Wednesday, January 24, 2018 – Organizational meeting
Wednesday, February 7, 2018 – Discussion Leader: Fabiola Fernandez-Doig (Spanish and Portuguese)
Martohardjono, Gita et al. 2017. Measuring cross-linguistic influence in first- and second-generation bilinguals: ERP vs. acceptability judgments. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics Vol 23, Article 17.
Two types of Spanish-English bilinguals were tested in an event-related potential (ERP) experiment on a contrast in the two languages exemplified in (1) and (2) in order to investigate linguistic permeability during processing of Spanish (1a and 2a). In Spanish, but not English, absence of the complementizer que is ungrammatical.
(1) a. Qué hermana confesó Inés que había comido la tarta?
b. *What sister did Inés confess that had eaten the cake?
(2) a. *Qué hermana confesó Inés Ø había comido la tarta?
b. What sister did Inés confess Ø had eaten the cake?
In a first analysis, we grouped subjects by generation and compared ERP responses to que-less vs. que-full sentences. A significant N400 effect was found for first-, but not second-generation, suggesting reduced sensitivity to missing que for the latter. However, a second analysis, using linear mixed modeling to test predictiveness of individual speaker variables revealed generation to be non-predictive of N400 amplitude. Instead, current language use, cumulative exposure to English, and socioeconomic status (SES) were significant predictors for all subjects: increased English use, exposure, and SES resulted in smaller N400 amplitude to the anomaly in Spanish shown in (2a). Our results show that a priori classification of bilinguals masks gradient cross-linguistic effects, and processing is permeable in all bilinguals depending on amount of language use. Results from an acceptability judgment task administered to the same subjects using a subset of the same stimuli show that both subject groups judge que-less and que-full to be equally natural. These results suggest that behavioral measures that rely on metalinguistic judgments may not be good indicators of processing, and that having to appeal to metalinguistic knowledge may mask intrinsic knowledge.
Wednesday, February 21, 2018 – Discussion Leader: Anna María Escobar (Spanish and Portuguese)
Zhou, M. (2016). Language ideology and language order: conflicts and compromises in colonial and postcolonial Asia. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2017(243), pp. 97-117.
Following Fishman’s (1998/1999. The new linguistic order. Foreign Policy 113. 26–40) seminal work “The new linguistic order”, this article first defines language ideology and order, then studies how they interact dialectically and how the conflicts and compromises between local language ideologies and global language order may have shaped colonization and postcolonial nation-state building in Asia. With colonial and postcolonial cases from Southeast Asia, East Asia, and Central Asia, this study sheds light on how the dialectical relationship between language ideology and language order is crucial to language policy and language management, but does not seem to receive full attention in theory and practice. Attention to this dialectic relationship also extends Fishman’s legacy of work on linguistic order by acknowledging unfolding globalization phenomena since the publication of his article seventeen years ago.
Wednesday, March 7, 2018 – Discussion Leader: Gyula Zsombok (French and Italian)
Angermeyer, Philippe, S. 2017. Controlling Roma refugees with ‘Google-Hungarian’: Indexing deviance, contempt, and belonging in Toronto’s linguistic landscape, Language in Society 46(2), 159–183.
This article investigates signage in the linguistic landscape of Toronto that is addressed to Hungarian-speaking Roma asylum applicants, focusing on mul-tilingual public-order signs that convey warnings or prohibitions. Such signs are produced by institutional agents who often use machine translation (Google Translate), yielding ungrammatical texts in ostensible Hungarian. Drawing on ethnographic interviews, the article explores the indexicalities that such multilingual signs have for different groups of participants, includ-ing Roma addressees and English-speaking ‘overreaders’. While institutions may view the production of multilingual signs as indexical of open-minded-ness towards migrants, Roma interviewees may see public-order signs as in-dexing racial stereotypes by presupposing deviant behavior, and may view ungrammaticality as indexing an unwillingness to engage in face-to-face in-teraction. (Multilingualism, Canada, Gypsies (Roma), linguistic landscapes, Hungarian, machine translation, indexicality).
