Local support - Universiteit...

1

Local organizers Mily Crevels Anne Rose Haverkamp Maarten Mous

Local support Leiden University Centre for Linguistics

Cover image: Paul Wedig

Online addresses Website: http://www.hum.leiden.edu/lucl/knaw-conference-diversity-and-universals Email: [email protected]

http://www.hum.leiden.edu/lucl/knaw-conference-diversity-and-universals

mailto:[email protected]

2

Table of contents

Introduction to the conference page 3

Conference program page 4

Abstracts keynote lectures page 7

Abstracts workshops page 13

Workshop Pitch and Timbre in the Language-Music Relation:

Interactions, Differences and Similarities across Cultures page 13

Workshop The Universality of Linguistic Micro and Macro Variation page 17

Workshop The Body in Language and Culture page 22

Workshop Experimental Approach to Variation in Speech page 25

Workshop Universals in the Semantic Representation of

Verbs and Nouns page 28

3

KNAW Conference on Diversity and Universals in Language, Culture, and Cognition

Leiden, 24-26 October Recently the Language Diversity: Genesis, Historical Development, and Cognition Program, initiated by Pieter Muysken (Nijmegen), Maarten Mous (Leiden), and John Nerbonne (Groningen) has been funded by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). The main aim of this program is to link the themes involved in two major research questions that have been formulated by the KNAW, namely the historical question What do languages teach us about the past? and the cognitive question Are there universal laws for each human language? To this purpose three major conferences have been organized, in which we brought and will bring together Dutch and foreign researchers working on language diversity from a historical and a cognitive perspective. In doing so, we hope to strengthen the specialism by broadening the relationships with other disciplines, such as anthropology, archaeology, ethnohistory, cognitive sciences, and genetics. By further developing the different approaches to diversity, major digital linguistic databases can be used systematically in future research in language diversity.

Within the various disciplines of humanities different thoughts exist about the weight of universal aspects of human cognition, language, and culture (universalism) and of aspects specific to a particular people or to a certain tradition (relativism). Broadly speaking, whereas within anthropology relativism dominates, within linguistics opinions are strongly divided, while many cognitive scientists (particularly in the corner of neurocognition) take a universal position. In the last conference in the series of three, Diversity and Universals in Language, Culture, and Cognition, the various dimensions of this controversy will be highlighted in terms of conceptual frameworks, empirical evidence, and research methodology.

The scientific study of human cognition, language, and culture is far from uniform in terms of centrality of explanations based on universal aspects or not. In this conference we want to study the value of universal explanations in terms of conceptual frameworks, empirical evidence, and research methods.

Language research over the last 50 years has been characterized by two apparently contradictory tendencies: on the one hand much research has been carried out from the perspective of cognitive science in the areas of linguistic competence, acquisition, and processing. In this research the unity of the human language capacities, as part of the ‘psychic unity of mankind’, is a central postulate. On the other hand, descriptive and comparative linguists have uncovered considerable differences between the languages of the world, which has greatly stretched our view of the boundaries of human language capacities. The key question is how to reconcile these two tendencies. Questions to be asked include in particular:

1. How are diversity and universals in human behavior perceived and studied in different disciplines?

2. What are the limits of language diversity? What are new insights after decades of grammar writing of hitherto underdescribed languages? In which domains do we still know far too little? Do true universals exist? To what extent do spoken and signed languages have the same properties?

3. Which aspects of our language capacity are responsible for the impressive language diversity? Why are languages so different?

4. Are there differences in language acquisition and in language processing that can be related to structural differences of languages?

5. How does language diversity come about and how does it stabilize? What is the importance of language diversity in evolution?

There is strong tradition in the Netherlands in research in language diversity, in the cognitive basis of languages, and in universal grammar. At this conference we also want to discuss where the future of Dutch linguistics lies, and how to strengthen Dutch research in linguistics in view of these questions and the expectations regarding the main developments in linguistics.

The mornings of this three-day conference will be dedicated to plenary lectures. In the afternoons two parallel workshops will take place on specific topics concerning language, culture, and cognition.

4

Conference Program

Thursday October 24

Klein Auditorium (Academiegebouw)

8:45-9:15 Coffee/tea and registration

9:15-9:30 Welcome

9:30-10:30 John A. Lucy

Language Diversity, Cultural Practice, and the Development of Mind

10:30-11:00 Coffee/tea

11:00-11:45 Asifa Majid

Meaning, mind and culture

11:45-12:30 Felix K. Ameka

Feeling, thinking, and culture

12:30-14:00 Lunch Faculty Club

Lipsius 148 Lipsius147

Workshop Pitch and Timbre

in the Language-Music Relation

Workshop The Universality of Linguistic Micro and Macro Variation

14:00-14:15 Introduction: Julien Meyer Introduction: Marjo van Koppen

14:15-14:45 Didier Demolin

Pitch and timbre in the languages and music

of Central African Pygmies

Mark C. Baker

Ergative and Accusative; Syntactic and

Morphological; Formal and Functional;

Micro- and Macro-

14:45-15:15 Julien Meyer

Pitch and timbre emulation in whistled dialogs

and songs

Norbert Corver & Marjo van Koppen

The architecture of variation

15:15-15:45 Anastasia Karlsson, Håkan Lundström,

& Siri Tuttle

The interaction of music and language in tone

and non-tone Kammu dialects

Jack Hoeksema

Variation without parameters, micro,

macro or otherwise


16:15-16:45 Tommaso Montagnani

The melodic talk of the flute: music-language

relations in ritual instrumental music among

the Kuikuro (Upper-Xingu-Brazil)

Sjef Barbiers

Where is syntactic variation?

16:45-17:15 Anjali Bhatara et al.

Rhythmic grouping of musical instrument

sounds is affected by language experience

Marc van Oostendorp

What is variable? The view from

phonology

17:15-17:30 Final discussion Final discussion

Welcome reception Faculty Club

5

Friday October 25

Lipsius 005


9:00-9:45 Mark C. Baker

Diversity out of Unity in Language: Polysynthesis and Beyond

9:45-10:30 Michael Fortescue

The diversity and universality of polysynthesis


11:00-11:45 Niels O. Schiller

Cross-linguistic psycholinguistics: Phonological encoding across languages

11:45-12:30 Didier Demolin

Constraints on the diversity of phonetic and phonological systems


Lipsius 228 Lipsius 148

Workshop The Body

in Language and Culture

Workshop Experimental Approach

to Variation in Speech

14:00-14:15 Introduction: Felix K. Ameka

14:00-

14:45

Vincent J. van Heuven &

Renée van Bezooijen

Avant-garde Dutch: A perceptual,

acoustic, and evaluational study

14:15-14:45 Vincent de Rooij

Body-language iconicity: Some

explorations into language ideologically

informed notions of the speaking body

14:45-15:15 Konrad Rybka

Between people and places:

The expression of landforms in Lokono

14:45-

15:30

Shinichiro Ishihara

On Syntax–Prosody

Correspondence and Mismatch

15:15-15:45 Ewelina Wnuk

Verbs of perception in the context of

ethnobiology in Maniq

15:30- 16:00

Coffee/tea

16:00- 16:30

Dan Dediu Genetic foundations of speech variation – methods, findings and future directions


16:15-16:45 Eithne B. Carlin

(Dis)ease and illness among the Trio, a

Cariban group of Suriname

16:30-

17:00

Lesya Ganuschchak

Individual variation in speech

16:45-17:15 Lourens de Vries

Body count: Numerals in Papuan

languages of the Greater Awyu family

17:00-

17:30

Niels O. Schiller

Variation and diversity in

grammatical encoding: An example

of field-based psycholinguistics 17:15-17:30 Final discussion

19:00 Conference dinner Arsenaal

6

Saturday October 26

Lipsius 028


9:30-10:15 David Kemmerer

The cross-linguistic prevalence of SOV and SVO word orders reflects the sequential and

hierarchical representation of action in Broca’s area

10:15-11:00 Maria Polinsky

Till Death Us Do Part? Theoretical syntax and cognitive science


11:30-12:15 Johan Rooryck

TBA

12:15-13:00 Pieter Muysken

How can linguistics survive? The need for integrative approaches


Lipsius 228

Workshop Universals in the Semantic Representation of Verbs and Nouns

14:00-14:15 Introduction: Roel Jonkers

14:15-14:45 Lea Hald, Marianne van den Hurk, & Harald Bekkering

Embodied cognition for word learning

14:45-15:15 Patrick Santens & Miet de Letter

Cortico-subcortical interactions for semantics in Parkinson’s Disease

15:15-15:45 Inna Skrynnikova

The ways to be located: An image-schematic account of posture verbs


16:15-16:45 David Kemmerer

Nouns and verbs in the brain:

Implications of linguistic typology for cognitive neuroscience

16:45-17:15 Roel Jonkers, Jet Vonk, & Loraine Obler

Processing verbs and nouns in Alzheimer’s disease: The Embodied View of Cognition

17:15-17:30 Final discussion

Farewell reception Faculty Club

7

Abstracts Keynote Lectures

Feeling, thinking, and culture

Felix K. Ameka Leiden University

Feelings seem to be part of the biological endowment of humans but there is enormous diversity of the means of expression across languages and cultures. Studies from different perspectives have established their universality and variation; whether it is in terms of facial expressions of feelings, or vocalizations, or in terms of linguistic expressions and their underlying conceptual metaphors. The studies have however focussed on recognition or availability of codability of feelings. Like with other biological heritage predispositions, the forms and expressions are constrained and shaped by cultural practices which can be revealed or articulated in discursive practices. To advance our understanding of feelings in language, culture and cognition we need an interdisciplinary study of multimodal investigations of everyday conversations. In this talk I explore the role of specialised discursive practices and linguistic ideologies in providing clues about forms of thought about feelings in different West African communities of practice. I discuss the constraints on the display of feelings in social interaction as embodied in proverbs, behavioural codes and status related forms of communication.

