UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN BOOK S CENTRAL CIRCULATION AND BOOKSTACKS The person borrowing this material is responsible for its renewal or return before the Latest Date stamped below. You may be charged a minimum fee of $75.00 for each non-returned or lost item. Theft, mutilation, or defacement of library materials can be causes for student disciplinary action. All materials owned by the University of Illinois Library are the property of the State of Illinois and are protected by Article 1 6B of Illinois Criminal Law and Procedure. TO RENEW, CALL (217) 333-8400. University of Illinois Library at Urbana-Champaign ; \ nn Art\ 004 When renewing by phone, write new due date below previous due date. L162 4 1 : ; I ! 2 8; 1 1998 : COPS Studies in Linguistic Sciences , I A VOLUME 28, NUMBER 1 (SPRING 1998) DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URB ANA-CHAMPAIGN [•/Itiiriitiitf iiifiliiitfji] 1*1 [di'partimntl fov] [lip'gwistiks] J*\ \ \ cvcvcecvcc vc cvcccvccvcc/ / STUDIES IN THE LINGUISTIC SCIENCES (ISSN 0049-2388) PUBLICATION OF THE DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS IN THE COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS AND SCIENCES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN GENERAL EDITOR: Elmer H. Antonsen EDITORIAL ASSISTANT: Jennifer Griffith EDITORIAL BOARD: Elabbas Benmamoun, Eyamba G. Bokamba, Chin-Chuan Cheng, Jennifer S. Cole, Adele Goldberg, Georgia M. Green, Hans Henrich Hock, Braj B. Kachru, Yamuna Kachru, Chin-W. Kim, Charles W. Kisseberth, Peter Lasersohn, Howard Maclay, Jerry L. Morgan, Rajeshwari Pandharipande, Daniel Silverman, James H. Yoon, and Ladislav Zgusta. AIM: SLS is intended as a forum for the presentation of the latest original re- search by the faculty and students of the Department of Linguistics, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Scholars outside the Department and from other institutions are also cordially invited to submit original linguistic research for consideration. In all cases, articles submitted for publication will be reviewed by a panel of at least two experts in the appropriate field to determine suitability for publication. Copyright remains with the individual authors. Authors of articles will receive one copy of the particular issue and 10 offprints of their individual contributions. SLS appears twice a year, and one issue is traditionally devoted to restricted, specialized topics. A complete list of available back issues is on the last page of this issue. BOOKS FOR REVIEW: Review copies of books may be sent to: Editor, Studies in the Linguistic Sciences Department of Linguistics, 4088 For. Lang. Bldg., University of Illinois 707 S. Mathews, Urbana, IL 61801, USA SUBSCRIPTION: Requests for subscriptions should be addressed to SLS Sub- scriptions, Department of Linguistics, 4088 Foreign Languages Building, Univer- sity of Illinois, 707 South Mathews, Urbana, Illinois 61801. Price: $20.00 per year ($10.00 per single issue). e-mail address: deptling@uiuc.edu Telephone: (217) 333-3563 Fax: (217) 333-3466 Homepage: http://www.cogsci.uiuc.edu/linguistics/SLS/sls.html STUDIES IN THE LINGUISTIC SCIENCES Papers in General Linguistics EDITOR Elmer H. Antonsen EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Jennifer Griffith VOLUME 28, NUMBER 1 (SPRING 1998) DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS URBANA, ILLINOIS 61801 \M& ^«* ( I CONTENTS Papers in General Linguistics GEORGIA GREEN: Unnatural kind terms and a theory of the lexicon MOLLY HOMER: Conditioning factors for progressive and regressive nasal harmony 27 JOSE IGNACIO HUALDE & INAKI GAMINDE: Vowel interaction in Basque: A nearly exhaustive catalogue 41 YAMUNA KACHRU: Culture and speech acts: Evidence fom Indian and Singaporean English 79 MOSES K. KAMBOU: The acquisition of Lingala tense-aspect by American college students 99 HYO- YOUNG KIM: Prenucleus glides in Korean 1 1 3 HIROKI KOGA: English Tough Sentence Analysis of Japanese 'Intransitivized' Verbal Gerund + Ar ('be') Sentences 1 37 ELIZABETH MARTIN: The use of English in written French advertising: A study of code-switching, code-mixing, and borrowing in a commercial context 159 EDWARD A. MINER: Discursive constructions of Kiswahili-speakers in Ugandan popular media 185 JOYCE B. G. SUKUMANE: African Languages, English, and educational policy in Namibia 207 REVIEW ARTICLE Kenneth J. Wireback: The Role of Phonological Structure in Sound Change from Latin to Spanish and Portuguese. (Dale Hartkemeyer) 221 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences Volume 28, Number 1 (Spring 1998) UNNATURAL KIND TERMS AND A THEORY OF THE LEXICON " Georgia M. Green University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign g-green@cogsci.uiuc.edu It is commonly taken for granted that the words in a language are, as a matter of linguistic convention, associated with meanings. This association is standardly represented in terms of functions from expressions of the language to the objects in the world, which the words (and compound expressions of the language) are claimed to denote. This article surveys the evidence that this common assump- tion is incorrect, and that much more often than is realized, the asso- ciation is pragmatic rather than semantic, that is, a matter of inference rather than stipulation. Accepting this view requires abandoning the comfortable view of communication as the routine delivery of infor- mation safely packaged in linguistic expressions, in favor of a view whereby speaker and hearer must rely on assumptions about each other's goals and beliefs to reconstruct intended referents and predi- cations from linguistic objects which function only as clues. 1. Introduction It is commonly accepted that terms for natural kinds (i.e., biological species, natu- rally-occurring substances, and natural phenomena such as heat (but not sensa- tions like pain)) are nondescriptional. That is to say, they lack any sort of Fregean sense, and instead rigidly designate the kinds they are used to refer to, 2 as Kripke 1972 has argued proper names designate individuals. It is less commonly ac- cepted that this analysis extends to the majority of common nouns, perhaps on the assumption that human beings recognize essential differences between natu- ral and artifactual kinds, and that these differences must therefore be reflected in language (Abbott 1989). 3 Much of the literature discussing this issue does not say anything about states and events, but it is probably fair to interpret this si- lence as rejection of the position that adjectives and verbs might be nondescrip- tional, especially since many of the arguments for nondescriptionality do not ex- tend to states and events. For Kripke, Putnam, and Abbott, it appears to be critical that the things that nouns are the names of be antecedently existing natural kinds, with 'essences'. I argue below that language-users do not know which kinds of things are natural, and which are artificial, so whether the kinds have essences or are privately per- ceived (see Nunberg 1978a) is immaterial to whether the nouns used to invoke them are logically names. 2 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1 998) Section 2 of this paper reviews the distinction between descriptional and nondescriptional accounts of the semantic contribution of kind terms. Section I details the rationale for a nondescriptional theory of kind terms generally as a r - alternative to the (traditional) descriptional account. Section 4 demonstrates how the relativity of 'normal' beliefs about the relation of a word and a class of refer- ents and the arbitrariness of choosing a unique such relation as the basic 'meaning' of a word argue against adopting an account of how words contribute, to reference that depends on lexically stipulated relations between words andl particular kinds. Section 5 provides an account of how communication can be as possible and effortless as it is in the face of the conclusion that the connection between words and their intended referents is infinitely variable (and therefore not a matter of lexical stipulation). In Section 6, I examine Abbott's arguments against treating artifact terms as nondescriptional, and then, in Section 7, I sketch an account for relevant phenomena which is based on a view of lexical semantics in which nondescriptional meaning is not limited to the small subset of nouns for natural kinds. 2. Descriptional vs. non-descriptional accounts There is a certain ambiguity in the usage of the term natural kind term, with writ- ers occasionally (cf. Abbott 1989:269) taking the Kripke-Putnam analysis of natural kind terms for granted and using natural kind term to denote the prop- erty of lacking a Fregean sense. Thus, they focus on the property of nondescrip- tionality, independently of any characterization of words which may or may not have this property. Other writers (Kripke 1972, Putnam 1975a, 1975b, Green 1983) use natural kind term and artifact term in their transparent, compositional senses, 'term for natural kind', 'term for artifact'. This is how I will use these terms in this paper. Most familiar accounts of the meaning of individual words are criterion- based ('checklist') descriptional accounts. This includes Aristotelian analyses, feature-based analyses like those of Katz & Fodor 1963 and Weinreich 1966, predicate-based lexical decomposition (McCawley 1968), Labov's 1973 parame- terized accounts, and translational accounts such as those of Wierzbicka 1972, 1980. Some prototype theories of meaning are criterion-based and descriptional. Descriptional accounts may be decompositional, spelling out the criteria for kind 'membership', or more attributive, doing no more than assigning kind membership to its referent. Thus, an attributive-descriptional account would say that, e.g., tea- pot means 'is a teapot'. 4 . / According to descriptional accounts, the meaning of a word is a description > that the (intended) referent satisfies. Saying that horse means 'large, strong ani- mal with four legs, solid hoofs, and flowing mane and tail, long ago domesticated for drawing or carrying loads, carrying riders, etc' (Webster's New World Dic- tionary 1968:701) would be a descriptional account. Descriptional accounts de- scribe facts about objects, and treat those facts as criterial for kind membership. Where descriptional accounts treat the fact that horses are called horses as something that follows from the meaning of the word horse, non-descriptional ac- I Georgia Green: Unnatural kind terms and a theory of the lexicon 3 counts treat it as a social fact, a fact about social custom in a linguistically homo- ;eneous group: the term folks use to refer to horses is horse. I hasten to empha- ize that this account is not equivalent to a criterion-based, descriptional account which gives horse a meaning, namely, 'thing that is called a horse'. 5 If names had meanings that amounted to 'thing that is called by this name', then true sentences like (la) and (lb) would be contradictions. (1) a. John Robert Ross is not called John Robert Ross, b. Haj Ross is not named Haj Ross. It is no more defensible to claim that horse means 'is called a horse' than it is to claim that the name John means 'is named John'. Both are just names that are as- sociated, ultimately arbitrarily, with classes of individuals. 3. A nondescriptional account of kind terms generally 3.1 The problem of reference As we shall see, Abbott's arguments that artifact terms should be treated as de- scriptional depend on the assumption that the essential properties that define natural kinds are different in nature from the essential properties that define arti- facts, and on the assumption that human beings are able to recognize these differ- ences. An account of terms for kinds that does not distinguish between natural and artifactual kinds will naturally not require or allow any such distinction. An alternative to the notion that kind terms are semantically associated with proper- ties or characterizations of their referents was outlined by Nunberg 1978a 6 and approaches the domain that linguists have been accustomed to calling lexical se- mantics in terms of the problem of reference: How does a speaker's use of a word enable that speaker to successfully refer to a particular object, class, or concept (i.e., have her intention to refer to it recognized as such, following the Gricean ac- count of the nature of meaning (Grice 1957))? Under a descriptional account of reference, if successful reference is to be accomplished, when a speaker uses a term, the addressee must be able to tell what subset of experience the term is sup- posed to denote. Thus, minimally, the addressee must correctly identify the sense (or intension) of the term, and from the sense, locate its extension in the real (or other relevant) world. 3.2 The problem of polysemy It is a commonplace observation that most words have more than one (apparent) sense. This is evident from a glance into any desk dictionary. Thus, my New World Dictionary indicates three senses for lemon (837): 1 . a small, egg-shaped, edible citrus fruit with a pale-yellow rind and a juicy, sour pulp, rich in vitamin C. 2. the small, spiny, semitropical ev- ergreen tree that it grows on. 3. [Slang], something or someone unde- sirable or inadequate. and five for gold(62\): 4 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1 998) 1. a heavy, yellow, metallic chemical element with a high degree of ductility and malleability: it is a precious metal and is used in the manufacture of coins, jewelry, alloys, etc.: symbol, Au; at. wt., 197.2; at. no., 79: abbreviated G., g. 2. gold coin; hence, 3. money; riches; wealth. 4. the bright yellow color of the metal. 5. something regarded as having any of the qualities of gold, as great value, luster, splendor, etc.: as, his voice is pure gold. two for newspaper (988-9): ' 1. a publication regularly printed and distributed, usually daily or weekly, containing news, opinions, advertisements, and other items of general interest. 2. newsprint. and five for steel (1427): 1. a hard, tough metal composed of iron alloyed with various small percentages of carbon ... 2. a particular kind of steel [depending on carbon content]. 3. a piece of steel; something made of steel; specifi- cally, a) [Poetic] a sword or dagger, b) a piece of steel used with flint for making sparks, c) a steel strip used for stiffening, as in a corset, d) a roughened steel rod used as a knife sharpener. 4. Great strength or hardness: as, sinews of steel. 5. often in pi. the market price of shares in a steel-making company ... This means that if words have descriptional meanings, then what they denote on an occasion of use is an exclusive disjunction of their descriptional senses. But the problem is more than the ambiguity that is inevitable if terms are descriptional and have a number of distinct senses. Massive ambiguity is merely computation- ally awkward. The problem is that the number of kinds distinguishable by human societies depends only on the human imagination, and consequently, there ap- pears to be no limit to the number of possible kinds a term might name. Since lan- guages tend to have a limited lexicon of basic, word-level expressions, there ap- pears to be no principled limit to what, in context, a word may be rationally used to refer to. Thus, lemon can also be rationally and unremarkably used to refer to the wood of the lemon tree, as in (2a), to the flavor of the juice of the fruit (2b), to the oil from the peel of the fruit (2c), to an object which has the color of the fruit (2d), to something the size of the fruit (2e), and to a substance with the flavor of the fruit (2f). I stop here only because this example is getting boring. (2) a. Lemon has an attractive grain, much finer than beech or cherry. b. I prefer the v 74 because the x 73 has a lemon aftertaste. c. Lemon will not penetrate as fast as linseed. d. The lemon is too stretchy, but the coral has a snag in it. e. Shape the dough into little lemons, and let rise. f. Two scoops of lemon, please, and one of Rocky Road. Similarly, newspaper can be rationally and unremarkably used to refer to, among other things, the corporation which publishes a news publication (3a), a copy of the publication (3b), an issue of the publication (3c), the building where the pub- I Georgia Green: Unnatural kind terms and a theory of the lexicon 5 lication is manufactured (3d), the editorial staff which puts together the content of the publication (3e), and a representative of the corporation (e.g., a reporter) (3f). (3) a. The newspaper agreed to extend the contract another year. b. Be careful not to spill your coffee on my newspaper. c. Yesterday's newspaper identified the gunman as Frank Tsem, but the editor promised to run a correction today. d. There is a picket line outside the newspaper. e. The newspaper criticized the state for being unresponsive to the needs of the people. f. The newspaper missed her train, but will be here by noon. The problem of polysemy is that it is in principle unlimtted. Suppose that artifact terms are descriptional. This entails that artifact terms have extensions that are strictly delimited in clearly expressible ways. Yet, as has been demonstrated (and could be demonstrated ad nauseam), words are typically used to denote an almost limitless variety of kinds of objects or functions: program unremarkably refers to a plan, a schedule, a curriculum or course of study, a set of courses, a list of in- structions for a computational device, a written representation of any of these, a