The 8th Newcastle-upon-Tyne Postgraduate Conference in Linguistics 2013

7/28/2019 The 8th Newcastle-upon-Tyne Postgraduate Conference in Linguistics 2013

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Programme and Papers

Auditorium, Herschel BuildingNewcastle University

United Kingdom5th April 2013

The 8th Newcastle-upon-Tyne PostgraduateConference in Linguistics


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Programme Committee

This conference is organised by postgraduate students of Newcastle and

Northumbria Universities, with the support of the Centre of Research inLinguistics and Language Sciences (CRiLLS). The organising committee ismade up of the following:

Tendai Charles (Chair)

Enas Filimban (Vice chair)

Tamader Hwaidi (Member)

Sameerah Saeed (Member)Hadeel Awad (Member)

Chisato Danjo (Member)

Patchanok Kitikanan (Member)

Acknowledgements

The 8th International Newcastle-upon-Tyne Postgraduate Conference inLinguistics is made possible by the kind support of a number oforganizations. We would like to extend our thanks to:


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Content

Programme Committee ........................................................................................ iConference Schedule ............................................................................................ 1Keynote Presentations ......................................................................................... 3Biographical information of keynote speakers ................................................. 4Abstracts of oral presentations ........................................................................... 5Abstracts of poster presentations ..................................................................... 38Map of conference venue to conference dinner ............................................ 59Map of conference venue .................................................................................. 60


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Conference Schedule8.30- 9.00 Registrat ion and Pos ter set-up

9:00 - 9:05 Conference opening (Curtis Auditorium)

9:05 - 9:45 Dr. Steve Walsh: Current issues in the teaching of speaking(Curtis Auditorium)

Lecture Theatre 1Lecture

Theatre 2Lecture Theatre

3Curtis

Auditorium

L1/L2 Acquisition Syntax Sociolinguistics Phonetics

9:50-10:20

Perception andProcessing of

EnglishMorphology in

SLA(Kahoul)

An incorporationanalysis of

object markingin Bembe

(Iorio)

Variation in theRealisations of

GOAT andFACE in Barrow-

in-Furness(McDougall)

A real-timesociophonetic

study ofpostvocalic /r/in the speech

of Glaswegianschoolchildren

(Lennon)

10:20-10:50

InvestigatingAspectual/

temporalinterpretations in

L2 English bySaudi Arabic

speakers

(Alruwaili)

Genitive caselicensing inPashto DPs(Masood)

ResearchingLanguage

Attitudes in aDigital Age

(Kostadinova)

A Phonetic /PhonologicalInvestigationof Grenadian

English Creole(GEC)

(Paterson)

10:50-11:10 Coffee break

L1/L2 Acquisition Syntax Sociolinguistics Phonetics

11:10-11:40

Formativeassessment ofChildren withEnglish as anAdditional

Language (EAL):

Challenges andOpportunities

(Pothin)

Evidentiality inInterrogativesand Point ofView shifting

(Woods)

Ode to a DyingLanguage?

(Neises)

Training AdultL1-Mandarinof L2-Englishspeakers to

perceiveEnglish

contrast/s/-//(Ying Li)

11:40-12:10

Effectiveness ofpushed/non-

pushed spokenoutput tasksfocussing on

upper intermediatestudents in the

EFL classroom(Byrne)

Preverbal Wh-Elements inLate Archaic

Chinese(Wang)

Singular youwas/were

variation inspoken English

in the eighteenthand nineteenth

centuries

(Widlitzki)

Earwitnessesand their

accent: dolocals hear

voicesdifferently?

(Atkinson)

12.10-13:10Lunch and Poster presentation

(Poster session starts from 12:40)


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13:10-13:50 Dr. Emma Marsden: An Introduction to IRIS(Curtis Auditorium)

L1/L2 Acquisition Syntax Sociolinguistics Phonology

13:55-14:25

Is the ObserveHypothesise

Experiment cyclemore effective than

PresentationPractice Production

when teachingchunks?

(Golebiewska)

Derivingdouble

Accusative: theLatin docere

and theGerman lehren

(Bertollo &Cavallo)

Lexicalinnovation in a

multiculturalyouth peer

group: Romaniinfluence in

banlieue French(McAuley)

FinalDevoicing inKurdish: AnOT Analysis

(Hamid)

14:25-14:55

An Investigation ofTeachers? and

Students? Attitudestowards the Use of

L1, L2 and L1+L2Subtitles in theL2 Classroom(MingyueLi)

The prosodicmarking of

givenness inEnglish and

Italian: acomparative

study(Harris)

Using ReferenceCorpora for

Sociolinguistic

Research: theCase of Class

(Sierra)

Effects ofDevelopment

on Cross-

LanguageSpeech

Perception(Dar)

14:55-15:15 Coffee break

L1/L2 Acquisition HistoricalLinguistics

Morphology/Phonology

Psycho-linguistics

15:15-15:45

Problems ofCantonese objectneg-wh quantifiers

(Lee)

The interaction

of syntax andinformation

structure in OldSardinian(Wolfe)

Evaluating therole of the head

and modifiercompounds andnominal phrasesin English and

German(Antonova-Baumann)

The Languageof Neurons:

UsingLinguistics toAid

Understandingof the Neural

Code(Williams)

15:45-16:15

DevelopingFormative

Assessment in

Chinese SecondaryEnglish Classroomsto FacilitateLanguage

(Chen)

Rules forScribal

Copying &

DialectVariance in14th-CenturyNorthumbria

(Gilbert)

Do vowel-initial

syllables exist inArabic(Hwaidi)

N/A

16:20-17:20Prof. Geoffrey Leech: Growth and decline: How grammar has been

changing in recent standard English(Curtis Auditorium)

17:20-17:30 Conference closing

18:00 - Dinner (pre-book ing required)Leave for the restaurant at 17:40


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Keynote Presentations

(Curtis Auditorium)

Dr. Steve Walsh

Newcastle University

Current issues in the teaching of speaking

9:05-9:45

Dr. Emma Marsden

University of York

An Introduction to IRIS

13:10-13:50

Prof. Geoffrey Leech

Lancaster University

Growth and decline: How grammar has been

changing in recent standard English

16:20-17:20


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Biographical information of keynote speakers

Dr. Steve Walsh

Dr. Walsh joined the ECLS department at Newcastle University in March2007 from Queen's University Belfast where he had been working foralmost 10 years. Most of his working life has been spent abroad, workingas an English language teacher and teacher educator in Spain, Hong Kong,Hungary, Ireland, Poland and China. Dr. Walsh is committed to teachereducation, especially second language teacher education, and enjoysworking with teachers to develop a closer understanding of teaching and

learning in all contexts.

Dr. Emma Marsden

Dr. Marsden is interested in most aspects of second language teaching andlearning including: second language acquisition, grammar pedagogy,implicit learning, morphosyntactic development, second language input

processing, and second language education policy and practice. She is alsointerested in the role and design of experiments in educational research.

Prof. Geoffrey Leech

Prof. Leechs main research area is English linguistics. Since 1970 he hasbeen engaged in research on computer corpora, including the compilation

of the LOB Corpus and the BNC (British National Corpus). Corpuslinguistics over the decades has converged with English grammar, anotherof his major research interests. Apart from this, Prof. Leech has worked onpragmatics, where his interest has above all been in the linguistic theory ofpoliteness. Recently he has returned to literary stylistics/poetics, a field towhich he contributed from the 1960s, and on which he has collaboratedwith Lancaster colleague Mick Short.


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Abstracts of oral presentations

Alphabetically by last name of the author


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Ruwayshid AlruwailiUniversity of York

Investigating Aspectual/ temporal interpretations in L2 English by SaudiArabics

A number of L2 studies have mainly focused on whether L2 learners can acquiretarget-like functional categories and features. These studies have tended toobserve the surface realization of functional morphology. However, it hasbecome clear that surface manifestation is not necessarily a good indication of L2abstract knowledge (Lardiere, 2000; Prvost & White, 2000). Therefore,investigation of L2 learners knowledge by observing the semantic consequencesof functional categories and related features is of great significance. Hawkins(2009, p.220) pointed out that recent studies investigating learners interpretations

associated with functional category distinctions are heading into a promisingdirection of inquiry and redirecting the focus from the syntactic to the semanticreflexes of functional categories. Accordingly, this study extends this line ofinquiry by examining temporal and aspectual contrasts in English by Saudi-Arabicspeakers.

