Effect of tone sandhi on singing in Chaozhou dialect

The Chaozhou dialect is a branch of Southern Min Chinese with eight tones and a wealth of tone sandhi. In this paper we explore whether there is a tone-sandhi effect on melodic construction and tone realisation in Chaozhou song, using a corpus analysis and observational study. Outcomes from the corpus analysis show a strikingly higher rate of tone-melody matching in Sandhi dataset than that in Citation dataset. In the observational study, we found significant differences between sandhi form and citation form concerning tones /53/ and /21/, but no significant difference for tones /35/ and /213/. Results suggest that falling tones in the final position of a phrase tended to exhibit a larger contoural range, and that tones in non-final positions may be more affected by the pitches of tones that precede or follow them.

The Gender Of The Noun Of The Russian Language In Foreign Groups

At the same time, most inanimate nouns are masculine or feminine. The grammatical gender of these nouns is conditional and inexplicable as regards to their meanings. The division of inanimate nouns into masculine and feminine is determined only by their formal endings and syntactical factors. The gender of most Russian nouns can be established according to the last letter of their citation form (usually nominative singular). There are few basic rules that allow identifying the gender for the majority of Russian nouns. These rules are sufficient for those who just begin learning Russian, but it is necessary to keep in mind that they do not work for all Russian nouns and, sooner or later, a large number of deviations from these rules become evident.

‘As It Is Written’ … Where? Examining Generic Citations of Scripture in the New Testament

This article examines 33 ‘generic’ citations of Israel’s scriptures in the NT, defined as passages containing an introductory formula or other overt reference to a source, but lacking any actual quoted text. Each passage (from the gospels, Acts and Pauline epistles) is examined in terms of its citation form and particular meaning in context, and then this broader pattern of ‘generic’ citation is compared with Second Temple citation practices. Having rarely been studied collectively, these citations provide interesting insight into how the NT authors draw upon the whole of the OT – without reference to specific prooftexts – to make assertions about Israel’s history, Christology, and the church. They should be given more consideration in the broader field of biblical intertextuality.

Looking for the Kennformen of the Italian verb paradigm. An experimental study

It is generally assumed that, within an inflectional paradigm, some forms are cognitively more salient than others. Although this effect is the result of various concomitant factors to which all forms of the given paradigm concur, the existence of salient forms is crucial to assist the speaker in predicting the remaining forms of the paradigm. The notion of ‘salient form(s)’ was implicit in the so-called Kennform(en) proposed by Wolfgang Ullrich Wurzel as inflectional class marker(s). A possible candidate to salience is the so-called citation-form, i.e. the form by means of which lexemes are referred to in a dictionary, but this should be checked on a language-by-language basis. The present paper addresses the task of defining the most salient form(s) within the Italian verb paradigm. By means of three lexical decision experiments, the performance on the Infinitive (the citation-form) was compared with the performance on its most likely competitors, i.e. the Present Indicative 3SG, which is the most frequent form of most verbs, and the Present Indicative 1SG, which is selected as citation-form in some lexicographic traditions. The results indicate that the Infinitive and the Present Indicative 3SG prevail over the Present Indicative 1SG – as well as on various other forms used as controls and fillers in the experiments – but do not differ from each other. This offers an interesting insight into the organization of a complex verb paradigm, such as the Italian one. In particular, it shows that salience depends on the interaction of various morphological and psycholinguistic factors, whose relative weight is a function of the specific language considered.

Igbo dialects and the citation-form: the possibility of a standard Igbo dictionary

It is the norm in lexicography to have dictionary headwords in the standard variety of the language. But up to date, no Igbo dictionary exists in this variety. Most Igbo lexicographers have adopted the dialectal or multidialectal approach in their choice of a citation-form. The multiplicity of Igbo dialects accounts for this situation. This paper examines both sound and lexical variations in the language; describes the lexicographic problems of choice and arrangement of headwords, and discusses the suitability of the Igbo dictionary as a tool for standardizing the language. Two major sources of data were employed: the modified Ibadan 400 wordlist of basic items - used for a survey of the seven dialect zones identified by Manfredi (1989), and the dictionaries of Welmers and Welmers (1968), Williamson (1972), Igwe (1999) and Echeruo (2001). The paper demonstrated that sound and lexical variants in Igbo can be harnessed by Igbo lexicographers to produce an Igbo dictionary in the standard variety. Considering the optimal benefits derivable from a standard dictionary, the following suggestions for future Igbo lexicographers are proffered: words from different dialects of the language should be included in the dictionary; the standard forms be selected and consistently entered as headwords. Words with sound variation should be treated as sub-entries and lexical variants be cited as main-entries in their right alphabetical positions. The paper argued that, for the Igbo dictionary to fulfil its indispensable role as a language standardizing tool, the production of a Standard Igbo dictionary is imperative in Igbo lexicography and Igbo language studies.

