Current and Past Volumes

Welcome to Volume 9 of the Northeastern University Working Papers in Linguistics!

Since its inception in 2016, this journal has served as an online home for the fascinating research which our undergraduate students complete on language and linguistics each year. In the last eight years, we have published highly original articles on every sub-field of the study of language, from syntax to child language acquisition; from pragmatics to evolutionary linguistics; from reports on fieldwork on understudied languages to presentations of conlangs. This year, we are again pleased to offer our readers six papers which highlight the breadth of academic research of our Linguistics Program, spanning approaches quantitative and qualitative in focus, as well as work more creative in nature.

The first section of the volume is qualitative linguistic research that covers the topics of historical linguistics, language change, and perceptual phonetics. Thus, Anja Castro-Diephouse opens the subsection with her study of the English serial verb construction go-V and its evolution over time. Using a 600,000-word corpus collecting plays from the Early Modern English period through the 20th century, she investigates the changing usage of go/come-V, go/come-and-V, and go/come-comma-V, comparing usage across grammatical contexts and dialects. In similar manner, Tula Singer examines the evolution of the Cuban dialect of Spanish after the Revolution by examining eight Cuban films between 1959 to 1999 and analyzing relevant terminology appearing throughout this cinematic corpus. Based on an etymological investigation of 173 of the items collected, she reveals that the isolation of Cuba conditioned limited linguistic change within the 1959 to 1999 timeframe, and pushed for the recycling of pre-existing African and indigenous terms which had been introduced into the island long before the Revolution. Finally, Veronica Foster focuses on perceptual intelligibility that is characteristic of the articulatory speech impairments associated with dysarthria, a motor speech disorder common in those with cerebral palsy, and assesses the relationship between the quadrilateral vowel space area (VSA) (Thompson, 2023) and dysarthria in terms of both diagnostic category and perceptual intelligibility ratings.

Meanwhile, the next section presents the two studies that implemented qualitative discourse analysis approaches to understanding interactions among friends. Specifically,  Radhika Shivaprasad revealed that Edelsky’s (1993) proposal of floor function and turn-taking rings true in a discourse between friends. Thus, her analysis shows that floors can indeed be built collaboratively, especially in contexts where friends are joking or discussing otherwise non-serious topics. In the same vein, Aaron Van Blerkom focuses on interactions between friends and explores how various identities are constructed via personal stories. Specifically, his analysis examines how the identity of the “morally righteous guest” is constructed through a display of both epistemic and agentive selves (Schiffrin, 1996), focusing on how the main storyteller navigates these roles in contrast to another character in the narrative.

The third and final section of this volume centers on a paper at the intersection of creativity and linguistics. Audrija Sarkar takes the reader to the fictional planet of Del, in the Calia system, and examines the grammar of safat Dɛl, a language of three settlements established there (Arov, Schcheen, and Choshech). A survey of the sound, word, and sentence structure of this language reveals influences from and similarities to the Semitic languages found on Earth, but also shows how safat Dɛl is a product distinctly of and intimately connected with its own particular context.

We hope this volume illustrates well the diversity and richness of approaches in linguistics and the study of language. Enjoy the volume!

Aisulu Kulbayeva (Raspayeva)

The English serial verb construction go-V is hypothesized to have originated from the semantically similar go-and-V construction via grammaticalization (Nicolle 2007), or alternately from a sequence of sentenceinitial imperatives (Zwicky 2003). Building on diachronic corpus work by Nicolle (2009) and Bachmann (2013), this study investigates the changing usage of go/come-V, go/come-and-V, and go/come-comma-V, comparing across grammatical contexts and dialects. The corpus is an original 600,000-word collection of plays, balanced by 50-year time period and by dialect, spanning the Early Modern English period through the 20th century. Results indicate that a 16th- 17th century preference for go-V shifts in favor of go-and-V by the 19th century, finally equalizing by the end of the 20th century, which contextualizes the 19th-20th century shift from go-and-V to go-V observed by Bachmann (2013). A consistent high frequency of infinitive and imperative contexts supports a non-finite, but not specifically imperative, origin for go-V, contrary to hypotheses by Zwicky (2003) and Nicolle (2007). The expanded perspective offered by the Early Modern English data suggests a need for Old English evidence, rather than extrapolation from more recent data, in uncovering the origin of go-V.