Arabic has a perfective/imperfective contrast whereas English distinguishesbetween past/non-past (Comrie, 1976). Therefore, Saudi L2 learners of Englishhave to move from one way of representing the aspectual / temporal contrastinto another different representation. Aspectual/ temporal syntactic and semanticcontent is assumed to be the same between the two languages but they differ intheir overt morphological realizations which are language-specific (Fassi Fehri,2004). Therefore, the two languages share the same underlying representation(involving the formal features associated with the distinctions), but they aredifferent in the morphological configuration which determines whichaspectual/temporal meaning is selected. Slabakova (2008) argued that functionalmorphology constitutes a relative difficulty for adult L2 acquisition and it is the

bottleneck in particular mapping L2 morphemes to their related target meanings.Two different tasks were administered: an Acceptability Judgment task and aGap-Filling task. The study was carefully designed to provide convergingevidence about whether L2 interpretations are learnable or problems arise at themorphological level. The preliminary results from Acceptability Judgment taskand Gap-Filling task suggest that functional morphology is the bottleneck andcan account for the observed second language problems. They also will preciselytest the predictive power of existing L2 theories by examining whether Saudi-


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speaking learners of English can acquire knowledge of temporal/aspectualmeanings of morphological forms.

Svetoslava Antonova-BaumannNorthumbria University

Evaluating the role of the head and modifier compounds and nominalphrases in English and German

This proposal discusses the role of the head and modifier components in Englishcompounds and nominal phrases and German compounds. The main questionunder consideration is whether a particular element of a compound or a phrase isthe most salient one for language users. The majority of the literature onmorphology and the processing of complex linguistic structures (e.g.,compounds) has traditionally emphasised the important role of the headconstituent, whereas the modifier is said to further specify the head (e.g.,Marchand 1960, Bauer 1983, Dressler 2006).

The present study seeks to empirically evaluate the dominant role which has beenposited with respect to the head. For this purpose monolingual native speakers ofEnglish participated in a cued recall study. Findings revealed a significant

interaction of modifier cues and target type (more specifically, compounds),suggesting that targets associated with modifiers are recalled better incompounds. This finding is consistent with a previous study, which revealed thatmodifier rather than head associates come most readily to speakers minds. Thestudy was replicated with German speakers. Again, the findings revealed thattargets related to the modifier element are recalled significantly better than thoserelated to the head, which is interpreted as establishing that the modifier is moresalient than the head.

Two accounts for the salience of the modifier are put forward. On the one hand,the semantic information carried by the head often serves to anchor the wholestructure to a particular category. The role of the modifier as an element whichprovides the head with further semantic specification is what contributes to itsincreased salience. On the other hand, the ordering of elements within thestructure should also be taken into account. If the speakers attention is drawnmore strongly to the beginning of a word, then in right-headed compounds, suchas those typically found in German and English, the modifier would be in a more

privileged position.


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In conclusion, the present study casts doubt on the view that the head is the mostdominant component in a complex structure. The suggestion that the modifier issemantically more salient should encourage linguists to reevaluate their conceptsof the notion head and modifier.

Nathan AtkinsonUniversity of York

Earwitnesses and their accent: do locals hear voices differently?

Earwitnesses, those who have heard speech during the course of a crime, may betested on their recollection of the voice by means of a voice parade. They areexposed to usually eight voices and asked if any are that of the perpetrator. Howsuccessfully a person can remember a voice is dependent on a number of factors,such as type of exposure to the voice, time between exposure and recall, andfamiliarity with speaker (Bull and Clifford, 1984). Research also suggests that alisteners own accent relative to that of the voice heard can affect identificationaccuracy (e.g. Vanags et al., 2005) but is inconclusive in determining whethersharing an accent with the speaker is beneficial or detrimental to lateridentification

The current study focuses on speakers of North East English (NEE). Participantslisten to the voice of a speaker from one of three perceptual varieties in the area(Pearce, 2009) and are later asked if they can identify the same voice from aselection of eight (voices are from across the NE region). Euclidean distances arecalculated for features to determine how similar the voices are to one another

with respect to segmental and non-segmental features.

Results show that neither NEE nor non-NEE listeners perform better atidentifying the target voice. It does appear that the two listener groups are using

different cues when remembering the voice. Inaccurate identifications made bylocal listeners involve selection of voices which match closely with the target

voice with respect to phonetic features but differ in terms of suprasegmentalfeatures. This suggests that local listeners focus on the featural differencesbetween the speakers which they may be more attuned to given their increasedexposure to the accents spoken. The contrary is true for inaccurate identificationsmade by listeners not from the local area, where incorrectly chosen voices share

with the target voice more holistic/suprasegmental than phonetic features.


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Bull, R. & Clifford, B. 1984. Earwitness voice recognition accuracy. In: Wells, J.C. & Loftus, E. F. (eds.) Eyewitness Testimony: Psychological Perspectives.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Pearce, M. 2009. A perceptual dialect map of North East England. Journal ofEnglish Linguistics, 37(2), 162-192.

Vanags, T.,Carrol, M. & Perfect, T. J. 2005. Verbal overshadowing: A soundtheory in voice recognition? Applied Cognitive Psychology, 19, 1127-1144.

Sabrina Bertollo and Guido CavalloUniversit degli Studi di Padova

Deriving double Accusative: the Latin docere and the German lehren

Incorporation has been considered a productive mechanism in deriving verbalheads. Many inergative verbs are the result of a head-to-head incorporationprocess in which a noun is conflated into a verbal head generically meaning door make. Incorporation is possible with complex predicates as well; in this casethe result is a verbal head which is richer in features. In this presentation we

would like to analyze an instance of incorporation, which gives rise to a causativecomplex predicate: the verbs docereand lehren(to teach) can be considered theresult of a conflation in which a basic verb meaning to learn is absorbed in a

higher head with a causative value (Hale and Keyser, 2002; Harley and Folli2005).

Doceo and lehrenassign, in the first phase, three -roles: the Agent to DP0whichthen receives the Nominative, the Patient to animate DP1,which is then assignedthe Accusative1,and finally a compositional -role (with Instrumental, Source andPath features) to DP2, which receives the Accusative2. The standard structurerequires the obligatory use of double Accusative.

DP2 passivization is extremely marginal in German (3), and not attested in Latin:the Accusative2 assigned to DP2 is inherent (Wooldorf 2006) and higher in thestructure than Accusative1: DP2 is assigned Case in a higher projection (Cinque2006). We suppose that the structure of docere and lehren derives from verbs


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meaning to learn, whose structure is formed by a bi-argumental VP of the typein (3): (3) [DP1 TP [ VPto learn [P0 [CaseAcc P DP2]].

Here the arguments are assigned Case as in the prototypical pattern of accusativelanguages. If the verb is inserted in a causative structure, the Nominative is

assigned to the external argument of the causative v, whereas the Vto learn isincorporated in the light head of vP which assumes a CAUSE learn value (4):(4) [DP0TP vPCAUSElearn[DP1 [tlearn DP2]]].

DP1 receives the Accusative assigned by vP. Part of DP2 semantic features aretransferred to the lexical verb. The incorporated vP contains therefore a Probe

which is capable to trigger part of the features contained in DP2, as shown in (5)-(6).

DP2 receives Case in a higher Accusative projection, since the CaseAcc1P isalready engaged.

Shelley ByrneUniversity of Central Lancashire

Study into the effectiveness of pushed/non-pushed spoken output tasksfocussing on upper intermediate students in the EFL classroom

Following investigation into Swains Comprehensible Output Hypothesis,existing literature appeared deficient in the areas of its effect on spoken ratherthan written output, its effects on students within a university setting and researchcombining both quantitative and qualitative data. This talk will describe a study

which therefore investigated the effectiveness of pushed and non-pushedspeaking tasks in a UK university setting with 21, B2 level students of EFL.Specifically, the study addressed a) if a pushed speaking task produced morelanguage related episodes (LREs) than a non-pushed speaking task b) in what

ways did pushed or non-pushed tasks vary in the type of LREs produced c)

whether a pushed speaking task resulted in better performance in past narrative


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tenses and d) how student views regarding preference and effectiveness variedaccording to task type. The procedure comprised a pretest-speaking tasktreatment-posttest design involving a pushed or non-pushed storytelling task witha native English speaker teacher, a stimulated recall activity to ascertain studentthoughts during the storytelling task and a concluding interview to obtain

perceptions of each task. Questionnaire data was also obtained from 66 studentsfrom the same EFL course to acquire more student views. The talk will discussthe results by exploring both quantitative and qualitative data and will suggestsome implications of its findings for classroom pedagogy.