An Acoustic Measurements of English Stops Produced by Native Yemeni Arabic Speakers of English (NYASE)

Acoustically, this paper investigates English stops consonants as produced by NYASE. The researcher examines the voicing of six stops by the use of Voice Onset Time (henceforth VOT) method. This inquiry aims to identify how similar/different the VOT patterns produced by NYASE to the VOT-literature-based patterns produced by native speakers of English. The subjects of this study are two Yemeni adults doing their Ph.D. at Annamalai University, Center of Advanced Study in Linguistics. They were chosen based on a self-evaluation test. Those subjects who evaluated themselves as having an ‘excellent’ command over English were selected to participate in this study. Knowingly, the subjects are late bilinguals, who learned English in their adulthood. Later on, the targeted sounds in word-initial position, pre-vocalically, in monosyllabic words, and in their citation form, have been recorded and analyzed following Lisker and Abramson (1964) procedures. Wide-band spectrograms cross-checked with waveforms were made, and from them, VOT was measured by ‘marking off the interval between the release of the stop and the onset of voicing’. The acoustic measurements showed that NYASE produce long lag VOT patterns for voiceless stop, long lead VOT patterns for voiced ones.

Lexemes

A lexeme is a theoretical construct that stands for the unitary meaning and shared syntactic properties of a group of word forms. A lexeme is stripped of any inflectional endings. Thus play, plays, played, and playing are all inflected forms of the lexeme play. In a similar vein, cat and cats are inflected forms of the same lexeme, i.e., cat. Although inflection creates forms of the same lexeme, derivation creates new lexemes. Thus, player is not a form of the lexeme play but is considered a different lexeme; it has its own meaning and lexical category; it is a noun. With respect to their morphology, lexemes can be either simple or complex. For example, door is simple and lemon-tree is complex. With respect to their semantics, lexemes can be monosemous or polysemous. For instance, names for days such as Saturday have only one meaning and are monosemous, whereas a lexeme such as university is polysemous; it has more than one meaning. Polysemy is often contrasted with homonymy, under which the same form is associated with two or more unrelated meanings. Polysemous senses are attributed to the same lexeme; homonyms are considered as different lexemes. Although it is usually possible to identify a phonological form that is basic to all the forms of a lexeme, this is not always the case. For example, the form kiss is shared by all forms of the lexeme kiss (e.g., kiss, kisses, kissed, kissing). There is no common phonological form, however, between all forms of the lexeme go (e.g., go, went). Lexemes and their citation form should be kept distinct since the way a lexeme is cited is merely a convention and does not bear on any crucial phonological property of that lexeme. In certain traditions, as for example in Greek, the first-person singular is used as a citation form for verbs, whereas in other traditions, as for example in French, the infinitive is used. For nouns, the nominative singular is used. The terms lexeme, lexical unit, lexical item, word, and lemma are often used interchangeably in the relevant literature and in different linguistic fields. The author gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG Collaborative Research Centre 991: “The structure of representations in language, cognition, and science,” Project C08, “The semantics of derivational morphology: A frame-based approach”).

Realisations and variants of have to: what corpora can tell us about usage-based experience

This paper explores the potential of corpus data to account for language users’ mental representations of a high-frequency item that is prone to phonetic reduction. We present an analysis of the realisations of semi-modal have to in spoken American English, which is a candidate for to-contraction (compare wanna and gotta) but has no clearly established contracted form. The study therefore focusses on the potential reduction of to and its conditioning by speech rate and phonetic environment. Three variants are extracted from the data, a citation form [hævtʊ] (or [hæftʊ]), a ‘schwa variant’ [hævtə] (or [hæftə]), and a reduced form that is akin to to-contraction [hævɾə] (‘havda’). The first two can alternate freely, but are subject to preferences based on the following sound, while the contracted form is strongly tied to rapid speech. These results suggest that the citation form and schwa variant are generally stored exemplars of have to, while ‘havda’ is more weakly represented in the system (as an outcome of on-line articulatory reduction). In this it clearly differs from conventionalised contractions such as gotta and wanna. On the methodological level, the study shows that thorough analysis of spoken corpus data provides insights into exemplar representations, though experimental hypothesis testing is also necessary.

A case for agreement

Previous research on Russian nominal inflection reports a processing advantage for the Nominative case, the citation form, in native and highly proficient nonnative speakers (Gor, Chrabaszcz, & Cook, 2017). However, it remains unclear whether this advantage is present only in single-word presentation, or it is a fundamental property of lexical storage and access. Moreover, it is unknown whether the processing costs for different cases in native and nonnative word recognition reflect the hierarchical structure of the nominal paradigm where cases have different functional load and type frequency. We report two lexical decision experiments with cross-modal morphosyntactic priming, which compare the processing of case-inflected noun targets preceded by adjective primes with ambiguous oblique-case inflections by native speakers, early (heritage) and late learners of Russian. While all groups showed a processing advantage for the citation form, only native speakers and highly proficient late learners were sensitive to the oblique-case type frequency hierarchy.