Linguistics Faculty Publications

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    Antonymous Adjectives in Disyllabic Lexical Compounds in Mandarin: A Cognitive Linguistics Perspective
    (Horizon Research Publishing,USA, 2015) Zhang, Yuan; Kemmer, Suzanne
    Corpus-based research into antonyms in English, Sweden and Japanese has gradually brought the lexical relation of antonymy into functional-cognitive linguistics in recent years. When antonymous adjectives are examined in Mandarin corpora, we find that they co-occur in both discontinuous constructions, for example, 既不热也不冷ji bure ye buleng, literally not hot also not cold, 'neither hot nor cold', and lexical compounds, often called disyllabic compounds, for example, 大小da xiao, literally big-small, 'size'. This study is a cognitive account of Mandarin disyllabic compound constructions composed of two antonymous adjective roots, such as长短chang duan, literally long-short, 'length', 左右zuo you, literally left-right, 'control', and 反正 fan zheng, literally back-face, 'anyway'. With the help of the Lancaster corpus of Mandarin Chinese (LCMC) and the corpus from the Center for Chinese Linguistics (CCL), 51 instances of antonymous adjective compounds were retrieved. When the antonymous adjectives co-occur, there are interactions between the componential semantics and the constructional semantics. While the disyllabic compound constructions may inherit the part of speech from their components, they may also have their own part of speech, functioning as nouns, adverbs and even verbs. The different categories reflect different construals of the same conceptual content. In a nutshell, by adopting a cognitive linguistics approach, we show that the different uses of these compounds are related in a systematic way.
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    The perceptual filtering of predictable coarticulation in exemplar memory
    (Ubiquity Press, 2020) Manker, Jonathan
    Exemplar models of word representations have remained ambivalent or impressionistic as to precisely what veridical auditory information is stored in individual word exemplars. Earlier models (Johnson, 1997b) suggest all perceived information was stored in memory, whereas more recent proposals (Pierrehumbert, 2002; Goldinger, 2007) suggest some degree of abstraction occurs in storing particular exemplars. Findings from the phonetic accommodation paradigm (Goldinger, 1998; Nielsen, 2011, etc.) suggest that the accumulation of new exemplars may drive the spread of sound change. At the same time, some theories of sound change suggest that perceptual biases serve as a starting point for change (Ohala, 1981, 1983). The current study investigates how perceptual biases, such as the predictability of coarticulation, can shape the contents of exemplars. The experimental results suggest that an expected phonetic alteration, such as f0 raising on vowels following voiceless consonants—a predictable coarticulatory effect—is more likely to undergo some degree of abstraction when stored in exemplar memory, whereas unexpected phonetic detail (e.g., f0 raising following voiced consonants) is more faithfully stored or maintained for longer in memory. These findings suggest perceptual biases that could shape pools of exemplars, leading to different expectations for conditioned versus unconditioned sound changes.
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    The primacy of morphology in English braille spelling: an analysis of bridging contractions
    (Springer Nature, 2024) Englebretson, Robert; Holbrook, M. Cay; Treiman, Rebecca; Fischer-Baum, Simon
    This study examines the use of braille contractions in a corpus of spelling tests from braille-reading children in grades 1-4, with particular attention to braille contractions that create mismatches with morphological structure. Braille is a tactile writing system that enables people who are blind or visually impaired to read and write. In English and many other languages, reading and writing braille is not simply a matter of transliterating between print letters and their braille equivalents; Unified English Braille (the official braille system used in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and several other English-speaking countries) contains 180 contractions—one or more braille cells that represent whole words or strings of letters. In some words, the prescriptive rules for correct braille usage cause contractions to bridge morphological boundaries and to obscure the spellings of stems and affixes. We demonstrate that, when the prescriptive rules for correct braille usage flout morphological structure, young braille spellers generally follow the morphology rather than the orthographic rules. This work establishes that morphology matters for young braille learners. We discuss the potential impact of our findings on braille research, development, and pedagogy, and we suggest ways in which our findings contribute to understanding the nature of orthographic morphemes and the place of braille in the reading sciences.