Multicultural London English in Ealing: sociophonetic and discourse-pragmatic variation in the speech of children and adolescents.

PhD ThesesThis thesis is about Multicultural London English (MLE), a multiethnolect that is spoken by young people in London (Cheshire et al., 2011) and potentially beyond (Drummond, 2016). The thesis investigates MLE in the speech of young people in a relatively understudied part of London: Ealing, a borough of West London. The speech of adolescents and children is compared to see if in Ealing, MLE features are used as part of an adolescent speech style, or are also acquired by children. Because a different range of heritage languages are spoken in Ealing compared to East London, the thesis also asks whether there are linguistic innovations in Ealing that have not been found in previous studies of MLE. Using a variationist sociolinguistic framework, the project analyses MLE in the speech of 24 young people aged 16–24 and 14 children aged 5–7. The diphthongs FACE, PRICE and GOAT are analysed acoustically for both age groups. There is also a qualitative analysis of epistemic phrases (phrases related to I swear) in the adolescent data, motivated by the adolescents’ use of wallah – an Arabic borrowing that has also been found in other European youth languages (Opsahl, 2009). It is found that the children’s and adolescents’ diphthongs are similar in the quality of the onset, and similar to the emerging MLE system described by Kerswill et al. (2008). Among the adolescents, differences in the diphthongs pattern with language-internal effects as well as social factors including speaker sex and community of practice membership. The comparison between adolescents and children reveals that the children have acquired the same diphthong onset qualities as the adolescents – replicating Cheshire et al.’s finding in Hackney. However, the children have not acquired monophthongisation of the diphthongs. These findings have implications both for the study of multiethnolects and MLE, and for research on children’s acquisition of sociolinguistic variation

On Bohr-Sommerfeld bases

This paper combines algebraic and Lagrangian geometry to construct a special basis in every space of conformal blocks, the Bohr-Sommerfeld (BS) basis. We use the method of [D. Borthwick, T. Paul and A. Uribe, Legendrian distributions with applications to the non-vanishing of Poincar\'e series of large weight, Invent. math, 122 (1995), 359-402, preprint hep-th/9406036], whereby every vector of a BS basis is defined by some half-weighted Legendrian distribution coming from a Bohr-Sommerfeld fibre of a real polarization of the underlying symplectic manifold. The advantage of BS bases (compared to bases of theta functions in [A. Tyurin, Quantization and ``theta functions'', Jussieu preprint 216 (Apr 1999), e-print math.AG/9904046, 32pp.]) is that we can use information from the skillful analysis of the asymptotics of quantum states. This gives that Bohr-Sommerfeld bases are unitary quasi-classically. Thus we can apply these bases to compare the Hitchin connection with the KZ connection defined by the monodromy of the Knizhnik-Zamolodchikov equation in combinatorial theory (see, for example, [T. Kohno, Topological invariants for 3-manifolds using representations of mapping class group I, Topology 31 (1992), 203-230; II, Contemp. math 175} (1994), 193-217]).Comment: 43 pages, uses: latex2e with amsmath,amsfonts,theore

Superstring measure and non-renormalization of the three-point amplitude

We show that a recently conjectured expression for the superstring three-point amplitude, in the framework of the Cacciatori, Dalla Piazza, van Geemen - Grushevsky ansatz for the chiral measure, fails to vanish at three-loop, in contrast with expectations from non-renormalization theorems. Based on analogous two-loop computations, we discuss the possibility of a non-trivial correction to the amplitude and propose a natural candidate for such a contribution. Thanks to a new remarkable identity, it is reasonable to expect that the corrected three-point amplitude vanishes at three-loop, recovering the agreement with non-renormalization theorems.Comment: 14 pages; minor corrections, some comments added. Accepted for publication in Nucl.Phys.

Long Lasting Egocentric Disorientation Induced by Normal Sensori-Motor Spatial Interaction

Perception of the cardinal directions of the body, right-left, up-down, ahead-behind, which appears so absolute and fundamental to the organisation of behaviour can in fact, be modified. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it has been shown that prolonged distorted perception of the orientation of body axes can be a consequence of disordered sensori-motor signals, including long-term prismatic adaptation and lesions of the central nervous system. We report the novel and surprising finding that a long-lasting distortion of perception of personal space can also be induced by an ecological pointing task without the artifice of distorting normal sensori-motor relationships.Twelve right-handed healthy adults performed the task of pointing with their arms, without vision, to indicate their subjective 'straight ahead', a task often used to assess the Egocentric Reference. This was performed before, immediately, and one day after a second task intended to 'modulate' perception of spatial direction. The 'modulating' task lasted 5 minutes and consisted of asking participants to point with the right finger to targets that appeared only in one (right or left) half of a computer screen. Estimates of the 'straight-ahead' during pre-test were accurate (inferior to 0.3 degrees deviation). Significantly, up to one day after performing the modulating task, the subjective 'straight-ahead' was deviated (by approximately 3.2 degrees) to the same side to which subjects had pointed to targets.These results reveal that the perception of directional axes for behaviour is readily influenced by interactions with the environment that involve no artificial distortion of normal sensori-motor-spatial relationships and does not necessarily conform to the cardinal directions as defined by the anatomy of orthostatic posture. We thus suggest that perceived space is a dynamic construction directly dependent upon our past experience about the direction and/or the localisation of our sensori-motor spatial interaction with environment

Personal semantics: Is it distinct from episodic and semantic memory? An electrophysiological study of memory for autobiographical facts and repeated events in honor of Shlomo Bentin

Declarative memory is thought to consist of two independent systems: episodic and semantic. Episodic memory represents personal and contextually unique events, while semantic memory represents culturally-shared, acontextual factual knowledge. Personal semantics refers to aspects of declarative memory that appear to fall somewhere in between the extremes of episodic and semantic. Examples include autobiographical knowledge and memories of repeated personal events. These two aspects of personal semantics have been studied little and rarely compared to both semantic and episodic memory. We recorded the event-related potentials (ERPs) of 27 healthy participants while they verified the veracity of sentences probing four types of questions: general (i.e., semantic) facts, autobiographical facts, repeated events, and unique (i.e., episodic) events. Behavioral results showed equivalent reaction times in all 4 conditions. True sentences were verified faster than false sentences, except for unique events for which no significant difference was observed. Electrophysiological results showed that the N400 (which is classically associated with retrieval from semantic memory) was maximal for general facts and the LPC (which is classically associated with retrieval from episodic memory) was maximal for unique events. For both ERP components, the two personal semantic conditions (i.e., autobiographical facts and repeated events) systematically differed from semantic memory. In addition, N400 amplitudes also differentiated autobiographical facts from unique events. Autobiographical facts and repeated events did not differ significantly from each other but their corresponding scalp distributions differed from those associated with general facts. Our results suggest that the neural correlates of personal semantics can be distinguished from those of semantic and episodic memory, and may provide clues as to how unique events are transformed to semantic memory