Linguistics Theses and Dissertations

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Automatic Analysis of Epistemic Stance-Taking in Academic English Writing: A Systemic Functional Approach
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-10) Eguchi, Masaki; Kyle, Kristopher
Existing linguistic textual measures that investigate features of academic writing often focus on lexis, syntax, and cohesion, despite writing skills being considered more complex and multifaceted (e.g., Sparks et al., 2014). For this reason, writing assessment researchers seek ways to measure and assess various textual features beyond the traditional ones, including discourse moves and steps (Cotos, 2014), source use (Burstein et al., 2018; Kyle, 2020), and essay argument structures (Fiacco et al., 2022). The present dissertation attempts to extend this research by proposing an automated analysis of rhetorical discourse features of epistemic stance-taking strategies. Drawing on a theoretical framework of the engagement system from Appraisal Analysis (Martin & White, 2005), which originates from the Sydney School of the systemic functional discourse analysis tradition, the dissertation develops and evaluates a series of end-to-end machine learning models to conduct automated engagement resource analysis. The experiment in Study 1 indicated that the developed system can perform as well as (or even outperform) trained annotators’ intercoder agreement. Study 2 uses the natural language processing (NLP) systems to conduct the first large-scale analysis of engagement resources in university written assignments across genres and disciplines. The findings suggested that the registers of university writings are far more complex and nuanced than simple characterization by genres or disciplines. Study 3 investigates whether the developed measures of rhetorical features of engagement can provide additional information above and beyond the traditional linguistic measures at the levels of lexis, syntax, and cohesion, for modeling professional ratings of essay qualities in a standardized second language proficiency assessment. The results indicate that the features of engagement (particularly the diversity of rhetorical strategies) can complement the existing measures in predicting essay quality. The three studies together indicate that the proposed machine-learning approach is beneficial to scale up the analysis of rhetorical discourse features in academic writing for research and educational purposes. The dissertation concludes with a call for increased collaboration among discourse analysts, second language researchers, assessment researchers, and computational linguists to define essential textual features for writing assessments across contexts and automate the analysis of such constructs (Lu, 2021, Burstein et al., 2016).
Open Access
Information Management in Isaan Storytelling
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Raksachat, Milntra; Payne, Doris
This study is an investigation of information packaging or information structure properties associated with selected productive morphosyntactic constructions in Isaan narrative texts. The description and analysis of grammatical constructions draws from the Spoken Isaan Corpus. Information packaging properties associated with Isaan constructions are examined primarily from within the Construction Grammar framework, supplemented by collexeme analyses. The study assumes that a speaker’s assessment of the listeners’ states of mind guides the linguistic choices that they make in terms of referring expressions, single vs. serial verb clauses, and other morphosyntactic structures. Some constructions and contexts require ka immediately after the subject of a construction (if overt) and before the predicate; but in other instances, ka is structurally optional. Special attention is given to the speakers’ choice in using or not using the morpheme ka when it is structurally optional. The study argues that ka is a coherence building device that enables speakers to explicitly signal a particular range of underlying semantic and information-structure relationships between units of propositions. In certain constructions, ka is found to be associated with given or accessible referents and sequences of events that push forward the narrative timeline. The study concludes that ka is more related to the concept of a “focus of assertion” than to any concept of “topic”.
