ACOUSTIC CORRELATES OF LEXICAL STRESS IN NATIVE SPEAKERS OF UYGHUR AND L2 LEARNERS

Some syllables are louder, longer and stronger than other syllables at the lexical level. These prominent prosodic characteristics of certain syllables are captured by suprasegmental features including fundamental frequency, duration and intensity. A language like English uses fundamental frequency, duration and intensity to distinguish stressed syllables from unstressed syllables; however, a language like Japanese only uses fundamental frequency to distinguish the stressed syllables from unstressed syllables. This study investigates the stress pattern of Uyghur, a Turkic language, as produced by native and non-native speakers. The first three experiments provide a detailed phonetic analysis in order to determine the acoustic cues to stress in Uyghur. In Experiment 1, six disyllabic minimal pairs (e.g., A-cha, a-CHA), contrasting in location of stress, were produced by five native Uyghur speakers with three repetitions in a fixed sentence context. In order to generalize the results from the small set of minimal pairs in the first experiment, Experiment 2 examined the initial syllable of disyllabic nouns that contrasted in first-syllable stress (e.g., DA-ka, da-LA) while syllabic structure (CV versus CVC) was also manipulated. In both experiments, average fundamental frequency, syllable duration, and average intensity were collected in accented and unaccented syllables. The results from both experiments showed that there were significant differences in duration and intensity between stressed and unstressed syllables, with the intensity differences moderated by syllable structure. No difference was found in fundamental frequency. Experiment 3 investigated the role of F0 in lexical stress. Experiment 3 focused on the interaction between sentential intonation and lexical stress in which the declarative assertion sentence (falling F0) and the declarative question sentence (rising F0) were used. The results confirmed the previous experiments. No interaction between sentential intonation and lexical stress indicated that the obtained duration effect was due to lexical stress. There were no effects of fundamental frequency or intensity in terms of stress. While previous studies have classified Uyghur as a pitch-accent and a stress-accent language, the present acoustic data suggest that native speakers make no use of pitch cues to signal stress in Uyghur. Previous research has focused on the acquisition of lexical stress by non-native speakers of English. This study also examined the acquisition of lexical stress by English learners of Uyghur. Five highly advanced English learners of Uyghur produced the six minimal pairs and disyllabic nouns contrasting in the first syllables. The stimuli that were produced by L2 learners were the same as in Experiment 1 and Experiment 2. Highly advanced Uyghur learners used duration as a cue and did not use fundamental frequency and intensity as stress cues. The results indicated that native-like lexical stress can be acquired at the high advanced level

Word Identification According to Syllabic Property

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a field of computer science, artificial intelligence and computational linguistics that concerned with the interactions between computers and natural languages. With developing computer technologies and social networks, researching natural languages such as machine translation, content summarization and information retrieval become most studied fields of NLP. To make a general solution for a problem, it is important to classify words and find out the category of language. In this paper, according to syllabic property of Uyghur words, a simple Uyghur word identification approach has been suggested

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

Case in Uyghur and beyond

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 239-249).The focus of this dissertation is the syntax and morphology of case, and how case interacts with A-movement and agreement. In chapter 1, I argue on the basis of novel data from Uyghur that noun phrases bearing structural case can still be eligible for raising. I show that raising in Uyghur is EPP-driven, and does not trigger overt agreement. Thus, we must either conclude that pure EPP movement does not depend on Agree (cf. Richards 2009, a.o.), or abandon the Activity Condition proposed by Chomsky (1998, 2001). I suggest that phenomena that have been attributed to the Activity Condition can be reanalyzed by means of other principles, such as the Phase Impenetrability Condition (Chomsky 1998, 2001). In chapter 2 (based on joint work with Jeremy Hartman), I argue in favor of Chomsky's (2001) weak version of the Phase Impenetrability Condition, and against Chomsky's (1998) stronger version of the Phase Impenetrability Condition more commonly assumed. The argument is based on case assignment and agreement in n Uyghur genitive subject constructions. I furthermore suggest that adopting Chomsky's (2001) version of the Phase Impenetrability Condition makes the concept of a weak phase head unnecessary (cf. Richards 2009). In chapter 3, I propose that quirky case in Faroese is not assigned immediately when a noun phrase enters the derivation. Rather, Faroese quirky case depends on a higher functional projection. This helps explain why quirky case-marked noun phrases in Faroese can trigger number agreement and dependent case licensing, and why quirky case can fail to be assigned in Faroese passive and raising constructions. In chapter 4, 1 present the results of a study of multiple case assignment in Russian Right Node Raising constructions. I show that the morphological system can rule out multiple case assignment when no systematically syncretic form is available, and propose a way of extending Distributed Morphology to capture this phenomenon.by Alevtina (Alya) Asarina.Ph.D

Suspended affixation in Ossetic and the structure of the syntax-morphology interface

I describe and analyze suspended affixation (a situation when an affix only appears on the rightmost coordinand, but takes scope over all the coordinands) of case markers in Ossetic. Based on how suspended affixation interacts with allomorphy and certain case conflicts, I propose that suspended affixation arises due to phonological deletion of exponents, and that semantic information is still available at this stage. I speculate that it is this stage of derivation that should be considered the morphological module

Computational Linguistics and Adaptation of Turkic Languages to Computer

This article describes computational linguistics briefly, and explains Turkic language studies in this field using Uyghur language as an example. With developing computer technologies, many software has been implemented in order to complete some tasks in place of human. For example, translate from one language to another, or translate from one language to more than one languages at the same time, correcting or editing texts, analyzing documents, converting speeches into texts or converting texts into speeches etc. Until now, there are many successful researches have been done on different languages such as English, Japanese, Arabic, Turkish, Chinese, French and Russian etc. In Turkic languages, especially in Turkey Turkish, though there are some important researches have been done, other Turkic languages still at a beginning stage. Though, Uyghur language belongs to Turkic language family and it has common properties with other languages, however research results about other Turkic languages cannot be applied to Uyghur language directly. As a natural language, Uyghur language has many special properties those (are) different from other Turkic languages. This paper summarizes some computer based researches about Uyghur language and use them as a part of general machine translation system of the Turkic world

UniMorph 4.0:Universal Morphology

The Universal Morphology (UniMorph) project is a collaborative effort providing broad-coverage instantiated normalized morphological inflection tables for hundreds of diverse world languages. The project comprises two major thrusts: a language-independent feature schema for rich morphological annotation and a type-level resource of annotated data in diverse languages realizing that schema. This paper presents the expansions and improvements made on several fronts over the last couple of years (since McCarthy et al. (2020)). Collaborative efforts by numerous linguists have added 67 new languages, including 30 endangered languages. We have implemented several improvements to the extraction pipeline to tackle some issues, e.g. missing gender and macron information. We have also amended the schema to use a hierarchical structure that is needed for morphological phenomena like multiple-argument agreement and case stacking, while adding some missing morphological features to make the schema more inclusive. In light of the last UniMorph release, we also augmented the database with morpheme segmentation for 16 languages. Lastly, this new release makes a push towards inclusion of derivational morphology in UniMorph by enriching the data and annotation schema with instances representing derivational processes from MorphyNet