Native Lexicon Research Articles

Manner change in early French unharmonic obstruent-sonorant clusters

This diachronic constraint-based analysis details shifting reflexes in Proto-French (PF) and early Old French (OF) (approximately 2nd-12th centuries) towards the repair of underlying obstruent-nasal clusters, especially where the obstruent is coronal, as well as phonotactically dispreferred /tl, dl/. In earlier PF, deletion and gemination prevail, with gemination broadening scope from flat-sonority clusters to some obstruent-sonorant clusters, including /dl/ and variably obstruent-nasal. Late PF /dn/ assibilates to [zn], avoiding a suboptimal syllable-contact sonority contour, with the end result of both processes finalizing a broader coda obstruent ban before OF. Early OF ecclesiastic loanwords from Latin re-introduce underlying medial obstruent-nasal and /tl, dl/ clusters, with the cluster-final sonorant undergoing the novel repair of rhotacization (/n/ or /l/ " [r]), representing an extension of manner change seen in earlier spirantization and assibilation in the native lexicon. The unified optimality-theoretic analysis identifies and argues for a multi-stage shift in the prioritization of constraints governing the intersecting deletion, gemination, spirantization, assibilation, and rhotacization processes, and their interaction with syllabification, sonority, and phonotactics.

Word-initial rhotic avoidance: a typological survey

This paper addresses the issue of word-initial rhotic avoidance (WIRA) from a typological point of view. Its first aim is to document WIRA cross-linguistically, based on the examination of a sample of 200 languages designed by the WALS (Dryer and Haspelmath 2013). This set of 200 languages has been surveyed in order to reveal rhotic (and more generally liquid) phonotactic patterns in relation to word-initial avoidance. On the basis of this survey, the paper identifies two types of WIRA: i) phonological, or emic-WIRA; and ii) phonetic, or etic-WIRA. The first and most notable result of this research is that 49% of all languages containing at least one phonemic rhotic exhibit some degree of emic-WIRA, i.e, they possess no word or very few words beginning phonologically with at least one of their rhotics in their native lexicon. The paper also examines how word-initial rhotics are adapted from a non-WIRA language into a WIRA language. The loanword adaptation data suggest that WIRA is a recessive feature because no language in the sample has been observed to develop WIRA due to language contact (although one exception, Gascon, has been identified outside of the 200-language sample). Finally, the paper proposes two new universals in relation to WIRA: 1) if a language forbids /l/ word-initially, it also forbids /r/; 2) a rhotic segment never occurs as the positional allophone of a non-liquid segment word-initially.

Народні географічні терміни в українських східнослобожанських говірках Луганщини (загальна структурно-семантична характеристика)

Geographical native lexicon is one of the fragments of linguistic worldview, which reflects both common and specific ideas in the folk’s perception of the environment. Features of the nationally biased units each person perceives and classifies individually, nevertheless there is a lot of common in their worldview. Thematic justification connected with geographical names led to the rich terminology in Slavic languages. For this reason, linguists are interested in above mention lexical units. Geographically native lexicon of the Ukrainian East-Slobozhansk dialects in Lugansk region has never been examined before. The work presents geographical native lexicon as target of linguistic research, underlines the theoretical significance of this lexicon considering its functions. There were studied the researches of other linguists in the field of name analysis in Slavic languages. Introductory paragraph includes the definition of purposes and tasks of scientific paper, methodological and methodical principals of the research. Moreover, it describes academic novelty, theoretical and practical significance of the research and provides the classification of resources that were used in the process of study. The target and tasks defined the main methods of the research: descriptive and lingvo-geographical. Lingvo-geographical method included areal analysis and mapping based on identified dialect differences. The work contains the feature-by-feature comparison of linguistic units. There was determined the structure of thematic lexical groups that presents the geographical terms for relief denomination, geographical objects of relief, plants, water resources, landscape and its parts. The groups comprise the lexcio-semantic units that are not totally compatible in the quantity in case of demonstration the idiographic distinctiveness of the researched thematic group. In the result of semantic, etymologic and word-building analysis there were taken common dialects and specific geographical terms with their own meanings which have peculiar functions in Lugansk region dialect in comparison with Slavic languages, standard Ukrainian language and its dialects. Specific notions were mapped out to feature territorial peculiarities of thematic lexical groups in the Ukrainian East Slobozhansk dialects in Lugansk region. Collected dialect material allows study the zone of verbal contact, features of lexical units’ semantic development in this thematic group. It contributes to the enrichment of theoretical decryptions of semantic in dialect word and specific names in general linguistics.

