Permanent URI for this collection
Browse
Recent Submissions
Item Mvskoke Language Patterns(William & Mary Press, 2024-01-01) Martin, JackMvskoke is spoken in east-central Oklahoma by members of the Muscogee Nation. This work is designed as a resource for those trying to learn the language. It describes the alphabet and basic patterns speakers use in daily conversation. It also includes a collection of phrases at the back. Chapter 1: The Alphabet Chapter 2: Parts of Speech Chapter 3: The Present Tense and Grades Chapter 4: Simple Sentence Patterns Chapter 5: Parts of a Verb Chapter 6: Mood: Statements, Questions, Commands Chapter 7: Possession Chapter 8: Plurals of Nouns: Hopuetake 'Children' Chapter 9: 'Be' Sentences Chapter 10: Numerals: Hvmken 'One', Hokkolen 'Two' Chapter 11: Letkvs! 'Run' Chapter 12: Person Markers Chapter 13: Negative Sentences Chapter 14: Plural Adjectives and Verbs Chapter 15: Markers after Nouns Chapter 16: 'With' and Comparisons Chapter 17: Making New Nouns and Verbs Chapter 18: Questions Chapter 19: Grades Chapter 20: Tense Chapter 21: Adverbs Chapter 22: Expressing Amount: Orēn ‘Very’ Chapter 23: Location and Direction Chapter 24: Possibility and Helping Verbs Chapter 25: Expressing 'And' Chapter 26: Adverbial Clauses Chapter 27: Relative ClausesItem Three-Year-Olds' Understanding of Desire Reports Is Robust to Conflict(2018-02-01) Harrigan, Kaitlyn; Hacquard, Valentine; Lidz, JeffreyIn this paper, we present two experiments with 3-year-olds, exploring their interpretation of sentences about desires. A mature concept of desire entails that desires may conflict with reality and that different people may have conflicting desires. While previous literature is suggestive, it remains unclear whether young children understand that (a) agents can have counterfactual desires about current states of affairs and (b) agents can have desires that conflict with one's own desires or the desires of others. In this article, we test preschoolers' interpretation of want sentences, in order to better understand their ability to represent conflicting desires, and to interpret sentences reporting these desires. In the first experiment, we use a truth-value judgment task (TVJT) to assess 3-year-olds' understanding of want sentences when the subject of the sentence has a desire that conflicts with reality. In the second experiment, we use a game task to induce desires in the child that conflict with the desires of a competitor, and assess their understanding of sentences describing these desires. In both experiments, we find that 3-year-olds successfully interpret want sentences, suggesting that their ability to represent conflicting desires is adult-like at this age. Given that 3-year-olds generally display difficulty attributing beliefs to others that conflict with reality or with the child's own beliefs, these findings may further cast some doubt on the view that children's persistent difficulty with belief (think) is caused by these kinds of conflicts.Item Encoding and Accessing Linguistic Representations in a Dynamically Structured Holographic Memory System(2017-01-01) Parker, Daniel; Lantz, DanielThis paper presents a computational model that integrates a dynamically structured holographic memory system into the ACT-R cognitive architecture to explain how linguistic representations are encoded and accessed in memory. ACT-R currently serves as the most precise expression of the moment-by-moment working memory retrievals that support sentence comprehension. The ACT-R model of sentence comprehension is able to capture a range of linguistic phenomena, but there are cases where the model makes the wrong predictions, such as the over-prediction of retrieval interference effects during sentence comprehension. Here, we investigate one such case involving the processing of sentences with negative polarity items (NPIs) and consider how a dynamically structured holographic memory system might provide a cognitively plausible and principled explanation of some previously unexplained effects. Specifically, we show that by replacing ACT-R's declarative memory with a dynamically structured memory, we can explain a wider range of behavioral data involving reading times and judgments of grammaticality. We show that our integrated model provides a better fit to human error rates and response latencies than the original ACT-R model. These results provide proof-of-concept for the unification of two independent computational cognitive frameworks.Item From Switch-Reference to Case Marking In Muskogean: The Role of Clefts(University of Chicago Press, 2024-10-01) Martin, Jack B.Case markers and switch-reference markers in the Muskogean languages are often similar in form and can be difficult to distinguish. This paper surveys both phenomena in each branch of the family. It argues that cleft clauses in Proto-Muskogean appeared after noun phrases to indicate focus. These cleft clauses ended in same- and different-subject switch-reference markers. With