Dialect Pronunciation Research Articles

PENGGUNAAN BAHASA JAWA DIALEK BANYUMAS DALAM SENI BEGALAN DI CILACAP

The purpose of this study was (1) describe the layout variations sound/dialect pronunciation Banyumas in the begalan art at Cilacap, (2) describe the dialect lexical variation Banyumas in the begalan art at Cilacap, and (3) describe the grammatical variations of dialect Banyumas in the begalan art at Cilacap. This research was done in three stages, namely stages of data collection, data analysts, as well as exposure data analysis. Collection/provision carried out by methods refer to and capable, is a sequel technique refer to techniques involved free conversation and record. In this study the data from the oral form of the language used by the player dialog begalan art in the village of Jepara Kulon Binangun District of Cilacap in which there are words in the form of dialect Banyumas. Source of data derived from the use of the language spoken by the player begalan art. Information obtained in the form of dialogue sound used by players begalan art. After that, the data is classified and analyzed using the methods of unified referential. Afterwards, the data was analyzed qualitatively in terms of interpretation and inference. Results of this study are as follows. (1) Variation of the sound system / dialect pronunciation Banyumas contained in begalan in Cilacap art can be classified into two, namely vocal variety, ie the phoneme / i / is pronounced [i], the phoneme / u / pronounced [u], the phoneme / a / is pronounced [a] and the variation of the consonants, the phoneme / b / is pronounced [B], the phoneme / g / is pronounced [g], the phoneme / k / is pronounced [k], and the phoneme / w / is pronounced [w]. (2) Variation lexical dialect Banyumas in the art begalan in Cilacap variations lexical innovation, substitution, addition, and subtraction. (3) The variation of grammatical Banyumas dialect different from other dialects, including the standard dialect (Yogyakarta and Solo).Variasi Banyumas dialect grammatical form variations and variations affix reduplication.

Study on Phoniatrics Directed at Chinese English Learners from Regions of Prominent Dialects in Anhui Province

Based on Optimality theory and the long-term phonetics teaching and experimental teaching，the author probes into the study on optimality theory in English phonetics acquisition of students from Anhui Province with the phonetic investigation. Try to explore and analyze the phonetic phenomenon of negative transfer from Anhui dialects. Then some advices are given to the practical phonetic teaching. summarize students' acquisition of English dialect speech difficulties and pronunciation error characteristics, and try to find a viable Phonetic teaching approach as to promote education.

A preliminary report on the English phonology of typically developing English–Mandarin bilingual preschool Singaporean children

There are no published data on typical phonological development for Singaporean children. There is therefore the risk that children's speech in Singapore may be misdiagnosed or that clinicians may set goals erroneously. This paper reports a preliminary study on the English phonology of typically developing 4;0-4;5-year-old Chinese Singaporean children who speak English and Mandarin. Seventy children were recruited throughout Singapore, and speech samples were collected in English using the Phonology Assessment of the Diagnostic Evaluation of Articulation and Phonology (DEAP). The participants were divided equally into two groups: English-dominant and Mandarin-dominant. Their speech samples were compared with British English targets (BT) and Singapore English targets (ST) in terms of phonological accuracy and types of phonological processes used. The results showed that Singaporean children's phonological accuracy scores increased significantly when scored against ST instead of BT. When scored against ST, English-dominant children were found to perform similarly to their DEAP counterparts. However, Mandarin-dominant children had significantly less accurate consonant production in English and exhibited more interference effects from Mandarin phonology than English-dominant children. In this preliminary study, the results highlight the importance of speech and language therapists using local dialect pronunciations to be the target of speech assessments so as to provide appropriate assessment and intervention. It is also essential to account for the language background and language dominance of the children. More local normative data are needed for the typical acquisition of Singapore English in children, especially for children whose dominant language is not English.

Measuring Foreign Accent Strength in English

With an eye toward measuring the strength of foreign accents in American English, we evaluate the suitability of a modified version of the Levenshtein distance for comparing (the phonetic transcriptions of) accented pronunciations. Although this measure has been used successfully inter alia to study the differences among dialect pronunciations, it has not been applied to studying foreign accents. Here, we use it to compare the pronunciation of non-native English speakers to native American English speech. Our results indicate that the Levenshtein distance is a valid native-likeness measurement, as it correlates strongly (r = -0.81) with the average “native-like” judgments given by more than 1000 native American English raters.