Diversity out of Unity in Language: Polysynthesis and Beyond

Mark C. Baker Rutgers University

Our notions of universal grammar and typological diversity are often thought of as being at odds with one another, such that we need to highlight one and background the other, at least for particular domains. In this talk, I argue that, on the contrary, sometimes the reason that languages seem so different from one another is because they are so similar—both obeying the same universal principles. I show how this paradoxical situation can hold by an analysis of polysynthesis and nonconfigurationality in Mohawk. Mohawk seems very different from (say) English in many typologically salient ways: it allows the object to be incorporated into the verb, it requires pronominal prefixes for both subject and object (polysynthesis), it allows arguments to be omitted freely, and it allows the constituents of a sentence to be freely ordered (nonconfigurationality) and so on. Moreover, when one moves to the more subtle grammatical properties discovered by generative grammar, one finds even more differences: the interpretations of pronouns in Mohawk are different, for example, and the possibilities for moving question words are different. We thus seem to find differences at every level. However, more careful consideration of the data show that these impressive differences are also highly patterned, pointing in a consistent direction. This allows them to be reduced to a single difference: that the direct object is inside the verb phrase in English but outside it in Mohawk, as a result of dislocation induced by the presence of pronominal prefixes on the verb in Mohawk. Crucially, this single difference in the sentence structure affects not only the word order of the clause but also the interpretation of pronouns, the movability of question words, and other features because Mohawk obeys the same structure-based principles of Universal Grammar as English does. The grammaticality patterns in Mohawk are then predictably different from those in English because the same rigid formal principles are applying to a slightly different structure, and thus give systematically different results. Virtually the only syntactic difference between the two languages, then, is that polysynthesis in Mohawk forces its direct objects to either incorporate into the verb or dislocate out of the verb phrase. However, this simple difference reverberates throughout the grammar because there are so many rigid universal principles in play. In short, the languages are so different in their observable grammatical patterns precisely because they are so similar in the abstract grammatical principles that shape them.

8

I conclude with two further examples that suggest that this picture may be quite general, one concerning the interaction of polysynthesis with the apparent absence of a noun-adjective distinction (Nahuatl), and the other concerning the interaction of polysynthesis and ergative case marking (Chukchi, Rembarrnga). I also draw some conclusions about what sort of research we need to do more of in order to learn how far this way of resolving the apparent tension between unity and diversity can go: first, we must strike the right balance between studying languages as organic wholes and comparing constructions across languages; second, we need to embrace a degree of top-down deductive reasoning in our approach to crosslinguistic comparison so as to be able to understand how the features of a language may interact with each other.

Constraints on the diversity of phonetic and phonological systems

Didier Demolin Gipsa-lab, Université de Grenoble, Alpes

Phonological systems and the sounds of the world’s languages show a large diversity. The simplest, such as Hawaiian or Rotokas, only have 12 sounds in their phonemic inventory (Maddieson 1984), while more complex systems such as Changana or !xun have 121 and 141 contrastive segments (Janson & Engstrand 2001, Koenig 2006). Why are the sound systems and the sounds of the world’s languages so different one from another? How can we explain the basis of this diversity? Can we associate particular sounds or sound systems with specific language families? To answer these questions, we can consider that the only true limits on sound systems is the physics, the vocal tract’s morphology and the constraints on the auditory system. By looking at detailed variations of the vocal tract anatomy, one could find some sources for the variation observed in the world’s languages. Dediu & Ladd (2003) showed this possibility for the distribution of tone in languages but also emphasized that a key element to account for the distribution of variation is cultural transmission. Small variations transmitted over generations push systems in some direction and towards a certain shape. Data from San languages show the absence of alveolar ridge in !xoõ (Traill 1985) and facts from some South American languages show the absence of lip rounding and protrusion in some languages (Staveness et al. 2012). In both cases, these anatomical features favor variations in sound production that have been transmitted over many generations to account for the shape of present systems. Finally, another factor linked to the dynamics of gestures, i.e. to their temporal aspects, seems important. If we accept that discrete phonetic gestures are the basis of phonological systems (Studdert-Kennedy & Goldstein 2003), temporal variations in their realizations, both in space and time, could play a role to explain the shape of phonological systems. The acoustic consequences and the categorization of some gesture variations account for some of the differences found in phonological systems. Data from !xoõ show that the timing of gestures is different between clicks (Traill 1985). The same is true in Amharic to account for differences between short and long ejective fricatives. Therefore, differences in the timing, trajectory, location and in the acoustic output produced by gestures involved in speech are an important factor to account for variations in sounds and likely in the shape of phonological systems. This fact associated with the observation that languages divide the continuum of possible places of articulation in different ways (Ladefoged & Zongji Wu 1984) is likely a good basis to discuss phonetic and phonological diversity. This would also account for the reason why there does not seem to be any universal basis for the inventory of phonetic segments in the world’s languages (Port & Leary 2005). Data from the world’s languages force us to admit that a complex language-specific, many-to-many relationship exists between the phonological specification and the phonetic facts of a language. There is no way in which phonological features can be associated with simple phonetic scales. It is impossible to specify all the phonetic aspects of languages if we limit each phonological feature to denoting values on a single physical scale. This question is a major challenge to understand the diversity of phonetic and phonological systems. Taking into consideration a continuous time model, anatomical constraints, discrete gestures, their acoustic consequences and categorization provide a good way to explain some of the phonetic and phonological diversity found in the world’s languages.

9

The diversity and universality of polysynthesis

Michael Fortescue University of Copenhagen and St Hugh’s College, Oxford

Of the various labels for morphological types currently in use by typologists ‘polysynthesis’ has proved to be the most difficult to pin down. For some it just represents an extreme on the dimension of synthesis (one of Sapir’s two major typological axes) while for others it is an independent category or parameter with far-reaching morphosyntactic ramifications (cf. Baker 1996). For most practical purposes Boas’s rather loose description of the phenomenon still holds: ‘A large number of distinct ideas are amalgamated by grammatical processes and form a single word, without any morphological distinction between the formal elements in the sentence and the contents of the sentence’ (Boas 1911: 74). A more modern characterization (Evans & Sasse 2002: 3f.) is not much more specific: ‘Essentially, then, a prototypical polysynthetic language is one in which it is possible, in a single word, to use processes of morphological composition to encode information about both the predicate and all its arguments, for all major clause types [....] to a level of specificity, allowing this word to serve alone as a free-standing utterance without reliance on context.’

In this presentation, while acknowledging the structural diversity of languages of this type (as distinguished in Fortescue 1994), I shall attempt to define polysynthesis somewhat more tightly in relation to the universals of Cognitive Semantics, in particular to Talmy’s conception of the ‘macro-event’ and the process of ‘event integration’ (Talmy 2000, vol. 2, Chapter 3). The resulting definition will involve the intersection of two major factors, holophrasis (corresponding to a single ‘macro-event’) and the integration of more than one heavy element (lexical or affixal) into the unitary ‘word-sentence’.

The cross-linguistic prevalence of SOV and SVO word orders reflects the sequential and hierarchical representation of action in Broca’s area

David Kemmerer

Purdue University Despite the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of the language sciences, so far relatively little effort has been devoted to exploring potential connections between typology and neuroscience. To illustrate some of the insights that can be gained from pursuing such an integration, this talk focuses on one of the most well established and frequently cited typological generalizations, namely that in the vast majority of human languages, the basic word order is either SOV (about 48%) or SVO (about 41%). It has been suggested that these strong tendencies can be explained cognitively in terms of the prototypical transitive action scenario, in which an animate agent acts forcefully on an inanimate patient to induce a change of state. Two forms of iconicity are especially relevant: first, because the agent is at the head of the causal chain that affects the patient, subjects usually precede objects; and second, because it is the agent’s action, rather than the agent per se, that changes the state of the patient, verbs and objects are usually adjacent. The purpose of this talk is to show that this account converges with, and hence receives further support from, recent research on how actions are represented in the brain. Specifically, several lines of evidence are reviewed which suggest that Broca's area plays a pivotal role in schematically representing the sequential and hierarchical organization of goal-directed bodily movements, not only when they are performed and perceived in the real world, but also when they are symbolically expressed as transitive clauses. Taken together, these findings support the hypothesis that the most cross-linguistically prevalent word order patterns reflect the most natural ways of linearizing and nesting the core conceptual components of actions in Broca's area.

10

Language Diversity, Cultural Practice, and the Development of Mind

John A. Lucy University of Chicago

Languages mediate both social interaction and psychological representation, bringing language, culture, and mind into coordination. Since there is no one universal language but rather myriad individual languages all differing from one another in important respects, one perennial debate concerns just how important structural differences between languages are in shaping this coordination. The contention that the particular language we speak influences the way we experience and think about the world has been called the linguistic relativity proposal. The first part of my talk characterizes the relativity proposal both conceptually and historically, showing how current approaches fit into our own intellectual tradition. The second part describes the range of language forms that have been linked to cognition and the types of language-specific effects on thinking that have been identified, with special attention to the growth of these effects during child development. The final section turns in a slightly different direction, to consider variation in the uses of language, focusing on the effects of language standardization, schooling, and literacy, as individual cultures put new registers into practice and socialize children into them.