The Role of Language and the Significance of Primordialism in Nationalistic Rhetoric

Nihonjinron, the particularistic discourse on Japanese national identity, successfully dominates the Japanese panorama even now, thanks to the influence of academic and popular literature, mass media, Japan’s powerful cultural industry, politics, and a widespread, genuine interest in “Japaneseness” among the Japanese themselves. The works of professor Watanabe Shōichi represent an outstanding example of Nihonjinron literature and of its temporal continuity. From the second half of the 1970s until well into the 2000s, Watanabe has been surprisingly prolific in the nihonjinron field, enthusiastically propagating the establishment’s ideology. In this respect, his essays provide a significant insight into three main aspects of the Nihonjinron: the role of language as the highest expression of national identity; the existence of a widespread set of peculiar Japanese expressions conveying its ideological framework; its deep-rooted primordialist core. In the construction of a lexical and conceptual dichotomy between the stratum of the supposed “native lexicon” and that of “foreign loans” which compose the Japanese language and in the emphasis on the uniqueness of the Japanese language as a vehicle of Japanese primeval spirit, Watanabe shows the primordialist system of beliefs surrounding the concept of the “Japanese nation” (naturalness, organicity, continuity, timelessness, mythical-ness, sameness, perennial-ness) which firmly underlines the entire Japanese identity discourse.

Partial devoicing of voiced geminate stops in Tokyo Japanese.

Tokyo Japanese has a constraint against voiced geminate stops in its native lexicon. The present study investigates whether recently introduced word-medial voiced geminate stops [C1V1C(C)2V2] are differentiated from voiceless geminates and voiced singletons in terms of duration, voicing during closure, and spectral moments of stop release bursts. The findings suggest that the voiceless and voiced singleton stops were clearly differentiated by C2 duration. In contrast, C2 duration of the voiceless and voiced geminate stops was not significantly different. The devoicing of the word-medial stops was not only observed in voiced geminates, but voiced singletons also showed devoicing. The duration of the preceding vowel (V1) distinguished the voicing contrast in both singleton and geminate stops. The first four spectral moments of C2 stop release bursts did not distinguish the length and voicing contrasts in stops. These results indicate that, although word-medial voiced geminate stops are fully or partially devoiced, the Tokyo Japanese speakers lengthen the preceding vowels (V1) to maintain a voicing contrast. Production patterns of the voiced geminates are considered in relation to marginal or intermediate phonological contrast.

Contact effects on the technical lexis of Middle English: a semantic hierarchic approach

In the context of multilingualism in later medieval Britain, the influx of French terminology into the emerging technical vocabulary of Middle English is likely to have produced synchronous synonyms. For functional reasons, some native terms are expected to be dropped from the language, others to undergo differentiation through semantic shift. A significant proportion of the French borrowings are often seen as having been new technical terms, but earlier historical research on the nature of technical vocabulary in English has not clearly characterized this lexical domain; ways are therefore explored here of identifying technical terminology in this period. Definitions contained in historical dictionaries, principally theMiddle English Dictionary, provide the main diagnostic, specificity of meaning. As a case study, borrowings in a technical register are examined using the terms contained in the subdomain ‘Instruments’ within the Middle English vocabulary for Building (extracted from theBilingual Thesaurus of Everyday Life in Medieval Englandproject) supplemented with lexis from theHistorical Thesaurus. Utilizing the components of meaning in theMiddle English Dictionaryand theOxford English Dictionarydefinitions, the lexical items are classified into semantic hierarchies as was done for theHistorical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. In addition to dates of first usage, etymological information about the lexical items is included in the semantic hierarchies, allowing analysis of patterns of replacement by borrowed terms at different levels of the lexicon. It is found that the impact of French on the native lexicon in this dataset is most evident at the superordinate and basic levels of the lexicon, where we find almost equal numbers of native and borrowed terms, while at the hyponymic level native terms are in the vast majority. The study provides an insight into the vocabulary of speakers of the Middle English period with a high level of experience and expertise in technical fields and the findings suggest a resistance to borrowed vocabulary not at the lowest section of the social stratum, but rather by the class of skilled workers.

