Acoustic analysis of the rhotic contrast in Chicagoland Spanish

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 285-321 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Henriksen
Keyword(s):  
Individual Variation ◽  
Speech Signal ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Acoustic Analysis ◽  
Mexican Spanish ◽  
Heritage Speakers ◽  
Phonetic Variation ◽  
Contact Situation ◽  
Phonological Contrasts ◽  
First And Second Generation

This paper reports on an acoustic analysis of the phonemic tap-trill contrast (/ɾ/-/r/) for first and second generation speakers of Mexican Spanish who live in the Chicagoland area. First, it is shown that speakers most commonly produce phonemic trills with a single apical occlusion, although there is much individual variation. Second, nearly all speakers realize the tap-trill contrast by means of segmental duration, and this is especially true for speakers who favor zero or one closures in the phonemic trill. These data suggest that heritage speakers make use of the limits of phonetic variation to the extent that phonological contrasts are intact in their grammar. The findings have implications for disentangling the sources of individual variation in heritage pronunciation. Specifically, we propose that between-speaker instabilities in rhotic production result more directly from an inherently variable speech signal than from the language contact situation.

scholarly journals Language Contact: A Study of the Spanish in Two Spanish-Language Presses in Charleston, South Carolina

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 335-372
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. Martínez-Gibson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spanish Language ◽  
Heritage Speakers ◽  
Hispanic Populations ◽  
Contact Situation

Past studies analyzing the English influence in Spanish-language press in the United States focused on major cities of large Hispanic populations, such as, Miami, New York or Los Angeles. In recent years, the Hispanic population in the Carolinas has been growing quickly and merits studies equivalent to those of the large cities to analyze the effects of the language contact between Spanish and English. This study analyzes the English influence on the Spanish of two Spanish-language presses available in Charleston, South Carolina. The study analyzed the English influence at different linguistic levels in the two different writing styles of articles and advertisements and the types of English influence at the different linguistic levels in these two writing styles. The data were collected from one edition of each of the presses. The results indicated that the English influence found in the Spanish-language press of Charleston, sc is comparable to the findings of past studies in larger cities with greater Hispanic populations. In addition, the outcomes reveal parallels with studies on language acquisition and loss in a contact situation and studies on bilingualism of second language learners and heritage speakers. Furthermore, the findings suggest social effects on language in a contact situation at the varying linguistic levels.

“I Can See What You’re Saying”: Clinical Utility of Spectral Moment Analysis

2011 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 44-54
Author(s):  
Kerry Callahan Mandulak
Keyword(s):  
Speech Production ◽  
Speech Signal ◽  
Clinical Utility ◽  
Acoustic Analysis ◽  
Moment Analysis ◽  
Analysis Tool ◽  
Spectral Moment ◽  
Clinical Measure ◽  
Perceptual Analysis ◽  
Disordered Speech

Spectral moment analysis (SMA) is an acoustic analysis tool that shows promise for enhancing our understanding of normal and disordered speech production. It can augment auditory-perceptual analysis used to investigate differences across speakers and groups and can provide unique information regarding specific aspects of the speech signal. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the utility of SMA as a clinical measure for both clinical speech production assessment and research applications documenting speech outcome measurements. Although acoustic analysis has become more readily available and accessible, clinicians need training with, and exposure to, acoustic analysis methods in order to integrate them into traditional methods used to assess speech production.

Modern Greek V V dvandva compounds: A linguistic innovation in the history of the Indo-European languages

2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Ralli
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
High Rate ◽  
Compound Formation ◽  
Modern Greek ◽  
Late Medieval Period ◽  
European Languages ◽  
History Of ◽  
Internal Change ◽  
Contact Situation ◽  
Asian Languages

This paper deals with [V V] dvandva compounds, which are frequently used in East and Southeast Asian languages but also in Greek and its dialects: Greek is in this respect uncommon among Indo-European languages. It examines the appearance of this type of compounding in Greek by tracing its development in the late Medieval period, and detects a high rate of productivity in most Modern Greek dialects. It argues that the emergence of the [V V] dvandva pattern is not due to areal pressure or to a language-contact situation, but it is induced by a language internal change. It associates this change with the rise of productivity of compounding in general, and the expansion of verbal compounds in particular. It also suggests that the change contributes to making the compound-formation patterns of the language more uniform and systematic. Claims and proposals are illustrated with data from Standard Modern Greek and its dialects. It is shown that dialectal evidence is crucial for the study of the rise and productivity of [V V] dvandva compounds, since changes are not usually portrayed in the standard language.

