Week of October 31

Language Universals Workshop

 

Sabriya Fisher (Wellesley College)

Title: Innovation in the grammar of African American English

Abstract: This talk presents the results of a  sociolinguistic investigation of variation in the use of negation in a corpus of naturalistic speech from 42 speakers of Philadelphia African American English. Particular focus is placed on the use of ain't in past/perfective contexts, where it varies with didn't, which is a unique feature of AAE that may also be a recent innovation in the grammar (Fasold & Wolfram, 1970; Green, 2002; Howe, 2005; Labov et al., 1968; Loman, 1967; Maynor, 1997; Weldon, 1994, 2021; Wolfram, 1969, 2004). Use of ain't in the past/perfective context is compared to its uses in other tense-aspect contexts where it varies with negative auxiliary contractions as in other varieties of English. Results of apparent time comparisons reveal that past/perfective uses of ain't increased over the course of the 20th century while uses in other contexts remained stable, aligning with the hypothesis that past/perfective uses result from a recent change. Generalized linear models of variation between ain't and other negative contractions in past/perfective vs. other contexts show that socio-stylistic and linguistic constraints are otherwise similar across contexts. Finally, evidence that a past/perfective use of ain't resulted from a diachronic shift in meaning for ain't + Verb constructions is examined. 

Friday November 4 | 12-1:30 PM |  Sever Hall 102

 

 

 GSAS Indo-European and Historical Linguistics Workshop 

Spiridon-Iosif Scapotos (Department of Classical Studies, Boston University)

Title : "Short accusatives in Hesiod: a diachronic approach to an un-Homeric feature."

 Friday November 4 | 5.00 - 6.30 p.m | Boylston 335

 

Harvard LangCog

Leticia Schiavon Kolberg (LaPsyDÉ, Université Paris Cité)

Title: Children use prosodic information to constrain their interpretation of sentences in both spoken and written domain

Abstract: Phrasal prosody (i.e. the suprasegmental information in speech, such as duration, stress and intonation variation) has been proposed to be a crucial cue to constrain syntactic analysis in both children and adults. However, there are still few studies on young children’s ability to use prosody to constrain parsing. While some provide positive evidence for it in some languages (e.g., in French: Dautriche et al., 2014, de Carvalho et al., 2016a; and in English: Snedeker & Yuan, 2008; de Carvalho et al., 2016b), others failed to observe this ability in children up to 5 years old (e.g. in Korean: Choi & Mazuka, 2003).

In the first part of this talk, I will present studies investigating children’s ability to use prosodic boundary information in spoken sentences to constrain their parsing of complex syntactic structures in French and Brazilian Portuguese. In the second part I will present preliminary results of a series of studies investigating the role of prosody in written sentence parsing in children learning to read. Given that phrasal prosody is an important source of information for accessing the syntactic structure of sentences in the spoken domain, it may also help children recover the syntactic constituents of written sentences. However, while there are still no studies investigating the role of prosody in written sentence comprehension in children, several studies suggest that, when silently reading, adults tend to impose an implicit prosodic contour on written sentences, which positively affects their parsing and comprehension (e.g., Pynte & Colonna, 2000; Frazier & Gibson, 2015). In order to investigate when children become able to exploit prosodic information in the written domain, we are conducting a reading and picture selection task with French children in the first years of literacy acquisition. The preliminary results suggest that 9-year-olds are already able to generate representations of sentence intonation (i.e., prosodic phrasing) when reading sentences, which affect their interpretations of ambiguous written sentences. Altogether, the results presented in this talk will show that phrasal prosody may indeed play an important role in oral language acquisition and can also support reading comprehension in children. Since prosody can influence online sentence parsing in both oral and written domain in children, it should therefore be included in models of children’s spoken and written sentence processing and in methods of reading instruction.

  Tuesday, November 1 | 5:30- 7:00 PM | William James Hall, Room #1550

 

Bondarenko at Brown University

On 19th October, Tanya Bondarenko gave an invited talk titled "Factivity alternations in Azeri: an argument for the structural approach " at LingLangLunch hosted by the department of the Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences at Brown University.

 

Satik in Glossa

Deniz Satik's paper titled "Unraveling Balinese Binding" has been accepted for publication in Glossa. The pre-print is available here