Papers from the 2003 Bruce Pearson Award Recipients:

The Interplay of Sound Law and Lexical Diffusion in Middle German Dialects
Craig Callender
Linguistics Program and English Department
University of South Carolina

This presentation will contrast two ideas on how sound change operates, sound law and lexical diffusion, and suggest instead a hybrid model to account for the High German consonant shift. I will argue that the “first act ” of the second consonant shift, the tenues shift, was phonetically gradual, with aspiration as a first stage.

While a phonetically gradual change is in line with the Neogrammarian idea of sound law, unshifted forms in Middle German dialects also make it clear that lexical diffusion is at work. I argue that each successive phonetic stage required time to diffuse throughout each dialect region. Southern dialects have fewer residual forms because they are spoken closer to the point of the shift’s origin. The shift was therefore productive longer in those regions, allowing more time for diffusion.

Indexicals, Demonstratives, and deferred reference
Eva Moore
Linguistics Program and English Department
University of South Carolina

Kaplan (1978) asserted a fixed character view of indexicals, arguing that expressions such as ‘here’ and ‘now’ always have ‘the place of utterance’ and ‘the time of utterance’ as their indices, though their actual referents vary from use to use. However, examples like 1 and 2 present problems for Kaplan’s position (Smith 1989, Recanati 2001):

(1) (pointing at a map) My aunt lives here.
(2) With the advent of the assembly line, the automobile was now within reach of ordinary Americans.

I argue that ‘here’ and ‘now’ do have fixed characters, but are more productively viewed as demonstratives than indexicals.

Selected References:
Kaplan, David. 1978. On the logic of demonstratives. Reprinted in Pragmatics: a reader, ed. by Steven Davis. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Recanati, Francois. 2001. Are ‘here’ and ‘now’ indexicals? Texte 127.115-27.
Smith, Quentin. 1989. The multiple uses of indexicals. Synthese 78.167-91.

Friday, 26 September 2003
Gambrell 151, at 3:30pm.

Bosnian as a "Normal" Language

Curtis Ford
Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
University of South Carolina

The emergence of Bosnian as a successor language to Serbo-Croatian has been greeted with varying degrees of surprise and scepticism. In this presentation I will discuss historical precedents for speaking of a Bosnian language and address obstacles to full acceptance of a Bosnian norm today. Building on the comparative approach of my dissertation, which examined problems in the standardization of Norwegian, Macedonian, Hindi/Urdu, and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, I argue that current attempts to fashion a Bosnian standard language are motivated by sociolinguistic universals that can emerge in a variety of contexts.

Friday, 24 October 2003
Gambrell 151, at 3:30pm.

Implicature: The Interaction of Conventional and Conversational Factors

Craige Roberts
Linguistics Department
Ohio State University

It is generally assumed that the theories of presupposition of Gazdar (1979) and Heim (1983) are incompatible. Gazdar argues that conventionally triggered potential presuppositions may be cancelled when they contradict other information in the context of interpretation, including conversational implicatures. Heim argues instead that presuppositions are never cancelled, but must be satisfied, entailed by the local context of interpretation. I will argue that one can retain key insights from both theories: It is both necessary and sufficient that presuppositions be locally satisfied. In complex contexts this leaves open the question of whether they are globally satisfied as well. Conversational implicatures are not cancellable (Welker 1994); rather, apparent cancellation is really context revision. Presupposed propositions and others in the interlocutors' common ground must be respected, and contradiction is precluded. Hence, in many interesting cases presuppositions can only be satisfied locally, and not globally.

Friday, 14 November 2003
Gambrell 151, at 3:30pm.

Reconstructing a Historical Pidgin Language

Paul Roberge
Linguistics Department
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

In this presentation I address some methodological issues concerning the reconstruction of a historical pidgin language, specifically the Cape Dutch Pidgin, which was spoken in southern Africa between roughly 1658 and 1860.

Since discussions of heuristic and evaluative methodology have been mostly sketchy, and since many scholars have neglected to make their assumptions explicit, it has been all to easy to fall into one of two errors. These errors lie in the almost equally undesirable poles of (i) assuming that our corpus of Afro-Asian L2 Cape Dutch represents nothing more than transient, jargonized forms of language, and (ii) assuming that all L2 forms in the corpus are constitutive of the "Pidgin." The latter error is hardly unique to Afrikaans studies. As Mühlhäusler (1997:138) observes, some pidginists and creolists have not regarded the distinction between jargon and stable pidgin as one deserving great attention.

