Session 1 Native American Linguistics Ballroom A

Rachael Nez University of California, Davis Language Maintenance Thru Community Music: Unconventional Methods to Heritage Language Learning

Music encourages language learning in children while simultaneously teaching stories of culture and tradition. Heritage language learning, often framed within a western educational framework, follows colonial language policies. As a result, language policy restricts language learning to a classroom and textbook based curriculum. This method emphasizes the importance of language learning, however, sends a message to youth that language learning only happens with in a school setting.

This presentation looks at critiques into heritage language learning providing insight into Native American language policies and educational curriculum, identifying the absences of music. My intentions with this presentation is to demonstrate current methods utilized for heritage language learning and challenge communities to consider music as a tool for sharing language and culture, particular with preschool aged children. I ask, in what ways can music support heritage language learning? Can music aid in the protection and maintenance of our languages? Does heritage language need to be taught only in a classroom? These are the question to be considered.

Sim Hay Kin Jack University of California, Davis How to do Language Research As/In/With My Community

The Colville Confederated Tribes (CCT), located in Central Washington are composed of twelve tribes: the Chelan, Chief Joseph Band of Nez Perce, Colville, Entiat, Lakes, Palus, Methow, Moses-Columbia, Nespelem, Okanogan, San Poil, and Wenatchee. The 12 bands of the Colville Indian reservation traditionally spoke/speak four primary languages, Colville-Okanagan, Moses- Columbia, Nez Perce, and Sahaptin.

During the summers of 2016 and 2017, I worked with the CCT to conduct research with tribal members. Having been away for some time, I felt it pertinent to return to my community to re- establish connections for my future dissertation work (A History of Language Policy and Practice on the Colville Indian Reservation). The research questions this presentation seeks to address are as follows: (1) How does the Colville Indian Reservation ascertain community member attitudes/ideologies in regard to research conducted on the reservation; (2) What is the best way for community researchers and allied scholars to gather traditional knowledge from the elders in order to benefit the community?

This presentation seeks to inform the field of linguistics, and help heal those communities who often forgotten after “data” was harvested. Over the course of this presentation I will share what I learned during my time back home, and hope that allied scholars and other tribal researchers will find my project applicable to future language documentation and revitalization work.

Researchers cannot conduct research with community members without being conscious of the communities history. My community remains apprehensive about research, having long since determined that researchers come to extract information without contributing projects of resources that benefit the community. Our fluent heritage language speakers were especially disinclined to share, operating under the assumption that we were only there to take. It took repeated visits before some chose to speak with us. Despite some reluctance, my community is supportive of research conducted by tribal members in consultation with the membership. During this presentation I will share the results of my community based research, and open new dialogues about changing language research paradigms for the benefit of Endangered Language communities.

When we employ Indigenous re-search methodologies, “those re-search methods, practices and approaches that are guided by Indigenous worldviews, beliefs, values, principles, processes and contexts” allow Indigenous researchers and our projects and deliverables to move our communities forward in a better way. (Absolon, 2011, 22)

Crystal Richardson University of California, Davis Linguistic Convention & Endangered Language Sovereignty: “To gloss, or to gloss over?”

Decade after decade and across generations Karuk youth have discovered their language and pursued L1 Karuk language acquisition, and L2 fluency in their mother tongue. Despite this, the Karuk language is labeled by the Ethnologue as “moribund,” and Karuk has officially fallen into this category for fifty years. As a speaker and teacher of the Karuk language myself, and now also as a second year Linguistics PhD student, I embrace that my language is in the state of Keeping Vital.

By returning to our Indigenous processes and definitions, rather than accepting the deficit-based definitions projected into and upon our extant language communities (by authorities like the Ethnologue), Karuk speakers are a part of the movement towards Endangered Language Sovereignty. “[Indigenous] knowledge need no longer be subsumed or assimilated into Western knowledge systems, but can stand side by side with other knowledge systems as a viable expression of spatial/temporal engagements” (Louis, 2017, 174).

This presentation seeks to demonstrate how Keeping Vital has occurred in the Karuk language community by looking at: 1) How Karuk educators have used local research frameworks to guide the Indigenous linguistic study of Karuk in its spoken and written form(s); 2) Who defines the TERMS of Existence when it comes to Linguistic institutions and the labels imposed on today’s extant Karuk language community? The paper being presented explores these fundamental concepts using a variety of qualitative data including: interviews, survey information, field notes, and pedagogic materials.

“As Indigenous Identities develop on a global scale and Indigenous engagements with [Academic Institutions and their representatives] continue, the role of language in maintaining local identities and in accessing and participating in discourses of power, social transformation and resistance becomes crucial” (Patrick, 2012).

Psycholinguistics and Semantics Conference Room A

Harvey Zhuang Qiu University of California, Davis A study on the epistemic strength of nested epistemic vocabulary

Epistemic modality indicates speakers’ commitment to the truth value of the proposition expressed, and serves as an important means of modifying the strength of an utterance. Sometimes, more than one epistemic lexical items can be used in a single clause, such as “he may possibly have forgotten” in English. This phenomenon is referred to as the “nested epistemic vocabulary”. In English, the nested epistemic vocabulary is not uncommon, especially during informal oral communication. However, questions related to the processing of nested epistemic vocabulary remain largely unsolved. This study provides an initial attempt to understand the processing of nested epistemic vocabulary by focusing on the epistemic strength of different epistemic expressions. An online possibility judgment task is conducted, collecting data on native English speakers’ understanding of different categories of nested epistemic expressions. Data analysis based on dependent T-tests shows that the epistemic strength of the non-harmonic nested epistemic expression lies in between the epistemic strength of the component modals. In general, the order of the two nested epistemic modals does not have a significant effect on the overall epistemic strength. However, when the epistemic strength of the component modals contrasts sharply to each other, a change in word order may produce a change in the overall epistemic strength expressed by the nested epistemic expression. This result provides insights into questions related to the scope of the nested epistemic vocabulary.

Shannon Grippando University of Arizona Equal but for the page: Effects from Orthographic Length on Speech Duration in a Novel Word Learning Task

Recent research has found a correlation between the number orthographic units and speech duration. For example, the duration of clique’s coda /k/ is produced significantly longer than click’s coda /k/, independent of word frequency (Brewer, 2008). A similar effect was also found in Japanese, with two-character homophones produced significantly longer than one- character homophones (e.g. 海苔>糊, /nori/) (Grippando, 2018). However, the number of pen strokes in a single-character homophones did not have a significant effect on speech duration (e.g. 城, 9 strokes, and 白, 5 strokes, /ʃiro/). Thus, this effect is not limited to languages with alphabets, but, so far, effects have only been observed across whole-unit orthographic differences (e.g. letters/characters) and not among internal orthographic differences (strokes). The current study investigates whether any increase in whole orthographic units affects speech duration, even in unfamiliar orthographic systems. Preliminary data from 5 English- speaking participants has been collected, but more participants are being recruited. Participants learned pronunciations of 5 pairs of disyllabic novel homophones and picture associations. Participants then learned how to write each word in a novel logographic system: one homophone was written with a single character and its sister with two characters (e.g. ꈸ vs ꆳꈨ). Participants’ word productions were recorded, and whole-word durations were measured. Because current subject numbers, statistical analyses have not yet been conducted. However, a consistent pattern has emerged. Before orthographic training, whole-word durations between homophones does not appear to follow a specific pattern (Fig. 1). However, after training, 2- symbol homophones are curiously produced shorter than 1-symbol homophones (Fig. 2). This pattern is opposite of previous studies. More data will be included in the final analysis as it is collected. Present results will be discussed in relation to syllable-mapping effects and language-learning strategies that may favor two-symbol homophones, consequently speeding-up production.

Figure 1: Duration Before Orthographic Training 600

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Whole Word Duration (milliseconds) 350 Set 1 Set 2 Set 3 Set 4 Set 5 Homophone Sets

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Figure 2: Duration After Orthographic Training 500 480 460 440 420 400 380 360 Set 1 Set 2 Set 3 Set 4 Set 5

Whole Word Duration (milliseconds) Homophone Sets 2 Symbols 1 Symbol References

Brewer, J. B. (2008). Phonetic reflexes of orthographic characteristics in lexical representation. The University of Arizona. Grippando, S. 2018. More characters, longer speech: Effects from orthographic complexity in Japanese. Proceedings from the 2017 Texas Linguistics Society Conference.

