Lecture 9: Language Diversity II

Question 1

universals in phonology: consonants (6)

Answer 1

• All languages have stops.
• Not all languages have fricatives.
• If a language has fricatives, then it also has stops (but not vice versa).
• What does this tell us? Are stops fundamentally easier to produce/perceive than fricatives?
  
  • Perhaps; remember special populations (e.g. aphasia, infant language development) → process of fortition (reducing fricatives to stops) is typical.
  • When language abilities are impaired (or not fully developed), stops are retained, but not necessarily fricatives.

Question 2

universals in phonology: vowels (4)

Answer 2

• All languages have oral vowels.
• Not all languages have nasal vowels.
• If a language has nasal vowels, then it also has oral vowels (but not vice versa).
• Does this mean that nasal sounds are more difficult to produce? Maybe, but we haven’t seen many experiments testing this.

Question 3

Goldin-Meadow et al. (2008) (9)

Answer 3

• Evidence that SOV is the “default” word order.
• Participants completed gesturing and transparency tasks.
• Participants were of different languages, using either SOV or SVO.
• When describing the task using speech, speakers followed the word orders of their native languages.
• Gesturing task → participants used SOV 80% of the time, contrary to their spoken language order.
  
  • This could tell us that either: 1) SOV is easier to gesture than another order; 2) SOV reflects the natural cognitive order of events.
• Transparency task → predominant order was SOV.
  
  • Provides evidence that SOV reflects natural sequencing of elements in an event → perhaps why SOV is the most common word order.
• The pressure toward this structure is an internal, cognitive bias.

Question 4

noisy channel hypothesis (4)

Answer 4

• Our communicative environment isn’t optimal (i.e. there’s lots of noise from many sources).
• Sometimes, elements of a sentence can get “lost in transmission.”
• SVO order provides maximum efficiency in an (inevitable) noisy environment.
• The pressure toward this structure is external, more environmental influence.

Question 5

Gibson et al. (2013) (4)

Answer 5

• Conducted a gesturing experiment based on Goldin-Meadow et al. (2008).
• In the Goldin-Meadow study, the subject was usually animate, and the object inanimate (i.e. not semantically reversible).
• Like Goldin-Meadow et al., when there was an animate-inanimate pairing, they found the same result: participants used SOV order in gesturing.
• But, they found that when the subject and object were both animate (semantically reversible), most people gestured using SVO order.

Question 6

What determines whether a language has fixed or free word order? (6)

Answer 6

• Communicative efficiency.
• English has a fixed SVO word order; reversing the S and O cannot mean the same thing.
• In German, the order is freer. Instead of relying on word order, German relies on case markers; der (nominative case marking) for subjects and den (accusative case marker) for objects.
  
  • Here, word order is used as a tool to signal focus.
• Thus, if language can use another means of conveying grammatical function (other than word order), word order can be free(-er).
  
  • Note: Languages with “free” orders still tend to have a default order.

Question 7

Fedzechkina et al. (2015) (7)

Answer 7

• Artificial language learning experiment.
• Two groups, each learnt a different artificial language.
  
  • Language 1: optional case markers, fixed word order.
  • Language 2: optional case markers, flexible word order.
• Training phase, followed by final testing (production) phase.
  
  • Dependent variable: % use of case markers in testing phase.
• Language 1 used case markers less (41%), while Language 2 used case markers more (71%).