Open Access
Empirical Foundations of Socio-Indexical Structure: Inquiries in Corpus Sociophonetics and Perceptual Learning
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Gunter, Kaylynn; Kendall, Tyler
Speech is highly variable and systematic, governed by the internal linguistic system and socio-indexical factors. The systematic relationship of socio-indexical factors and variable phonetic forms, referred to here as socio-indexical structure, has been the cornerstone of sociophonetic research over the last several decades. Research has provided mounting evidence that listeners track and exploit cross-talker variability during speech processing tasks. As one such example, recent work has demonstrated listeners’ sensitivity to talker characteristics via retuning phonetic categories (i.e., perceptual learning) in response to talker-specific patterns. Drawing on Bayesian models, researchers have argued that listeners’ perceptual learning is influenced by listeners’ prior experience with socio-indexical factors conditioning segmental variation. From experience listeners form beliefs about the underlying cause of variation to determine when to adapt to talker-specific forms and generalize to other similar talkers. However, theoretical work has over-simplified descriptions of socio-indexical structure, leaving open questions about the nature and range of phonetic variation that listeners track and exploit.This dissertation seeks to provide both theoretical and empirical foundations of socio-indexical structure at the intersection of individual talkers and geographic dialects drawing on mixed methods. Using large-scale datasets of American English vowel measurements, the corpus analyses probe different quantitative descriptions of socio-indexical structure under various scopes of socio-indexical granularity and internal organizations across the vowel space. The corpus analyses reveal an asymmetry in socio-indexical conditioning of the joint cue distributions (i.e., F1xF2) across several simulations whereby some categories (e.g., /eɪ/) are conditioned by dialect, while others are conditioned by individual talker identity alone (e.g., /ʊ/; Chapter 4). Additionally, analyses show that individual talkers diverge from their dialect areas less for dialect conditioned vowels compared to talker conditioned vowels, confirming talkers’ distributional patterns generally align with their communities. Additional analyses highlight how internal principles provide specificity to socio-indexical conditioning of variability, focusing on the acoustic overlap of vowel pairs and individual cue dimensions (Chapter 5). Such descriptions suggest acoustic overlap across some vowel pairs may be attenuated by socio-indexical information while other vowel pairs generally demonstrate stability across talkers and dialects (e.g., /æ/ and /a/). Finally, descriptions of individual cue dimensions demonstrate multimodal distributions both across and within talkers for some categories conditioned by dialects (e.g., /ɔ/; Chapter 5). Following from Bayesian models of speech processing and causal inference, this dissertation tests whether a priori links to socio-indexical structure influence perceptual learning (Chapter 6). A lexically guided perceptual learning experiment tests whether the asymmetry of socio-indexical conditioning (dialect vs. talker) observed in the corpus analyses correlates with listeners’ learning and generalization behavior after exposure to novel shifts in one of two vowels (/eɪ/ and /ʊ/) in a female speaker’s voice. The results demonstrate learning a novel shift in /ʊ/ but not in /eɪ/, with generalization of post-test categorization to a novel male talker but not a novel female talker. These results suggest that the asymmetry of social conditioning alone may guide listeners’ behavior for these vowels and challenge our current understanding of listeners’ adaptation to vocalic variability and the role of socio-indexical structure in perceptual learning. Overall, this dissertation advances our understanding of socially conditioned variation across speech production and perception.
Open Access
Case and Gender Loss in Germanic, Romance, and Balkan Sprachbund Languages
(University of Oregon, 2023-03-24) Alhazmi, Mofareh; Vakareliyska, Cynthia
My dissertation investigates the loss of morphological case and grammatical gender in the Germanic, Romance, and Balkan Sprachbund languages. Crucial language-internal and language-external motivations are considered. To illustrate the changes of morphological cases, the languages are divided into historical stages. Every change in nominal inflection between stages is attributed to either sound change or analogical change; these choices are justified through consideration of historical sound changes and the motivations behind analogical processes. The changes are also discussed in terms of their effects on number syncretism, case and gender mergers, order of case loss, and the relationship between gender and declension.These motivations can be classified as language-internal or language-external. Phonological, morphosyntactic, and semantic factors are among the former. Different types of sound change can neutralize inflection differences, but two closely related types, prosodic change, and vowel reduction have been suggested as key causes in case and gender loss in IE languages. A usual direction of change in morphological case loss includes variation between two or more cases in one or more functions, followed by functional narrowing and occasionally a complete functional merger of the case markings. Similarly, there can be differences between a case and an analytic construction, which can lead to the former being replaced by the latter in some or all functions. External motivations for case and gender loss include the kinds of contact conditions that cause or accelerate simplification in internal developments. Essential contact situation is the establishment of a sprachbund, or linguistic region, which usually entails structural convergence among surrounding languages during a long period of profound contact. Interactions among number, case, and gender are analyzed using original quantitative measures of number syncretism on nouns and gender syncretism on agreement targets. Overall, the results of my study support the general hypothesis that the loss of case and gender categories can be explained by the neutralization of distinctions in these categories as a direct result of sound change and by the profiling of a more relevant category through analogical processes.