show broadcast on radio or TV, and potentially to a person responsible (in any relevant sense) for any of these. (4) a. The program of this group is to subvert the youth of America. b. Their program calls for 10 pushups three times a day. c. She entered the program in 1977. d. We are expanding our program with the addition of two new faculty members, and six new courses. e. The program would not execute. f. The programs are all smudged. g. If you have a VCR you can tape your programs while you are at work or asleep. h. The program just called and said she would be late. While an argument can perhaps be made 7 that (4h) represents a metaphori- cal extension of the 'sense' of program, and should be accounted for by some special mechanism, no such claim is plausible for (4a-g). There are two options open to descriptionalists: either the meaning of any content word is vague enough to encompass all of its uses/senses — this has been the claim of Charles Ruhl for years (cf. Ruhl 1975, 1989) 8 or there is massive, perhaps infinite, polysemy-as many different senses for program, pencil, horse (or whatever) as there are kinds that it would be rational to refer to as programs, pencils, etc. All- embracing vagueness, though minimally descriptional, requires essentially the same apparatus for explaining how reference can succeed as a general nonde- scriptional account does, so Occam's razor dictates eliminating the minimally functional descriptional part. I am not supposing that speakers have conscious access to representations of the criteria that descriptional meanings would repre- sent, or that descriptions cannot be vague. If the descriptions are not specific 6 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1 998) enough to be distinct from each other, then descriptional kind terms will have the same extension, and extensions will contribute nothing to our understanding of reference. Now, we do not want or need to claim that as language-knowers we keep track of a large, possibly infinite, set of classes of objects (events, situations, rela- tions, properties) that a word could 'denote' or be used to refer to. It is enough to know, Nunberg argues, that our knowledge of how to use language to refer in-/ eludes the knowledge that if a term can be used to refer to some class X, then iv can be used under conditions that he describes to refer to objects describable by a (recognizable) function on X. This principle can be invoked recursively, and applies to functions composed of other functions, and to expressions composed of other expressions, enabling diverse uses like those cited in (2) and (3) to be predicted in a principled manner. Nunberg (1978a: 1-28) presents cogent arguments against indefinite polysemy. If the descriptional meaning of a word is a disjunction of senses, it must be an infinite disjunction. Infinite polysemy would be tractable if it were describ- able in terms of recursive rules to generate senses from (senses derived from) basic senses. I believe that this is what George Lakoff's 1986 radial approach amounts to, and it is the obvious approach to take if you are committed to the idea that each word in a language is associated with a limited number of meanings as a mat- ter of simple, stipulative fact — as part of the arbitrary conventions that distin- guish one language from another. The problem is that it requires basic meanings, and there are two obstacles to accepting that assumption. The first obstacle is that while it is sometimes not too hard to identify word-to-referent relations that are normal in a context, 'normar represents a social fact about language use, not an arbitrary lexical property of a word. The beliefs that are normal within a commu- nity are those that 'constitute the background against which all utterances in that community are rationally made' (Nunberg (1978a:94-5)). What it is normal to use tack or host or rock or metal to refer to varies with the community. These are so- cial facts, facts about societies, and only incidentally and contingently and sec- ondarily facts about words. More important, they are facts about what speakers believe other speakers believe about conventions for using words. Thus, it is normal among field archaeologists to use mesh bound in frames to sift through excavated matter for remnants of material culture, and it is normally believed among them that this is normal, and that it is normal to refer to the sieves as screens. Likewise, among users of personal computers, it is normally believed that the contents of a data file may be inspected by projecting representations of/ portions of them on an electronic display tube of some sort, and it is normally be- ^— lieved that this belief is normally held, and that it is normal to refer to the display tube as a screen. Whether screen is (intended to be) understood as (normally) re- ferring to a sort of sieve or to a video display depends on assumptions made by speaker and hearer about the assumptions each makes about the other's beliefs, including beliefs about what is normal in a situation of the sort being described, and about what sort of situation (each believes the other believes) is being dis- I Georgia Green: Unnatural kind terms and a theory of the lexicon 7 cussed at the moment of utterance. 9 This is what is irreducibly social about lan- guage use and word meaning. Nunberg notes a certain social character even in the case of the most unre- markable referents for ordinary terms since, as he remarks, it is plausible to assume that each speaker internalizes the same meaning 'not simply because phenome- nological considerations force on him a single characterization of the designated category, but because he assumes these same phenomenological considerations affect other speakers just as they do him' (Nunberg 1978a:87). Naturally, I am uncomfortable calling such sorts of facts 'meaning' and am inclined to say that words do not have meanings, if by meaning is intended a function from words to objects in the world, unmediated by beliefs about users of those words. 10 The claim that knowledge of how words are used to refer is partly social knowledge (knowledge about social groups) does not entail (despite Putnam's (1975b:227) sensationalism) that '"meanings" just ain't in the head', as long as meanings is understood as referring to beliefs according to which words are used to refer. Of course they are 'in the head'. How could they be utilized in reference if they were not? 4. Contextuality — the relativity of normal beliefs People often perceive the fact that the use of words to refer to things is depend- ent on users' beliefs about each other's beliefs as inconvenient, and try to cir- cumnavigate it by articulating a theory of meaning that is independent of par- ticular contexts in that it refers to a so-called null context, where speaker and hearer make no assumptions about each other. In fact, however, there are no such null contexts in which utterances could be interpreted. When we are asked to act as informants, and make judgements about expressions or their meanings 'out of context' or 'in a null context', we cannot help but imagine SOME context con- sisting of a speaker directing that expression as or in an utterance to some audi- ence. We differ, as individuals, and on occasions, in how much context we import into the judgement task, and in what we are willing to imagine when we try to construe the expression as a sensible thing to utter on an occasion of the sort we assume. 11 Consequently, if we abstract away from systems of normal beliefs that inhere in all the various possible groups of users of a language (say, English), we do not arrive at anything that looks much like what we imagine for a notion of either 'normal English user' or 'normal English'. The usage of such a 'normal user', depending on whether we abstracted by intersecting or unioning member- ships, would either be that of a person who belonged to no subgroups within the English-speaking world (imagine it — a person with no family, no country, no re- ligion, no occupation, no avocations, no ethnic background — it would be the epitome of a social misfit, and we would be saying it represented a normal user), or it would be a person who was a member of every subgroup (a Welsh Kikuyu Catholic Jewish evangelical Christian Muslim Hindu (etc.) needleworker profes- sor literary critic computer hacker multi-sport athlete insurance salesman) and his 12 usage would reflect the sum of all possible usages, and the problem of un- limited polysemy would be staring us in the face again. 8 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998) The second obstacle is that often there is no principled basis for identifying one 'sense' as more basic or normal than another. For example, as Nunberg (1978a:63-7) has argued, there is no way to decide whether the basic sense of window denotes a kind of hole in a wall, or the framed apparatus that goes in the hole (this is what window salesmen sell), or the usually transparent material that is part of that apparatus (the part you refer to when you say that someone's home run broke a window). Does newspaper denote a token of a kind of regularly pub-, *' lished document, or one of the types to which such a token belongs? In general, it\ is not obvious whether the count sense or the mass sense of terms like fire or night is best treated as the basic sense. Indeed, it is not even evident whether the type use of common count nouns like cat is more basic than the token use, or vice versa. 13 Nunberg' s solution 14 (or my interpretation of it) to the problem posed by the relativity of 'normal' reference and the arbitrariness of determining a normal referent in contexts where assumptions about normal states and beliefs do not af- fect the determination is to say that if you treat relations among referential possi- bilities as relations between uses, not relations between senses, then there is no need to identify a central, basic sense or use, as long as the speaker judges ACCURATELY WHAT IS A NORMAL USE IN THAT CONTEXT, (i.e., what the 'local' NAME for that class, situation, property or whatever is), and as long as any referring function that relates the intended referent to the ostensible referent is suffi- ciently salient from the context, however defined. Nunberg 1978a elaborates on both of these criteria in some detail. The bottom line is that the contribution of in- dividual kind terms to sentence semantics is treated as a matter of reference, some- thing ultimately indexical. Thus there is no need to make any distinction between natural kind terms and artifact terms. Kind terms are just names for kinds, and as with proper names, it does not make sense to talk about their meaning. As I have argued elsewhere (Green 1983:6-7, Green 1996b), natural kind terms are essential to compositional semantics in the same way as proper nouns and indexical ex- pressions like pronouns; they can be used to refer, to point to a particular individ- ual or kind. But it is just as nonsensical to give a semantic analysis of the word raccoon or pencil as it would be to do it for Fred or Pontiac. Inferences, includ- ing inferences of set relations, may be derivable from the use of the term, but they are inferences about the sets, not about the words. As with names, there are no linguistic limits on what sorts of things kind terms can be used successfully to re- fer to. Kind terms, in this account, are words that name kinds of entities, properties or actions, and include most common nouns, most verbs that take concrete argu- ments, most prepositions, and many adjectives, but I will only be concerned here with terms for kinds of objects. A nondescriptional account of kind-term meaning amounts to the fact that if terms like gorilla mean anything at all, it is just 'is a gorilla' or 'belongs to a cate- gory sometimes called 'gorilla', but it does not say what it means to be a gorilla. A language user could go her whole life without ever considering the question, blithely carrying on conversations about flesh-and-blood gorillas, two- and three- c Georgia Green: Unnatural kind terms and a theory of the lexicon 9 dimensional images of gorillas, gorilla embryos, gorilla fur, gorilla meat, and large, very intimidating human beings. 5. The achievement of reference The theory of how words with such an impoverished sort of semantics can be used to refer relatively effectively to only a subset of referents from among all the classes of possible referents depends on a somewhat less impoverished account of the social nature of 'word meaning": knowing what a person means to refer to when she uses a word involves a Gricean regressus. It would not be enough to know 'what a word means' since any word can be used without anomaly to refer to so many different sorts of things. Nor is it enough to know that people (or cer- tain people, namely those we are talking with) are disposed to use certain terms with certain classes of referents in mind, because, if we have accurate knowledge of their disposition, that will not guarantee a unique class of possible referents in a context either. We have to say, as Nunberg does, that on an occasion of use, when someone predicates some property p of some class described as q, we guess at what (our interlocutor thinks we will guess 15 ) he means to refer to by q when he is speaking to us about it having property p. That we guess with a fair degree of accuracy is testimony to our sensitivity, but we guess wrong occasionally, and surely more often than we realize. In general, we do not recognize how often we mistakenly attribute our own beliefs to other people, and how often we conse- quently misinterpret what they say. This fact follows from the universal belief that people are rational — i.e., act purposefully, together with the (universal?) belief that in the absence of specific reason to believe otherwise, other members of our species are just like us. In addition to assumptions about what uses are normal in which contexts, speakers have access to a number of referring functions (strictly: partial func- tions) of the sort mentioned above, such as 'type of, 'token of, 'possessor of, 'location of, 'work of, and to a (presumably infinite) number of composites of these functions (e.g., 'location of possessor of, as in Chicago beat Dallas, 44-0). These simple and composite functions relate classes of potential referents, and they can do this even when reference is indicated ostensively — by pointing — rather than by the employment of linguistic expressions. Thus, a truck farmer could point to a bowl of creamed spinach, or a picture of a spinach salad to an- swer the question, 'What are you going to plant on the north forty next spring?' He does not communicate that he is going to plant bowls of creamed spinach, or photographs of spinach, or cooked or cut spinach, but forms of spinach suitable for planting (seeds or seedlings), by virtue of a referring function like 'source of or 'source of image of. Referring functions enable speakers to use terms to de- note several kinds simultaneously, as in a sentence like (5), where being herbivo- rous is predicated of a species, but tipping over the garbage is predicated of a few unspecified individuals. (5) Raccoons, which are herbivorous, tipped over our garbage can last night. 