scholarly journals Grammar trumps lexicon: typologically inconsistent weight effects are not generalized

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guilherme Duarte Garcia
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Comprehensive Review ◽  
Syllable Weight ◽  
Negative Effect ◽  
Heavy Syllable

In the vast majority of languages that are sensitive to weight, syllable weight is binary, i.e., a syllable is either light or heavy (see Gordon (2007) for a comprehensive review). In suchlanguages, heavy syllables are more likely to attract stress. This is the case for Latin and English, for example. As well, if a language is weight-sensitive, weight cannot have a negative effect on stress, by definition. In Portuguese, however, a lexical pattern exists where a heavy syllable seems to repel stress. In this paper, I show that such a pattern is not generalized by native speakers.

scholarly journals When lexical statistics and the grammar conflict: learning and repairing weight effects on stress

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guilherme Duarte Garcia
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Opposite Pattern ◽  
Positive Weight ◽  
Syllable Weight ◽  
Lexical Statistics ◽  
Impact Stress ◽  
Negative Effect ◽  
Weight Effect ◽  
The Right

In weight-sensitive languages, stress is influenced by syllable weight. As a result, heavy syllables should attract, not repel, stress. The Portuguese lexicon, however, presents a case where weight seems to negatively impact stress: antepenultimate stress is more frequent in light antepenultimate syllables than in heavy ones. This pattern is phonologically unexpected, and appears to contradict the typology of weight and stress: it is a case where lexical statistics and the grammar conflict. Portuguese also contains gradient, not categorical, weight effects, which weaken as we move away from the right edge of the word. In this paper, I examine how native speakers’ grammars capture these subtle weight effects, and whether the negative antepenultimate weight effect is learned or repaired. I show that speakers learn the gradient weight effects in the language, but do not learn the unnatural negative effect. Instead, speakers repair this pattern, and generalize a positive weight effect to all syllables in the stress domain. This study thus provides empirical evidence that speakers may not only ignore unnatural patterns, but also learn the opposite pattern.

scholarly journals Arguments for a Privative L Tone in Northern Tepehuan

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos Ivanhoe Gil Burgoin
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Tone ◽  
Tonal Language ◽  
Stress Assignment ◽  
Syllable Weight ◽  
System L ◽  
Low Tone ◽  
Low Constraint ◽  
Heavy Syllable ◽  
Tonal System

This paper proposes that Northern Tepehuan is a tonal language with just one lexical tone 'low tone' and is therefore a privative tonal system. L tone is sufficient to explain the pitch contrasts in the language and also necessary to explain the "inconsistencies" of stress assignment. Stress is normally predictable from the size of the word, from syllable-weight, and is cued by a H* intonational tone. Nonetheless, in words that do not obey the Stress-to-Weight constraint, it could be argued that stress is displaced from the heavy syllable by virtue of a high-ranked *Align(Head/Low) constraint that prohibits the placement of stress on a syllable with a lexical L. The L tone also explains why the H* intonational tone can be displaced from stressed syllables.

The role of acoustic cues in the development of (non-)target-like second-language prosodic representations

2010 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-114
Author(s):  
Annie Tremblay ◽  
Nathan Owens
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Acoustic Cues ◽  
Canadian French ◽  
L2 Learners ◽  
Primary Word ◽  
Heavy Syllable ◽  
Stress Patterns

AbstractThis study investigates the acquisition of English (primary) word stress by native speakers of Canadian French, with focus on the trochaic foot and the alignment of its head with heavy syllables. L2 learners and native English speakers produced disyllabic and trisyllabic nonsense nouns. The participants with consistent stress patterns were grouped according to their prosodic grammar, and their productions were analyzed acoustically. The results indicate that the L2 learners who failed to align the head of the trochaic foot with the heavy syllable realized stress with higher pitch. Conversely, the L2 learners who aligned the head of the trochaic foot with the heavy syllable realized non-initial stress by lengthening the syllable. Surprisingly, the native speakers produced higher pitch on the initial syllable irrespective of stress, and they used length to realize stress oh the heavy syllable. These findings suggest that L2 learners may have reached different prosodic grammars as a result of attending to distinct acoustic cues to English stress.

scholarly journals Syllable weight and duration: A rhyme/intervals comparison

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anya Lunden
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Interval Data ◽  
Vowel Duration ◽  
Syllable Weight ◽  
Word Position ◽  
Proportional Increase ◽  
Interval Weight

Steriade (2012) proposed intervals as a more appropriate syllable weight domain than rhymes. This study explores how interval weight cashes out as duration across word positions and compares this to a rhyme-based account. The data reported on in Lunden (2013), from native speakers of Norwegian (a language in which (C)VC syllables are heavy only non-finally) is reanalyzed with intervals. Lunden found that syllable rhymes in all three positions, if taken as a percentage of the average V rhyme in that word position, fell into a coherent pattern for weight. It is shown that interval durations allow for a similar, albeit less robust, pattern. The data from Lunden’s (2013) perception experiment that tested the correlation between increased vowel duration and listeners’ classification of syllable weight is also recast with interval durations, and the importance of the proportional increase over the raw increase, originally found for the rhyme data, is found to hold for the interval data. Thus, taking intervals as the weight domain is shown to result in reasonable durational relations between interval weights, although interval durations show less separation between some light and heavy units than the rhyme durations do. 