Open Access
Influences on Expert Intelligibility Judgments of School-age Children's Speech
(University of Oregon, 2023-03-24) Potratz, Jill; Redford, Melissa
Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) make impressionistic intelligibility judgments as part of an evaluation of children for speech sound disorders. Despite the lack of formalization, it is an important measure of choice for SLPs, going beyond single-word standardized measures by using spontaneous speech to assess functional communication. However, spontaneous speech introduces sources of error and bias in the listener. This dissertation argues that impressionistic intelligibility judgments are influenced by listener-dependent factors due to their subjectivity. To identify potential sources of error and bias, speech data were collected from four school-aged child groups: typically developing monolingual, children with speech sound disorder, typically developing Spanish-English bilingual (i.e., an accent familiar to the study’s listeners), and typically developing Mam-English bilingual (i.e., an accent unfamiliar to the study’s listeners), in two school-age groups. Perceiver data were collected from two listener groups (i.e., expert [SLP] and lay). Listeners provided baseline measurements of lab-based intelligibility scores and comprehensibility ratings by orthographically transcribing and rating audio recordings of experimentally controlled utterances. Listeners also made impressionistic global intelligibility assessments after viewing video recordings of children’s spontaneous speech. Findings showed differences between expert’s and lay listener’s global intelligibility assessments however experts were no better than lay listeners at discerning between age and speaker groups. Of the four speaker groups, there was a significant effect of the Mam-English bilingual speaker group on global intelligibility assessments. Relationships were found between global intelligibility assessments and both the lab-based intelligibility measure and the comprehensibility rating, indicating impressionistic judgments tap into both speech signal features and the understandability of speech. Surprisingly, the age and linguistic ability of the child speakers were not significant factors on global intelligibility assessments, so perhaps listeners were making accommodations for these differences in their assessments. These findings indicate the need for increased training of SLPs to reduce error and bias in their speech intelligibility judgments, as well as the need for further research to improve its objectivity.
Open Access
Factors that affect generalization of adaptation
(University of Oregon, 2023-03-24) Lee, Dae-yong; Baese-Berk, Melissa
As there is a growing population of non-native speakers worldwide, facilitating communication involving native and non-native speakers has become increasingly important. While one way to help communication involving native and non-native speakers is to help non-native speakers improve proficiency in their target language, another way is to help native listeners better understand non-native speech. Specifically, while it may be initially difficult for native listeners to understand non-native speech, the listeners may become better at this skill after short training sessions (i.e., adaptation) and they may better understand novel non-native speakers (i.e., generalization). However, it is not well-understood how native listeners adapt and generalize to a novel speaker. This dissertation investigates how speaker and listener characteristics affect generalization to a novel speaker. Specifically, we examine how acoustic characteristics and talker information interact in generalization of adaptation, how accentedness of non-native speech affects generalization to a novel speaker, and how listeners’ linguistic experience affects generalization of adaptation. The results suggest that acoustic similarity between speakers may help generalization and that listeners’ reliance on talker information is down-weighted, as long as speakers that listeners are trained with and tested with have similar acoustic characteristics. Furthermore, the results show that exposure to more accented non-native speech disrupts generalization of adaptation compared to exposure to less accented non-native speech, suggesting that having exposure to non-native speakers does not always help generalization. The results also show that having extended linguistic experience with non-native speakers may disrupt generalization to a novel non-native speaker. The results of the present study have implications for how speaker- and listener-related factors affect generalization of adaptation. Specifically, we suggest that, at least in the early stages of learning, generalization of adaptation is constrained by acoustic similarity and that generalization to a non-native speaker utilizes mechanisms that are general to speech perception, rather than specific to this type of adaptation. We suggest that exposure to non-native accented speech that is too different from the speech that listeners are familiar with may disrupt generalization. Further, we suggest that the representation of non-native accents becomes less malleable with extended linguistic experience.
Open Access
L2 Motivation in Language Revitalization Practice
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-26) Taylor-Adams, Allison; Gildea, Spike
This dissertation investigates the initial and ongoing motivations of language revitalization practitioners. This study extends our understandings of language revitalization from the programmatic and sociological levels to the level of the individual practitioner. It also extends theory in L2 motivation into a largely unstudied language learning context. I primarily engage with the L2 Motivational Self System (Dörnyei, 2005) and Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985) to frame the findings, as well as drawing on Ushioda’s (2009) ‘person-in-context relational view’ of L2 motivation. The findings in this study arise from rigorous, inductive qualitative analysis of individual practitioner voices and experiences. I propose a model for conducting applied research that centers principles of respect, relationality, and reciprocity with language communities and community members. Built on this model, and with careful attention to interview and transcription methods, this study includes data from interviews with 28 revitalization practitioners as well as qualitative data from the Global Survey of Language Revitalization Effort (Peréz Báez et al., 2019). Key themes in the findings from these sources include: Goals, that is, practitioners’ diverse goals and trajectories towards those goals; Relationships, meaning the role of relations and relationship-building in sustaining motivation and effort; and Time, including how motivation and effort vary across periods of time, as well as how practitioners describe being motivated by perspectives on the past, experiences in the present, and visions of the future. From these findings I propose practical suggestions for practitioners looking for strategies to sustain motivation, and theoretical implications for our understanding of L2 motivation in general. Language revitalization is not an easy task; it requires significant effort on the part of many individuals, most of whom recognize they will not get to see the results of their work in their lifetimes. Individuals who learn these languages as second languages face enormous odds with enormous determination. My hope is that this dissertation might, in some small way, help those individuals stay motivated in their journeys, and might contribute in some small way to a future where all people have the chance to speak their languages.