10 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1 998) In the following excerpt from Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, implicit and explicit references to Belgium denote successively a place, a nation or people, and a government (Tuchman 1962:135). Belgium, where [place] there occurred one of the rare appearances of the hero in history was lifted above herself [nation, people] by the uncomplicated conscience of her [nation, people] King and, faced with the choice to acquiesce or resist, took less than three / hours to make her [government] decision, knowing it might be mor- tal. Assuming that normal beliefs license uses which we may call normal within a speech community is not tantamount to assuming a core meaning or extension, for two reasons. First, a normal use is just a use that is rational (i.e., reasonable to expect to be correctly interpreted directly) given normal beliefs. Consequently, a single term (like cat) may have several normal uses (e.g., 'type', 'token') within a single homogeneous speech community. They can all be normal, and none of them needs to be more core or basic than any others. Normal uses serve the same grounding function for reference transfer/sense extending that people assume ba- sic senses serve, but it is not necessary to posit 'basic meanings' for this purpose to be served. This leaves us with a picture in which a word can be used to refer to any- thing which can be related by one of these functions, or a composite of them, to something normally named by that word in some (sub)community. This amounts to saying that a particular word might be used to refer to almost anything at all. Supposing that there are a finite number of basic relations (even a smallish num- ber, like 100 or 1000), the fact that referring functions can be composed of these (recursively) means that an unlimited number of things can be referred to. Strictly speaking, it does not follow from the fact that there is no mathematical limit to the things you could use that word to refer to, that you could use any word to refer to anything at all, but the spirit of the Humpty-Dumpty problem 16 - whether a word can mean whatever a speaker arbitrarily intends it to mean - persists in ei- ther case. Nevertheless, the view presented here is not as anarchic or Humpty- Dumptian as it sounds, because rationality severely limits what a speaker is likely to use a term to refer to in a given context. By this I mean only that people as- sume that people's actions are goal-directed, so that any act will be assumed to have been performed for a reason. This is a universal normal belief in Nunberg's terminology — everyone believes it and believes that everyone believes it (cf. Green 1993). The consequence of this for communicative acts is that people in-( tend and expect that interpreters will attribute particular intentions to them, so consideration of just what intention will be attributed to speech actions must en- ter into rational utterance planning (cf. Green 1993, also Sperber & Wilson 1986). This is the Gricean foundation of this theory (cf. also Neale 1992). In the context of word usage, when a speaker rationally uses a word w to refer to some intended referent a, she must assume that the addressee will consider it rational to use w to refer to a in that context. She must assume that if she and her addressee do not in fact have the same assumptions about what beliefs are normal in the community- I Georgia Green: Unnatural kind terms and a theory of the lexicon 11 at-large, and in every relevant subgroup, at least the addressee will be able to infer what relevant beliefs the speaker imputes to the addressee, or expects the ad- dressee to impute to the speaker, and so on, in order to infer the intended referent. One might imagine simpler accounts than this. But by the time they are fleshed out to accommodate the facts outlined above, it is not clear that they will in fact be any simpler. Accounts that suppose a single common shared meaning for each non-homophonous word in anticipation of adopting Nunbergian refer- ring functions will still have to have a principled way of determining whether type or token meanings, and mass or count meanings are more basic. Accounts that suppose a single meaning for each term so vague that the distinction be- tween mass and count, type and token does not arise must find some principled way of predicting the regularity of mappings among uses on concrete occasions that was sketched above. It is hard to see how functions could apply to some- thing so vague and have this effect. Accounts that opt for polysemy will have to come up with principled means for determining just what meanings each word in "the' language 'has'. It is not clear that this is possible, in practice, much as dic- tionary makers may try to draw a line between metaphor and 'meaning 7 or to characterize all of the unremarkable possible uses of words. 17 No doubt I have made communication sound very difficult to effect, and very fragile. I do not doubt that we are generally less successful at it than we think we are, but in general, we are not conscious of the work that is required, and I do not think it is all that fragile. Believing in the convenient fiction that words 'mean things' 18 is what makes it seem effortless for us to use them to try to communicate. If we were aware of how much interpretation we depended on each other to do to understand us, we might hesitate to speak. The inferencing that constructing or understanding an utterance requires (cf. Green 1982) is com- parable to the inferencing we do in resolving structural or lexical ambiguity, or inferring reference or conversational implicature, and indeed, involves the same principles for inference. Fortunately for us, it is work we are not aware of doing. For example, if we write something like Shape the mixture into walnuts in a meat- ball recipe, we must be assuming that our readers will not consider it rational for us to be referring to their making real walnuts by molding a mixture of ground meat, egg, and cracker crumbs. If we attribute to the addressee as a normal belief the assumption that uncooked meatballs are normally between, say, one-half inch and two and a half inches in diameter, then it is rational for us to expect him to find the referring function from an object to objects the size and/or shape of that object salient enough to infer that by referring to walnuts in that context, we in- tend to communicate that he should form meatballs the size he identifies with un- shelled walnuts. And even if we attribute this belief incorrectly, we assume that the addressee will be able to correctly identify the belief we incorrectly attributed to him, and correctly identify the referring function 'size of. Without the assumption that achieving reference requires inferences about your interlocutor's beliefs about your beliefs (etc.) about what beliefs and uses are normal in the context, we would have a genuinely Humpty-Dumptian situa- tion: people would consider it normal to use any word for any thing any time at ( 12 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998) all. Everyone would always be in the position we find ourselves in when we try to interpret text like these paragraphs from an article in the Chicago Tribune written to illustrate all the different senses documented over the centuries for the word shamble(s): She rested her feet on a shamble. Then she went out shopping, first stopping to look at a shamble in a department store before going on to buy meat for dinner at a shambles. The meat had arrived that morning fresh from the shambles. She bought a newspaper, which described the dreadful shambles af- ter a battle in Bosnia. Then she returned home, found her dog had knocked over a vase, and thought, 'What a shambles!' Even if we know that shamble(s) might be used to refer to a footstool, a counter for displaying goods, a meat market, a slaughterhouse, a scene of carnage, or just any kind of mess, it is difficult to tell with any confidence which sense is intended for which use, and infuriating to discover that it changes with each use! This shows how dependent we are in normal situations on using assumptions about (the speaker's assumptions about our assumptions about) the context to interpret what is meant by what is said. When a speaker uses a kind term like jazz 19 or snow, that term will be in- tended to rigidly designate whatever the speaker expects to be understood as in- tending to refer to, and it will be understood as rigidly designating whatever the hearer believes it was intended to be understood as referring to, that is, as invok- ing its name, or the name of the class to which it belongs, without characterizing it or its class. To say that a term designates rigidly is to claim that the term picks out the same referent in all worlds where that referent exists. So horse or snow or jazz refers to whatever in a world counts as a horse, snow, or jazz in that world. As long as terms are names which rigidly designate the kinds which are their in- tended referents, the criteria for being a horse, being snow, or being jazz do not enter into the designation relationship directly. Thus, in any world, horses can be used to refer to whatever entities in any world| people in some worldj would call horses in that world;, regardless of whether the counterparts of those entities in other worlds would be called horses in the other worlds. Thus, the size, scale, and uses of the animals are not the criteria which solely affect which ones can be suc- cessfully referred to as horses when or where; from ourj point of view (indexing speakers and referents to worlds), Eohippus is a horsej with respect to early Ter- tiary times, but not with respect to periods since the great ice agej. 20 From an Eo-/ cene point of view, horsesj are a lot bigger than they, used to be. Of course, not all words rigidly designate the entities they are used to refer to. For example, there are non-rigid designators like pope, which designates who- ever is the titular head of the Roman Catholic Church at a contextually indicated time. In addition, I want to make it clear that I am not claiming that no words ever have descriptional meanings. Some words have, in additional to an unlimited number of uses related by referring functions to other uses, a sense which de- scribes criteria for class membership just as a descriptive phrase like gray sweater Georgia Green: Unnatural kind terms and a theory of the lexicon 13 indicates a referent by limiting it to something which is gray and a sweater. For example, orphan indicates a child whose parents are dead, and kill refers to caus- ing a change of state from alive to dead. The motivation for the claim that orphan is descriptional, but horse is not, is that a horse with three legs which is not used for carrying or drawing loads is still a horse, but an orphan whose parents are brought back to life is not an orphan anymore. Putnam's (1962:65-70) 'one-crite- rion' words (like bachelor or renate ('kidney-having') or cordate ('heart- | having') surely have descriptional senses, as do all the words that are inherently relational. Examples like kill and orphan are just the tip of the iceberg; Barker & Dowty 1993 discuss several classes of relational nouns, including boundary words like top, side, inside, outside, border, tip (but not iceberg), part-denoting words like hand, whisker, root, wheel, chapter, and terms referring to socially sig- nificant relations, such as friend, enemy, sister, citizen. Of course, some words, like not, every, if and and do not refer at all, and contribute to the semantics of an ex- pression syncategorematically, as operators, according to rules of combination. Still others (like heck, hello, urn) do not even contribute to the truth conditions of an expression, but only to the pragmatics, the calculation of what is to be inferred from what was said. The question at hand is: to which category do terms for arti- facts like pencil, pasta, and steel belong? 6. Some objections to treating artifact terms as nondescriptional Three sorts of objections may be made (as for example, by Abbott 1989) to the claim that artifact terms are non-descriptional. 6.1 Objection 1: 'Artifact terms describe function and external structure, because this is visible' The first one is that, contrary to Putnam's opinion, Putnamian Twin-Earth thought experiments 1) distinguish between natural and artifactual kinds, and 2) show that names for artifacts are descriptional. Abbott, for example, agrees with Putnam that entities that looked and acted like cats but were really robots would only count as robots, but reports the intuition that genetically reproduced organisms that could be exploited like pencils would just be pencils. (I think I would be in- clined to say that they were fruits (or creatures) that are used like pencils. If Twin Earthlings call them pencils, that is mere coincidence, since on this history of Twin Earth, there are no artifactual pencils.) Abbott (1989:281) speculates that external appearance and function are the denotation-determining criteria for artifactual kind terms: 21 Artifacts are typically made by humans and are categorized ac- cording to their purposes, so we know how they are shaped and what they are used for. When it comes time to name them we have the reference-determining properties there at hand, we know what we are talking about. It is only in the case of nature's species that we have observable kinds whose real essence is mysterious, and so only in that case must we leave the reference-determining properties open. 14 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998) Thus, the gist of this sort of argument seems to be: we cannot tell what the mem- bership criteria are for biological kinds by direct inspection, so they cannot be part of the meaning of natural kind terms. We can tell what the criteria are for arti- facts, so they must be part of the meaning of artifact terms. There are several problems with the conclusion that function and external appearance determine the denotation of artifact terms, and with this sort of ra- tionale for it. First of all, people's knowledge of the appearance and function of/ potential referents of terms they use is independent of their linguistic knowledge^ of those terms. Following the external structure and function account, a person who does not know that a pearl is a natural object has an incorrect grammar, be- cause he has the wrong sort of semantics for pearl, and his grammar should change when he discovers that pearls are not man-made like beads are. While not knowing whether something is man-made (or robot-made) and another is a prod- uct of nature 22 may result in a foolish claim, it does not affect our ability to use words to refer. The position that the semantics of words for natural kinds is of a different sort from the semantics of words for artifactual kinds because natural kinds are different from artifacts entails that the words rice and orzo (a rice- shaped pasta) have different semantic relations to their referents, and that some- one who does not know that orzo is manufactured (or that rice is a grain) has a different grammar from someone who is better informed. The word pearl would have to have a different kind of semantics depending on whether its intended referent is (assumed to be) natural or artificial. This alleged distinction does not seem to contribute anything to our understanding of words as they are used. If I tell you that I am looking for a yarn swift, your ability to tell that there is some- thing I want, that I do not have, that is called a yarn swift, does not seem to be impaired by your not knowing whether yarn swifts are a natural kind or a kind of artifact, nor would it be significantly improved by your learning that yarn swift is a descriptional (or nondescriptional) term. Second, external appearance is in fact a poor criterion for kind membership, for both natural and artifactual kinds. Whales and dolphins look like fish; bats look like birds; sharks, which are fish, look like dolphins. Indeed, the literature on the acquisition of kind terms indicates that children as young as three years of age ignore appearance when it conflicts with claims of category membership (Gelman & Markman 1987). One can also take issue with the notion that artifact terms are defined by their exostructure, appearance and function. Yuppie catalogs of recent years dis- . play desk telephones that look like Mickey Mouse, like footballs, and like sneak- 1 ers, so it cannot be their exostructure or appearance that identifies them as tele- phones. Often the way they work is disguised; the dials or keypads are not ex- posed, and the handset (what a peculiar term!) is just a detachable portion of the 'sculpture'. Yet, it is enough for someone to tell you that one of these things is a telephone, for you to have a belief that you can use it for what you use tele- phones for. You do not have to believe it has a dial or a keypad OR a handset to do this. It could be a speaker-phone; it could do speech-recognition dialing. Georgia Green: Unnatural kind terms and a theory of the lexicon 15 The purpose an artifact serves is no better a criterion for the extension of artifact terms. Cordless phones and cellular phones are telephones, but their func- tion will not distinguish them from 2-way radios. 23 Yet ordinary people consider them telephones, and maintain the same expectations about communications on cordless and cellular phones as about more conventional telephones, in spite of high court opinions to the contrary. I Finally, the assumption of descriptionality for artifact terms is inconsistent 'with the (Nunbergian) observations cited in section 3 that the reference of a term on an occasion of use is determined by (speakers') beliefs about (others') beliefs. Descriptionality entails either fixed references (basic meanings), or unbounded polysemy, or both, and we have reviewed the reasons for rejecting both. 6.2 Objection 2: 'Multiple functions allow artifact terms to have multiple essences, unlike natural kind terms' A second argument against analyzing artifact terms as being non-descriptional (cf. Abbott 1989:281-2) also seems to depend on the premise that if artifacts are different from natural kinds 'in kind of essence' (Abbott 1989:282), then artifact terms must be essentially different from natural kind terms. It assumes that the essential properties of artifacts do not involve internal structure, but rather func- tion, and cites the existence of artifacts that can be used for multiple purposes, like a high-chair that folds down to a play table, or a cane that flips out to serve as a stool, as evidence that unlike natural kind terms, artifact terms are defined by the function of the artifact. However, it is not the case that a highchair/playtable just is a highchair when it is being used as one, and just is a playtable when it is used that way. It is always a dual-purpose object, even if it can only be used for one purpose at a time. Of course, there is a referring function that gives the illusion that these multiple purpose objects have multiple identifications or 'essences'. This is the functional equivalence of particular classes of objects and other ob- jects that serve the same relevant purpose. This function is commonly exploited in metaphors like those in (6), and even less remarkably used when we refer to these dual-purpose objects sometimes as highchairs or playtables simpliciter, and in- deed, in sometimes classifying them for particular purposes as highchairs or as playtables. (6) a. You can use a newspaper to keep your head dry when it sprin- kles, but this sort of umbrella is no use in a Midwestern gully- washer. b. In Dickens' novel about the French Revolution, Mme. LaFarge knitted a catalogue of crimes against the people into the shawl she was making. It must be clear that I am not committed to identifying (members of) natural or artificial kinds across or within worlds by reference to unrelativized essential properties. I am not certain whether others intend the expression essential prop- erties referentially or attributively in discussing the views of Kripke and Putnam (cf. also Section 2, and Abbott 1989:287-8), but I have found no reason to be- lieve that when speakers identify some individual as sufficiently like an X to be 16 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998) called by the same name, that they all do it according to the same criteria (cf. also footnote 20 (Gould quote)). Thus, quibbling over whether exostructure and func- tion are as essential for determining category membership is doubly beside the point. 