TO HAVE AND TO BE: FUNCTION WORD REDUCTION IN CHILD SPEECH, CHILD DIRECTED SPEECH AND INTER-ADULT SPEECH by DANIELLE GILBERTE BARTH A DISSERTATION Presented to the Department of Linguistics and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 2015 DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE Student: Danielle Gilberte Barth Title: To HAVE and to BE: Function Word Reduction in Child Speech, Child Directed Speech and Inter-adult Speech This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of Linguistics by: Vsevolod Kapatsinski Chairperson Melissa Redford Core Member Tyler Kendall Core Member Zhuo Jing-Schmidt Institutional Representative and Scott L. Pratt Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree awarded September 2015 ii © 2015 Danielle Gilberte Barth This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (United States) License. iii DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Danielle Gilberte Barth Doctor of Philosophy Department of Linguistics September 2015 Title: To HAVE and to BE: Function Word Reduction in Child Speech, Child Directed Speech and Inter-adult Speech Function words are known to be shorter than content words. I investigate the function words BE and HAVE (with its content word homonym) and show that more reduction, operationalized as word shortening or contraction, is found in some grammaticalized meanings of these words. The difference between the words’ uses cannot be attributed to differences in frequency or semantic weight. Instead I argue that these words are often shortened and reduced when they occur in constructions in which they are highly predictable. This suggests that particular grammaticalized uses of a word are stored with their own exemplar clouds of context-specific phonetic realizations. The phonetics of any instance of a word are then jointly determined by the exemplar cloud for that word and the particular context. A given instance of an auxiliary can be reduced either because it is predictable in the current context or because that use of the auxiliary usually occurs in predictable contexts. The effects cannot be attributed to frequency or semantic weight. The present study compares function word production in the speech of school- aged children and their caregivers and in inter-adult speech. The effects of predictability in context and average predictability across contexts are replicated across the datasets. iv However, I find that as children get older their function words shorten relative to content words, even when controlling for increasing speech rate, showing that as their language experience increases they spend less time where it is not needed for comprehensibility. Caregivers spend less time on function words with older children than younger children, suggesting that they expect function words to be more difficult for younger interlocutors to decode than for older interlocutors. Additionally, while adults use either word shortening or contraction to increase the efficiency of speech, children tend to either use contraction and word shortening or neither until age seven, where they start to use one strategy or the other like adults. Young children with better vocabulary employ an adult- like strategy earlier, suggesting earlier onset of efficient yet effective speech behavior, namely allocating less signal to function words when they are especially easy for the listener to decode. v CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Danielle Gilberte Barth GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene Rice University, Houston, TX DEGREES AWARDED: Doctor of Philosophy, Linguistics, 2015, University of Oregon Master of Arts, Linguistics, 2009, University of Oregon Bachelor of Arts, Linguistics, 2006, Rice University AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: Corpus linguistics, usage-based linguistics, grammaticalization, information theory, complex predicates, Oceanic languages, language archiving issues PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Graduate Teaching Fellow, University of Oregon, September 2005-Spring 2015 GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS: Linguistic Society of America Student Abstract Award, 2nd place for Reduction in Child Speech, Child-Directed Speech and Inter-Adult Speech: $300, 2015 Grant from Firebird Foundation for Oral Literature Collection in Matukar, Papua New Guinea: $9,665, 2013 2nd International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation student scholarship (for one of 7 top ranked student submissions): $1000, 2011 Fellowship from Living Tongues Institute for Endangered language and National Geographic Enduring Voices: apx. $7,000, 2011 Fellowship from Living Tongues Institute for Endangered language and National Geographic Enduring Voices: $7,500, 2010 vi Baden-Wuerttemberg-Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts Scholarship for study in Germany, apx. $4,200, 2009–2010 PUBLICATIONS: Barth, D. and Kapatsinski, V. (In Press). A multimodel inference approach to categorical variant choice: construction, priming and frequency effects on the choice between full and contracted forms of am, are and is. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory. Published online ahead of Print October 7, 2014: http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/cllt.ahead-of-print/cllt-2014- 0022/cllt-2014-0022.xml?format=INT Barth, D. and Anderson, G. D. S. (In Press). Directional constructions in Matukar Panau. Oceanic Linguistics. Anderson, G. D. S., Barth, D. and Rawad Forepiso, K. (2015). The Matukar Panau online talking dictionary: collective elicitation and collaborative documentation, in I Wayan Arka, Ni Luh Nyoman Seri Malini and Ida Ayu Made kam Puspani (Eds), Language documentation and cultural practices in the Austronesian world: papers from 12-ICAL, Volume 4. Canberra: Asia-Pacific Linguistics (111-126). Barth, D., Barth, W. and Rawad Forepiso, K. (2014). Ngahamam Kabiyai (Our Customs) DVD. Produced in Eugene, OR. Barth, D., Barth, W. and Rawad Forepiso, K. (2014). Ngahamam Neuraurau (Our Stories) DVD. Produced in Eugene, OR. Harrison, K. D., Anderson, G. D. S. and Barth, D. (2010-2012). Matukar-English online talking dictionary. http://matukar.swarthmore.edu/ Rawad Forepiso, K. and D. Barth. (2011). Learn Panau. Printed in Matukar: Saky Office. Rawad Forepiso, K. and D. Barth. (2011). Stories from Matukar. Printed in Matukar: Saky Office. Mathieu-Reeves, D. (2005). Direct and Indirect Causation in Sinhala: Examining the Complexity Continuum, in R. Englebretson and C. Genetti (Eds.), Proceedings from the Workshop on Sinhala Linguistics June 3-4, 2005. Santa Barbara Working Papers in Linguistics, 17. Santa Barbara, CA: UCSB. http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/research/Mathieu- Reeves_vol17.pdf vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I sincerely thank Prof. Volya Kapatsinski for being all I could hope for in an advisor and all of his help with this project. Beginning with teaching me advanced statistics over skype in 2010 and getting me to use my first corpus, all the way to today finishing my degree, you have been a wonderful person to work with and I am inspired by you. I also wish to thank Prof. Lisa Redford for letting me use her awesome and unique data and also for all the thought provoking discussions we have had in the last nine years. You have helped me see the forest despite the trees and taught me to be willing to reevaluate theory and see findings in a new light. I wish to thank Prof. Tyler Kendall for helping me get started with the nitty gritty of the corpus project described in this dissertation, introducing me to lots of cool techniques and for letting me use space in his convivial lab. I also wish to thank Prof. Harald Baayen for taking out some time at the Quantitative Investigations in Linguistic Theory 4 to introduce me to ctrees and cforests. Absolutely enormous thanks goes to my wonderful husband, Wolfgang Barth. Not only did you support me emotionally and keep me on schedule, your badass programming skills and help with python scripts, COCA frequency calculations and Buckeye data processing made things go much quicker than they would have otherwise. Thank you, seriously. Finally, I wish to thank audiences at the Linguistics Society of America 2015 Annual Meeting, 8th International Conference on Construction Grammar, Current Trends in Grammaticalization Research and Northwest Phonetics and Phonology Conference and Prof. Zhou Jing-Schmidt, Prof. Rolf Koeppel, and the entire Cognitive Linguistics- Phonology Workgroup at the UO for helpful comments during various stages of this project. All the advice is sincerely appreciated. viii To Wolfgang Haus and Jesse Haus ix TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................... 1 II. LITERATURE REVIEW ............................................................................................... 9 2.1. Introduction .............................................................................................................. 9 2.2. Word Specific Characteristics .................................................................................. 9 2.2.1. HAVE .............................................................................................................. 10 2.2.1.1. History...................................................................................................... 10 2.2.1.2. Frequency Distribution