Qi ChenNewcastle University

Developing Formative Assessment in Chinese Secondary EnglishClassrooms to Facilitate Language Learning: An Action Research

This proposed research seeks to explore classroom formative assessment insecondary English classrooms, which is an under-developed field both in EFLclassroom teaching and secondary education assessment in China as well as

worldwide. It proposes to set out a collaborative action research involving theresearcher and a team of English teachers in a secondary school noted for its

communicative teaching approaches in China - Hangzhou Foreign LanguagesSchool. A previous case study has been conducted in the school, and findingsrevealed a predominance of teacher-led classroom organization with large amountof teacher talk time and a communicative teaching approach in conductingclassroom activities with embedded formative assessment purposes. Further,inefficiencies were observed during classroom assessment activities (e.g.,peer/self-assessment, student portfolio), especially little attention was paid to thequality of teacher language use. Therefore, it necessitates the needs to examineand develop ways to use formative assessment activities and to modify teacherlanguage use, so as to maximize learning opportunities and facilitate languagelearning.

The aims of this proposed research are to generate a working framework forconducting effective formative classroom assessment and developing classroominteractional competence for both teachers and learners, and most importantly tobring about changes in teachers classroom language use by providing ways forteachers to reflect upon their classroom language use during talk-in-interaction

when conducting assessment activities, and potential strategies teachers can adopt


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to conduct effective classroom formative assessment. Three phases will beconducted: 1. Identification of problems; 2. Action planning; 3. Implementationand evaluation. A wide rage of data collection and analytic tools will be employedat each phase to focus on contextual, detailed linguistic and paralinguisticfeatures, such as classroom observation with field notes, participant questionnaire

and interview, simulated recalls and conversation analysis.

Mariam DarUniversity of York

Effects of Development on Cross-Language Speech Perception

The present study tested infants from English-speaking homes to examine effectsof development on cross-language speech perception. Werker (1981) showed that6-8-month-old infants are able to discriminate non-native speech sounds thatadults cannot discriminate, but by 10-12 months the infants were no longer ableto make the discrimination. According to Kuhl (2008), this decline indiscrimination is due to infants increase in native-language exposure, which leadsto neural commitmentto the native language at this age. Many studies have showna decline in discriminatory abilities of infants for non-native contrasts between 6

12 months of age but no study to date has tested a contrast in affricates in a

cross-language perception test. Also, very little attempt has been made to showwhether the experimental order of presentation of stimuli affects infants

performance. An aspirated unaspirated contrast of Urdu /t / - /th/ wasselected based on a pilot study with 20 English-speaking adults who were testedon a number of Urdu contrasts not found in English to identify the mostdifficult. Twenty-four 7- and 11-month olds were tested in a habituationprocedure. Half of the infants were habituated to the voiceless aspirated affricateand tested on the contrasting voiceless unaspirated affricate while the remaining

infants experienced the reverse pattern. Discrimination was assessed bycomparing mean looking time during the last two habituation trials to meanlooking time during the first two trials of the test phase. In agreement with theliterature, the results indicated that 6-8-month-olds could discriminate theaffricate pair but 11-month-olds could not. Infants presented with the non-prototypical consonant (the aspirated affricate, which does not occur in English)in the habituation phase showed better discrimination in the test phase than theinfants presented with the prototypical consonant in the habituation phase.

Werker, J. F., et al. (1981). Developmental aspects of cross-language speech


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perception. Child Development, 52(1), 349-355.Kuhl, P., et al. (2008). Phonetic learning as a pathway to language: new data andnative language magnet theory expanded (NLM-e). Philosophical Transactions of theRoyal Society B-Biological Sciences, 363(1493), 979-1000.

Emma GilbertUniversity of Leicester

Al e longage of e norumbres': Rules for Scribal Copying and DialectVariance in 14th-Century Northumbria

Very little work has been done on differentiating the various dialects looselyclassifiable as 'fully northern English', as opposed to - and, indeed, in relation toScots. In their 1972 study, A Descriptive Guide to the Manuscripts of the Prick ofConscience, Angus McIntosh and Robert Lewis identified thirteen 'fully northern'texts of this work, these being characterised broadly by their retention of anunrounded vowel, normally , in words which had been spelled with inOld English and Old Norse. They did not, however, make any attempt todifferentiate the dialects of these texts, stating that they had not the means to goabout this within the scope of their study. Nevertheless, dialectologists possess aninvaluable and largely untapped resource in the manuscript tradition of the Pricke

of Conscience, a devotional poem once so popular that it exists in 116 manuscripts,with nearly three quarters of the counties in England boasting at least one copy.This paper will analyse the potential of the Pricke of Conscience as a system oftranslations, capable of providing the scholar with word-geographical information

which could be obtained from no other source. The popular nature of the text,combined with its length, mean that the scholar can find a very large number ofcommon words from each dialect in every manuscript, along with a general ideaof the lexical, morphological, and extrapolated phonological variation betweendialects. Applied to the previously unexplored realm of Northern Middle English,the Pricke of Conscience manuscripts indicate that these dialects are far fromhomogenous, and linguistic tics enable us even to localise some of themspecifically.


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Patrycja GolebiewskaUniversity of Central Lancashire

Is the Observe Hypothesise Experiment (OHE) cycle more effective thanPresentation Practice Production (PPP) when teaching chunks?

The existence and significance of prefabs in native speakers language productionis well known (e.g. Pawley and Syder, 1983, Nattinger and DeCarrico, 1992, Wray,2002). The importance of teaching chunks to language students was perhaps mostsuccessfully introduced by Lewis and the Lexical Approach (1993) and is now

widely agreed on. In spite of this, the research into pedagogy is limited and Lewisdoes not provide us with a clear methodology. Nonetheless, Lewis stronglyadvocates replacing PPP with OHE considering it most adequate for teachingformulae. However, the lack of empirical evidence supporting Lewis claims to

date makes his assertions questionable. The study, which took form of classroomresearch, addresses this issue and compares the effectiveness of PPP and OHE

when teaching fifteen chunks necessary for stalling and circumlocution.

The investigation was conducted at a British university and involved twentyparticipants at B2 level enrolled on an EAP foundation programme. The learners

were in their early twenties and of mixed nationalities. An experimental pre-testpost-test delayed test design was chosen and two groups of ten students received90 minute of instruction with the use of either PPP or OHE. A questionnaire andfocus groups were also conducted to triangulate the results.

While the test for statistical significance demonstrated no difference between theframeworks, it was discovered that overall the PPP group performed better onthe delayed tests which coincided with more positive opinions about thetreatment. Both PPP and OHE students indicated that it is practicewhich makesinstruction more effective. It appears that Lewis disregard for practice is notreflected in the students views suggesting that perhaps it deserves more attention

in ELT (DeKeyser, 2007). Secondly, the participants identified three word chunksas easiest to memorise, and these claims were confirmed by test results. Hence, itis argued that Lewis recommendation on teaching chunks as long as seven wordsshould be revisited and research into the optimal length chunks for acquisitioncould be valuable. Lastly, the participants considered learning chunks beneficialfor several reasons, thus while essential for language proficiency, chunks appearto be welcomed by EAP students and research into best means of incorporatingthem in EFL classrooms is seen as invaluable.


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Twana HamidNewcastle University

Final Devoicing in Kurdish: An OT Analysis

As Selkirk (1986) states, final devoicing is a pattern of phonological distributionin which both voiced and voiceless obstruents occur in a language, but at the endof a particular prosodic domain only voiceless obstruents occur. ThePhonological process of final devoicing has been a well-studied topic dating backto Trubetzkoy in 1933 and it has been cited by most phonologists as examples ofneutralisation (Brockhaus 1991 inter alia). Many languages disfavour coda voicedphonemes; however, devoicing is subject to parametric variation (Myers 2010).Most languages resolve voiced coda in a similar fashion; by devoicing rather thannasalization, deletion, or epenthesis.

This paper argues that Kurdish is one of the languages that undergoes finaldevoicing; it also claims that Kurdish resolves coda voicing by devoicing the

voiced coda rather than other means mentioned above. For example, underlying/bd/ stone can become [bart] but not *[b], *[bm], *[bd]. Further, myanalysis makes two theoretical claims: First, The prosodic domain within whichcoda devoicing occurs in Kurdish includes both syllable and Prosodic word.Second, coda devoicing in Kurdish, like many other languages (Steriade2001/2008), can pose a hitherto unsolved problem to Optimality Theory. Withthe total absence of literature on this topic, I will recourse to Speech PerceptionSoftware (Praat) to support the claim that final devoicing is really occurring inKurdish.

Katie HarrisUniversity of Cambridge

The prosodic marking of givenness in English and Italian: a comparativestudy

English renders repeated or contextually inferable (given) information less salientthrough the absence of a pitch accent in environments where it would otherwisebe present. Conversely, in Romance languages such as Italian the correlationbetween prosody and information structure is less systematic. The investigationpresented here considers the prosodic marking of givenness in Neapolitan Italian

(NI), Standard Southern British English (SBE) and that of a native NI speaker of


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English as a second language (NI-EL2). New and given tokens were elicitedthrough a semi-spontaneous card game. While native SBE speakers signalledgiven information through deaccentuation and decreased duration, no prosodicmarkers of givenness were identified in NI: accent distribution, pitch contour andduration were not predictive of information structure. The NI-EL2 speaker

showcased accent distribution and intonation curves typical of NI in English L2tokens, indicating that prosodic transfer persists even at advanced levels.

