguistic acceptability is shown to solve the measurement scale problems which plague conventional techniques.; to provide data which make fine distinctions robustly enough to yield statistically significant results of linguisitc interest; to be usable in a consistent way by linguistically naive speaker-hearers, and to allow replication across groups of subjects. Methodological pitfalls are discussed and suggestions are offered for new approaches to the analysis and measurement of linguistic acceptability.
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Chronicling the Times: Productive Lexical
Innovations in an English Newspaper
R. Harald Baayen
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
Antoinette Renouf
University of Liverpool
This study examines the productivity of five derivational affixes in a British newspaper, the Times (London), in the period from September 1989 to December 1992. This diachronic corpus of roughly 80 million word tokens contains large numbers of neologisms. Thus, this corpus offers a good opportunity to test both qualitative and quantitative theories of morphological productivity. Our investigations support the usefulness of the quantitative formalization of the notion Degree of Productivity developed in Baayen 1992, 1993a. At the same time, they illustrate that productivity is a function of both text type and real time. An investigation of the morphological structure of the neologisms provides strong support for Aronoff's (1976) claim that the productivity of an affix may vary significantly with the morphological structure of the base word to which it attaches.
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Early Syntactic Acquisition in German:
Evidence for the Modal Hypothesis
David Ingram
University of British Columbia
William Thompson
Northwestern University
Poeppel and Wexler (1993) present the Full Competence hypothesis, which claims that German children very early (circa age 2) require finiteness, verb agreement, and verb movement. they also propose the Grammatical Infinitive Hypothesis, which states that children have the option of using either a finite or finite form and randomly select verbs for one or the other. The data on which these claims are based consist of 282 sentences from a german child at 2;1. We present a more conservative alternative, the Lexical/Semantic Hypothesis, which proposes that early learning is more lexically oriented, and that early word combinations can be explained by more semantically oriented accounts. To replace the Grammatical infinitive hypothesis, we put forth the Modal hypothesis, which states that the distinction between finite and non finite forms can be accounted for by the modality of the sentence. Nonfinite forms occur in modal contexts, and finite ones in nonmodal ones. Data to support this alternative are presented from the analysis of 1084 sentences from four German children, including the subject studied in Poepel and Wexler
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