Browsing by Author "Achard, Michel"
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Item A Constructional Reanalysis of Semantic Prosody(2019-10-09) Stempel, Philipp B; Achard, MichelThis dissertation is a re-examination of semantic prosody within the framework of construction grammar. The basic idea of semantic prosody is that ostensibly neutral words can have a probabilistic tendency to co-occur with words that express either positive or negative evaluations. Sinclair (1987), for example, notes that the phrasal verb 'set in' tends to occur with nouns like 'decay' or 'despair'; Stubbs (1995) finds that the verb 'cause' often collocates with words like 'problem' or 'damage'. Even though semantic prosody is an important and much-discussed topic within corpus linguistics, it remains an elusive and contentious subject. There are numerous areas of disagreement in the research literature, e.g. what its function is, at what level it is located, or how it relates to other distributional phenomena such as collocation or semantic preference. This dissertation proposes a novel account of semantic prosody to solve these issues by examining them through a different quantitative methodology and by contextualizing them within a different theoretical framework. A major limitation of previous studies has been their focus on word-level co-occurrences. Corpus evidence reveals that much of a word's meaning is not invariant but instead differs across constructional contexts. Once this context-dependent nature of meaning is considered, a much clearer image of co-selection between linguistic items emerges. Evidence from collostructional analysis (Stefanowitsch & Gries 2003), a type of quantitative corpus methodology, demonstrates that constructional patterns are often associated with specific lexical fields, which allow for a detailed description of their semantics. Not only does this reveal that the evaluative meaning of semantic prosody reaches far beyond the simple positive/negative polarity posited in prior research; it also shows that semantic prosody surfaces in language use as an epiphenomenon of more complex evaluative semantics. With the help of the methodology of quantitative corpus linguistics and the theoretical frameworks of construction grammar and usage-based linguistics, semantic prosody is readily explained as an ordinary part of meaning and does not pose a challenge to linguistic theory.Item An Interactional Account of Multilingual Usage Patterns in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia - a High Contact Area(2015-04-06) Lee, Sarah; Achard, Michel; Englebretson, Robert; Ward, KerryThis thesis provides an interactional account of some multilingual usage patterns found in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur, the capital city and major commercial center in this internationally-focused country, can be described as a ‘high contact’ area, where several languages (the major ones being Malay, Sinitic (especially Cantonese, Southern Min and Mandarin) and Tamil) are in intensive and extensive contact. The approach taken here argues that an important aspect of exploring language usage patterns, especially in understudied locales such as Kuala Lumpur, necessarily involves situating the investigation in the wider local context, since emergent patterns of language use also reflect reflexivity between speakers as social actors and salient macro-level conditions (Agha 2007, van Dijk 2008a,b, Stroud 2004, Gumperz 1992, 1982, amongst others). I first elaborate on two salient social conditions in Kuala Lumpur: (1) pluralistic organization of Malaysian society through three ethnic constructs – Malays, Chinese and Indians, and (2) expression of cosmopolitanism of mainstream Kuala Lumpur. Next, using procedures from interactional linguistics developed to account for code-switching elsewhere (Gafaranga 2005, Auer 1985), I demonstrate how such social conditions as schematic representations can organize language selection patterns. I then apply these procedures to the exploration of usage patterns of specific language units. Some of them, e.g., discourse particles lah and ah24, person reference forms, and topic prominence, are well-researched, but typically from the context of particular languages. Others, such as the entry of English discourse marker like into KL speech, have not been researched in any depth. What these usage patterns share in common is that they regularly occur across more than one language. Departing from a language-particular approach, I demonstrate that we can analyze usage patterns through another dimension - a multilingual usage perspective. I propose that alongside other considerations, there are also interactional reasons for such convergences. Interactional reasons can emerge from local context of the text or from situational aspects, such as participant backgrounds and discourse topic. I show that in these multilingual usage patterns, traces of social conditions are present, via indexation of social schemas, or indirectly, through the action of actually selecting multilingual patterns.Item "C'est either que tu parles francais, c'est either que tu parles anglais": A cognitive approach to Chiac as a contact language(2002) Young, Hilary Adrienne Nicole; Achard, MichelThis thesis concerns Chiac, a dialect of Acadian French (AF) that emerged in a small speech community of AF-English bilingual teenagers in Moncton, Canada. Syntactically and morphologically, Chiac closely