David IorioNewcastle University

An incorporation analysis of object marking in Bembe

Object marking (OM) in Bantu, i.e. cross-referencing object arguments throughverb morphology, has long resisted a unified analysis, with opinions diverging onwhether it should be analysed as grammatical agreement (Baker 2008; Buell 2008;Henderson 2006; Riedel 2009) or pronominal incorporation (Adams 2010; Bax &Diercks 2012; Bresnan & Mchombo 1987; Julien 2002; van der Spuy 1993;Zerbian 2006). This paper proposes a pronominal analysis of OM in Bembe(D54), thereby challenging recent claims by Riedel (2009) that the agreement-pronoun dichotomy is insufficient to account for the variation in Bantu, and

should thus be abandoned in favour of an agreement analysis. Evidence that OMin Bembe is argumental comes in form of (a) obligatory phonological phrase-boundaries with OM, (b) local co-occurrence restrictions between OM andindefinite, focused, relativised, passivised and negative-polarity elements, (c) theorder of OMed objects with respect to other elements, and (d) interpretationaldifferences.

The empirical facts are explained under an analysis that merges OMs asargumental, deficient pronoun clitics (Ps; Cardinaletti & Starke 1999) in verb-complement position, which subsequently incorporate into v(Roberts 2010) andmove with the verb to AspP (Julien 2002). An Agree relation between theunvalued -features on vand P is established, in the course of which of P is

forced to incorporate into v, ultimately made possible by its defective nature.


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Selected References:

Bresnan, J. & S. Mchombo (1987). Topic, Pronoun and Agreement in Chichewa.Language63: 741782.Cardinaletti, A. & M. Starke (1999). The Typology of Structural Deficiency: ACase Study of the Three Classes of Pronouns. In H. van Riemsdijk (ed.). Clitics inthe Languages of Europe. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 145233.Roberts, I. (2010)Agreement and Head Movement: Clitics, Incorporation, and DefectiveGoals.Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Tamader HwaidiNewcastle University

Do vowel-initial syllables exist in Arabic?

In this study I claim, contrary to much of the literature on Arabic, that vowel-initial syllables do exist in Arabic, though these are restricted to very limitedenvironments. The reason that linguists often claim that vowel-initial syllables areabsent from Arabic, I argue, is because of the confusion of recognising thedifferent types of hamza glottal stop- in Arabic. Recognition of these types ofhamza will lead to a better understanding of the different behaviour of the initialglottal stop (or the glottal-stop-like gesture) that is often heard in underlyingly

vowel-initial words.

Thus, while hamzatu l-wali (HW) is a short vowel that might surface indifferent forms, depending on the context, hamzatu l-gai (HQ) is a glottalstop that must occupy the onset position of an epenthesised vowel, when addedto verbs. This epenthesised vowel is either one of the short vowels: a, i, or u, or

the long vowel .

In standard Arabic, HQ does not usually lose its glottal stop nor is the glottal stoppronunciation weakened even when it is pronounced in non-initial position. HW,

on the contrary, undergoes some post-lexical processes depending on its position
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in speech or the type of speech. The current studyinvestigates these phonologicalprocesses in Standard Arabic with a view to extending this comparison later tothe Arabic dialects.The difference in the behaviour of each type is illustrated inthe examples below:Qdn WH a1 el aT

HW HQWord adding wa: and Gloss Word adding wa Gloss

/ukur!/ wa kur thank! akur wa akur I thank

/irib!/ wa rib! hit! arib wa arib I hit

The table shows that when HW-initial words are preceded by a vowel, HW islost while HQ is not lost in a similar environment.

Moreover, these two types of hamza also have to be differentiated from the othertwo types of hamza; namely hamzated alif and non-hamzated alif (glottalisedand non-glottalised). One of the differences between the two groups is that whilethe first two types are prefixes that are attached to certain types of verbs andnouns, the second two types constitute part of the stem in which they exist. Thus,

for example iqra read! is formed by adding /i / to qara read and aqra I

read is formed by adding /a/ to qara, while /i/ in ismname and // in arearth are parts of the stems.

Additionally, to differentiate between the second two types, non-hamzated alifexists only in the initial position of only ten nouns in SA while hamzated alifoccurs in a much wider context: word-initially, medially or finally. Such examplesfor both types are listed in the table below:

Table (2) Hamzated alif and Non-hamzated alif

Hamzated alif Non-hamzated alifWord word position Gloss Word word position Gloss

ibn or ibin initially son amal initially hope

ism initially name saim medially got bored

imre initially man marfa finally port

Thus, the aim of this paper is to disambiguate the various sorts of glottal stop,leading ultimately to more focused analysis of the data.


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Walid KahoulNewcastle University

Perception and Processing of English Morphology in SLA

It is widely observed that L2ers of English alternate between the inflected andstem forms of verbs in their production of third-person agreement and pasttense. Some researchers hold that this non-native-like performance is due toabsence of related syntactic representations (e.g., Vainikka and Young-Scholten,1994; 1996) whereas others reject this view and attribute the alternation instead toprocessing failure between production of surface forms and the underlyingrepresentations (e.g., Prvost and White, 2000). The evidence for these proposalshas primarily involved production data and the issue therefore remains far frombeing settled.

The study this paper will report on aimed to find out the source of variability inthe production of English verbal agreement and past tense morphology throughtesting proposals against perception and processing data collected via acomputerized picture-choice task supplemented with reaction time and eye-tracking data. The task consisted of 88 trials, each of which presented threepictures and an auditory sentence to the learner. Participants were asked tochoose one picture, the choice of which depended on their perception of verbalmorphology. Thirty-four L1 speakers of Chinese and thirty-one L1 speakers of

Arabic, who were matched in L2 proficiency at low, mid and high levels, inaddition to a control group of ten native speakers of English participated in thestudy.

The accuracy results showed that while Chinese participants perceived themorphology variably at all levels, Arab participants did so only at low and midlevels, overcoming variability at the highest proficiency level. The reaction timesrevealed no differences between Chinese and Arabic speakers at the same

proficiency levels. The eye-movement patterns of non-native groups revealedsimilarities in processing verbal agreement, but robust differences in processingpast tense morphology. These results will be discussed in the light of differentproposals on the source of variability.


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Viktorija KostadinovaLeiden University Centre for Linguistics

Researching Language Attitudes in a Digital Age

Attitudinal research in linguistics comprises very different perspectives andapproaches, depending on the kinds of attitudes that are being investigated. Theterm language attitudes is used as a general designation in this context for a

variety of different topics, from attitudes towards language variation, dialect andspeech style, to attitudes towards language learning, or language preference(McKenzie, 2010: 26). These variations result in a plethora of approaches in thestudy of language attitudes based on some kind of interdisciplinarity.

The focus of this paper is to explore insights into the possible ways ofinvestigating attitudes towards language mistakes and problematic usages, such asare mainly featured in prescriptive usage guides. The paper will give an overviewof the existing research methods, ranging from sociolinguistic (McGroarty, 1996)to psychometric approaches (Bekker, 2004) and discuss in particular theirpossible application in the research of attitudes towards language usage. Finally,internet-based tools and methods will be discussed as well as their potentialincorporation into existing methods. In this respect, special attention will be

given to the possibility of using Social Network Sites (SNSs) data for researchpurposes. The overall goal of the paper is to arrive at a new model for researchinglanguage attitudes that combines existing approaches with new digital data, toolsand techniques.

Bekker, Ian. An attitude scale for measuring language attitudes at South Africantertiary institutions. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies. 22.1-2(2004): 4362.McGroarty, Mary. Language attitudes, motivation, and standards. In McKay,Sandra Lee, and Hornberger, Nancy H. (Eds.) Sociolinguistics and Language

Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.McKenzie, Robert M. The Social Psychology of English as a Global Language. New

York: Springer, 2010.


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Man Ki Theodora LeeUniversity of York

Problems of Cantonese object neg-wh quantifiers: evidence from themissing interpretation in English-Cantonese interlanguage

This study tests Slabakovas Bottleneck Hypothesis\ (2008), that functionalmorphology at the syntax-semantics interface is particularly difficult for secondlanguage (L2) learners. I look at L2 acquisition of Cantonese negative wh-quantifier constructions (neg-whQ), which have the form [mouno + wh-word].

There is no one-to-one morphological mapping between neg-whQs and Englishlexical items that bear the same features. Neg-whQ as an object is variouslyinterpreted as non-existential nothing or implied existential only a fewdepending on different contexts (e.g. tones or sentence final particle). It occurs

obligatorily in preverbal position, resulting in an SOV structure rather than thecanonical SVO structure.

