Language and Linguistics Seminar Series: Week 18 - Research Student Talks

ABSTRACTS

Carmen Ciancia - "(TD) Deletion: exploring the emergence of morphological effect in British English" 

The lack of morphological effect, found for British English, is one of the unsolved problems concerning word final (t,d) deletion. Guy (1991) argues that the probability of application of a variable deletion rule is conditioned by the morphological structure of a word. The “robust morphological effect” was found to be largely uniform in many US dialects, however, conflicting results have been found in the UK: data from Manchester (Baranowski & Turton, 2016) conform to the American pattern, whilst in the York data (Tagliamonte & Temple, 2005) morphology was not a significant predictor. This paper, which investigates (t,d) deletion in 36 East Anglian speakers, exhibits the emergence of the morphological effect as one of the strongest predictors of (t,d), even when the preceding phonetic segment was included in the mixed-effects Rbrul regression analysis. Results also show that preceding and following phonetic segments are strongly significant in East Anglia and fit in the overall trend for this variable. 

Sharaf Yassin: "Agreeement in Palestinian Arabic: Humanness and Animacy"

I am studying agreement in Palestinian Arabic within the noun phrase, and this seminar covers the role of animacy and humanness in resorting to default agreement or deflected agreement patterns in an NP-internal domain with certain noun groups (Al-Jarf 2016, Prochazaka & Gabsi 2017, Hasselbach 2004, Dahl 2009, Kotey 1999, Bamyaci et al. 2014).

Amanda Cole - "Exploring the role of phonological and social factors in language change for Cockney"

How sound change proceeds has drawn a wealth of research into the social and phonological factors that condition the change. Recent work has demonstrated that social factors are most likely the impetus for many sound changes as a result of features adopting social meaning and become indexing (Johnstone et al, 2006). Once this change is in motion, it is not clear how and when the sound change becomes 'phonologized' (see Fruehwald, 2016). One theory for language change is the Constant Rate Effect whereby change occurs monotonically through applicable linguistic environments (Fruehwald et al, 2013). This paper attempts to address these questions with regards to both social and phonological factors for two sociolinguistic variables at different stages of change in Cockney: h-dropping and g-dropping. This is aided by the application of a new methodology in LVC work, phoneme n-grams, which allows for an interpretation of the interaction between sociolinguistic variants. This paper concludes that there is evidence that firstly, sociolinguistic variants work together to index a variety which is the impetus for change and secondly, the Constant Rate Effect is present for phonological variables.