Meaning, mind, and culture

Asifa Majid Radboud University Nijmegen

Eminent scholars disagree about the fundamental properties of meaning. Is it innate and universal, thus suggesting an invariant connection to mind? Or is it learned and relative, reflecting cultural preoccupations? These differing stances reflect, at least partially, differences in domains of comparison and choice of participants (e.g., children or adult). Now, after decades of empirical investigation we can see some newly emerging answers to these age old questions. Recent research shows that prelinguistic infants have rich conceptual structures before they have comprehension of their to-be mother tongue, favouring the first view. Cross-linguistic studies, on the other hand, illustrate the rich variation in how meaning is packaged into lexical fields, thus seeming to favour the second. While variation abounds, however, it is not unlimited. Comparison across multiple semantic domains with statistical techniques shows recurrent patterns in how languages carve up meaning. These recurrent meaning elements reflect aspects of mind (i.e., perception and cognition), but also regularities in the environment, shared sociocultural histories, etc. To conclude, infants do not begin tabula rasa but they are immediately enculturated to their local meaning system, which in turn reflect both mind and culture.

How can linguistics survive? The need for integrative approaches

Pieter Muysken Radboud University Nijmegen

Linguistics as a separate academic discipline currently faces at least three challenges:

(a) Student numbers are stagnating or dwindling, and deans are making budget cuts. A number of linguistics departments have been closed down, in spite of overall growth of the universities.

(b) Chomskyan linguistics has failed to convince the cognitive science community of the central role it had envisaged for itself;

(c) Many of the language-related publications in journals such as Nature, Science or PNAS come from researchers outside of linguistics proper.

Quite possibly, these challenges are related. At the same time, language-related issues continue be central to the socio-political agenda. Also

within the academic discipline, much exciting work is being carried out; many subdisciplines are

11

flourishing, good dissertations are being written, etc. Most or all of the people at this conference would like our discipline to thrive. How can we make it thrive? Of course, I do not have all or even many of the answers, but I am convinced of two things. (i) There are many more things that linguists agree upon than that they disagree upon, when compared with the outside community. We should stress our commonalities and simplify our metalanguage, if we can: internal integration. (ii) We need to engage more than we do with the outside world, and e.g. not ask ourselves: how can we make linguistics interesting to children in schools, but how can we make language interesting to them: external integration. I will attempt a SWOT analysis of linguistics, and try to elaborate some of these points.

Till Death Us Do Part? Theoretical syntax and cognitive science

Maria Polinsky

Harvard University Until recently modern theoretical syntax has been primarily concerned with primary data and theoretical modeling. Two parallel developments have led to a significant paradigm change in recent years: theoretical models have become more articulated and predictive, and the advent of the experimental paradigm has led to new ways of assessing the psychological reality of models. In this talk I will explore the interdependence between the two paradigms by addressing two cases where cognitive science needs theoretical linguistics (hierarchical organization of the language and categorization) and three cases where linguistics needs cognitive science: (i) choice between competing analyses of relative clauses; (ii) evidence for null categories, and (iii) island effects in wh-in situ languages.

Whither linguistics? Neither physics, nor archaeology!

Johan Rooryck Leiden University

The field of linguistics traditionally interacts with at least the following disciplines: social sciences, cognitive science, the humanities. The nature of this interaction has changed substantially in the last 20 years, under the influence of developments from within these disciplines as well as pressures from outside. Developments from within include the rapid advances in neurolinguistics and psycholinguistics. Pressures from outside include the increasing demands for "knowledge utilisation" from funding agencies. The perceived immediate 'usefulness' of research increasingly determines research agendas. In such a context, it is impossible to get funding for a project investigating e.g. the nature of syntactic islands; research that immediately speaks to the imagination of the general public wins the race. In this evolving landscape of changing alliances, moving targets, and receding goalposts, the once central field of 'general' or 'theoretical' linguistics looks increasingly quaint and marginal. The 'physics' model of linguistics is (or was) a perspective in which theoretical linguistics lives in splendid isolation and only derivatively inspires all sorts of interdisciplinary endeavors in L1/2 acquisition and neuro- and psycholinguistics. Increasingly, however, a new model seems to be emerging, which I would call the 'archaeology' model of linguistics. In this model, relatively isolated issues are investigated from a variety of disciplinary angles. Just as there is no Unified Theory of Archaeology, there is no longer any common core of assumptions about general linguistics: at best, there is a shared toolbox of terminologies and methodologies. In this model, the original broad linguistic agenda (what is the architecture of the language faculty?) is often hijacked by a microscopic approach (let's publish the results of Experiments A, B and C) that loses sight of the big picture. I will not propose a miracle solution for this, but I do believe the issue deserves reflection. As always, the answer lies in the middle. Greater collaboration among linguists (and other scholars) of all persuasions is necessary in multidisciplinary ventures where issues of general linguistics are at the core of the project. I will present some of my own projects as an illustration.

12

Cross-linguistic psycholinguistics: Phonological encoding across languages

Niels O. Schiller Leiden University

The language production process is markedly characterized by different stages of planning (ahead). Conceptual, grammatical and phonological planning need to run in parallel to ensure fluent speech production. One (set of) process(es) that has attracted a lot of attention in last two decades is phonological encoding. It has been shown, for instance, that segmental and prosodic encoding exhibit an incremental time course, that prefab speech units such as syllables may be stored and accessed separately, and that consonants and vowels fulfill different roles in speech production due to their different features. I will provide cross-linguistic behavioral as well as electrophysiological data about phonological encoding from a number of (non-western) languages demonstrating different functional units of phonological encoding such as segments, syllables and mora’s in typologically different languages.

13

Workshop descriptions & abstracts

Workshop Pitch and Timbre in the Language-Music Relation: Interactions, Differences and Similarities across Cultures

Pitch and timbre are two essential and complementary perceptual attributes in human speech and music. During this workshop, we propose to revisit the principal productive, perceptual and cognitive differences/similarities that have been so far described between language and music along these two frequency levels. Examples from various different languages and musical traditions from different continents will be chosen to illustrate the discussions. We also encourage the participation of researchers who have been investigating phenomena of direct music-language interactions, such as the influence of speakers’ native language on the structure of their music (correspondence of pitch patterns in instrumental music/songs/spoken speech in tone and non-tone language; influence of spoken formant ratios on musical scales, etc.) or the impact of musical experience/deficiency on speech production and perception.

Abstracts

Pitch and timbre in the languages and music of Central African Pygmies

Didier Demolin Gipsa-lab, Université de Grenoble, Alpes

The vocal polyphonies of Central African Pygmies have been studied in depth for a few decades from the point of view of their musical structure, Arom (1985), Arom & Fürniss (1993), Demolin (1990, 1993), Fürniss (1993, 2007), Fernando (2011). Several features are now clearly identified in this musical universe. These are complex vocal polyphonic music, hoquetus, pentatonic scales, a principle of ostinato with variations, counterpoint and yodel. This last feature leads to interesting observations about the relation between pitch and timbre in music and language. This particularly concerns the relation of the nature of vowels used in Pygmy yodel. The Pygmy yodel consists of the alternation between two voice registers sometimes defined as mechanisms I and II (Castellengo 1994) or more commonly as chest and head voice. One also has to know that most vocal polyphonies of Pygmy music are sung without any semantic content, i.e. there are no words, just alternating vowels. The acute register, which defines a timbre and has to be distinguished from a high pitch, which concerns the height of a musical note, is related to the (API) front vowels [i,e], while the grave register, distinguished from low pitch, is associated with the (API) back vowels [u,o]. Overall there is a slight preference for front vowels in the musical discourse but the most important feature is a principle of timbre alternation between the acute and grave registers, i.e. between front and back vowels and sometimes even between high and low vowels. Note too that the yodel, as an technique that is independent from the spoken language, uses some vowels that do not exist in the phonology of the languages, such as the high front vowel [y]. Another particularity of yodel in Pygmy vocal music is that the scale of intervals loses its relevance. Indeed, the yodel can be produced not only between the intervals of a second but also between two repeated identical notes. Another important question concerns the richness of registers. Both the acute and grave registers show great variety and both can exhibit rich spectra. These observations suggest that in Pygmy vocal polyphonies, musicians play both with the relative height of musical notes and with the timbre and that the two are not automatically correlated. A consequence of this is that the impression of pitch can be perceived from the height of a musical note but also from the height of resonances defining the spectrum of vowels. Indeed, one of the consequences of the principle of timbre alternation is that it enhances either the first or the second formant of the sung vowels. Therefore, the perception of pitch in Pygmy vocal music comes not only from the execution of several nested musical melodies, but also from the, more

14

constrained, alternation between the enhanced resonances of the sung vowels. This is more common in this music than it may seem at first sight. Indeed the enhancement of resonances is frequently observed in the melodies played with the musical bow by the Pygmies. In addition, it is often the case that a melody played on a musical bow has a corresponding song containing words. When the musician plays with a bow, he generally plays a melody copied from the vowels resonances of the spoken words. Several examples coming from the music of various groups of Pygmies will illustrate these claims.