scholarly journals TOWARDS THE PROBLEM OF THE UNJUSTIFIED USE OF ANGLICISMS IN THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE (experimental study)

2020 ◽  
pp. 74-79
Author(s):  
Виктория Михайловна Мельникова
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Study ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Russian Language ◽  
Psychological Aspect ◽  
Source Language ◽  
Foreign Origin ◽  
Negative Effect ◽  
Everyday Communication ◽  
The Russian Language

В статье рассматривается психологический аспект использования английских заимствований в русском языке. Обсуждается оправданность и уместность использования англицизмов, а также рассматриваются причины, по которым носители языка-рецептора предпочитают слова иностранного происхождения русским в ситуациях повседневного общения. Приводятся и анализируются результаты экспериментального исследования, направленного на выяснение положительного или отрицательного эффекта, который оказывают англицизмы как языковой феномен на развитие и обогащение словарного состава русского языка. The article deals with the psychological aspect of using English borrowings in the Russian language. The justification and relevance of using anglicisms are discussed, as well as the reasons why native speakers of the receptor language prefer words of foreign origin to the Russian ones in situations of everyday communication. The article contains the results of the experimental study aimed at finding out the positive or negative effect that anglicisms as a language phenomenon have on the development and enrichment of the vocabulary of the Russian language. The purpose of the article is to determine the influence of mass borrowing of the vocabulary from the source language on the lexical system of the receiving language.

scholarly journals The stability of word stress across Mixean languages

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carmen Jany
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Studies ◽  
Stress System ◽  
Stress Assignment ◽  
Edge Orientation ◽  
Syllable Weight ◽  
Word Stress ◽  
Phonological Structure ◽  
Heavy Syllable ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Stress Patterns

<p>Word stress patterns have been widely discussed for individual languages and in typological work (Van der Hulst 2010), but there are very few comparative studies within language families and across dialects. This paper examines stress patterns in Mixean varieties and how they relate to the phonological distinctions among these varieties. The term ‘variety’ is applied here as in a number of cases it has yet to be determined whether a variety constitutes its own language or a dialect.</p><p>Word stress does not vary in Mixean languages, always falling on the rightmost heavy root syllable, but roots often represent the only heavy syllable(s) in a word. As a result, syllable weight plays only a minimal role in stress assignment. Rather, the stress system rests upon edge-orientation and morphological conditioning. If it relied to a greater extent on the phonological structure of words, some deviation would be expected, given that variation among Mixean languages is primarily phonologically based. This paper demonstrates how weight-sensitive stress patterns can remain stable across related languages even in light of major phonological differences.</p>

scholarly journals Do Errors Matter? The effects of actual and perceived L2 English errors in writing on native and non-native English speakers’ evaluations of the text, the writer and the persuasiveness of the text

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brigitte Planken ◽  
Frank Van Meurs ◽  
Karin Maria
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Design ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
L2 Writing ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Significant Negative Effect ◽  
Text Quality ◽  
Negative Effect ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Insight Into

Building on studies of L1 error effects in writing, the present study aimed to gain further insight into thecommunicative consequences of actual and perceived L2 errors in writing by investigating their effects beyond theevaluation of text quality. No studies of L2 writing would appear to have investigated the impact of errors onperception of the author and communicative outcomes. We investigated the effect of L2 English errors in persuasivewriting on native and non-native English speakers’ evaluation of the text, of the author, and of the persuasiveness ofthe text. Selected, authentic, errors from a corpus of petitions written in English by Dutch native speakers wereincluded in a stimulus text. Two versions of the text were presented to (non-teacher) participants in a 2 (errors vs. noerrors) by 2 (native vs. non-native judges) between-subject experimental design. It was found that, while actual errorhad no effect on the participants’ evaluation of the text, the author, or the persuasiveness of the text, perceived error(that is, if participants thought the text contained errors) had a significant negative effect on text attractiveness andthe author’s trustworthiness, friendliness and competence. Thus, the findings would suggest that perceived errorplays an important role in how non-teacher judges evaluate a text and its author, and, more generally, that suchjudges would seem to use their own standards of correctness against which to judge writing and the writer, regardlessof whether the judges are native or non-native speakers.

Social Motives Predict Loneliness During a Developmental Transition

2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 145-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jana Nikitin ◽  
Alexandra M. Freund
Keyword(s):  
Social Relationships ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Social Avoidance ◽  
Social Approach ◽  
Social Motives ◽  
Developmental Transitions ◽  
Avoidance Motivation ◽  
Negative Effect ◽  
Low Levels

Abstract. Establishing new social relationships is important for mastering developmental transitions in young adulthood. In a 2-year longitudinal study with four measurement occasions (T1: n = 245, T2: n = 96, T3: n = 103, T4: n = 85), we investigated the role of social motives in college students’ mastery of the transition of moving out of the parental home, using loneliness as an indicator of poor adjustment to the transition. Students with strong social approach motivation reported stable and low levels of loneliness. In contrast, students with strong social avoidance motivation reported high levels of loneliness. However, this effect dissipated relatively quickly as most of the young adults adapted to the transition over a period of several weeks. The present study also provides evidence for an interaction between social approach and social avoidance motives: Social approach motives buffered the negative effect on social well-being of social avoidance motives. These results illustrate the importance of social approach and social avoidance motives and their interplay during developmental transitions.

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