Inconsistencies in spoken language

2008 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Esther Borochovsky Bar-Aba
Keyword(s):  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Indirect Speech ◽  
Plural Form ◽  
Verb Tense

This paper displays examples of inconsistencies in spontaneous speech. It refers to cases in which the speaker changes his manner of expression while speaking, even though there generally seems to be no objective reason for doing so. I demonstrate the phenomenon in the use of verb tense, of person inflection, of singular/plural form, and of direct/indirect speech. I suggest that these phenomena be viewed as cases in which the speaker tries (not necessarily consciously) to make his speech less monotonous and more attractive to the listener by providing various ways of expression differing mainly in the degree of closeness they convey between the reported event and the addressee.

Searching for standard French: The construction and mining of the Recueil historique des grammaires du français

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shana Poplack ◽  
Lidia-Gabriela Jarmasz ◽  
Nathalie Dion ◽  
Nicole Rosen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Variant Selection ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
Form Function ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Quebec French ◽  
Contextual Elements ◽  
Meta Analyses

AbstractThis paper describes a massive project to characterize “Standard French” by constructing and mining the Recueil historique des grammaires du français (RHGF), a corpus of grammars whose prescriptive dictates we interpret as representing the evolution of the standard over five centuries. Its originality lies in the possibility it affords to ascertain the existence of prior variability, date it, and determine the conditions under which grammarians accept or condemn variant uses. Systematic meta-analyses of the RHGF reveal that grammarians rarely acknowledge the existence of alternate ways of expressing the same thing. Instead, they adopt three major strategies to establish form-function symmetry. All involve partitioning competing variants across distinct social, semantic or linguistic contexts, despite pervasive disagreement over which variant to associate with which. This effectively factors out variability. In contrast, systematic analysis of actual language use, as instantiated in the spontaneous speech of 323 speakers of Quebec French over an apparent-time period of a century and a half, reveals robust variability, regularly conditioned by contextual elements which have never been acknowledged by grammarians. This conditioning has remained largely stable since at least the mid-nineteenth century. Taken together, these results indicate that the “rules” for variant selection promulgated by grammarians do not inform the spoken language, nor do grammars take account of the variable rules structuring spontaneous speech. As a result, grammar and usage are evolving independently.

scholarly journals Syntactic Maxi-Accidents in Spontaneous Speech of Middle-Class Speakers of English

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (2 (20)) ◽  
pp. 38-49
Author(s):  
Karen Velyan
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Functional Properties ◽  
Empirical Data ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Frequency Of Occurrence ◽  
Native Speakers Of English

Spontaneous spoken language is known to be rich in fragmented and nonintegrated chunks of speech. The latter are the result of syntactic “accidents”, which are indispensible elements of spontaneous talk. Caused by a variety of pragmatic factors, syntactic accidents differ in their formal, lexical, and distributional features. With these features in view, we single out three main varieties of syntactic accidents: 1. maxi-accidents, 2. mini-accidents and 3. micro-accidents, which collectively constitute one whole paradigm. Within the framework of the present article, the main focus of the analysis is on maxi-accidents in spontaneous talk of middle-class native speakers of English. Based on the empirical data, the analysis outlines the key functional properties of maxi-accidents, such as their frequency of occurrence, positional characteristics and pragmatic reasons that lie behind maxi-accidents.

scholarly journals Backshift and tense decomposition

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francisco Costa ◽  
António Branco
Keyword(s):  
General Analysis ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Indirect Speech ◽  
Past Tense Form ◽  
Speech Time ◽  
Event Times ◽  
Embedded Contexts ◽  
Verb Tense

Backshift is a phenomenon affecting verb tense that is visible as a mismatch between some specific embedded contexts and other environments. For instance, the indirect speech equivalent of a sentence like 'Kim likes reading', with a present tense verb, may show the same verb in a past tense form, as in 'Sandy said Kim liked reading'. We present a general analysis of backshift, pooling data from English and Romance languages. Our analysis acknowledges that tense morphology is ambiguous between different temporal meanings, explicitly models the role of the speech time and the event times involved and takes the aspectual constraints of tenses into consideration.

scholarly journals The Difficulties Faced by Indonesian EFL Learners in Pronouncing "S" and "Es" Suffixes in the Simple Present Tense Verbs and in Plural Form of Nouns

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 55
Author(s):  
Andri Saputra ◽  
M.Arif Rahman Hakim ◽  
Eko Saputra ◽  
Yurike Nadiya Rahmat
Keyword(s):  
English Education ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Relevant Research ◽  
Teaching Experiences ◽  
Efl Learners ◽  
Plural Form ◽  
Teachers Experiences ◽  
Present Tense

