Liliana Sanchez speaks on Friday

Luiz Amaral writes:

Liliana Sanchez (Rutgers) will give a talk on Friday, April 22 at 2:30 in Herter 301. Please join us.

"Modularity and variability at the interfaces: Quechua, Shipibo and Spanish pronominal systems in contact"

"The study of bilingualism and second language acquisition from a generative perspective has been characterized in the last decades by approaches that have ranged from strong empirical support for the autonomy of syntax and the availability of universal language acquisition (Flynn 1987, Liceras 2010,  Schwartz & Sprouse 1996, White 1989, 2003) to approaches that focus on variability at the interfaces between language components (Montrul 2010, Sorace 2000, 2005, 2009). These have become increasingly acknowledged as crucially involved in the development of the grammatical representation of adult and child sequential bilinguals (Pladevall 2010, Serratrice, Sorace & Paoli 2004, Sorace & Serratrice 2009).In this talk, I will focus on some of the major findings and contributions that the study of adult bilingualism in Spanish and agglutinative languages such as Quechua and Shipibo have brought to the understanding of modularity and variability at the interfaces.Quechua is a nominative-accusative language with no gender marking. It is an agreement-based null subject language that also allows null definite objects (Cerrón-Palomino 1988, Sánchez 2010). Shipibo is an ergative language with no gender marking. It is a mixed null subject language with obligatory first and second person overt pronouns and pragmatically conditioned third person null subjects and null objects (Camacho and Elías 2010).Bilingualism in Quechua and Spanish and bilingualism in Shipibo and Spanish have resulted in partially divergent Spanish pronominal patterns. I will discuss evidence of variability in the pronominal system of Spanish among Quechua and Shipibo speakers due to crosslinguistic influence at the interfaces of syntax and morphology and syntax and pragmatics. The evidence presented includes: a)  the feature specification of direct object clitics (Camacho, Sánchez, and Paredes, 1995; Kalt 2012b; Sánchez 2003, Mayer and Sánchez in prep), b) the emergence of secondary topic interpretations for clitic doubling expressions (Sánchez 2003, Mayer 2010, Mayer and Sánchez in prep), and c) the interpretation of overt first person subjects in Shipibo Spanish (Sanchez, Camacho and Elías 2010)."

Terrell Morgan speaks in Hispanic Linguistics talk series

The Hispanic Linguistics Talk series features Terrell Morgan (Ohio State University) on Friday, April 1 at 3PM in Herter 601. The title of his talk is “Cultura fonológica: Expanding the notion of `phonological competence’ in second language acquisition.” 

Professor Morgan is also giving a workshop on Saturday April 2nd at the UMass Center at Springfield, which is designed for high school and middle school teachers of Spanish. His talk is from 10 to 1 in room 014 at the Springfield UMass Center. For a description, and to register for tickets, go here.

Meghan Armstrong in Leipzig

Meghan Armstrong gave a talk at a session on the prosody and meaning of (non-)canonical questions across languages at the DGfS conference last week in Leipzig. The title of her talk was “The rise-flat-fall contour as an epistemic operator in American English.” You can learn more here.

Ibaños gives Hispanic Linguistics Talk on Friday

Luiz Amaral writes:

Prof. Ana Ibaños from the Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, and currently a visiting scholar in the Linguistics Department, will talk about current changes in Brazilian Portuguese at the Hispanic Linguistics Talk Series this Friday (10/24) at 1:30 (Room TBA).

Here is the abstract:

"Traditionally, Brazilian Portuguese (BP) has been considered a pro-drop language, which allows the absence of subject pronouns in the sentence. But studies have shown that it is losing some of the properties that typically characterize a pro-drop language (Duarte 1995; Xavier 2006; Kato 2000). Some even state that BP is evolving from a pro-drop to a non-pro-drop language (Duarte 1995). This talk is about some changes in the pronominal system in Brazilian Portuguese that would prevent the Null Subject Parameter hence changing its status."

Pilar Prieto gives talk in Hispanic Linguistics on Thursday

Meghan Armstrong writes:

We invite you to join us for the first of our series of talks in Hispanic Linguistics:

Pilar Prieto (ICREA/Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

Intonational and gestural meaning reflect information about spaces of commitment

October 16 - 11:30am

301 Herter Hall

ABSTRACT:

It is well-known that prosody and gesture patterns across languages, among other functions, convey information about the epistemic stance of the speaker, not only in relation to the speaker’s own propositions but also in relation to the addressee’s propositions. In the first part of this talk I will present evidence from two recent experiments on the role of prosody and gesture in the expression and assessment of the epistemic stance of the speaker (Roseano et al 2014, Borràs-Comes and Prieto 2014; see also Armstrong to appear). In one of our experiments on biased questions and intonation, results showed that different tune patterns in Catalan were used to encode (a) different degrees of speaker knowledge on the content of the speakers' own proposition; and (b) different degrees of speaker acceptance of the content of the proposition of the addressee(Borràs-Comes and Prieto 2014).