6.3 Objection 3: 'Children distinguish between artificial kinds and natural kinds' A third argument raised by Abbott (1989:282-3) that artifact terms do not( 'express essential properties' (277, 287-8) is that the work of Keil 1986 shows that by the age of 10, and often as early as 7, children treat manipulation of ap- pearance as changing the category of manufactured objects (like birdfeeders or coffeepots), but not of natural kinds (like skunks and raccoons), although kinder- garteners do not reliably make the distinction. In fact, this observation only shows that older children know that there is a difference between certain types of natural and unnatural kinds, and can correctly categorize certain kinds. Indeed, further work by Springer & Keil 1989, 1991 shows that the chief conceptual divi- sion accessed by experiments of the sort Keil reports is not between natural kinds and artificial kinds, but between biological natural kinds, and everything else. As they put it, '...preschoolers consistently distinguish between heritable and non- heritable features, claiming that only features influencing parents' biological func- tioning are passed on to offspring.' Consequently, if we were to draw conclu- sions for natural language semantics from the controlled investigations of young children's abilities to classify objects, we would have to say that the words skunk and raccoon (or flower and dog) are in one class, while water, pencil, and island are in the other. In any case, I see no reason to take Keil's experiments as show- ing that the terms for the two sorts of kinds (whatever they may be) indicate their referents differently. Throughout the arguments for a descriptional account of artifact terms runs the assumption that there is a privileged and transparent relation between arti- facts and the terms used to refer to them, that it is obvious what artifact terms are supposed to be terms for, or, if they are descriptional, that it is obvious what they are supposed to describe. But the question, 'Do artifact terms express essential properties?' raises another question: properties of what? The very terms natural kind term and artifact term presuppose basic senses and basic extensions, i.e., they presuppose that there is some natural or artificial kind that that term refers to in a privileged way, so that lemon, by its nature 24 refers to a fruit, not to a piece of candy or a poorly manufactured automobile. Yet, it is easily demonstrated (cf. also . Sec. 4 above) that identifying 'the basic sense' of such a term is problematic, to 1 put it mildly. To take another example, even if we agree that the Constitution is an artifact term, it is not evident whether it refers to a document signed at some point in history and perhaps amended many times since then, or to the laws that the signing (and amending) of that document enacted. With the assumption of descriptional meaning, if it cannot be determined what a term denotes, then it is not possible to say whether terms for artifacts express essential properties of the objects they describe. I Georgia Green: Unnatural kind terms and a theory of the lexicon 17 If it is assumed that the classification of referents as species occuring in nature or not is significant in determining the mode of referring of the term, such claims are false, because terms for both kinds of species are unremarkably used to refer to both kinds of objects. Lemon can refer to a natural tree, its natural fruit, or the natural flavor of the oil or juice of its fruit-or to the processed wood of the tree, or any manufactured object that resembles the fruit. (When pine refers to plywood or lumber, is it a natural kind term, or an artifact term? When the governor's office lis used to refer to the governor, is it an artifact term, or a natural kind term?) Is cof- fee a natural kind term or an artifact term? Insofar as the answer depends on whether the speaker intends to refer to a growing plant, its roasted fruit, or a bev- erage brewed from ground particles of the roasted fruit, then the classification of words into natural kind terms and artificial kind terms is at the very least, point- less. 7. A nondescriptional lexicon What if kind terms generally (both so-called natural kind terms and so-called artifact terms) are nondescriptional names? We should no more expect terms to name unique kinds than we expect personal names to name unique individuals. I know lots of Susans and Bobs; maybe you know lots of Scotts and Jennifers. In 1989 there were two Jeff Georges in Champaign, and in 1990, two Keith Joneses in the NFL, two Eddie Johnsons in the NBA, and two Jennifer Coles and two Carol Tennys in linguistics. It is really quite unremarkable. But if we say that kind terms are names for kinds, parallel to personal names, we do not need to say that what kind they name is a semantic property of a lexical form (Green 1983, Kripke 1972). Lexical representations would detail underlying phonological forms, syn- tactic category, morphological irregularities, and subcategorization: PHONOLOGY /lemon/ CATEGORY noun PLURAL-MORPHOLOGY regular SPR <(Det)> This is grammatical information. The fact that English speakers use lemon to refer to all sorts of kinds that are related directly or indirectly to the fruit of the citrus limonum is a cultural fact about language users, like the fact that there are social implications of using certain specific words in certain situations to REFER to their normal referents. Referring to a correctional institution as the slam- mer or the joint implies a certain familiarity that using jail or prison lacks; not saying please when making a request implicates a different kind of familiarity (Green 1990, 1992). But these are not facts about a semantic correspondence be- tween the word and the world. This means, to put it bluntly, that grammars do not associate denotata with words. Indeed, if kind terms are names for kinds, then since the kinds which a term can be taken to name are indefinitely variable, and in general, no single kind is logically prior to all others named by the same term, and the relation between a kind name and which kind it is intended to refer to on an occasion of use is a mat- ter of inferring a speaker's referential intentions, it is not sensible to say that the 18 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998) mapping from words to kinds is a property of the individual words. Then how, one might ask, do we know what the words mean? First of all, this is the wrong question. To paraphrase a cliche, words do not mean things, people mean things. And everything follows from this. (This is not a new idea. It is Paul Grice's story, and Geoff Nunberg's, and in some ways, Sperber and Wilson's. I am just retelling it.) As described in Section 2, when someone speaks, generally, and when she uses a certain word, in particular, we assume that she meant something by it. If we (presume that we) are the addressee, we presume that she believed we would/ know, or be able to figure out by virtue of our knowledge of what is normal in various contexts and of the sorts of referring functions available, what she in- tended us to understand by it. As long as she abides by this social contract and considers what we are likely to take a word to be-generally-taken-to-name-in- that-context, 25 there will be no problem. If all the classes of potential kinds of referents are not going to be enumer- ated (listed in lexical entries for words) or described via a descriptional meaning, how is the diversity of potential referenda to be accounted for? Probably a genuinely radical pragmaticist would derive part of speech as well as kind of in- tended referent from context and a theory of relevance (Grice 1975, Sperber & Wilson 1986, Green 1990), 26 but it is hardly radical to propose that pragmatic competence includes knowledge of regular correlations between sorts of in- tended referents. The correlations that I am thinking of are not to be understood as lexical rules; they do not expand the lexicon, because, according to the view of lexical meaning I have sketched, information about properties of the referent (of a USE) of a term is not information that is in the lexicon, because it is infomation about the use of a term. Such rules however, may entail shifts in syntactic proper- ties, where those properties correspond to properties of referents. (This is a really thorny issue, broached in Nunberg 1993 with respect to deixis and indexicality.) Thus, in addition to rules like (7), which maps from count noun uses to count noun uses, there must be rules like (8), which map between the count and mass uses of a term. (7) If a name can be rationally used to designate a product, it can be ra- tionally used to designate the source of that product, and vice- versa. PRODUCT SOURCE NATURAL KIND lemon [fruit] lemon [tree] ARTIFACT newspaper [copy] newspaper [corporation] PROPER NAME Picasso [print] ' Picasso [artist] (8) If a name can be rationally used to designate an individuated object, it can be rationally used to designate a substance derived from that i object, and vice-versa. ^" OBJECT SUBSTANCE NATURAL KIND pine [tree] pine [lumber] chicken [bird] chicken [meat] ARTIFACT newspaper [copy] newspaper [=newsprint] marker [pen] marker [ink] PROPER NAME Shakespeare [author] Shakespeare [opus] Georgia Green: Unnatural kind terms and a theory of the lexicon 19 Rules like (8) are necessary because they interact with determiner selection; whether a noun subcategorizes for a determiner or for no determiner is a function of the type of the referent, whether it is a mass or an individuated object (cf. Wierzbicka 1988). Principles like (7) and (8) are parallel to the cognitive capacity for deferred reference, which we have seen to be not specifically linguistic (recall the discussion of deferred gestural reference to spinach seeds by pointing to an image of prepared spinach leaves in Sec. 5). At the same time, they seem to be at lleast partially independent of the rules for indexicals, which appear to be quite a bit more complicated (cf. Jackendoff 1992, Nunberg 1993). There are also category-changing rules (apparently language-specific) like (9) and (10), which derive denominal verbs and deverbal nouns, respectively. (9) If a word can be rationally used to designate an object or sub- stance, it can be rationally used as a verb to designate a situation (event, process, or state) in which an object that can be rationally des- ignated by that word plays a role. (Cf. Clark & Clark 1979) OBJECT SITUATION PROPER NAME Willie Horton Willie Horton (an opponent) NATURAL KIND milk milk (a source) elbow elbow (a person) water water (drinks; plots of land) ARTIFACT trumpet trumpet (a communication) bread bread (a portion of uncooked food) bug bug (a location) (10) If a word can be used rationally as a verb to designate a situation-type, it can also be rationally used as a count noun to designate that situa- tion-type. EXAMPLES: run [intransitive] capture [transitive] kick [transitive or intransitive] kiss lack [transitive] look [COMPS ] or [COMPS ] Notice that rule (9) applies equally to proper names (cf. also Oliver North, George Bush, Dan Quayle), natural kind terms (cf. also sugar, lead, salt, pepper, hound, I ape, parrot, eyeball), and artifact terms (cf. also ring, glue, saddle, lace), and that all such rules, but especially rules like (10) will be constrained in practice by fa- miliarity with existent forms that are used to denote terms in the range of the function, according to now familiar 'blocking' principles (cf. McCawley 1978, Horn 1984, 1989). Among the questions that have barely begun to be explored are ones con- cerning exactly how many of these rules a language or culture has, and exactly what their relation is to the referring functions, which being cognitive in nature are presumably the product of a universal capacity. Obviously, in other languages 20 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998) or cultures, these rules might entail morphological embellishment that a morpho- logically underprivileged language like English does not have. Although the in- ventory of linguistically reflected referring functions is cross-linguistically quite robust (Nunberg 1978a), Jackendoff 1992 observes that some pairs of interpreta- tions of nouns act differently from others with respect to binding phenomena, and Nunberg 1993 discusses a wealth of issues involving agreement and pronominal reference that arise from the possibility of both deferred reference and predicate, •' transferral. It may be too early to say exactly what kinds of mappings exist be-( tween lexical rules and cognitive relations, how much is conventionalized from general, causal principles and how much redundancy an optimal model of our abilities encodes. 27 These are questions we might not have been led to ask if we accepted the claim that only natural kind terms were non-descriptional. My purpose has been to challenge the notion that terms for artifacts are different linguistically (semantically and pragmatically) from terms for natural kinds. I have argued that Nunberg' s arguments against polysemy taken together with his arguments against fixed basic meanings hold equally for the multiplicity of unremarkable uses for natural kind terms and artifact terms, and argue that both are linguistically no more analyzable than proper names. NOTES 1 This work was supported in part by the Beckman Institute for Advanced Sci- ence and Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Portions of this paper were read at the 1992 meeting of the Michigan Linguistics Society, the Korean Workshop on Discourse and Pragmatics, the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Tokyo, at Northwestern University, and at the Director's Seminar at the Beckman Institute, University of Illinois. I have benefitted from the comments and questions of these audiences as well as from comments from Barbara Abbott, Jerry Morgan, Gregory Murphy, and Alessandro Zucchi on a previous draft. Naturally, none of them is to be held responsible for anything I say that they would wish to disclaim. 2 Perhaps as originally ostensively indicated — Abbott (1989: 286) rightly distin- guishes commitment to the causal theory of reference from the phenomenon of nondescriptionality or rigid designation. 3 In taking the position that the generally accepted analysis of so-called natural kind terms does not extend to artifacts, which she describes as a conservative po- / sition, Abbott (1989:269, 271, 287) aligns herself with Kripke (1989:271), imply- V*. ing that Kripke would severely limit the assignment of nondescriptionality. How- ever, she admits that 'it is somewhat difficult to tell' (Abbott 1989:270) [the ex- tent, in Kripke's view, of the nondescriptional class of words], and the passage she cites as 'Kripke's clearest statement' (Abbott 1989:270) shows only that he is cautious, not that he is 'conservative' (Kripke 1972:327): ...my argument implicitly concludes that certain general terms, those for natural kinds have a greater kinship with proper names than is Georgia Green: Unnatural kind terms and a theory of the lexicon 21 generally realized. This conclusion holds for certain for various spe- cies names, whether they are count nouns, such as 'cat', 'tiger', 'chunk of gold', or mass terms such as 'gold', 'water', 'iron pyri- tes'. It also applies to certain terms for natural phenomena, such as 'heat', 'light', 'sound', 'lightning', and presumably, suitably elabo- rated, to corresponding adjectives — 'hot', 'loud', 'red'. Kripke does not say that other terms are not like proper nouns in the relevant re- spects. 4 Abbott considers this a nondescriptional account, saying that her account of natural kind terms as expressing the 'essential properties' of the kind (1989:277) is not descriptional in that the property expression it attributes to natural kind terms 'is the minimal one of being of such-and-such a kind, e.g., being a tiger, or being gold, whatever that entails' (1989:287-8 (fn. 6)). 5 Kripke (1972:284) rightly criticizes an account of this sort that he attributes to Kneale. 6 This section interprets and elaborates on arguments given originally in Nunberg 1978a. 7 The argument is not worth pursuing, however, insofar as it is impossible to draw a principled line between (poetic) metaphor and meaning (cf. Nunberg 1978b), without invoking the notion of novelty, which involves an evaluation (by the speaker) of evaluation by the hearer, and is thus a matter of language use, not of lexical meaning. I find compelling the arguments of Nunberg 1978a that the same principles account for both (poetic) metaphor and what many take to be ordinary polysemy. 