Phonological Reduction Research Articles

The history of the quasi-auxiliaryuse(d)to

This article is a corpus-based study on the grammaticalization of the quasi-auxiliary use(d) to. It describes and seeks to explain the historical process whereby use(d) to, starting from the Middle English source construction use ‘be in the habit of’ + to + verb, grammaticalized into a habitual aspect marker with idiosyncratic morphosyntactic properties. A detailed corpus study is presented, based on four historical English corpora, which together cover a time period from 1410 to 2009. The results of the corpus analysis are interpreted within the theoretical framework of usage-based grammar, with the aim of uncovering the mechanisms that propelled the gradual grammaticalization of use(d) to on the semantic, morphological, syntactic and phonological dimensions. Among the underlying mechanisms and processes identified are semantic generalization via host-class expansion and habituation, pragmatic enrichment, analogy, chunking, loss of analyzability and internal structure, as well as phonological reduction through neuromotor automation. Supported by the quantitative empirical evidence from the corpus analysis and drawing on findings from usage-based research on language change, the present study depicts the grammaticalization of use(d) to as a self-feeding process driven by frequency effects, i.e. by the effects that the increasingly high discourse frequency of the use(d) to construction had on its cognitive representation.

The Relationship Between English and Polish Rhythm Measures in Polish Learners of English

This paper investigates native and non-native speech rhythm in the speech of Polish learners of English at an intermediate/upper-intermediate level. More specifically, it attempts to explore the relationship between rhythm measures scores in L1 Polish and L2 English within individual speakers. Phonological vowel reduction in terms of duration is present in English and crucial for the perception and acoustic measurements of linguistic rhythm. Polish, on the other hand, has no phonological reduction of that kind. The acquisition of L2 vowel reduction is highly determined by the level of language proficiency and influences non-native rhythmic patterns. The study tests six speech rhythm measures: %V, DV, DC, VarcoV, VarcoC and nPVI-V in two tempos: normal and fast. The results show that most of these measures are positively and significantly correlated with each other between L1 Polish and L2 English across the subjects and for two tempos, although to a different degree. Highly significantly correlation has been noted for %V and ΔC in fast tempo. Moderate significant correlations between the two languages are observed for ΔV, ΔC (normal tempo), VarcoV and nPVI in fast tempo.

Kulenikka-Prefaced Utterances (KPUs) in Other-Initiated Other-Repair (OIOR)

ABSTRACT The paper demonstrates a new function of kulenikka-prefaced utterances (kpus): where the discourse marker kulenikka is used as an other-repair initiator and kpus provide other-initiated other-repairs (oior). Close analysis of the data shows that when speakers used kpus for oior, they treated the immediately previous turn of the other speaker as problematic; hence, as a trouble source. The kpus used in oior have three distinct features: (1) they add adversative information to the previous utterances, while their speakers expect that all of the participants have common opposing stances toward the trouble source; (2) they are followed by sequence closings and topic shifts; and (3) they are pronounced clearly without phonological reduction.

Phonological reduction and grammaticalization: Examples from the Southern Min dialect of Hui'an

Phonological reduction and grammaticalization: Examples from the Southern Min dialect of Hui'an

Degrees of Irregular Change

This paper employs a quantitative model of irregular sound change to investigate whether West Iranian languages have developed formally similar functional items via parallelism or via contact. I analyze etymologically related functional items in two Middle and eight New West Iranian languages, comparing observed forms to expected outcomes of these forms on the basis of purely regular sound change. A quantitative model is used to measure the distance between the observed and expected forms across West Iranian, particularly with respect to New Persian. I find that, while most New West Iranian languages undergo roughly the same amount of irregular reduction, Balochi, a language with conservative historical phonology, shows significantly more irregular phonological reduction than New Persian in its functional vocabulary. Given this result, it is plausible that the similarity in functional items seen across West Iranian is due to New Persian influence, though this contact may not be quantitatively detectable in all cases.

Cos—A New Discourse Marker for Australian English?

A number of studies of clausal linkage in Modern English have suggested the causal marker because/cos is showing a change in progress from prototypical subordinator to discourse marker (via the semantic bleaching of because and its phonological reduction to [kəz]). In this paper, I dispute the idea that paratactic because/cos is innovative. Drawing on various spoken language collections, including those from the Australian National Corpus (AusNC), and on historical examples from a number of Old and Middle English texts, I suggest that the different grammatical behaviour of because/cos is not the consequence of on-going grammaticalization, but a direct result of the complexity of causal relations and the different communicative needs of speakers versus writers.