The authors perceive that Indonesian EFL learners find it challenging to pronounce -s and -es suffixes properly. This position was first established during the authors’ teaching experiences in some high schools, English centre course and colleges (for students majoring in English Education) in Indonesia. The observations were confirmed not only during teaching, but throughout the authors’ own English study. It seemed difficult to adhere to the rules of suffix use in spoken language, i.e. How -s and -es suffixes should and should not be pronounced during a conversation. Generally speaking, Indonesian EFL learners do not pay much attention to pronouncing the suffixes of -s or –es, and although many English users accept such mistakes in conversation with non-native speakers, it is not, however, an error a native-speaker is likely to make. In fact, this issue could lead to misunderstanding when non-native English users have conversations with native speakers. This study aims to present comparative literature review of a number research studies related to teachers’ experiences and other EFL learners. Firstly, this study explains a presentation of existing relevant research on pronunciation is offered. This is followed by an explanation of the specific difficulties faced by Indonesian EFL learners in pronouncing -s and -es suffixes in the present tense verbs and plural form of nouns. The discussion part suggests practical ways of dealing with the difficulties in pronouncing -s and -es suffixes of present tense verbs and the plural form of nouns, and proposes several activities to this end.

scholarly journals How Software Features and Linguistic Analyses Add Value to Orthographic Markup in Transcription of Multilingual Recordings for Digital Archives

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Enrique Rodriguez ◽  
Robert Vann
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Linguistic Analysis ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Digital Archives ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Linguistic Analyses ◽  
Digital Language

This report discusses the importance of accounting for language contact and discourse circumstance in orthographic transcriptions of multilingual recordings of spoken language for deposit in digital language archives (DLAs). Our account provides a linguistically informed approach to the multilingual representation of spontaneous speech patterns, taking steps toward documenting ancestral and emergent codes. Our findings lead to portable lessons learned including (a) the conclusion that transcriptions can benefit from a bottom-up approach targeting particular linguistic features of sociocultural relevance to the community documented and (b) the implication (for researchers developing transcriptions for other DLAs) that the principled implementation of particular software features in tandem with systematic linguistic analysis can be helpful in finding and classifying such features, especially in multilingual recordings.

scholarly journals The effect of nouns and verbs on pausing in spoken language

2020 ◽  
pp. 45-58
Author(s):  
Oleksandr Ishchenko ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Speech Production ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Pause Duration ◽  
Conversational Speech ◽  
Parts Of Speech ◽  
Expressive Speech ◽  
Part Of Speech ◽  
Statistical Measures ◽  
Relative Standard

The study analyzes speech pauses of Ukrainian. The research material is the audio texts of spontaneous conversational speech of customarily pronunciation and intonation, as well as non-spontaneous (read) speech of clear pronunciation and expressive intonation. We show a robust tendency for high frequency of pauses after nouns. It suggests that pausing is like a predictor of nouns. The frequency of pausing after verbs is slightly lower. The probability of pause location after any another part of speech is much lower. Generally, pausing can be occurred after words of any grammatical category. These findings spread virtually equally to both spontaneous conversational speech and non-spontaneous speech (clear intonated reading). The effect of nouns on pause occurrence may be caused by universal property of the human language. It is recently accepted that nouns slow down speech across structurally and culturally diverse languages. This is because nouns load cognitive processes of the speech production planning more as compared with verbs and other parts. At the same time, some Ukrainian language features also impact the pausing after nouns (these features are characteristic of other Slavic languages too). This is about a prosodic phrasing of Ukrainian according to that interpausal utterances usually are finalized by nouns (rarely by verbs or other principal parts of speech) which get most semantic load. The pauses do not follow after each noun, because they can be exploited in the speech segmentation in depends on linguistic (linguistic structure of speech), physiological (individuality of speech production, breathing), and psycholingual factors. We suggest that the priming effect as a noun- and verb-inducted psycholingual factor can significantly impact pausing in spoken language. Statistical measures show the following: 430 ms ±60% is the average pause duration of non-spontaneous clear expressive speech, 355 ms ±50% is the average pause duration of spontaneous customarily speech. Thus, pauses of non-spontaneous speech have a longer duration than of spontaneous speech. This is indicated by both the average pause duration means (ms) and the relative standard deviation of pause durations (±%). Keywords: expressive speech, spontaneous speech, phonetics, prosody, speech pauses, pausing, prepausal words, nouns, verbs.

scholarly journals ERROR ANALYSIS OF THE WRITTEN ENGLISH ESSAY AT THE THIRD SEMESTER OF ENGLISH DEPARTEMENT

2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Syarfuni
Keyword(s):  
Language Learning ◽  
English Education ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Learning Problems ◽  
Word Choice ◽  
Plural Form ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
The Third ◽  
Verb Tense ◽  
Insight Into

This study examiners error in a corpus 25 essay written by 25 participant. The participants are the third semester of who are studying at the English department; 4 male and 21 females. The have experienced approximately for one semester in subject writing. All participants are come form non-English education background and hardly communicate in English out the college. The instruments used for this study was participants’ written essay. All of error in the essays were identified and classified into various categorizations. The result of the study show that six common errors committed by the participants were singular/plural form, verb tense, word choice, preposition, subject-verb agreement and word order. These aspects of writing in English pose the most difficult problems to participants. This study has shed light on the manner in which students internalize the rules of the target language, which is English. Such an insight into language learning problems is useful to teachers because it provides information on common trouble-spots in language learning which can be used in the preparation of effective teaching materials.

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