time, the cleft clauses were reinterpreted as subject and nonsubject case markers.Item “One does not simply categorize a meme”: A Dual Classification System for Visual-textual Internet Memes(Linguistic Society of America, 2022-01-01) Cochrane, Leslie; Johnson, Alexandra; Lay, Aubrey; Helmandollar, GinnyInternet memes are a popular and long-standing genre of discourse on social media platforms, used to express everything from emotional states to political opinions. Dancygier and Vandelanotte (2017) define internet memes as intertextual, multimodal discourses that combine text with images. In order to capture and compare these rapidly-changing discourses, we propose a descriptive dual classification system for memes with two components: meme composition and multimodal quality. Meme composition categorizes memes by their structure—beyond the individual images they employ—and thus explains how memes recontextualize images and text to create new meanings. Multimodal quality serves to describe the way(s) that the text interacts with the image in the meme: as a caption, label, and/or utterance. Combining one meme composition with one or more multimodal qualities classifies an individual meme structurally and provides a basis for explaining its intertextuality, modality, and meaning-making. We apply the dual classification system to English language data collected in its naturally-occurring context on the social media platform Instagram from 2019 to 2021. Analysis of these data shows that the dual classification system is a flexible and robust approach which provides a vocabulary for discussing the creative agency exerted by meme creators in a wide range of communities. We argue that the dual classification system affords researchers the ability to study memes linguistically across a variety of platforms and over time.Item Documenting Multilingualism and Contact(Brill, 2023-05-01) Grenoble, Lenore A.; Martin, Jack B.In order to understand why languages become endangered, linguists must shift from documenting the last fluent speakers to documenting the larger ecology of language use in an area. The papers in this special issue all address different aspects of documenting language multilingualism. They address three related topics: (1) consideration of the state of multilingualism in endangered language ecologies; (2) tools and methods for transcribing, annotating, analyzing and presenting multilingual corpora; and (3) methods in documenting and studying language contact in process.Item How to Tell a Creek Story in Five Past Tenses(2010-01-01) Martin, Jack B.Creek (or Muskogee) is among a small number of languages around the world that distinguish multiple tenses based on degrees of remoteness from the time of speaking. Those working on Creek have rarely agreed on the number of tenses or on their meanings, however, and have rarely examined the seemingly intricate ways that speakers use tenses in texts. This paper argues that Creek has one future tense and five past tenses. It finds, however, that speakers may cast events within a single time frame in several different tenses based on immediacy. That is, just as English speakers will sometimes use present tense in describing past events, Creek speakers will sometimes allow tenses to creep forward from past 5 (remote past) to past 4 or even past 3 as events become more vivid. The Creek data thus provide especially clear support for observations that temporal distance in language may be extended metaphorically to express subjective distance (Dahl 1984, Fleischman 1989, and Hintz 2007).Item The Influence of Language-Specific and Universal Factors on Acquisition of Motion Verbs(2021-01-01) Smyder, Rebecca; Harrigan, KaitlynThis study explores children’s encoding of novel verbs referring to motion events, and finds influence of both language-specific and universal constraints on meaning. Motion verbs fall into two categories—manner verbs encode how a movement happens (run, swim), and path verbs encode the starting and ending point of a motion (enter, fall). Some languages express path more frequently in the verb (Spanish, Hebrew), and others manner more frequently (English, German). Our study expands on this previous work demonstrating sensitivity to these language-specific distributions, as well as expanding to test environmental factors representing a predictable universal distribution. We find that children are sensitive to both the language-specific factors as well as the universal factors in motion verb acquisition.Item Some Phonetic Structures of Koasati(2015-01-01) Gordon, Matthew; Martin, Jack B.; Langley, LindaThis paper presents results of the first quantitative phonetic study of Koasati, a Muskogean language spoken in Louisiana and Texas. We examine vowel quality, length contrasts in vowels and consonants, the limited system of lexical tone contrasts in nouns, and the grammatical system of tone in verbs. We also study the realization of several word-final consonant clusters (fn, tl, lw, etc.) that are absent in related languages and that are typologically unusual due to their sonority reversals. Finally, we examine the cognates in related languages of the tones we document in Koasati nouns and verbs.Item Hope For Syntactic Bootstrapping(2019-12-01) Harrigan, Kaitlyn; Hacquard, Valentine; Lidz, JeffreyWe explore children’s use of syntactic distribution in the acquisition of attitude verbs, such as think, want, and hope. Because attitude verbs refer to concepts that are opaque to observation but have syntactic distributions predictive of semantic properties, we hypothesize that syntax may serve as an important cue to learning their meanings. Using a novel methodology, we replicate previous literature showing an asymmetry between acquisition of think and want, and we additionally demonstrate that interpretation of a less frequent attitude verb, hope, patterns with type of syntactic complement. This supports the view that children treat syntactic frame as informative about an attitude verb’s meaning.Item Syllable Weight and Duration: A Rhyme/Intervals Comparison(2017-01-01) Hogoboom, AnyaSteriade (2012) proposed intervals as a more appropriate syllable weight domain than rhymes. This study explores how interval weight cashes out as duration across word positions and compares this to a rhyme-based account. The data reported on in Lunden (2013), from native speakers of Norwegian (a language in which (C)VC syllables are heavy only non-finally) is reanalyzed with intervals. Lunden found that syllable rhymes in all three positions, if taken as a percentage of the average V rhyme in that word position, fell into a coherent pattern for weight. It is shown that interval durations allow for a similar, albeit less robust, pattern. The data from Lunden's (2013) perception experiment that tested the correlation between increased vowel duration and listeners' classification of syllable weight is also recast with interval durations, and the importance of the proportional increase over the raw increase, originally found for the rhyme data, is found to hold for the interval data. Thus, taking intervals as the weight domain is shown to result in reasonable durational relations between interval weights, although interval durations show less separation between some light and heavy units than the rhyme durations do.Item Position and Stress as Factors in Long-Distance Consonant Metathesis(2017-07-01) Hogoboom, Anya; Renoll, KelseyLong-distance consonant metathesis is less common than the metathesis of adjacent segments but is shown to occur in multiple languages (e.g. Māori kāheru∼" role="presentation" style="box-sizing: border-box; display: inline-block; line-height: 0; font-size: 20px; overflow-wrap: normal; word-spacing: normal; white-space: nowrap; float: none; direction: ltr; max-width: none; max-height: none; min-width: 0px; min-height: 0px; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 1px 0px; position: relative;">∼∼kārehu ‘spade’) As words tend to be short, and examples rare, it is difficult to assess the tendencies of long-distance consonant metathesis. This paper gives the results of a production experiment with five-syllable nonce words set up to examine the effect of position within the word and stress-status for long-distance consonant/consonant metathesis. It is found that all positions but the initial one are equally likely to be involved in a metathesis, which is consistent with a previous finding that word-initial onsets resist metathesis in adjacent-segment metathesis. Onsets of stressed syllables are also less likely to participate in metathesis with consonants at greater distances than in an adjacent syllable. The findings suggest that long-distance consonant metathesis is not fundamentally different from adjacent-segment metathesis, although, unlike adjacent segment metathesis, it cannot occur as part of regular process.Item Teasing Apart Encoding and Retrieval Interference in Sentence Comprehension: Evidence from Agreement Attraction(2020-01-01) Parker, Daniel; Konrad, KellyThis study investigates interference effects in sentence processing. A parade case involves agreement attraction, where the processing of a number mismatch between a verb and its subject is eased by a number-matching lure (*The keytarget to the cabinetslure were rusty), relative to sentences where neither noun matches the verb (*The key to the cabinet were rusty). Existing accounts claim that this effect reflects error-prone retrieval or misrepresentation of the target. Recently, a third account has been proposed which claims that the contrast between the two configurations reflects increased difficulty in the second sentence due to feature overwriting in the encoding (both nouns are singular). We provide results from two self-paced reading experiments that isolate the effects of feature overwriting and attraction by manipulating the presence of an agreement cue. Results showed a larger difference within the configurations with a cue, which