Pitch and timbre emulation in whistled dialogs and songs

Julien Meyer Collegium de Lyon & Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi

The present paper proposes to study natural traditional oral practices that permit the transformation of human voice into simple prosodic signals. We will compare whistled emulations of both spoken and sung speech produced with various techniques that range from bilabial whistling to the use of musical instruments such as flutes. Most of our examples will concern Amazonian languages such as Gavião and Surui of Rondônia, or Wayãpi and Teko of French Guiana. However, some examples will concern also European and South-East Asian languages. We will focus on what they tell us about pitch and timbre percepts in music and language. Indeed, they reveal how the human brain is able to simplify the otherwise very complex frequency spectrum of the human voice, without altering much the comprehension of the original encoded information. The practice called ‘whistled languages’ transposes spoken dialogues into a whistled speech stream made of the most salient phonetic cues of spoken phonemes. The reduction of the frequency space of spoken communications in whistles implies that certain phonetic details present in normal speech are lost. Consequently, comparative studies have shown that whistlers make the choice to prioritize emulation of spoken speech in specific portions of the frequency spectrum of the voice as a function of the phonological structure of their language. A major distinction in strategy is noted for tonal vs. non-tonal languages. For non-tonal languages, whistlers approximate the vocal tract articulation used in spoken form; this provokes a whistled adaptation of vowel and consonant qualities carried by the timbre of the spoken voice. We argue that such a whistled emulation is probably the reflection of the perceptual integration of spoken formant proximities. On the contrary, for tonal languages, whistles are focused on supra-segmental features of the normal voice (mostly pitch) to encode the distinctive phonological tones. Such a preferential imitation of pitch in whistled forms of tonal languages is again potentially important for general speech perception and phonology, suggesting a perceptual precedence of tone over vowel segment for speakers of tonal languages. Finally, all over the world, the whistled imitation of songs mostly transposes pitch patterns of sung voice rather than timbre, without distinction between tonal and non-tonal languages. This confirms the primordial role of pitch, in most cultures, when the speech signal is characterized by a musical valence.

The interaction of music and language in tone and non-tone Kammu dialects

Anastasia Karlsson1, Håkan Lundström

2, and Siri Tuttle

3

1=Linguistics and Phonetics, Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, 2=Malmö Academy of Music, Lund University, 3=Native Language Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks

This presentation is part of a research project concerned with the study of vocal expressions in the borderland between speech and song sponsored by the Swedish Research Council. The project spans over several language and music settings in societies where oral transmission of culture dominates. The aim of the project is to gain increased knowledge through collaboration between researchers with different approaches, to develop an interdisciplinary method for analysis of the vocal expressions and to use this method in an intercultural study including several language and music settings. A long-term aim is also to play a part in the revitalization of such oral traditions and to contribute to their sustainability.

15

The Kammu form an ethnic minority in Southeast Asia. The Kammu language is an Austroasiatic language spoken by some 600,000 people in northern Laos and adjacent areas of Vietnam, Thailand and China. The major vocal music genre of the Kammu is t m, which consists of orally transmitted poems, trn m, that are varied in performance and may be partly improvised. This is a mono-melodic genre, which means that trn m are performed to standard melodies that are varied according to the variation of the words – language and music are thus highly interdependent in the t m genre. There are a number of such area melodies that differ between dialect areas, between villages within dialect areas and between individuals even within the same village. An interesting feature of Kammu is that it has two main dialects, one with and one without linguistic (lexical) tones, which enables us to investigate the differences between a tone language and a non-tone language which differ only minimally from each other in other respects. There are perceptually clear differences in tempo and melodic patterns between t m in tonal and non-tonal singers. Non-tonal singers have faster delivery of words, while the main melodic movements in beginning and end of melodic phrases are sung to vocalises. Tonal singers have a slower delivery of words and less melismatic vocalises, while pitch variations occur also within syllables; moreover, we observe differences in how melody changes within syllables depending on the type of lexical tone (low or high). The differences between tonal and non-tonal singers as well as differences in melodic changes upon lexical tones are assumed to have some connections to the properties of speech. Previously we found that tonal speakers have in average longer duration of syllables (rhyme) than non-tonal.

It is of great interest to further investigate the relation between the melodies in the tonal and non-tonal dialects and to investigate to what extent they are similar or different in structure and performance manner: Are the language differences (lexical tones, syllable length) paralleled in musical differences? Are there other differences (like rhythm, timbre) in the music that can be explained by other differences between the dialects?

In order to answer these questions we will study t m performances by Kammu singers that represent two neighbouring dialect areas in northern Laos: the tonal Yùan dialect and the non-tonal Ùu dialect. By use of ethnomusicological methods on the pitch/lexical tone relation and by linguistic methods on rhythm/syllable length relation we will aim at an integrated musicolinguistic analysis.

The melodic talk of the flute: music-language relations in ritual instrumental music among the Kuikuro (Upper-Xingu-Brazil)

Tommaso Montagnani Musée du quai Branly

The Kuikuro are a Carib speaking native community living in southern Amazonia, in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso. They perform several forms of vocal and instrumental ritual music; I will focus my presentation on the flute music Kuikuro call kagutu. This repertoire is purely instrumental, yet the connections with language are numerous and absolutely relevant, not only in the ritual performance but also during the apprenticeship period, during which language is used as a mnemonic support.

One of the most striking examples of these relations are the fragments of melody that, in the kagutu repertoire, are said to be spirits’ names pronounced by the instrument. By analyzing the melodic contour of those fragments, it appears that the connection between the name and the instrumental melody is not arbitrary: by means of a very codified system of intervals alternation and rhythmic procedures, the melody reproduces the prosodic structure of the spirit’s name.

16

Rhythmic grouping of musical instrument sounds is affected by language experience

Anjali Bhatara

1,2, Natalie Boll-Avetisyan

3, Trevor Agus

1,2,4,

Annika Unger3, Barbara Höhle

3, Thierry Nazzi

1,2

1=CNRS (Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, UMR 8158), 2=Université Paris Descartes, 3=Universität Potsdam, 4=Département d’études cognitives, Ecole normale supérieure

Listeners tend to group intensity-varied sequences as trochees and duration-varied sequences as iambs, independent of whether the sequences are made up of tones or speech syllables. This auditory bias has been proposed to originate from a domain-general perceptual mechanism, the Iambic-Trochaic Law (ITL; Hayes, 1995) and similar grouping preferences proposed for music (Lerdahl & Jackendoff, 1983). Recent work from our group showed that rhythmic perception of linguistic stimuli was affected by language experience, but only when the stimuli had enough acoustic variability. French listeners were less consistent than German listeners in grouping variable rhythmic sequences of syllables (Bhatara et al., in revision). This is in line with previous studies that have shown that French listeners are less sensitive to certain prosodic information than are Spanish speakers (Dupoux et al., 1997). In the present study, we address the question of whether language experience can also affect more general perception. If the processing of rhythmic aspects of music and speech are mediated through the same cognitive system, this should be the case.

A recent study examining grouping of sequences of a repeated tone or syllable found no difference between French and English listeners (Hay & Diehl, 2007). However, their stimuli were simple compared to the relative complexity of music or speech. Specifically, they had less variability within the sequence than Bhatara et al. and there were pauses between each element of the sequence, whereas Bhatara et al.'s speech stimuli were coarticulated. Thus, the present study aims to answer the question of whether differences in linguistic experience between French and other-language speakers only affect perception of speech, or if they can also affect general auditory perception of complex stimuli.

To answer this question, we investigated grouping of sequences of auditory chimeras formed from eight Western orchestral instruments. Sequences of these chimeras imitated the complexity of speech and music without being classifiable as either. Participants heard sequences of chimeras that alternated in either intensity (loud-soft-loud-soft), in duration (long-short-long-short), or neither (control), and they were asked to respond whether they heard the sequence grouped into trochaic (strong-weak) or iambic (weak-strong) pairs. In four separate experimental conditions, we investigated the effects on grouping of timbral variability (high = 16 different chimeras, low = 1 repeating) and presence of pauses: 1) High/No Pauses, 2) Low/No Pauses, 3) High/Pauses, 4) High/No Pauses. For each condition, 20 French and 20 German participants were tested.

Results were analyzed using a linear mixed-effects model and showed that acoustic manipulation (intensity, control, or duration) interacted with language group, p < .001. As found for speech stimuli in Bhatara et al., the German listeners' groupings of nonlinguistic stimuli were more consistent (intensity = trochaic, duration = iambic) than those of the French listeners. In addition, timbral variability interacted with acoustic manipulation, p < .001. The difference between variability conditions was similar to the difference between language groups: participants gave more consistent groupings in the low-variability condition than in the high-variability condition. Interestingly, there was no three-way interaction among language, variability, and acoustic manipulation, suggesting that variability affects both groups in a similar manner. Presence of pauses was not a significant factor. However, musical experience was, interacting with language and acoustic manipulation, p = .01, with the French group (but not the German group) showing improved grouping consistency with increasing musical experience. Thus, we conclude that both language and musical experience can affect auditory rhythmic perception in adulthood. In addition, we find that variability of the sequence (in this case, timbral variability) has a large effect on perception. These results are in line with hypotheses for shared neural resources underlying perception of speech and music (Patel, 2011).

17

Workshop The Universality of Linguistic Micro and Macro Variation

Introduction The languages of the world may appear to be incredibly diverse to a casual observer, showing a lot of language specific properties. A closer look reveals, however, that they appear to be remarkably similar in their diversity when larger samples of languages are taken into account (cf. Greenberg 1963, Dryer & Haspelmath 2011). The question is if, and if so, how this uniformity in diversity should be explained.