The second part of the talk will be devoted to show the results from a joint project with M.T. Espinal and S. Tubau (UAB) and two members of our team (J. Borràs-Comes and S. González, UPF) on the role of prosody and gesture in the interpretation of denial in Catalan. Two specific cases will be analyzed, namely double negation and yes-answers to negative yes-no questions (Espinal & Prieto 2011, Tubau et al. in press). These two cases constitute a challenge for semantics and pragmatics because double negative and yes- responses to negative questions are ambiguous in that they can constitute either a negative answer to the proposition expressed or a denial to a presupposition (e.g., What isn’t working? Nothing ‘Everything is working’; Isn't John coming (either)? Yes). Our research supports the conclusion that specific intonation contours (in particular, the so- called contradiction contour, L+H*L!H%) and gestures associated with n-words do constrain meaning in ways that allow listeners to obtain the double negation and/or the contradiction interpretation in the two types of structures. It is our claim that in both cases prosody and gesture act as linguistic and conventionalized encoders of presupposition denial (see also Espinal et al. to appear, Prieto et al. 2013). Support for the linguistic view comes from languages classified as truth-based languages (e.g. Chinese, Japanese, or Russian [Jones 1999: 8ff.]), which contradict negative questions by answering no yes (Don’t you drink coffee? No yes (meaning you are not right, I drink coffee)), while some languages with a polarity-based system contradict the truth of the negative proposition by answering Yes and a specific prosody (i.e. the answer ‘disagrees’ with the whole contentof the negative sentence).

Following Krifka's proposal on the interpretation of speech acts as "spaces of commitments", we propose that intonation and gesture patterns associated both to biased questions and to n-words and particles can be interpreted as epistemic operators encoding REJECT, ASSERT and REQUEST operations (see also Portes et al. 2014 for a related proposal). For example, the contradicting answer to a negative question yes is composed of REJECT (encoded by prosody and gesture) plus ASSERT(φ) (encoded through the positive word, where φ is the propositional discourse referent). All in all, these results are challenging for the design that has been traditionally assumed in the theory of grammar, since they suggest that prosody and gesture constrain meaning representations. Inparticular, the inferencing of denial.

Call for papers extended: InToSpan 2014

UMass is hosting the First Symposium on Intonation and Tone in the Spanish-Speaking world October 11-12. John Kingston is one of the invited speakers. Abstracts for oral presentations and posters are being accepted until June 7. For more information about the conference, go here. For information about submitting abstracts, go here.

UMass at Speech Prosody 7

Trinity College in Dublin is hosting the seventh Speech Prosody conference this week (May 20-23). UMass is represented by Kristine Yu, who will be presenting “Intonational phonology in Bengali and English infant-direct speech,” joint work with Sameer Ud Dowla Khan and Megha Sundara, and by Meghan Armstrong, who presents “The acquisition of multimodal cues to disbelief,” joint work with Nuria Esteve-Gilbert and Pilar Prieto.

Jonathan Rosa on the Language/Word gap

Meghan Armstrong writes:

The UMass Hispanic Linguistics program has invited Jonathan Rosa  (Anthropology) to lead a discussion on the language gap/word gap that  has been receiving substantial attention in the media.

We invite you to join us for this discussion:

Power, Perspective, and Linguistic “Problems:: Rethinking the  "Language/Word Gap"

4/8 @ 5:45 -- 217 Herter Hall

For more info: http://umasshispling.wordpress.com/

Pilar Chamorro gives Hispanic Linguistics Talk on Friday

Meghan Armstrong writes:

We invite you to join us for the next event in our Hispanic Linguistics Talk Series.

Pilar Chamorro, University of Georgia
On the Plurality of Western Iberian Romance Periphrastic Pasts
Friday, March 7 @ 3pm
301 Herter Hall

Page Piccinini talks on Thursday

Page Piccinini (UCSD) will be giving the following talk at 10AM on Thursday, October 31, in Herter 301. 

Accessing Cross Language Categories in Learning a Third Language

Current theories differ greatly in explaining how bilinguals organize
their two languages, including at the sound level. The heart of the
debate is whether bilinguals have constant access to all of their
sounds across their two languages, or only access to sounds from one
of their two languages at a time. The present study examines these
theories by testing the ability of early Spanish-English bilinguals to
access phonetic distinctions within the voice onset time (VOT)
continuum that exist across their two languages (negative, short-lag,
and long-lag VOT). To this end, bilinguals were tested on a third
language that has all three contrasts phonemically: Eastern Armenian.
The effects of both language mode and language dominance were
examined. One production and two perception tasks were carried out. In
the production task participants heard words and nonce words in
Eastern Armenian and were told to repeat the words back to the best of
their abilities. Participants produced the three types of stops
significantly differently both for bilabials and velar. However this
was modulated by language dominance, with those who were more English
dominant producing less of a contrast between the negative and
short-lag categories (the phonemic categories in Spanish). There was
no effect of language mode. The first perception task was an AX
discrimination task. Participants heard two words and said if the
words were the same or different. Participants were consistently good
at negative versus long-lag VOT, but did poorly at both negative
versus short-lag VOT and short-lag versus long-lag VOT. There was no
effect of language mode or language dominance. The second experiment
was an ABX discrimination task. Participants heard three words and
said if the third word was the same as the first or second word.
Participants performed best at negative versus long-lag VOT, also
preformed well at short-lag versus long-lag VOT, but performed poorly
at negative versus short- lag VOT. However, there was an interaction
with language dominance such that those who were more balanced
bilinguals preformed better at the negative versus short-lag VOT
contrast than those were more English dominant. Language mode was not
significant. These results support a theory whereby language dominance
and not language mode is a key determining factor both in speech
production and perception. Furthermore, the results of the AX and ABX
experiments together suggest that while more balanced bilinguals can
accurately perceive the three way contrast when forced to assign
category labels (the ABX task) they do poorly when categorization is
open (the AX task). This may show a preference by participants for a
language with a two-way contrast, as would match their native
languages, even if they can produce and perceive a three-way contrast.