Linguistic variation in space reflects patterns of social interaction. Gravity models have been successfully used to capture the role of urban centers in the dissemination of innovations in the ...speech community along with the diffusion of variants in space. Crucially, the effects of the factors of a gravity model (distance and population size) depend on language situation and may result from different sources, in particular processes of vertical and horizontal convergence. In the present study, we investigate lexical variation in contemporary Yucatec Maya, an indigenous language of Mexico, spoken in a situation of generalized bilingualism. This language situation lacks some crucial ingredients of vertical convergence: no variety of Yucatec Maya has the status of a standard variety: the language of administration and education is Spanish (diglossia-with-bilingualism). The present study finds evidence of convergence processes that can be exclusively attributed to horizontal convergence. The lexical distance between speakers decreases in and between urban centers, variants with a large distribution are more likely in areas with a maximum of interactions with other areas. Even Spanish variants are distributed in the sample with a pattern that reveals processes of horizontal convergence: their distribution is accounted for through an areal bias (widespread in areas with a stronger exposition to Spanish) rather by influences from the urban centers (as centers of administration/education) to the rural areas in their surroundings.
We use the comparative method of language acquisition research in this article to investigate children’s expression of directional clitics in two Eastern Mayan languages – K’iche’ and Mam (
Pye and ...Pfeiler, 2014
;
Pye, 2017
). The comparative method in historical linguistics reconstructs the grammatical antecedents of modern languages and traces the evolution of each linguistic feature (
Paul, 1889
;
Campbell, 1998
). This history informs research on language acquisition by demonstrating how phonological and morphological features interact in the evolution of new uses for common inherited traits. Children acquiring modern languages must learn the arbitrary constraints imposed on their language by its history.
This book includes six studies on the acquisition of single Mesoamerican indigenous languages, (Huichol, Zapotec, and the Mayan languages Ch'ol, Tzeltal, K'iche', and Yukatek); and a crosslinguistic ...study of five Mayan languages (K'anjob'al, K'iche', Tzeltal, Tzotzil, and Yukatek). Three topics are theoretically and methodologically discussed and empirically demonstrated: with respect to ergativity, the ergative-absolutive cross-referencing pattern on the morphological level, noun-verb distinction and the acquisition of body- part locatives in the early lexicon, and the role of semantic properties and cultural context in language acquisition and socialization. This book makes important claims regarding the methodology of cross-linguistic studies as well as the results of these studies and the comparative method used in the book (structural and discursive factors in language acquisition, cross-linguistic relationships and variation).
•Data from typologically diverse languages shows common distributional patterns.•Discontinuous repetitive patterns in the input provide cues for category assignment.•Morphological frames accurately ...predict nouns and verbs in the input to children.
How does a child map words to grammatical categories when words are not overtly marked either lexically or prosodically? Recent language acquisition theories have proposed that distributional information encoded in sequences of words or morphemes might play a central role in forming grammatical classes. To test this proposal, we analyze child-directed speech from seven typologically diverse languages to simulate maximum variation in the structures of the world’s languages. We ask whether the input to children contains cues for assigning syntactic categories in frequent frames, which are frequently occurring nonadjacent sequences of words or morphemes. In accord with aggregated results from previous studies on individual languages, we find that frequent word frames do not provide a robust distributional pattern for accurately predicting grammatical categories. However, our results show that frames are extremely accurate cues cross-linguistically at the morpheme level. We theorize that the nonadjacent dependency pattern captured by frequent frames is a universal anchor point for learners on the morphological level to detect and categorize grammatical categories. Whether frames also play a role on higher linguistic levels such as words is determined by grammatical features of the individual language.
Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions:
Northern Pame (autonym: Xi’iuy) is an Otopamean language situated in the Mexican state of San Luís Potosí. Today over 90% of the Pame population speaks ...Spanish, and two-year-old children only speak Northern Pame in two Northern Pame villages. The paper explores differences in two-year-old Pame children’s production of words in Northern Pame and Spanish in order to assess the possibility that developmental constraints and/or language shift influence the form and distribution of the children’s words in the two languages.
Design/Methodology/Approach:
The study is based on video recordings of five Northern Pame children around the age of 2;0. The adult speakers included one father and four mothers. Four hours of production data were analyzed from each of the five children.
Data and Analysis:
We analyzed the following: (1) the proportion of major lexical categories; (2) the use of the Spanish copula ser in Pame; (3) the mean segmental length of words in Pame and Spanish; and (4) the syllable structure of words in Pame and Spanish.
Findings/Conclusions:
The overall results demonstrate that the children’s Pame and Spanish words have distinct linguistic properties.