Talking about MOTION in Middle English

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Huber
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The Other ◽  
Motion Verbs ◽  
Text Type ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
Contact Situation ◽  
Analysis Of Motion

Chapter 6 begins with an overview of the language contact situation with (Anglo-) French and Latin, resulting in large-scale borrowing in the Middle English period. The analysis of 465 Middle English verbs used to express intransitive motion shows that there are far more French/Latin loans in the path verbs than in the other motion verbs. The range of (new) manner of motion verbs testifies to the manner salience of Middle English: caused motion verbs are also found in intransitive motion meanings, as are French loans which do not have motion uses in continental French. Their motion uses in Anglo-Norman are discussed in terms of contact influence of Middle English. The analysis of motion expression in different texts yields a picture similar to the situation in Old English, with path typically expressed in satellites, and neutral as well as manner of motion verbs being most frequent, depending on text type.

Cognate similarity and intervocalic /d/ production in Riverense Spanish

2021 ◽  
pp. 136700692199680
Author(s):  
Michael Gradoville ◽  
Mark Waltermire ◽  
Avizia Long
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Mixed Effects ◽  
Frequency Effect ◽  
Acoustic Measurements ◽  
Linear Mixed Effects Model ◽  
Phonetic Variation ◽  
Linear Mixed Effects ◽  
Contact Language ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Phonetic Realization

Aims and objectives: While previous research has shown that phonetic variation in language contact situations is affected by whether a word has a cognate in the contact language, this paper aims to show that such an effect is not monotonic. According to the usage-based model, items in memory are organized according to similarity, thus we anticipated that formally more similar cognates would show a stronger cognate effect. Methodology: This variationist sociophonetic study investigates the relationship between cognate similarity and phonetic realization. We examined this relationship in the bilingual community of Rivera, Uruguay, in which both Portuguese and Spanish are spoken with regularity. Specifically, we focused on intervocalic /d/, which in monolingual Spanish is realized as an approximant [ð̞] or phonetic zero, but in monolingual Brazilian Portuguese is produced as a stop [d] or, in most varieties, an affricate [ʤ] before [i]. Data and analysis: We analyzed a corpus of sociolinguistic interviews of the Spanish spoken in Rivera. Acoustic measurements were taken from approximately 60 tokens each from 40 different speakers. Using a linear mixed-effects model, we examined the relationship between several predictors and the degree of constriction of intervocalic /d/. Findings/conclusions: While there is an overall frequency effect whereby more frequent words exhibit less constriction of intervocalic /d/, as both frequency and cognate similarity increase, less constriction of intervocalic /d/ obtains. Therefore, frequent cognates in Portuguese that have very similar forms affect the production of intervocalic /d/ more so than other cognates. Originality: No previous study has demonstrated that the cognate effect on phonetic variation in a situation of language contact is regulated by form similarity between cognate pairs. Significance/implications: The data support the usage-based model in that similar cognates have more lexical connections and can therefore show greater influence on phonetic realization than can cognates that share less phonetic material.

Forty years of language contact and change in Kupwar: A critical assessment of the intertranslatability model

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonal Kulkarni-Joshi
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Historical Data ◽  
Original Study ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
Syntactic Variation ◽  
Border Town ◽  
Data Point ◽  
State Boundaries ◽  
Contact Situation ◽  
Local Languages

AbstractThis paper revisits the language contact situation in the Indian border town-village of Kupwar originally reported by Gumperz and Wilson (1971. Convergence and creolization: A case from the Indo-Aryan/Dravidian border. In D. Hymes (ed.), Pidgnization and creolization of languages, 151–168. Cambridge: CUP). The study presents evidence for morpho-syntactic variation and complexification in the contact varieties of the local languages, Marathi and Kannada. Similar patterns of variation are adduced from contact varieties of Marathi and Kannada from historical data as well as present-day border villages which, like Kupwar, have been traditionally bilingual. The synchronic and historical data point out methodological and theoretical limitations of the original study. The variation and complexity observed in the Kupwar varieties allow for a reconsideration of the notion of intertranslatability or isomorphism in convergence areas. While suggesting a possible geographically defined micro-linguistic area at the Marathi-Kannada frontier, the paper indicates that the recent re-drawing of state boundaries along linguistic lines may have initiated divergence in this convergence area.

scholarly journals Montenegrin-Albanian Linguistic Border: In Search of “Balanced Language Contact”

Slovene ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 258-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria S. Morozova ◽  
Alexander Yu. Rusakov
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
Speech Community ◽  
Community Members ◽  
The Past ◽  
External Relations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Contact Situation ◽  
Linguistic Behavior ◽  
The Village

