Juncture prosody across languages: Similar production but dissimilar perception

How do speakers of languages with different intonation systems produce and perceive prosodic junctures in sentences with identical structural ambiguity? Native speakers of English and of Mandarin produced potentially ambiguous sentences with a prosodic juncture either earlier in the utterance (e.g., “He gave her # dog biscuits,” “他给她#狗饼干 ”), or later (e.g., “He gave her dog # biscuits,” “他给她狗 #饼干 ”). These productiondata showed that prosodic disambiguation is realised very similarly in the two languages, despite some differences in the degree to which individual juncture cues (e.g., pausing) were favoured. In perception experiments with a new disambiguation task, requiring speeded responses to select the correct meaning for structurally ambiguous sentences, language differences in disambiguation response time appeared: Mandarin speakers correctly disambiguated sentences with earlier juncture faster than those with later juncture, while English speakers showed the reverse. Mandarin-speakers with L2 English did not show their native-language response time pattern when they heard the English ambiguous sentences. Thus even with identical structural ambiguity and identically cued production, prosodic juncture perception across languages can differ

Juncture prosody across languages : similar production but dissimilar perception

How do speakers of languages with different intonation systems produce and perceive prosodic junctures in sentences with identical structural ambiguity? Native speakers of English and of Mandarin produced potentially ambiguous sentences with a prosodic juncture either earlier in the utterance (e.g., “He gave her # dog biscuits,” “他给她 # 狗饼干”), or later (e.g., “He gave her dog # biscuits,” “他给她狗 # 饼干”). These production data showed that prosodic disambiguation is realized very similarly in the two languages, despite some differences in the degree to which individual juncture cues (e.g., pausing) were favoured. In perception experiments with a new disambiguation task, requiring speeded responses to select the correct meaning for structurally ambiguous sentences, language differences in disambiguation response time appeared: Mandarin speakers correctly disambiguated sentences with earlier juncture faster than those with later juncture, while English speakers showed the reverse. Mandarin speakers also showed higher levels of accuracy in disambiguation compared to English speakers, indicating language-specific differences in the extent to which prosodic cues are used. However, Mandarin, but not English, speakers showed a decrease in accuracy when pausing cues were removed. Thus even with high similarity in both structural ambiguity and production cues, prosodic juncture perception across languages can differ

Archival Phonetics & Prosodic Typology in Sixteen Australian Languages

In naturalistic speech, the phonetic instantiation of phonological categories is often highly variable. Speakers have been observed to converge on patterns of phonetic variation that are consistent within languages but variable cross-linguistically for the same phonological phenomenon. Speakers are evidently sensitive to these sorts of patterns and learn the phonetic variation in a consistent way. Furthermore, the systematicity of this variation suggests that these patterns should change over time systematically as well. Most Australian languages assign lexical stress consistently on the first syllable of the word, raising the question of how the phonetics of stress varies across languages with this phonologically stable pattern. This dissertation presents an investigation into structured variation of the acoustic correlates of stress and prosody in sixteen Indigenous languages of Australia that all have consistent initial stress placement, with a focus on the source(s) of variation in these factors cross-linguistically. Acoustic correlates of stress, despite the phonological uniformity present among these languages, show significant cross-linguistic variation, both in the presence or absence of a particular cue to stress, as well as the size of these effects. The phonological uniformity of stress assignment allows for a more controlled comparison of the acoustic correlates of stress across these languages, since the placement of stress marking remains constant. Acoustic correlates investigated are vowel duration, pre-tonic and post-tonic consonant duration, intensity, f0 (maximum and range), and vowel peripherality. These cues are identified using a series of mixed effects linear regression models. To identify the source(s) of variation in acoustic correlates to stress, the population genetics tool Analysis of Molecular Variance (AMOVA) is used. This is a statistical tool created for analysis of genetic variance that has been applied to cultural evolution topics such as music and folktales. This model finds significant variation across languages, as well as substantial intra-speaker variation, similarly to the findings for both biological and cultural evolution, but no significant intra-language variation across speakers. These results are also supported by the investigation of inter- and intra-language variation using regresssion modeling. Another population genetics measure, fixation index, is used to create a network model of language relationships based on the phonetic correlates of lexical stress. This network shows clear relationships between the Pama Nyungan languages in this sample, as well as some Gunwinyguan languages, supporting the claim that the phonetic cues to stress are stable within language families and change according to the principles of diachronic language change. Smaller groupings in this network also indicate some contact-induced change or areal effects in these phonetic markers. Phrasal prosody is also investigated in this dissertation, using a toolkit for automated phrasal contour clustering. For each language, f0 is measured at regular intervals across the word, which is used as input to a complete-linkage clustering algorithm to identify major categories of phrasal contours. Results of this sort of automatic clustering provide testable hypotheses about phrasal types in each language, while avoiding some common pitfalls of impressionistic analyses of prosodic phrases. As with the investigation into lexical stress, this sort of automated typological work serves as a crucial complement to more detailed language-specific studies for the creation of well-rounded and well-supported theories. The data used in this dissertation are narrative speech recordings sourced from language archives, collected in varying field settings. In processing these data I have created a large corpus of these recordings force aligned at the segment level and have worked out post-hoc methods for controlling noise and variation in field-collected audio to create a comparable set of language data. I include in the dissertation a lengthy discussion of these methods, with the aim of providing a practical toolkit for the use of archival materials to address novel phonetic questions, as well as to aid in the creation of language revitalization resources