Phonological reduction in the first part of noun compounds

Regular plural nouns rarely appear as the first member of a compound noun in English under any circumstances, while irregular plurals are more likely under certain conditions. One explanation holds that this is a consequence of the fundamentally different ways in which regular and irregular plurals are stored and processed, while an alternative explanation suggests that it may be rooted in phonological differences between regular and irregular forms. If the first part of a compound is phonologically restricted, the restrictions may interact with lexical access in a way that disfavors regular plurals (especially given that plurals of any sort are of low frequency in the first part of a compound, so processing is far from ceiling). This paper provides evidence from a case study of one child that the first part of a compound can be phonologically restricted compared to nouns when they appear as independent words. The data address compounds whose first elements are monomorphemic nouns, rather than plurals, but document the existence of phonological restrictions within compounds for at least one child This existence proof strengthens the hypothesis that differences between regular and irregular forms may derive partly from differences in phonological structure.

Rate and Phonological Variation in Preschool Children: Effects of Modeling and Directed Influence

To explore the effect of modeling and explicit elicitation of slow and accurately produced speech in typically developing preschool children. Optional phonological reductions (e.g., deleted final stops) and changes in speech rate were examined in response to an adult conversational speaker's speech style. Forty 3- and 4-year-olds (20 each) were tested in 3 tasks: (a) immediate repetition of a model, (b) spontaneous speech, and (c) directed speech style (cueing to correct "sloppy" speech). In Task 1, half of each group heard fast and hypoarticulated versus slow and hyperarticulated speech for a between-group response-to-model comparison. Tasks 2 and 3 were compared within subjects. Task 1 demonstrated that both age groups aligned with the speaker's rate and phonological variants usage when repeating a model. Tasks 2 and 3 revealed that 4-year-olds varied phonological reduction patterns according to the task demands, whereas 3-year-olds maintained consistent patterns of usage. In addition, neither group successfully realigned with the rapid speech rate in Task 3. These results contribute to an evidence base supporting the practice of modeling slow and clear speech to children with various production disorders. Further research is needed to explore the cognitive-linguistic processes underlying alignment before findings are applied to clinical populations.

Zur Historie der nominalen -er-Bildungen. Ist die Suffixidentität sprachwandlerischer Zufall?

The various different occurrences of -er in the morphology of German (e.g. in agentive and instrumental nouns, in comparatives, iteratives and intensifiers) are generally treated as being homonymous. In other words, just as in the case of full lexemes (e.g. Kiefer(knochen) 'jaw bone' vs. Kiefer(baum) 'fir tree'), it is assumed that different suffixes exist and that it is merely coincidental that they have an identical phonetic realisation. As far back as Germanic, the source of this identity-of-form has been taken to lie in reduction of the final syllable, whereby the process of phonological reduction has created identical suffixes from ones that were previously formally distinct. Our aim is to illustrate that in the case of nominal -er forms, there is good reason not to attribute identity of form simply to the 'blind application' of phonological rules. On the one hand, there are various aspects of the historical development which simply cannot be accounted for by recourse to phonological rules. This will be made clear through analysis of historical grammars and related literature. On the other hand, those categories that are formed with -er share common grammatico-semantic features. This too is often hinted at in the historical grammars and may be corroborated by an analysis of the grammatical features involved. Our findings thus motivate the following claim: The emergence of identical forms is not coincidental. Rather, alongside phonological rules, the emergence of identical forms is driven by more global principles of structure-formation, in particular by the principle of 'one form = one function'. Instead of different -er suffixes, there is in fact just one suffix which symbolises the iterative feature structure common to the -er marked categories.

Reanalysis of negatives as polarity markers? The last 400 years of decline of the French preverbal negative clitic

Typically, the evolution of negation involves an intermediate stage where a post-verbal negator doubles a preverbal marker. The decline of the preverbal marker is generally understood as a form of weakening, through mechanisms that remain rather vague in the literature. A precise hypothesis is proposed by Anne Breitbarth in her analysis of the negative cycle in Germanic (2009). She claims that the acquisition of negative status by the post-verbal item causes the preverbal item to become a polarity marker. The marker should therefore increasingly display a preponderance of uses in non-negative environments. Whether the predictions made by this dual reanalysis hypothesis are supported by the history of French negation is assessed in this paper. Data from 17th and 18th century vernacular French texts (Textes français privés des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles), as well as from the contemporary vernacular (Corpus de français parlé parisien des années 2000), show that the French preverbal negative contradicts the predictions of the dual reanalysis hypothesis in being increasingly used in negative environments. The causes of the decline of the preverbal negative in French are proposed to relate to its membership of a clitic cluster that is susceptible to phonological reductions.