The article aims to clarify the notion of “balanced language contact” and to model the situation of a language contact (in the present and the past) in one of the ethnically and linguistically mixed regions of the Montenegrin-Albanian linguistic border. The study focuses on the situation in the bilingual community of thevillageofVelja Gorana, located in the area of Mrkovići inSouthern Montenegro. The community of the village, as it seems at a first glance, provides a good example of a “balanced contact” situation. The language situation in Velja Gorana is described in the article as a set of micro-situations, or scenarios, developing on family and individual levels. Attention is paid not only to the communication in the family domain, but also to the external relations of the community members. Following on from this material, the authors attempt to develop a methodology for assessing the role of both languages in such communities in general, showing which factors influence individual linguistic behavior; how this behavior may change during an individual lifetime; how the different speakers’ strategies amalgamate in what can be considered as behavior of a multilingual speech community. Analyzing the information on the history of Velia Gorana, in particular, conducting a detailed examination of the origins, genealogies and marriage strategies of its families, allows the authors to reconstruct the mechanisms for the development of “linguistic exogamy” in the community of Velja Gorana and to make assumptions about the nature of the contact situation in this region in the past.

scholarly journals Contact-induced grammatical (non)changes? Observations of morphosyntactic structures in the Kashubian dialect in Canada

2018 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-29
Author(s):  
Motoki Nomachi
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
History Of ◽  
Contact Situation ◽  
New Phenomena

This article considers the context of language contact and discusses four typologically relevant morphosyntactic features (definite and indefinite articles, the merger of instrumental and comitative cases, and the non-pro-drop tendency) and their possible changes in the Kashubian dialect in Canada. A comparison of the data on the Kashubian dialect recorded in Prussia during the mid-19th century by Hilferding and in the present-day by the author in the Renfrew area (Ontario, Canada) revealed no significant difference, even though the Kashubian spoken in the area has undergone various innovations due to the influence of English. Both grammatical and sociolinguistic analyses of the history of the contact situation suggested that the conservativeness of grammatical changes in the dialect can be explained by the prolonged isolation of the speakers in their new homeland, and by the fact that the intensive language contact and collective bilingualism between Kashubian and English are relatively new phenomena.

scholarly journals Language contact within the speaker: Phonetic variation and crosslinguistic influence

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Khia A. Johnson ◽  
Molly Babel
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Mutual Influence ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Recent Model ◽  
Phonetic Variation ◽  
English Bilingual ◽  
Speech Communities ◽  
Crosslinguistic Influence ◽  
Cross Language ◽  
Language Influence

A recent model of sound change posits that the direction of change is determined, at least in part, by the distribution of variation within speech communities (Harrington, Kleber, Reubold, Schiel, & Stevens, 2018; Harrington & Schiel, 2017). We explore this model in the context of bilingual speech, asking whether the less variable language constrains phonetic variation in the more variable language, using a corpus of spontaneous speech from early Cantonese-English bilinguals (Johnson, Babel, Fong, & Yiu, 2020). As predicted, given the phonetic distributions of stop obstruents in Cantonese compared to English, intervocalic English /b d g/ were produced with less voicing for Cantonese-English bilinguals and word-final English /t k/ were more likely to be unreleased compared to spontaneous speech from two monolingual English control corpora (Pitt, Johnson, Hume, Kiesling, & Raymond, 2005; Swan, 2016). Cantonese phonology is more gradient in terms of voicing initial obstruents (Clumeck, Barton, Macken, & Huntington, 1981; W. Y. P. Wong, 2006) than permitting releases of final obstruents, which is categorically prohibited Bauer & Benedict (2011); Khouw & Ciocca (2006). Neither Cantonese-English bilingual initial voicing nor word-final stop release patterns were significantly impacted by language mode. These results provide evidence that the phonetic variation in crosslinguistically linked categories in bilingual speech is shaped by the distribution of phonetic variation within each language, thus suggesting a mechanistic account for why some segments are more susceptible to cross-language influence than others in studies of mutual influence.

When the Construction Is Axla, Everything Is Axla: A Case of Combined Lexical and Structural Borrowing from Arabic to Hebrew

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 337-348 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roey J. Gafter ◽  
Uri Horesh
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Lexical Borrowing ◽  
Syntactic Structures ◽  
Modern Hebrew ◽  
Specific Contact ◽  
Theory Of Language ◽  
Contact Situation

This article examines a borrowing from Arabic into Hebrew, which is a combination of a lexical borrowing and a structural one. The Arabic superlativeaħla‘sweetest, most beautiful,’ pronounced by most Modern Hebrew speakers [axla], has shifted semantically to mean ‘great, awesome.’ Yet, as our corpus-based study illustrates, it was borrowed into Hebrew—for the most part—with a very particular syntactic structure that, in Arabic, denotes the superlative. In Arabic itself,aħlamay also denote a comparative adjective, though in different syntactic structures. We discuss the significance of this borrowing and the manner in which it is borrowed both to the specific contact situation between Arabic and Hebrew and to the theory of language contact in general.

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