Following Sorace & Filiaci (2006) and Yuan (2007; 2008), I assume that the lackof one-to-one mapping between a target L2 item and an L1 equivalent may leadto deficits in the ultimate L2 knowledge. Moreover, acquisition of the facts ofCantonese neg-whQs by English speakers is a poverty of the stimulus problem,since the relevant facts are not evident from the input, nor are they covered inCantonese teaching materials.

Learner knowledge was investigated by means of grammaticality and context-based judgment tasks. The participants included Cantonese natives and English-speaking (adult) learners of Cantonese at beginner and advanced levels. The focusis to test learner interpretability of Cantonese neg-whQ constructions and revisitthe role ofparameter resettingin L2 acquisition.

Preliminary results suggest that learners are unaware of the implied existentialreading of neg-whQs. In addition, there is evidence that the differences betweenCantonese and English with respect to the expression of negative quantifiersaffect learners knowledge of neg-whQs. Since neg-whQs integrate both syntaxand semantics, they are an interface phenomenon. I interpret the findings assupport for the BN hypothesis. Moreover, I explain the results in terms ofLardieres (2005, 2008, 2009) Feature Reassembly Hypothesis, that L2 acquisitionis affected by how successful is the reconfiguration of the sets of lexical featurestransferred from L1 into associated feature sets for neg-whQs in the L2 grammar.


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Robert LennonUniversity of Glasgow

A real-time sociophonetic study of postvocalic /r/ in the speech ofGlaswegian schoolchildren

In Scotland, speakers are said to pronounce the /r/ at the end of words such ascar and hair: in other words, Scottish speech is rhotic. However, recentsociophonetic research indicates that there is a trend towards derhoticisation in

working class Glaswegian speech (e.g. Stuart-Smith 2007), and an increase inrhoticity is hypothesised in the more standard variety spoken by many in themiddle class areas of Scotlands Central Belt (e.g. Lawson et al. 2011). This paperpresents the findings of a real time sociophonetic trend study, in which thechange across time in the rhoticity of middle class Glaswegian schoolchildren (13-

14 years old) was investigated using two corpora of recordings made in 1997 and2012 from one school.

Tokens from a read word list (e.g. appear, near) from each corpus were subjectedto acoustic and auditory analysis, and through direct comparisons of acousticmeasures such as psychoacoustic Bark measurements alongside auditoryclassifications, the results show that rhoticity has increased in the fifteen yearsbetween the two corpora. While the females speech only shows a marginalincrease in rhoticity, the males has displayed a dramatic increase in schwar andbunched-tongue articulations of postvocalic /r/ (as found in middle classEdinburgh speech (Lawson et al. 2011)), to catch up with the females. Theseresults suggest that there is a socially-stratified divergence in rhoticity inScotlands largest city. This may be a result of the socio-economic characteristicsof Glasgow, where middle class and working class speakers are segregated inneighbouring areas, or because of the bipolar continuum (McArthur 1979) ofthe two dialects of Scottish Standard English and Scots, found in many Scottishconurbations. A further finding of this study is a method of acoustically

classifying postvocalic /r/ variants, using a psychoacoustic Bark measurement.

Lawson, E., Scobbie, J. M. and Stuart-Smith, J. (2011) The socialstratification of tongue shape for postvocalic /r/ in Scottish English inJournal ofSociolinguistics15:2, 256-268McArthur, T. (1979) The Status of English in and furth of Scotland in A. J.

Aitken and Tom McArthur Languages of ScotlandEdinburgh: Chambers, 50-67Stuart-Smith, J. (2007) A sociophonetic investigation of postvocalic /r/ inGlaswegian adolescents in 16thInternational Congress of Phonetic Sciences1449-1452


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Mingyue LiUniversity of Edinburgh

"An Investigation of Teachers? and Students? Attitudes towards the Use ofL1, L2 and L1+L2 Subtitles in the L2 Classroom"

Subtitles in videos are widely used in the L2 classroom and in daily life in China.There are different types of subtitles: subtitles in the audiences first language(L1), subtitles in their second language (L2), and subtitles in both their firstlanguage and their second language (L1+L2). L1, L2 and L1+L2 subtitles are, tosome extent, a type of written code-switching as well as a written form of parallelmedium (Gafaranga and Torras, 2001). The purpose of this dissertation is to fillthe literature gap regarding student and teacher attitudes towards bilingual(L1+L2) subtitles, by comparing their attitudes towards L1-only or L2-only

subtitles in listening comprehension and vocabulary learning in the L2 classroom.This project involves two case studies of advanced level and intermediate levelstudents and their teachers, seeking their perspectives on the use of subtitles inthe L2 classroom. Three students and their teachers from each level wereinterviewed in depth, and a questionnaire was conducted to the whole class. Data

was analysed by typology/category development in accordance with the literaturereview structure: subtitles in vocabulary learning, subtitles in listening learning,and subtitles in affective filter aspects. The results showed that both teachers and

students prefer videos with L1+L2 subtitles for L2 learning in most situations.However, according to their perceptions, the efficiency of L1+L2 subtitlesdepended on several factors such as students current L2 level, the difficulty ofthe videos and the stages of teaching. L1+L2 subtitles were favoured by studentsand teachers from the vocabulary learning perspective. At the end of the study,some recommendations are given for teachers in their L2 teaching.

Key words: subtitles; listening comprehension; vocabulary learning; video


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Ying LiNewcastle University

Audiovisual Training in Improving Adult L1-Mandarin SpeakersCapability in Perceiving English Contrast /s/-//

It was widely documented that L1 (first language) speakers language experiencemay impede their perception of L2 (second language) speech sounds due to the

variance of phoneme inventory between their L1 and L2 (e g. Flege, 1995; Guionet al., 2000). However, perceptual training was proved to be able to facilitate L2learners perceiving of L2 speech sounds (e g. Bradlow, 1997). Moreover, it isassumed that articulatory gestures play critical role in listeners perception ofspeech sounds. (e g. Bests (1995) Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM);Libermans et al., (1967) Motor theory). Therefore, audiovisual training, which

provides the subjects with visual codes of target L2 speech sounds, may improvetheir ability of perceiving these sounds.

This study aimed to examine to what extent, if only, L1-Mandarin speakerscapability in perceiving L2-English contrast /s/-// can be improved byaudiovisual training. Six adult L1-Mandarin speakers of L2 English were recruitedin the study. Four 30-minutes training sessions were carried out, which includednative English speakers demonstration of how to pronounce /s/-//; minimalpair discrimination of naturally and audiovisually produced words with /s/-// indifferent vowel environment with syllable structure of VC, VCV, CV. In the task,immediate feedback of the correctness of the subjects response was given. AXBtask were designed for pre-/post-test (auditory modality only). Nonsense words

were created: the target contrast was embedded in initial/medial/final position ofdifferent vowel context (/i, , u/). Compared with that in pre-test, the subjectsperceptual performance in post-test was greatly improved, which was consistent

with the findings in former relevant studies.

The results further illustrated: (1) subjects capability in perceiving non-nativespeech sounds can be improved through training; (2) articulatory codescontributes to enhance subjects capability in perceiving L2 speech sounds.


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Talat MasoodNewcastle University

Genitive case licensing in Pashto DPs

This paper studies the licensing of genitive Case in Pashto Determiner Phrases(DPs). There are two views regarding genitive Case assignment, namely, that Caseis assigned from outside the DP and that it is assigned from inside the DP. I haveadopted the later one as it is more akin to the Minimalist notions of Caseassignment. In the recent Minimalist literature the assignment of structural Casehas been attributed to different agencies, such as, functional categories (T and )and their relevant features, tense, mood and modality, aspect, location andperson. My contention is that genitive Case in Pashto DPs is assigned as a resultof- feature agreement between the Pashto DPs functional layer D, phonetically

realized as da, and the relevant noun. Pashto has two types of DPs that exhibitgenitive Case. The first type can be characterized as those that show possession,

while the second type is headed by nouns which denote processes and assign -roles to arguments.

