Author Archives: ryin

Jessica Coon colloquium Friday April 14th at 3:30

Jessica Coon of McGill University will be presenting “Building verbs in Chuj: Consequences for the nature of roots” in the Linguistics colloquium series Friday April 14th at 3:30, in ILC N400. All are welcome!

Abstract: The suffix -w in Chuj (Mayan) is found in two contexts: (i) attached to transitive roots to form what have been called “incorporation antipassives” and (ii) attached to nominal and positional roots to form unergatives. In both contexts, the result is an intransitive verb with a single, agentive external argument. In this talk I provide a unified analysis of these constructions in which -w is a v/Voice head that attaches to a root and introduces an external argument, but does not assign ergative case. Intransitivity is indirectly ensured through the limited availability of licensing heads. This has important implications for the status of certain antipassives. In Chuj, I argue that the incorporation antipassive formed with -w does not convert a transitive verb into an intransitive verb, but rather, both transitive and “antipassive” stems are formed directly from the root.

This detailed look at Chuj verbal morphology sets the scene for a broader question: when it comes to verb-stem formation, what information is contributed by the root, and what is contributed by the functional heads? I argue first that roots in Chuj are not acategorical, but must be grouped into categories based on their stem-forming possibilities. Root category does not map directly to surface category, but does determine which functional heads are possible. Second, I show that while licensing, agreement, and the introduction of the external argument are all governed by higher functional heads, the presence or absence of an internal argument is dictated by the root. Specifically, transitive roots in Chuj always combine with an internal argument, whether it be a full DP, a bare pseudo-incorporated NP, or an implicit object. The internal argument cannot be fully omitted or suppressed, regardless of higher functional material.

Andries Coetzee colloquium Friday April 7th at 3:30

Andries Coetzee of the University of Michigan will be presenting “Individual and Community Level Differences in the Perception and Production of Coarticulatory Speech” in the Linguistics colloquium series Friday April 7th at 3:30, in ILC N400. All are welcome!

Abstract. Individual speakers can differ in the extent to which they overlap articulatory gestures. Similarly, listeners can differ in how much they rely perceptually on coarticulatory information. In this presentation, I will explore the ways in which this kind of community level variation is structured at the level of the individual. Specifically, I will investigate the extent to which the coarticulatory production patterns of an individual correspond to that individual’s reliance on coarticulatory information during speech perception. Most theories of speech production and perception (including theories of sound change) assume a link between the perception and production repertoires of individuals, although there is limited evidence to date for the existence of such a link.

The focus in this presentation will be on the perception and production of anticipatory nasalization. In the studies that will be discussed, nasal airflow was used to identify the onset of anticipatory nasalization during speech (at what point during the vowel does nasal airflow initiate in the production of a word like scent), and eye-tracking was used to measure the perceptual reliance on anticipatory nasalization (when presented with an auditory stimulus scent, do listeners fixate on the target scent rather than the competitor set based on the anticipatory nasalization during the vowel, or do they wait for the disambiguating information contained in the consonant following the vowel).

I will discuss two studies that explore this phenomenon, in American English and in Afrikaans, respectively. These two languages are similar in terms of the observed inter-speaker variation in the reliance on anticipatory nasalization during both production and perception. The social structure of the variation is different between the two speech communities, however. In American English, the extent of nasalization is socially relatively unmarked, while the degree of nasalization is strongly correlated with the difference between so-called “White Afrikaans” and the socio-ethnic minority variety of the language known as “Kleurling Afrikaans”. I will show that there is evidence for the correlation between perception and production repertoires of speakers in both American English and in Afrikaans, and explore some of the differences that arise from the different social embeddedness of anticipatory nasalization in these two speech communities.