Keynote Abstracts
Is that which glitters in English also gold in Spanish? Exploration of bilingual phonaestheme transfer
Dr. Esther Brown (CU Boulder)
Phonaesthemes, or interlexical repetitions of phoneme clusters sharing an element of meaning across sets of words in a language, are noteworthy form~meaning pairings indicative of compositionality within a word that are neither phones nor morphemes in the traditional sense. Despite this uncertain grammatical status, they are widely attested in myriad languages (Mompean et al, 2020). Usage-based perspectives (e.g., Bybee 2010), nevertheless, predict the emergence of phonaesthemes as automatic, natural byproducts of the cognitive organization of tokens of experience via similarity matching and categorization of statistical recurrences across words (Bergen 2004). Given how naturally phonaesthemes instantiate core usage-based tenets such as gradience, variation, and the non-modularity of grammar, the lack of empirical research into their emergence and use is noteworthy.
An attested phonaestheme in English, for example, is gl- [‘light’, ‘vision’ (glitter, glisten, glow)] (Gutiérrez et al, 2016), which is embodied through an abstract schema emerging over the lexical items sharing the form~meaning overlap. Spanish shares this consonantal onset (globo ‘globe’, gloriosa ‘glorious’, glacial ‘glacial’), but the lexical items lack the phonaesthemic meaning of light or vision. In a situation of language contact, would bilinguals employ the schematic meaning, at a level of abstraction beyond the participating lexical items, when using their other language? Studies of bilingualism and language contact have examined form~meaning overlaps and interlingual influence across languages. Notably, of course, is research into cognates, sites of high congruence between languages (Bullock & Gerfen, 2004), where interlingual influences (in production and perception), are enhanced. Despite this abundant research, however, we lack studies of the potential interlingual borrowability, transferability, or productivity of phonaesthemes and/or their abstract schemas.
This work asks whether that which glitters in English, also glows in Spanish. We employ survey data and a nonce-word task to test for the existence of an abstract phonaestheme schema and to examine any productivity of the pattern in Spanish~English bilingual data. In the monolingual populations, unsurprisingly, the robust productivity found for gl- in English is absent in Spanish. Results suggest the gl- schema is productive for the bilinguals, though in ways distinct from monolingual benchmarks. The implications of these findings for models of lexical representation and bilingual speech production are discussed.
Contact, Change and Social Networks: a study of Yakama and Mexican sociolects in Washington state
Dr. Alicia Beckford Wassink, University of Washington
Dialectological research into the phonological systems of nonwhite groups in the US has tended to focus on how or whether such groups participate in ‘majority’ dialect features and sound changes. For example, in Oregon, Peterson (2019) found participation in /u/- and /o/-fronting (two key sound changes in the so-called Western Vowel Pattern) in women of color. In Washington, Wassink & Hargus (2020) and Wassink (2016) reported that Yakama and Chicanx speakers do not show Western US-like fronting of /u/. However, these approaches tend to center the majority ethnicity in a broader region, regardless of who the most important local groups in contact really were. Anthropological and historical texts documenting the history of the Yakima Valley in south central Washington state make clear that earliest, year-round, non-intertribal contact in the region involved the Yakama and Mexican peoples.
This talk will trace the timecourse of interethnic contact between the Yakama and Mexican peoples, and examine aspects of the vowel system configurations of both groups that may reveal the roles of language transfer and phonological restructuring. First, we examine the overall configuration of vowel space. Next, focusing on the back region of vowel space, we will see that these two Washington groups’ systems share subphonemic features not present in other sociolects of Washington state, but are also differentiated by features that appear to reflect heritage language transfer. For the Yakama, /u/ and /ʊ/ are variably extremely fronted, perhaps under the influence of the heritage language Sahaptin, which has a phonemic high central vowel /ɨ/ (Wassink & Hargus 2020). However, the target of (near-) merger for /ul/~/ʊl/, a Western Vowel Pattern feature, appears unaffected by this extreme fronting of /u/. Among the Chicanx speakers in the Yakima Valley we see moderate /u/-fronting, but we find that this fronting also does not appear to occur in prelateral syllables.