A Reading of the Dialect Chapter of Zhāng Wèi’s Wènqíjí

The Wènqíjí of the late sixteenth century Míng scholar Zhāng Wèi 張位 contains a short chapter entitled “Local Pronunciations of Various Areas”. The work comprises a number of direct sound glosses on Chinese characters, with the glossing words used to indicate dialectal pronunciations of the glossed words. In the present article, we assume that Zhāng's glossing characters were to be read in the standard pronunciation of that period, i.e., in the so-called Nányīn pronunciation of the Guānhuà koine. Using the nearly contemporary romanized sound glosses of Nicholas Trigault, which are also thought to represent this type of Guānhuà pronunciation, we then attempt to determine how Zhāng Wèi believed the dialect readings of the glossed characters were pronounced.

The Novgorod Antiphonal Psalters: Their Orthographical Peculiarities and Textological Significance

The thirteenth-century Novgorod antiphonal psalters were written for liturgical use by two choirs or readers in alternation; consequently each of them contains an incomplete version of the psalms, and they complement each other only in part. Nevertheless, they are of interest both in relation to the development of Church Slavonic norms of orthography and orthoepy as well as from a textological standpoint. In one of them, the older of the two, the infiltration of dialect pronunciation into the Novgorod variety of Church Slavonic can be detected (a list of the various different examples of cokan′e in this manuscript is provided in the appendix). On the basis of an analysis of the variant readings found in both manuscripts or attested in either of the two sources, it is demonstrated that they belong to Redaction II of the Church Slavonic translation of the psalms, and that they are important witnesses to the dissemination of this redaction among the East Slavs up to the end of the thirteenth century.

Can Choosing the Form of a Name Be an Act of Identity?

This paper discusses if place names can be used to construct and express identity, with a focus on the Norwegian names of farms and parishes. Since the Norwegian Place Name Act came into existence in 1991, the many appeals in regard to official spellings as decided by the authorities give clear indication that Norwegians have different opinions of how the names of farms and parishes should be spelled compared to names referring to natural features. Many people prefer the spelling of names of natural features to be as close as possible to the dialectal pronunciation, whereas they prefer older, often ornamental spellings or spellings which differ from the pronunciation when it comes to the names of farms and parishes. This paper looks at the reasons for these attitudes towards the spelling of place names, and is highlighted by some theory pertaining to language and identity.

A Generative Data Augmentation Model for Enhancing Chinese Dialect Pronunciation Prediction

Most spoken Chinese dialects lack comprehensive digital pronunciation databases, which are crucial for speech processing tasks. Given complete pronunciation databases for related dialects, one can use supervised learning techniques to predict a Chinese character's pronunciation in a target dialect based on the character's features and its pronunciation in other related dialects. Unfortunately, Chinese dialect pronunciation databases are far from complete. We propose a novel generative model that makes use of both existing dialect pronunciation data plus medieval rime books to discover patterns that exist in multiple dialects. The proposed model can augment missing dialectal pronunciations based on existing dialect pronunciation tables (even if incomplete) and the pronunciation data in rime books. The augmented pronunciation database can then be used in supervised learning settings. We evaluate the prediction accuracy in terms of phonological features, such as tone, initial phoneme, final phoneme, etc. For each character, features are evaluated on the whole, overall pronunciation feature accuracy (OPFA). Our first experimental results show that adding features from dialectal pronunciation data to our baseline rime-book model dramatically improves OPFA using the support vector machine (SVM) model. In the second experiment, we compare the performance of the SVM model using phonological features from closely related dialects with that of the model using phonological features from non-closely related dialects. The experimental results show that using features from closely related dialects results in higher accuracy. In the third experiment, we show that using our proposed data augmentation model to fill in missing data can increase the SVM model's OPFA by up to 7.6%.