Since the 1959 Communist Revolution, the Cuban people have faced conditions of isolation and scarcity which have limited the country’s contact with outside languages (West-Durán 2017). Even so, the island offers a rich, complex, ancestral dialect that is unique to Cuban society not only in its accent, but also in its lexicon and slang system. This study considers the evolution of the Cuban dialect after the Revolution by examining eight Cuban films between 1959 to 1999 and analyzing relevant terminology appearing throughout this cinematic corpus. Based on an etymological investigation of 173 of the items collected, this paper offers two main arguments. Firstly, the isolation of Cuba conditioned limited linguistic change within the 1959 to 1999 timeframe. This leads to our second argument: the isolation of Cuban society influenced the dialect not only in the lack of major changes which it faced, but also in the recycling of pre-existing African and indigenous terms which had been introduced into the island long before the Revolution.

Perceptual intelligibility is characteristic of the articulatory speech impairments associated with dysarthria, a motor speech disorder common in those with cerebral palsy (Pennington et al., 2016). Previous research has sought to establish more empirical diagnostic measures of dysarthria through investigation of articulatory acoustic correlates, such as vowel space area, to perceptual intelligibility in this population. The objective of the present study was to assess the relationship between quadrilateral vowel space area (VSA) (Thompson, 2023) and dysarthria in terms of both diagnostic category and perceptual intelligibility ratings. Eight adult male speakers with spastic dysarthria associated with cerebral palsy were compared to age and gender matched control speakers, and clinical speakers were also compared to themselves based on perceptual intelligibility ratings. Results reaffirmed previous findings that VSA is impaired in dysarthric speakers and that quadrilateral VSA is highly and accurately predicative of perceptual intelligibility (Platt et al., 1980; Ansel & Kent, 1992; Kent & Kim, 2003; Kim et al., 2011; Scholderle et al., 2016; Thompson et al., 2023). Specifically, a variable statistic model factoring both general intelligibility category as well as specific percent intelligibility was found to be highly accurate in predicting intelligibility based on VSA. Because these results reaffirmed previous findings that VSA may be an effective measure of intelligibility impairment, this study reaffirms the need to further confirm the efficacy of quadrilateral VSA as a predictive diagnostic measure of dysarthria in a more diverse array of dysarthric speakers.

In her 1993 chapter “Who’s Got the Floor?”, Carole Edelsky stated that floors can often be built jointly between interlocutors, in addition to previous conceptions of floors being orderly and built by one speaker at a time. In my analysis of my conversational segment, I argue that Edelsky’s proposal of floor function and turn-taking rings true in a discourse between friends. My analysis shows that floors can indeed be built collaboratively, especially in contexts where friends are joking or discussing otherwise non-serious topics. Furthermore, I argue that the collaborative floor-building in my data is a reflection of and contributes to the group’s cohesion and shared identity as friends.

The construction of narrative identity is a dynamic process, particularly within storytelling interactions, where the narrator and other characters negotiate their roles and stances. In sociolinguistics, identity is not viewed as a fixed trait but as something that emerges through interaction, shaped by the speaker’s alignment with others and their display of knowledge and agency. This paper examines how the identity of the “morally righteous guest” is constructed through a display of both epistemic and agentive selves, focusing on how the main storyteller navigates these roles in contrast to another character in the narrative. Drawing on the concepts of reported speech and voicing, the storyteller positions themselves as a moral evaluator by emphasizing their epistemic self-offering judgments about the events-while minimizing their own agency. This voicing technique allows the storyteller to shift responsibility to other characters while garnering alignment and empathy from the audience. Through this interaction, not only is the storyteller’s identity shaped, but the alignment between the storyteller and the audience also becomes central, as it reinforces shared values and perspectives. This paper will demonstrate how the interplay of these elements-constructed dialogue, alignment, and identity negotiation-illuminates the process of narrative identity construction in discourse.