The DP in Pashto has some unique properties, such as, it has no articles, noquantifying determiners, cardinals and ordinals act as adjectives, determiners arenot mutually exclusive rather they can be staked with one another like adjectives,many ambiguities about the nature of different words whether they have beenused as determiners or adjectives, determiners in most cases are not required forgrammaticality, adjectives are not gradable, the possessive pronoun in Pashtooccurs in the region between N/NP and D, and the determiners and adjectives ina Pashto DP follow a fixed order of a noun preceded by an adjective, an adjectivepreceded by a quantifier, a quantifier preceded by a demonstrative, and ademonstrative preceded by a possessive pronoun. A theory is proposed whichcan account for these properties, and, at the same time, explain the assignment ofgenitive Case in both the possessor type DPs and DPs that denote processes with

-roles. Then derivations are made for the possessor type of DPs and licensingof genitive Case in these DPs is analysed according to my hypothesis. The sameprocess is repeated for Pashto DPs that denote processes and -roles. Theanalyses of both the types give the desired results, namely, phi-features agreementbetween D and the relevant noun results in assigning genitive Case to theconcerned noun. In order to deal with all types of Pashto DP constructions Ihave made some changes to the DP structures suggested by Adger (2004). Thesechanges are: introduction of a non-empty functional layer D, proposing that in

Pashto the noun remains in situ and does not move upwards to the specifier DP,


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use of selectional features in derivations, and proposing that Saxon genitive doesnot exist in Pashto. The paper also solves some other issues that surfaced, whileanalysing genitive Case in Pashto, and needed instant solution, such as theabsence of the genitive marker da from 1st and 2nd Person Pronouns in theNorthern varieties and subsequent empirical evidence from the Southern varieties

to prove that it is still there; that only covert agreement exists in Pashto DPs forthe licensing of genitive Case; and that the morphological form of a Pashtogenitive remains the same irrespective of its place in a sentence.

Daniel McAuleyQueen's University

Lexical innovation in a multicultural youth peer group: Romani influencein banlieue French

This paper discusses innovative lexical processes in use by adolescent speakers ofdiverse ethnic and cultural origins in the inner suburbs of Paris and Marseille, andforms part of a larger project which encompasses issues of language contact andexchange and linguistic and cultural identity among adolescent speakers in theperipheries of major urban settlements in metropolitan France. This research isinformed by and complements work by teams in London (led by Gardner-

Chloros & Cheshire) and Paris (led by Gadet) on the effects of long-term urbanlanguage contact.

The paper focuses on innovative lexical items in French that demonstrate theinfluence of Romani. This contact-based influence is evident across regionalboundaries, in similar social milieus, in a number of items borrowed from variousRomani dialects. The suffix av is of particular interest, both sociolinguisticallyand morphologically, and raises a number of broader issues. It is an element ofRomani origin which occurs in items borrowed in their entirety from Romani, as

well as in a small number of pseudo-Romani items formed by suffixation of anpre-existing item withav. Items suffixed withavprovide a useful case study forthe broader issues targeted by my research since they entail crossing and culturalexchange, they exemplify the cryptic, playful and identifying functions of word-formation in youth speech, and they bring about problems of integration in thehost language, French. I will discuss the morphosyntactic effects on thesurrounding discourse of the inclusion of these lexical items which comprise aforeign verbal inflectional suffix. The issue of regional variation in the use of

items showing Romani influence will be raised, with reference to borrowed and


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pseudo-Romani items as they occur in comparable sub-corpora from the Parisand Marseille metropolitan areas.

Many of these Romani-influenced items have been noted and defined indictionaries and glossaries of slang and youth language in the cits (Goudailler

1997, Lexik des Cits), but this paper examines the behaviour of such items in thecontext of spoken discourse, based on a number of examples attested in an oralcorpus. Furthermore, the paper will consider the cultural significance both ofintegral or adapted borrowings from Romani and ofpre-existing items suffixed

withavin the social context of a marginalised multicultural youth group.

Fernanda McDougall

Manchester University

Variation in the Awareness of GOAT and FACE in Barrow-in-Furness

This study investigates language variation and change in the vowel system ofBarrow-in-Furness, Cumbria. The variables under consideration in this paper arethe GOAT and FACE vowels, which display stable variation in this dialect.Sociolinguistic interviews were conducted with twenty-two speakers and acousticanalyses carried out in order to understand the extent to which variation and

change is taking place, with particular consideration of style-shifting.

While Watt (2002) found GOAT and FACE to have similar social evaluations inTyneside, it is not entirely clear whether this finding can be applied to allNorthern varieties. It is possible that a different sociolinguistic set-up may resultin different social evaluations. Results for the variable of style provide evidencefor this idea as there are opposing patterns of style-shifting between social classesin Barrow-in-Furness.

The social stratification of GOAT is as expected, with diphthongal variantsfavoured by middle class speakers and in more formal speech styles, andmonophthongal variants favoured by working class speakers and in more casualspeech. However, the FACE vowel appears to be evaluated differently byspeakers from different social groups. An initial analysis shows similar socialstratification for FACE as for GOAT, with diphthongs favoured by middle classspeakers and in formal speech. Yet, the direction of style shifting is not the samefor working class speakers as it is for middle class speakers. Middle class speakersshift in the direction one would expect, using diphthongal variants in more


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formal speech and monophthongal variants in more casual speech. By contrast,the pattern of style shifting for working class speakers is inverted. They favourdiphthongal variants in casual speech and monophthongal variants in the wordlist. While the differences between the two appear above the level of awarenessfor middle class speakers, they appear below the level of awareness for working

class speakers. These are intriguing findings with possible theoretical implicationsfor a group-differential application of the concept of sociolinguistic awareness inEnglish dialects.

ReferencesWatt, D. 2002. I dont Speak With A Geordie Accent, I speak, like, theNorthern Accent: Contact Induced Levelling in the Tyneside Vowel System.

Journal of Sociolinguistics, 6/1, 44-63.

Diane NeisesUniversity of York

Ode to a dying Language? The Shift of Luxembourgish from a Functionalto a Tradition-Bearing Language in the American Midwest

The presentation deals with the status and the situation of American

Luxembourgish in the nineteenth-century immigrant communities in theAmerican Midwest. Between 1840 and 1900, some 70,000 to 72,000Luxembourgers left the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg for the United States, andmostly settled together in communities in Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, andMinnesota. In the multicultural setting of the Midwest, Luxembourgish at firstmanaged to assert itself as a powerful symbol of national identity among the earlyimmigrants from Luxembourg. Due to the acculturation of the settlers and theirdescendants over generations, however, Luxembourgish has lost ground as anative tongue in the American Midwest. Today, a mere one hundred nativespeakers of the variety are left, most of which are aged well above 70 years.

My research is based on 16 Luxembourgish-speakers of Luxembourg ancestrywho are resident in the Midwestern communities, and who either speak thelanguage as L1, or have learned it as a late second language. By the means of aquestionnaire, I studied the link between the participants linguistic background,their usage of Luxembourgish, and their perception of the language in a by now

widely English-speaking environment in order to conclude on the future of

Luxembourgish in the Midwestern Luxembourgish communities.


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My questionnaire exposed a stark contrast between the participants languageattitude and their actual linguistic behaviour. While there was overall consent onthe cultural importance of the American Luxembourgish variety, not a single ofthe native speakers has handed the variety down to their children. Despite thefacts that the return to the communities Luxembourgish roots also

linguistically has become a marker of prestige in the communities, and thatpeople actively take up Luxembourgish as L2, the social and communicative rolesof the language have been irrevocably reduced over the last decades. With the lastgeneration of native speakers slowly disappearing from the demographic table,

American Luxembourgish currently experiences an inevitable shift from afunctional to a purely tradition-bearing language in the Midwestern immigrantcommunities.

Jill PatersonUniversity of Cambridge

A Phonetic / Phonological Investigation of Grenadian English Creole(GEC)

This paper presents some phonetic and phonological documentation ofGrenadian English Creole (GEC) based on a series of interviews carried out with

GEC speakers on the island of Grenada. The paper focuses on acoustic analysesof phonemes, phonemic distribution and major phonological processes in GEC,much of which provide distinct demarcations in comparison with otherCaribbean English Creoles. Many of the languages of the Caribbean receive verylittle attention from linguists. Among the sparsely described languages of the

Anglophone Caribbean, is Grenadian English Creole (GEC) which functions asthe deepest basilectal form in the Grenadian Creole continuum (cf. DeCamp1971). GEC phonemic system shows a reduction of English phonemes as well asconsistent free variation in monophthongal and diphthongal distribution; quitedistinct from many creoles and non-creoles. Processes like vowel mergingprovide interesting cases of homophony and GEC displays a unique case ofrhoticity which classifies the language as neither rhotic, neither non-rhotic norsemi rhotic but rather as; rhotic in isolated cases. This paper examinesphonological behaviour like palatalization of velars, segmental deletion including:aphaeresis, syncope and apocope, dissimilation of alveolars to velars andoccurrences of metathesis in the language.


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The phonological system of GEC, the principal vernacular in Grenada, features arange of interesting yet undocumented phenomena. In fact, linguisticinvestigation into the phonological system of GEC has only scratched thesurface of the linguistic structure of this creole language (Holbrook, Grenadaand Carriacou 7). However, this phonetic and phonological research venture

contributes substantially to an undervalued yet actively used language as the paperhelps to establish a tripartite function through its contribution to the field ofphonetics/phonology, creole linguistics and language planning and education.