Formal linguistic perspective Formal linguists have been investigating if, and if so, how this variation in phonology, morphology and syntax can be limited by and even reduced to universal properties of human language (see, for instance, Baker 2008; Cinque 1999; Kayne 2005). Independently of the precise theoretical framework used, the objective is to find the locus of variation within the human language system.

At present there are various proposals as to which part of the language system allows for variation: Baker (2008), for instance, claims that the notion of parameter (Chomsky & Lasnik 1993) should be employed, since we need a device that can cross cut between different types of languages by imposing properties on syntactic rules. In his recent work, Baker has, for example, shown that there is a parameter stating that agreement is either looking to the left or to the right. Verbal agreement targets elements to the left in the Niger-Congo languages but to the right in the Indo-European languages. He bases his conclusions on the typological comparison of large sets of unrelated languages.

Kayne (2005) and Cinque (1999) on the other hand, identify the features on functional items as the locus of variation. They argue that variation should be reduced to already variant properties of human language, namely the elements in the lexicon. On the basis of typological research, Cinque (1999), for instance, shows that there is a universal hierarchy of adverbs. He argues that the language system has a universal ordering of functional projections hosting these adverbs. Languages may differ, however, in whether they employ all these projections or not, whether these adverbs appear as heads or phrases, and whether or not there is movement of elements through these projections.

This perspective of hypothetical-deductive typological research has not only led to refining the hypotheses on the locus of variation, but also to the discovery of many new data patterns, and to new and innovative research programs. One of those research programs involves looking at variation at different levels of linguistic comparison.

Micro and Macro variation Linguistic variation has been investigated at different levels. One can look at samples of unrelated languages (macro variation/typology) and try to find differences and commonalities. Another option is to look at languages that are very closely related, like dialects or languages within one language family (micro variation/dialectology), or languages that are related to each other through time (i.e. different stages of one language/diachronic research). Obviously, for a complete understanding of the design of linguistic diversity in human language, comparative research is needed on all three levels. Given what we have described as the differences between micro variation and macro variation, one would expect variation to be qualitatively and quantitatively different. Recent research seems to suggest that this is not the case (see D’Alessandro & Roberts 2010, Van Koppen 2010).

In recent years a start has been made in the Netherlands with combining data from different levels of comparison. These comparisons lead both to linguistically interesting results and to the development of new research tools and methodologies. To name a few initiatives: the Meertens Institute has run the Edisyn project, funded by the European Science Foundation, that compares the variation between different dialect systems (see Barbiers 2005 et al.) and that has also built a digital interface to facilitate this type of research. Utrecht University has completed the DiDDD-project in which variation between synchronic and diachronic micro variation was compared (see Corver et al. to appear). The data that has been collected within this project has been combined with dialect data from two other large micro variation projects in the Netherlands (SAND and MAND) in the Mimore database (see Mimore). Utrecht University hosts a NWO VIDI project The Uniformity of Linguistic Variation that compares micro, macro and diachronic variation (see Van Koppen 2010), and Leiden University hosts yet another VIDI project Splitting and clustering grammatical information (see D’Alessandro 2010). These projects lead to databases comparing data from different levels as well.

18

Methodology This type of research combines the hypothetical-deductive approach towards language, characteristic of formal linguistics, with the more descriptive, data-based approach, characteristic of typological and historical studies of language. Furthermore, it integrates micro and macro variation research, which involves both corpus studies, study of grammars and fieldwork with native speakers, and diachronic research, which is necessarily based solely on study of reference grammars and corpus studies.

Because of new technology it is now possible to digitalize large samples of data, to combine data from different sources, and to search through/systematize these data automatically. This also leads to new questions concerning methodology and technology.

Aim and questions of this workshop The aim of this workshop is to formulate the questions that will be at the core of the type of research described above.

In particular we will ask workshop participants to address the following two questions:

What are the formal linguistic research questions that will drive research in the field described above in the coming years?

What are the methodological and technological tools that are necessary to answer these research questions in the coming years?

Abstracts

Ergative and Accusative; Syntactic and Morphological; Formal and Functional; Micro- and Macro-

Mark C. Baker

Rutgers University One of the most significant theoretical questions concerning uniformity and diversity in natural languages, I believe, is whether there is true variation in the syntactic system, or whether all the observed variation reduces to lexical differences (e.g., in the feature content of lexical items) and/or morphological differences (e.g., in what elements are realized overtly). This question is heavily correlated with the more discussed question of macro- and microparameteric variation, but it is conceptually distinct and logically independent. I also illustrate and reflect on what current typological databases do and do not contribute to answering this question, as they are currently conceived. While these issues arise in connection with many specific topics, for illustrative purposes I concentrate on the domain of morphological case marking and alignment, drawing on my own current work.

I begin by comparing Comrie’s (1978, 1981) functionalist notion of the “discriminating” function of case with Marantz’s (1991) formal notion of “dependent” case, as ways of accounting for accusative and ergative languages. While the fundamental insights are essentially the same, value is added by Marantz’s more precise generative formulation, in that he makes it explicit that two nominals must be in the same local domain in order to influence each other’s case. When this domain is understood as a phase in the sense of Chomsky (2000, 2001), some positive results pop out. First, we understand why the subject of a lower clause can receive accusative case under the influence of the subject of the main clause (only) in very special circumstances in languages like Sakha and Quechua. Second, we derive a form of differential object marking from the very same principle. Third, we can deduce from these simple principles that the very same structural factors should influence ergative case assignment in ergative languages and tripartite languages as influence accusative assignment in accusative languages. For example, just as the position and specificity of the object determine whether the object is accusative in Turkic languages, so the position and specificity of the object should determine whether the subject is ergative in ergative languages. Existing databases like WALS cannot tell us if this is true, given the limits of their design, but the prediction is confirmed by languages like Ostyak, Kanuri, Ika, and Nez Perce. This shows the value of using a top-down hypothetical-deductive method in both linguistic theory and the construction of databases and other research tools.

19

Given that the same factors influence the assignment of both accusative and ergative case across accusative, ergative, and tripartite languages, should we say that case assignment is exactly the same in the syntax of all languages? That would mean that all languages are underlyingly tripartite, assigning both ergative and accusative case, and the differences we observe come from which cases have an overt morphological exponent at PF: one, the other, both, or neither. I argue that this strong form of syntactic uniformity is not warranted. There are languages with ergative case subjects in which the tensed verb agrees with the subject only if the subject bears ergative case (Coast Tsimshian, Semelai). If this sort of agreement is syntactic, and all languages assign ergative in the syntax, then a language with any superficial morphological alignment type should be able to have this sort of ergative-only agreement pattern. But existing typological databases indicate that this is not the case: distinctively ergative agreement patterns are only found in languages with ergative or neutral case patterns, never with accusative case patterns. From this, we can conclude that the rules of case assignment differ across languages in the syntax, so some crosslinguistic variation is crucially syntactic in nature—and that existing typological databases do have some value for addressing theoretical questions.

Finally, we can use this empirical domain to learn something about the relationship between macro-variation between language families and micro-variation between dialects of a single language. The varieties of Kurmanji Kurdish spoken in Adıyaman and Muş (towns in Turkey) are both aspect-based split ergative languages, where in present tenses the subject is nominative and triggers agreement on the verb and the object is oblique, whereas in past tenses the subject is oblique and does not trigger agreement. The alignment difference is seen on objects in the past tense: in Adıyaman, they are nominative (i.e. absolutive) and agree with the verb, a standard ergative pattern; in Muş, they are oblique and do not agree with the verb, giving an otherwise unattested alignment pattern (cf. Comrie 1981). I show that this smallish but important difference cannot be understood as a difference in the PF spell out of syntactically uniform case marking, given the interaction with agreement. Rather, it must be understood as a difference in the syntactic rules of case assignment. Therefore, the difference between morphological variation and syntactic variation crosscuts the distinction between microvaration and macrovariation (as we might have expected).

The architecture of variation

Norbert Corver and Marjo van Koppen Utrecht University

There is a large body of literature addressing the issue of variation. Comparing languages from different language families (macrovariation or typology), see for instance WALS, as well as comparing closely related languages (microvariation or dialectology), see for instance Edisyn, has revealed a huge amount of variational patterns. Theoretical linguists have analyzed these patterns of variation in terms of (a set of) so-called macroparameters (see among others Baker 2001, 2012) or they have tried to show that variation can be reduced to lexical information of a certain function element (also called microparameters, cf. among others the recent work by Kayne 2005).

A natural approach towards the search for patterns of variation across languages/dialects starts from the empirical data: on the basis of a sample of languages the linguist tries to identify dimensions of variation along which languages can differ from each other. A quite different approach would be one which starts from the abstract structure of linguistic expressions and the architecture of language, and tries to answer the question of how an engineer would implement the property of variation. That is, what formal linguistic devices are available and can be manipulated yielding different linguistic instantiations of the same thought? We suggest that UG makes available a certain set of variation points, for instance the option to move or not. These variation points define both the variation found between unrelated languages and the variation within one language family. We hypothesize that UG allows a restricted set of grammatical permutations on the structures it generates. These permutations define the scope of linguistic variation. There is no difference between micro and macro parameters or micro and macro-variation.