[No abstract.]

Welcome to Volume 8 of the Northeastern University Working Papers in Linguistics!

Since its inception in 2016, this journal has served as an online home for the fascinating research which our undergraduate students complete on language and linguistics each year. In the last eight years, we have published highly original articles on every sub-field of the study of language, from syntax to child language acquisition; from pragmatics to evolutionary linguistics; from reports on fieldwork on understudied languages to presentations of conlangs. This year, we are again pleased to offer our readers two papers which highlight the range of academic research of our Linguistics Program.

Starting within the rich sociolinguistic field of language shift and maintenance, Abigail Chung presents a questionaire-based study of first-generation immigrant parents from East Asian backgrounds and their motivations for passing down their heritage language to the next generation, and how the parents cope with deeply personal questions of language, culture, and identity in the United States. Whereas there is a glut of sociolinguistic research on language maintenance across generations for other groups, notably Latinx, this work fills a gap in studies on language and identity among Asian-American communities, and presents rich qualitative data on the competing pressures which East Asian immigrant parents face: whether to help their children assimilate to the dominant language of English or to maintain their family heritage in terms of language and identity.

Meanwhile, the next paper showcases the growing amount of research taking place on discourse and conversational analysis at Northeastern. Using an integrated framework of frame analysis, positioning theory, and narrative analysis, Eliza Rice gives a corpus-based case study of audience positioning during storytelling. She argues that the roles which audience members adopt during storytelling in a North American context – including prompter, empathizer, evaluator, co-teller, self-relator, attentive listener, and affirmer – are based and interpretable largely through the lens of the culture background of the participants. By analyzing hours of audio recordings of dinnertime conversation, she evokes patterns of storytelling behaviors based on ethnicity, nationality, and cultural background of the audience.

Happy Reading!

Rob Painter

First and second generation immigrants comprise a significant amount of the US population, coming from various countries and various linguistic backgrounds. First generation immigrant parents will either choose to pass down their heritage language to their second generation children, or not. This decision will invariably impact the children and parents’ lives, as language is inextricably linked to culture, identity, and relationships. This sociolinguistic research seeks to investigate what factors are involved in the parents’ decision to pass down their language, and what consequences the child and parents experience as a result.

Following an integrated framework that combines aspects of frame analysis (Goffman, 1981), positioning theory (Davies & Harre, 1990), and narrative analysis, this case study analyzes audience positioning within a storytelling frame and focus on how differences in positioning may relate to the differences in the cultural background of the speakers. Using recorded data from a meal-time conversation amongst four friends, audience turns are analyzed within the context of the surrounding narrative. In the narrative data, seven categories of audience positionings can be isolated: prompter, empathizer, evaluator, co-teller, self-relator, attentive listener, and affirmer. Through comparing the frequencies with which each participant assumes each position, analysis shows that participants raised in Western households are most likely to assume the empathizer and attentive listener positions in interaction, while participants raised in Eastern households are most likely to assume the evaluator position and to disfavor the empathizer and attentive listener positions. These findings illustrate how, in the storytelling frame, differences in culture may influence the perceived appropriateness and conventionality of assuming certain positions when in an audience role.

Welcome to Volume 7 of the Northeastern University Working Papers in Linguistics! Despite the pandemic-induced disruptions of the past year, this online journal continues to present the first-rate research on language and linguistics of our undergraduates at Northeastern University. This year we are pleased to publish work which showcases particular strengths of our Linguistics Program, notably discourse analysis, constructed languages, and descriptive fieldwork.