Sociolinguistic Variation in the Nativisation of BSL Fingerspelling

Abstract British Sign Language (BSL) is a visual-gestural language distinct from spoken languages used in the United Kingdom but in contact with them. One product of this contact is the use of fingerspelling to represent English words via their orthography. Fingerspelled loans can become “nativised”, adapting manual production to conform more closely to the native lexicon’s inventory of phonemic constraints. Much of the previous literature on fingerspelling has focused on one-handed systems but, unlike the majority of sign languages, BSL uses a two-handed manual alphabet. What is the nature of nativisation in BSL, and does it exhibit sociolinguistic variation? We apply a cross-linguistic model of nativisation to BSL Corpus conversation and narrative data (http://bslcorpusproject.org) obtained from 150 signers in 6 UK regions. Mixed effects modelling is employed to determine the influence of social factors. Results show that the participants’ home region is the most significant factor, with London and Birmingham signers significantly favouring use of fully nativised fingerspelled forms. Non-nativised sequences are significantly favoured in signers of increasing age in Glasgow and Belfast. Gender and parental language background are not found to be significant factors in nativisation. The findings also suggest a form of reduction specific to London and Birmingham.

Effects of language experience and stimulus context on the neural organization and categorical perception of speech

Categorical perception (CP) represents a fundamental process in converting continuous speech acoustics into invariant percepts. Using scalp-recorded event-related brain potentials (ERPs), we investigated how tone-language experience and stimulus context influence the CP for lexical tones—pitch patterns used by a majority of the world's languages to signal word meaning. Stimuli were vowel pairs overlaid with a high-level tone (T1) followed by a pitch continuum spanning between dipping (T3) and rising (T2) contours of the Mandarin tonal space. To vary context, T1 either preceded or followed the critical T2/T3 continuum. Behaviorally, native Chinese showed stronger CP as evident by their steeper, more dichotomous psychometric functions and faster identification of linguistic pitch patterns than native English-speaking controls. Stimulus context produced shifts in both groups' categorical boundary but was more exaggerated in native listeners. Analysis of source activity extracted from primary auditory cortex revealed overall stronger neural encoding of tone in Chinese compared to English, indicating experience-dependent plasticity in cortical pitch processing. More critically, “neurometric” functions derived from multidimensional scaling and clustering of source ERPs established: (i) early auditory cortical activity could accurately predict listeners' psychometric speech identification and contextual shifts in the perceptual boundary; (ii) neurometric profiles were organized more categorically in native speakers. Our data show that tone-language experience refines early auditory cortical brain representations so as to supply more faithful templates to neural mechanisms subserving lexical pitch categorization. We infer that contextual influence on the CP for tones is determined by language experience and the frequency of pitch patterns as they occur in listeners' native lexicon.

Intervocalic lenition and word-boundary effects

The lenition of intervocalic consonants is typically phonologized in sound change only within word domains. At first blush, this morphological restriction might seem to contradict the Neogrammarian hypothesis of exclusively phonetic conditioning in sound change. In this paper I examine the weakening of intervocalic voiced stops/affricates in Istanbul Judeo-Spanish. Comparison with Old Spanish shows that in the native lexicon intervocalic lenition has affected only word-internal consonants. Even consonants following a prefix boundary remain unaffected. I argue that, at the time of the expulsion of the Spanish Jews, the language already had the spirantization process, at least in incipient form. This process, which continues to operate across the board in Mainstream Spanish, became restricted at the word level in Judeo-Spanish. This interpretation, consistent with the Neogrammarian hypothesis, is the only one that offers an explanatory account and is supported by the evidence from other similar developments in the history of the Romance languages and with results from recent acoustic studies on incipient or optional lenition processes.

The emergence of the unmarked: Vowel harmony in Hebrew loanword adaptation

In this paper, it is argued that adult speakers of all languages have a universal predisposition to use vowel harmony, even when there is no evidence of productive harmony in the native lexicon. Evidence for this harmony may emerge in the lexicon's periphery (e.g. loanwords). We investigate harmony in loanwords in Modern Hebrew, a language not considered to be a vowel harmony language, focusing on the universal aspects of vowel harmony. Different grammars operate on different areas of the lexicon, loanwords vs. native words, and the differences between the grammars are formally described within an Optimality Theoretical approach.