Let us for instance look at a variation point that has been discussed in a lot of detail over the years, namely the realization of a pronominal subject. When we look at this from the point of view of the architecture of grammar we expect three basic patterns: the subject position is realized, the subject

20

position is not realized, more than one position of the subject chain is realized. This is exactly the variation we find if we look at macrovariational patterns: WALS-map 101 shows three basic patterns: (i) an obligatory subject pronoun, (ii) no overt subject pronoun and (iii) more than one subject pronoun. Interestingly, it is also exactly what we find if we look at a group of closely related languages, like the Dutch dialects. There are dialects that obligatorily express the subject, dialects that have pro-drop and dialects that have doubling or tripling of the subject. Interestingly, we even find the variation when we look at the different registers of one idiolect. A speaker of Dutch can leave out the subject, realize the subject or double the subject depending on information structural considerations. In this talk we will also explore this approach towards the structure of diversity on the basis of the encoding of affective information in language, which essentially is also a dimension of linguistic variation (sometimes referred to as stylistic variation): viz. ‘descriptive’ language (expression of thought) versus ‘expressive’ language (expression of affect).

Variation without parameters, micro, macro or otherwise

Jack Hoeksema Rijksuniversiteit Groningen

The notion of a parameter was introduced in generative grammar to deal with linguistic variation in a restrictive manner, to give body to the idea that languages, in spite of their obvious superficial differences, embody a universal grammar that severely constrains the set of possible languages. By allowing only a limited number of settings, they were meant to give some substance to the claim that the number of possible languages is relatively small, while still allowing for some variation.

OK, so this seems like excellent scientific stuff. What’s not to like about a theory that is restrictive and cuts right through the multitude of languages and their seemingly endless variation? I will try and present the case against the parametric approach. I will argue that it is nonexplanatory, that it has been oversold, and that we don’t need it.

Where is syntactic variation?

Sjef Barbiers Meertens Instituut & Utrecht University

Since in current Minimalism the syntactic module of the Faculty of Language has been reduced to Merge and Labeling, apparent syntactic variation can arise at any level of analysis but not in the syntactic module. This implies a program for syntactic variation research that seeks to explain syntactic variation as the result of the interaction between the fixed principles of the syntactic module and the levels of the lexicon, phonology, morphology, semantics, pragmatics, processing, memory, physiology, physics and society. This complicates our research task considerably. It is not a priori clear to which level a certain piece of syntactic variation belongs and more generally, a lot is unknown about the properties of each of these levels and the ways they interact. A strategy that tries to explain a microscopic detail in its full complexity seems to be more promising here than general examination of the various levels. In this talk I demonstrate the fruitfulness of this approach by zooming in on a case of microsyntactic variation, focus particle doubling in Dutch. I show how each lexicon, syntax, semantics, phonology and society contribute to the complex variational patterns that we observe.

21

What is variable? The view from phonology

Marc van Oostendorp Meertens Instituut & Leiden University

In current syntactic debate about the locus of variation, there are roughly two positions. One is that languages differ in their grammar, i.e. the computational device working on representations can differ (by way of parameters) from one language to the next (Baker 2008, Roberts et al. 2013). The other view is that languages differ in their representations (e.g. the presence or absence of certain functional features); under this view, the grammar of all languages is ultimately the same, but the processes work on the same representations (Borer 1985, Chomsky 1995).

Phonologists do not seem to participate in this debate; everybody seems to assume that in phonology *at least* the computational device varies (parameter choice, constraint ranking), sometimes in addition to the permissible representations. In this talk, however, I want to explore to what extent we can build a Borer-Chomsky view on phonology, i.e. one in which the only task of the child is to learn the permissible representations of the language and all phonological processes are universal.

In this talk, I present two case studies: syllable final obstruent devoicing (the /d/ in 'bad' becoming [t] in German but not in English) and vowel harmony in Turkic languages (segments being subject or not subject to it) and argue what the advantages are of a model that takes languages to differ only in their permissble representations.

22

Workshop The Body in Language and Culture The body is a central topic in culture and language, with all languages and cultures envisaging and making metaphoric use of the body. Therefore, it is important to focus on the intricate relationship between culture, language, and body, when studying language and culture. Across various cultures internal body organs, such as the heart or liver, have been used as the locus of feelings, thinking, knowing, etc. Although space has the same physical properties all around the world, the location of the human body is encoded in different ways cross-linguistically. Space, direction, perception, the state of the human body, etc., all involve metaphoric extensions of the body and its parts. Other cognitive capacities, such as counting, are often based on the human body as well. In this workshop experts on language and culture will focus on the relation between language and culture by zooming in on the body.

Abstracts

Body-language iconicity: Some explorations into language ideologically informed notions of the speaking body

Vincent de Rooij

University of Amsterdam

In this talk, I will take up the challenge put forward by Woolard (2008) who asks whether and how we should study the problem of why specific language forms become iconically linked to specific socio-cultural meanings. As studies in language ideology have shown over and over again, thinking of linguistic signs as either purely conventional or purely iconic is misguided. In the assignment of socio-cultural meanings to linguistic forms, the body, or rather how the body speaks, plays a crucial role. Using data from different societies, I will show how language ideologically informed ways of judging the speaking body provide a template for the judging of linguistic elements.

Between people and places: The expression of landforms in Lokono

Konrad Rybka University of Amsterdam

The idea that we conceptualize topographic features as a somewhat indeterminate category of objects is a recurring theme in geographic modeling (cf. Cova & Goodchild 2002), ecological psychology (cf. Gibson 1979) as well as linguistics (cf. Lyons 1979). Nevertheless, little evidence has been brought forth to support such assumptions about folk conceptualizations of landforms. In this talk, I look at the expression of topography in Lokono (Arawakan) in order to explore what the linguistic features of such expressions can tell us about the conceptualizations they encode. The terms used to express landforms belong to the category of non-lexicalized phrases containing the set noun horhorho ‘land’ and a term that specifies its spatial configuration (a body part term, a configurational term, a directional term or a combination thereof); landform terms are therefore deeply embedded in spatial language. A comparison of spatial expressions across different domains of Lokono lexicon reveals a cline from person-referring terms to place-referring terms, with landforms representing a grammatically intermediate category.

23

Verbs of perception in the context of ethnobiology in Maniq

Ewelina Wnuk Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

Sensory information across languages and perceptual domains is encoded in various word classes. In Maniq, an Austroasiatic language spoken by a group of nomadic hunter-gatherers in Thailand, the bulk of perceptual distinctions is packaged into verbs. This talk highlights stative verbs of perception in Maniq, investigating them in the context of ethnobiology. Maniq belongs to the Aslian group of languages of the Malay Peninsula. Maniq verbs of perception are morphologically simple forms carrying highly specific semantic information, e.g. cawãc ‘to be striped lengthwise’, kadiet ‘to be striped crosswise’, kamɛh ‘to stink (of a millipede)’, bayel ‘to be light green and slightly red (of young leaves)’. Furthermore, some domains – for instance, color – are host to verbal templates, an iconic device expressing fine-resolution semantic contrasts, e.g. haʔ__ŋ as in haʔõŋ ‘to be brown/grey (of tubers)’, haʔuŋ 'to be yellow (of mud)'. Apart from the rich and expressive sensory lexicon, Maniq possesses a set of verbal derivational morphemes allowing for the encoding of additional semantic detail, e.g. the iterative affix lp- in lpɲup ‘to feel soft in the mouth (repeatedly, when chewing)’ (from ɲup ‘to be soft’). The data illustrate that verbs in Maniq are a highly functional word class, offering precision and expressiveness in reference to salient perceptual qualities of the natural world and reflecting the detailed ethnobiological knowledge of the Maniq.

(Dis)ease and illness among the Trio, a Cariban group of Suriname

Eithne B. Carlin Leiden University

Medical anthropological approaches to interethnic health issues generally tend to ascribe differing health attributions to ‘cultural’ differences, i.e. different worldviews of one biomedical reality. In this presentation of the conception of (dis)ease and illness among the Trio Amerindians of Suriname, I look at illness concepts and the linguistic strategies used to express notions of disease and illness and show, inter alia by means of antonymic values and the issue of agency, how they differ in their conception from biomedical etiological and causation definitions. I will show, that Trio conceptions of illness are more insightfully treated as ontological rather than cultural stances. For the Trio, health, (kure wehto ‘wellness’) is understood, not as the absence of disease (injetun) or illness (ësenë wehto), but rather as the presence of spiritual and communal harmony (sasame wehto ‘being at one with oneself and the collective’). Illness, on the other hand, is associated with spirit or human intervention and/or anger in its various guises, internal or external to the subject. I will present a preliminary taxonomy of Trio illness terms showing how, although illness abounds and may be localized to specific parts of the body or not, disease concepts are few and are expressed descriptively rather than as abstract monolexemic terms.

Body count: numerals in Papuan languages of the Greater Awyu family

Lourens de Vries VU University, Amsterdam

Numeral systems of the Greater Awyu family of Papuan languages are transparently based on body-parts (De Vries, Wester & Van den Heuvel 2012, De Vries 2013, Van Enk & De Vries 1997). Extended body-part tally systems that employ the fingers, parts of the arm and head are used by most languages of this family. Body-part tally systems of this type are only found in parts of New Guinea and northern Australia and are therefore of great interest for the typology of numeral systems. They are closed systems, with 23, 25 or 27 as highest number in the languages of the Greater Awyu family (47 being the highest number found in a New Guinea body-part tally system). They are also interesting because of the role of conventional gestures to distinguish the primary body-part meaning from the secondary numeral meaning. The body-part tally systems

24

are used in combination with elementary numerals for 1 to 4 that are not derived from body-parts. One subgroup of the Greater Awyu family, the Awyu subgroup, uses a hands-and-feet system which they borrowed from their Asmat and Marind neighbours. Such systems are also body-part based but differ radically from body-part tally systems: they distinguish base and derived numbers, they are in principle open-ended and they are not restricted to New Guinea. The paper describes the cultural and typological contexts of the numeral systems of the Greater Awyu family, pays attention to the interaction with borrowed Indonesian numerals, to the syntactic integration of the body-part-numerals in phrases and clauses and to the intriguing variation between speakers in the use of body-parts.