Matthew Reese University of California, Davis AMR Parsing: A Neural Network Approach

This project explores the effectiveness of using sequence-to-sequence neural network modeling techniques to translate natural language data into a meta-linguistic model of formal semantics known as Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR). Recently, with the steady improvement of translation technologies employing machine learning neural network models, researchers in the field of computational linguistics have begun to generalize these same tools to perform tasks involving translating atypical and non-natural linguistic data. This research was conducted using the open-source neural machine translation toolkit OpenNMT provided as a collaboration of Harvard NLP and SYSTRAN. The AMR data was taken from Abstract Meaning Representation Annotation Release 2.0 (K. Knight et.al.) and underwent a linearization and tokenization process which formatted the data so that it could be used to train an OpenNMT model and provide evaluable translation output. The AMR output of the English-to-AMR translation model was evaluated using the Smatch (semantic match) tool which has been used to evaluate AMR parsing and producing methods in contemporary literature. Because the OpenNMT neural modeling tool does not constrain outputs to match a particular format, Smatch was only able to evaluate the lines of the resulting translations which were well- formed AMRs. However, for those that were evaluable, maximum F-scores (Smatch scores) from our preliminary dataset ranged from 0.25 to 0.61 depending on the sub-dataset. In the past five years, studies employing AMR production and parsing techniques have produced Smatch scores in the range of 0.5 to 0.65 for comparison.

Spanish as a Heritage Language Conference Room B

Melissa Patiño-Vega University of California, Davis Developing an Academic Biliteracy among Heritage Language Learners

Due to the constant contact between English and Spanish in the US, a natural bilingual context flourishes in which new linguistic innovations emerge. Even though these two languages coexist, the political, economic, and social capital that English represents accords it a dominant status over Spanish, resulting in patterns of language loss among first- and second-generation Latino immigrants. To promote Spanish language maintenance among US Latinos, many researchers have recommended the development of academic literacy skills in students’ heritage language (Colombi, 2015; Colombi & Magaña, 2013). Although many US universities have programs for heritage speakers of Spanish, little is known regarding how effective such courses are in promoting biliteracy. This study seeks to provide evidence regarding how students in heritage language programs develop academic skills over time and what factors might be related to their biliteracy development.

This study tracks in a longitudinal manner, the development of academic literacy in oral and written discourse among heritage language learners enrolled in the Spanish for heritage speakers course series (SPA 31-33) at the University of California, Davis. Students with three different backgrounds are considered: (1) students who had received formal instruction in another Spanish-speaking country, (2) those who had taken previous Spanish for heritage speakers courses during secondary education, (3) and those who had never taken a Spanish for heritage speakers course. Using Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday 1985, 1994), academic development is analyzed vis-a-vis lexical density and lexical- grammatical features (nominalization and combination clauses). Because heritage language learners often battle linguistic insecurity (Colombi & Roca, 2003; Potowski, 2005; Villa, 1998), the study also analyzes to what extent student confidence level increased (if at all) during the academic year. Quantitative and qualitative data gathered reveal an increase in students’ academic writing and oral Spanish development as well as their language confidence. Key words: Heritage Speakers, biliteracy, Systemic Functional Linguistics

Lorraine Ramos University of California, Merced Spanish Heritage Language Students' use of Metaphor in University Level Writing

The question of heritage language learners in foreign language classrooms has been widely debated in second language education, especially with Spanish in a U.S. Professors like Guadalupe Valdés has brought pedagogical focus to Spanish heritage language students in order to retain, develop and maintain their first language. While previous research has concentrated on advanced Spanish students and writing development, few have examined students use of conceptual metaphors within autobiographical linguistic narratives. Pairing genre theory from Systemic Functional Linguistics with metaphor theory by Lakoff and

Johnson, my paper will examine the metaphors used by 3rd and 4th year university Spanish students within the narrative genre from a corpus of 16, 091 words. I argue that heritage language students use a variety of bicultural metaphors, transferred from both languages to conceptualize their linguistic development, in addition to using metaphor in specific narrative stages as a literary strategy. The use of conceptual metaphors in heritage language learners has yet to be studied and can be connected to second language learning. In conclusion, this study, by closely examining the function of student discourse through their multicultural metaphoric competence will provide instructors important insights on how to further students’ writing development in the target language.

Evelyn Medrano, Genesis Vera, Giselle Barbosa, Daniela Guerra, Kristen Ellis University of California, Santa Barbara Testing the Simple View of Reading: Spanish-English Bilinguals in California

Reading comprehension is crucial for school success in late elementary school as students progressed from learning to read to reading to learn. In some cases, children learn to read in their second language (L2) – the most prestigious language – before learning to read in the first language (L1) – usually less prestigious. According to Cook (2003), there is a reciprocal relationship between first and second language skills and he suggested that L1 and L2 relations are bidirectional and provided evidence of L2 influences on the L1 in highly skilled users of each language examined. Evidence examining relations between specific skills suggests that L2 literacy builds on existing levels of language abilities and literacy skills in the L1 (Durgunoglu 2002; Geva and Wang 2001). The Simple View of Reading (Gough and Tunmer 1986) suggests that reading comprehension includes two basic components: word recognition (decoding) and language comprehension. In this case study (N=10), we ask which components of listening comprehension are related to reading comprehension in the Simple View of Reading by testing variables such as vocabulary, syntax, and morphology. Participants are Spanish-English children from grade 4 to grade 6 from Southern California. Furthermore, we consider social factors that may affect bilingual language development in young immigrants such as acculturation, motivation to learn, and socioeconomic status. We expect that multiple components contribute to reading skills development, but results will be discussed in order to identify which components are most strongly related to the Simple View of Reading, while considering the social factors that might affect reading skills.

Durgunoğlu, A. Y. (2002). Cross-linguistic transfer in literacy development and implications for language learners. Annals of Dyslexia, 52, 189 -204.

Geva, E, Wang, M (2001). The development of basic reading skills in children: A cross- language perspective. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 21: 182204.

Gough, P. and Tunmer, W. (1986). Decoding, reading, and reading disability. Remedial and Special Education, 7, 6-10.

Technology and Language Learning Ballroom A

Jenny Nadaner Stanford University L2 Learner Autonomy & Technology Mediated Task-Based Pedagogy in the Synchronous Online Spanish Language Classroom

The present descriptive study compares the role of “flipped classroom” pedagogy in the Spanish L2 synchronous online and face-to-face classrooms and its implications for Second Language Acquisition. Recent work suggests myriad benefits afforded by the flipped classroom teaching method (Bergmann, J., & Sams, A., 2012) to optimize the classroom learning experience for students, providing a foundation for cultivating intrinsic motivation to pursue further learning. Previous studies highlight prime examples of the advantages of the flipped model such as increased student learning opportunities (Gannod, Berg & Helmick, 2008) and heightened efficacy in the use of class time (Cole, 2009).

In our study, we demonstrate how a flipped pedagogical approach promotes greater learner agency, interpersonal learning opportunities, and teaching moments in both distance-learning and face-to-face Spanish L2 classrooms. Specifically, we explore the following questions: What interpersonal learning opportunities and teaching moments are compromised in the flipped L2 classroom? Is it a compromise or a shift in the communicative classroom paradigm? How can we "teach" students to learn in a meaningful way in both the synchronous online and face-to-face classroom and through asynchronous online or hard copy course materials?

To address these questions, we provide a qualitative study of two Control and two Experimental groups of students enrolled in intermediate second-year university-level Spanish classes at Stanford University (synchronous online classroom) and Pitzer College (face-to-face classroom). Recordings of actual live classes along with sample student work will serve as a springboard for a discussion on how diverse pedagogical approaches and methodologies (both low and high tech) can be tailored to work within the flipped model. Through the analysis of the tasks completed by both the Control and Experimental groups, we hope to facilitate fresh perspectives for the customizable use and benefits of the flipped pedagogical model in the context of CALL.

