Fall 2019

Wednesdays, 3:00 – 4:00 p.m., 3072E Foreign Language Building


Monday, September 9, 2019 – Organizational meeting


Wednesday, September 18, 2019

Charlotte Prieu (French and Italian): Research on gender-inclusive language

Charlotte Prieu is working on an article to submit for publication in Current Issues in Linguistic Theory. The article is based on her presentation at LSRL 2019 that discussed the gender-inclusive language that a group of Black feminists use on Twitter based on two categories: closed-class items (articles and pronouns) and open-class items (nouns and adjectives). For the article, Charlotte is narrowing the scope to only third-person subject pronouns within the binary (il, ils, elle, and elles) and third-person subject gender-inclusive pronouns (iel and iels). The research is mostly about counting the occurrences and comparing participants to one another to find out their use of third-person subject pronouns. Charlotte would welcome feedback on her work to ensure that it is coherent and pertinent to the field, and to get feedback about the methodology and what she can improve before sending the article to the journal.


Wednesday, September 25, 2019 

NWAV 2019 Conference practice presentation

Gyula Zsombok (French and Italian): Sharp/click words: Regional variation of prescribed variants on Twitter in France and Quebec

The cultural and linguistic practices on Twitter has interested scholars since its launch. English became a dominant language on Twitter, which resulted in intensive lexical borrowings of computer terminology in French. Language planning bodies in France and Quebec demonstrate strong intentions to control the lexicon and intervene whenever they deem necessary. Nonetheless, the successful uptake of state-promoted intervention depends greatly on the region. This research investigates the use of Twitter’s emblematic word, hashtag, and its officially recommended variants: mot-dièse (‘sharp word’, prescribed in 2013 in France) and mot-clic (‘click word’, prescribed in 2011 in Quebec) in a corpus of tweets from January 2010 to December 2016, measuring variation between the English and the prescribed variant respective to their region. Statistical analyses were implemented on a sample set, including variables of sex (male or female users), social media influence score, and urban areas from where the tweet was posted.


Wednesday, October 2, 2019 

NWAV 2019 Conference practice presentation

Zsuzsanna Fagyal (French and Italian): Observing the actuation of phonetic change through the evolution of multiethnic urban speech styles in the French media

Urban speech styles have been difficult to study systematically due to the rarity of large socially-stratified corpora. I present the results of a longitudinal analysis of variable liaison, schwa, and word-initial consonant realizations in a corpus of interview segments recorded with French artists who participated in the spread of global hip hop over thirty years in France. Results show that the omission of obligatory liaisons and the simplification of word-final consonant clusters became more frequent, while schwa realizations remained stable in thirty years. Conditioning factors, such as preceding and following phonetic contexts for schwa and lexical frequency in liaison remained significant and unchanged during the same period. The only change starting from the mid-1990s was the palatalization of word-initial /t/ and /d/ after high vowels. I discuss these results as a first step in gaining insights into the actuation and diffusion of phonetic variation in specific genres of public speech.


Wednesday, October 16, 2019

Hispanic Linguistic Symposium practice presentation

Anna María Escobar (Spanish and Portuguese): What does Spanish-Quechua tell us about processes of language transfer?

This presentation centers on processes of linguistic transfer that affect grammatical categories expressed in the Spanish Present Perfect (PP). Historical research on this Spanish verbal form has benefited from a long tradition in Hispanic and Romance morphosyntax, as well as research done on its dialectal variation, both in Spain and Latin America. In consequence, this long tradition led to a set of linguistic factors that are included in studies of the PP of the last decades, making dialectal comparisons possible. More importantly to highlight, however, is the fact that the study of the PP is focused mainly on addressing linguistic factors that center around the conceptual domain of temporal reference (cf. Bybee & Dahl 1989; de Acosta 2011; Rebotier 2017), where indeterminate temporal reference gives way to the grammaticalization of the PP from an anterior to a perfective/past (cf. Mexican and Peninsular varieties, Schwenter & Caccoullos 2008). Nonetheless, the study of PP in Spanish-Quechua contact situations has produced strong research that shows that in Andean Spanish dialects of Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador, the PP has evidential function. Spanish varieties that emerged in contact situations, particularly between unrelated languages (both genetically and typologically), are a fruitful area of research that helps challenge our methodologies in the study of grammatical features and, more importantly, leads us to question our understanding of processes of linguistic transfer and how they emerge. Spanish-Quechua contact is a special case for two reasons: the two languages view time from different perspectives  and their contact involves varieties in several countries, which can then be compared.

While Spanish uses an egocentric reference frame, typical of European languages, Quechua uses an allocentric reference frame (Faller 2002, 2011; Shapero 2017; Mannheim, in progress), in which evidentiality and the speaker’s experience toward narrated events, both central to Andean ontology, are prominent.  Using diachronic corpora from two Peruvian Spanish dialects, and comparing them to data from other dialectal studies on the Spanish PP, I question the use of only factors connected to a tempo-aspectual perspective for the Andean case, and argue for an additional set of factors focused on the speaker’s perspective towards the narrated events and evidentiality. The results of this revised methodology provide some insight into the different path that Andean Spanish varieties have taken with respect to the PP, as opposed to the usual Tempo-Aspectual path familiar from the literature.


Wednesday, October 30, 2019

Lorena Alarcon (Spanish and Portuguese): An auditory analysis of rhotic assibilation in Northwest Argentina

Please join us for Lorena Alarcon’s (Spanish and Portuguese) presentation that explores if assibilated rhotics are produced in radio shows in Northwest Argentina. An auditory analysis revealed the presence of assibilation, and the linguistic and sociolinguistic factors that favor assibilation.


Wednesday, November 6, 2019

Discussion Leader: Gyula Zsombok (French and Italian)

María del Puy Ciriza: Towards a parental muda for new Basque speakers: Assessing emotional factors and language ideologies

The concept of muda refers to how specific biographical moments can precipitate changes in the speaker’s linguis- tic repertoire (Pujolar & Gonzàlez, 2012). In recent years, more inclusive or participatory approaches to intergen- erational transmission in language revitalization contexts have been encouraging all parents, including those with low proficiency in the minority language, to participate in their child’s language acquisition. This article examines a Basque‐ language campaign that instructs low‐proficiency parents to adopt child‐directed speech in Basque to mould affective orientations in the home environment. Drawing on a case study, I explore the complications of new speaker- hood, especially the difficulties of bringing about a parental muda. I demonstrate how mudas are traversed by competing ideologies of language and language socialization. In dis- rupting monolingual ideologies, participatory approaches which aim at increasing the symbolic value of the language clash with the attitudes of speakers who view these mudas as inconsequential for achieving normalization.

READ ARTICLE


Wednesday, December 4, 2019

Britni Moore (Linguistics): Language of police investigation and race

Britni is interested in the language that police officers use when questioning rape victims in order to see if they use different language/terms to different races. The hypothesis would be that African American women would be less likely to be labeled as victims by police officers than white women, but research would not be limited to the binary. Moreover, Britni wants to look at how the race (if known) of the rapist impacts police officers language towards the victim. The problem with this research area is feasibility- how do you get access to police transcripts being the first obstacle. Any feedback and recommendation are welcome!