Starting us off in the fields of discourse analysis and gendered language, Hannah Lee’s paper presents a thought-provoking case-study of the speech of a mother caregiver and her twin children, a girl and a boy. For this original pilot study, Lee was able to collect 36 minutes of audio recordings of spontaneous naturalistic speech between a mother and her three-year old twin children. Lee analyzes the number of turns taken by the boy and the girl, alongside the number of turn ratifications issued by the mother, showing that the twin boy takes more and longer turns than the girl, and that the mother engages more of the boy’s turns than the girl’s. Situated within up-to-date research in the field of language socialization, Lee concludes that the twin girl is socialized into the gender norm that she does not have the right to hold the floor compared to her brother – a lesson which may impact her communicative behavior into adulthood.

For several years now, Prof. Adam Cooper has run highly-popular introductory and seminar courses on constructed languages, a sub-field of linguistics which has exploded in popularity based on the commercial success of shows and films such as Game of Thrones (Dothraki and High Valerian) and Lord of the Rings (Elvish), among many others depicting other worlds whose denizens speak fully-wrought, autochthonous languages invented by linguists. In his article, conlanger Henry Fellner presents his original language, Mazhimo Tuhasamin, conceived as an amalgamation of eight southeast Asian languages. Imagining its speakers as a nomadic people wandering through Asia for generations who evolved a kind of argot, Fellner strives to build the Mazhimo Tuhasamin language from structural elements of Burmese, Hmong, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Mandarin, S’gaw Karen, and Thai. His paper not only gives a succinct descriptive overview of a novel linguistic system; it provides valuable discussion on conlanging as a scholarly and artistic process.

The remaining two papers of Volume 7 were nominated out of the Ling 4654: Seminar in Linguistics, where six senior students spent the Spring 2022 semester taking on the role of field linguistics working with a 25-year old native speaker of Albanian and eliciting hundreds of hours of language data on the Tosk dialect. It is important to note that, for pedagogical reasons, students were banned from examining ANY outside academic research on the Albanian language; consequently, all analyses and conclusions were based solely on the language data which students obtained through direct elicitation in sessions with our wonderful consultant, E. In light of this ban, Sofia Caruso’s paper on Albanian noun and adjective morphology is a towering achievement of fieldwork: she has independently motivated the complex case morphology of Albanian, determining nominative, vocative, accusative, dative, genitive, and ablative; and shows how there is widespread syncretism within and across paradigms in the Tirana variety of our native speaker, E. Caruso also independently studies the linking morphemes used in adjective agreement within a noun phrase, an unusual quirk found in Albanian and few other Indo-European languages. Her paper is remarkably supported with glossed language examples from a database of over 1,000 noun and adjectives in various structures which she collected herself after hundreds of hours of fieldwork.

If Caruso (2022) makes a contribution to our understanding of Albanian morphology, Henry Volchonok’s paper fills a gap in understanding the language’s phonetics. Recording individual words, phrases, and full utterances from our consultant, E, and analyzing them in sound analysis software, Volchonok makes a highly original contribution to the study of pitch, intonation, and emphasis in Albanian. The paper presents detailed acoustic analyses of intonation contours for imperative, declarative, and interrogative utterances; and it investigates how Albanian speakers shift the main intonational contour to place certain items in narrow contrastive focus. While Volchonok’s paper is a pilot study, it opens the door for further study, as even a cursory search in the phonetic literature shows that there is scant material available on intonation and emphasis in Albanian when compared to other major European languages.

Happy reading!

Rob Painter

The Albanian language has a rich morphological inflection system, which can be seen particularly in the components of noun phrases, such as nouns and adjectives. Noun and adjectives in this language must inflect for gender, number, case, and definiteness, and must agree within the noun phrase. Through original fieldwork done on Albanian with no prior knowledge of the language, this paper investigates the language’s system of noun and adjective morphology.