評《馮夢龍民歌集三種注解》的注解

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English.
 本文對《馮夢龍民歌集三種注釋》一書中的注釋訛誤匡正，大致從：一、名物誤判；二、雖注未確；三、主觀臆測；四、鄉音壅閼；五、校勘失察等方面進行，並提出注釋的一些基本要求，力避主觀，宣導治學嚴謹。同時指出一本書中舛錯百出，反映了我們出版界某種浮躁心態，尤其是出在中華書局，值得我們深思。This essay corrects some errors in a recent publication entitled Three Sets of Commentaries on an Anthology of Folksongs Compiled by Feng Menglong. The mistakes in this book fall into five categories: 1) the wrong name and form of an object; 2) inaccurate annotation; 3) subjective, conjectural judgment; 4) obstruction caused by dialect pronunciation, and 5) careless collation. In these corrections, the author establishes basic criteria for commentarial work in order to avoid subjectivity, thereby promoting a serious attitude toward scholarship. By pointing out the numerous mistakes in a book published by Zhonghua shuju, the author wishes to alert readers and ask them to ponder the impetus attitude currently prevalent in the academic publishing industry.

Weigh your words--memory-based lemmatization for Middle Dutch

This article deals with the lemmatization of Middle Dutch literature. This text collection—like any other medieval corpus—is characterized by an enormous spelling variation, which makes it difficult to perform a computational analysis of this kind of data. Lemmatization is therefore an essential preprocessing step in many applications, since it allows the abstraction from superficial textual variation, for instance in spelling. The data we will work with is the Corpus-Gysseling, containing all surviving Middle Dutch literary manuscripts dated before 1300 AD. In this article we shall present a language-independent system that can ‘learn’ intra-lemma spelling variation. We describe a series of experiments with this system, using Memory-Based Machine Learning and propose two solutions for the lemmatization of our data: the first procedure attempts to generate new spelling variants, the second one seeks to implement a novel string distance metric to better detect spelling variants. The latter system attempts to rerank candidates suggested by a classic Levenshtein distance, leading to a substantial gain in lemmatization accuracy. This research result is encouraging and means a substantial step forward in the computational study of Middle Dutch literature. Our techniques might be of interest to other research domains as well because of their language-independent nature. 1 Spelling Variation in Middle Dutch Middle Dutch is a typical example of a historical language displaying a considerable amount of spelling variation (Van der Voort van der Kleij, 2005; Ernst-Gerlach and Fuhr, 2006; Kestemont and Van Dalen-Oskam, 2009; Souvay and Pierrel, 2009). Especially before the advent of the printing press, there existed no standard language variety of Dutch, let alone a standard spelling. As such, medieval Dutch spelling was generally highly phonological and ‘personal’ in nature, since it would represent each writer’s own dialectal pronunciation and local spelling habits. That is why even highly frequent words could be spelled in very different ways, reflecting the abundant variety of dialects and local substandards then found in the Low Countries (Fig. 1). This spelling variation makes it difficult to process medieval texts in any computational application. For instance for authorship attribution, it Correspondence: Mike Kestemont, Universiteit Antwerpen, Stadscampus, Prinsstraat 13, Room D.118, 2000 Antwerpen, Belgium. E-mail: mike.kestemont@ua.ac.be Literary and Linguistic Computing, Vol. 25, No. 3, 2010. ! The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of ALLC and ACH. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org 287 doi:10.1093/llc/fqq011 Advance Access published on 4 August 2010 at U nivrsiteit Antw epen Bibotheek on Agust 0, 2010 llc.oxfjournals.org D ow naded rom

Lexical Plasticity in Early Bilinguals Does Not Alter Phoneme Categories: II. Experimental Evidence

When listening to modified speech, either naturally or artificially altered, the human perceptual system rapidly adapts to it. There is some debate about the nature of the mechanisms underlying this adaptation. Although some authors propose that listeners modify their prelexical representations, others assume changes at the lexical level. Recently, Larsson, Vera, Sebastian-Galles, and Deco [Lexical plasticity in early bilinguals does not alter phoneme categories: I. Neurodynamical modelling. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 20, 76-94, 2008] proposed a biologically plausible computational model to account for some existing data, one which successfully modeled how long-term exposure to a dialect triggers the creation of new lexical entries. One specific prediction of the model was that prelexical (phoneme) representations should not be affected by dialectal exposure (as long as the listener is exposed to both standard and dialectal pronunciations). Here we present a series of experiments testing the predictions of the model. Native listeners of Catalan, with extended exposure to Spanish-accented Catalan, were tested on different auditory lexical decision tasks and phoneme discrimination tasks. Behavioral and electrophysiological recordings were obtained. The results supported the predictions of our model. On the one hand, both error rates and N400 measurements indicated the existence of alternative lexical entries for dialectal varieties. On the other hand, no evidence of alterations at the phoneme level, either in the behavioral discrimination task or in the electrophysiological measurement (MMN), could be detected. The results of the present study are compared with those obtained in short-term laboratory exposures in an attempt to provide an integrative account.