8 Thus, he would derive all of the use possibilities of bear and hit (but not kick (Ruhl 1989:225)) from unique meanings, though he admits that he cannot repre- sent those meanings (1989:63): So what does bear mean? It should be clear by now that this ques- tion cannot be answered in words; there is no single word or phrase that can comprehensively capture exactly what bear contributes. 9 Nunberg 1978a gives numerous examples of this. 10 1 certainly would not want to say that a meaning is a function from a word to its denotation on an occasion of use, because that would conflate meaning and reference, and claim that, e.g., there was no difference between a 'literal use' like (i) and a metaphorical use like (ii). [i.J They waltzed through the room. [ii.] They waltzed through the calculus exam. 1 1 Cf. Schmerling 1978, Green 1993. 12 Or her, if you like; the mind boggles at imagining the sex and gender of such an individual. 22 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1 998) 13 This does not mean that only they are genuinely ambiguous. There is no em- pirical support for saying that window and fire are ambiguous because we cannot say that one use is more basic than all the others, but that lemon is vague because all the uses can be derived from a single salient use; ambiguity tests (Zwicky & Sadock 1975) treat both types as ambiguous, not vague. Example (i) cannot refer to a fruit in one clause and a piece of candy in the other, and (ii) cannot refer to . an individuated fire in the first instance and the phenomenon fire in the second. ( [i.] Kim bought a lemon and Sandy did too. [ii.] Some fire is beneficial and some isn't. 14 This account is greatly abbreviated and somewhat oversimplified, of course. For fuller discussion the reader is referred to Nunberg 1978a and to the summary and commentary in Green 1996a. 15 The recursion goes as deep as necessary, but usually there is no need to go deeper than one or two cycles, if that many. 16 'When /use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.' (Carroll 1960:229). 17 Pilot studies of twenty or so 200-word passages of unremarkable prose show that from 8-29 percent of the nouns, verbs, and adjectives are used in ways not characterized by large desk dictionaries. Cf. also Nunberg 1978b. 18 What kind of things, I have always wondered. Cf. Austin 1963. There is a lot in this article that seems way ahead of its time (it was written in 1940) - e.g., char- acterization of what amounts to implicature, as distinct from implication; discus- sion of the consequences of regular polysemous usages (amounting to referring functions). Naturally, I reject Austin's dismissal (1963:7) of the idea that it is rea- sonable to treat common nouns as names for kinds. Austin objected to this idea on the grounds that while proper names are names of real individuals, if the des- ignatum of a common noun is considered to be a kind, it is not a real thing, be- cause kinds are fictitious entities. Insofar as there are proper nouns for 'fictitious individuals' like Santa Claus and Satan, fictitiousness of the (intended) referent is not a distinctive property of common nouns. He also supposes that common nouns have connotation while proper nouns do not, and that this is also a good reason to reject the idea that common nouns might be logically names. If all the things that we believe to be (commonly believed to be) true of the individuals that we take proper names to denote amount to connotations, then having con- / notations or not does not distinguish between common and proper nouns either. ^ That we can use proper nouns as common nouns as in sentences like (i) points to parallel modes of determining reference. i. I'll trade you three Jose Cansecos for a Bobby Bonilla. ii. Even the casual visitor to the Windy City discovers that there are many Chicagos. Georgia Green: Unnatural kind terms and a theory of the lexicon 23 The fact that proper nouns can be used as verbs (to denote a characteristic prop- erty of the individual (normally taken to be) named by the noun, as in (Hi) just as common nouns are (as in (iv)) corroborates this judgement. iii. The strategy they adopted for the next four years was to Willie Horton their opponents into a defensive position. I iv. They trumpeted their discoveries from every pulpit available. For more examples, see Section 7. 19 An enlightening discussion of this is to be found in Nunberg (1978a:81-6). 20 Pedants may object to my use of the name Eohippus for a species properly called Hyracotherium (Gould 1991:90), but as it would be genuinely pedantic for me to use that name when I have no confidence that it would be meaningful to more than a few readers, I use what we must perhaps now take to be the common name of this species. It is interesting that the usage of Gould (a paleontologist) is to use Eohippus when discussing older works that call the critter Eohippus, and Hyracotherium when discussing the beast itself. 21 Experts are not so certain that natural kinds are so observable. Cf. Gould (1985:93-4): 'Nature, in some respects, comes to us as continua, not as discrete objects with clear boundaries. One of nature's many continua extends from colo- nies at one end to organisms at the other. Even the basic terms — organism and colony - have no precise and unambiguous definitions. ... Some cases will be im- possible to call - as a property of nature, not an imperfection of knowledge.' 22 Only the inventor of an artifact could be depended on to have this knowledge. If it is granted that the nature and status of terms in the language shared by mem- bers of the community therefore depends on the knowledge of a specific individ- ual, advocates of desdriptional meaning for artifact terms must find their own sto- ries to tell about the consequences of positing Putnamian experts: Putnam's 'division of linguistic labor' entails that knowledge of language is societal, not individual, and contra Abbott (1988:286), requires commitment to a causal theory of reference. 23 Malt 1992 offers controlled demonstrations that function is not a reliable clue to category membership as reflected in referential practice. 24 To some extent, the research on categorization inspired by Rosch 1973 and Rosch et al. 1976 may provide a way of narrowing the likely domain of a term in \ uses presented out of context, since if a term (like chair) can be understood as the name of a basic level category, it will be natural to interpret it (out of context) as naming that basic-level category. However, this really provides very little help ei- ther in any particular circumstance, because language interpretation is not carried on out of context even in contrived experiments (cf. Sec. 3.3 above), or in gen- eral, because most terms (including lemon and pencil) do not name basic-level categories, and this principle gives us no guidance for them. Nunberg (1978a:29- 47) gives some principles which not only cover a considerably broader domain. but are considerably more specific, and are framed under a set of assumptions 24 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998) which does not presuppose a privileged, linguistically specified denotation. My point here is simply that what class a term denotes is not a question that can be insightfully answered out of context by reference to arbitrary grammatical stipula- tions. c 25 Of course, it is more complex than this. Often she must consider what I am likely to take her to assume I am likely to take it to (be taken to) name. In princi pie there is no limit to the depth of recursion here. See Nunberg 1978a:82-116 Green 1989:56-61. 26 See Russell 1993 for some details on how this would work. 27 Cf. Sadock 1983, Green 1985. REFERENCES Abbott, Barbara. 1989. Nondescriptionality and natural kind terms. Linguistics and Philosophy, 12:269-92. Austin, J. L. 1963. The meaning of a word. Philosophy and Ordinary Language, ed. by Charles E. Caton, 1-21. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Barker, Chris, & David Dowty. 1993. Nonverbal thematic proto-roles. Proceed- ings of the North East Linguistic Society 23, ed. by Amy Schafer, 49-62. Amherst, MA: GLSA, University of Massachusetts. Carroll, Lewis. 1960. Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There. The Annotated Alice. New York: World. Clark, Eve, & Herbert H. Clark. 1979. When nouns surface as verbs. Language 55:767-811. Dowty, David. 1979. Word Meaning and Montague Grammar. Dordrecht: Rei- del. Gelman, Susan A, & Ellen Markman. 1987. Young children's inductions from natural kinds: The role of categories and appearances. Child Development 58:1532-41. Gould, Stephen J. 1985. The Flamingo's Smile. New York: Norton. Green, Georgia M. 1982. Linguistics and the pragmatics of language use. Poetics 11:45-76. . 1983. Some Remarks on How Words Mean. Bloomington, IN: Indiana Uni- versity Linguistics Club. . 1985. Subcategorization and the account of inversions. Proceedings of the First Eastern States Conference on Linguistics, 214-21. Columbus, OHI Ohio State University. . 1990. On the universality of Gricean interpretation. Proceedings of the 16th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, ed. by Kira Hall, Jean-Pierre Koenig, Michael Meacham, Sondra Reinman, & Laurel Sutton, 41 1-28. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Linguistics Society. . 1992. Implicature, rationality, and the nature of politeness. Paper presented at Meiji Gakuin University, October 1992. Georgia Green: Unnatural kind terms and a theory of the lexicon 25 . 1993. Rationality and Gricean inference. Cognitive Science Technical Re- port UIUC-BI-CS-93-09 (Language Series). Beckman Institute, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois. . 1996a. Pragmatics and Natural Language Understanding, 2d ed. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. . 199b. Ambiguity resolution and discourse interpretation. Semantic Ambi- guity and Underspecification, ed. by Kees van Deemter & Stanley Peters, 1- 26. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. Grice, H. P. 1957. Meaning. Philosophical Review 66:377-88. . 1975. Logic and conversation. Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts, ed. by P. Cole & J. Morgan, 41-58. New York: Academic Press. Horn, Laurence R. 1989. A Natural History of Negation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . 1984. Toward a new taxonomy for pragmatic inference: Q-based and R- based implicature. Meaning, Form and Use in Coniext{GURT '84J, ed. by Deborah Schiffrin, 11-42. Washington: Georgetown University Press. Jackendoff, Ray. 1992. Mme. Tussaud meets the binding theory. Natural Lan- guage and Linguistic Theory, 10:1-31. Katz, Jerrold J., & Jerry Fodor. 1963. Structure of a semantic theory. Language 39:170-210. K.EIL, Frank C. 1986. The acquisition of natural kind and artifact terms. Language Learning and Concept Acquisition, ed. by William Demopolous & Ansonio Marras, 133-53. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Kripke, Saul. 1972. Naming and necessity. Semantics of Natural Language, ed. by D. Davidson & G. Harman, 253-355. Dordrecht: Reidel. Labov, William. 1973. The boundaries of words and their meanings. New Ways of Analyzing Variation in English, ed. by C.-J. N. Bailey & Roger W. Shuy, 340-73. Georgetown: Georgetown University Press. Lakoff, George. 1986. Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. Chicago: Univer- sity of Chicago Press. McCawley, James D. 1968. Lexical insertion in a transformational grammar with- out deep structure. Papers from the 4th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 71-80. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society. . 1978. Conversational implicature and the lexicon. Syntax and Semantics 9: Pragmatics, ed. by Peter Cole, 245-59. New York: Academic Press. Malt, Barbara, & Eric C. Johnson. Do artifact concepts have cores.'' Journal of Memory and Language 31:1 95-2 17. Neale, Stephen. 1992. Paul Grice and the philosophy of language. Linguistics and Philosophy 15:509-59. NUNBERG, Geoffrey D. 1978a. The Pragmatics of Reference. Bloomington, IN: In- diana University Linguistics Club. . 1978b. Poetic and prosaic metaphor. Theoretical Issues in Natural Lan- guage Processing 3, New Mexico State University, ed. by Association for Computational Linguistics, 177-80. New York: Association for Computing Machinery. . 1993. Indexicality and deixis. Linguistics and Philosophy 16:1-43. 26 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998) Putnam, Hilary. 1962. The analytic and the synthetic. Reprinted in Mind, Lan- guage and Reality: Philosophical Papers 2:33-69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. . 1975a. Is semantics possible? Reprinted in Mind, Language and Reality: Philosophical Papers 2:139-52. Cambridge: Cambridge Univerity Press. . 1975b. The meaning of 'meaning'. Reprinted in Mind, Language and Re- ality: Philosophical Papers 2:272-90. Cambridge: Cambridge University^- Press. Rosch, Eleanor. 1973. Natural categories. Cognitive Psychology 4:328-50. Rosch, Eleanor, C. B. Mervis, W. D. Gray, D. M. Johnson, & P. Boyes-Braem. 1976. Basic objects in natural categories. Cognitive Psychology 8:382-439. Ruhl, Charles. 1975. Polysemy or monosemy: Discrete meanings or continuum? Analyzing Variation in Language, ed. by Ralph Fasold & Roger W. Shuy. Georgetown: Georgetown University Press. . 1989. On Monosemy; A Study in Linguistic Semantics. Albany: State Uni- versity of New York Press. Russell, Dale W. 1993. Beyond the lexicon: language acquisition via unifica- tion-based grammar processing. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Ph.D. dissertation in Linguistics. Sadock, Jerrold M. 1983. The necessary overlapping of grammatical components. Papers from the Parasession on the Interplay of Phonology, Morphology, and Syntax, ed. by J. F. Richardson, M. Marks, & A. Chukerman, 198-221. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society. Schmerling, Susan F. 1978. Synonymy judgements as syntactic evidence. Syn- tax and Semantics 9: Pragmatics, ed. by Peter Cole, 299-313. New York: Academic Press. Sperber, Dan, & Deirdre Wilson. 1986. Relevance: Communication and Cogni- tion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Springer, Ken, & Frank C. Keil. 1989. On the development of biologically spe- cific beliefs: The case of inheritance. Child Development 60:637-48. . 1991. Early differentiation of causal mechanisms appropriate to biological and nonbiological kinds. Child Development 62:767 -81. Weinreich, Uriel. 1966. Explorations in semantic theory. Current Issues in Lin- guistics, Vol. 3: Theoretical Foundations, ed. by Thomas A. Sebeok, 395- 477. The Hague: Mouton. Wierzbicka, Anna. 1972. Semantic Primitives. Frankfurt: Athenaeum. . 1980. Lingua Mentalis. New York and Sydney: Academic Press. . 1988. Oats and wheat: mass nouns, iconicity, and human categorization! The Semantics of Grammar, by Anna Wierzbicka, 499-560. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Zwicky, Arnold, & Jerrold M. Sadock. Ambiguity tests and how to fail them. Syn- tax and Semantics 4, ed. by John Kimball, 1-36. New York: Academic Press. Studies in the Linguistic Sciences Volume 28, Number 1 (Spring 1998) CONDITIONING FACTORS FOR PROGRESSIVE AND REGRESSIVE NASAL HARMONY Molly Homer i University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ' homer@grimm.cogsci.uiuc.edu The results of a survey of nasal harmonies triggered by nasal consonants argue for independent conditioning factors for progres- sive and regressive nasal harmony. Specifically, the only condition on a consonantal trigger of progressive nasal harmony is that it be re- leased into a vowel, while triggers of regressive harmony should mark the right edge of a boundary. Schourup's 1973 survey of local nasal to vowel assimilation suggests that similar conditioning factors gov- ern local perseverative and anticipatory nasal assimilation. Several motivations for the conditioning factors are considered, and tentative phonetic reasons are outlined. 