In the last few years, a number of research studies have been conducted on stress in Amazigh, a Hamito-Semitic language spoken in North Africa. However, these works were mainly confined to analysing ...word-level stress. The objective of this paper is, therefore, to examine stress distribution beyond this level, namely within the phrase and the sentence in Goulmima Amazigh. Specifically, an attempt is made to investigate whether the stress patterns of isolated words are similar or distinct from those of items that appear within phrases or sentences. Results of the study revealed that the assignment of stress at the phrasal and sentence levels shows marked differences from the assignment of stress at the word level. In fact, stress above the word level no longer depends on the internal make-up of the syllable. Apart from nominal forms that occupy the initial position of a phrase or sentence, those that are part of each of these strings get stressed on the rightmost syllable whose nucleus is a plain vowel. Nonetheless, only the last stressed syllable in the sequence bears more prominence.
Interaction between second language (L2) learners in which the primary goal is the communication of meaning rather than the manipulation of language forms is widely regarded as beneficial for L2 ...learning from a variety of theoretical and pedagogical perspectives. Besides learning opportunities created through interactional feedback, modified output, and attention to language form, collaborative tasks may also promote L2 learning by generating the occurrence of priming. Priming refers to effects of speakers' previous experience with specific aspects of language. Collaborative priming activities provide models of target structures and elicit production of those structures with a variety of lexical items, without requiring that learners provide each other with feedback, produce modified output, or discuss language form. Consequently, these types of activities may be an innovative method for modeling and eliciting target structures through peer interaction in L2 classrooms. This study examined whether collaborative tasks can elicit auditory and structural priming during peer interaction in L2 classrooms. (Contains 2 tables.)
The word-level prosody of Samoan Zuraw, Kie; Yu, Kristine M.; Orfitelli, Robyn
Phonology,
08/2014, Letnik:
31, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This paper documents and analyses stress and vowel length in Samoan words. The domain of footing, the Prosodic Word, appears to be a root and cohering suffixes; prefixes and most disyllabic suffixes ...form a separate domain. Vowel sequences that disrupt the normal stress pattern require constraints matching sonority prominence to metrical prominence, sensitive to degree of mismatch and to the number of vowels involved. Two suffixes unexpectedly have an idiosyncratic footing constraint, observable only in a limited set of words. We also discuss trochaic shortening and its asymmetrical productivity, and the marginal contrastiveness of some features in loans. While Samoan does not appear to be typologically unusual, it does offer arguments (i) in favour of alignment constraints on Prosodic Words rather than only on feet directly, and (ii) against simple cyclicity. Some of the strongest evidence comes from stress patterns of the rich inventory of phonotactically licit vowel sequences.
Researchers have long sought to determine the strength of the relation between prosody and the interpretation of scopally ambiguous sentences in English involving quantification and negation (e.g. ...All the men didn't go). While Jackendoff (1972) proposed a one-to-one mapping between sentence-final contour and the scope of negation (falling contour: narrow scope, fall-rise contour: wide scope), in subsequent work, researchers (e.g. Ladd 1980; Ward & Hirschberg 1985; Kadmon & Roberts 1986) disentangled the link between prosody and scope. Even though these pragmatic accounts predict variability in production, they still allow for some correlation between scope and prosody. To date, we lack systematic evidence to bear on this discussion. Here, we present findings from two perception experiments aimed at investigating whether prosodic information – including, but not limited to, sentence-final contour – can successfully disambiguate such sentences. We show that when speakers provide consistent auditory cues to sentential interpretation, hearers can successfully recruit these cues to arrive at the correct interpretation as intended by the speaker. In light of these results, we argue that psycholinguistic studies (including language acquisition studies) investigating participants' ability to access multiple interpretations of scopally ambiguous sentences – quantificational and otherwise – should carefully control for prosody.
Indefinites in comparatives Aloni, Maria; Roelofsen, Floris
Natural language semantics,
06/2014, Letnik:
22, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The goal of this paper is to explain the meaning and distribution of indefinites in comparatives, focusing on English some and any and German irgend-indefinites. We consider three competing theories ...of comparatives in combination with an alternative semantics of some and any, and a novel account of stressed irgend-indefinites. One of the resulting accounts, based on Heim's analysis of comparatives, predicts all the relevant differences in quantificational force, and explains why free choice indefinites are licensed in comparatives.
Pairs of sentences like the following pose a problem for ontology: (1) Jupiter has four moons. (2) The number of moons of Jupiter is four. (2) is intuitively a trivial paraphrase of (1). And yet ...while (1) seems ontologically innocent, (2) appears to imply the existence of numbers. Thomas Hofweber proposes that we can resolve the puzzle by recognizing that sentence (2) is syntactically derived from, and has the same meaning as, sentence (1). Despite appearances, the expressions 'the number of moons of Jupiter' and 'four' do not function semantically as singular terms in (2). Hofweber's primary evidence for this proposal concerns differences in the focus-related communicative functions of (1) and (2). In this paper I raise several serious problems for Hofweber's proposal, and for his attempt to support it by appeal to focus-related phenomena. I conclude by offering independent evidence for an alternative, purely pragmatic resolution of the ontological puzzle.
Jackson responds to criticism by Hofweber in his attempt to solve the ontological puzzle raised by pairs like the following: (1) Jupiter has four moons.(2) The number of moons of Jupiter is four.
Samek-Lodovici (2005) contributes to a well-established tradition of work on the prosody-focus interface, which proposes that, cross-linguistically, there is a correlation between culminative ...prosodic prominence and focus. Chichewa focus prosody is problematic for the Stress-Focus correlation, because words with in-situ focus do not bear sentential stress, according to Kanerva's (1990) description. To account for Chichewa, Samek-Lodovici proposes that, in essence, Chichewa does not have culminative focus prosody because it does not have culminative sentential prosody. Kanerva (1990: 139-140) suggests that Chichewa does, though, have sentence-level stress: the penult of the final word of the Intonation Phrase (IP) is described as having 'considerable lengthening' making it 'noticeably longer' than any IP-internal stressed syllable whether focused or not. However, he does not provide phonetic figures to support this description. Surprisingly, no thorough follow-up phonetic study of Chichewa has systematically investigated this issue. In this paper we present the results of an experiment conducted in Malawi involving several non-linguist native speakers of Chichewa, which set out to test Kanerva's (1990) and Samek-Lodovici's (2005) conflicting claims about the relative length of penult vowels in focused vs. IP-final position. We show that Kanerva's claim is correct: the penult vowel of an IP is significantly longer than other penult vowels in the IP, including those of words in focus. However, our study contradicts Kanerva (1990), as we find that focused constituents do not attract even phrasal stress. We suggest that the focus prosody reported is actually emphasis prosody, and that there is no obligatory focus prosody in Chichewa.
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