Leslie Banes University of California, Davis Computer-based Math Assessments for Bilingual Students: Issues of Equity and Validity

Math tests, including high-stakes standardized tests, are now commonly administered on computers with textboxes in which students write mathematical explanations. However, past research has defined mathematical communication as multi-semiotic because it includes language, symbols, and visual representations (O’Halloran, 2005). Because textboxes only facilitate language use, the current practice of assessing mathematical writing via on-screen textboxes calls into question the content validity of the assessments, or the extent to which they accurately measure students’ ability to communicate mathematically. Further, because they incentivize written language over other valid forms of mathematical communication, these items may disadvantage emergent bilinguals (EBs), who are in the process of acquiring the language of the assessment. This study explores the effect of computer-based math assessments with “write-to- explain” items on EBs in two fifth grade classrooms (n=58). Students were given problems requiring explanations, not just numerical answers, scored using a rubric. Students took similar assessments in paper-pencil and computer-based format. Twenty students, representing a range of English proficiencies, were selected for interviews. Quantitative analyses demonstrate students performed better on paper assessments than computer-based assessments and this difference is more pronounced for EBs than proficient English speakers. Moreover, the difference between assessment formats was much larger for one item than others, suggesting some item types may impact EBs differentially. Interviews revealed students found it more difficult to “show work” and “explain what they did” when typing than with paper-pencil. This suggest textbox math assessment items limit the communicative resources available students and appear to disadvantage all students, with EBs in particular. Because test scores are used to make decisions impacting course selection, retention, and graduation, they play a crucial role in considerations of equity in mathematics education (Gutierrez, 2007). Work must begin immediately to correct inequitable testing conditions and reconsider whether assessment items are measuring content understanding or language acquisition.

Sam Davidson & Aaron Yamada University of California, Davis COWS-L2H: A novel corpus for measuring Spanish writing development

We present a corpus of compositions written by learners of Spanish, collected from L2 learners as well as students of Spanish as a Heritage Language, at a single American university. We also present initial findings based on these data concerning rates of lemma acquisition among these learners. Our corpus is a novel contribution to the field that is differentiated from currently available corpora of L2 Spanish in three key ways. (1) We specifically include data collected from students learning Spanish as a heritage language, a feature currently unavailable in other Spanish learner corpora. (2) The present corpus includes longitudinal data, as we collect data from individual students at multiple points in their Spanish course progression. (3) While other corpora aggregate data from students at numerous institutions, our corpus offers data collected from a single university with known curriculum and teaching methods, allowing researchers to investigate the effects of specific teaching methods on students’ acquisition of Spanish. We intend to further differentiate our corpus by error tagging the collected data to facilitate research in the study of L2 writing, vocabulary, and morphosyntax, among other areas. As an initial step in this research program, we use the newly collected data to identify patterns of lemma acquisition among Spanish language learners, and to identify differences in lemma usage between L2 and heritage learners. We find that L2 learners acquire lemmas at a rapid rate during their initial Spanish courses, but that the rate of lemma acquisition slows considerably after the first quarter of Spanish instruction. Heritage learners, on the other hand, show lemma usage and acquisition patterns similar to those of more advanced L2 learners. We conclude with a discussion of the future directions of this corpus project.

Language Policy Conference Room A

Višnja Milojičić University of California, Davis Peer Feedback in the Workload English Classroom: Implications for University Teaching and Policy

Over the last three decades, the literature on Chinese international students has blossomed rapidly, particularly with regards to their attitudes toward group work (Peacock, 2001) and their role expectations within the English-language learning (ELL) classroom (McCargar, 1993). Specifically, Peacock (2001) has argued that Chinese international students strongly dislike group learning; and McCargar (1993) has found that ELL teachers who remain unaware of emergent bilinguals’ role expectations risk “having students withdraw or be unhappy” (p. 200), adding on that emergent bilinguals also prefer more teacher-oriented environments. Extending previous findings, Ruegg (2018) has found that emergent bilinguals’ self-efficacy increases significantly more with teacher feedback than with peer feedback. This paper supports and extends existing literature by looking at Chinese international students’ experiences more specifically through the frameworks of positioning theory (Davies and Harre, 1990), structuration theory (Giddens, 1979), and critical discourse analysis (van Dijk, 1997) as a means of analyzing how Chinese international students position themselves and others within the ELL classroom context.

The paper is based on qualitative datasets (including interviews and ethnographic field notes) gathered over the timespan of January through April 2015 as part of a larger previous study. It uses the frameworks of positioning theory (Davies and Harre, 1990), structuration theory (Giddens, 1979), and critical discourse analysis (van Dijk, 1997) to inform its research methodology and seeks to answer the following research questions: 1) How do Chinese international students position themselves, their peers, and their teacher in the English- language learning (ELL) classroom? and 2) What does Chinese international students’ positioning (of themselves and others) say about their role expectations for peer feedback activities?

The paper concludes by contextualizing its findings within existing literature, as well as offering several implications for future research focusing on Chinese international emergent bilingual students’ perspectives in public university ELL classroom contexts.

Cari Ito University of California, Davis Children with International Roots: An Analysis of the Status of Language Policy in Japan for Children of Migrant Workers

Previous scholarship in linguistic diversity in the Japanese context argues that Japan is at a crossroads, where the deeply entrenched ideas about Japanese homogeneity, monolingualism, and language ownership increasingly cannot be applied to the realities of the many diverse peoples living and being educated in Japan (Kawakami, 2008; Heinrich, 2012). Other scholars in immigration language policy argue for a comprehensive national Japanese as a Second Language (JSL) education program (Gottlieb, 2011), while still others argue for decentralization of the educational system to allow for targeted education of minority language speakers (Chapple, 2014). Situated in this body of work, this paper argues that Japan is not a homogenous, monolingual nation, as often presented in nationalistic ideologies, and therefore, provisions must be made to assist the learning of migrant children. However, current ad hoc measures by local governments to aid JSL education, such as the provision of a minority language speaking tutor for no more than 1 year (128 tutoring hours total), are not providing the necessary support for all children to succeed.

This paper draws on various kinds of qualitative data, including discourse analysis of policy documents, mass media articles, and government body meeting minutes to address the following two research questions: (1) How have language ideologies shifted in reaction to an increasingly diverse population? (2) What is the status of education for children of immigrants in Japan and what does current policy do to provide educational opportunities for children of all linguistic backgrounds?

The paper concludes with a call for a national policy that creates standards for multilingual education programs, guaranteeing all students are supported, not just those who live in localities where the local government feels cultural diversity is important, and a discussion of multilingual pedagogies (Garcia & Flores, 2012) and their implications in the Japanese context.

Wendah P. Alvarez University of California, Davis Language in Policy that Negates Inclusion of Indigenous Minority Languages

Previous scholarships in Native American sovereignty and rights to self-determination alerts us to the non-existent effort to accommodate Native American languages as minority language groups in society (Strommer and Osborne, 2015). Considering the “distinctive political/legal status” (McCarty, 2013) of Native Americans in this society, language accommodation at the ballot box for this population as a minority language group is overlooked. Other scholars such as Matthew Higgins, a scholar for policy and enactment, argue for transparency of Section 203 compliance (Stanford Law Review, 2015) and David J. Carlson, author of Imagining Sovereignty: Self-Determination in American Indian Law and Literature argue the existence of language in the law that can create policies to include Native Americans without subjugating their sovereignty and self-determination.

This paper attempts to illuminate the problematic language and default exclusion of Native American languages in Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act, particularly the requirements set for minority language in order to be recognized as a “minority language.” Drawing on a discourse analysis of Native American policy documents, census, and interviews including the historical challenges of the landscapes of Native American languages, this paper similarly seeks to challenge interpretation of language accommodation for Native Americans limited text-based literacy. Native American languages survival demands temporality of visibility that needs to include language change and reclamation efforts for both recognized and unrecognized Native nations despite language cost. In order to mitigate the language violence committed against Indigenous peoples, written and future policies must always consider Native Americans “unique nation-to-nation relationship with the federal government” (McCarty 2013).

This analysis of language and policy is important because it reveals the problematic discourse around non-dominant language rights and language reclamation efforts among Native Americans of which precludes getting Navajo, Yupik and Yurok language need on the voting ballot.

Gendered Discourses in Online Contexts Conference Room B

Haley Kennedy University of California, Davis A Look at Masculine Speech Performances in the CSGO Community

Gender is embedded in all settings and experiences. The realm of technology and videogames is no exception. Currently, Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) gaming is dominated by men. This imbalance is most prevalent in games which simulate traditionally masculine roles, including sports games, tactical shooters, racing games, and first person shooters. This research focuses on a popular first-person shooter game known as Counter- Strike: Global Offensive (CSGO). The intent is to explore how speakers in the CSGO gaming community perform masculinity during their online gameplay. This is being accomplished by looking at the speech of 20 CSGO streamers, 10 male and 10 female (self-identified). A streamer is an individual who publicly broadcasts their gameplay on an online platform such as Twitch or Youtube. The speech in these broadcasts is being analyzed from a community of practice perspective, specifically focusing on stance. The goal is to determine which stances are preferred among these subjects for performing masculinity and to find consistencies in the ways they take up these stances in their interactions. Preliminary results looking at a small subset of male players show a few consistencies in masculine performance. These men took up stances which aligned them with working class masculinity, and which distanced them from femininity and homosexuality. This includes the use of “dude” and “bro,” the use of profanity, the use of ritual insult, and discussion of drug use. The goal of further research is to see if these performances extend to a larger pool of subjects and to look at how these masculine performances relate to female streamers.

