Directional adposition use in English, Swedish and Finnish

Directional adpositions such as to the left of describe where a Figure is in relation to a Ground. English and Swedish directional adpositions refer to the location of a Figure in relation to a Ground, whether both are static or in motion. In contrast, the Finnish directional adpositions edellä (in front of) and jäljessä (behind) solely describe the location of a moving Figure in relation to a moving Ground (Nikanne, 2003). When using directional adpositions, a frame of reference must be assumed for interpreting the meaning of directional adpositions. For example, the meaning of to the left of in English can be based on a relative (speaker or listener based) reference frame or an intrinsic (object based) reference frame (Levinson, 1996). When a Figure and a Ground are both in motion, it is possible for a Figure to be described as being behind or in front of the Ground, even if neither have intrinsic features. As shown by Walker (in preparation), there are good reasons to assume that in the latter case a motion based reference frame is involved. This means that if Finnish speakers would use edellä (in front of) and jäljessä (behind) more frequently in situations where both the Figure and Ground are in motion, a difference in reference frame use between Finnish on one hand and English and Swedish on the other could be expected. We asked native English, Swedish and Finnish speakers’ to select adpositions from a language specific list to describe the location of a Figure relative to a Ground when both were shown to be moving on a computer screen. We were interested in any differences between Finnish, English and Swedish speakers. All languages showed a predominant use of directional spatial adpositions referring to the lexical concepts TO THE LEFT OF, TO THE RIGHT OF, ABOVE and BELOW. There were no differences between the languages in directional adpositions use or reference frame use, including reference frame use based on motion. We conclude that despite differences in the grammars of the languages involved, and potential differences in reference frame system use, the three languages investigated encode Figure location in relation to Ground location in a similar way when both are in motion. Levinson, S. C. (1996). Frames of reference and Molyneux’s question: Crosslingiuistic evidence. In P. Bloom, M.A. Peterson, L. Nadel & M.F. Garrett (Eds.) Language and Space (pp.109-170). Massachusetts: MIT Press. Nikanne, U. (2003). How Finnish postpositions see the axis system. In E. van der Zee & J. Slack (Eds.), Representing direction in language and space. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Walker, C. (in preparation). Motion encoding in language, the use of spatial locatives in a motion context. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Lincoln, Lincoln. United Kingdo

Proceedings of the 1st Conference on Central Asian Languages and Linguistics (ConCALL)

The Conference on Central Asian Languages and Linguistics (ConCALL) was founded in 2014 at Indiana University by Dr. Öner Özçelik, the residing director of the Center for Languages of the Central Asian Region (CeLCAR). As the nation’s sole U.S. Department of Education funded Language Resource Center focusing on the languages of the Central Asian Region, CeLCAR’s main mission is to strengthen and improve the nation’s capacity for teaching and learning Central Asian languages through teacher training, research, materials development projects, and dissemination. As part of this mission, CeLCAR has an ultimate goal to unify and fortify the Central Asian language learning community by facilitating networking between linguists and language educators, encouraging research projects that will inform language instruction, and provide opportunities for professionals in the field to both showcase their work and receive feedback from their peers. Thus ConCALL was established to be the first international academic conference to bring together linguists and language educators in the languages of the Central Asian region, including both the Altaic and Eastern Indo-European languages spoken in the region, to focus on research into how these specific languages are represented formally, as well as acquired by second/foreign language learners, and also to present research driven teaching methods. Languages served by ConCALL include, but are not limited to: Azerbaijani, Dari, Karakalpak, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Lokaabharan, Mari, Mongolian, Pamiri, Pashto, Persian, Russian, Shughnani, Tajiki, Tibetan, Tofalar, Tungusic, Turkish, Tuvan, Uyghur, Uzbek, Wakhi and more!The Conference on Central Asian Languages and Linguistics held at Indiana University on 16-17 May 1014 was made possible through the generosity of our sponsors: Center for Languages of the Central Asian Region (CeLCAR), Ostrom Grant Programs, IU's College of Arts and Humanities Center (CAHI), Inner Asian and Uralic National Resource Center (IAUNRC), IU's School of Global and International Studies (SGIS), IU's College of Arts and Sciences, Sinor Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies (SRIFIAS), IU's Department of Central Eurasian Studies (CEUS), and IU's Department of Linguistics

Lateral (morpho)syntactic transfer: An empirical investigation into the positive and negative influences of French on L1 English learners of Spanish within an instructed language-learning environment

This thesis explores lateral (morpho)syntactic transfer – non-native transfer at the level of morphology and syntax – from French among L1 English learners of Spanish in an instructed language-learning environment. A quantitative and qualitative study was conducted to investigate the positive and negative influences of L2 French and to identify learners’ foreign language experiences and strategies in making interlingual connections. The quantitative study focused on providing statistical evidence of morphological and syntactic transfer and comprised three groups: The EN/FR/SP Group consisted of 28 L1 English learners with five years’ instruction in French and two in Spanish; the EN/SP Group consisted of 22 L1 English learners with two years’ instruction in Spanish and no prior knowledge of French; the SP Group consisted of 36 monolingual Spanish speakers. The qualitative study was conducted through semi-structured interviews to gain a greater understanding of learners’ ability to apply interlingual connections and draw on prior language-learning experiences and strategies. Participants consisted of 10 L1 English learners with six years’ instruction in French and three in Spanish. It is argued that knowledge of a non-native language plays a pivotal role in the learning of a further typologically similar one at the level of morphology and syntax. The overall results suggest that positive transfer may be facilitated and negative transfer may be highlighted and understood through cross-linguistic comparisons, with important pedagogical implications for future research