1. Introduction This paper explores the relation between the context of a nasal consonant, and the direction of the nasal harmony it triggers. Specifically this paper considers whether the consonantal triggers of progressive and regressive nasal harmony favor different contexts, and if they do, whether the same correlations can be ob- served in local nasal to vowel assimilation. Previous generalizations about the directionality of nasal assimilation do not suggest a connection between local assimilation and long distance harmony. In her survey of the feature nasal, Cohn (1993:159) makes the following observa- tion: ...it is less common for long distance spreading to occur with antici- patory thanprogressive nasalization. Only four cases out of the 61 cases of anticipatory nasalization invole spreading in a domain larger than a segment; whereas 11 of the 30 cases of progressive nasaliza- tion involve such spreading. I Not only do the numbers that Cohn gives suggest that there are more pro- gressive harmonies than regressive harmonies total, but they also indicate that the percentage of progressive assimilations that are long distance is higher, es- pecially as the total number of anticipatory assimilations is twice that of progres- sive assimilations. Therefore, long distance harmony appears to favor the pro- gressive direction. For local assimilation, Conn's numbers suggest that anticipatory nasal to vowel assimilation is more common than progressive nasal to vowel assimilation. This coincides with Ferguson's (1975:181) statement: 'Nasality may spread either 28 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences (Spring 1 998) regressively or progressively from a nasal consonant to a neighboring vowel, but regressive spread is more common.' A preliminary conclusion might be that local nasal to vowel assimilation and long distance nasal harmony have nothing in common with respect to their likely directionality: without considering any other factor, local nasal to vowel assimilation is more likely to be anticipatory while nasal harmony triggered by a consonant is more likely to be progressive. However, there are other factors to/ consider, namely the context of the triggering nasal. When this factor is consid-^ ered, common generalizations about directionality in local nasal to vowel assimi- lation and nasal harmony emerge. The first generalization is that in both local and long distance nasal assimi- lation processes, a nasal consonant that is released into a vowel is more likely to trigger progressive assimilation than regressive assimilation, and that this is equally true regardless of the position within the word this prevocalic nasal oc- cupies. For example, being in word initial position does not appear to increase the likelihood of triggering progressive harmony. One result of this is that intervo- calic triggers which might be expected to trigger either progressive or regressive harmony, usually trigger progressive harmony. The second generalization is that for both local and long distance nasal as- similation, the likelihood that a nasal consonant will trigger regressive assimila- tion is increased when that triggering consonant is at the right edge of some kind of boundary (e.g., at the end of a syllable, a morpheme, or a word). For example, a nasal in coda position is more likely to trigger regressive assimilation by virtue of marking the right edge of a syllable. The first goal of this paper is to establish the generalizations stated above by comparing a survey of nasal harmonies to a survey of local nasal to vowel as- similations. Section 2 describes the results of a survey of nasal harmonies with consonantal triggers which I conducted, while section 3 reviews Schourup's 1973 survey of local nasal to vowel assimilation. Both surveys confirm the de- scribed generalizations. For both regressive nasal harmony and anticipatory na- sal to vowel assimilation, there is an implicational hierarchy of contextual restric- tions on triggers: intervocalic triggers in a regressive assimilation imply the pres- ence of syllable final and word final triggers, but syllable and word final triggers do not imply the presence of intervocalic triggers in regressive nasal assimilation. This suggests that the act of marking the right edge of a syllable or word bound- ary somehow promotes regressive nasal assimilation from a consonantal trigger./^ No similar hierarchy is observed for the contextual restrictions on triggers of^ progressive nasal harmony and perseverative nasal assimilation. This suggests that the condition of being released into a vowel is the only factor which induces a nasal consonant to trigger progressive assimilation. The second goal of this paper is to consider possible explanations for the two generalizations. Section 4 considers and rejects phonological-representa- tional accounts. The autosegmental treatment of feature harmony (exemplified in Piggott 1992) does not predict a correlation between the context of a trigger and Molly Homer: Conditioning factors for nasal harmony 29 the direction of harmony. Although the Optimal Domains Theory treatment of feature harmony (described in Cole & Kisseberth 1994, 1995 a and b) allows ex- pression of the correlation, it also allows the expression of correlations which don't exist so the observed correlation must be stipulated. Section 5 explores the possibility that the correlation logically follows from the nature of nasal harmony itself, but no simple logical explanation is found. Finally Section 6 looks to the phonetic aspects of nasalization for an explanation. Tentative articulator/ and 'acoustic motivations are outlined for the generalizations established in this pa- per. 2. Survey of Nasal Harmonies The appendix contains data from nine languages which display nasal har- mony triggered by a consonant. For convenience, the results are summarized in table ( 1 ). For each nasal harmony in the survey, the table indicates whether trig- gers are found in a particular context, those contexts being word final, before an- other consonant, intervocalic, word initial, and after another consonant.' (1) Summary of Survey Results: Context of trigger Language Direction N# NC VNV #N CN examples Capanahua regressive <• • - triggers but only if it also has word final and syllable final triggers. In fact regres- ^ sive assimilations that have only word final or syllable final triggers are much more common. For progressive assimilation on the other hand, there is no prefer- ence for word initial triggers. The only cases where a prevocalic trigger of pro- gressive harmony is in any way restricted is when the trigger must have a certain place, or where the target vowel must be word final, but not where the trigger must be in a certain position. Articulatory data from Krakow 1993 support the generalizations made about anticipatory nasal to vowel assimilation. In a study comparing the relative timing Molly Homer: Conditioning factors for nasal harmony 31 of lip movements and velum movements during the production of intervocalic nasal bilabial consonants, Krakow 1993 found that when the consonant is a coda (e.g., the [m] in 'home E'), velic lowering begins as the lip starts to rise for the bilabial closure. In contrast, when the nasal consonant is in an onset (like the [m] in 'hoe me'), the velic lowering begins as the lip completes its rise. This confirms that at least in English, anticipatory nasalization is greater if the trigger conso- nant marks the end of a syllable boundary. To summarize, both the survey of long distance nasal harmony and Schou- rup's 1973 survey of local nasal to vowel assimilation find similar conditioning factors on consonantal triggers. On the one hand, all prevocalic nasal conso- nants are equally likely to trigger progressive assimilation, indicating that the only conditioning factor for a trigger of progressive assimilation is that it be re- leased into a vowel. On the other hand, triggers of regressive assimilation fall into an implicational hierarchy: nasal consonants which mark the right edge of boundary, trigger regressive assimilation before other nasal consonants. This indicates that the conditioning factor for triggers of regressive assimilation is that they mark the right edge of a boundary. At this point the question arises as to why these two factors should condition progressive and regressive nasal as- similation respectively. The next three sections explore possible answers to this question. 4. Phonological-Representational Accounts Current phonological-representational treatments of feature harmony can't account for the generalizations in a satisfactory way. The autosegmental analysis of feature harmony as spread of association lines from an underlying feature specification on the trigger has no account for the tendency for intervocalic nasals to trigger progressive harmony. There is nothing in the representation which would predict that it should be more preferable to spread in one direction over the other. The diagram in (3) shows progressive nasal harmony in Warao as resulting from the spread of association lines from a [+nasal] specification on an intervocalic nasal consonant to the right, but given the representation in (3), the association lines could just as easily have spread to the left. The fact that they don't must be stipulated. (3) Autosegmental account of nasal spread in Warao as seen in Piggott 1992. [+nasal] f T I. M Vt 1 in a w a R a In contrast, the Optimal Domains Theory of feature harmony can at least express the correlation. Optimal Domains Theory (as described in Cole & Kisse- berth 1994, 1995a, b) treats feature harmony as occuring when feature domains < 32 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences (Spring 1 998) have wide scope, which in turn results when alignment constraints require the edges of feature domains to be aligned with the edges of prosodic or morpho- logical domains. So for example, progressive nasal harmony would result if alignment constraints requiring the right edge of a nasal domain to be aligned to the right edge of a word outranked the constraints requiring it to be aligned to the right edge of the triggering segment. Therefore Optimal Domains Theory could express the correlation between trigger context and the direction of har- mony by positing constraints requiring the edge of the trigger aligned to the fea- ture domain to also be aligned with a syllable boundary. This is shown in (4) where the tendency for intervocalic nasal consonants to trigger progressive har- mony is expressed by a constraint requiring that the left edge of a Nasal Domain be aligned to the left edge of a syllable boundary. (4) Constraint: Align (Nasal Domain, left, syllable, left) (i) [(na)(wa)(fia)] : '[ ]' mark the Nasal Doman, '( )' mark syllables. However, the fact that progressive harmony shows no preference for word initial triggers while regressive harmony does would have to be stipulated. Fur- thermore, any similar patterning in local nasal assimilation would be accidental because Optimal Domains Theory doesn't address local assimilation. Finally, it might not be appropriate to approach these generalizations with any Optimality Theoretic account as the generalizations describe cross-linguistics tendencies. Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993) handles crosslinguistic variation by changing constraint rankings, so to handle a crosslinguistic tendency, one must make statements about preferred rankings. This could be done, but the question as to why the ranking is preferred would still be left unanswered. 5. Possible Logical Explanation It might be the case that the tendency for intervocalic nasal consonants to trigger progressive harmony follows logically from the very nature of nasal har- mony. Homer 1998 argues that nasal harmony is non-neutralizing. It follows that nasal harmony from a consonantal trigger should spread in the direction of a compatible segment which, if it were to undergo nasalization, would not have to change so much as to neutralize a contrast. This predicts that the most likely tar- get would be a vowel because vowels can nasalize easily with a minimal impact on their contrastive properties. 5 Given the assumption that harmony should spread towards a vowel, it follows logically that a trigger preceded by a conso- nant will spread progressively, a trigger followed by a consonant would spread regressively, but an intervocalic trigger could still spread either way. These con- f elusions are summarized in (5). ^ (5) Logical conclusions assuming that nasal harmony spreads towards vowel: - CN triggers will spread rightward. - NC triggers will spread leftward. - VNV triggers can spread either way. The prevalence of intervocalic nasals triggering progressive harmony is not explained by this line of reasoning. Another option is to propose the functional argument that in order to be detected, harmony should spread into the word. Molly Homer: Conditioning factors for nasal harmony 33 This predicts that word initial triggers should spread progressively, and that word final triggers should spread regressively, but predicts nothing about word medial triggers. These conclusions are summarized in (6). (6) Logical conclusions assuming that nasal harmony spreads into the word: - #N triggers will spread rightward. - N# triggers will spread leftward. I - # ... N... # triggers can spread either way. One might argue that word medial triggers just pattern after the more default word initial or word final triggers to achieve phonological symmetry, but in this case one should expect some harmonies that have only word initial consonantal triggers. None are found among the nine nasal harmonies surveyed in this paper. 6. Phonetic Reasons There are possible articulatory reasons for the connection between syllable final triggers and anticipatory nasalization. According to Bell-Berti 1993, it's likely that raising the velum involves active muscular contraction, while lowering the velum results from passive muscular relaxation, so one might expect the nasal to oral transition to be quicker than the oral to nasal transition. 4 This predicts that in general, anticipatory nasalization is more common. Krakow 1989, cited in Bell- Berti (1993:80) finds that coda nasals achieve a lower velic position than onsets. This might predict that codas in general make better triggers for nasalization than onsets. Putting these two pieces together, one might reach the conclusion that codas are better triggers for nasal assimilation, and that they're more likely to as- similate regressively. The articulatory evidence presented thus far makes no prediction about progressive nasal assimilation. However there may be perceptual reasons for prevocalic nasals to trigger progressive assimilation. In a perceptual test involv- ing synthesized vowels, Stevens 1985 found that the nasal consonant in a nasal- vowel sequence where nasality was extended 100 msec into the vowel was more readily identified as nasal than when nasality was only extended 50 msec into the vowel. Hence it appears that extending nasalization into the following vowel aids in the identification of the consonant as nasal, as opposed to an obstruent. 7. Conclusion In conclusion, there appear to be independent factors which condition pro- gressive assimilation and regressive assimilation from a nasal consonant. Being released into a vowel conditions progressive assimilation from a nasal conso- nant, while marking the right edge of a boundary conditions regressive assimila- tion from a nasal consonant. These conditioning factors are active in both local and long distance assimilation, and result in different contextual restrictions for the triggers of progressive and regressive nasal assimilation. These conditioning factors are not accounted for by phonological-representational treatments of fea- ture harmony, nor do they logically follow from any inherent properties of nasal harmony. There are articulatory reasons to expect regressive assimilation in gen- eral to be more prevalent, and for coda nasals to be better triggers. There are per- < 34 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences (Spring 1 998) ceptual reasons for nasal consonants released into a vowel to trigger progressive assimilation. However, it is still not clear why regressive harmony should be conditioned when a nasal consonant marks the right edge of a boundary: the ar- ticulatory evidence presented here suggests that codas make better triggers for both regressive and progressive assimilation. One other question that remains is why the progressive direction is pre- ferred for long distance harmony, while the regressive direction is preferred for local assimilation. To answer this question requires a more complete under- standing of the different natures of local and long distance assimilation than is currently within our grasp. However if we assume that long distance harmony is a higher level, or more 'phonologized' phenomenon than local assimilation, then the beginning of an answer can be found in the results of experiments described in Kawasaki 1986. Kawasaki 1986 finds that nasal vowels are more easily per- ceived as nasal when in a context where they would not typically receive contex- tual nasalization. If anticipatory local nasalization is more common, perhaps vow- els following nasals are more easily identified as being nasal so phonologization into harmony from local progressive assimilation is more likely. This assumes that a crucial step in the development of a long distance nasal harmony from lo- cal nasal assimilation is that the speaker-hearer actually recognizes the vowel as being nasal. NOTES * An earlier version of this paper was presented at the fourth Mid-Continental Workshop on Phonology held in Ann Arbor, Michigan, October 16-18, 1998. Thanks to Jennifer Cole, Khalil Iskarous, Daniel Silverman, Jose Hualde, Patrice Beddor, and Stuart Davis for comments and discussion. 1 Although I've included included Capanahua and Ijo as languages with word final consonantal triggers, an examination of the data shows that none of the forms in either language actually surface with a nasal consonant at the end of the word. Descriptions of both languages propose underlying word final consonants that trigger anticipatory nasalization, and then delete. While stated in synchronic terms, these descriptions are probably accurate reflections of historical develop- ments in both languages, so even though the word final consonantal triggers have since disappeared, they were the original source of harmony emanating from the end of the word. 2 The absence of triggers preceded by a consonant (i.e., in the CN context) most€ likely is not significant. It might be the case that the CN sequence itself is rare, so there just aren't any CN nasals around that can trigger harmony. 3 Homer 1998 discusses an apparent exception to this statement: in Applecross Gaelic, nasalization reduces the number of height contrasts among vowels, so mid-high vowels block nasal harmony in order to preserve height contrasts. However, when compared to consonants, it is easier to preserve contrasts on vowels under nasalization. I Molly Homer: Conditioning factors for nasal harmony 35 4 Using auditory reasons, Bladon 1986 reaches the same conclusion. Bladon ar- gues that the vowel to nasal consonant transition is less salient than the nasal consonant to vowel transition because the first type of transition involves 'spectral offset'. As a result, the vowel to nasal consonant is more susceptible to 'auditory temporal smear' and therefore anticipatory assimilation is more likely. REFERENCES Anderson, Stephen. 