Department of Linguistics
Dr. Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy and Dr. Juan Antonio Cutillas-Espino
Tuesday, September 18, 2007 from 11:40am to 12:55pm, ICC 450Performative Approaches to Style-Shifting: Speaker External Factors
The study of style within the variationist tradition in sociolinguistics has traditionally received little attention in general terms. Some of the main introductory textbooks dealing with this discipline hardly mention style as a variable; and when they do, they usually understand style as a reflection of the speaker’s attention to his/her own speech. Increasingly, researchers have moved from viewing stylistic variation as a primarily reactive phenomenon, conditioned by matters external to speakers such as formality (Labov 1972) and audience (Bell 1984), to more proactive approaches, in which speakers use stylistic resources to project and create identity, as well as to accomplish conversational and longer-term goals (e.g. Coupland 2001a, 2001b, forthcoming; Eckert 2000; Schilling-Estes 2002). In other words, the Audience Design model conceives stylistic variation primarily as the result of adaptation to the features of a present or absent audience, whereas so-called Speaker Design approaches (e.g. Coupland 1996, Schilling-Estes 2002) look at stylistic variation as a process of identity building. In the present paper, we extend this constructivist approach to style shifting by demonstrating that even in seemingly highly constrained stylistic contexts, namely publicly broadcast radio or political speech, people make personal, strategic, and sometimes quite surprising, stylistic choices.
In the first of our two studies, we analyse the speech of a radio presenter in a local station in Murcia and compare it to the audience’s linguistic behaviour shown in phone calls received during the programme. We also analyse the data obtained in an interview with the radio presenter. Our results, which show a radical divergence between the presenter’s speech and that of his audience, are contrasted with both Audience Design and Speaker Design theoretical tenets, using the explicit knowledge of the presenter’s attitudes and opinions to contrast theory and fact. We conclude that neither model offers a completely satisfactory explanation of the patterns found. Finally, we reflect on the need to consider not only performance, but also the script (in the form of sociolinguistic norms and attitudes to language) that underlies the individual linguistic behaviour, thus suggesting the need to consider community-specific factors in the explanation of stylistic variation.
The second piece of research focuses on the unexpected (and controversial) use of many features of the local dialect by a female former President of the Local Government of Murcia, in southeastern Spain. The Murcian dialect is stigmatized within Spain but also carries covert prestige for Murcians as a marker of local identity and solidarity. The comparison of the President’s broadcast speech with that of other local speakers shows, surprisingly, that she has higher usage levels for dialect features than any of the other groups. Her hyper-use of Murcian dialect features indicates that she is not shifting her speech in reaction to formality, or even in accommodation to the many Murcians in her audience. Rather, she is purposely designing her speech to project an image that highlights her Murcian identity and her socialist ideals. The fact the even prominent politicians use stylistic resources in ways that are most fully explicated by appealing to speaker-internal as well as speaker-external, situational factors lends further support for viewing style as a matter of Speaker Design as well as Audience Design.
Dr. Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy and Dr. Juan Antonio Cutillas-Espino
Thursday, September 20, 2007 from 11:40am to 12:55pm, ICC 450
Murcian Spanish: Diachronic and Synchronic Perspectives
In any process of linguistic standardisation, the promotion of one variety to the status of standard triggers the devaluation of the other linguistic varieties present within the boundaries of the nation-state and impinges upon their domains. Diachronically speaking, this process is a constant struggle between the standard and the non-standard varieties either to reach uniformity and invariance, or to avoid compliance and maintain local values and customs, always under the pressures of prestige of different kinds. The present study examines aspects of the dialect contact maintained between the standard Castilian Spanish and the non-standard variety of Murcia, in southeastern Spain. Such long-term contact situations most often result in dialect obsolescence together with standardisation and even levelling; conversely and less frequently, they may result in survival processes of dialect maintenance. Conclusions are reached from results obtained in two pieces of research: i) a longitudinal study of Murcian speech carried out in order to detect and measure the apparently increasing spread of standard Castilian features from northern Peninsular Spanish over Murcian Spanish, as well as its geolinguistic patterns of diffusion; ii) a cross-sectional study carried out in a local community considering socio-demographic factors such as gender and age.
Dr. Tonia Bleam
Thursday, October 4, 2007 from 10:15am to 11:30am, ICC 450
On the Status of Null Determiners Or: The Role of Information Structure in determining the distribution of bare nominals in Spanish
It has long been observed that the distribution of bare nominals in Romance languages such as Spanish and Italian differs from their distribution in English. Spanish and Italian bare nominals are much more restricted in their distribution, being barred from canonical pre-verbal subject position. Previous accounts of these facts have put the locus of variation in the presence or absence of a null determiner: Spanish and Italian bare nominals contain a null determiner which is subject to a syntactic constraint, whereas English bare nominals contain no such null determiner.
In this talk, I show that principles of information structure are crucial to accounting for the distribution and interpretation of bare nominals in Spanish, and that once we adopt these principles (which we need independently), the Null Determiner Hypothesis no longer does any explanatory work for us.
A second goal of this paper is to demonstrate the need for flexible composition in the semantics. In particular it will be argued that property-denoting nominals can appear in argument positions in the syntax, and that we thus cannot adhere to the neo-Montagovian position that function application is the only means of semantic composition. However, the Montagovian idea that there is a strict mapping between syntactic category and semantic type is maintained.
Dr. Draga Zec
Tuesday, October 23, 2007 from 11:40am to 12:55pm, ICC 450
Types of interactions in prominence based prosodic systems
According to Ivic 1958, the Stokavian dialect group, which includes Serbian and Croatian regional idioms, diverges into a range of pitch accent systems. The goal of this paper is to capture both the similarities and differences across these systems in terms of different rankings of a small set of OT constraints. The constraints will make reference to tone and stress, the two crucial components of the Stokavian pitch accent systems. There are several properties that all these systems have in common. First, the pitch accented syllable bears stress, and is also linked to a H(igh) tone (Lehiste and Ivic 1986, Inkelas and Zec 1988). Second, tone is associated with lexical forms, and serves as a basis for characterizing lexical classes. The lexical H may occur on any syllable in the word, and its locus influences the place of stress. The differences among the systems, while minimal, have the cumulative effect of giving rise to the prosodic partitioning of the Stokavian dialect group across several dimensions. The resulting Stokavian pitch accent systems crucially diverge with regard to the prosodic influences on the place of stress: those of the tonal variety, such as the locus of the lexical H, as well as those directly associated with stress systems, such as syllable weight effects, and edge orientation. In the proposed analysis, this dialectal divergence is expressed as a factorial typology of constraints on tone and stress. The resulting factorial typology exhibits a close fit with Ivic’s description of the dialectal variation.
Dr. Valentine Hacquard
Wednesday, October 31, 2007 from 4:15am to 6:45am, ICC 462
Towards a reunification of modal auxiliaries.
Various types of modality are expressed, cross-linguistically using the same modal words. In influential work, Kratzer (1981, 1991) proposed a unified semantics for modals, where the type of modality involved is contextually determined. A long standing problem for such a proposal is that, while the same lexical item can express 'epistemic' or 'root' modality, there is a systematic correlation across languages between the type of modality a modal can have and the position of that modal with respect to other functional elements: epistemics tend to scope high, while roots scope low (cf. Brennan 1993, Cinque 1999, a.o.). In this this talk, I explore a semantically motivated alternative explanation for this ordering, which does not stipulate different relative syntactic positions for different types of modals, but still maintains a unified semantics for modals in the spirit of Kratzer.