The impulse to orthodoxy: why illiberal democracies treat religious pluralism as a threat

Since the late 1990s, governments across the post-Soviet space have redefined freedom of conscience as freedom from "non-traditional" religious groups — part of a broader effort to recast pluralism as a threat to national sovereignty. This dissertation focuses on the Central Asian states of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, which have restricted such groups as the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Ahmadi Muslim community, and the Chinese spiritual movement Falun Gong. It analyzes why illiberal regimes restrict marginal and apolitical religious groups, which are often more docile than the population at large. Furthermore, it addresses why policies that infringe on civil liberties nevertheless enjoy popular support. These questions take on greater significance in the midst of the current global retreat from democratic values. Yet they cannot be answered by the prevailing instrumentalist perspective in political theory, which assumes that rational citizens should seek to maximize individual liberties. Popular support for authoritarian figures has prompted scholars to propose non-instrumental motivations, such as national and religious identity. Rather than treat “identity“ as non-instrumental, I propose a relational model of identity politics, wherein pluralism and essentialism represent opposing strategies in a competitive political field. Drawing from Bourdieu's work on public politics, I argue that essentialist claims to authority (e.g. ethnic nationalism, religious populism) appeal to strata with relatively low capacity for autonomous political mobilization. Illiberal regimes propagate essentialist claims on behalf of such strata, and repress even benign forms of pluralism as part of this essentialist social contract. I investigate these hypotheses by examining recent discourses on religious tradition in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. I employ a dataset of 5,000 public documents (legislation, court rulings, etc.), which I analyze using qualitative coding. In addition, I draw on interviews with government officials and religious leaders collected during fieldwork between 2012 and 2014, and on data from the World Values Survey. I find that the political and religious establishments of both states are erecting new orthodoxies that consecrate the will of their political bases as essential to national self-determination. Thus, illiberal democracies maintain popular support by redistributing authority (symbolic capital, per Bourdieu) to core constituencies at the expense of peripheral constituencies

Don DeLillo’s Underworld: Systems, Loops, and Contradictions

This thesis attempts to continue Tom LeClair's studies on a critical genre of fiction named the systems novel. The thesis specifically analyzes Underworld (1997) by Don DeLillo, which has yet to be analyzed within LeClair's paradigm. Through engaging with LeClair's categorizations, scholarly arguments on DeLillo's writing, and expansions into extraliterary fields of theorizations of the contemporary world, the thesis uses close reading of specific parts of the novel that relates to systems and systems theory. It simultaneously attempts to configure the master system that the novel conveys by looking at its larger structures as a whole. Emerging from this comes a loop and network pattern that LeClair has also argued to be an integral part of DeLillo's fiction. As the systems novel concerns itself with representations of humans in their ecosystem, acting according to its laws, the thesis has paid close attention to the noise in the characters’ communication loops and self-referential frames. Close reading passages that represented elements of loops and self-referentiality enabled an argument to be made that parts of the novel dictated the way the reader should approach the novel's representations to uncover its themes. Additionally, investigating the cultural understanding of criminal networks persists throughout specific characters' environments, becoming a symbol of noise, corruption, and survival. Finally, DeLillo proposes an immanent critique of the neoliberalist economy through the novel’s epilogue. By closely reading the contradictions that emerge in the chapter, an argument appears for hope for fiction in a digital world. While this thesis is limited to a smaller account of systems theory, there is potential for this study to be expanded into a larger theoretical framework

Explaining Russian-German code-mixing

The study of grammatical variation in language mixing has been at the core of research into bilingual language practices. Although various motivations have been proposed in the literature to account for possible mixing patterns, some of them are either controversial, or remain untested. Little is still known about whether and how frequency of use of linguistic elements can contribute to the patterning of bilingual talk. This book is the first to systematically explore the factor usage frequency in a corpus of bilingual speech. The two aims are (i) to describe and analyze the variation in mixing patterns in the speech of Russia German adolescents and young adults in Germany, and (ii) to propose and test usage-based explanations of variation in mixing patterns in three morphosyntactic contexts: the adjective-modified noun phrase, the prepositional phrase, and the plural marking of German noun insertions in bilingual sentences. In these contexts, German noun insertions combine with either Russian or German words and grammatical markers, thus yielding mixed bilingual and German monolingual constituents in otherwise Russian sentences, the latter also labelled as embedded-language islands. The results suggest that the frequency with which words are used together mediates the distribution of mixing patterns in each of the examined contexts. The differing impacts of co-occurrence frequency are attributed to the distributional and semantic specifics of the analyzed morphosyntactic configurations. Lexical frequency has been found to be another important determinant in this variation. Other factors include recency, or lexical priming, in discourse in the case of prepositional phrases, and phonological and structural similarities and differences in the inflectional systems of the contact languages in the case of plural marking