Linguistics Program of Seminars - Semester 2, 2008
These seminars are open to the public.
Tuesdays, Semester 2, 2008
11.00am-1.00pm, followed by lunch & coffee in the Staff Club
Theatre G23 Building 6 (Education)
29th July
Anna Mostovaia (Monash University)
Colour words in Russian: attitudes, connotations and gender differences in usage
This paper considers the limits of the concept “connotation” and consequences of its different understandings. The term connotation has been introduced in the wide use by James Mill and John Stuart Mill. The latter went through two different stages in his understanding of the term: the more narrow one, as a sum of essential features which make up a concept corresponding to a word or a phrase and a wider one, according to which connotation is a “secondary” part of meaning, associations a word acquires as a result of being used in real language contexts and encyclopaedic knowledge of the speakers. This latter understanding is, with some variations (Barthes 1967; Greimas & Courtes 1993), accepted today. According to Sinclair (2003, 2004), connotations of a language item are manifested as words often co-occurring with it in texts, that is, its collocates. Associations a word acquires by co-occurring with other words are also called “semantic prosody” in corpus linguistics and can be studied by looking at the word’s concordances. If connotations are associations acquired through exposure to diverse contexts, also called “lexical priming” (Hoey 2005), they may be different for the same language item used by different speakers or a group of speakers. In order to compare connotations of the same language item between groups, tools for comparison are of interest. One such tool is analysis of word frequencies in texts.
The paper considers the following three hypotheses. Firstly, that Russian literary texts written by women contain more colour words than texts of similar genre (and time – late 20th century) written by men. Secondly, it is hypothesized that women use on average more than men colour words for describing body parts and clothes. Thirdly, it is hypothesized that women’s descriptions of body parts containing colour words more often, than men’s, have an emotional connotation (cheeks pale from fear, face red out of shame). Only the first of these hypotheses, concerning the total average number of colour words used was confirmed at the marginal level of statistical significance. This can be interpreted as an indication that larger samples have to be considered, since literary texts generally contain few colour words for each hundred words (Wyler 1992), although more than other types of texts.
Another avenue for investigating the limits of the concept “connotation” is concerned with the use of syntactic tests. The idea of syntactic tests is based on the concept that the presence of some semantic components in a word’s meaning can be confirmed or rejected on the basis of grammatical (un) acceptability of certain words and sentences (Wierzbicka 1988). Extending this idea to connotations, one can say that a number of phrases in Russian are unacceptable because there exists a stable, recurring in a number of contexts connotation connecting a certain colour with a certain state of affairs.
References:
- Barthes, Roland. (1967). Systeme de la Mode. Paris: Seuil.
- Greimas, A. & J. Courtes. (1993). Semiotique. Dictionnaire raisonne de la theorie de langage. Paris: Hachette.
- Hoey, Michael. (2005). Lexical Priming. N.Y.: Routledge.
- Sinclair, John. (2003). Reading Concordances. London-N.Y.: Pearson-Longman.
- Sinclair, John. (2004). Trust the Text. Language, Corpus and Discourse. London-N.Y.: Routledge.
- Wyler, Siegfried. Colour and Language. Colour terms in English. Germany: Tubingen.
- Wierzbicka, Anna. (1988). Semantics of Grammar. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
12th August
Sarah Cutfield (Monash University)
Spatial (exophoric) uses of the demonstratives in Dalabon
In this talk, I report on the exophoric (or, 'spatial') uses of the demonstratives in Dalabon, a non-Pama-Nyungan language of south-western Arnhem Land.
Traditional descriptions of the spatial uses and semantics of demonstratives have characterised the spatial distinctions as symmetrical, or as being equally-spaced and paradigmatically-opposed (e.g. proximal/distal, proximal/medial/distal, near-skpr/near-addr/away-from-both) (Fillmore 1982; Anderson and Keenan 1985; Diessel 1999; Dixon 2003).
Recent work suggests that these characterisations may in fact be masking the real paradigmatic distributions, which may not be equal (Levinson 2000:79), spatial (Özyürek 2001), or even semantic (Enfield 2003; Hanks 2005)
Using a guided elicitation tool as a primary method, I investigate the exophoric uses of the demonstratives in Dalabon according to several deictic parameters (referent location, concurrent pointing, discourse status of the referent, referent visibility, etc). It is shown that speakers make exophoric reference according to whichever deictic parameter is most salient or useful to them at the moment of utterance. The concept of the 'here-space' is significant in understanding speakers' choice of demonstrative, as well as related concepts of 'engagement area' and 'common ground'.
The Dalabon demonstrative 'paradigm' is shown to be unequal, not necessarily semantic, nor fully spatial, with some demonstratives specialising for spatial reference, and others specialising as indicators of assumed 'familiarity' or 'unfamiliarity' with the referent.
References:
- Anderson, S. R., and E. L. Keenan. 1985. Deixis. In Language Typology and Syntactic Description, edited by T Shopen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Diessel, Holger. 1999. Demonstratives: form, function and grammaticalization. Edited by M Noonan. Vol. 42, Typological Studies in Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- Dixon, R. M. W. 2003. Demonstratives: A cross-linguistic typology. Studies in Language 27 (1):61-112.