1972. On nasalization in Sundanese. Linguistic Inquiry 3. 253-68. Beddor, Patrice. 1983. Phonological and phonetic effects of nasalization on vowel height. University of Minnesota Doctoral dissertation. . 1993. The perception of nasal vowels. Phonetics andPhonology V: Nasals, Nasalization, and the Velum, ed. by Huffman & Krakow, 171-96. San Di- ego: Academic Press. Bell-Berti, Fredericka. 1993. Understanding velic motor control: Studies of seg- mental context. Phonetics and Phonology V: Nasals, Nasalization, and the Velum, ed. by Huffman and Krakow, 63-85. San Diego: Academic Press. Bladon, Anthony. 1986. Phonetics for hearers. Language for Hearers, ed. by Graham McGregor, 1-24. New York: Pergamon Press. Cohn, Abigail. 1993. A survey of the phonology of the feature [+/- nasal]. Work- ing Papers of the Cornell Phonetics Laboratory. 8.141-203. . 1990. Phonetic and phonological rules of nasalization. University of Cali- fornia at Los Angeles, Ph. D. dissertation in Linguistics. Cole. Jennifer S., & Charles Kisseberth. 1994. An optimal domains theory of harmony. Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 24:2.101-14. .1995a. Pardoxical strength conditions in harmony systems. Proceedings of the North-East Linguistic Society 25:1.17-29. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. . 1995b. Nasal harmony in optimal domains theory. Proceedings of the West- ern Conference on Linguistics 7.44-58. Fresno: California State University Fresno, Department of Linguistics. Ferguson. Charles. 1975. Universal tendencies and 'normal' nasality. Nasdlfest. Papers from a Symposium on Nasals and Nasalization, ed. by C. Fergu- son, L. Hyman. & J. Ohala, 175-96. Stanford: Stanford University Language Universals Project. Gudschinsky, Sarah, Harold Popovich. & Frances Popovich, 1970. Native reac- tion and phonetic similarity in Maxakali phonology. Language 46.77-88. Hayes, Bruce. 1996. Phonetically driven phonology: The role of Optimality The- ory and inductive grounding. MS. Rutgers Optimality Archive. Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University. Homer, Molly. 1998. The role of contrast in nasal harmony. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Ph. D. dissertation in Linguistics. van der Hulst, Harry, & Norval Smith. 1982. Prosodic domains and opaque segments in autosegmental theory. The Structure of Phonological Repre- sentations, part I, ed. by van der Hulst & Smith 1.31 1-36. 36 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences (Spring 1 998) Kawasaki, Haruko. 1986. Phonetic explanation for phonological universals: The case of distinctive vowel nasalization. Experimental Phonology, ed. by J. Ohala & J. Jaeger, 81-103. Orlando: Academic Press. 81-103. Kenstowicz, Michael, & Charles Kisseberth. 1979. Generative Phonology: De- scription and Theory. New York: Academic Press. Krakow, Rena. 1993. Nonsegmental influences on velum movement patterns: Syllables, sentences, stress and speaking rate. Phonetics and Phonology V: Nasals, Nasalization, and the Velum, ed. by Huffman & Krakow, 87-1 16 San Diego: Academic Press. Loos, Eugene E. 1969. The Phonology of Capanahua and its Grammatical Basis. Norman, OK: Summer Institute of Linguistics. Osborn, Henry. 1966. Warao: phonology and morphophonemics. International Journal of American Linguistics 32:2.108-23. PiGGOTT, G.L. 1992. Variability in feature dependency: The case of nasality. Natu- ral Language and Linguistic Theory 10.33-77. Prince, A., & P. SMOLENSKY. 1993. Optimality Theory: Constraint Interaction in Generative Grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press [forthcoming]. Rich, Furne. 1963. Arabela phonemes and high level phonology. Studies in Peru- vian Indian Languages I, ed. by B. Elson, 193-206. Norman, OK: Summer Institute of Linguistics. Safir, Ken. 1982. Nasal spreading in Capanahua. Linguistic Inquiry 13:4.689-694. Schourup, Lawrence. 1973. A cross-language study of vowel nasalization. Co- lumbus, OH: Ohio State Working Papers in Linguistics 15. Stevens, Kenneth. 1985. Evidence for the role of acoustic boundaries in the per- ception of speech sounds. Phonetic Linguistics: Essays in Honor of Peter Ladefoged, ed. by V. Fromkin, 243-55. New York: Academic Press. Teoh, Boon-Seong. 1989. Aspects of Malay phonology revisited — A Non-linear approach. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Ph. D. dissertation in Linguistics. Walker, Rachel. 1994. Hierarchical opacity effects in nasal harmony: An opti- mality theoretic account. Proceedings of the Eastern States Conference on Linguistics-ESCOL 1 1 .3 1 8-29. Williamson, Kay. 1987. Nasality in Ijo. Current Approaches to African Linguis- tics IV, ed. by D. Odden, 397-407. Dordrecht: Foris. < Molly Homer: Conditioning factors for nasal harmony APPENDIX A. Data from Capanahua (Loos 1969, Piggott 1992, van der Hulst & Smith 1982, Safir 1982, Walker 1994): From word final nasal that deletes: 37 /waran/ [want] "squash' /poyan/ [poya] 'arm' /bawin/ [bawl] 'catfish' /ci?in/ [cl7i] 'by fire' /boon/ [boo] 'hair' From word medial nasal before a glide that deletes, then nasal spreads right: /wiranwi/ [wirawi] 'push it over' /hisyaja?nwi/ [hisaja?wi] 'see sometime' From word medial nasal that remains: ciponki 'downriver' kmca 'bowl' kanci(n) 'banana' blmi 'fruit' banawi 'plant it' hamawi 'step on it' Rama?6na 'coming stepping' wiranai 'I pushed it' B. Data from English (Schourup 1973): raim fialrrj 'rhyme' 'hollering' fjum klefots 'fume' 'Clarence' Reign riwainrj 'Helen' 'rewiring' C. Data from Ijo (Williamson 1987, Piggott 1992): (Piggott (1992:42-43) proposes an underlying word final nasal that deletes for Ijo and for another Nigerian language, Urhobo.) bei 'be full' owei 'bite' 6 yari 'shake' erei 'day' kofonmbo: 'thin' mdaa 'how many' anda 'wrestle' Omgbo 'seed' umbu 'navel' urjgs 'riches' oyaya 'horse' I D. Data from Maxakali (Gudschinsky, Popovich, & Popovich 1970) (It appears that Maxakali also exhibits progressive nasal harmony. The data shown here are selected to demonstrate the regressive harmony only) : p'iit y narj 'frog species' jowan'to open' kome^n 'city' tomaan 'tomato' mayowon 'sun' plrpn 'noise made by jumping" mihlem 'wood, tree' ?e?eem'who' ?amb'iyi 'needle' ?amb'ik'cook' ?ambii 'wind' haempjoebay 'a good thing' 38 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences (Spring 1 998) E. Data from Arabela (Rich 1963): naxe? 'his father' naan ld ri? 'type of demon' nai? 'stinging ant' rilnyu? 'to come' nuwa? 'partridge' nyseaeri? 'he laid it down' nasexeriti? 'did he say it' riityasnu? 'to carry on the back riiyeno? 'he is coming' neenu? 'to turn over' neysetu? "daughter' nununu? 'light beaming' myaenu 'swallow' mwiraettyenu? 'cause to be seen' man:te? 'moth' mau? 'mushroom* monu? 'to kill' maanu? 'woodpecker' Ranu? 'to fly' RyuuJ":Jsen6? 'where I fished' Ruwa? 'a yellow bird' Riyaerii? 'oldi woman' kanaage? "our father' papanXRa? 'hollow' komAfil? 'over there' tinyakari? 'afternoon' pokonagi? 'yellow' keroril? 'deep' karAk:koRwa? 'type of owl' rupoRonu? 'to stick together' F. Data from Land Dayak (Schourup 1973, Kenstowicz & Kisseberth 1979): nlRin nuwarj nijum snak psmlrj pimajln ntakadn 'place' 'pour' 'kiss' 'child' 'dizzy' 'a game' 'taste' nafian nabur malu sirjau simlrnrj 'bear' 'sow' 'strike' 'cat' 'ten' najun nu?a:n me?an kinam umo 'swing 'open' 'eat' 'feeling' 'water' mpahit 'send' sunok 'in need of surjkoi 'cooked rice' samps: 'extending to' G. Data from Malay (Teoh 1988, Pi nawah 'soul, spirit' riiyat 'wish' narjke 'jack fruit' nanti 'to wait' mawas 'type of monkey' mahasiswa'undergraduate' merjaya? 'to sift' mewah 'prosperous' mampu 'affordable' merjkuarj 'a species of grass kesuffiyan 'stillness' binase 'destruction' sempurne 'complete' urju 'purple' pesamama?an 'the same' ggott 1992): nahu 'grammar' nani 'to sing' nampa? 'to see' mahal 'expensive' mlnoman 'drinks' makan 'to eat' ma?ap 'forgive' mayarj 'stalk (palm)' mandi 'to bathe' niyo: 'coconut' na?e? 'to ascend' rjarja 'agape' mlnom "to drink' ma?en 'to play' makanan 'food' mati 'to die' mayaf 'corpse' rniqgu "week' mendorj 'overcast' benua 'continent' istane 'palace' binatar) 'animal' ena? 'delightful' barjon 'to rise' surjai 'river' kebi:mbarjan 'anxiety' ramai 'numerous' kemot 'crumpled' Molly Homer: Conditioning factors for nasal harmony 39 elmu 'knowledge' semue 'all' ema? "mother' ilmlyah 'scientific' gurimdam'type of poetry' to:mbarj 'to fall' ba:nge 'to be proud' H. Data from Sundanese (Anderson 1972, Piggott 1992, Conn 1990): laksemane' admiral" > jilar 'seek' Jiaur 'say' jiaho 'know' jiaTatkin 'dry' nuS'us 'dry' rjatur 'arrange' rjudag 'pursue' rjisar 'displace' rjiwat 'elope' rjajak 'sift' rjobah 'change' mTTasih 'love' mahal 'expensive' marios 'examine binhar 'to be rich' kumaha 'how?' dumlhls 'to approach' nalan 'wet' nuhurkin 'dry' riiSIs 'relax in a cool place' rjuliat 'stretch' qaluhuran 'to be in a high position' maro 'to halve' rrilhak 'take sides' gumade 'to be big' pinarjgih "to find" I. Data from Warao (Osborn 1966, Piggott 1992): na5 'come* moau 'give it to him" moyo 'cormorant' mehokohi 'shadow' inawaha 'summer' horilwaku 'turtle' no codas allowed (Osborn 1966) I ( ( ► Studies in the Linguistic Sciences Volume 28, Number 1 (Spring 1998) VOWEL INTERACTION IN BASQUE: A NEARLY EXHAUSTIVE CATALOGUE* Jose Ignacio Hualde University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign j-hualde@uiuc.edu Inaki Gaminde Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea tlpgatei@lgdx04.lg.ehu.es The treatment of vowel sequences in Basque inflectional mor- phology has played a prominent role in discussions of rule interaction, literally becoming a textbook example of extrinsic rule ordering (cf. de Rijk 1970, Kenstowicz & Kisseberth 1979:176-7, Kenstowicz 1994:21- 2, 126-7, Lakoff 1993, Kirchner 1997, Trask 1996:92-3). However, perhaps because of the incomplete sources, the facts are often misrep- resented. Thus Kenstowicz & Kisseberth 1979 mix facts from different dialects and Trask's 1996 'conservative Bizkaian', which he uses to illustrate rule reordering, is purely fictional. In addition, the incom- pleteness of the data that are presented can be misleading. The reader may conclude that no other possibilities are found (or could be found). This is enough reason to justify the compilation of facts that we under- take in this paper. Another important reason, of course, is that as a consequence of the difusion of standard Basque much of the existing diversity in the treatment of vowel sequences in Basque can be ex- pected to disappear in the near future. It is thus important to document these facts in an easily available source. 1. Attested patterns Inflected singular and plural forms arose historically by the affixation of the distal demonstrative (h)a(r): *gizon (h)a(r) 'that man 7 > gizona 'the man'. This origin is obvious when we compare, for instance, dative forms such as gizonari 'to the man' and gizon (h)ari 'to that man' (see Michelena 1977:218, 1981). Other de- monstratives have also developed into suffixes. In this paper we will focus on the absolutive singular, which is the citation form. The basic shape of the absolutive singular suffix is -a, added to the uninfected stem, as in gizon 'man', gizona 'the man'.:' The vowel sequences resulting from suffixation of the singular determiner to stems ending in different vowels have undergone a great number of different changes in different areas. Thus, the absolutive singular of, for instance, a stem ending in -o, such as beso 'arm', may be besoa, besua, besue, besu, etc. depend- ing on the variety. A nearly exhaustive catalog of the patterns that have been documented for the absolutive singular is given in Table I. Each pattern is identi- 42 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: l (Spring 1998) fied by a representative variety. The output for each of the historical (or, if one wishes, 'underlying') sequences resulting from affixing the singular determiner -a to stems ending in each of the five vowels is listed in a separate column (The sound represented as -y- may range from a glide, to a voiced nonstrident palatal fricative [j] to a voiced palatal stop [j], depending on the variety, similarly l-b-l may be a stop [b] or an approximant [£]) Table 1: Treatment of vowel sequences in the absolutive singular a + a e + a o + a ] + a u + a 1. Standard Basque a ea oa i a ua 2. Literary Bizkaian ea ea oa i a ua 3. Arratia ea ea oa i e ue 4. Getxo e e 1 u 5. 18th cent Markina ia ia ua i za uba 6. Lekeitio/Deba ia ia ua i za/isa ua 7. Bermeo ie ie ue i ze ue 8. Gernika ie ie oa ze ue 9. Elantxobe u ze u 10. Larrauri ia ia oa ze ue 1 1 . Errezil ia ia ua u 12. Urdiain ia ia ua (y)a u(b)a 13. Zumaia aa ia ua sa ua 14. Zarautz a ia ua ya ua 15. Alegia a ea oa e ue 16. Etxarri a ie ue ye ube 17. Lizarraga a je ue ye ube 18. Ultzama a ja ua ie ue 19. Basaburua a ii oa ii uu 20. Beruete a ee oa i uu 21. Baztan a ja ua e ue 22. Aezkoa a ea oa ia ua 23. Zaraitzu ara ea oa ia ua 24. Erronkari a ea oa ia ja 25. Zuberoa a ia ua ia ia 26. Sara a ja ua ia ua 27. Beskoitze a ja ua ia uya (iia, ia) 28. Arbona a ja ua ia ua 29. Aiherra a ia ua ia ja ( The patterns in Table I are roughly organized in terms of geographical dis- tribution. On the basis of the treatment of vowel sequences, we can establish the following major dialectal groups (see Map 1): A. Western dialects (mostly Bizkaian): Types 2-12 (those which present reflects of the dissimilation a + a > ea . To the west of isogloss 1 on the map). B. Central dialects (mostly Gipuzkoan): Types 14-16. HUALDE & GAMINDE: VOWEL INTERACTION IN BASQUE 43 C. Navarrese dialects: Types 17-24 (with rising diphthongs. To the east of isogloss 2 on the map) D. Northern dialects: Types 25-29 Map 1: Basque dialect areas Bay of Biscay Donostia ( ~"\ ... vP""^ San Sebastian,. '^^LAPURDI ) > Gernika y^L^sis^^ s~\-P m \± ea neska 'girl' vs. neskea 'the girl' (western) Contraction: aa > a neska 'girl' = 'the girl' (central) aa > a neska 'girl' vs. neska 'the girl' (easternmost area) In a few localities on the western -ea I central -a isogloss (e.g., Zumaia) we find the older -aa sequence unmodified: aa neska 'girl' vs. neskaa 'the girl' The sequence -ea has been further altered in many western varieties: Western developments UNINFL/ABS SG ea > ia neska / neskia (e.g., Eibar, Lekeitio) ea > ia > ie neska / neskie (e.g., Gernika) ea > ia > ie >i neska / neski (e.g., Ondarroa) ea > e neska / neske (e.g., Getxo) The dissimilatory change aa > ea (and further evolutions) is found in all of Bizkaia, in the Basque-speaking area of Araba, in western and southern Gipuzkoa and even in a few towns in the Navarrese Burunda Valley (Zuazo 1995, 1998:197) . This sound change is already present in our first documents for west- ern dialects such as a letter by Fray Juan de Zumarraga dated 1537 (see Sarasola 1990), Landucci's 1562 dictionary, and the anonymous Ref ranes y Sentencias of 1596. The identical sequence created in plural forms such as neskaak 'the girls' is, however, not affected in the same manner. In 18th century Markina as well as some present-day varieties, such as Onati, this sequence is left unchanged and we do indeed find neskaak. But the sequence has subsequently been reduced to < I I HUALDE & GAMINDE: VOWEL INTERACTION IN BASQUE 4 5 neskak almost everywhere. The common western pattern is thus neska 'girl', neskea 'the girl', neskak 'the girls' (all forms are for the absolutive case, unless otherwise indicated). As Michelena 1981 points out, the failure of the dissimila- tion rule to operate in the plural can be taken as evidence for concluding that the plural determiner became a suffix later than the singular. Some additional evi- dence for this position is provided by the marked accentual behavior of plural suffixes. In what appears to be the most conservative western accentual system, most words are unaccented and are subject to only phrase-level accentuation on the last syllable; e.g.,: sagarrd 'the apple', neskea 'the girl', saga?- ederrd 'the beautiful apple', neska ederrd 'the beautiful girl', sugar ederra da 'it is the beau- tiful apple'. Clitics, on the other hand, introduce an accent on the preceding syl- lable; e.g.,: sagar ederrd be(re) 'the beautiful apple too'. Plural suffixes behave like clitics in triggering preaccentuation; e.g., sagdrrak 'the apples', neskak 'the girls'. We may thus surmise that at the point the dissimilatory raising of stem-final low vowels took place, the singular determiner was already a suffix, but the plural was only a clitic, with a less intimate link to the stem (cf. Hualde 1993). In most of the Basque Country, on the other hand, we find a reduction aa > a in both singular and plural forms; e.g.,: neska 'girl; the girl', neskak 'the girls'. Interestingly, as mentioned, in some points on the dividing line between the west- ern and the central solution we find the original sequence unchanged. In the easternmost Zuberoan or Souletin dialect (as well as in the now ex- tinct Roncalese or Erronkari dialect), the contraction of the sequence -aa is re- flected accentually. In this area, stress is regularly penultimate, as in gizun 'man', gizuna 'the man'. The contraction of the aa sequence has created marked oxy- tonic words: neskaa > neska 'the girl' (vs. uninflected neska 'girl'), neskaak > neskak 'the girls'. Finally, in Salacenco (Zaraitzu), a now obsolescent dialect, an epenthetic -/- distinguishes absolutive singular forms such as alabara 'the daughter' from unin- flected alaba 'daughter'. Everywhere in the case of (nonsingular) suffixes starting with a vowel other than /a/, stem-final -a is deleted, as in the standard forms neskek 'the girls, erg pi', neskok 'the girls abs/erg prox pl\ nesken 'of the girls, gen pi'. 