Chloe Brotherton University of California, Davis The Linguistic Construction of Queer Identities on Tumblr

Previous scholarship in sociolinguistics has explored how social identity categories become reified through language (Edelman and Zimman, 2014; Livia and Hall, 1997). Other scholars in queer theory and poststructuralist philosophy have argued that gender and sexuality are performative, constantly being reiterated and constituted through discourse (Foucault, 1990; Butler, 1997). Situated in this body of work, this paper argues that Tumblr users create new sexual identity labels to construct and legitimate their own identities and positionality within the queer community.

This paper analyzes several personal Tumblr blogs, specifically investigating individual blogs’ glossaries. Tumblr is a microblogging social networking website which has over 400 million blogs (Tumblr, 2018). Tumblr has a large LGBTQ+ presence, where queer users engage in “queer world-making:” creating a “space that affirms a queer self that is rejected within the dominant heteronormative culture” (Zamanian, 2014, p. 2). One linguistic strategy of queer world-making is to coin new sexual and gender identity terms, such as quoisexual and wtfsexual, which are used frequently on queer-themed blogs but rarely outside Tumblr. This paper investigates the linguistic and discursive construction of sexual and gender identity through language on Tumblr. It explores two major research questions: 1) how are new identity labels created and circulated through Tumblr, and 2) what does this label creation process indicate about queer users’ conceptions of their identities?

This paper ends with a discussion of the contrasting discourses regarding identity construction in the queer community. While many activist and non-academic discourses emphasize the essential nature of sexual and gender identity and the neoliberal notion that the self can choose or create a label to fit their internal identities, postmodernist, queer theorists (e.g. Butler, 1997) argue that identity is performative and constructed. Using data from Tumblr blogs, this paper examines how queer speakers position their own identity through language.

Ryan Redmond University of California, Davis ‘Those rotten pigs’: Discourses surrounding female fan participation on 2chan

The present study involves a critical discourse analysis of computer-mediated communication in order to analyze misogynistic attitudes towards female fan participation on a popular online Japanese community/bulletin board, 2chan. The data for this study was sampled from a single post thread and its continuing reply threads, “The boundary line of women who can perform boy roles”, which began on 9/28/09, and documents an often-sidetracked discussion about whether Japanese female voice actors can believably perform male roles in Japanese animation. Over the course of the threads, participants demonstrated mixed feelings towards female voice actors, either disparaging or praising their abilities to mimic male voices, which resulted in euphemistic labeling of their performances, such as ‘safe’ or ‘out’. However, participants also demonstrated clear feelings of responsibility to protect the voice actresses at times, who were seen as possibly losing their livelihoods due to female fan participation. In one recurring example, where an animated character was recast from a female voice actor to a male voice actor, participants deemed it to be caused by fubuta ‘rotten pigs’ (female fans) urging the production studios to cast biological male actors, so they could ‘get off’ on hearing such voices. This research highlights how, even in seemingly-unrelated contexts where female fan participation was not intended to be the central theme, overt discrediting of their participation takes place through multiple vehicles, including uses of epithets and general disparagement, and an overgeneralization of female fan involvement in queer pairing fandoms.

Most Innovative Research Panel

Peter Joseph Torres University of California, Davis 'On a Scale of 1 to 10, How Much Pain Are You in?' Conversations on Chronic Pain and Controlled Substances.

Recent sociolinguistic research calls attention to the study of voice quality variation and the role of linguistic choices in shaping individual identity and creating social meaning (Mendoza- Denton, 2011; Podesva, 2007; Zimman, 2013). This exploratory investigation supplements the lack of similar research in the field of clinical sociolinguistics and attempts a novel approach to the study of doctor-patient interactions by combining both acoustic and discourse analyses. More specifically, I observe the linguistic practices of two chronic pain patients to map out the prominent context-dependent vocal features employed during their medical consultations.

Since chronic pain symptoms are not always physically visible, patients make use of "talk" to express their pain and suffering to physicians. Likewise, there are no objective clinical tests for measuring chronic pain, which means treatment decisions are often based on the patients' verbal manifestations of suffering (Sullivan and Ferrell, 2005). I approach this study by examining the discourse and coding each speaking turn systematically. I then analyze the acoustic data to visually present what may otherwise be regarded as simply perception data. The results indicate that the average pitch of both patients was lower for pain and opioid-related utterances. Similarly, the patients spoke with both low pitch and creaky voice in the following situations: (1) discussing pain, (2) expressing pain as well as narrating symptoms, (3) and requesting for opioid refills.

The idea that certain vocal choices are employed in certain situations and not others displays an emphasis on what is being said. Though it is impossible to generalize, this exploratory clinical sociolinguistic study opens up the possibilities that register shift and creak carry social significance in medical interactions. This study allows us to start thinking about the stylistic use of linguistic features in sending messages, shaping identities, and expressing behaviors inside and out of the clinical setting.

Hiba Al Ghabra & Tiffany R. Diebold Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey Constructing Shared Knowledge Through Gesture

This study investigates gesture use in naturalistic conversation between native (NSs) and non- native speakers (NNSs) of English through a sociocognitive lens (Atkinson, 2011; Atkinson, Churchill, Nishino, & Okada, 2007; Goodwin, 2000). Nonnative speakers were those who spent fewer than six years of their K-12 schooling in the United States or Canada. Gestures were defined as both emblems and gesticulations (Kendon, 1982; McNeill, 1992). Three NS dyads and three NNS dyads were video recorded as they talked about their favorite childhood TV shows. Speech was transcribed and gestures were drawn in over the transcribed speech. Gestures were coded according to type and function, based on a framework that modified typologies outlined in McNeill (1992) and Krauss, Chen, and Gottesman (2000). Categories of the resulting framework include symbolic, deictic, repetitive, and lexical gesture types and communication, tension reduction, and lexical retrieval functions. Both NSs and NNSs most frequently used lexical and deictic gesture types as well as communicative functions. Nonnative speakers produced more than three-fold the number of gestures produced by native speakers, similar to Nicoladis’s (2007) findings between bilingual and monolingual speakers. Furthermore, NNSs’ gesture use differed from that of NSs in that NNSs additionally used repetitive gestures and lexical retrieval functions. These added features of gesture use may be attributed to alignment and construction of new schemata in the absence of shared knowledge. Because participants attend a graduate school that requires students to be proficient in two or more languages, English proficiency did not seem to be a factor in increased gesture use. Rather, a lack of shared knowledge about different TV shows seemed to drive different gesture behavior. By contrast, NSs shared content and cultural schemata in the TV shows they described and thus did not use as many gestures. This study demonstrates the role of gesture in creating and co-constructing shared knowledge. Language teachers could raise learners’ awareness to the usefulness of gesture in aligning with interlocutors to construct and negotiate meaning.

Silvia Aguinaga Echeverria University of California, Davis Building Fluency: A Corpus Based Contrastive Analysis of Formulaic Speech in Students of Spanish as a Second Language and Native Speakers

It has long been recognized that collocations, or chunks of formulaic language, are essential and frequent in language (Sinclair, 2004; Henriksen, 2012). However, collocations are often considered to be vocabulary words or expressions that are difficult to acquire due to a number of factors such as its compositional transparency but closed format or the difference between the L1 and the L2 structures, among others (Schmitt, 2000: 79; Nesselhauf, 2003; Chen, 2011). At present, we know very little about how students of Spanish acquire formulaic language, yet these speech routines are a key component of linguistic fluency and modern measures of language proficiency. With this in mind, I carried out a corpus study, which examines the oral language production of 40 students of Spanish (20 advanced, 20 intermediate) and 20 native speakers. Collocations were manually annotated and analyzed based on several parameters, such as density, variety, sophistication, and type of collocational error. The results of a quantitative comparison of learners' and native Spanish speakers' collocation production show a gap between intermediate and advance students, although advance and native speakers produce similar number of collocation. Furthermore, learners have a smaller repertoire and they overuse frequent combinations with less variability regarding the choice of the collocate. A qualitative analysis reveal that most lexical collocation errors affect the collocate, the element whose selection is restricted, and that most errors result from Ll transfer. The results of this research highlight the production of formulaic language as one of the characteristics of native-like production, as well as they help establish a developmental baseline that will help inform the creation of a new generation of pedagogical materials that put lexical results competence at the heart of L2 curriculum.

