Mechanisms of Grammaticalization in the Variation of Negative Question Tags

This paper presents an investigation of the extent to which Heine’s (2003) mechanisms of grammaticalization—erosion (phonetic reduction), decategorialization (loss of morpho-syntactic properties), desemanticization (semantic bleaching) and extension (context expansion)—are evident in the variation of negative question tags in three varieties of British English spoken in Glasgow, Tyneside, and Salford. The study considers the variation in terms of three types of variant—full (e.g., isn’t it), reduced (e.g., int it), and coalesced (e.g., innit)—which each represent a stage in the erosion process. Quantitative variationist analysis of informal conversational data shows that erosion of negative tags occurs to different degrees in each of the three communities. The locality with the least tag erosion—Tyneside—displays particularly strong social stratification in the variation that suggests a change in progress led by younger men. However, there is little to no evidence of decategorialization in the negative tags, nor does variation in tag meaning correlate with phonetic form in a consistent manner. The results therefore suggest that erosion and desemanticization/extension do not occur in lockstep as these constructions grammaticalize, while decategorialization occurs at a later stage in the change.

Phonetic and phonological vowel reduction in Brazilian Portuguese

The present study examines the phonetic and phonological status of vowel reduction in Brazilian Portuguese. In order to compare the effects of duration and metrical structure, we tested the influence of duration on the realization of /a/ in five prosodic positions: word-initial pretonic, word-medial pretonic, tonic, word-medial posttonic, and word-final posttonic. The results revealed that, while both phonetic duration and prosodic position had effects on F1 values for /a/, the categorical effect of prosodic position was much stronger and more reliable. In particular, F1 values for /a/ were best predicted by a two-way distinction between posttonic and non-posttonic syllable positions. Correlations between a vowel’s duration and its F1 frequency were statistically significant but generally weak in all positions. We argue that these findings suggest that vowel reduction in Brazilian Portuguese primarily reflects phonological patterning rather than phonetic undershoot, although there was also evidence for some amount of undershoot. Brazilian Portuguese can therefore be said to have a mixed system of phonological and phonetic reduction. The present study discusses the results in the context of Brazilian Portuguese metrical organization, sound change, and the relation between phonetics and phonology.

Phonetic reduction and paradigm uniformity effects in spontaneous speech

Recent work on the acoustic properties of complex words has found that morphological information may influence the phonetic properties of words, e.g. acoustic duration. Paradigm uniformity has been proposed as one mechanism that may cause such effects. In a recent experimental study Seyfarth et al. (2017) found that the stems of English inflected words (e.g. frees) have a longer duration than the same string of segments in a homophonous mono-morphemic word (e.g. freeze), due to the co-activation of the longer articulatory gesture of the bare stem (e.g. free). However, not all effects predicted by paradigm uniformity were found in that study, and the role of frequency-related phonetic reduction remained inconclusive. The present paper tries to replicate the effect using conversational speech data from a different variety of English (i.e. New Zealand English), using the QuakeBox Corpus (Walsh et al. 2013). In the presence of word-form frequency as a predictor, stems of plurals were not found to be significantly longer than the corresponding strings of comparable non-complex words. The analysis revealed, however, a frequency-induced gradient paradigm uniformity effect: plural stems become shorter with increasing frequency of the bare stem.

The Grammaticalization of the Spanish Construction lo que pasa es que: From Lexical Reference to Subjectification

The construction lo que pasa es que ‘what happens is that’ is a Spanish discourse marker that was originally a pseudo-cleft construction. Before becoming grammaticalized, the verb pasar contained its full lexical meaning ‘to happen,’ but later evolved into a fixed expression losing its lexical meaning and acquiring an implicit contrastive and causal meaning. The present study aims to describe the construction’s evolution on the path of grammaticalization in relation to Traugott’s (1989) three semantic-pragmatic tendencies. In addition, a Usage-based Theory approach is employed in order to describe some of the formal aspects of the construction. Using two corpora, CORDE and Corpus del Español, all instances of the construction were located and analyzed with regard to function and usage in context. Results indicate that the construction was first used in the 16th Century and that its evolution as lexical > concessive > epistemic is in line with Traugott’s tendencies. Mechanisms of change such as chunking and phonetic reduction and loss of compositionality and analyzability, as well as increase in overall frequency are also discussed in relation to this construction, lending further support to Usage-based theory.

Grammaticalization and phonological reidentification in White Hmong

The “dynamic coevolution of meaning and form” of Bybee et al. (1994: 20) has been the subject of significant discussion as regards the languages of Mainland Southeast Asia. However, little work has focused on the mechanisms through which this coevolution occurs when it does surface in these languages. The current work considers phonological reidentification resulting from phonetic reduction in White Hmong (Hmong-Mien, Laos) involving four morphemes, ntshai/ntshe ‘maybe’, saib/seb ‘see if/whether; comp.cfact’, puag/pug ‘locl;ints’, and niaj/nej ‘each, every’. These morphemes exhibit an alternation where a rime is phonologically reidentified in a manner consistent with typical phonetic underarticulation patterns, such that an exemplar-model approach (Pierrehumbert 2001, inter alia) provides a straightforward explanation. Furthermore, the data show that the phonological reidentification patterns found in White Hmong exhibit parallels in other languages in the region, confirming that an areal approach to grammaticalization provides greater descriptive adequacy cross-linguistically as regards this phenomenon.