Polysynthetic sociolinguistics: the language and culture of Murrinh Patha Youth

This thesis is about the life and language of kardu kigay – young Aboriginal men in the town of Wadeye, northern Australia. Kigay have attained some notoriety within Australia for their participation in “heavy metal gangs”, which periodically cause havoc in the town. But within Australianist linguistics circles, they are additionally known for speaking Murrinh Patha, a polysynthetic language that has a number of unique grammatical structures, and which is one of the few Aboriginal languages still being learnt by children. My core interest is to understand how people’s lives shape their language, and how their language shapes their lives. In this thesis these interests are focused around the following research goals: (1) To document the social structures of kigay’s day-­‐to-­‐day lives, including the subcultural “metal gang” dimension of their sociality; (2) To document the language that kigay speak, focusing in particular in aspects of their speech that differ from what has been documented in previous descriptions of Murrinh Patha; (3) To analyse which features of kigay speech might be socially salient linguistic markers, and which are more likely to reflect processes of grammatical change that run below the level of social or cognitive salience; (4) To analyse how kigay speech compares to other youth Aboriginal language varieties documented in northern Australia, and argue that together these can be described as a phenomenon of linguistic urbanisation. I will show that the “heavy metal gangs” are an idiosyncratic local subculture that uses foreign heavy metal bands as group totems. Social connections and loyalties are formed on the basis of peer solidarity, as opposed to the traditional iv totemic system, which is structured around ancestry. Lives are now shaped by the dense (and often conflict-­‐riven) town environment, as opposed to bush life, which was inseparable from the land. Kigay’s in-­‐group language is a “slang” variety of Murrinh Patha (MP), which deploys new words and phrases by borrowing and reinterpreting English vocabulary. It is also characterised by substantial lenitions and deletions in the pronunciation. The MP grammatical system still underlies this speech, but some of its more complex morphosyntactic forms are restricted to the “heavy” speech of older people, and there are various mergers and reconfigurations occurring in the verb morphology. This thesis adds to the growing body of work describing how language contact and changing sociolinguistic dynamics are radically restructuring the linguistic repertoire of Aboriginal communities in northern and central Australia. At the same time, it is one of very few studies providing sociolinguistic description of a polysynthetic language, and is therefore an innovative study in polysynthetic sociolinguistics

Skin, Kin and Clan

Australia is unique in the world for its diverse and interlocking systems of Indigenous social organisation. On no other continent do we see such an array of complex and contrasting social arrangements, coordinated through a principle of ‘universal kinship’ whereby two strangers meeting for the first time can recognise one another as kin. For some time, Australian kinship studies suffered from poor theorisation and insufficient aggregation of data. The large-scale AustKin project sought to redress these problems through the careful compilation of kinship information. Arising from the project, this book presents recent original research by a range of authors in the field on the kinship and social category systems in Australia. A number of the contributions focus on reconstructing how these systems originated and developed over time. Others are concerned with the relationship between kinship and land, the semantics of kin terms and the dynamics of kin interactions