The phonological forms and perceived functions of janyarrp, the Gurindji ‘baby talk’ register

Baby talk is an aspect of infant- or child-directed speech where caregivers imitate children's immature productions in stylized form. Within non-generativist approaches to language acquisition, children's language acquisition is often viewed an emergent response to a highly patterned linguistic environment, at least some of which is tailored by caregivers to children's cognitive and social needs. Some cross-cultural research, however, has disputed whether caregivers modify speech to children in all cultures, and whether or to what extent special infant- or child-directed speech is necessary for successful language acquisition. In this paper we present new cross-linguistic and cross-cultural data on baby talk or janyarrp among Gurindji people. Using a corpus of naturalistic family interactions and interviews with Gurindji people of northern Australia we describe the phonological modifications and specific lexicon of baby talk and investigate its possible functions. Several phonological reductions were found which are familiar from baby talk and child speech in other languages, including rhotic replacement and cluster reduction. More unusually, baby talk neutralizes the three-way coronal contrast in Gurindji Kriol, the language which Gurindji children learn at home. The functions of baby talk for Gurindji people likewise seem to comprise familiar baby talk functions like holding attention as well as less familiar functions, such facilitating children's imitations in production.

Phonological reduction in maternal speech in northern Australian English: change over time

Segmental variation in maternal speech to children changes over time. This study investigated variation in non-citation speech processes in a longitudinal, 26-hour corpus of maternal northern Australian English. Recordings were naturalistic parent-child interactions when children (N=4) were 1;6, 2;0, and 2;6. The mothers' speech was phonetically transcribed and analyzed. Based on previous sociophonetic research showing proportional changes in speech variants in maternal speech as children get older, it was predicted that deletion of word-initial /h/ and word-final /v/, processes common in non-citation speech, would increase over time. Instead results showed a non-linear change in deletion within a stable set of lexical items. Deletion proportionately increased between 1;6 and 2;0 and decreased between 2;0 and 2;6. Further analysis indicated increased deletion was not accounted for by changes in speech rate, which only marginally increased over time. Findings suggest mothers fine-tune differentially over time as children's receptive and productive language knowledge develops.

Roadrunners and Eagles

Our previous research on perception of gated casual English by university students suggests that ceteris paribus, Polish students are much more accurate than Greeks. A recent pilot study of casually-spoken Polish leads us to the conclusion that many shortcuts found in English are also common in Polish, so that similar perceptual strategies can be used in both languages, though differing in detail. Based on these preliminary results, it seems likely that perceptual strategies across languages tend towards the “eagle” approach - where a birds-eye view of the acoustic terrain without too much emphasis on detail is found - or the “roadrunner” approach, where phonetic detail is followed closely. In the former case, perceivers adjust easily to alternation caused by casual speech phonology while in the latter, perceivers expect little variation and possibly even find it confusing. Native speakers of Greek are “roadrunners”, since there is little phonological reduction in their language there is little difference, for example, between stressed and unstressed syllables. We suggest that native speakers of Polish join English speakers as “eagles”, which gives them a natural perceptual advantage in English. There is a conceptual similarity between this idea and that of the stress- or syllable-timed language, and we hypothesise that as in this case, there is a cline rather than a sharp division between eagles and roadrunners. As usual, more research is called for.

Use of syntax in perceptual compensation for phonological reduction.

Listeners resolve ambiguity in speech by consulting context. Extensive research on this issue has largely relied on continua of sounds constructed to vary incrementally between two phonemic endpoints. In this study we presented listeners instead with phonetic ambiguity of a kind with which they have natural experience: varying degrees of word-final /t/-reduction. In two experiments, Dutch listeners decided whether or not the verb in a sentence such as Maar zij ren(t) soms 'But she sometimes run(s)' ended in /t/. In Dutch, presence versus absence of final /t/ distinguishes third- from first-person singular present-tense verbs. Acoustic evidence for /t/ varied from clear to absent, and immediately preceding phonetic context was consistent with more versus less likely deletion of /t/. In both experiments, listeners reported more /t/s in sentences in which /t/ would be syntactically correct. In Experiment 1, the disambiguating syntactic information preceded the target verb, as above, while in Experiment 2, it followed the verb. The syntactic bias was greater for fast than for slow responses in Experiment 1, but no such difference appeared in Experiment 2. We conclude that syntactic information does not directly influence pre-lexical processing, but is called upon in making phoneme decisions.

How phonological reductions sometimes help the listener.

In speech production, high-frequency words are more likely than low-frequency words to be phonologically reduced. We tested in an eye-tracking experiment whether listeners can make use of this correlation between lexical frequency and phonological realization of words. Participants heard prefixed verbs in which the prefix was either fully produced or reduced. Simultaneously, they saw a high-frequency verb and a low-frequency verb with this prefix-plus 2 distractors-on a computer screen. Participants were more likely to look at the high-frequency verb when they heard a reduced prefix than when they heard a fully produced prefix. Listeners hence exploit the correlation of lexical frequency and phonological reduction and assume that a reduced prefix is more likely to belong to a high-frequency word. This shows that reductions do not necessarily burden the listener but may in fact have a communicative function, in line with functional theories of phonology.