Open Access
The Chepang language: Phonology, Nominal and Verbal morphology - synchrony and diachrony of the varieties of the Lothar and Manahari Rivers
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-26) Pons, Marie-Caroline; DeLancey, Scott
N/A
Open Access
Factors affecting the incidental formation of novel suprasegmental categories
(University of Oregon, 2021-11-23) Wright, Jonathan; Baese-Berk, Melissa
Humans constantly use their senses to categorize stimuli in their environment. They develop categories for stimuli when they are young and constantly add to existing categories and learn novel categories throughout their life. A key factor when learning novel sound categories is the method a person uses to acquire the novel sound categories. Different learning methodologies interact with different neural processes and mechanisms, leading to diverse learning outcomes. However, auditory learning research has only recently begun to focus on the ways that various auditory processing structures interact with different learning methodologies. This dissertation investigates the acquisition of novel tone categories using natural tokens and an incidental learning paradigm. Throughout the experiments we demonstrated that native English participants with no prior experience with the target tone categories, from 18 to 66 years old, can use an incidental learning paradigm with natural tokens to form four novel tone categories after 30 minutes of training with very high, even perfect, accuracy. These findings confirm results from previous studies that suggest that participants can effectively learn novel sound categories through incidental learning paradigms, and we extend the investigation of factors impacting incidental learning into natural speech sound categories. Across the four experiments we examined factors known to impact novel sound category acquisition. We demonstrated that high variability of tokens within trials resulted in greater learning than when the variability was spread out across trials. We also demonstrated that training on a single talker results in robust learning to novel tokens but a sharp decline when generalizing to novel talkers. By contrast, if participants are trained on multiple talkers during training, there is less learning, but there is little or no difference when generalizing learning to novel talkers. We also demonstrated that the presence of an unfamiliar vowel in the auditory stimuli did not impact the incidental formation of novel tone categories during perception only training. Further, we demonstrated that producing the tokens on each trial destroyed perceptual learning, and we presented multiple hypotheses regarding the nature of the disruption for future investigation. We also demonstrated that the presence of an unfamiliar vowel did not further disrupt perceptual learning over training with familiar segments. Thus, as a whole, this dissertation illustrated that incidental learning paradigms are an effective and efficient means for learning novel tone categories and investigating factors known to impact novel sound category acquisition.
Open Access
Indigenous Methodologies in Linguistics: A Case Study of Nuu-wee-ya' Language Revitalization
(University of Oregon, 2021-11-23) Hall, Jaeci; Gildea, Spike
Doing linguistic research for the purpose of language revitalization, academic inclusion, and social justice fundamentally changes the perspective, questions, and goals of the work. Framing this research in a traditional linguistic model does not best convey the point and the beauty of findings for community members. This is partly due to the ‘lack’ associated with archival work: because the archival data is limited and there are no (or limited) speakers to confer with, findings are often incomplete, even minimal, and rarely sufficient to justify a rigorous linguistic analysis. Indigenous knowledge is the idea of relationality, that everything is related (Wilson, 2008). This concept is central to being indigenous and shifts the focus of research from advancing the understanding of science through focus on the abstraction of patterns to advancing understandings of how to support all of creation. Indigenous knowledge is, by itself, a valid and complete way of perceiving and learning about the world. This can be evidenced through the close relationships indigenous people have with the environment and through the rich complexity of ceremonies. Using an indigenous model, I focus on the relationship between the research and community needs and knowledge. I incorporate indigenous intellectual models to investigate language revitalization, yielding a complex research model that approaches linguistic analysis with a mind to the priority of different components of language revitalization. In this model, the central components are planning, processing, analysis, and use. Within this model, the focus shifts from what is missing to the wealth of the knowledge that is. This dissertation links the linguistic work done to an indigenous framed research model and illustrates how this approach shifts the perceived ‘lack’ of knowledge to perceived riches. This Language Revitalization approach carries and honors our indigeneity and supports social justice for all indigenous people, including my own ancestors.