resembles AF, but it also makes use of a number of English lexical items and other English-influenced constructions. This thesis addresses two related questions with regard to Chiac: how (and why) did it emerge, and what is its structure? I answer the first question in Chapters 2--3, arguing that Chiac emerged as a result of a confluence of social factors. Speakers' age, their bilingualism, their urban environment and their attitudes toward the languages spoken in Moncton resulted in speakers sharing a sense of identity and wanting to distinguish themselves from other social groups. Within the framework of Cognitive Grammar (CG) I model the emergence of Chiac due to these social factors. The advantage of a CG approach is that, in addition to allowing for a unified analysis of how social factors influence linguistic structure, it treats the bilingual linguistic system in the same way as the monolingual linguistic system in that no special modules or formal devices are needed to account for bilingual language usage. Chapters 4--6 address the second question: what is the structure of Chiac? Still using the framework of CG I describe the Chiac lexicon, as well as some of its noun phrase and verb phrase constructions. I find, for example, that English-based lexical items in Chiac tend to involve certain semantic domains related to teen culture (drugs, social groups at school etc.). The motivation for this usage seems to be that speakers' adolescence is highly relevant to their sense of identity, and that mixing English with their parents' language (AF) is a way of asserting that identity. This thesis therefore has both theoretical and descriptive relevance in that, in addition to describing specific constructions, I show how constructions and ultimately an entire system emerged as a result of language mixing that is motivated by social factors.Item Constructions, Semantic Compatibility, and Coercion: An Empirical Usage-based Approach(2013-07-24) Yoon, Soyeon; Kemmer, Suzanne E.; Achard, Michel; Orlandi, Nicoletta; Franklin, AmyThis study investigates the nature of semantic compatibility between constructions and lexical items that occur in them in relation with language use, and the related concept, coercion, based on a usage-based approach to language, in which linguistic knowledge (grammar) is grounded in language use. This study shows that semantic compatibility between linguistic elements is a gradient phenomenon, and that speakers’ knowledge about the degree of semantic compatibility is intimately correlated with language use. To show this, I investigate two constructions of English: the sentential complement construction and the ditransitive construction. I observe speakers’ knowledge of the semantic compatibility between the constructions and lexical items and compared it with empirical data obtained from linguistic corpora and experiments on sentence processing and acceptability judgments. My findings specifically show that the relative semantic compatibility of the lexical items and the construction is significantly correlated with the frequency of use of their co-occurrences and the processing effort and speakers’ acceptability judgments for the co-occurrences. The empirical data show that a lexical item and a construction which are less than fully compatible can be actually used together when the incompatibility is resolved. The resolution of the semantic incompatibility between the lexical item and its host construction has been called coercion. Coercion has been invoked as a theoretical concept without being examined in depth, particularly without regard to language use. By correlating degree of semantic compatibility with empirical data of language use, this study highlights that coercion is an actual psychological process which occurs during the composition of linguistic elements. Moreover, by examining in detail how the semantics of a lexical item and a construction interact in order to reconcile the incompatibility, this study reveals that coercion is semantic integration that involves not only dynamic interaction of linguistic components but also non-linguistic contexts. Investigating semantic compatibility and coercion in detail with empirical data tells about the processes by which speakers compose linguistic elements into larger units. It also supports the assumption of the usage-based model that grammar and usage are not independent, and ultimately sheds light on the dynamic aspect of our linguistic system.Item Framing the 2016 election: Politicians, parties, and perspectives(2019-04-09) Koth, Anthony; Achard, MichelThis dissertation offers a new model to analyze political rhetoric: political Frames of Reference (FoRs) which analogically map our ability to describe navigating in three-dimensional space onto the ideological need to describe how our socio-political world functions. Through their messages, the twenty-two candidates who ran for president in 2016 offered their own unique yet party-approved ideological worldviews, and laid out paths of logic, demarcated by various semantic parameters or Grounds, for voters to follow in order to properly assess the policy prescriptions on offer, both their merits and whether they would indeed chart a better course forward for the nation. Three FoRs and the nature of their different Grounds are described: the Republicans’ Absolute, the Democrats’ Conjoint, and Trump’s unique Decompetitive FoR. Through the rhetorical tactics of decontestation