The Yakima Valley data were collected as part of the long-term Pacific Northwest English (PNWE) study (2013-present). Vowel trajectories (F1-F3) were sampled using a proportional distance approach (20-35-50-65-80%), and modeled using Generalized Additive Mixed Modeling (Soskuthy 2017).
A second research question asks how social network composition relates to vowel system variation. While contact between these groups dates back to the 1700s, the Yakama have many members whose networks display a high level of insularity. We ask whether this insularity may further predict retention of heritage Sahaptin features. Using methods for measuring network reach as an indicator of interethnic contact within the individual’s network, we explore the relationship between network composition and phonological variation.
A long-term partnership project with the Yakama nation lies at the heart of this research program. I will discuss how the partnership developed, using Wolfram’s (2019) concept of linguistic gratuity. Together with the Yakama Language Program and Tribal Cultural Committee, a set of web pages was developed that have recently been incorporated into the Yakama Nation’s mandatory history curriculum. I will end this talk by looking at the work done in partnership with the Yakama, and discussing how we came to see how sociolinguistic research might be of value to a non-specialist community within the context of that community’s educational priorities.
The interaction of language ecology, frequency, and chunking leads to language variation and change in signed language grammar
Dr. Erin Wilkinson, University of New Mexico
In this talk, I will be talking about few things that I find interesting about deaf people and signed languages. Deaf children tend to grow up experiencing highly divergent language backgrounds. Most are born into hearing families, who may or may not decide to learn a signed language to communicate with their child(ren). However, some deaf children experience exposure early or at birth to a signed language with their deaf or hearing parents. In other words, language ecologies for individual deaf signers are highly variable and to an extent idiosyncratic. How do the interaction of types of language ecologies (and changes to ecologies), frequency effects, and chunking help us to understand better how signed languages in general develop, maintain, and evolve in terms of language variation and change?
First, I will discuss how changes in the ecology of a signed language community and embodied intersubjectivity drive language change and variation in signed languages. Previous literature has demonstrated that language use and intersubjectivity shape discourse and grammar. The degree of intersubjectivity depends on the degree of experience and knowledge that discourse partners share. The more intersubjectivity participants have, the higher context their communicative interactions tend to be. Simply put, because much information is shared, or known, discourse participants would not only generate less linguistic material but also evoke experientially rich content in their linguistic material. The evocation of shared conceptualization is found to be strengthened through the regularization of linguistic structures, which is a result of the embodied intersubjectivity. However, what happens if the ecology of a signed language changes to a point where the embodied intersubjectivity may have been evolved into a possible different variation of signed language grammar. To investigate this new line of inquiry on the evolution of the embodied intersubjectivity in the lens of typological-functional theory as follows: if changes are taking place in the language ecology of ASL and other majority signed language communities, then what changes will manifest in their signed language grammar?
Second, research on spoken language has shown that frequency and chunking play a role in the mental organization of grammar. In signed language research, previous research has concerned individual signs with complex, simultaneous structure. Revisiting these individual signs, I question the tradition of analyzing these signs as individual units masks the fact that they have structure that is parallel to the structure that is found in larger, multi-sign units. Accordingly, here I argue that chunking of sequential structures provides a template for the analysis of signed languages. Previous studies on all demonstrate that ASL users frequently produce fixed sequential expressions with reorganized internal structure, which are also themselves are the structure for larger units (Hou 2022; Lepic 2019; Wilkinson, Lepic & Hou 2023). Comparing these phenomena with multi-word expressions in spoken languages, some differences are observed, such as the fact that chunks of spoken language are often characterized by embedding of multiple schematic constructions. These have not yet been thoroughly researched in signed languages; however, I will provide some examples that I believe will be promising in this direction. In short, differences between the modalities may interact with general cognitive pressures to yield different types of constructions in spoken and signed languages.