If our characterization of the corpus of Afro-Asian L2 Cape Dutch as "Pidgin" is to have any substantive value, we must be able to establish the existence of stable linguistic norms. It is argued that our extant source material does allow reconstruction of some basic functional categories of the Cape Dutch Pidgin and their phrasal projections.

Reference
Mühlhäusler, Peter. 1997. Pidgin and Creole Linguistics. 2nd edn London: University of Westminster Press.

Friday, 13 February 2004
Gambrell 151, at 3:30pm.

Measuring the Frequency Resolution Employed During the Perception of Speech

Eric W. Healy
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders
Arnold School of Public Health

A primary function of the ear is to serve as a frequency analyzer and a considerable amount of work has been performed over the years to measure the frequency-resolving power of this system. These psychoacoustic tests typically employ simple tone and noise stimuli with the goal of revealing limits of our auditory abilities. However, the functional roles of these abilities in the perception of complex sounds such as speech are often difficult to determine and therefore left to assumption. In particular, the frequency resolution employed during the processing of speech, arguably our most important auditory stimulus, has not been directly measured. A series of experiments will be described which are designed to measure directly the frequency resolution employed by listeners when processing everyday speech sentences. These measures have the potential to reveal whether the speech signal has sufficient density of information to allow resolution to be governed by attributes of the auditory system, or alternatively, if resolution in some regions of the spectrum is limited by attributes of a spectrally impoverished signal. Implications for normal hearing, cochlear hearing impairment and cochlear implants will be discussed.

Friday, 19 March 2004
Gambrell 151, at 3:30pm.

Stefan Frisch
Dept. of Communication Sciences and Disorders
University of South Florida

Speech errors at the gestural level

Speech errors provide a rich source of data for models of speech production. Errors provide support for models that use interactive activation and competition between units in speech production. Speech errors can be seen as the accidental over-activation of an unintended unit. However, models of speech production have been based on data from perceptions of speech errors, recorded with phonetic transcription. Speech perception is known to categorical, so that non-contrastive regularities are ignored. Thus, speech errors that appear to involve well-formed units in the speech production mechanism may instead be a reflection of normalization by the perceptual system. This talk presents ongoing phonetic studies of speech errors in which details of speech articulation and speech acoustics have been measured. There have been several findings. The unitary nature of some speech errors have been confirmed by instrumental measures. Speech errors frequently produce phonetically normal instances of the wrong phonemic category. In addition, the processes of interactive activation and competition appear to apply at a sub-phonemic or gestural level of speech production. Gestures compete with one another during speech production, occasionally producing gestural blends of more than one phoneme. In addition, interactive activation between word and gestural levels can be observed. Speech errors that produce words (e.g. "zap" for "sap") tend to be unitary more frequently than speech errors that produce nonwords (e.g. "zung" for "sung").

Friday, 26 March 2004
Walsh Conference Room, 2nd Floor, Barnwell College, at 1:00 pm.

On the convergence of internal and external evidence in linguistics

As connections between the cognitive sciences are developed, there is a natural tendency to attempt to apply the views and methodology from one branch to another branch in search of new insights into old problems. For example, studies of the psychology of language (aka psycholinguistics) have used behavioral experiments to explore speech perception, speech production, and the organization of the mental lexicon. Behavioral experiments have also been used to explore the linguistic competence or grammar of the speakers of a language. These experiments have often found that subjects' intuitions about their language are more complex and detailed than would be expected from a linguistically-based model of their grammar (i.e. the rules and constraints created by linguists based on their investigation of the patterns of the language). The use of tools from a second area of cognitive science, computer/information science, has resolved this apparent mismatch. When linguistic patterns are analyzed using large lexical or text corpora, the patterns themselves are found to be as detailed and complex as the judgments provided by native speakers. This talk will present examples from the study of English, Arabic, and other
languages that demonstrate the convergence of data from experimental and corpus-based studies of language patterns.

Friday, 26 March 2004
Gambrell 151, at 3:30pm.