A “Lasting Boon to All”: A Note on the Postal Romanization of Place Names, 1896–1949

A “Lasting Boon to All”: A Note on the Postal Romanization of Place Names, 1896–1949 Lane J. Harris (bio) Prior to the general acceptance of Hanyu pinyin (汉语拼音 ) as the governing transliteration system for Chinese in the mid-1980s, the Wade-Giles system predominated for fifty years except in the spelling of place names.1 Shortly after the establishment of the modern Imperial Post Office (大清郵政總局 Da Qing youzheng zongju) in 1896 it became the toponymic authority for the spelling of place names through its postal style romanization system (郵政式拼音 youzheng shi pinyin), which was carried on in the Republican era (1912–1949) by the Directorate General of Posts (郵政總局 Youzheng zongju). In the early twentieth century, then, Western scholars, cartographers, journalists, and foreign governments commonly employed Wade-Giles for general terms, but maintained Chinese postal spellings for place names. Upon opening its doors to the general public in 1897 the Imperial Post Office encountered mail matter addressed to and from foreigners living in China using a wide variety of transliteration systems. The dissimilarity in spellings resulted from the existence of numerous romanization systems representing local dialect pronunciations, transcriptions of different regional varieties of Mandarin (官話 guanhua), and Chinese orthoepy as interpreted through different European languages. The Imperial Post Office attempted to solve these transliteration problems by creating postal style romanization. Postal romanization eased the burden on postal clerks and ensured the prompt and correct delivery of mail matter by requiring the foreign public, overseas Chinese, and international postal patrons to adopt standardized postal spellings, thereby protecting the reputation of the Post Office. Creating the postal romanization system and establishing itself as the official toponymic authority, however, did not eliminate all of the thorny problems inherent in formulating an entire romanization system. The Post Office still had to decide among local pronunciations, a specific regional pronunciation of spoken Mandarin, and between orthographically English or [End Page 96] other European-language representations of those sounds. Prior to 1905 the orthographically English system of Sir Thomas Francis Wade (威妥瑪 1818–1895) based on a Beijing pronunciation of Mandarin and containing some local dialect spellings predominated. Between 1905 and early 1920, the Post Office adopted Herbert A. Giles’ (翟理斯 1845–1935) “Nanking syllabary” but maintained the older Wade spellings and those stemming from local dialects.2 Continued inconsistencies in transcriptions forced the Directorate General to switch back to Wade’s system in 1920. Less than two years later, however, the rapid multiplication of variant transliterations compelled the Directorate to reverse its decision. Between December 1921 and 1949 the Directorate returned to Nanjing Mandarin pronunciations as “the best” for the Post Office while maintaining some local dialect spellings. At least one latter-day scholar has assailed the Post Office for introducing so-called irregularities into postal romanization because of its use of a combination of local dialects, Nanjing and Beijing pronunciations of Mandarin, and the retention of some pre-existing romanizations and ancient usages.3 What they have criticized is actually the very strength of postal romanization. That is, postal romanization accommodated local dialects and regional pronunciations by recognizing local identity and language as vital to a true representation of the varieties of Chinese orthoepy as evinced by the Post Office’s repeated desire to transcribe according to “local pronunciation” or “provincial sound-equivalents.”4 Both Hanyu pinyin and amalgamated Wade-Giles, by contrast, employ a northern Mandarin that ignores the realities of pronunciation differences and thus local identity and language across China. Although imperfect and often perplexing, postal romanization was the only early twentieth-century national transliteration system that even attempted to integrate both northern and southern Mandarin pronunciations, local dialects, and popularly established usages. [End Page 97] Early Years Using the Wade System, 1899–1905 When the modern Imperial Post Office was established under the auspices of the foreign-controlled Imperial Maritime Customs Service (海關總稅務司署 Haiguan zong shuiwu sishu) in 1896, there was no generally accepted transliteration system for Mandarin pronunciation. Instead, missionaries, sinologists, foreign traders, and foreign governments created and used a heterogeneous mix of transliteration systems, each with its own strengths and weaknesses, that vied for public acceptance. This bewildering array of choices led one long-term foreign resident of central China in the nineteenth century to...