25

Workshop Experimental Approach to Variation in Speech

Organizers: Dr. Yiya Chen and Dr. Lesya Ganushchak

This half-day workshop will present research aiming to uncover the various mechanisms involved in speech variability, from linguistic messages and genetic variation to individual behaviors. We will show that phonetics, at the forefront of research on speech variability, can be of crucial importance for various research fields on speech variability and vice versa. The subtopics covered by the workshop include how prosodic variation is used to signal grammatical structures and pragmatic functions, how cognitive skills lead to individual variation in speech, and what are the genetic factors that influence speech variability and linguistic diversifications.

Abstracts

Avant-garde Dutch: A perceptual, acoustic, and evaluational study

Vincent J. van Heuven1 and Renée van Bezooijen

2

1=Leiden University, 2=Groningen University

Dutch. It is the most conspicuous feature of a new variety of Dutch ‘discovered’ and described by Stroop (1998), who christened it Polder Dutch. Here we will refer to the new variety by the more interpretable name of Avant-garde Dutch (for details on the background of the variety we refer to Van Heuven, Van Bezooijen & Edelman 2005). The clearest phenomenon in avant-garde Dutch is a change affecting the closing low-mid diphthong /ɛi/, which is said to undergo a process of lowering. According to Stroop, the lowering would be especially noticeable in the speech of relatively young, highly educated and politically progressive women.

We aim to present an integrated study of various properties of the ongoing change. We will do this by presenting three separate studies. The first study uses a perceptual approach to test the claim that avant-garde women are more prone to adopt the new variety than male speakers. The second study tries to determine the acoustic basis of the difference in realization of /ɛi/ by female and male speakers. The third evaluational study aims to determine the gender-related attractiveness and other subjective features of Avant-garde Dutch.

On Syntax–Prosody Correspondence and Mismatch

Shinichiro Ishihara Goethe University Frankfurt am Main

In this talk, I discuss a few case studies in which phonetic experiments provide some insights into the study of syntax.

Since prosodic structures are known to reflect syntactic branching structures and semantic scopes syntax-prosody correspondence), close examination of prosody can reveal certain syntactic information of the sentence. Phonetic experiments can also be used to examine predictions of syntactic theories.

At the same time, there are constraints on prosodic structures that interfere with syntax-prosody correspondence (e.g. length and rhythmic effects). When the correspondence is overridden by prosodic factors (syntax-prosody mismatch), sentences may become difficult to parse, or intended readings may no longer be available. This means that apparently syntactic 'ungrammaticality' may in fact be due to purely prosodic factors. It is therefore essential to find out how the syntax-prosody correspondence and mismatch affect syntactic acceptability, and in some cases to re-consider syntactic theories based on these finding.

In this talk, I will illustrate some cases of syntax-prosody correspondence and mismatch with some data from wh-questions in Japanese. After reviewing some experimental studies that confirm the syntax-

26

prosody correspondence found in wh-questions in Japanese, I will discuss cases of syntax-prosody mismatches that illustrate how syntax-prosody mismatches may affect the syntactic theories.

As a perspective for future research, I will also discuss potential influences of variation in prosody on syntactic parsing. Inter-speaker variation found in the data may lead us to an interesting hypothesis that variability of syntactic acceptability judgments may partly due to variability in prosody.

Genetic foundations of speech variation – methods, findings and future directions

Dan Dediu

Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

Variation in speech – both within-population inter-individual and between populations – is pervasive and of fundamental interest for understanding language change and evolution. It is uncontroversial that at least part of this inter-individual variation is influenced by genetic differences and I will review here the relevant methods and findings. Heritability studies of various parameters of speech (such as the fundamental frequency) and of the vocal tract (such the vocal tract dimensions) strongly suggest a genetic component, and genetic pathologies affecting them (cleft palate, ankyloglossia, etc.) support this conclusion while also highlighting some candidate genes and mechanisms. It is, however, unclear what the link between genetic variation in vocal tract anatomy and physiology with a genetic basis and variation in speech output is, given our huge capacity to compensate for such variation.

On the other hand, while there are reports of inter-population variation in the vocal tract with a potential genetic basis, more work remains to be done in order to ascertain the validity and the actual nature of the genetic influences on such variation. I will present some examples and argue that, even if such variation can be compensated within individuals, it can, nevertheless, lead to small but persistent biases in populations of similar individuals. These biases have the potential to affect language change across multiple generations such that cross-linguistic phonetic and phonological diversity will in part reflect these differences in the vocal tract.

An interdisciplinary approach is needed to find such cases, estimate the strength of the biases involved and identify the genes and the molecular mechanisms responsible. Computer models, experimental phonetic investigations, data on cross-population variation and genetic studies are promising avenues of future research.

Individual variation in speech

Lesya Ganushchak LUCL, LIBC, & Education and Child Studies, Leiden University

Speech is highly complex and variable. While much variation comes from regular and predictable linguistic alternations, a lot of variation are indexical signaling e.g., talker identity (e.g., male vs. female speakers), language background, and emotional states (happy vs. angry). In addition, there is evidence that non-linguistic skills, such as inhibition and working memory, also play an important role in speech processing, which leads to individual variation. For instance, people who have better inhibition (as measured by Simon task) are better in learning word boundaries and discriminating native vowel contrasts in noise. In the talk I will review relevant methods and findings in the literature on individual variation. I will show that although research has shown a strong relationship between production and comprehension, most work on individual variation addressed the issue of phonological/phonetic variation from the comprehension side. We will discuss the possibilities of individual variation in speech production, arguing that an interdisciplinary approach of experimental, neurophysiological, and phonetic investiga-tions combined with cognitive studies of individual differences approach is a promising direction for future research on linguistic variability

27

Variation and diversity in grammatical encoding: An example of field-based psycholinguistics

Niels O. Schiller

Leiden University

In this talk, I will first give an overview of the language production process and especially grammatical encoding. Then, I will exemplify grammatical encoding by the gender congruency effect and present examples of noun phrase production including behavioral and neuroimaging studies. I will provide experimental evidence from Germanic languages such as Dutch or German and demonstrate how theory-driven research in those languages has contributed to new insights regarding the discussion about the mechanisms and architecture in lexical access. Importantly, however, it is widely known that psycholinguistic theories are heavily based on data obtained from Germanic languages, above all English. Therefore, I will also provide new data from several Cushitic languages such as Konso, native to parts of Ethiopia. Cushitic noun morphology exhibits an interesting interaction between gender and number morphology. I will demonstrate the importance of field-based psycholinguistic data acquisition to inform theories of language processing.

28

Workshop Universals in the Semantic Representation of Verbs and Nouns

Verbs play an important role in sentence processing. They contain grammatical information contributing to the structure of the sentence, and semantic information contributing to its meaning. Despite a lot of research on the structure of our mental lexicon, it still is not clear how verbs, in comparison to, for example, nouns are stored. In studies on aphasia it is shown that some subjects find verbs more difficult to retrieve than nouns, whereas others show the opposite pattern. This led some researchers to believe that verbs and nouns are separately stored in the mental lexicon. In connection to this assumption, it was even suggested that verbs are stored in the frontal parts of the brain, as subjects with lesions in this part of the brain have problems with verbs, and nouns are represented in the anterior parts, again in line with lesions of subjects having specific problems with nouns.

However, neuroimaging and behavioral data from aphasia research show that a uniform division into the broad grammatical categories of verbs and nouns is untenable. In aphasia research, for example, it is shown that verbs do not form a uniform category, but that grammatical factors (e.g., transitivity) and lexical factors (e.g., instrumentality) influence the performance of aphasic subjects in verb processing.

As verbs and nouns do not seem to be uniform categories, it could be argued that semantic subcategories should be distinguished within the categories of verbs and nouns. One of the leading theories in the field of semantic processing is the Embodied Cognition Framework. Within this framework it is assumed that semantic knowledge of verbs is not amodal, but incorporated in motor-sensory systems in the brain.

This would mean, for example, that subjects with motoric problems due to brain lesions would also have problems with processing verbs that semantically express motion. Kemmerer et al. (2008) showed that semantic components of verbs depend on different parts of the brain. They showed that different verb types, like change of state, hitting, and cutting verbs, have different localisations in the brain. Recently, it was shown by Vonk and colleagues (2012) that subjects with Alzheimer’s disease have more problems with the interpretation of hitting verbs in comparison to cutting verbs, which relates to the localisation of the brain damage of these subjects, providing also clinical evidence for the distinction made by Kemmerer et al. (2008).

In the Netherlands different research groups study the representation of verbs and nouns within the Embodied Cognition Framework. This workshop will bring groups studying non-language disturbed and language disturbed subjects together, aiming to combine neuropsychological and clinical evidence to distinguish universal subcategories for verbs and nouns in the brain.