Historically, popular and notable constructed languages based on real-world dialects tend to use Indo-European languages like English, Spanish, and French as their main sources of inspiration, especially in terms of grammatical structure. Asian-inspired languages are significantly less common, especially in Western linguistic circles. Constructed languages tend to be for specific practical use (i.e. for potential universality, such as the most popular constructed language, Esperanto) or for artistic purposes. Artistic languages usually tend to stray away from real-world languages, instead attempting to form new and unique languages which differ from those on Earth. Mazhimo Tuhasamin seeks to combine eight real-world languages from Asia into one, though for artistic purposes rather than practical. The goal is to lay out a framework for the language that successfully incorporates multiple languages while still seeming like a natural standalone language with its own identity.

As young children, we learn the culturally based norms of conversation, including gender norms, through language socialization (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet, 2003). Research has found that men claim a right to speak, or hold the floor, more than women in interactions of gender-mixed groups within the cultural context of the United States (Baxter, 2002; Tannen, 1995). It is possible that boys and girls learn this gender norm and related interactive patterns at a young age through the construction of turns and responses to turns in conversations with their caregivers. This case study examines the relation between turn- taking and gender through discourse analysis of a conversation among a caregiver and twin children. Specifically, it focuses on the number of turns taken by a twin boy and girl and the number of turn ratifications issued by their mother. The analysis shows that the twin boy takes more and longer turns than the girl, and the mother ratifies more of the boy’s turns than the girl’s turns. In light of this finding, the girl may be socialized into the gender norm that she does not have a right to hold the floor compared to her brother, which could have an impact on her communicative behavior in adulthood.

Intonation is the system through which speakers manipulate pitch throughout an utterance to affect its meaning and interpretation (Ashby & Maidment 2005:166); thus, understanding intonation is crucial to understanding not only the phonetics and phonology of a language, but also its semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistic features. This study discusses intonation and emphasis in Albanian, an Indo-European language spoken in Albania. Albanian was chosen due to its under-studied nature. The direct elicitation methodology was used to gather language data, and no additional sources about Albanian were consulted, to mimic a field scenario where the linguist has no prior information about the target language. This study found that in declaratives, the intonational curve peaks around the verb of the sentence; whereas in imperatives there are two peaks: one around the verb, and another at the end of the sentence; and questions only have a peak at the end of the sentence. To create emphasis in Albanian, the stress pattern of the emphasized word is exaggerated, resulting in louder pitch, intensity, and a longer syllable length, compared to unemphasized words that are part of the same utterance. While this paper overviews intonation and emphasis across different Albanian sentences, more research is needed to fully understand Albanian suprasegmental features and how they interact with phonetics, phonology, and semantics and pragmatics.

Batterers’ intervention is a program that teaches non-violence to perpetrators of intimate partner violence (Snyder, 2018). As such, interactions between group facilitators and participants are fraught with power imbalance and traumatic content. This pilot study analyzes these interactions linguistically in terms of how face threats are used and what strategies are used to respond. The methodology is adapted from Ojwang et al.’s (2010) qualitative case study of face threat and uses Brown & Levinson’s (1987) distinction of positive and negative face-one’s desire to be liked and to be unimpeded, respectively. This is applied to transcripts of batterers’ intervention groups. It is found that the most commonly facilitators use expressions of disapproval, a type of positive face threat, to dissuade participants’ use of dominant and controlling behaviors, which are common to narratives of abuse (Wood, 2004). The study also finds that participants use agreement to maintain their positive face. These findings have implications regarding the efficacy of batterers’ intervention programs, which can be expanded on in future research.