suggest that attraction cannot be reduced to feature overwriting.Item Durational Cues to Stress, Final Lengthening, and the Perception of Rhythm(Linguistic Society of America, 2018-01-01) Hogoboom, AnyaBinary stress languages have a well-known asymmetry between their tolerance of initial versus final lapse; the former being extremely rare and the latter being quite common. Lunden (to appear) proposes that final lengthening plays a role in this asymmetry, as the additional inherent phonetic duration of the final syllable can contribute to the continuation of a perceived rhythm, even in the absence of actual final stress. She notes this effect of final lengthening should only be available in languages that use duration as a cue to stress. However, some languages are described as having different cues to primary and secondary stress, and it is not clear which is more important for this perceptual effect. The results of four new studies show that final lengthening contributes to the perceptual rhythm of the word even when only one level of stress is cued with duration.Item Vowel-Length Contrasts and Phonetic Cues to Stress: An Investigation of their Relation(2017-12-01) Hogoboom, Anya; Campbell, Jessica; Hutchens, Mark; Kalivoda, NickThe functional load hypothesis of Berinstein (1979) put forward the idea that languages which use a suprasegmental property (duration, F0) contrastively will not use it to realise stress. The functional load hypothesis is often cited when stress correlates are discussed, both when it is observed that the language under discussion follows the hypothesis and when it fails to follow it. In the absence of a more wide-ranging assessment of how frequently languages do or do not conform to the functional load hypothesis, it is unknown whether it is an absolute, a strong tendency, a weak tendency or unsupported. The results from a database of reported stress correlates and use of contrastive duration for 140 languages are presented and discussed. No support for the functional load hypothesis is found.Item Stress Avoidance in Hiatus(Linguistic Society of America, 2018-01-01) Hogoboom, AnyaSegment-based syllable weight has been proposed to be calculated by either rhyme segments (McCarthy, 1979) or by intervals (Steriade, 2012). An interval is defined as the vocalic material of a syllable and all following segmental material until the vowel of the following syllable. The two theories parse segments into the same domains in two cases: word-finally,1 and for the first vowel of two adjacent vowels in different syllables, i.e., in hiatus. While the weight domain is the same for the two theories in cases of hiatus (consisting of just a short vowel, ‘V’), the categorization of weight is different. While a short vowel alone is considered “light” in rhyme-based weight, it is considered “extra-light” in interval-based weight, as “light” intervals consist of a vowel and a following onset consonant. A comparison of (some) interval- and rhyme-based weights and domains is given in (1). Periods denote syllable boundaries. All intervals are delineated with bullets, and the interval of interest and the corresponding weight domain in Rhyme Theory are underlined.Item An Imagined Community of Practice: Online Discourse Among Wheelchair Users(Bern Open Publishing, 2017-12-01) Cochrane, LesliePeople with disabilities often live in local communities primarily made up of people without disabilities: in the absence of a geographic community of people with disabilities, the internet becomes a valuable tool for connecting individuals across both local and global contexts. The power of computer-mediated communication (CMC) to allow individuals to interact both locally and globally has been well-studied in linguistics (e. g. Baron 2008; Page 2012), and this work has included the discourse of e-health (e. g. Hamilton 1998; Locher 2006, 2013) and the online discourse of people with disabilities (Al Zidjaly 2011, 2015). Less research has been done, however, on the implications of online discourse for understanding people with disabilities as a linguistic community. This paper argues that the community of people with disabilities can be viewed from a linguistic perspective as an imagined community of practice: an imagined community, because members recognize their common belonging even if they do not interact locally (Anderson 1983); a community of practice, because members use recognizable, if not identical, disability practices and engage in shared sense-making (Eckert 2006; Eckert/McConnell-Ginet 1992). This understanding of the community of people with disabilities is evidenced in online blogs by wheelchair users. A close discourse analysis of the blog posts shows shared sense-making around disability practices, even though individual bloggers’ practices may vary according to their specific strategies for accommodation. In their posts, the bloggers construct their disability identities in terms of practice and imagine themselves to belong