L2 Inflectional Morphology and Prosody: the Case of L1 Bengali
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L2 Inflectional Morphology and Prosody: The Case of L1 Bengali Speakers of L2 English Jacqueline Ingham A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Language and Linguistics University of Sheffield March 2019 Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to express my sincerest gratitude and appreciation to my supervisor, Dr. Kook-Hee Gil. Kook-Hee has been the most supportive, accessible and patient supervisor that I could have wished for, and has encouraged me throughout. I have learned so much and enjoyed every minute of it. Thank you. I would also like to thank my second supervisor, Dr. Ranjan Sen, especially in guiding me though my analysis of the morphophonology of Bengali and also in directing me towards Dr. Jean Russell. My thanks go to Jean for such kindly given help. I would also like to thank Kook-Hee for introducing me to, amongst others, Dr. Ivan Yuen, who provided me with such helpful insight. Many thanks also to Dr. Patrycja Strycharczuk, Dr. Robyn Orfitelli and Prof. George Tsoulas, who have all helped me along the way. I would also like to express my thanks and appreciation to my internal and external examiners, Dr. Gareth Walker and Dr. Alex Ho-Cheong Leung. There are many people who are not named in this acknowledgment who have been influential in making my time of study at the University of Sheffield so enjoyable and fulfilling. My thanks, therefore, also go to the academic and administrative staff in the School of English, who create such a positive environment and provide so much background support. I am, of course, most grateful to the participants who took part in this study, both in the UK and Bangladesh. I extend my deepest thanks to all participants and also to friends and acquaintances who helped in the recruitment process. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Marie Peppercorn, for creating the artwork for the test stimuli. Finally, I would like to say thank you to all my family and friends who have supported me throughout my studies. i Abstract This study is set in the context of the persistent omission of functional morphology by adult second language speakers, which often remains in evidence at high levels of profi- ciency and end-state grammars. The aim of this thesis is to examine the spoken suppliance of inflectional morphology by adult first language speakers of Bengali, as spoken in and around Dhaka, Bangladesh, and to do so in the phonological framework of the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis. An initial analysis of the prosodic representation of Bengali in- flectional morphology, in contrast to that in English, finds that the acquisition task for Bengali speakers should, on the one hand, be facilitated according to the availability of required second language prosodic representation to transfer to the interlanguage gram- mar. On the other, however, a mismatch is found between the minimality requirements of the prosodic word and the moraic structure below the level of the prosodic word. A small group of learners from beginner to advanced participated in a semi-spontaneous elicitation task, grammaticality judgement test and elicited imitation task. The data were analysed for evidence of suppliance of inflection (in accordance with the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis) and for signs of transfer of Bengali minimality requirements and subsequent repair on English `sub-minimal' stems. The results of the experiments in this study found that by advanced proficiency, first language Bengali speakers appeared to reap the benefits of transfer of first language prosodic representation. However, though observation of suppliance rates on different stem types during the developmental stages may at first not seem to support the outcome, depending upon the interpretation of the strong and weak versions of the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis, asymmetrical suppliance rates at lower levels may, in part, be phonologically influenced by the availability of the required prosodic representation and adjustment to the moraic structure of the second language. ii Contents 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Background to the current study . .1 1.2 Research questions . .4 1.3 Overview of the thesis . .4 2 Background to the study 6 2.1 Introduction . .6 2.2 Adult acquisition of L2 functional morphology: Some current perspectives6 2.2.1 Representational Deficit accounts . 10 2.2.2 Full Functional Representation accounts . 12 2.3 The Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis . 14 2.3.1 The prosodic representation of English tense and agreement . 