Cross-culturally, L2 motivational intensity has been shown to positively correlate with achieved proficiency (Gardner & Lambert 1959, Gardner & MacIntyre 1991), but the strength of specific motivation types and their relationships to motivational intensity and proficiency appear to differ with cultural context (Kormos et al. 2011, Cocca & Cocca 2019). These relationships also differ by proficiency level: motivation has been found to be more impactful on the success of beginners (Danesh & Shahnazari 2020). Turning to the largely unexplored L2 acquisition context of the United States, this study utilizes a two-part proficiency assessment and motivation survey methodology to investigate these variables in Northeastern University L2 learners. Motivational intensity was found to strongly relate to proficiency, but the strongest motivation types of the sample did not correlate with motivational intensity or proficiency in any significant way. And while advanced learners were on average more motivated, the correlation between motivational intensity and proficiency was stronger in beginners. These findings reinforce the cross-cultural impact of motivation on L2 learning success while simultaneously highlighting the way that motivation is shaped by cultural context.

A number of metrics quantifying morphological productivity have been presented in past studies (see Baayen 1992, Baayen 1993, Hay 2001) which utilize large language corpora. These measures had not been applied to television script corpora, despite this type of data becoming accepted in the field (see Tagliamonte & Roberts 2005, Fägersten 2016). This study tests these metrics on the affixes pre-, -er, non-, un-, and -less in a corpus created from the dialogue of the show Parks and Recreation. Hapax legomena were isolated and base-derivative ratios were calculated, and three metrics were run using these measurements. Each measure differed in how the productivity of the affixes was ranked, with the base-derivative ratios creating results that were the most intuitively sound. Implications of these findings are discussed, along with why the data might have shown the distributions that it did.

Possession relationships are cognitively complex as well as linguistically complex in that they use a combination of features to express their meaning. This means that children have multiple possible stages of possession acquisition. Few studies have focused on how children acquire possession in their language, but reports indicate two potential patterns: either 1) children build up possession utterances with possession units attested in target forms, shown in English, German, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, and French (Marinis 2016; Leroy-Collombel & Morgenstern 2012), or 2) they use an unattested form in adult speech as a preliminary method until they can produce meaningful possession relationships with elements of the target form, shown in the polysynthetic language Northern East Cree (Henke 2019). With these two patterns in mind, the current study explored how Inuktitut-acquiring children produce possession. Spontaneous speech of three children was investigated (aged 2;0-2;9, 2;6-3;3, and 3;7-4;4), as well as that of their caregivers. The three children showed patterns of possession relationships in their speech that were very similar to those of their caregivers in terms of overall possession use, the constructions of possession constituents, and types of possessor and possessee forms (pattern 1). This result suggests that the “preliminary method” of acquiring possession does not hold for all polysynthetic languages. Data from younger children and a more nuanced look at the possession relationships would be useful in order to fully detail how children acquire possession in Inuktitut.

This paper examines neuroanatomical differences in Neanderthal and Homo sapiens brains and how those differences relate to behavioral or surface level characteristics for two purposes. First, did Neanderthals have language or a precursor to it? What evidence is there for or against Neanderthals having (an at least partial) linguistic system? Second, what aspects of these characteristics might have significantly contributed to the extinction of one species and the continued survival of the other species.

This paper conducts a syntactic analysis of the language of Wambaya, a Mirndi family language spoken in the Northern Territory of Australia. Wambaya is classified as ‘moribund’ by Ethnologue and possesses only 60 remaining speakers. Syntactically, aside from the requirement for the auxiliary to appear in 2nd position, the word order of Wambaya is free, with subjects frequently occurring both before and after verbs. However, the language displays a preference for a VO ordering and fits the normal typological pattern of a VO language. Wambaya utilizes a mixed marking system, with auxiliary verbs exhibiting head-marking while noun phrases exhibit double marking. In terms of morphosyntax, Wambaya makes frequent use of pronoun-dropping, and reflexive and reciprocal constructions are produced through affixation. As a critically endangered language with a rich and unique morphosyntactic system, Wambaya merits further linguistic exploration and preservation.