Deivis PothinKing's College London

Formative assessment of Children with English as an Additional Language(EAL): Challenges and Opportunities

Formative assessment (aka Assessment for Learning, AfL) has been regarded byresearchers and educators as an effective way of promoting learning in theclassroom. Its popularity has increased dramatically in the UK, especially after thepublication ofInside the Black Box, by Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam in 1998.

However, research on formative assessment within a wider range of contexts is

still in its infancy and there is the need to further investigate how classroom-based assessment can enhance the learning of pupils with EAL. The growingnumber of bilingual and multilingual children in mainstream education meansthat both teachers and school leaders increasingly need to find ways to assess thelearning needs of this group of children and promote learning, despite feeling, atmany times, unprepared. EAL pupils, on the other hand, also find it challengingto engage in their learning as they have the added task of learning the contentbeing taught alongside its language of instruction.

This presentation will look at what assessment for learning is and the implicationsfor teaching and learning. It will explore why it is not always so straightforwardfor EAL learners (and their teachers) to engage in classroom-based assessment;

what UK-based research on formative language assessment has found so far andthe opportunities for future research.


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Rosa Escanes SierraUniversity of Sheffield

Using Reference Corpora for Sociolinguistic Research: the Case of Class

This paper discusses the potential use of large reference corpora as a tool toinvestigate the stereotypical construction (Mautner, 2007) of social class. Toachieve this, I carried out an exploratory analysis of the terms working class, middleclassand upper class in the British National Corpus (BNC), using the quantitativeand qualitative tools available in this corpus.

By looking at the occurrences per million words of the three keywords, analysingtheir collocation profile and concordance lines, the study aimed at answering thequestions: what patterns can we observe in the use of these three terms? What

are the most statistically relevant words to appear around them? In whichcontexts do they appear most commonly? What patterns regarding semanticprosody (Stubbs, 1996) can we find?

A diachronic analysis (by comparing the periods 1960-1974, 1975-1984 and 1985-1993) of the occurrences per million words point to a progressive decrease in theuse of class references. However, overall, working classis the most commonly usedterm compared to middle classand upper class. The latter is quite dramatically absentin the BNC (with only 4.8 occurrences per million words).

These patterns of occurrences seem to point to a more 'problematised' (Mautner,2007) vision ofworking classalongside the apparent trivialisation of upper classasanachronistic and only of marginal relevance. Moreover, the representative natureof reference corpora and its potential to uncover the most common uses ofcertain socially relevant keywords (Baker, 2006) is highlighted in this study, whichcontributes to the development of this line of research within sociolinguistics.

References:Baker, P. (2006). Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis. London: Continuum.Mautner, G. (2007). Mining Large Corpora for Social Information: the Case ofElderly. Language in Society, 36: 51-72Stubbs, M. (1996). Text and Corpus Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell.


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Aiqing WangUniversity of York

Preverbal Wh-Elements in Late Archaic Chinese

Late Archaic Chinese (5th-3rdc BC; LAC) is classified as an SVO language(Aldridge 2012, Djamouri et al 2012, Meisterernst 2010), but it requires partialfronting of postverbal wh-elements. This paper extends the theory of partial wh-movement in LAC as clause-internal focus fronting to the edge of vP (Aldridge2010). I propose that wh-elements in LAC have two distinct positions, internaltopic and focus positions, in the lower INFL domain, assuming that a preposedobject occupies the specifier of a functional projection below TP and above vP(Paul 2002, 2005). Evidence for two structural positions comes from the relativeordering of preposed constituents and negative/modal elements. I show that wh-

phrases may be in either topic or focus position, as shown in the linear formatof clausal positions in (1):

(1) Subject > Internal Topic > Neg/Modal > Focus > vP

Bare wh-words can appear in either preverbal position in (1) (see (2) and (3)).Internally complex NPs, however, must be in the higher position (4):

(2) h b [wi th] h? (4thc BC; Zhuangzi, Qiushui)

what not do Excl

What do (I) not do?

(3) wng jing h [wi th]? (5th -3rdc BC; Guoyu, Chu)

emperor will what do

What will the emperor do?(4) yu [h y] zh nng [d th y]? (4th -3rdc BC; Chuci, Qijian)

then what fish ZHI can catch

Then what fish can (one) catch?

If the wh-phrase is a PP, it is in the lower position (5), even if internally complex.


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(5) q jing [h c] [[y th c] du]? (5thc BC; Chunqiuzuozhuan, Yin 3)

3. Subj will what utterance with reply

What utterances will he reply with?

In the paper I explore the syntactic consequences of these observations.

Bianca WidlitzkiJustus Liebig University Giessen

Singular you was/were variation in spoken English in the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries

This paper investigates the use of singularyou wasand you werein spoken Englishin the 18th and 19th centuries. While sentences like you was in townwere perfectlyacceptable and widely used in the early 18th century, you was became a sociallystigmatized variant around mid-century and usage patterns changed. In contrastto previous work on the topic, which focused on written language and the role ofnormative grammarians and language professionals in this development (e.g.Laitinen 2009), the present study extends the investigation to the spoken register,

with a particular focus on the social diffusion of this diachronic change. It takes aqualitative and quantitative corpus-linguistic approach and aims to complementexisting research by providing a more comprehensive historical sociolinguisticperspective.

The analysis is based on data from the 14-million-word Old Bailey Corpus(http://www.uni-giessen.de/oldbaileycorpus), which spans the years 1720-1913.

The corpus is based on the Proceedings of the Old Bailey(http://www.oldbaileyonline.org), Londons central criminal court, and provides

access to a reasonably close representation of spoken language. Its detailedutterance-level mark-up for sociolinguistic (e.g. gender and social class),pragmatic (role in the courtroom) and textual variables (e.g. publisher ofindividual Proceedings) permits investigation of a number of diverse factors thatmight have influenced variant choice.

The corpus data will be analyzed for changes in frequencies of variants over timeas well as for sociolinguistic variation and change in the use of was/were(i.e. werethere social class and/or gender differences and how did they change over the


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two centuries?). Where appropriate, the potential influence of the linguistic co-text will also be investigated (e.g. do particular grammatical constructionspromote the use of a specific variant?).

References:

Laitinien, Mikko. 2009. Singular You was/werevariation and English normativegrammars in the eighteenth century. In Nurmi, Arja, Minna Nevala and MinnaPalander-Collin (eds.) The Language of Daily Life in England (1400-1800), 199-217.

Amsterdam: Benjamins.

James WilliamsUniversity of Nottingham

The Language of Neurons: Using Linguistics to Aid Understanding of theNeural Code.

One of the major problems facing Neuroscience and the Cognitive Sciences isthat of neural encoding - the way in which sensory information about theenvironment and behaviour of organisms is encoded by the electrical andchemical mechanisms of the brain. All incoming sensory information, be it sight,touch, auditory etc, is encoded by neurons as a sequence of electrical impulses:

Action Potentials or Spikes. Similarly all orders from the brain to other parts ofthe body also take the form of a series of Action Potentials. The problem is howto match the spike patterns to the stimulus or behaviour. Our specific projectapproaches this problem from a Linguistic angle - by using the analogy betweenthe neural encoding and language to further our understanding of how neuralnetworks process information.

This talk explores the analogy made by some neuroscientists between neural spikesequences and language and comes to conclusion that although spike sequences

are, unsurprisingly, not identical to a language there are enough similarities tomake the comparison worthwhile. Given this, the talk argues that tools andtheories from within Linguistics can be applied to aid neuroscientists indeciphering the neural code. By considering the architecture of language to be ahierarchical structure of interlinking levels of representation linguists have madegreat strides in understanding how a linguistic system results in successfulcommunication. The aim, therefore, is to create an analogous system ofhierarchical levels of representation for neural networks, with individual spikes at

the lowest and behaviour at the highest level, with a number of intermediate


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levels of representation between the two and interface rules to show how relevantinformation is passed from one level to another. The talk concludes with someearly ideas about how this may proceed, including frequency-based chunkingresulting in grammatical structures (Bybee, 2010) and Discourse Representation

Theory (Kamp, 1981).

Overall, this talk argues that a interdisciplinary approach between the cognitivesciences is not only useful but crucial if we are ever going to better understandissues relating to the brain, language and cognition and to put forward one way in

which collaborative enterprise may proceed by arguing for a linguistically-informed theory about information encoding in neural networks.

Sam WolfeUniversity of Cambridge

The interaction of syntax and information structure in Old Sardinian

Despite a large body of literature on Medieval Italo-Romance syntax (cf. Beninc1983-4, 1995, 2004; Ledgeway 2007, 2008, 2009; Salvi 2004, 2011 inter alios), nodetailed empirical study of the syntax of Old Sardinian exists in the literature.