and rhetorical erasure, the Republican candidates reified a series of supposedly shared, extra-human social constructs, such as Christian Morality, American Exceptionalism, and Economic Supremacy, as Absolute fixed bearings which permeate the socio-political landscape and delimit the standards of behavior and assessments that Americans should accept if they want to properly make sense of what is happening in America. The Democratic candidates acknowledged that policy issues are discussable from multiple viewpoints, and contextualized the socio-political landscape by referring to the perspectives which people take on the commonplace behaviors and assessments everyone engages in within the social systems created by people’s mutual interactions with one another. Trump offered his ideological worldview through mutually entailing Grounds, victory and defeat, as he refereed what was fairly or unfairly happening in the world. Through these winner-take-all and by-any-means-necessary conceptual routines, Trump was able to engage in zero-sum thinking about e.g. how much wealth or justice exists in the world and its proper distribution, activating a series of “folk’’ knowledges as a means to speak more directly to the fears and concerns of voters as he argued how he would Make America Great Again.Item Middle Voice in Northern Moldavian Hungarian(2013-07-24) Hartenstein, Anne Marie; Shibatani, Masayoshi; Achard, Michel; Tyler, Stephen A.Based on 160 hours of recording collected in the villages of Săbăoani, and Pildeşti, Romania, the present research attempts to describe the middle voice system of Northern Moldavian Hungarian (NMH), an endangered language spoken by no more than 3000 speakers. Defining the middle voice category semantically rather than formally, it is argued that the various middle situation types in NMH can be placed relative to one another on a “semantic map” based on shared semantic properties such as 1) the confinement of the development of the action within the agent’s sphere to the extent that the action’s effect accrues back on the agent itself, 2) the degree of volitionality of the Initiator/Agent, and 3) the degree of affectedness of the Initiator/Agent. Polysemy structures are examined against the background of a common semantic map derived on the basis of cross linguistic investigation of a given grammatical domain. In working toward this end a detailed description of major patterns of meaning inherent in the NMH middle system, examining three types of morphological middles, syntactic middles, and lexical middles is presented. Cases in which the same verb can occur with or without a middle marker apparently having the same meaning are discussed. Moreover, seemingly minimal pairs in which two different morphological constructions occur with the same verb are analyzed. A detailed analysis of the differences in form and function of the two reciprocal syntactic middle constructions in NMH is provided. Regarding reflexive syntactic middles it will be shown that depending on the case marking taken by the reflexive anaphoric operator the function conveyed is different such as reflexives, intensifiers, causers, and experiencer. Finally, cases in which the same verb can convey a middle meaning by using a morphological middle marker or by using a syntactic middle construction are analyzed showing that there are main differences in the meaning those two strategies convey. Thus, the present paper identifies specific semantic properties relevant to the middle voice system in NMH, sets up some hypotheses regarding the relations among middle and related situation types and proposes some diachronic predictions regarding the middle voice system of NMH.Item Palatalization in Mandarin Loanwords: An Optimality-Theoretic Approach(2014-12-01) Ma, Ling; Niedzielski, Nancy; Englebretson, Robert; Achard, MichelThis study conducts an Optimality-Theoretic analysis on palatalization phenomenon in Mandarin loanwords borrowed from American English based on transliterated American state and city names. Because of the differences between Mandarin and American English in sound inventories and syllable structures, words introduced to Mandarin from American English may need to undergo some feature change. The present study focuses on the palatalization phenomenon of velar consonants, and the constraint-based theoretical framework provides an explanation. The constraints and their ranking accounting in this study are: 1) *COMPLEX, *VELAR-V(+front), MAX, IDENT(dorsal) >> IDENT(place), 2) *[PALATALIZATION-V(+low, +front)-n]SYLL, DEP >> *VELAR-V(+front) >> IDENT(place). However, some other factors besides phonological ones, such as character choosing, and translation conventions, may lead to some counterexamples, and thus may need to be further studied.Item Poietics of autobiography and poietics of mind: Cognitive processes and the construction of the self(2007) Akli, Madalina; Achard, MichelThe three autobiographies I study in this work, Sartre's The Words, Perec's W or The Memory of Childhood, and Sarraute's Childhood, are each at least partially devoid of chronological structure. Calendar-based order, traditionally associated with autobiography, fails to provide the coherence that the reader has come to expect. Hence, the reader must create a sense of coherence at a level other than chronological while bringing into play his conceptual resources. This work shows that in these literary texts coherence is maintained based