Lexical competition during second-language listening: Sentence context, but not proficiency, constrains interference from the native lexicon.

A spoken language eye-tracking methodology was used to evaluate the effects of sentence context and proficiency on parallel language activation during spoken language comprehension. Nonnative speakers with varying proficiency levels viewed visual displays while listening to French sentences (e.g., Marie va décrire la poule [Marie will describe the chicken]). Displays depicted several objects including the final noun target (chicken) and an interlingual near-homophone (e.g., pool) whose name in English is phonologically similar to the French target (poule). Listeners' eye movements reflected temporary consideration of the interlingual competitor when hearing the target noun, demonstrating cross-language lexical competition. However, competitor fixations were dramatically reduced when prior sentence information was incompatible with the competitor (e.g., Marie va nourrir... [Marie will feed...]). In contrast, interlingual competition from English did not vary according to participants' rated proficiency in French, even though proficiency reliably predicted other aspects of processing behavior, suggesting higher proficiency in the active language does not provide a significant independent source of control over interlingual competition. The results provide new insights into the nature of parallel language activation in naturalistic sentential contexts.

One hand or two?

In this paper, we focus on the nativisation process as a fully fingerspelled word or fingerspelled letters become a fingerspelled loan or initialised sign. Previous models of nativisation (e.g., Brentari & Padden 2001) have described forms derived from one-handed fingerspelling systems; however, fingerspelling can be either one- or two-handed. Thus we propose an extension of Brentari & Padden’s model that accounts for varying degrees of nativisation based on the extent to which native parameters (i.e., native handshapes, movements, locations and native combinations of the three) exist within a given sign. According to the extended model, there are five main criteria for delineating nativisation — the extent to which: (1) forms adhere to phonological constraints of the native lexicon, (2) parameters of the forms occur in the native lexicon, (3) native elements are added, (4) non-native elements are reduced (e.g., letters lost), and (5) native elements are integrated with non-native elements.

Articles selected from posters presented at the Tenth Annual International Conference on Research in Computational Biology – Preface

The synergies among biology, computing and other formal disciplines continue to produce a unique blend of domain-specific and methodological advances that is shaping the very fabrics of the new scientific method. Among the many examples of this phenomenon, the one offered by the unrelenting growth of bioinformatics and computational biology is unique in that nowhere else is the native lexicon of a natural science more directly conducive to digital representation and manipulation. The research articles contained in this Supplement originate from posters presented at the Tenth Annual International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB 2006), which was held in Venice, Italy, on April 2–5, 2006. The RECOMB conference series was started in 1997 by Sorin Istrail, Pavel Pevzner and Michael Waterman. The previous meetings were held in Santa Fe, NM (USA); New York, NY (USA); Lyon, France; Tokyo, Japan; Montreal, Canada; Washington, DC (USA); Berlin, Germany; San Diego, CA (USA); and Boston, MA (USA). RECOMB 2006 was hosted by University of Padova in the Venice Convention Center at Cinema Palace, Venice Lido, Italy. The Tenth Edition of RECOMB was special in several ways. For one, the Program Committee, consisting of 38 specialists of the highest distinction in the field, included all past Committee and Conference Chairs as well as the Members of the Steering Committee. The Committee selected 40 papers out of the received submissions of well over 200. Some of the accepted papers were further expanded and refereed in order to appear in the special issue traditionally devoted to the Conference. For the Tenth Edition, however, in view of the high quality of the contributions submitted for poster presentation, it was felt that another Special Issue, devoted to expanded and duly refereed versions of poster submissions was also warranted. Thus, the present Supplement constitutes one more innovation brought about by the Tenth Anniversary of RECOMB. The eight enclosed papers emerged at the outset of a rigid selection and review and represent a vivid snapshot of work mature enough to be reported within vibrant frameworks still in the making. We hope that they will start one more tradition for RECOMB. This Issue was made possible thanks to the effort of many, in particular, the special task force set up for handling posters, which consisted of Luca Bortolussi (University of Udine, Italy), Giovanni Ciriello (University of Padova, Italy), Matteo Comin (University of Padova, Italy), Claudio Garrutti (University of Padova, Italy), Giosue Lo Bosco (University of Palermo, Italy), Sabrina Mantaci (University of Palermo, Italy) Cinzia Pizzi (University of Padova, Italy, and Helsinki, Finland), Simone Scalabrin (University of Udine, Italy), and Nicola Vitacolonna (University of Udine, Italy). We are also grateful to the external reviewers, the members of the Steering Committee and other colleagues who helped in the process. Finally, we express our thanks to the institutions and corporations who provided financial support for the conference: Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, USA; College of Computing, Georgia Tech., USA; Department of Energy, USA; Department of Information Engineering, University of Padova, Italy; IBM Corporation, USA; ISMB, International Society for Computational Biology; AICA, Italian Association for Informatics and Automatic Computation; National Science Foundation, USA; University of Padova, Italy.