to a community that is distinguished by disability practice. The analysis reveals shared sense-making: in particular, the way that the bloggers position themselves in opposition to the societal discourse that people with disabilities are an inspiration to people without them. In this way, the bloggers demonstrate their membership within an imagined community of practice made up of people with disabilities.Item Semantic typology: New approaches to crosslinguistic variation in language and cognition(De Gruyter, 2015-04-13) Moore, Randi ElizabethThis article presents an overview of the goals and methods of semantic typology, the study of the distribution of semantic categories across languages. Results from this field inform theoretical accounts of syntax-semantics interface phenomena, as well as the nature of the relationship between language and cognition. This article discusses a variety of quantitative methods that represent recent efforts in semantic typology to (i) discover patterns in the distribution of independent variables and (ii) predict the distribution of dependent variables in relation to identified independent variables. Such methods include Multi-Dimensional Scaling, Hierarchical Cluster Analysis, and Generalized Linear Mixed Effects regression analyses. We identify and discuss notable published examples of these methods used in semantic typology.Item Cue Combinatorics in Memory Retrieval for Anaphora(Cognitive Science Society, 2019-01-01) Parker, DanielMany studies have shown that memory retrieval for real-time language processing relies on a cue-based access mechanism, which allows the cues available at the retrieval site to directly access the target representation in memory. An open question is how different types of cues are combined at retrieval to create a single retrieval probe (“cue combinatorics”). This study addresses this question by testing whether retrieval for antecedent-reflexive dependencies combines cues in a linear (i.e., additive) or nonlinear (i.e., multiplicative) fashion. Results from computational simulations and a reading time experiment show that target items that match all the cues of the reflexive are favored more than target items that mismatch these cues, and that different degrees of mismatches slow reading times in comparable amounts. This profile is consistent with the predictions of a nonlinear cue combination and provides evidence against models in which all cues combine in a linear fashion. A follow-up set of simulations shows that a nonlinear rule also captures previous demonstrations of interference from nontarget items during retrieval for reflexive licensing. Taken together, these results shed new light on how different types of cues combine at the retrieval site and reveal how the method of cue combination impacts the accessibility of linguistic information in memoryItem Error-Driven Retrieval in Agreement Attraction Does not Lead to Misinterpretation(Frontiers Media, 2019-05-01) Schlueter, Zoe; Parker, Daniel; Lau, EllenPrevious work on agreement computation in sentence comprehension motivates a model in which the parser predicts the verb’s number and engages in retrieval of the agreement controller only when it detects a mismatch between the prediction and the bottom-up input. It is the error-driven second stage of this process that is prone to similarity-based interference and can result in the illusory licensing of a subject–verb number agreement violation in the presence of a structurally irrelevant noun matching the number marking on the verb (‘The bed by the lamps were…’), giving rise to an effect known as ‘agreement attraction’. Here we ask to what extent the error-driven retrieval process underlying the illusory licensing alters the structural and thematic representation of the sentence. We use a novel dual-task paradigm that combines self-paced reading with a speeded forced choice task to investigate whether agreement attraction leads comprehenders to erroneously interpret the attractor as the thematic subject, which would indicate structural reanalysis. Participants read sentence fragments (‘The bed by the lamp/lamps was/were undoubtedly quite’) and completed the sentences by choosing between two adjectives (‘comfortable’/’bright’) which were either compatible with the subject’s head noun or with the attractor. We found the expected agreement attraction profile in the self-paced reading data but the interpretive error occurs on only a small subset of attraction trials, suggesting that in agreement attraction agreement checking rarely matches the thematic relation. We propose that illusory licensing of an agreement violation often reflects a low-level rechecking process that is only concerned with number and does not have an impact on the structural representation of the sentence. Interestingly, this suggests that error-driven repair processes can result in a globally inconsistent final sentence representation with a persistent mismatch between the subject and the verb.