on the exploitation of conventional metaphors taken from everyday language. The autobiographers transform them in a manner that is creative and yet familiar to their readers. I first stipulate that the autobiography as genre is built on the familiar metaphor "Life is a journey," for readers can generically understand the three autobiographies as three specific journeys, with a starting point in childhood and an ending point chosen by the writer. Thus, readers travel with the autobiographers on a road that the latter have already traveled (fictionally and/or factually) towards a destination unknown to the first at the outset of reading. In reading, they move to different stages of the book, and at the same time progress from location to location along the autobiographical path. Each time they pass a stage, they move away from the starting point and approach the final destination (the end of the book and the ultimate meaning it carries). The notion "Autobiography is a journey" is a conceptual resource autobiographers and their readers share as they metaphorically travel together along the autobiographical path, journeying from one mental stage to another, and remaining all the while co-located. This generic autobiographical journey is further structured by metaphors specific to each work, which are useful tools for both writers and readers. Sartre, Perec, and Sarraute use metaphors to capture their pasts and structure their autobiographical artifacts, while readers employ them to conceptualize others' life experiences. The autobiography is understood in each case through knowledge that is familiar to both writers and readers. These conventional patterns of thought are metaphorical bridges between the productive consciousness of the writers and the receptive mind of the readers that allow the first to organize their works and the latter to understand them.Item Schema-guided comprehension of noun-noun compounds: An experimental and corpus-based approach(2017-10-31) Lanneau, Bazile Rene; Achard, MichelThis dissertation provides evidence that the comprehension of noun-noun compounds is guided by probabilistic knowledge of the structures of things, events, and situations. These structures are what we refer to as “schemas”. As a theoretical construct, schemas are important because they supply information that is not explicitly given. Understanding language involves inference, and this is particularly true for noun-noun compounds. The constituents of lexicalized compounds are semantically linked in a variety of ways. A door knob is a knob that is located on a door, a wedding dress is a dress designated for use in a wedding, a chicken leg is the leg of a chicken, and so on. The list of relations semantically linking the constituents of noun-noun compounds goes far beyond these Locative, Purposive, and Part-Whole examples. To complicate matters, such relations can be analyzed at varying levels of specificity, creating a trade-off between semantic accuracy and theoretical elegance. Language use therefore offers no deterministic rule for how novel noun-noun compounds should be interpreted. Cloud house, for example, could be understood as 'a house in the clouds', 'a house from which clouds can be seen', or 'a house in the shape of a cloud'. Understanding how such interpretations are constructed would provide crucial clues to how language comprehension works in general. To that end, a random sample of transparent noun-noun compounds from The Corpus of Contemporary American English is analyzed. Over two hundred examples of noun-noun compounds are provided whose meanings appear to be obvious only in light of schematic world knowledge. Additionally, a series of experiments are discussed which provide evidence that interpretations of novel noun-noun compounds can be biased by abstract conceptual schemas. Through reading tasks, subjects are prompted to build schemas by mapping animals onto roles typically filled by humans in schemas of human activity. Subjects are thus primed to interpret novel compounds of the form Animal-Noun anthropomorphically, e.g., crab shirt as 'a shirt worn by a crab'. In conjunction with a broad theoretical discussion, these qualitative and experimental data provide a strong case that schemas play a central role in noun-noun compound comprehension.Item The Effect of Linguistic Experience on the Perception of Pitch Contour(2014-01-31) Galindo, John; Englebretson, Robert; Niedzielski, Nancy; Achard, MichelStudies conducted in the area of tone perception suggest that experience with tonal features such as pitch height, direction, duration, and contour in the L1 of the listener affect the perception of such features. This study consists of a categorical perception experiment to investigate whether native experience with a tone language affects the perception of pitch contours. Subjects are divided into two groups: native Mandarin speakers and native English speakers. The central hypothesis of this study is that Mandarin speakers would perceive a continuum between the rising tone and the falling-rising tone categorically, while English speakers would make no such distinction. Results from a discrimination task indicate that neither the Mandarin group nor the English group perceived the tonal continuum categorically. This may be accounted for by the fact that differences between Tone 2 (rising) and Tone 3 (falling-rising) in Mandarin are perceptually ambiguous for both native and non-native listeners.