Psycholinguistics Ballroom A

Noelle Todd University of California, Davis Evidence for Visually-Mediated Encoding of Phonetic Representations at the Auditory Cortex Audiovisual (AV) integration is essential to speech comprehension. The prevailing theory, proposed to explain the neural mechanisms underlying AV integration, posits that auditory and visual percepts fuse in a multi- sensory ‘integrator’. An alternative to this theory advocates that cross-modal influence occurs via one modality acting upon the representations of a second modality. In this study, we examine the viability of the second theory. We hypothesize that AV integration of speech occurs when the visual cortex influences the encoding of phonetic information to the auditory cortex, and in certain situations alters the perception of acoustic information based on that encoded input. To test this hypothesis, we recorded Auditory Evoked Potentials (AEPs) while participants watched videos of a speaker uttering consonant vowel syllables /ba/ or /wa/, and heard auditory input for /ba/ or /wa/. In the congruent condition, the auditory and visual inputs were the same; and in the incongruent condition, the auditory and visual inputs were different. AEP results for this study provided evidence in favor of phonetic encoding mediated by the visual cortex. The N1 AEP consistently shifted with perception of the auditory input towards that conveyed by the visual input. It increased in amplitude when they heard an illusory /ba/ (audio /wa/, video /ba/, heard as /ba/) and decreased in amplitude when they heard an illusory /wa/ (audio /ba/, video /wa/, heard as /wa/), mirroring the N1 amplitude distinction observed for congruent /ba/ and /wa/ CVs (N1 larger for /ba/ than /wa/). This bi- directional shift of auditory perception and N1 amplitude towards the direction of visual input provides evidence that AV perception is not just an equal integration of information from the auditory and visual cortices in a multisensory ‘integrator’, but rather represents phonetic encoding that begins at the visual cortex and feeds over to the auditory cortex.

Kayla Vodacek University of California, Davis The effects of spectral noise modulations on language understanding

Systematic manipulations of natural speech (e.g. sine-wave speech, spectral rotation, vocoding) have been useful in testing theories of language processing and in modeling diagnostic forms of language interventions. In the present study we examine three types of noise modulations (broadband clicks, upward frequency- modulated chirps and noise-vocoded speech with clicks) on the sentence comprehensibility. One-hundred and eight sentences were chosen from Harvard IEEE sentences corpus. They were digitally sampled at a rate of 22,050 Hz and pitch flattened flattened to 82 Hz using Praat (Boersma and Weenink 2001). In condition 1, upward frequency-modulated chirps (CHirp-spEECH, “cheech”) were added to temporally align to voicing onsets and subsequent multiples of 24ms relative to the first chirp. The speech and chirps were frequency multiplexed by one octave wide bands and interleaved together. In condition 2, pitch flattened sentences were multiplexed and interleaved with the same method but, in place of chirps, broadband clicks were used (CLick- spEECH, “cleech”) (Miller et al 2016, GOOGLE Patents). In condition 3, the cleech stimuli were further noise- vocoded using a 16-channel noise vocoding algorithm (Shannon et al., 1995). In a counter balanced design, thirty undergraduate students were presented with each sentence in one of three blocked conditions and once in the clear. The subjects’ responses were compared to the expected sentences and discrepancies were noted. Data are coded for substitutions, omissions, misspellings and IDK’s (I don’t know) responses. While data analysis is currently underway, we expect that relative to clear speech, noise vocoded click-speech will be harder to understand than either cleech or cheech speech, with clear speech being easily understood. We discuss the outcome of these studies in relation to prior studies of speech in noise and in relation to an on- going effort to use cleech and cheech stimuli in electrophysiological studies designed to assess the integrity of the ascending auditory pathways in populations with cochlear implants.

References:

Boersma P, and Weenink D. PRAAT, a system for doing phonetics by computer. 2001, p. 341- 345.

Miller L, Moore IVB, and Bishop C. Frequency-multiplexed speech-sound stimuli for hierarchical neural characterization of speech processing. Google Patents, 2016.

Shannon, R.V., Zeng, F., Kamath, V., Wygonski, J. & Ekelid, M. (1995) Speech Recognition with Primarily Temporal Cues. SCIENCE13 OCT 1995: 303-304

Erica Verde University of California, Davis Exploring allophonic variation in infant-directed speech

“Baby talk” or “Motherese” is a speech style often used by Western caretakers to young children. Termed ‘infant-directed speech’ (IDS) by researchers, it is characterized by longer duration, more distinct vowel spaces, more variable pitch, and increased hyper-articulation compared to adult-directed speech (ADS) (Fernald & Kuhl, 1987; Fernald, 1985). How reliable these features are as a construct is an empirical question that can be tested using an imagined speech context, a paradigm used successfully in similar elicitation procedures (Scarborough & Zellou, 2013).

In the current study, we recorded adults’ use of IDS in the absence of a child. Subjects read phrases aloud as if engaged with a small child and completed demographic questionnaires regarding their language variety, age, and experience with young children. Acoustic data will be analyzed in Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2018) to explore vowel characteristics, pitch variation and hyper-articulation. We are also interested in whether frequency of IDS features occurs as a function of imagined-child age.

Given prior work on IDS, we expect that 1) vowels will become more prominent (evidenced by longer duration, higher intensity and a more distinct vowel space), 2) pitch will be more variable than ADS at both the word and utterance level, and 3) hyper-articulation (operationalized as released final –t and articulation of medial tap/flap as [t]) will be more frequent than in ADS. Additionally, we also expect that adults with more experience with young children will demonstrate more features of IDS than those with little experience.

To our knowledge, this is the first work to explore the strength of IDS as a register in the absence of a child listener. If adults do show features of IDS even in the absence of a child, this finding will bolster the validity of IDS as a psycholinguistic construct.

Discourse Analysis Conference Room A

Lisa Gonzalves University of California, Davis Metalinguistic Development and Expression in L2 Adults with little to no L1 Literacy

While an estimated 3-15% percent of incoming immigrants to the U.S. are not literate in their first language (L1) (Tarone, Bigelow & Hansen, 2009), little research has been conducted on non- and limited-literate adults learning English as a Second Language (ESL) (Tarone, 2010; van de Craats, Kurvers, & Young-Scholten, 2006), and instructing such learners is generally not part of teacher training programs (Vinogradov & Liden, 2009). Nonetheless, 18% of adult school students are enrolled in the ESL beginning literacy level (U.S. Department of Education/OCTAE, 2015), many who lack L1 literacy.

ESL programs in U.S. adult schools currently aim to create academic and career pathways by implementing “21st century skills” into the curriculum, focusing on higher order thinking skills and metalinguistic application. However, this “ability to reflect on and manipulate the structural features of language” (Nagy & Anderson, 1999, p 2) is a significant hurdle to limited-literate learners, as typical metalinguistic measurements include written journals and grammaticality judgement tests – all requiring significant levels of literacy. Furthermore, studies on non-literate L2 adult learners have shown their inability to perform oral-based metalinguistic tasks such as segmenting words and sentences, producing rhymes, and determining word length. (Kurvers, Vallen, & Hout, 2006; Onderdelinden, Van de Craats, & Kurvers, 2009). Researchers have concluded that (L1) literacy influences (L2) metalinguistic awareness; however, this awareness can indeed be developed and demonstrated over time.

Using discourse analysis as a window into the learners’ thinking, this qualitative case study tracked 6 adult ESL literacy learners and their engagement with metalinguistic reflection. Via transcripts from small group tutoring sessions, the study underscores the students’ ability to showcase their metalinguistic awareness despite their limited English vocabulary and literacy skills. Using a sociocognitive framework of second language acquisition (Atkinson, 2002, 2011), the researcher highlights the role of social interaction in developing metalinguistic insights.

Karen Tsai & Jamaal Muwwakkil University of California, Santa Barbara Relational Social Deixis in Japanese: Senpai Register

Japanese has well-established politeness registers connoting relational social deixis, speakers’ relative social distances from each other (Ikuta 1983, Peng 1974). These registers are reflected in a continuum of various copulas such as gozaimasu (formal), desu/masu (polite), and zero copula (casual). However, what happens when the speaker needs to communicate both politeness and intimacy in the relational status? In this paper, we explore a relational dynamic that is specific to senpai/kouhai relationships, which involve a difference in seniority between speakers of the same status/rank. Senpai refers to an upperclassman, typically in school, sports, or work; kouhai refers to the underclassman in the same setting. The power dynamic in this relationship is asymmetrical in that the kouhai must acknowledge the senpai’s status/rank by using more polite speech, but the senpai is not obligated to speak in a “polite register”. This senpai/kouhai register is marked by a unique copula, which is a reduced form of desu (polite) to ssu (Senpai register). Using Kamiusagi Rope video shorts created by TOHO Cinema, we analyze the syntactic structure of this construction in senpai/kouhai interactions. Notably, the ssu is exclusively used by Rope, the main character who is the kouhai. Akira, the senpai, consistently uses casual and zero copula forms. The data from these video shorts support the conclusion that this innovative ssu form is used to index both politeness and intimacy in senpai/kouhai relationships.