17 2.3.2 Interim summary . 20 2.3.3 The prosodic representation available in Mandarin . 21 2.3.4 Interim summary . 25 2.3.5 The prosodic representation available in Turkish . 27 2.3.6 Interim summary . 31 2.4 Chapter summary . 32 3 Bengali inflectional morphology and prosodic representation 34 3.1 Introduction . 34 3.2 Bengali: Dialects, diglossia and orthography . 36 3.2.1 Dialect continuum . 37 iii 3.2.2 Sylheti dialect . 38 3.2.3 Dialectal differences: A partial review of Bengali consonant and vowel inventories . 40 3.2.3.1 Consonants . 40 3.2.3.2 Phonotactics . 41 3.2.3.3 Vowels . 43 3.2.4 Diglossia . 45 3.2.5 Orthography, transcription and the sound system in Bengali . 46 3.2.6 Interim summary . 48 3.3 Bengali: Key linguistic characteristics . 49 3.3.1 The bimoraic minimal word constraint and distribution of weight in the syllable . 49 3.3.1.1 Bengali phonetic vowel length . 52 3.3.1.2 Tense-lax distinction in English . 53 3.3.1.3 Pre-lenis lengthening in English but not Bengali . 53 3.3.2 Verbal morphology . 54 3.3.3 Vowel height assimilation . 59 3.3.4 Interim summary . 63 3.4 Prosodic representation in Bengali . 64 3.4.1 Prosodic representation pwd internal: Bengali simple past tense . 65 3.4.2 Prosodic representation pwd adjoined: Bengali present perfect and past perfect tense . 70 3.4.3 Prosodic representation: Number agreement on Bengali plural nouns 75 3.5 Verbal morphology and prosodic representation in Sylheti . 78 3.5.1 Sylheti: Simple present and simple past . 79 3.5.2 Sylheti: Present perfect tense . 81 3.5.3 Summary of analysis of Sylheti prosodic representation of inflec- tional morphology . 83 iv 3.6 An overview of Bengali prosodic representation and the suppliance of L2 English inflectional morphology . 85 3.6.1 Prosodic representation in the L1 and L2: The required and the transferable in accordance with the PTH . 86 3.6.2 Interim summary . 89 3.6.3 Suppliance of L2 inflectional morphology: Minimal word and moraic structure . 90 3.6.4 Interim summary . 94 3.6.5 Determining prosodic boundaries in L2 productions . 95 3.7 Consolidation . 98 3.8 Chapter summary . 101 4 Methodology 102 4.1 Introduction . 102 4.2 Participants: L1 Bengali speakers . 106 4.2.1 Recruitment: UK-based and Bangladesh-based participants . 106 4.2.2 Participant recruitment for Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 . 109 4.2.3 Placement test: Oxford Quick Placement Test . 109 4.2.4 Experiment 1: UK-based participants . 110 4.2.5 Experiment 1: Bangladesh-based participants . 112 4.2.6 Experiment 1: Linguistic profiles of participants . 112 4.2.7 Experiment 1: Native speaker control group . 116 4.2.8 Experiment 2: UK-based participants . 116 4.2.9 Experiment 2: Bangladesh-based participants . 117 4.2.10 Experiment 2: Linguistic profiles of participants . 117 4.2.11 Experiment 2: Native speaker control group . 119 4.3 Experiment 1: Suppliance of inflectional morphology in a spoken produc- tion and grammaticality judgement test . 120 4.3.1 Experiment 1A: Experiment design . 122 4.3.1.1 Test stimuli . 122 v 4.3.1.2 Frequency of stimuli . 123 4.3.1.3 Test token quantities . 124 4.3.1.4 Overview of data collection . 124 4.3.1.5 Recapitulation of predictions . 125 4.3.1.6 Data collection: Organisation of test stimuli and procedure127 4.3.1.7 Elicitation procedure and test stimuli . 128 4.3.1.8 Coding: Regular verbs, third singular agreement and plu- ral noun agreement . 137 4.3.1.9 Coding: Irregular simple past and word-final consonant clusters in monomorphemic words . 140 4.3.1.10 Duplicate productions . 140 4.3.1.11 Data analysis . 141 4.3.2 Experiment 1B: Grammaticality judgement test . 141 4.3.2.1 GJT: A true-false reading test . 141 4.3.2.2 Test tokens and categories . 144 4.3.2.3 Distractors and participant exclusion . 146 4.3.2.4 Data analysis . 147 4.4 Experiment 2: Prosodic boundaries and vowel lengthening . 147 4.4.1 Experiment design . 148 4.4.1.1 Test stimuli and categories . 148 4.4.1.2 Spoken tasks and stimuli . 150 4.4.1.3 The recording procedure . 153 4.4.1.4 Analysis . 153 4.4.1.5 Data analysis . 155 4.4.1.6 Excluded data . 155 4.5 Chapter summary . 157 5 Results for Experiment 1 158 5.1 Introduction . 158 5.2 Background to the method of statistical analysis . 159 vi 5.2.1 Working correlation matrix . 160 5.2.2 Reporting the goodness of fit . 163 5.2.3 Probability: Sequential Sidak . 163 5.2.4 Data preparation . 163 5.2.4.1 A measure of proficiency and the Oxford Quick Placement Test............................. 163 5.2.4.2 Log frequency for the frequency variable . 167 5.2.4.3 Reporting standard error . 168 5.3 Experiment 1: Transfer of L1 prosodic representation . 169 5.3.1 Overall suppliance of inflectional morphology . 170 5.3.2 A recapitulation of the predictions .