- Enfield, N. J. 2003. Demonstratives in Space and Interaction: Data from Lao Speakers and Implications for Semantic Analysis. Language 79 (1):82-117.
- Fillmore, Charles J. 1982. Towards a Descriptive Framework for Spatial Deixis. In Speech, Place and Action, edited by R. J. Jarvella and W. Klein. Norwich: John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
- Levinson, Stephen C. 2000. Presumptive Meanings: The theory of generalized conversational implicature. Cambridge MA, and London: MIT Press.
- Özyürek, Asli. 2001. An Analysis of the Basic Meaning of Turkish Demonstratives in Face-to-Face Conversational Interaction. In Oralité et Gesutalité: Communication Multimodale, Interaction, edited by Serge Santi, Isabelle Guaïtella, Christian Cavé and Gabrielle Konopczynski. Paris: Harmattan. 609-614.
26th August
Diane Jonas
On Embedded Verb-Second in Scandinavian
The goal of this talk is to examine the distribution of embedded Verb-Second in the Scandinavian languages, and in Faroese in particular, from a diachronic perspective. There is considerable variation with respect to the distribution of embedded Verb-Second between Older and Modern Faroese and this is compared with the situation in Old and Modern Icelandic. The approach taken here is to examine both the distribution and interpretation of embedded Verb-Second by an examination of the syntax and semantics of various embedded clause types. In particular, I take as a starting point for this study the work of Julien (2007) on embedded Verb-Second in Mainland Scandinavian (Norwegian and Swedish) where she argues that embedded clauses that are Verb-Second have illocutionary force. We will see that under this approach it is possible to begin to provide an account of the observed variation that we find currently in spoken and written Modern Faroese and the diachronic changes that are apparent in the texts.
Reference:
- Julien, Marit. 2007. Embedded V2 in Norwegian and Swedish. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 80:103-161. Lund University.
9th September
Birgit Helwig (RCLT, Latrobe)
Meaning and translation: Discovering the meaning of property expressions in Goemai (West Chadic, Nigeria)
Translation is a major tool in fieldwork. We tend to spend a large amount of our time asking speakers to translate from a metalanguage into their language, and from their language back into a metalanguage. We then tend to use these translations as the basis for our understanding and analysis of their language. But do these translations really allow us to understand the meaning of expressions?
The talk aims to explore this question by focusing on one illustrative example: the investigation of property-denoting (“adjectival”) expressions in Goemai (a West Chadic language of Nigeria). The talk describes the different methods employed during the investigation, compares them, and evaluates their results. On this basis, it advocates using a combination of methods in order to benefit from each method’s advantages while counterbalancing its disadvantages. In particular, the talk argues in favour of a semantics-based approach to fieldwork, illustrating the invaluable insights to be gained from it.
23rd September
Zosia Golebiowski (Deakin University)
How academic writers in Linguistics and Education promote their research? A study of abstracts.
This study investigates the rhetorical structure of abstracts of papers published in Applied Linguistics and Education. It examines how abstract authors in these two fields emphasize the significance of their research, and how they appeal to their prospective readership. Although abstracts in both disciplinary groups are found to display a coordinate textual development they exhibit a utilization of different relational schemata to indicate the functional prominence of textual propositions. In particular, different relational patterns are seen to be employed to fulfil the two primary objectives of an abstract: to provide a synopsis of the accompanying article, and to promote it to relevant research and professional communities. The way authors demonstrate the value of their research and their professional credibility appears to be conditioned by disciplinary writing conventions. It is proposed that relational choices, which result in differences in the accentuation of communicative messages in Applied Linguistics and Education abstracts, depend on the perceived relationship between the author and the discourse community in terms of expectations of prior knowledge.
7th October
Ulrike Mosel (Kiel University, Germany)
Putting oral narratives into writing – experiences from a language documentation project in Papua New Guinea
Transforming oral narratives into written texts certainly creates a new genre that is foreign to an endangered language and culture without any former literary tradition. But it does not necessarily do any damage to the language as some linguists warned. When members of the Teop speech community in Papua New Guinea edited the transcriptions of forty recorded oral narratives, they did not only eliminate speech errors and lexical borrowings from the dominant languages English and Tok Pisin, but also made syntactic changes by replacing parenthetical sequences of simple clauses by complex sentence constructions. As these constructions are – though less frequently – also found in the recordings, they are not considered as innovations, but are attributed to probably universal differences between spoken and written language.
For the grammatical analysis of the language, the edited versions reveal natural transformational equivalents of constructions that genuinely reflect the native speaker's metalinguistic knowledge. Furthermore, they enlarge the corpus with data which often show lexically and syntactically more elaborate structures than their oral equivalents.
In conclusion, the enterprise of editing spoken narratives is not only justified from the speech community's point of view, but is also fruitful from a purely linguistic perspective.