Grammaticalization and language contact in a discourse-pragmatic change in progress: The spread of innit in London English

This variationist analysis investigates the development and spread of innit as an invariant tag in London English. The sociolinguistic distribution of innit in a socially stratified corpus of vernacular speech suggests that the form's emergence and spread were initiated and propelled system-internally through changes associated with grammaticalization. Frequency triggered phonetic reduction of isn't it to innit; loss of syntactic-semantic usage constraints and growing functional versatility enabled innit to seize the range of contexts and functions of grammatically-dependent tags (e.g. didn't you, weren't we), virtually ousting these from the system of negative-polarity interrogative tags. Examination of cross-linguistic data and comparisons with relevant pre- and non-contact varieties indicate multiple language contact and grammatical replication may have played an ancillary role. I flag some challenges of establishing contact effects in discourse-pragmatic change, and propose that the promotion of innit for invariant use was governed by its low salience and social indexicality of localness. (Innit, question tags, (Multicultural) London English, grammaticalization, language contact, grammatical replication)*

GRAMMATICALIZATION OF NOUNS IN JORDANIAN ARABIC: EVIDENCE FROM ʃIKIL AND OMIR

The current study aims at exploring the grammaticalization of the nouns ʃikil 'shape' and omir 'age' in Jordanian Arabic. The data were collected from Jordanian T.V. series and interviews with native speakers of Jordanian Arabic. The sample of the study consisted of 300 tokens of ʃikil and 200 tokens of omir. The researcher collected the data, then he analysed the functions of these two words. The study found out that ʃikil was used 100 times as a noun meaning 'shape', and 200 times as an evidential particle. Besides, omir was also used as a noun 60 times and 140 times as a negative polarity item. The findings of the study showed that ʃikil has one lexical meaning 'shape', and it evolved by the process of grammaticalization into an evidential particle. ʃikil underwent the process of semantic bleaching, since it lost its content meaning and developed to serve a grammatical function of evidentially. Bedsides, it was decategorized as it lost the grammatical features of nouns, i.e. it cannot be pluralized and cannot accept definite articles. Also ʃikil lost its stress as part of phonetic reduction. Similarly, omir has one lexical meaning 'age' and developed into a negative polarity item. Omir was affected by the process of semantic bleaching and decategorization as it was developed from its original meaning as a noun meaning 'age' into a negative polarity item. Additionally, omir underwent the process of phonetic reduction as it lost stress. The study found out that ʃikil and omir underwent three stages of grammaticalization: semantic bleaching, decategorization, and phonetic reduction.

Phonetic Reduction of Intervocalic [w] in Contemporary Polish

Przedstawione w artykule wyniki analizy akustycznej opisujączęstotliwość, z jakąmiędzywokaliczna głoska [w] jest usuwana ze strumienia mowy. Analizie poddano wypowiedzi 20 rodzimych użytkowników języka polskiego, których poproszono o opowiedzenie fabuły filmu, w którym głównąpostaciąjest kobieta. Wyniki analizy akustycznej wskazują, że w ok. 25% przypadków międzywokaliczne [w] nie jest wymawiane, jeśli stanowi element końcówki fleksyjnej czasownika, np. -ała, -iła, -yła. W takich przypadkach trajektorie formantów, jak równieżich intensywność, nie wskazywały na obecnośćpółsamogłoski [w] pomiędzy samogłoskami lub zmiany te były tak niewielkie, że nie wywoływały akustycznego wrażenia głoski [w]. W badaniu nie stwierdzono przypadków usunięcia [w], jeśli dźwięk ten znajdowałsięw podstawie słowotwórczej, np. w słowach skała, szkoła. ABSTRACT This paper reports the results of an acoustic study concerned with deletion of intervocalic [w] in contemporary Polish. The data for analysis were obtained by asking twenty monolingual native speakers of Polish, ten males and ten females, to tell the story of a film or a book whose protagonist was female. The results revealed that approximately 25% of the sound combinations in question were reduced phonetically to a vowel geminate. In cases of deletion, the formant trajectories of the examined sound sequences either did not show any signs of the glide or the expected drop in formant frequencies throughout the glide section is so slight that it is rather unlikely to produce an auditory impression of a [w] sound. Importantly, in the analysed recordings, w-dropping affects only the glide elements found in various verb forms, while intervocalic [w] appears to be resistant to deletion in the few cases where the glide constitutes an element of the stem, e.g. in the nouns skała ‘rock’and szkoła ‘school’.