Alexander Mendes University of California, Davis Representations of multiplicity: constructing a multilingual/Corsican ABC book

Linguistic multiplicity is visible throughout Corsica. Resistance is legible in Corsican- language graffiti reflecting opposition to continental French dominance (Cotnam-Kappel, 2014). Additionally, German and Italian in the service sector demonstrate seasonal catering to tourist groups, while English and Arabic illustrate the effects of globalizing surges (Ramanathan, 2013) such as hypermobility and new communication technologies. The list goes on. This multilingualism manifests amidst ongoing maintenance efforts of Corsican, arguably the most successful case of regional language revitalization in France today. This presentation will analyze a recently published Corsican-French ABC book (Corsican abicidì) and the implications of the particular type of multilingualism it promotes. The central social actors involved in the construction of the ABC book are a group of newly arrived (im)migrant adolescent students in a French-as-a-second-language (FLE) class and a local arts non-profit. Utilizing linguistic-ethnographic data collected during fieldwork in Northern Corsica in 2016, this presentation will synthesize findings from semi-participant observation (Bonacina- Pugh, 2011), sociolinguistic interviews, and publications. By reading the abicidì in conjunction with other data, I will illustrate the competing linguistic ideologies underlying the multilingualism in the book—one that goes beyond the Corsican- French binary since the project involves (im)migrants. The process of staging the final version of the bi-/multilingualism presented reveals latent political motivations and challenges notions of what it means to be a minority/heritage language speaker when faced with the pressures of sociocultural integration and globalization.

Spanish Linguistics Conference Room B

Aaron Yamada University of California, Davis Complex Negation in L2 Spanish

Negation is crucial to natural language. Research in applied linguistics has examined the development of negation in first and second language acquisition in several languages (Bernini, 2000; Eskildsen, 2016). However, there exists a significant gap in the literature, in that no studies have outlined the development of negation in L2 Spanish, nor the factors that contribute to its development. Furthermore, current research in L2 negation has focused primarily on the acquisition of sentential negation constructions, while leaving unstudied more complex syntactic and semantic relationships in negation.

The present study seeks to accomplish the following goals: (1) Address the aforementioned lack of research by providing the first empirical study of the development of negation in L2 Spanish, (2) Contribute to the broader study of L2 negation via the empirical study of a complex negation construction (particularly, negative concord), and (3) Expand the discussion of L1 Transfer in second language acquisition with respect to the semantic notion of scope at the crossroads of word order and vocabulary. To meet these goals, this study utilized a structured oral production task to elicit negative concord constructions among 105 L1 English-speaking university students of L2 Spanish. Initial results of a logistic mixed-effects regression analysis outline a general picture of how target-like negative concord structures in L2 Spanish emerge with respect to factors such as L2 proficiency, verb type, and negative word type. Additionally, results also indicate that these learners transfer components of scope relationships from L1 English, in constructing complex negation structures in L2 Spanish.

This research essentially offers two innovations. It provides the first developmental portrait of a previously unstudied micro-topic within L2 Spanish. Furthermore, in terms of larger questions within second language acquisition, it adds finer-grained detail to what is known about L1 Transfer and its role in L2 learning.

Kathleen S. Guerra University of California, Davis Phonological and Phonetic Aspects of Sifeísmo in Quito Spanish

In the casual, rapid speech of young adults in and around Quito, Ecuador, one perceives an extra sound, almost like an emphatic /f/, at the end of an utterance. It is commonly observed in simple responses, such as sif and nof in place of sí ‘yes’ and no ‘no’, and it does not impede comprehension. The phenomenon, henceforth referred to as sifeismo, has been loosely attributed to the devoicing of vowels in the frequent filler word pues [ps̩ ː] ‘then, well’ (Haboud & de la Vega 2008). This additive sociolectal feature occurs in a variety of utterance-final contexts, thus extending beyond the syntactic and discursive uses of pues to serve an additional sociopragmatic function.

In utterance-final position, pues can be realized in its careful form [pwes], the condensed form [ps̩ ː], or in the more reduced forms [ɸs] and [ɸ], characteristic of sifeismo. However, utterance-initial position favors [ps̩ ː] or [pwes]; [ɸs] and [ɸ] are not possible. To account for the asymmetrical distribution of surface allomorphs in utterance-initial and utterance-final positions, this initial investigation uses gestural alignment, along with moraic phonology located within Optimality Theory (OT) to ensure minimal gestural overlap in the stronger, utterance-initial positions and greater overlap (reduction) in weaker, utterance-final positions. In addition, this investigation demonstrates how existing dialectal preference for the bilabial [ɸ] over the labiodental [f], along with unstressed vowel devoicing, favors sifeismo in the Andean-Ecuador context.

Preliminary References

Bradley, T. G. (1999). Assibilation in Ecuadorian Spanish. In Formal Perspectives on Romance Linguistics. Selected Papers from the 28th Linguistics Symposium on Romance Languages. Amsterdam, John Benjamins Publishing Company (pp. 57-71).

Delforge, A. M. (2008a). Gestural Alignment Constraints and Unstressed Vowel Devoicing

in Andean Spanish. In C. B. Chang & H. J. Haynie (Eds.), In Proceedings of the 26th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. (pp.147-155). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.

Delforge, A. M. (2008b). Unstressed Vowel Reduction in Andean Spanish. In L. Colantoni &

J. Steele (Eds.) In Selected Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Laboratory Approaches to Spanish Phonology. (pp. 107-124). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.

Haboud, M., & de la Vega, E. (2008). El español en América: Ecuador. El Español en América: Contactos Lingüísticos en Hispanoamérica, 161-185

Hualde, J. I. (2005). The Sounds of Spanish. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Lipski, J. (1990). Aspects of Ecuadorian Vowel Reduction. Hispanic Linguistics 4 (1), pp. 1- 19.

Stenström, A. (2006). The Spanish Pragmatic Marker pues and its English Equivalents. The changing face of corpus linguistics, 263-281.

Pablo Robles García & Diego Alins Breda University of California, Davis Thematic units and word knowledge aspects in L2 Spanish textbooks

Vocabulary learning is essential in the development of linguistic competence in a second language (L2), as a broad lexicon fosters both oral (Van Zeeland and Schmitt, 2012) and written comprehension (Hu and Nation, 2000) and plays a crucial role in academic achievement (Stæhr, 2008). However, breadth of vocabulary knowledge needs to be paired with depth of word knowledge, given that knowing a word goes beyond the mere recognition of its form- meaning relationship (Neary-Sundquist, 2015). Concretely, Nation (2001) proposes that lexical knowledge involves 9 different aspects: form (spoken, written and word parts), meaning (form and meaning, concept and references and associations) and use (grammatical functions, collocations and constraints of use). In this context, L2 learners should be given opportunities to practice all aspects of word knowledge. One way to assess whether this is the case is by studying how vocabulary is presented in L2 textbooks, since these influence most classroom activities (Woodward, 1989). This study analyzes the treatment given to the 9 aspects of vocabulary knowledge in four elementary Spanish textbooks. Seven themes were selected for analysis, since certain aspects of lexical knowledge are more likely to appear in specific themes. For example, greetings would promote the introduction of constraints of use, since Spanish greetings depend on the formality of the situation and the relationship between interlocutors; whereas introducing the parts of a house would not implicate contextual constraints. Results show that textbook activities mainly focus on the form-meaning aspect of vocabulary knowledge while all other aspects play little to no role in the textbooks. Results are overall consistent across themes, indicating that even when a particular theme could foster a specific aspect of lexical knowledge, this was not fully exploited in any of the textbooks.

Sociolinguistics Ballroom A

Qian Wang Ohio State University Friendliness in [ʋ]-variations: Language Attitudes Towards Phonetic Variations in Mandarin Chinese

In Mandarin Chinese, /w/-initial syllables have two phonetic variations: labial-velar approximant [w] and labiodental approximant [ʋ], known as W-type and V-type variation, respectively (Shen 1987). This study uses matched-guise tasks and a survey to explore native speakers’ perceptions of phonetic variations in /w/-initial syllables.