Wednesday, March 14, 2018 – Discussion Leader: Alicia Brown (Spanish and Portuguese)
Matusevych, Y., Alishahi, A., & Backus, A. (2017). The impact of first and second language exposure on learning second language constructions. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 20(1), 128-149.
We study how the learning of argument structure constructions in a second language (L2) is affected by two basic input properties often discussed in literature – the amount of input and the time of L2 onset. To isolate the impact of the two factors on learning, we use a computational model that simulates bilingual construction learning. In the first two experiments we manipulate the sheer amount of L2 exposure, both in absolute and in relative terms (that is, in relation to the amount of L1 exposure). The results show that higher cumulative amount of L2 exposure leads to higher performance. In the third experiment we manipulate the prior amount of L1 input before the L2 onset (that is, the time of L2 onset). Given equal exposure, we find no negative effect of the later onset on learners’ performance. This has implications for theories of order of acquisition and bilingual construction learning.
Conference Dry-Runs: Gyula Zsombok and Jessica Nicholas in preparation for AAAL 2018
Wednesday, April 4, 2018 – Discussion Leader: Charlotte Prieu and Zsuzsanna Fagyal (French and Italian)
Pichler, Pia and Williams, Nathanael. 2016. Hipsters in the hood: Authenticating indexicalities in young men’s hip-hop talk. Language in Society 45.4: 557-581.
In this article we explore the relationship between authentication and identification in the spontaneous hip-hop talk of four young London men from multi-ethnic working-class backgrounds. Whereas sociolinguistic studies of authentication and/or hip hop have frequently focused on the linguistic style of hip hoppers, this article explores hip-hop talk with a specific interest in ‘cultural concepts’ (Silverstein 2004). This focus allows us to discuss how the young men authenticate themselves in relation to a range of other identity performances they discuss, including the ‘white posh girl’s’ appropriation of ‘world star’ hip-hop culture or the local South London gang’s display of violent gangsta personas. These cultural concepts not only index various aspects of hip-hop culture but also need to be understood in relation to various aspects of larger-scale discourses, practices, and structures. (Hip hop, authentication, indexicalities, cultural concepts).
Wednesday, April 18, 2018 – Discussion Leader: Eda Derhemi (French and Italian)
Morgan, C. A. (2017), Post-socialist language ideologies in action: Linking interview context and language ideology through stance. J Sociolinguistics, 21: 34–63.
Changes associated with the post-socialist period in Albania have complicated the legacy of language ideologies grounded in Ottoman-era and socialist-era politics. In this article, I analyze two metalinguistic interviews with young adults in the Albanian capital of Tirana in order to investigate the status of standardizing and anti-standardizing language ideologies while also raising a methodological question regarding interview context and researcher role as persistent issues in sociolinguistic research. As acts of evaluation, language ideologies can be linked to interactional positionings and alignments via stance, which is significant for understanding aspects of identity and context in the interview. I argue that this framework provides a better understanding of interview dynamics than previous style shifting approaches, as any explanation of differences in interview interactions must simultaneously consider macro-level influences of ideology and micro-level interactional developments.
Wednesday, May 2, 2018 – Discussion Leader: Jessica Nicholas (French and Italian)
Podesva, Robert J and Callier, Patrick. 2015. Voice Quality and Identity. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics; Cambridge35 (Mar 2015): 173-194.
Variation in voice quality has long been recognized to have functions beyond the grammatically distinctive or phonetically useful roles it plays in many languages, indexing information about the speaker, participating in the construction of stance in interaction, or serving to identify the speaker as a unique individual. Though the links between voice quality and identity have been studied in phonetics, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, forensic linguistics, and speech technology, considerable work remains to be done to problematize the ways in which the voice is taken as covering privileged, immediate meanings about the speaker’s body and to break apart the ideologies that construct it as an inalienable, unitary, and invariant facet of a speaker’s identity. We point out promising directions in recent research on the voice and bring up ideas for where this important area of research should be taken.