Pizzas und Pizzen – die Pluralformen (un)assimilierter Fremdwörter im Deutschen

Abstract The paper takes plural formation as an example of morphological assimilation of loanwords into the German inflectional system and shows that the assimilation process proceeds in two steps. German speakers first create intermediate plural forms with the non syllabic suffix -s, later the definite forms with a schwa suffix. Both kinds of plural forms are analysed in the framework of Optimality Theory. The forms created during the two stages are shown to follow from different hierarchies of wellformedness constraints and correspondence constraints respectively. Correspondence constraints are highly ranked for unassimilated borrowings as they are for peripheral word classes of proper names and onomatopoeia, by contrast, prosodic and phonological, esp. phonotactic wellformedness constraints are highly ranked for assimilated borrowings as they are for common nouns in the native lexicon. The shape of both kinds of plural forms will be shown to be functionally motivated. Whereas the schwa plural formation is rooted in the pressure for plural forms to be easy to articulate, the -s plural is rooted in the need for preservation of the sound shape of the stems: The syllabic schwa suffixes provide trochaic plural forms, words of optimal length with optimal syllable structure, the non syllabic -s provides structure preserving forms where the base is easy to recognize.

Gender Assignment in Danish, Swedish and Norwegian: A Comparison of the Status of Assignment Criteria

The paper deals with gender assignment of English loanwords in Danish, Swedish and Norwegian. The following assignment criteria have been analysed: semantic (animate, mass), phonological (number of syllables, homonymy), and morphological (inflection, suffixation, deverbal monosyllables, compounds). Common gender in Danish and Swedish and masculine in Norwegian are overrepresented in comparison with the native lexicon. This is confirmed by discriminant function analysis, which shows that neuter nouns in the three languages and feminine nouns in Norwegian show fewer characteristic features. This analysis has also been used to measure the degree of regularity based on the postulated criteria: the percentage of correctly classified cases (from 67% in Swedish to 68% in Norwegian and 72% in Danish) suggests only a partial regularity in gender assignment. The stronger pull of common or masculine gender is reflected in the contribution of selected assignment rules, particularly in the assignment of animates, where common or masculine nouns constitute 96% of assigned nouns. As regards phonological rules, monosyllables show a slightly better correlation with neuter gender, particularly in Danish. Homonymy is significant for nouns of both genders in Danish, while in Swedish and Norwegian nouns with a native neuter or feminine homonym are more likely to be assigned common or masculine gender. Likewise, most inflectional and derivational assignment rules contribute to the assignment of common or masculine genders, with the exception of zero plurals, Swedish <em>n</em>-plurals, suffixes such as <em>-ment, -ery</em>, deverbal monosyllables in Danish and Norwegian, and compounds whose base appears in the corpus with n. gender. Discriminant function analysis shows that plural inflection has the greatest discriminant power among the postulated criteria. Finally, it is suggested that these tendencies may indicate an ongoing expansion of common and masculine genders in the three Scandinavian languages.

Loanword Nativization in German

The present article examines the changes that affect stressed vowels in the nativization of loanwords into Standard German, e.g. laxing of vowels like [i] to [I] in F[I]rma ( > FAITH are independently required for the native lexicon of German. Thus, we conclude that our treatment is inherently superior to any rule-based analysis because a rule-based treatment would be forced to posit specific rules to account for the loanword data which have no independent motivation.