Recognising Groups among Dialects

In this paper we apply various clustering algorithms to the dialect pronunciation data. At the same time we propose several evaluation techniques that should be used in order to deal with the instability of the clustering techniques. The results have shown that three hierarchical clustering algorithms are not suitable for the data we are working with. The rest of the tested algorithms have successfully detected two-way split of the data into the Eastern and Western dialects. At the aggregate level that we used in this research, no further division of sites can be asserted with high confidence.

Do Surname Differences Mirror Dialect Variation

Our focus in this paper is the analysis of surnames, which have been proven to be reliable genetic markers because in patrilineal systems they are transmitted along generations virtually unchanged, similarly to a genetic locus on the Y chromosome. We compare the distribution of surnames to the distribution of dialect pronunciations, which are clearly culturally transmitted. Because surnames, at the time of their introduction, were words subject to the same linguistic processes that otherwise result in dialect differences, one might expect their geographic distribution to be correlated with dialect pronunciation differences. In this paper we concentrate on the Netherlands, an area of only 40,000 km2, where two official languages are spoken, Dutch and Frisian. We analyze 19,910 different surnames, sampled in 226 locations, and 125 different words, whose pronunciation was recorded in 252 sites. We find that, once the collinear effects of geography on both surname and cultural transmission are taken into account, there is no statistically significant association between the two, suggesting that surnames cannot be taken as a proxy for dialect variation, even though they can be safely used as a proxy for Y-chromosome genetic variation. We find the results historically and geographically insightful, hopefully leading to a deeper understanding of the role that local migrations and cultural diffusion play in surname and dialect diversity.

Do Surname Differences Mirror Dialect Variation?

Our focus in this paper is the analysis of surnames, which have been proven to be reliable genetic markers because in patrilineal systems they are transmitted along generations virtually unchanged, similarly to a genetic locus on the Y chromosome. We compare the distribution of surnames to the distribution of dialect pronunciations, which are clearly culturally transmitted. Because surnames, at the time of their introduction, were words subject to the same linguistic processes that otherwise result in dialect differences, one might expect their geographic distribution to be correlated with dialect pronunciation differences. In this paper we concentrate on the Netherlands, an area of only 40,000 km2, where two official languages are spoken, Dutch and Frisian.We analyze 19,910 different surnames, sampled in 226 locations, and 125 different words, whose pronunciation was recorded in 252 sites. We find that, once the collinear effects of geography on both surname and cultural transmission are taken into account, there is no statistically significant association between the two, suggesting that surnames cannot be taken as a proxy for dialect variation, even though they can be safely used as a proxy for Y-chromosome genetic variation. We find the results historically and geographically insightful, hopefully leading to a deeper understanding of the role that local migrations and cultural diffusion play in surname and dialect diversity.

Defining Abstract Nouns from Citations: From Shame to Ruin, from Affinity to Sorrow