Linguistic profiling occurs when a listener uses auditory cues to identify social characteristics, such as race, gender, sexual orientation, or geographic origin. Linguistic profiling is a natural and automatic psychological process. Though it is not itself inherently discriminatory, it can contribute to racial profiling, which is inherently discriminatory. Evidence of discrimination resulting from linguistic profiling is shown in research by John Baugh, Jeffrey Grogger, and others. Linguistic profiling interacts with the law in a variety of ways, both discriminatory and non-discriminatory. Witnesses have based their testimonies on linguistic profiling that occurred during the crime, when they overheard the suspect. Linguistic profiling has also led to race-based discrimination in the housing market, and several cases have been brought to court. In other cases, linguistic profiling has led to key witness testimony being thrown out because of discrimination attached to a witness’s speech. The goal of this article is to highlight the kinds of linguistic profiling that bear on legal issues.

The grammaticality judgment task (GJT) attempts to understand language phenomena through speaker intuition, which requires speakers’ judgments to reflect implicit linguistic knowledge and not rules prescribing “correct” language use. The validity of the GJT has been investigated be- fore (Schütze 2016), but only one study, Cowart (1997), has investigated whether task instructions affect participants use of prescriptive rules. This paper presents a follow-up study with 200 par- ticipants, new stimuli, and adapted versions of Cowart’s instructions, two of which, INTUITIVE PLAIN and INTUITIVE SCHOOL, target intuitive knowledge and two of which, PROFESSOR and TUTOR, simulate the role of an instructor. Both intuitive sets ask participants for “gut reactions,” but only INTUITIVE SCHOOL tells them explicitly not to use “school grammar.” The PROFES- SOR condition has participants imagine they are English professors and the TUTOR condition has them imagine they are tutoring a friend learning English. Stimuli test whether participants prefer sentences following a prescriptive rule when either is grammatical and when the application of a prescriptive rule would make a sentence ungrammatical. As English professors are associated with using “correct” English, I hypothesized that participants in the PROFESSOR condition would prefer prescriptively correct sentences compared to the baseline, INTUITIVE PLAIN. I found that while PROFESSOR condition participants were more likely to respond prescriptively when both options were grammatical, TUTOR condition participants were more likely to choose an ungrammatical prescriptive response. Overall, this study suggests more care should be taken in designing GJT instructions, especially when prescriptive rules may not coincide with speakers intuitions.

People create languages to achieve a wide variety of goals: from uniting speakers of multiple languages, aiming for a language of pure logic, or making an artistic or aesthetic statement. The last goal is fulfilled by a category of constructed languages known as artistic languages, or artlangs. One of the driving motivators behind many artlangs is for use in a fictional setting. Tlavehmak, the focus of this paper, is one such language. I created it for a story set in the fictional city of Castle Veh, an underground and isolated place, which has had no contact with the outside world for several centuries.

The beginning of a news story is of the utmost importance: It is the first thing to catch a reader’s eye, and it may be the only part of the story that is ever read (Scanlan 2003). Traditionally journalists have embraced the direct lede, which gives a summary of the pertinent details of the story in the first sentence, but other styles of ledes exist. I argue, using a linguistics framework for news analysis, that there was a change in lede-writing style over the last century. Weldon (2008) found an overall move away from direct ledes in 20 newspapers between 2001 and 2004; the current study covers a longer time frame with a more narrow focus. I analyzed 376 articles from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal from 1927 to 2017. Recently, the New York Times has shifted from direct ledes towards delayed ledes, while the Wall Street Journal has been more changeable. The New York Times’ changing style towards delayed ledes, which tend to be more anecdotal and humanistic, could be indicative of the huge pressure newsrooms face to keep readers engaged for longer, a cultural shift toward ‘Everyman News,’ in which laypersons are encouraged to identify with the characters in news stories (Weldon 2008), or something else entirely. The New York Times’ shift from direct ledes to delayed ledes over the last century is a critical piece of the changing media landscape.