Originality:
The study is the first to report acquisition data for the Northern Pame language. Northern Pame differs from Spanish on a wide range of lexical and grammatical features. The analysis includes four lexical features. The outcomes for these four features produce a multi-dimensional measure of language differentiation.
Significance/Implications:
The study shows that Northern Pame parents are successfully passing their home language to their children despite pressure from the contact language. The children acquired the features of Pame words even though some mothers produced over 40% of their nouns in Spanish. The Spanish vocabulary does not inhibit the children’s developing Pame lexical structures.
Caretakers tend to repeat themselves when speaking to children, either to clarify their message or to redirect wandering attention. This repetition also appears to support language learning. For ...example, words that are heard more frequently tend to be produced earlier by young children. However, pure repetition only goes so far; some variation between utterances is necessary to support acquisition of a fully productive grammar. When individual words or morphemes are repeated, but embedded in different lexical and syntactic contexts, the child has more information about how these forms may be used and combined. Corpus analysis has shown that these partial repetitions frequently occur in clusters, which have been coined variation sets. More recent research has introduced algorithms that can extract these variation sets automatically from corpora with the goal of measuring their relative prevalence across ages and languages. Longitudinal analyses have revealed that rates of variation sets tend to decrease as children get older. We extend this research in several ways. First, we consider a maximally diverse sample of languages, both genealogically and geographically, to test the generalizability of developmental trends. Second, we compare multiple levels of repetition, both words and morphemes, to account for typological differences in how information is encoded. Third, we consider several additional measures of development to account for deficiencies in age as a measure of linguistic aptitude. Fourth, we examine whether the levels of repetition found in child-surrounding speech is greater or less than what would have been expected by chance. This analysis produced a new measure, redundancy, which captures how repetitive speech is on average given how repeititive it could have been. Fifth, we compare rates of repetition in child-surrounding and adult-directed speech to test whether variation sets are especially prevalent in child-surrounding speech. We find that (1) some languages show increases in repetition over development, (2) true estimates of variation sets are generally lower than or equal to random baselines, (3) these patterns are largely convergent across developmental indices, and (4) adult-directed speech is reliably less redundant, though in some cases more repetitive, than child-surrounding speech. These results are discussed with respect to features of the corpora, typological properties of the languages, and differential rates of change in repetition and redundancy over children's development.
En este artículo se explora el efecto de proximidad en la identificación de los espacios geográficos en donde se habla diferente desde la percepción de los hablantes nativos de la lengua maya de la ...península de Yucatán. Los rasgos más salientes que los hablantes identifican entre una variedad y otra se encuentran en la entonación, la velocidad de la elocución, así como en el léxico. Los datos obtenidos son de un total de 73 personas entrevistadas en la península de Yucatán, hombres y mujeres monolingües en maya y bilingües maya-español, cuyo rango de edad varió entre los 22 y los 81 años. El análisis de los datos y un estudio de caso que se realizó entre dos comunidades cercanas mostró que la proximidad se vincula más con las diferencias de habla que con las similitudes. Se identificó que la prosodia y las variantes léxicas se perciben como diferentes, sobre todo entre hablantes de lugares cercanos entre sí. Las respuestas indicaron que la proximidad no solamente está determinada por la lejanía o cercanía geográfica entre comunidades, sino también por la prominencia cultural que tienen algunos lugares, tal es el caso del estado de Yucatán, al interior del cual, además, destacan las ciudades de Valladolid y Peto.
En los censos oficiales se considera que Yucatán es el estado mexicano con el mayor grado de bilingüismo. No existe un solo municipio en Yucatán en el cual no se use el maya-yucateco. Pero al tomar ...en cuenta la política lingüística histórica y actual, la situación lingüística en Yucatán esta caracterizada por el fenómeno "diglosia con bilingüismo (Fishman, J97la: 75). La diglosia se manifiesta de tal manera que a nivel nacional existe una lengua dominante y oficial junto a otra lengua subordinada y no estandarizada. El desequilibrio de las dos lenguas en contacto no es resultado del racismo, sino más bien de los diferentes factores socioeconómicos y demográficos. Según la definición de Fishman (1967) predomina el bilingüismo individual en Yucatán. La diglosia en cambio, se da en el nivel sociocultural. La cuestión de hasta que grado se manifiesta esta situación lingüística es el ambiente rural del estado de Yucatán depende de los factores demográficos y económicos de cada comunidad. La zona agrícola maicera presenta el porcentaje mas alto de población monolingüe, seguida de las zonas: henequenera, ganadera, frutícola y por último la pesquera.
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