Linguistique - Publications // Linguistics - Publications

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10393/42708

Browse

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3

Northern Jê Verb Morphology and the Reconstruction of Finiteness Alternations
(2024-12-10) Nikulin, Andrey; Salanova, Andrés Pablo
This paper examines the morphology of verbs in the Northern branch of the Jê language family, paying particular attention to verbal finiteness, a pervasive category in the family that exhibits a number of morphological complexities. We argue that a number of Proto-Northern Jê verbs whose nonfinite forms have been traditionally regarded as suppletive can be shown to be derived through morphophonological processes that are plausible in comparative perspective. The proposal advanced here also illuminates a number of points regarding person inflection and other verbal morphology that have figured prominently in historical studies of Macro-Jê languages.
Bilinguals have a single computational system but two compartmentalized phonological grammars: Evidence from code-switching
(2022) Gosselin, Leah
Classic linguistic models, such as Chomsky’s minimalist schematization of the human language faculty, were typically based on a ‘monolingual ideal’. More recently, models have been extended to bilingual cognition. For instance, MacSwan (2000) posited that bilingual individuals possess a single syntactic computational system and, crucially, two phonological systems. The current paper examines this possible architecture of the bilingual language faculty by utilizing code-switching data. Specifically, the natural speech of Maria, a habitual Spanish-English code-switcher from the Bangor Miami Corpus, was examined. For the interface of phonology, an analysis was completed on the frequency of syllabic structures used by Maria. Phonotactics were examined as the (unilingual) phonological systems of Spanish and English impose differential restrictions on the legality of complex onsets and codas. The results indicated that Maria’s language of use impacted the phonotactics of her speech, but that the context of use (unilingual or code-switched) did not. This suggests that Maria was alternating between encapsulated phonological systems when she was code-switching. For the interface of morphosyntax, syntactic dependencies within Maria’s code-switched speech and past literature were examined. The evidence illustrates that syntactic dependencies are indeed established within code-switched sentences, indicating that such constructions are derived from a single syntactic subset. Thus, the quantitative and qualitative results from this paper wholly support MacSwan’s original conjectures regarding the bilingual language faculty: bilingual cognition appears to be composed of a single computational system which builds multi-language syntactic structures, and more than one phonological system.
Monolingual and bilingual children's processing of coarticulation cues during spoken word recognition
(2020) Desmeules-Trudel, Félix; Moore, Charlotte; Zamuner, Tania S.
Bilingual children cope with a significant amount of phonetic variability when processing speech, and must learn to weigh phonetic cues differently depending on the cues’ respective roles in their two languages. For example, vowel nasalization is coarticulatory and contrastive in French, but coarticulatory-only in English. In this study, we extended an investigation of the processing of coarticulation in two- to three-year-old English monolingual children (Zamuner, Moore & Desmeules-Trudel, 2016) to a group of four- to six-year-old English monolingual children and age-matched English-French bilingual children. Using eye tracking, we found that older monolingual children and age-matched bilingual children showed more sensitivity to coarticulation cues than the younger children. Moreover, when comparing the older monolinguals and bilinguals, we found no statistical differences between the two groups. These results offer support for the specification of coarticulation in word representations, and indicate that in some cases, bilingual children possess language processing skills similar to monolinguals.

Browse

Recent Submissions