Η Κυριλλομεθοδιανή παράδοση και η λειτουργική γλώσσα στη Σερβική Εκκλησία

The Cyrillo-Methodian Tradition and the Liturgical Language of the Serbian Orthodox Church In this paper the history of Serbian accepting and adopting of Old Slavonic Language – the first literary language of the Slavs – as the liturgical language of the Church and the literary language of Serbian literacy in general has been represented. Old Slavonic language was preserved in the Liturgical Tradition of the Serbian Church up to the present. In this long interval of time the language went only through the phonological reduction in order to be adjusted to Serbian phonological system. Through the mission of Sts. Cyril and Methodius the worship in the language of the people was created, which made it possible for the Slavs to be incorporated into the Church in their own living, personal and unique way.

Speech reductions change the dynamics of competition during spoken word recognition

Three eye-tracking experiments investigated how phonological reductions (e.g., “puter” for “computer”) modulate phonological competition. Participants listened to sentences extracted from a spontaneous speech corpus and saw four printed words: a target (e.g., “computer”), a competitor similar to the canonical form (e.g., “companion”), one similar to the reduced form (e.g., “pupil”), and an unrelated distractor. In Experiment 1, we presented canonical and reduced forms in a syllabic and in a sentence context. Listeners directed their attention to a similar degree to both competitors independent of the target's spoken form. In Experiment 2, we excluded reduced forms and presented canonical forms only. In such a listening situation, participants showed a clear preference for the “canonical form” competitor. In Experiment 3, we presented canonical forms intermixed with reduced forms in a sentence context and replicated the competition pattern of Experiment 1. These data suggest that listeners penalize acoustic mismatches less strongly when listening to reduced speech than when listening to fully articulated speech. We conclude that flexibility to adjust to speech-intrinsic factors is a key feature of the spoken word recognition system.

Grammaticalization

AbstractThis article presents the study of grammaticalization within the fields of language change and variation, and historical linguistics. Grammaticalization has to do with the diachronic relationship between the lexicon and grammar and with stages of relatively greater and lesser grammaticality. The major effects of grammaticalization, e.g. phonological reduction, semantic generalization, and fusion (or bondedness) are reviewed. The various roles that reanalysis, analogy, and frequency play in grammaticalization are also discussed. The paper further presents the role that grammaticalization studies has played in establishing diachronic universals and discusses metaphor and metonymy in motivating those universals. Finally, the controversies concerning the exceptional status of grammaticalization, the unidirectionality hypothesis, and the legitimacy of grammaticalization as ‘process’ and ‘theory’ are addressed.

Frequency Effects on the Morphological Conditioning of Syllable-fi nal / s / Reduction in Border Uruguayan Spanish

Abstract This research provides a usage-based account of the phonological reduction of syllable and wordfinal /s/ in the bilingual Spanish of the Uruguayan-Brazilian border. As with monolingual dialects of Uruguayan Spanish, patterns of aspiration and deletion seem to be conditioned by lexical frequency, with words of high frequency demonstrating higher rates of reduction than words of low frequency. Unlike these dialects, however, the deletion of /s/ in border varieties may be conditioned by Portuguese morphological patterns in which plural /s/ is deleted for head nouns and adjectives but retained for determiners. This possibility is explored by examining the linear and relative positions of plural NP constituents as well as the plural marking patterns of preceding constituents. Multivariate analysis shows that /s/ deletion is statistically probable in highly frequent words whereas aspiration is favored among words of low frequency. The latter finding may be the result of a social distribution of aspirated variants among more upwardly mobile residents. The use of both variants is conditioned by the morphological patterns of Portuguese, in which plural marking is carried out through the use of overt articulations for plural determiners and first position NP constituents while plural markers are deleted for nouns and adjectives, especially for second and third position constituents. These results provide further evidence of the uniqueness of bilingual dialects and support the claim that bilinguals have more expansive linguistic repertoires than monolinguals.

Coordinating Voicing Onset with Articulation: A Potential Role for Sensory Cues in Shaping Phonological Distinctions

In the typical speech of any language, voicing onset and offset are effortlessly coordinated with articulation as part of the intrinsic coordination of sound production. In this paper, we argue that voicing-articulatory coordination patterns could be shaped by sensory feedback during early speech learning and these patterns persist in mature syllable productions. Our experimental results show that voicing onset is closely associated with the peak velocity and peak amplitude of jaw and upper lip movements for VC syllables in adults. This robust coordination in the onset position may function to increase the salience of VC syllables and provide a phonetically natural explanation for vowels to undergo phonological lengthening and to avoid phonological reduction in word-initial onset position.