Open Access
Production and Perception of Native and Non-native Speech Enhancements
(University of Oregon, 2020-12-08) Kato, Misaki; Baese-Berk, Melissa
One important factor that contributes to successful speech communication is an individual’s ability to speak more clearly when their listeners do not understand their speech. Though native talkers are able to implement various acoustic-phonetic speech enhancements to make their speech more understandable to their listeners (e.g., by speaking more slowly, loudly, or by articulating sounds more clearly), such goal-oriented adaptations employed by non-native talkers are much less well-understood. This dissertation investigates how talkers’ ability to implement speech enhancements is shaped by their target language experience and how these enhancements impact listeners’ perception. Specifically, we examine acoustic characteristics of speech enhancements produced by native English talkers and non-native English talkers of higher- and lower-proficiency in different contexts: in a reading task where talkers are explicitly asked to read materials clearly, as well as in a simulated communication task where listeners’ communicative needs for enhanced intelligibility are signaled implicitly in the context. We further examine perceptual consequences of speech enhancements in terms of intelligibility (whether listeners understand the speech) and other subjective evaluations of the speech, including perceived degree of comprehensibility (how easy the listeners perceive the speech is to understand). The results show that native talkers and higher-proficiency non-native talkers generally make larger acoustic modifications than lower-proficiency talkers. However, such effects of talkers' target language experience differ depending on the type of acoustic manipulations involved in the productions. Furthermore, an improvement in intelligibility does not necessarily correspond to an improvement in other subjective evaluations of the speech, suggesting that perceptual benefits resulting from speech enhancements could vary depending on how listeners are asked to evaluate the speech. The results of this dissertation highlight that talkers have the flexibility to accommodate listeners’ communicative needs in a native and non-native language, and suggest that this flexibility is shaped by the combination of talkers’ linguistic backgrounds and the focus of adaptation. Furthermore, the current work provides evidence that perceptual consequences of speech enhancements are multi-faceted, and suggest that acoustic features of speech enhancements responsible for an improvement in intelligibility may differ from those influence other types of subjective evaluations.
Open Access
Contingency, Contiguity, and Capacity: On the Meaning of the Instrumental Case Marking in Copular Predicative Constructions in Russian
(University of Oregon, 2020-12-08) Tretiak, Valeriia; Vakareliyska, Cynthia
This study investigates the use of the Instrumental case marking in copular predicative constructions in Russian. The study endeavors to explain why the case marking whose prototypical meaning cross-linguistically is that of an instrument, occurs with predicative nominals (nouns and adjectives), what meaning it has in predicative constructions, and how this meaning resonates with the rest of the Instrumental meanings in the language. While cross-linguistically the Instrumental case marking is notoriously known for a wide array of meanings and functions, only in Slavic and Baltic languages it is used to mark predicative nominals. On a broader scale, I use the Russian Instrumental case marking as a case study to examine the internal organization of a complex grammatical category. The study uses the prototype model based on Wittgenstein’s (1953) family resemblance to establish semantic relatedness among the various meanings of the Instrumental case marking. The study also proposes a general meaning of the Instrumental case marking, which I define in cognitive terms as relations of contingency and contiguity. Using evidence from Early East Slavic manuscripts, the study demonstrates that the Instrumental case marking in predicative constructions has as its semantic source the Instrumental case marking in similative constructions. I propose that besides denoting the manner of motion, the referent of the Instrumental noun phrase in similative constructions also denotes a new capacity of the subject referent which emerges when the subject referent metaphorically adopts the most salient features associated with the referent of the Instrumental noun phrase, that is, its particular manner of motion. This emerging capacity is contiguous with and contingent on the specific mode of acting. In predicative constructions, the referent of the Instrumental noun phrase is a capacity, as opposed to an inherent or essential property, of the subject referent and is realized through acting/ performance. That acting/ performance is crucial in delimitating Nominative vs. Instrumental-marked properties in predicative constructions is supported by the semantic unacceptability of the Instrumental case marking in instances where the implied acting is negated in the conjunct clause. Capacity is a role which has its designated function and purpose. Function links the meaning “capacity” with the meaning “instrument”. Inasmuch as function is what delimitates instruments from other physical objects, function is what tells apart, respectively, capacities from properties in Instrumental vs. Nominative predicative constructions. That all the individual meanings of the Russian Instrumental case marking, including its meaning in predicative constructions, are interrelated and form a coherent grammatical category is further corroborated by the analysis of Instrumental constructions with predicative nouns and adjectives.