This presentation focusses on the results of a recent study of two Old Sardinian

condaghes, legal documents used principally to record donations and court casesinvolving monasteries:Il Condaghe di San Nicola di Trulla andIl Condaghe diSanta Maria di Bonarcado.

It will be proposedpace Lombardi (2007) that the textual evidence points to OldSardinian having an unmarked Verb-initial word order. In addition it will besuggested that the Verb-Subject and Subject-Verb order alternations notedpreviously by Lombardi (2007) and Remberger (2012) are dependent on theInformation Structure of the subjects in question.

Evidence will be presented that the VSO order is derived by movement of thefinite verb to the head of the C (Fin) projection within the C-domain of theclause. Competing S-V-O orders are derived by further movement of the subjectto a specifier position higher than Fin.

Such findings have several desirable consequences. Firstly they suggest that V-to-Fin movement may be a commonality across Old Romance, meaning that Old

Sardinian is less anomalous than it might at first seem. Secondly, the presence


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of a competing S-V-O order in the texts highlights a way in which output from aV-S-O grammar could plausibly have been reanalysed as consistent with an S-V-O grammar, yielding the unmarked S-V-O order we see today in ModernSardinian (Jones 1993).

Selected ReferencesJones, M. A. (1993). Sardinian syntax. London; New York: Routledge.Ledgeway, A. (2009). Grammatica diacronica del napoletano. Tbingen: Niemeyer.Lombardi, A. (2007). Posizione dei clitici e ordine dei constituenti della linguasarda medievale. In A. Ledgeway & D. Bentley (Eds.), Sui dialetti italoromanzi:Saggi in onore di Nigel B. Vincent (pp. 133148). Norfolk: Biddles.Remberger, E. M. (2012). Sardinian syntax in diachrony. Presented at the ItalianDialect Meeting, Leiden.

Rebecca WoodsUniversity of York

Evidentiality in Interrogatives and Perspective shifting

How evidential and illocutionary markers express speakers and addresseesrelationship to the discourse differs in declarative and interrogative utterances.

This is true both in languages with grammaticalised evidentiality markers (e.g.Tibetan, in 1), and those with lexical means of expressing evidentiality and speechacts (e.g. English, in 2):

In both (a) cases, the evidentiality/speech act marker expresses the speakersperspective. However, in the interrogative (b) cases, the marker expresses the


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perspective expected of the addressee by the speaker. A formal syntactic accountfor this phenomenon is still lacking.

This change in orientation in the (b) cases does not relate to movement triggeredby the interrogative [+Q] feature because there is no movement in Tibetan, and

illocutionary adverbs in English echo questions also orient to the addresseedespite having the syntactic structure of a declarative. Therefore, the shift inorientation is due to the presence of the [+Q] feature itself. Focusing on Englishexamples, I propose that a covert performative verb triggers covert that in thedeclarative and covert whether, which bears [+Q], in the interrogative. Ininterrogatives, the perspective shift then results from an operator-variable relationbetween the role in the subject of the covert performative verb and theillocutionary adverb, as illustrated below:

This analysis is supported by evidence including parallel effects seen in theinterpretation of tense (Stowell, 2007) and perspective orientation in clauses withovert performative verbs.References

Stowell, T. (2007). The syntactic expression of tense. Lingua, 117, 437463.


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Abstracts of poster presentations

Alphabetically by last name of the author


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Ahmed A. Al KhateebUniversity of Southampton

"General academic writing in an EFL context: Analysing the developmentof joint texts and shared writing"

Meeting new genres for teaching and learning of writing have become a need andnecessity in the recent decades. Collaborative writing (CW) is one of those newgenres peculiarly established for practising of writing, which created variousissues of debate amongst educationalists and linguists. Collaborative authoringhas been originated as a practice for creating a text or composition by more thanone single writer. It differs from other genres in the following features: theintensity of efforts exerted, the ways of gaining information in respect of differentminds, the nature of completing the writing tasks and the extent of the addressed

audience. Furthermore, the concept of collabowriting has newly formed as aconsequence of technology revolution especially in the subject of collaborativeauthoring tools and social networking media, which have given an emphasis onthe written form since it is the a medium of communication.

This paper intends to illuminate the mechanism and the fundamental aspects ofWiki-mediated collaborative writing, by focusing on the process approach as wellas the distributed group-based learning. Since this action can be managed ondifferent platforms of wikis, via tracking and rolling-back the contributions of theparticipants, this research, as a response, was performed to identify the actualnature of collaborative writing, among novice writers in Saudi Arabia. It alsoscrutinises the stages of development of peers shared texts by moving from thecollaborative brainstorming and finishing with the collaborative editing andrevising (or peer feedback). As the researcher examined the growth of the processof shared texts using Wikispaces, content analysis has been used for the textsproduced collaboratively. The presentation will illustrate the most three domains,

which were chiefly observed: act of cognition and knowledge construction, act of

mutual expression and dialogues and act of collaboration and social interaction.These acts of communication will then be elucidating by more examples. Finally,a brief introduction details the types of assigned tasks and the strategiesemployed, for the completion of these given tasks will be exhibited.


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Shadiya Al-HashmiUniversity of York

Residual effects of historical gutturals on the vowels of Arabic loanwordsin Turkish

Historical gutturals of Arabic loanwords tend to block the application of vowelraising in Turkish and trigger vowel backing. The examples in groups 1 and 2illustrate vowel raising while those in groups 3 and 4 exemplify vowel backing.

In the first set of data (Groups 1& 2) the class of historical gutturals in Arabicloanwords in Turkish includes //, /x/, //, /t/, /d/, //, /s/ and /q/ but not // and /h/

which do not participate in the vowel blocking effect. Yet, in the second set ofdata (Groups 3 & 4) vowel backing is limited to the emphatic sounds (/t /, /d/,//, /s/) and /q/. Two questions this work addresses are whether historical

gutturals form a natural class and why some guttural sounds have a backing andraising effect on Turkish vowels while others do not.

My answer to these questions comes from the principles of constraintsinteractions; that is faithfulness and markedness constraints as set in Optimality

Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993). It is expected that the analysis should yieldinteresting implications to feature theory and phonology in general.


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Mumtaz AliNorthumbria University

Pakistani EFL learners Willingness to Communicate across DifferentCommunication Contexts and Receiver Types

The publication of the MacIntyre et als (1998) heuristic model of willingness tocommunicate (WTC) inspired researchers across the world to focus abundantlyon the communication both as an essential process and a gaol of learning Englishas a foreign/second language (Yashima, 2005:54). Willingness to communicate isgenerally defined as an intention or readiness to enter into discourse whenindividual has a free choice to do so (MacIntyre et al, 1998:547). However, Kang(2005:291) argues that this intention or probability or even readiness to engageinto communication may vary according to the interlocutor (s), topic, and

conversational context, among other potential situational variables. Drawingupon that, this study sets out to investigate Pakistani University EFL students

willingness to communicate in English across variety of contexts (i.e. One to onesituation, small meetings, large meetings and group of people) under differenttypes of interlocutors (i.e. Friends, acquaintances and strangers). 350 students ofthe Department of English, Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur, Pakistanparticipated in this study. This study was designed to be quantitatively drivenmixed method research in which research questionnaire was pre-dominantly the

main source of data collection and the inclusion of the qualitative componentbased on the in-depth semi-structured interviews was supplemental to coreproject. This paper would first highlight that how English language is taught andlearnt in country like Pakistan together with the relevance of WTC construct intoPakistani context. In the end, some initial results/findings drawn from bothquestionnaires and semi-structured interviews would be discussed.

Mufleh Salem M. AlqahtaniNewcastle University

Sonority and Epenthesis in Najdi Arabic: an OT perspective

Violation of the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP) in coda clusters of thesuperheavy syllable CVCC is one of the motivations for epenthesis in some

Arabic dialects in general and in Najdi Arabic (NA) in particular, according toIngham (1994), who states that epenthetic vowels occur between the last two

consonants to create a new syllable in NA. According to him, epenthetic vowels


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occur in words that have final clusters, where the second member of theseclusters is /r/, /l/, /w/, /j/, and /n/ (sonorants). Examining Ingham's examples,I observe that epenthetic vowels occur in the final clusters that include thesesonorants as the second member and which therefore violate the SonoritySequencing Principle. Take, for example, /masr/ Egypt in which the final

cluster violates the Sonority Sequencing Principle due to the final voicedcontinuant liquid /r/ being more sonorous than the voiceless fricative /s /. This

cluster

Documents

The 8th Newcastle-upon-Tyne Postgraduate Conference in Linguistics 2013