Abstracts

Embodied cognition for word learning

Lea Hald

1, Marianne van den Hurk

2, and Harold Bekkering

1

1=Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen, 2=Education Department, Radboud University Nijmegen

Evidence suggests that word meaning is represented in the brain in a manner that reflects real-world experience with words’ referents (Barsalou, 2008; Fischer & Zwaan, 2008; Glenberg & Kaschak, 2002). This idea suggests that by nature of our experience with objects and actions, there may be differences in how we learn and represent the meaning of nouns and verbs. Namely many verbs (or at least action verbs) may be linked more to movements, while the meaning of nouns may be more often linked to sensory information (e.g., visual, tactile, auditory, etc.). The aim of this talk is to explore this possible difference by looking at research on how word meaning is learned in children and adults. In particular we will discuss how learning verbs and nouns benefit from the execution or observation of actions conveying semantic information in different ways (i.e., pantomime, iconic gestures, and dynamic animations). It may be the case that linking verb meaning to action may lead to better learning of meaning, but is this also the case for nouns? For example, does the observation of an actor pretending to turn a knob and open a door contribute to the semantic representation of the word door? Reviewing evidence from our own lab and

29

others on children and adult word learning, we will consider the possibility that action information aids learning of verbs and nouns.

Cortico-subcortical interactions for semantics in Parkinson's Disease

Patrick Santens and Miet de Letter Universiteit Gent & UZ Gent

TBA

The ways to be located: an image-schematic account of posture verbs

Inna Skrynikkova Erasmus Mundus Aurora Postdoctoral Scholarship

Visting Scholar of the Department of Linguistics, University of Groningen

A great body of research has been done on the cross linguistic differences in space conceptualization and description (Levinson 2003, Ameka 2007, Regier 1996). Yet, the verbal component of locative constructions is still a relatively neglected topic in recent studies (Svorou 1994; Newman 2002), with more preference being given to the analysis of spatial prepositions and deictics (Talmy 2000, Feist 2010, Vandeloise 2003, Hanks 2009). However, posture verbs serve as an important source of lexicalization and metaphorical extensions (event structure metaphors).

This paper provides a detailed analysis of the semantics and combinability patterns of Russian and English posture verbs (“stoyat’” – “stand”, “sidet’” – “sit”, “lezhat’” – “lie”) , by not only focusing on their use in locational expressions, but also on their metaphorical extensions as well. I assume that spatial orientation of humans and objects can be described by one of these verbs, but there are certain unpredictable constraints on their usage in unrelated languages. The present paper is an attempt to more closely identify the components of the meanings of these verbs and to reveal the experiential basis (Lakoff, Johnson 1999) which underlies them.

The analysis shows that being mostly similar in describing canonical human postures, these verbs demonstrate significant differences in semantic extensions in the languages under consideration. I explore the types of extensions with each of the posture verbs in Russian and English, assuming that other languages, when considered in terms of combinability patterns, serve as the mirror, which highlights the contrast, imperceptible within the lexical system of a single language. The paper explores the application of posture verbs to varied scenarios, with different objects and arrangements in relation to different ground objects, emphasizing that there is some internal coherence and motivation of different uses of posture verbs in the languages in question, based on their image schematic organization. Posture verbs which allow for an extended locative use, such as sit, stand and lie, make reference to specific parts of the localized object, to the orientation of prominent object axes and to positional information, which are perceived by means of cognitive modules such as gestalt recognition and spatial perception. These properties render posture verbs an excellent object for the investigation of cognition and language.

30

Nouns and verbs in the brain: Implications of linguistic typology for cognitive neuroscience

David Kemmerer

Purdue University Recent research on the neural substrates of nouns and verbs has generated some interesting findings, but significant progress has been hindered by the lack of attention to theoretical issues regarding the nature of grammatical categories (GCs). I will argue that Bill Croft's framework, which is based on linguistic typology and construction grammar, can provide cognitive neuroscientists with much of the guidance that they need in order to interpret the extant data and chart a future course. Importantly, this theory distinguishes between universal and language-particular aspects of GCs. Regarding universal aspects of GCs, the key claim is that even though any pragmatic function (e.g., reference or predication) can be applied to any semantic class (e.g., objects or actions), certain combinations of pragmatic function and semantic class are typologically prototypical, as reflected by structural markedness criteria, and those combinations give rise to the two major parts of speech. Thus, prototypical nouns are words that have the least amount of overt function-indicating marking when they are used to refer to objects, and prototypical verbs are words that have the least amount of overt function-indicating marking when they are used to predicate actions.

Turning to cognitive neuroscience, advances are being made in understanding how object and action concepts—i.e., the sorts of concepts that tend to be encoded by prototypical nouns and verbs—are implemented in the brain. Specifically, object concepts rely especially on the ventral temporal lobes, which represent the shape, color, and texture features of entities, whereas action concepts rely more on frontoparietal and posterolateral temporal regions, which represent the motor and motion features of events. Now, some researchers maintain that neuroscientific studies that are restricted to object nouns and action verbs do not reliably isolate GCs because they conflate the conceptual and grammatical properties of each set of words. However, this criticism not only ignores the importance of the typological prototypes, but also implicitly and mistakenly assumes that, in addition to the universally valid pragmatic and semantic factors described above, there are straightforward morphological and syntactic criteria for identifying nouns and verbs both within and across languages. While it's true that in particular languages individual GCs can be characterized according to the distributional patterns of (non)occurrence of words across morphological and syntactic constructions, the fact of the matter is that most languages have myriad constructions, and these constructions hardly ever license exactly the same sets of words, so it is usually necessary to differentiate between a vast number of GCs that are both language-specific and construction-specific. Although one could select just a few constructions in a given language and assert that they are diagnostic of nouns and verbs, such a strategy would be arbitrary, reflecting what Croft calls methodological opportunism. A more promising approach would be to renounce the notion that (beyond being pragmatic-semantic prototypes) nouns and verbs are maximally general, atomic, distributionally identifiable GCs, and instead embrace the wealth of GCs that actually exist in particular languages. After all, many of those GCs exhibit interesting interactions between grammar and meaning, and they could potentially be considered subclasses of nouns and verbs, although terminological decisions about what exactly to call them should be made very cautiously. Turning again to cognitive neuroscience, some valuable work has been done on constructionally based GCs in English and a few other mostly Indo-European languages. But even though almost all of these studies involve only one or two constructions, like inflection for number (e.g., Those are dogs) or tense (e.g., Yesterday I walked), the researchers always assume, without justification, that the GCs under investigation warrant the designation of ‘nouns’ and ‘verbs’. The problem is that it is not obvious why the number/tense constructions should have such special diagnostic status, especially when many other languages lack comparable constructions. A small but growing literature has begun to explore more restricted factors relevant to language-particular GCs, like the count-mass distinction and the transitive-intransitive distinction. I think this is the right direction to go. But to achieve a truly rich understanding of how language-specific and construction-specific GCs are implemented in the brain, it will be necessary for cognitive neuroscientists to draw much more upon the findings of linguistic typologists.

31

Processing verbs and nouns in Alzheimer’s disease: The Embodied View of Cognition

Roel Jonkers

1, Jet M.J. Vonk

1,2, and Loraine K. Obler

2

1=Department of Linguistics, University of Groningen 2=The Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York

Within the Embodied Cognition Framework (ECF), different semantic features of objects and actions relate to the different neuroanatomical distribution of various categories of nouns and verbs. With respect to word processing in subjects suffering from Alzheimer’s disease (AD), the importance of subdivisions of these categories according to certain characteristics, such as living vs. non-living objects or actions with an instrument vs. actions without an instrument has been demonstrated (e.g., Almor, Arno, MacDonald, Gonnerman, Kempler, Hintiryan, Hayes, Arunachlam, & Anderson, 2009). In light of what is known about neurological impairment in AD, we hypothesize that specific semantic features will be impaired in AD, namely animals for objects and motion, change of state, and contact for actions.

We investigated the influence of semantic features on word processing in AD by testing 6 categories of verbs and nouns in two studies. In the first study, we tested 8 native English speakers clinically diagnosed with mild AD and 24 healthy English speaking controls. In the second study, 13 native Dutch speakers diagnosed with mild AD and 16 healthy speaking controls were tested. Accuracy and response times on a semantic similarity judgement task were evaluated. The procedure in both studies was the same.

A triad of words was presented, with one word on the top line and two words on the bottom line. The task was to decide which of the two bottom words was the closest in meaning to the word on top (e.g., tiger: lion - rat). Each triad consisted of either objects or actions, and all three words were from the same semantic category. The different object categories were animals, tools, and furniture. Action categories were hitting actions, cutting actions, and change of state actions. The materials were derived from the studies by Sabsevitz, Medler, Seidenberg, and Binder (2005) for the objects and Kemmerer, Gonzalez Castillo, Talavage, Patterson, and Wiley (2008) for the actions.

Object and action categories were shown to affect processing both with respect to accuracy and response times, however, not only in the subjects with AD, but also in the control subjects, with comparable patterns across languages. For the English speakers, the AD Group did not show significant differences between object categories, but for actions the AD group revealed the lowest scores on cutting actions as compared to the other actions. For the Dutch speakers, the AD group responded slower on both animals and tools compared to furniture. The results seem to support the ECF in that there is an anatomical-behavioral correlation between language deficits in AD and the regions most vulnerable to AD.

Local support - Universiteit...

Documents

Transcript of Local support - Universiteit...