Open Access
Towards Modelling Pausing Patterns in Adult Narrative Speech
(University of Oregon, 2020-12-08) Kallay, Jeffrey; Redford, Melissa
The study that is the focus of this dissertation had 2 primary goals: 1) quantify systematic physiological, linguistic and cognitive effects on pausing in narrative speech; 2) formalize a preliminary model of pausing behavior which integrates these effects with those related to individual differences. As a natural consequence of speech-language production, pausing behavior has been of interest to linguistics researchers since at least the mid-20th century. A large number of previous studies have demonstrated systematic effects from factors related to linguistic structure and cognitive processing on speech pausing patterns. Despite that work, a comprehensive understanding of how those factors interact in shaping pausing behavior remains elusive. This is largely due to the highly complex nature of pausing behavior, which also includes more idiosyncratic factors which are difficult to quantify. The current study was aimed at addressing this problem by adopting a more holistic framework. Three separate within-subject experiments were conducted to alternatively assess effects from respiratory recovery, speech planning, language structure and discourse planning processes on narrative speech pausing behavior. Each of these factors was found to systematically influence both the frequencies and durations of the pauses that were produced. The results also suggested effects on the variability of pause durations, but these effects were primarily limited to the low-level respiratory and speech planning factors. These results together formed the basis of a preliminary model of narrative speech pausing which was tested in the final part of the study. In addition to the experimentally investigated factors, a separate component related to working memory capacity was included in the model to account for the role of individual differences. On the whole, the model was only able to account for a relatively small amount of the variation in the pausing patterns. The language structure component was found to be the most significant contributor. The implications of these results are discussed with reference to the limitations of the preliminary model proposed in the current study. These limitations provide several suggestions on the best directions for future work in attempting to refine the model toward more accurately characterizing narrative speech pausing behavior.
Open Access
A Historical Reconstruction of the Koman Language Family
(University of Oregon, 2020-02-27) Otero, Manuel; Payne, Doris
This dissertation is a historical-comparative reconstruction of the Koman family, a small group of languages spoken in what now constitutes the borderlands of Ethiopia, Sudan and South Sudan. Koman is comprised five living languages: Gwama, Opo, Komo, Uduk, and the previously unidentified Dana language. The Koman family has been relatively understudied though it has figured prominently in large-scale classifications of the Nilo-Saharan super family. These classifications are radically distinct, given the paucity of research on Koman as a whole at the time. Some current scholars even question Koman’s genetic affiliation to Nilo- Saharan entirely. One main issue in high-level classifications is the lack of low-level reconstructions of families established with verifiable sound correspondences coupled with morphological evidence to support the internal structure of a given family. This dissertation addresses this issue by reconstructing the basic phonology, including segmental and suprasegmental domains, and tracing the evolution from Proto-Koman down through the nodes to the modern-day sound systems. In addition, some of the core lexicon and morphology is reconstructed to Proto-Koman and to the subnodes. The data for this dissertation was collected in the field from native speakers of all of the living Koman languages including from previously undocumented varieties. In an effort to make the analyses as faithful to the data as possible, all of the data and all of the correspondence sets employed to reconstruct proto-sounds are provided in the Appendices. Further, an etymological wordlist of lexica reconstructed to distinct nodes within the family is also provided. While Koman’s affiliation to the purported Nilo-Saharan super family is still under debate, the overarching aim of this dissertation is to provide a conservative reconstruction of Proto-Koman which will hopefully serve future Koman scholars as well as those interested in higher-level genetic classifications of East African languages.
Open Access
Nominalization and Predication in Ut-Ma'in
(University of Oregon, 2020-02-27) Paterson, Rebecca; Payne, Doris
U̠t-Ma'in is a Kainji, East Benue-Congo language, spoken in northwestern Nigeria (ISO 639-3 code [gel]). This study contributes to our understanding of Benue-Congo languages by offering the first indepth look at nominalization phenomena in any Kainji language. Kainji is an undesrdescribed 50+ language subgroup of Benue-Congo; current descriptions are limited to articles and dissertations on a few languages, unpublished wordlists, and unpublished grammar sketches. This study looks at the morphosyntax of predication in U̠t Ma'in, especially the extensive use of nominalization and NP agreement phenomena within a wide range of predicative functions. Five of fourteen noun class prefixes are involved in nominalization of the verb; a nominalized verb, along with a goal complement or an object, can be incorporated into the nominalized phrase in the same way that a noun modifier is marked within a NP. These nominalized verb phrases are extensively used in auxiliary constructions that cover a diverse range of tense, aspect, and mode designations; the syntactic transitivity of the clause determines the morphosyntax used. Intransitive auxiliary constructions use the full range of nominalizing noun class marking; in contrast, transitive auxiliary constructions show a shift in their use of the noun class agreement morphology required. The progressive auxiliary construction specifically has shown the most adjustment in the system. The U̠t-Ma'in associative morpheme is in widespread use across different syntactic constructions. The associative can create a modifying phrase from a descriptive noun with a wide range of semantic relationship between the two nouns. The associative also serves as the relative pronoun introducing a descriptive relative clause. The associative can mark a goal or an object that is contained within the nominalized verb phrase. When a nominalized verb phrase is the complement to an auxiliary construction, the associative marks only the object complement of the verb. Finally, the associative marks the nominative form of nouns in certain morphosyntactic environments; this results in a so called marked-nominative word form and clause alignment pattern. These diverse uses of the associative and the accompanying agreement marking are pervasive in U̠t Ma'in and are a major focus of this study.