A female informant was audio-recorded while reading a passage containing 54 /w/-initial syllables. The informant was asked to read the passage only using [w] then only use [ʋ] for all target syllables. A natural-sounding V-type recording was chosen as the carrier and W-type target syllables from a W-type recording were spliced in to generate the W-type stimulus. The W-type alternants were adjusted with respect to pitch, intensity, and length to match the original as closely as possible. As for the W/V-mixed-type stimulus, the V-realization frequency is determined according to the distribution pattern reported in Zhou 2003. The three stimuli along with two filters were rated by 40 native speakers of Chinese (balanced for gender) using a five- point Likert scale for four traits: speaker’s education, standardness, formalness, and friendliness. Last, four interview questions were used to elicit participants’ understandings of V/W-type phonetic variation in /w/- initial syllables and their attitudes towards language standards.

Quantitative analyses using paired t-tests and two-sample t-tests reveal that native speakers of both gender do not view the three types of stimuli differently in the first three traits. The only significant difference lies in the “friendliness” trait: male participants rate the mixed-type stimulus as friendlier than female participants do. Within female participants, they rate the talker from the V-type stimulus friendlier than the mixed-type stimulus. Qualitative analyses of survey questions indicate that though only the W-type variation is recognized as standard Putonghua, both W-type and V-type variation in /w/-initial syllables are deemed acceptable.

To conclude, this study shows that W/V-type variation in /w/-initial syllables affects native speakers’ perceptions of a speaker’s friendliness but does not affect native speakers’ perception of a speaker’s education level, accent, or urban background.

References:

SHEN, JIONG (沈炯). 1987. Beijinghua hekouhu ling shengmude yuyin fenqi. (北京话合口呼 零声母的语音分歧) [Phonetic differences of zero initial before finals beginning with u in the Beijing dialect]. Zhongguo Yuwen (中国语文) 5.352-362.

ZHOU, JINGUO (周锦国). 2003. Xiandai Hanyu Putonghua yuyinzhong de yizhong yinbian xianxiang-cong “xinwen 30 fen” zhong de “xinwen (xinwen) tanqi” (现代汉语普通话 语音中的一种音变现象-从“新闻 30 分”中的“新闻 (xinven)”谈起) [A phenomenon of phonetic change in Putonghua: Xinven vs. xinwen (news) in the TV show of “New’ 30” ]. Yuyan wenzi yingyong (语言文字应用) 1.116-119.

Kayla Palakurthy University of California, Santa Barbara Variation and change in the Diné discourse particle nít’ę́ę́’

Previous descriptions of Diné bizaad/Navajo describe a particle nít’ę́ ę́ ’ that functions as a contrastive conjunction, a clause linker, and a marker of past time (Young & Morgan 1987). Recent work has proposed that nít’ę́ ę́ ’ has undergone grammaticalization from an adverb to a past tense enclitic, while older functions remain with residual meaning (Chee et al. 2004). In this paper, I revisit this hypothesis with an analysis of the synchronic functions of the particle in a corpus of personal narratives and Pear Film retellings. I argue that there is evidence of prior polygrammaticalization of the particle into a temporal discourse sequencer, often indicating sudden or new events, and into a marker of habitual past, a more restricted past tense function than that noted by Chee et al. (2004). Overall the functions and syntactic distribution of nít’ę́ ę́ ’ found in these data are very similar to those recorded in earlier texts (Sapir & Hoijer 1942), suggesting that the grammaticalization of nít’ę́ ę́ ’ is not a new phenomenon. However, age- graded effects do point to ongoing changes in how the particle is used; young speakers (<45 years old) show signs of phonological renewal in their tokens of nít’ę́ ę́ ’, while expanding the past time function. They also have fewer tokens of nít’ę́ ę́ as a temporal clause linker. Data come from fieldwork interviews with 51 participants. All clauses with tokens of nít’ę́ ę́ ’ (n=452) were analyzed and annotated for relevant syntactic, morphological, and discourse factors. Clauses containing nít’ę́ ę́ ' are compared with clauses expressing past time without the particle. This analysis contributes to our current understanding of the Dene/Athabaskan particles, an under-described area of grammar. Additionally, these results add to cross-linguistic knowledge about grammaticalization pathways, with a focus on the development of past time in a language with an elaborate aspectual system.

References Chee, Melvatha, Evan Ashworth, Susan Buescher, & Brittany Kubacki. 2004. Grammaticization of Tense in Navajo: The Evolution of Nt'éé. Santa Barbara Working Papers in Linguistics, 15: 76- 90.

Sapir, Edward, & Hoijer, Harry. 1942. Navaho texts. William Dwight Whitney series, Linguistic Society of America.

Young, Robert W. & William Morgan. 1987. The Navajo language. A grammar and colloquial dictionary. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Anusha Anand University of California, Santa Barbara Subtitles or Sustitles? On the nonstandard orthographic representation of -ing words in the film Bringing Down the House Subtitles and closed captioning are representations of speech or dialogue in films, television programs, and other forms of media that serve as translations of foreign languages into a target language, or represent the dialogue of the same language along with other contextual information such as background noises and other linguistic or non-linguistic audio. The representation of speech has never been free from controversy and has been explored extensively by transcriptional linguists and linguistic anthropologists who study discourse and/or conversation analysis. The first level of the transcription process for linguistic research is the orthographic representation of speech, which becomes particularly controversial when transcribing discourse of a stigmatized variety or dialect, such as African American English (AAE) due to the notable phonetic and phonological differences between non-stigmatized American English (NSAE). In the event that these linguistic differences are represented, it will often come in the form of non-standard spelling. For this paper, we analyze the subtitles of a 2003 film, Bringing Down the House, to identify whether the spelling of -ing words consistently match the actual phonetic output which are either an alveolar nasal, [n] as -in’ or and velar nasal, [ŋ] as -ing. The results show that the actual realized phonetic output of the speakers did not systematically match with the orthographic representation. Our findings suggest that there are social and political ramifications surrounding the transcription practices of subtitle authors.

Keywords: African American English (AAE), non-stigmatized American English (NSAE), film subtitles, language ideologies, orthographic representation, speech representation

Typology Conference Room A

Jesus Olguin Martinez University of California, Santa Barbara The diachronic origin of sequential adverbial clause linkage

The grammaticalization of adverbial clause linkage has been addressed in two different ways. On the one hand, Hopper & Traugott (2008: 176) propose, very much in the Givonian spirit, that the grammaticalization of adverbial clause linkage may be explained in terms of a unidirectional cline (parataxis > hypotaxis > subordination). On the other hand, other studies have paid closer attention to the grammaticalization of particular elements of adverbial clause linkage, such as adverbial subordinators (Heine & Kuteva 2002; Kortmann 2001). While most studies have focused on adverbial subordinators, a few functional cross-linguistic studies have drawn attention to the origin of other clause-linking strategies, such as sequential coordinating devices (Dixon 2009: 9). This paper aims at contributing to the study of the origin of clause-linking strategies by exploring sequential devices (SDs), which are specifically used to encode temporal sequentiality (Haspelmath 2004a: 12), as can be observed in (1). The phenomenon has received relatively little attention cross-linguistically (e.g. Martowicz 2011; Olguín- Martínez, Campbell & Comrie 2018), yet careful investigation reveals a variety of examples in some language families (Olguín-Martínez, Comrie & Campbell 2017 on Uto-Aztecan).

Hoava (Austronesian/Oceanic: Solomon Islands; Davis 2003: 261) (1) dae hele=hele isa dae tiqe sagele pule isa be.finished RDP=was 3SG.SB and then go.up return 3SG.SBJ h J ‘He finished washing, and then he went back up.’

The goals of this paper are two-fold: First, I will establish the cross-linguistic presence of SDs by taking into account a typologically-balanced sample of 350 languages based on WALS (Haspelmath et al. 2005). In doing so, I will take into consideration one parameter, viz. the degree of mono/polyfunctionality of SDs. Second and most importantly, I will uncover the cognitive principles underlying the grammaticalization pathways of these devices by adopting the methodology followed by Heine & Kuteva (2007). In pursuing this goal, the guiding question is: Which syntactic categories do the world´s languages most frequently draw upon in the formation of SDs?