Prosody, prominence and segments in Djambarrpuyŋu

© 2019 Kathleen Margaret JepsonThis thesis is an investigation of the phonetics of prosodic structure and prominence in Djambarrpuyŋu, an Australian Indigenous language of the Pama-Nyungan language family spoken in northeast Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, Australia. The aim of this study is to provide a phonetic description of aspects of prosody in Djambarrpuyŋu that contributes to the phonological and phonetic understanding of this language, and that will inform phonological and phonetic investigations of Australian languages in the future. Specifically, it provides a phonetic account of the effects of word- and phrase-level prominence on segments, and how information structure is expressed by intonational means. Working with controlled speech data collected with Djambarrpuyŋu speakers on the island community of Milingimbi (Yurrwi), and through a perception study, this thesis is the first substantial quantitative phonetic analysis of Djambarrpuyŋu. Starting from previously described phonological features of the vowel system, the acoustic characteristics of the vowel length contrast are investigated in a production experiment. The results reveal that contrastively long vowels /ɪː, ɐː, ʊː/ are approximately twice as long as short vowels /ɪ, ɐ, ʊ/. The contrast is enhanced by different fundamental frequency contours between the length categories (similarly to Finnish) and by an inverse durational relationship with the following consonant (in a similar way to Swedish, Washo, and Thai, for example). A forced-choice perception study investigating the vowel length contrast and the effect of consonant duration on listeners’ categorisation of words in the minimal pair of wäŋa /wɐːŋɐ/ “home/place/country” and waŋa /wɐŋɐ/ “talk/speak”, shows that consonant duration is used by listeners particularly when the vowel’s length category is ambiguous. Word stress patterns previously reported for Djambarrpuyŋu include primary stress on the initial syllable and second stresses assigned to alternating odd syllables through a word or to the first syllable in suffixing morphemes. These patterns are typical of those described for Australian Indigenous languages. The results of a quantitative acoustic analysis partially support the previous description. The initial syllable of words does have the highest fundamental frequency of all syllables within a word. However, other correlates of prominence that are not pitch-related such as longer stressed vowels, higher intensity of stressed vowels, and more peripheral stressed vowel quality, are not found in the data. Furthermore, evidence for secondary stress, considered for both morpheme internal and morpheme initial secondary stresses is not found, suggesting that Djambarrpuyŋu is like other Australian languages where there is one main stress that is strong in terms of phonotactic restrictions and the association of a post-lexical pitch accent but shows little acoustic support for further word-internal strength relations. The effects of proximity to prosodic constituent boundaries and prosodic prominence on consonants is investigated. Australian languages have been proposed to unusually show strengthening (temporal and articulatory) of consonants following tonic (i.e., accented) vowels. Pre-boundary lengthening commonly described cross-linguistically is also reported, though strong effects of post-boundary lengthening are not as common. An acoustic experiment showed that post-boundary nasals following a pause have shorter duration than nasals following a segment (like findings for English), and that pre-boundary lengthening occurs in Djambarrpuyŋu for nasals preceding pauses. Consistent post-tonic consonant lengthening is not found in these data unlike other Australian languages such as Mawng, Bininj Kunwok, and Walpiri. However, further analysis comparing post-tonic consonants with consonants from non-focal or non-accented words as well as articulatory investigation would prove illuminating. Considering prosodic structure above the word, the role of intonation in encoding information structure is examined. The proposed intonational phonology of Djambarrpuyŋu is presented. In its tonal inventory, Djambarrpuyŋu is similar to other Australian languages for which there is an intonational analysis. It is shown that focus and topic elements can be marked with an intonational pitch accent associated with, or close to the initial syllable of the word. However, neither gradient nor categorical measures differentiated different uses of focus or topic categories. The contours and placement of pitch accents in questions follow cross-linguistic patterns and support previous impressionistic descriptions of Djambarrpuyŋu. Unusually for Australian languages, some words were also found to be deaccented. This study reveals that while Djambarrpuyŋu shows striking similarities with other Australian languages across language family boundaries, the results also highlight that there is diversity in acoustic patterns of segments and intonational systems, demonstrating the value in phonetic research of these languages that are often considered similar in their phonological systems