Open Access
Verbal Morphology of Amdo Tibetan
(University of Oregon, 2020-02-27) Tribur, Zoe; DeLancey, Scott
This dissertation describes the functional and structural properties of the Amdo Tibetan verb system. Amdo Tibetan (Tibetic, Trans-Himalayan) is a verb-final language, characterized by an elaborate system of post-verbal morphology that are limited to finite clauses and which encode information about the nature of the assertion. Aside from imperative mood, which is expressed by a different series of constructions, the finite verb constructions of Amdo Tibetan form a morphological paradigm expressing functions associated with the semantic domains of tense, aspect, (epistemic) modality, evidentiality and egophoricity. The data included in this study comes from three kinds of sources. The majority of examples are from my own field recordings, which include elicitations as well as spontaneous speech. I also make use of data from other linguistic publications, including two second language textbooks. My own data as well as these other sources reflect a high degree of dialectal (and register) variation which is characteristic of Amdo Tibetan. As will be apparent, my data shows a diversity of phonologies, morphosyntax, lexical items and even some functional categories. Consequently, this dissertation also serves as a cross-dialectal comparative study.
Open Access
Investigating differential case marking in Sümi, a language of Nagaland, using language documentation and experimental methods
(University of Oregon, 2020-02-27) Teo, Amos; DeLancey, Scott
One goal in linguistics is to model how speakers use natural language to convey different kinds of information. In theories of grammar, two kinds of information: “who is doing what (and to whom)”, the technical term for which is case or case role; and pragmatic information about “what is important”, have been assumed to be expressed by different means within a language. However, linguists have recently discovered that in numerous languages spoken in Australia, New Guinea, and South Asia, there are noun suffixes or enclitics that appear to simultaneously provide both case and pragmatic information. The existence of such systems suggests that our current theories of grammar need to be modified, though it is unclear how as we still know little about how these grammatical systems work. In this project, I looked at Sumi, a Tibeto-Burman language of North-east India, which has such a system of case marking. In this system, speakers do not consistently mark the subject of a transitive or intransitive sentence with an enclitic that conveys case information, but their choice depends on additional semantic and pragmatic factors. This was the first study of a Tibeto-Burman language to use a combination of new quantitative corpus methods with traditional linguistic fieldwork methods, including the recording, transcription, and tagging of spoken language, to identify semantic and pragmatic factors that are relevant to speakers’ choice of noun enclitic. In this study, some factors found to be relevant were: whether the sentence had a direct object or not; the animacy of the subject; and whether it was the first mention of a subject in connected speech or not. This was also the first study of a language with such a case system to include a perception study that investigated if intonation was used by native listeners to disambiguate whether a noun suffix was conveying either case or pragmatic information. This study showed that listeners were not using differences in intonation, but rather relied on the type of sentence the suffix occurred in to determine its meaning.