Defining Abstract Nouns from Citations: From Shame to Ruin, from Affinity to Sorrow D: Joseph P. Pickett Houghton Mifflin Company kefining from citations is never an easy task, but in my expedience it can be at its most difficult when the word in question is an abstract noun. The difficulty arises largely from the vagueness of meaning that is inherent in most abstractions, even those diat would seem less abstract or are more direcdy a part of ordinary experience (such as feelings) than otiiers (such as conditions or qualities). Where citations for abstract adjectives can usually be sorted in rough semantic categories on the basis ofthe kinds ofnouns tiiey modify, abstract nouns normally do not have such ready linguistic tip-offs for the definer, and they have to be sorted from the start by assessing the larger context of the quotation. As educated adults, definers usually have some preconceived notion of what a word means, and even preconceived notions about its sense divisions. With abstract nouns, these notions are usually based on conceptual arrangements, linguistic environments, and lexical oppositions drawn from a lifetime of language use and observation. For example , most adults who think of an abstraction like shame see it in contrast to words like honor on the one hand, and guilt on die other. Shame is public disgrace, as opposed to the public approval of honor, and shame is also a bad feeling associated with being caught and disgraced by a community for doing something wrong, rather than private self-reproach or guilt for not living up to a standard or expectation ofbehavior whether anyone else finds out about it or not. Dictionaries:Journal ofthe Dictionary Society ofNorth America 27 (2006) , 143-148 144Joseph Pickett But the citations for a word like this can easily defy such neat conceptual schemes and leave the definer, especially when inexperienced, at a loss for how to proceed. A well known problem in defining is that many citations do not provide sufficient information for the definer to make a comfortable decision about the semantic subfield that a given quotation belongs in. This is true for concrete nouns as well as abstract ones, but citations for abstractions can be especially impoverished in the information they provide about meaning. A definer can construct a plausible semantic scheme for aword, but find that most of the citations at hand are unusable for it because they could just as easily be interpreted as belonging under any of several possible definitions. The abundance of unusable or rejected citations then calls into question the validity of the editor's inchoate semantic distinctions, and the definer can be left wondering if there are any legitimate distinctions worth making in the first place, or if some other semantic scheme should be attempted from scratch. This challenge is not so great for commercial lexicographers as it is for people working on historical dictionaries, who are charged with presenting evidence for the development of a word's meanings over a period of time. To do so responsibly, the editor must include in an entry any number of semantically dubious quotations if only because their date of composition or recording is required or desirable as part of the project's effort to show periodic attestation. Thus, when texts for a given period of time are sparse (as in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries in the Middle English period) , and the editor is lucky enough to have a citation from one of them, the editor has no choice but to include it and somehow account for it in the entry, even if he or she cannot be exactly certain of the word's meaning. Other criteria for requiring a given quotation's inclusion in an entry are evidence of dialectal usage (as when a text is known to be written in a particular dialect and has spellings assumed to be indicative of dialectal pronunciation) and evidence of a syntactic construction or collocation that the editor feels should be made available to readers. Working with citations like this can conjure a linguistic landscape that is a mushy, foggy bottomland without discernible semantic landmarks . The editor does well simply to plant semantic signposts at those...

Perceived accents and comprehensibility of native and nonnative English

This study investigates the relation between perceived accentedness and comprehensibility of utterances spoken by native and nonnative English speakers. Native and nonnative English listeners heard six types of stimuli: single words, 2–10-word utterances from native and nonnative English speakers. Listeners classified the stimuli as either native or nonnative English speech and transcribed some utterances. Overall, results from the classification and transcription tasks indicate that perceived native-ness or nonnative-ness does not directly correspond to good or poor comprehensibility, as measured by transcription scores. Some nonnative utterances were classified as native speech by both native and nonnative listeners, although the transcription accuracy was not necessarily high. In other cases, native speech was correctly identified as native; however, dialectal pronunciation variation seemed to contribute to low transcription accuracy in some cases. On the other hand, although the transcriptions were accurate, native speech was sometimes classified as nonnative. In other cases, nonnative utterances were correctly identified as nonnative, and the speech was transcribed accurately. These results suggest that familiarity with certain dialects or accents influences listeners’ perception and comprehension for both native and nonnative speech, and that perceived nonnative-ness may not be the main cause for nonnative speech to be less comprehensible.

Sentence analysis, valency, and the concept of adject Ed. by Niels Davidsen- Nielsen (review)