Parents of deaf children often report receiving information biased toward “fixing” deafness (e.g. through cochlear implantation), and are often advised to not use sign language, although studies have shown that sign language facilitates language development. An analysis of online resources showed that most resources were biased toward listening and spoken language approaches, and little to no information about sign language was found on most-frequently appearing sites. Evaluating the quality of online resources for parents of deaf children is vital for seeing what information is out there and informing future strategies for getting fact-based information on sign language into parents’ hands.

This paper discusses Comanche syntax, examining both its complexities and its unique relationship with the language’s morphological system.

Several existing linguistic theories establish that language influences thought – Sapir-Whorf, labelling theory, and the theory of argumentation within language, to name a few. Although previous research into person-first language’s effects is sparse, healthcare professions encourage this modification as an attempt to reduce stigma within the field. This research study intends to examine the link between language and disability stigma. Participants were asked to report their feelings and strength of those feelings responding to one of three potential ways to describe ten individual disabilities, as well as list any associated behaviors and prescribe a treatment frequency for the presented stimuli. After data analysis, no significant effect was found of language use on valence or arousal scores aggregately, but when the data was parsed out based on participant experience with disability, the effects of language were clear in participants with the least experience and participants with the most experience. The lack of an effect in the group with moderate experience may be attributed to gender imbalance in a primary female-identifying study, as that group consisted mostly of self-identified men. The overarching results demonstrate a need for further education surrounding disabilities to reduce the stigma associated with them.

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This paper will begin with a brief overview of the grime subculture itself, what it entails, and the type of demographics one may expect to find within it. It will then continue on to discuss a variety of subtopics that more clearly show the relationship between grime music and the subculture that created it; these topics include commercialization, dialect, education as a common theme, as well as a discussion of the women involved in grime.

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Six other linguistics students and I spent a semester learning the Bulgarian language through elicitation with a native Bulgarian speaker, Y, a female from Sofia, Bulgaria who studied English and some French, and also knew some of the Serbian language.1 Our elicitations were based in a classroom setting, and our professor had us rotate acting as the point person for a thirty-minute elicitation session, in which the point person was in charge of eliciting the Bulgarian data. Our elicitation methods and technique were based on generally accepted methods of collecting linguistic data from an informant. Our goals were to: learn linguistic field techniques, learn the linguistic structure of the Bulgarian language, and reinforce understanding of linguistic concepts through direct application.

Question formation happens differently for both types of questions in different languages. Yes/no questions in English are formed by inverting the subject and the auxiliary verb in a process called subject aux inversion. Hindi yes/no question formation is done with a question word particle, kyaa, which is added to the beginning or end of a sentence that transforms the sentence into a question. It was expected that for the bilingual speakers whose L1 is Hindi that Hindi grammar techniques and instead of inverting the auxiliary and the subject NP, the bilingual will attempt to add the question particle in English the way they would do in Hindi. Participants were shown a picture of a scene from a cartoon and then prompted to ask a yes/no or a content question in English by posing this question to the characters in the scene. Participants were also asked to fill out a language background self-report. Participants produced optional failure of SAI in 19% of trials however not in the expected way. Several different methods and strategies were used to compensate for failure of SAI with the most common of these strategies being a “Do you think…” type question. This allowed participants a plug it in type of formula for question formation. This effect would not be as present in monolinguals of English or simultaneous bilinguals after acquisition.

In this paper I will outline the major features of Yoruba phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax. I will also point out the similarities and differences with English. By the end of this paper, I hope to have given the reader a basic acquaintance with the language.

This paper analyzes the phonetic and phonological system of Bulgarian. It specifically examines Bulgarian vowel qualities and percentage voicing of obstruents in intervocalic and word-final positions using data collected from two native Bulgarian speakers in a phonetic experiment. During the experiment, speakers were asked to utter a list of 14 identical words into a microphone under Slow and Fast Conditions. The first and second formant values of the vowel tokens were derived using Praat and plotted in vowel charts unique to the speaker. Percentage voicing was calculated by dividing the time the consonant was voiced over its total duration.