Benjamin Gomes University of California, Davis Predictability of Grammaticalization in the Spanish Pronominal System

Grammaticalization is the diachronic transition of lexical components of a language towards taking on distinct grammatical roles. This process is responsible for the development of auxiliaries, pronouns, etc. (cf. Hopper & Traugott 1993). While we can demonstrate trends post hoc, the field has struggled with the issue of predictability and the demonstration of causal forces which can be used to predict outcomes. Through a case study on changes in the Spanish pronominal honorific, we can both demonstrate some of the functional pressures that impact grammaticalization and speak to which aspects are predictable. The Spanish formal address experienced continued downward pressure on its formality, continuously eroding the formal connotation of the honorific after inheriting the initial V-T politeness distinction from Old Spanish (cf. Helmbrecht 2015). This necessitated terms of address with higher formality (eg. vuestra merced) as the existing ones slowly drifted towards more casual use. Vuestra merced itself then experienced this downward pressure as its use and pragmatic domain increased, resulting in slow erosion over time as it became a set phrase instead of a novel construction. Because of this, the vuestra merced construction experienced the typical reduction associated with grammaticalization (cf. Hopper & Traugott 1993). This erosion was a deterioration into over a dozen attested forms in a relatively tight temporal window prior to reaching the modern standard usted (Cárceles 1923). This explosion of forms represents a structure undergoing grammaticalization as a function of specific identifiable factors external to the language itself. The robust spread of new forms and the eventual “end” form of the modern usted represent the dialect continuum of Spanish responding to a simple pressure on the entire system. These myriad responses indicate both that the change was nonrandom in occurrence, and that the kinds of change attested followed a predictable pattern.

Daniel Ross University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign A typology of coordinating conjunctions: their distribution and definition

This talk proposes a typology of coordinating conjunctions as an expansion and revision of Haspelmath (2005) in the World Atlas of Language Structures. The results are replicated for each language based on the original descriptive grammars, and the sample of 301 languages is expanded to 325 (to include the full 100 language ‘recommended’ core sample from WALS). We begin with Haspelmath’s basic distinction between nominal and verbal coordination: whether the same word ‘and’ is used to link coordinated nouns and coordinated verbs. Many languages do not have a single, general coordinating conjunction like English and, but use different strategies depending on the part of speech or phrase level being coordinated. The most common distinction is between nominal and verbal conjunctions (Haspelmath 2004, Drellishak 2004), represented by Haspelmath as “Identity” and “Differentiation”. However, these categories obscure important differences cross-linguistically. Haspelmath does include a special third category: “Both expressed by juxtaposition”, but he does not indicate languages where only one strategy is juxtaposition. The current study finds two common strategies among the “Differentiation” languages: overt nominal conjunctions and juxtaposed verbs; and overt distinct conjunctions for both. But only three languages in the sample have only juxtaposed nouns but overt coordinators for verbs. Additional results and exceptions are also discussed: rather than treating juxtaposition as only a secondary strategy, languages with optional juxtaposition are also considered, and a distinction between the overt or juxtaposition strategies and a third type relying on dependent verb forms (cosubordination: Van Valin 1984) is also discussed. Finally, some languages have complex systems of overlapping coordinators across the categories, complicated also by factors such as overlap between comitative ‘with’ and nominal conjunctions (Stassen 2000, 2005). In summary, a morpheme- or construction-based typology is recommended instead of an oversimplified whole-language classification.

References Drellishak, Scott. 2004. A Survey of Coordination Strategies in the World’s Languages. University of Washington M.A. thesis. Haspelmath, Martin. 2004. Coordinating constructions: An overview. In Haspelmath (ed.), Coordinating Constructions, 3–39. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Haspelmath, Martin. 2005 (2013). Nominal and Verbal Conjunction. In Haspelmath, Dryer, Gil & Comrie (eds.), World Atlas of Language Structures, 262–265. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://wals.info/ Stassen, Leon. 2000. AND-languages and WITH-languages. Linguistic Typology 4. 1– 54. Stassen, Leon. 2005 (2013). Noun Phrase Conjunction. In WALS, 258–261. Van Valin, Robert D., Jr. 1984. A Typology of Syntactic Relations in Clause Linkage. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 10. 542– 558.

Language Acquisition Conference Room B

Seneca Schaffer California State University, Chico The Impact of One-on-One Tutoring on ESL Writing

Tutoring centers are often visited by adult ESL learners with persistent concerns about sentence-level, linguistic features in their writing (i.e., “grammar”), even when such concerns are not aligned with issues that need to be prioritized. With limited guidance provided by adult, ESL tutoring literature, this leaves tutors the challenging task of addressing both learners’ concerns and writing needs. For this reason, this research set out to examine the impacts of ESL tutoring on ESL learner’s writing and thereby identify ideal, one-on-one tutoring approaches to simultaneously support learners’ writing needs and enhance acquisition of sentence-level, linguistic features in their writing. To this end, three college-level, ESL case-study participants were tutored one-on-one over a 14-week period and their writing samples were documented and examined for changes in error frequency of the linguistic features: subject-verb agreement, tense, prepositions, articles, plurality, lexical category, spelling, and grammatical structures. In this process, language ability tailored ratios of directive-facilitative instructional approaches were utilized to encourage participants’ language engagement and keep them at ideal learning thresholds.

Though articles, plurality, and prepositions appeared more resistant, quantitative data generally showed that tutoring encouraged the acquisition of all the examined linguistic features and decreased their error occurrence, especially with increased tutoring session frequency. This positive relationship between tutoring and participants’ acquisition of linguistic features is recognized by the gradually declining, dip and rebound error rate averages (ERAs) of writing samples produced after tutoring sessions. While the data does indicate participants largely benefited from tutoring, their linguistic progression varied at the end. By pairing participants’ quantitative and qualitative data (surveys, interviews, and observations) and triangulating results, it was also revealed that tutoring’s potential was greatly affected by participants’ language proficiency, self-efficacy, and motivation. As such, this study calls for continued ESL tutoring research that also incorporates extensive examination of such influential, language acquisition variables.

Gabriella Notarianni Burk University of California, Davis The acquisition of tense and aspect in Italian child language

This investigation extends the study of the Aspect Hypothesis (AH) to Italian child language acquisition in narrative contexts. Italian temporal and aspectual categories are analyzed to understand if Italian children’s mapping of tense and aspect distinctions follows consistent developmental patterns across languages. To this end, sixty frog story narratives were extracted from the Rome CHlLDES corpus for three age groups (4, 5, 6). A total of 1,613 verb tokens were coded for past---referring tense and aspect morphology, inherent aspectual class, and grounding. Vendler’s classification was used to discriminate the predicate structures in each child’s text. Italian child language data suggest that the sequential patterns in the three age groups follow to a great extent the predicted patterns attested in the distribution of past verbal morphology in other Romance languages. In addition, results from two--- factor ANOVA

(grounding and aspect) show that the sixty Italian children (age range: 4---6) exhibited a statistically significant distinction between foregrounded perfective and backgrounded imperfective marking (p < .05). However, a closer examination of the narratives reveals an idiosyncratic production pattern for Italian children, whereby the marking of imperfetto deviates from the tenets of AH and emerges as deictic tense to entail completed and bounded events in foreground clauses. Instances of ‘perfective’ uses of imperfetto were predominantly found in the four---year old narratives (25%)

Kumiko Takizawa Portland State University Stance-taking: JFL learners and benefactive verbs

This study explores how JFL earners take a benefactive stance in Japanese. As Jaffe (2009) observes, stance-taking “plays a complex role with respect to the naturalization of social and linguistic ideologies and the social structures they legitimate.” The way in which people take a stance via communicative behavior varies from culture to culture. In other words, the way in which language is used to take a stance is closely tied to the social context in which speakers find themselves. In Japanese, benefactive verbs (kureru, ageru, morau and their honorific and humble equivalents) are indispensable stance indicators for showing gratitude or indebtedness. Such expressions do not really exist in English and their grammar is complex. It is assumed that JFL learners will struggle with taking a benefactive stance using those expressions. In order to analyze JFL learners’ stance-taking, data were collected from narrative interviews with ten JFL learners who are currently in 300/400 level university courses. In order to explore how learners attempt to show stance reflecting benefaction, they were asked questions that aimed to elicit speakers’ feelings of gratitude. Some examples of such questions are, “Who do you appreciate the most in your life?” or “Who is the most generous person you know?”

The data show that (1) learners do, in fact, fail to use benefactive verbs, (2) they misuse benefactive verbs, e.g. using ageru instead of kureru, and (3) they tend to show stance using adjectives or adverbs that show appreciation but they fail to utilize benefactive verbs and often their stance is culturally anomalous. This failure to project a benefactive stance can lead to miscommunication and/or misunderstanding between the learners and Japanese speakers. I offer possible ways to promote learners’ awareness of the benefaction in Japanese culture.