Open Access
Teaching Papa to Cha-Cha: How Change Magnitude, Temporal Contiguity, and Task Affect Alternation Learning
(University of Oregon, 2020-02-27) Smolek, Amy; Kapatsinski, Vsevolod
In this dissertation, we investigate how speakers produce wordforms they may not have heard before. Paradigm Uniformity (PU) is the cross-linguistic bias against stem changes, particularly large changes. We propose the Perseveration Hypothesis: Motor perseveration in the production system encourages copying from related wordforms. When this conflicts with paradigmatic associations requiring a change to the base, the change may be leveled, resulting in PU. Associations are more difficult to acquire when the forms are articulatorily dissimilar, and poorly-learned associations are a lesser obstacle to the perseveratory bias, which accounts for the stronger bias against large changes. Participants trained on a miniature artificial language with labial palatalization (p→tʃi), a large change, produce the alternation much less often than participants trained on alveolar (t→tʃi) or velar (k→tʃi) palatalization. The difficulty arises from articulatory, rather than perceptual, dissimilarity: k→tʃi and g→dʒi are learned equally well despite differing in perceptual similarity, and the bias against large changes is observed in production but not in judgment. Ratings of labial palatalization improve as much post-training as do ratings of lingual palatalization, suggesting that participants learn what they should produce by acquiring product-oriented schemas, but are unable to acquire a paradigmatic labial-to-alveopalatal association necessary for producing the alternation. How, then, do speakers learn to produce large changes? We propose that temporal contiguity between related forms allows speakers to notice the relationship between forms, strengthening paradigmatic associations between the chunks by which the forms differ and syntagmatic associations within these chunks. Presenting a plural immediately after the corresponding singular in training leads to more production of the exemplified pattern, whether the mapping is faithful (e.g. p→pa) or unfaithful (e.g. k→tʃa). If only one type of mapping is shown in contiguity, the pattern spreads to all inputs. Only when both types of mappings are shown in contiguity do participants learn to match inputs to the correct outputs. A simple two-layer discriminative model captures the results of the trial order manipulations, including cue availability and “chunking.” In sum, our work shows that paradigmatic associations are acquired through syntagmatic correspondence, which enables even large changes to be produced.
Open Access
Prosodic Prominence Perception, Regional Background, Ethnicity and Experience: Naive Perception of African American English and European American English
(University of Oregon, 2020-02-27) McLarty, Jason; Kendall, Tyler
Although much work has investigated various aspects of African American English (AAE), prosodic features of AAE have remained relatively underexamined (e.g. McLarty 2018; Thomas 2015). Studies have, however, identified prosodic differences between AAE and European American English (EAE) varieties, with AAE speakers found to have generally more dynamic prosody than EAE speakers. Despite these findings, the extent to which listeners perceive these differences remains unclear, as well as which specific phonetic features, alone or in concert, contribute to the differences. To address this gap in knowledge, this dissertation project utilized the Rapid Prosodic Transcription (RPT) task developed by Cole et al. (2010, 2017) to determine how much sensitivity listeners have to prominence variation in conversational speech excerpts from male and female African Americans and European Americans from North Carolina. Crucially, participants are drawn from three different listener groups, who represent a range of experience with AAE and EAE speech: African American listeners from North Carolina, European American listeners from North Carolina, and European American listeners from Oregon. In addition to examining listeners in terms of their regional background and ethnicity, listeners’ own self-reports about their experience with AAE are used to further explore the role of experience in prominence perception. Results indicate that African American voices are heard as having significantly more prominences in their speech than the European American speakers, a finding in line with prior literature on production-based differences. Further, findings identify some differences between the listener groups, but also show that the listeners generally attend to linguistic factors in similar ways for these voices despite different regional backgrounds, ethnicities and self-reported experiences with AAE. The methodological approach and findings in this dissertation provide a a new avenue for sociolinguistic research on prosody, while also providing insights on the relationship between production and perception.
Open Access
Accessibility, Language Production, and Language Change
(University of Oregon, 2019-09-18) Harmon, Zara; Kapatsinski, Vsevolod
This dissertation explores the effects of frequency on the learning and use of linguistic constructions. The work examines the influence of frequency on form choice in production and meaning inference in comprehension and discusses the effect of each modality on diachronic patterns of change in language. In production, high frequency of a form increases its accessibility given its meaning, and other related meanings. Under the pressures of online real-time speech production, greater accessibility makes a frequent form more likely to be selected over its competitors. Consequently, frequent forms are extended to novel meanings in production, resulting in a synchronic correlation between frequency and polysemy. At the same time, frequency in comprehension results in entrenchment—the more often a form is experienced with a meaning, the more confident the learner becomes that the form is unlikely to be used to express other meanings. The findings reconcile two seemingly contradictory effects of frequency in language change and language acquisition. While frequency results in extension of a frequent form to other meanings in production, it can, at the same time, cause entrenchment in comprehension, which curbs over-extension. The struggle between the pressures from production to extend and from comprehension to entrench molds language. I further provide experimental evidence demonstrating that frequent forms push their infrequent competitors out of their shared meanings, and that infrequent forms competing with frequent forms tend to be assigned to novel related meanings in comprehension. This result suggests a mechanism for the survival of infrequent forms in specific niches and the existence of push chains in semantic change. This dissertation includes previously published co-authored material.