BOOK NOTICES 175 abic' (95-1 14) is an engaging study based on a questionnaire distributed to 117 Tunisian university students concerning their own dialectal pronunciations of 'you' and various verbal forms, including imperatives. One result, reminiscent of work in the 1960s by Joseph H. Greenberg, was that for almost everyone, the use of inti 'you' for both genders implied the generalized use of no gender distinction in the verbal forms investigated (103). Laïla Lalami's 'Clitic left dislocation in Moroccan Arabic' (1 15-29) explains why 'a phrase, which should normally appear in a given clause, ends up appearing in its leftmost position' (1 16). The conclusion is that this process is base generated. Kimary N. Shahin's 'Accessing pharyngeal place in Palestinian Arabic' (131-49) seems out of place in a section entitled 'grammatical perspectives'. It deals with the well-known 'emphasis spread' and pharyngealization harmony in rural Palestinian Arabic (Abu Shusha dialect). Elabbas Benmamoun's 'The derivation of the imperative in Arabic' concludes that the imperative is derived from the imperfect indicative (151-64). This analysis, however, does not work for hollow verbs; rather, the imperfect jussive must serve as the base (which is the traditional analysis). Naomi Bolotin's 'Resetting parameters in acquiring Arabic' (167-78) offers evidence indicating that 'L2 learners . . . acquire nativelike intuitions about the second language and that parameter resetting in L2 acquisition is possible' (177). It is unclear how the 27 students at Middlebury College used in the study could have acquired 'nativelike intuition' of relative-clause formation in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), which is not spoken natively by any Arab. An Arabic speaker's intuition of MSA should be understood in terms of the native colloquial dialect. LaYMA Abdulkarim's 'Ellipsis as a mirror ofcase and agreement principles in language acquisition' compares children acquiring Najdi Arabic and English (179-91). One conclusion concerning a universal default case is that in Arabic, anaa T is the default whereas in English, the pronoun me is (186). Martine Vanhove's 'The negation maasii in a Yaafi'i dialect (Yemen)' (195-206) covers maasii 'nothing' and (despite the title) other negative particles in the mountains around Yaafi', 120 miles northeast of Aden. The existence of lam (197) seems incredible since, in all probability, it cannot be a borrowing from MSA (because the informant is illiterate and has never left her native Tenhara). Marie-Claude Simeone-Senelle's 'Negation in some Arabic dialects of the Tihaamah of the Yemen' (207-21) covers that area's entire range of negative markers and constructions. Of great interest are the negative daa?, a loanword from Sabean, and the particle lees — lays = Classical Arabic laysa 'not to be' (208) Elizabeth M. Bergman's 'Ma-tiYrafxeer-i: Verbal negation in Egyptian and Moroccan Arabic proverbs ' (223-46) investigates proverbs in Moroccan and ECA dialects. In the latter's proverbs, one can negate a verb with ma rather than the normal ma+ —s. The proverbial usage is Classical and has been previously investigated in the literature under 'emphatic negation' (230-31). The strength of this tome is the section on negation , since new information based on fieldwork is presented. [Alan S. Kaye, California State University , Fullerton.] Sentence analysis, valency, and the concept of adject. Ed. by Niels DavidsenNielsen (Copenhagen studies in language 19.) Frederiksberg, Denmark: Samfundslitteratur, 1996. Pp. 157. Denmark is one ofthe places in continental Europe where the study of valency—which in other parts of the world now usually goes under the name of 'argument structure' —continues to occupy a central position in both theoretical and descriptive linguistics , and quite a few Danish linguists have developed a valency theory of their own. This book centers around one of these, viz. the proposal developed since 1 982 by Michael Herslund and Finn S0rensen ofthe Copenhagen Business School to limit the number of categories used in addition to the verb to three: subject, object, and 'adject', the last covering the traditional categories of indirect object, subject complement , object complement, and (obligatory) adverbial , which, Herslund and S0rensen argue, have a complementary distribution and a common, 'locative ', semantics. In addition to an editor's preface and a brief (five pages) introduction by Herslund...

A Mid-18th-Century Use of [ə], [ɔ], and [ʞ] as Phonetic Symbols

According to Sweet, the German linguist Johann Andreas Schmeller was the first to use [ə] as a phonetic symbol (Sweet 1877: 175). (Although Sweet gives no bibliographical reference, the work he must have had in mind was Schmeller's Die Mundarten Bayerns of 1821; cf. also Ellis 1874: 1357.) Schmeller uses [ə] for the ‘dumpfe Vocallaut’ in words like Semmel, Nennen, Wetter, and for the second element of various diphthongs, e.g. in dialectal pronunciations of Not(h), Bruder, etc. (Schmeller 1821: 25, 72, 141, and passim). According to Abercrombie (1946), an earlier use of [ə] than Schmeller's is to be found in William Thornton's Cadmus of 1793, for the vowel in run, come, etc. However, neither the original nor the reprint of Cadmus uses a [ə], but the symbol [ℶ].

Automatic phonetic transfer in bidialectal reading

ABSTRACTThis study investigated phonetic activation in reading a nonalphabetic script – Chinese. Since the Chinese ideographic script can be read with more than one dialectal pronunciation, a reader who has learned to read in two dialects will have two pronunciations for the same word stored in his memory. Thus, interference effects will occur. Sixteen subjects who read in Cantonese and Mandarin and 16 subjects who read in Mandarin but not in Cantonese were tested in a similarity judgment task based on pairs of Chinese words that were pronounced the same or differently in one or both of the dialects. That automatic phonetic activation would occur even for an ideographic script such as Chinese was supported by the results.