2.3 e-final and o-final stems 2.3.1 Neutralization of the contrast between a-final and e -final stems in western dialects First of all, we must note that the dissimilatory change -aa > -ea in western dia- lects created a neutralization in the singular between a-final and e-final stems. All subsequent changes have treated the sequence -ea in the same way, regardless of whether the uninflected form ends in -e or in -a. That is, the absolutive singular of a-stems and e-stems is always identical in western dialects. The different evolu- tions of -ea in western dialects illustrated with a-final stems above are also the same for e-final stems: 46 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1998) Western developments UNINFL/ABS SG ea > ia seme / semia, neska / neskia (e.g., Eibar, Lekeitio) ea >ia > ie seme / semie, neska / neskie (e.g., Gernika) ea > ia > ie >i seme / semi, neska / neski (e.g., Ondarroa) ea > e seme / seme, neska / neske (e.g., Getxo) Since the change -aa > -ea only took place in the singular, plural forms of a- final and e-final stems are different. Thus, for instance in Gernika we find neska/ neskie/neskak 'girl/the girl/the girls' vs. seme/ semie/ semiek 'son / the son / the sons'. The neutralization between nominal classes is thus found only in the sin- gular (but it has nevertheless triggered the transfer of some words from the e-final to the a-final class in western varieties; e.g., lore/lorea > lora/lorea 'flower') Unlike the change -ea > -aa, all subsequent changes took place both in the singular and in the plural. Most of these changes are also found outside the west- ern area. 2.3.2 Mid Vowel Raising ea > ia, oa > ua The most common of the changes affecting mid vowels is the raising ea > ia. Al- ternations of the type seme/semia are found from western dialects like Lekeitio to Zuberoan, the easternmost dialect. In most of the area where ea > ia, there is a parallel development oa > ua; e.g.,: seme/semia 'son/the son', beso/besua 'arm/ the arm'. However, in Gernika, where we find seme/semie, the sequence -oa re- mains unchanged, beso/besoa. The acquisition of Mid Vowel Raising may or may not result in merger be- tween the sequences corresponding to stems ending in mid and high vowels, de- pending on whether or not other processes affect stems ending in high vowels (cf. Table I). In many areas we find the further development ia > ie, ua > ue, by Low Vowel Assimilation (cf. 2.1). 2.3.3 Gliding: ea > ea,ja, oa > oa, ua In many Navarrese and Lapurdian varieties stem-final mid vowels lose their sylla- bicity before the vowel of a suffix and are realized either as nonsyllabic versions of Id, lol or as true glides, often with both options as variants in the same dialect; e.g.,: seme / semea ~ semia. In most of this area the same results are found with stems ending in a high vowel, there are, however, some interesting exceptions (patterns 18 and 26 in Ta- ble I), where stem-final mid vowels glide, but stem-final high vowels do not. 2.4 Stems ending in a high vowel 2.4.1 Epenthesis of homorganic consonant: ia > iya > iza > isa, ua > uba With stems ending in a high front vowel a homorganic transitional glide devel- oped between the stem-final vowel and the initial vowel of a suffix in many I Hualde & Gaminde: Vowel interaction in Basque 4 7 Bizkaian, Gipuzkoan and High Navarrese varieties. This glide was hardened, giv- ing rise to several palatal and prepalatatal consonants: ia > iya [ija] ~ [ija] mendi / mendiya (many Gipuzkoan varieties) ia > iya > iza mendi / mendiza (many Bizkaian varieties) ia > iya > iza > isa mendi / mendisa (Deba valley) A parallel process of epenthesis is found with w-final stems, where the re- sulting epenthetic consonant is generally [-B-], but a stop [-b-] in Arbizu 3 (which contrasts with all other instances of intervocalic Pol, cf. Hualde 1996a). This proc- ess has been steadily losing ground during the last century. Whereas a hundred years ago epenthesis with //-final stems appears to have been as general as epen- thesis with /-final stems in Bizkaia, Gipuzkoa and Navarre and was also found in coastal Lapurdian, epenthetic [-B-] has now been lost in most of its former terri- tory or, in some areas, it is found only in the speech of older speakers. Alternations of the type mendi/mendize 'mountain/the mountain' (as in pat- tern 7 Bermeo) result from Low Vowel Assimilation. 2.4.2 Epenthesis of non-homorganic consonant: ua > uya In some Low Navarrese varieties we find epenthesis of a palatal glide with //-final stems. This phenomenon is already found in the first book written in Basque, Lin- guae Vasconum Primitiae by the Low Navarrese Bernard Etxepare [Dechepare] 1545, e.g., munduya "the world'. 2.5 Second Vowel Deletion In a few northern Bizkaian varieties the vowel [e], and sometimes [a], has been lost in hiatus after another vowel, e.g., ncskie > neski 'the giiT. This has hap- pened in Ondarroa, where now absolutive singular forms differ from the corre- sponding uninflected forms in the quality of the final vowel, for stems ending in a vowel other than N: beso/besii 'arm/the ami', seme/semi 'son/the son', neska/ neski 'girl/the girl'. The process is spreading to Markina and neighboring towns where besiie ~ besu 'the arm', semie ~ semi 'the son', neskie ~ neski 'the girl', etc. are found in stylistic variation (cf. Zubiaur et al. 1992). (With stems ending in l\l there is epenthesis in this area, e.g.,: mendixe 'the mountain'). Final vowels in hiatus have also been lost in Getxo and surrounding area. Since these varieties did not have Mid Vowel Raising, this has resulted in neu- tralization between uninflected and absolutive singular forms for stems ending in kvowels other than /a/: beso/beso, seme/seme, mendi/mendi, but neska/neske (< fneskea). A more general process, found in many areas, is this type of deletion, but only in closed syllables (i.e., in the plural, e.g.. seme/semie/semik 'son/the son/the sons'). 3. Alternation patterns The order of presentation follows that of Table I. The data presented here derive for the most part from fieldwork undertaken by one of the authors (Gaminde). 48 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998) Nevertheless, when written sources are available for a given dialect, these are given in footnotes. See also Yrizar 1991, 1992a-d, 1997, and sources therein. 3.1 Standard Basque In standard Basque (euskara batua), with a-stems the final vowel of the stem is deleted before vowel-initial suffixes. In the absolutive, where what we have is alabaa > alaba it is not obvious that the vowel that remains is that of the suffi But this is apparent in other inflected forms such as the ergative plural alabe Other stem-final vowels do not undergo any changes. Standard Basque spelling and pronunciation of vowel sequences is based on the literary tradition of central areas of the Basque Country. Standard Basque (euskara batua) 4 IS UNINFL ABSSG ABSPL c a ak gizon gizona gizonak -a -a -ak alaba alaba alabak -e -ea -eak seme semea semeak -i -ia -iak ogi ogia ogiak -0 -oa -oak asto astoa astoak -u -ua -uak esku eskua eskuak Among present-day local dialects, it appears that only some Lapurdian va- rieties have the same results as standard Basque: Ainhoa (Lapurdi) c a ak gizon gizona gizonak -a -a -ak alaba alaba alabak -e -ea -eak seme semea semeak -i -ia -iak ogi ogia ogiak -0 -oa -oak asto astoa astoak -u -ua -uak esku eskua eskuak In Goizueta (Navarre) the vowel sequences are the same as in standard Basque in the singular, but Second Vowel Deletion applies in the plural: Goizueta (western Navarre) oC a ak gizon gizona gizonak uC a ak egun eguna egunak -a -a -ak alaba alaba alabak -e -ea -ek seme semea semek -i -ia -ik ogi ogia ogfk -0 -oa -ok asto astoa astok -u -ua -uk esku eskua eskuk i 3.2 Literary Bizkaian In western Basque dialects, instead of the reduction aa > a found in central areas, there was a dissimilatory change aa >ea, which is already attested in the first texts from the western area. This dissimilatory change took place in the singular, HUALDE & GAMINDE: VOWEL INTERACTION IN BASQUE 49 but not in the plural, where, instead, the sequence -a + ak was reduced to -ak at a later stage. Literary Bizkaian UNINFL ABSSG ABSPL c a ak gizon gizona gizonak -a -ea -a(a)k alaba alabea alabaak ~ alabak -e -ea -eak seme semea semeak -i -ia -iak ogi ogia ogiak -o -oa -oak asto astoa astoak -u -ua -uak esku eskua eskuak The context for the raising of /a/ is morphological (singular inflection). This can be seen by comparing the ergative singular alabeak with the absolu- tive/ergative plural alabak, cf. also dat sg alabeari vs. dat pi alabari, etc. 3.3 Arratia type Low Vowel Raising: a + a = ea (sg) Low Vowel Assimilation: a — > e I V[ + hi] (C) ARRATIA VALLEY (Dima, Igorre, Zeanuri, etc., also neighboring Zeberio, Southern Bizkaia). This dialect differs from Literary Bizkaian in presenting a rule of Low Vowel Assimilation (cf. 2.1) by which /a/ becomes Id after a high vowel (also with intervening consonants). In the following tables, oC indicates a con- text where the last vowel of the stem is mid or low {Id, lol or /a/) and is followed by a consonant (or more than one consonant). Similarly, to represent consonant- final stems in which the last vowel is high (/i/ or /u/), uC is used as an abbreviation: Arratia (southwestern Bizkaia) 5 oC a ak gison gisona gisonak; uC e ek lagun lagune lagunek -a -ea -ak alaba alabea alabak -e -ea -eak seme semea semeak -i -ie -iek erri errie erriek -o -oa -oak asto astoa astoak -u -ue -uek esku eskue eskuek The accentual pattern given is the one occurring in nonfinal position. In phrase- final position the accent is retracted from the last syllable to the penultimate; e.g., gisona da 'it is the man', gisona dator 'the man is coming', but gisona 'the man'. No accent-shift takes place in the plural. The same forms are found in Mungia, where there is no accent retraction: alaba, alabea, alabak; seme, semea, semeak; idi, idle, idiek; asto, astoa, astoak; katu, katue, katuek. OROZKO (Southern Bizkaia). The forms are almost the same as in Arratia. but (a) the accent regularly falls on the second syllable in sg and pi and (b) u + ak > uek > uik: 50 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1998) Orozko (southwestern Bizkaia) oC a ak gison gisona gisonak uC e ek lagun lagune lagiinek -a -ea -ak alaba alabea alabak -e -ea -eak seme semea semeak -i -ie -iek erri errie erriek -o -oa -oak asto astoa astoak -u -ue -uik esku eskiie eskiiik LEGAZPI (Southern Gipuzkoa). Same as in Arratia in the absolutive singular, but with vowel-final stems the vowel of the suffix assimilates completely to the final vowel of the stem in a close syllable. There is regular post-initial accentua- tion. Legazpi (southern Gipuzkoa) oC a ak gizon gizona gizonak uC e ek lagun lagune lagiinek -a -ea -a(a)k alaba alabea alabak neska neskea neskaak -e -ea -eek seme semea semeek -i -ie -iik erri errie erriik -o -oa -ook asto astoa astook -u -ue -uuk esku eskiie eskiiuk ZEGAMA (Southern Gipuzkoa). Same as Legazpi above, except that there is no assimilation in /e + ak/. In addition, with /-a/-stems, in the singular raising is not consistent. Young speakers tend to reduce the long vowels of plural forms. Zegama (southern Gipuzkoa) 6 oC a ak gizon gizona gizonak uC e ek lagun lagune lagiinek -a -ea -aak neska neskea neskaak -aa -aak alaba alabaa alabaak -e -ea -eak bide bidea bideak -i -ie -iik erri errie erriik -o -oa -ook asto astoa astook -u -ue -uuk esku eskiie eskuuk ZALDIBIA (Southern Gipuzkoa). Same as Legazpia, but the long vowels re- sulting from assimilation in plural forms have been reduced (i.e., the vowel of the. suffix /-ak/ is deleted with vowel-final stems). ft Zaldibia (southern Gipuzkoa) 7 oC a ak gizon gizona gizonak uC e ek lagun lagune lagiinek -a -ea -ak taberna tabernea tabernak -e -ea -ek bide bidea bidek -i -ie -ik erri errie errik -o -oa -ok asto astoa astok -u -ue -uk esku eskue eskuk HUALDE & GAMINDE: VOWEL INTERACTION IN BASQUE 51 3.4 Getxo type This type is found in an area of northern Bizkaia close to Bilbao: Sopela, Gatika, Getxo, Erandio, Berango, Barrika, Gorliz, Lemoiz, Urduliz. It is the result of a fur- ther development in the Arratia system: in all sequences of two vowels the sec- ond one has been deleted (Second Vowel Deletion); e.g., alabea > alabe, astoa > as to. Low Vowel Raising Low Vowel Assimilation Second Vowel Deletion Getxo (northwestern Bizkaia, coast) 8 oC a ak gison gisona gisonak uC e ek lagun lagune lagiinek -a -e -ak alaba alabe alabak -e -e -ek seme seme semek -i -i -ik erri erri errik -o -o -ok asto asto astok -u -u -uk esku esku eskuk 3.5 18th century Markina This is the system found in the writers of the so-called Markina school, including J. A. Moguel, author of Peru Abarca, and also in the translations into the Markina dialect commisioned by L. L. Bonaparte. In Markina there have been important changes since then, but very similar systems are still found in parts of eastern Bizkaia and western Gipuzkoa. This type of alternation is characterized by the following processes: Stem final mid vowels rise to high when followed by another vowel in both singular and plural, and also morpheme-internally (Mid Vowel Raising, 2.3.2). This change also affected the sequence [ea] produced in singular forms of a-final stems: neskaa > neskea > neskia. With /iAfinal and /u/-final stems, a 'consonantized glide' is inserted (2.4.1). In the case of hi. the epenthetic seg- ment historically was probably a nonstrident palatal, which is still found as an epenthetic segment in areas of Gipuzkoa and Navarre presenting this rule. This segment later became a stridend [z] in western Gipuzkoa and Bizkaia, which fi- nally was devoiced to [s] in a large part of the area (devoicing is still an ongoing process in several towns, including Azkoitia). Epenthesis after lul is also found in a large area of Bizkaia, Gipuzkoa, Navarre and Lapurdi in older texts, but this phenomenon has been receding and the epenthetic [|B] has been lost almost eve- rywhere (including present-day Markina). The change has been ua > ufla > ua in most of the area where epenthetic [pj is documented in the 18th and 19th centu- ries. Nowadays too, there are parts of Gipuzkoa where older speakers pronounce -uj5a and younger speakers -ua. Low Vowel Raising Mid Vowel Raising Consonant Epenthesis 52 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998) 18th century Markina (northeastern Bizkaia, coast) a ak gizon lagun alaba seme erri asto esku 3.6 Lekeitio/Deba type This system represents an evolution of the pattern given in 3.5 for 18th Century Markina, where the epenthetical consonant has been lost with w-final stems, and in the pi of a-final stems, the long vowel has been reduced. Lekeitio (northeastern Bizkaia, coast) 9 •a -ia -aak •e -ia -iak ■i -iza -izak -ua -uak •u -uba -ubak gizona laguna alabia semia erriza astua eskuba gizonak lagunak alabaak semiak errizak astuak eskubak (b = [B]) -C ak -a -ia ak -e -ia -iak -i -iza -izak -0 -oa -uak -u -ua -uak gixona gixonak laguna lagunak alabia alabak semia semiak erriza errizak astua astuak eskua eskiiak gixon lagun alaba seme erri asto esku The same results, but with devoicing of z > s (and different accentual sys- tems), are found in the Deba Valley of western Gipuzkoa (Eibar, Bergara, An- tzuola, Elgoibar, Onati). 10 ONATI. This system differs from Lekeitio in that, (a) [z] has been devoiced to x [s], and (b) the sequence -aa- has been preserved in the plural (but is in the process of being lost when unaccented in the speech of younger speakers). Onati (southwestern Gipuzkoa) oC a ak gison gisona gisonak uC a ak lagun laguna lagunak -a -ia -aak alaba alabia alabaak -e -ia -iak seme semia semiak -i -ixa -ixak erri errixa errixak -0 -ua -uak asto astua astuak -u -ua -uak esku eskua eskiiak ANTZUOLA. Same as Onati, without long vowels in the plural of a-final stems (and a different accentual system). A Antzuola (southwestern Gipuzkoa) oC a ak gison gisona gisonak uC a ak lagun laguna lagunak -a -ia -ak alaba alabia alabak -e -ia -iak seme semia semiak -i -ixa -ixak erri errixa errixak -0 -ua -uak asto astiia astuak -u -ua -uak esku eskua eskuak HUALDE & GAMINDE: VOWEL INTERACTION IN BASQUE 53 I For the accentual pattern cf. Hualde 1997a. The general rule is penultimate accent, but in plural forms the accent appears two syllables before the suffix. The same vowel sequences as in Antzuola are found in Bergara, Deba, Elgoibar, Elor- rio, Itziar, Mutriku. The accentual systems vary considerably within this area. ELORRIO, Elgoibar. In these dialects the vowel patterns are the same as in Antzuola, but the accent is postinitial in sg and pi.: Elorrio (southeastern Bizkaia)" oC a ak gison gisona gisonak uC a ak lagun lagiina lagunak -a -ia -ak alaba alabia alabak -e -ia -iak seme semia semfak -i -ixa -ixak erri errixa errfxak -o -ua -uak asto astiia astuak -u -ua -uak esku eskiia eskiiak MUTRIKU. Same vowel patterns, accent is final in sg and penultimate in pi. Mutriku (northwestern Gipuzkoa, coast) gixon lagun alaba seme erri asto esku 3.7 oC a ak uC a ak -a -ia -ak -e -ia -iak -i -ixa -ixak -0 -ua -uak -u neo -ua type -uak gixona gixonak laguna lagunak alabia alabak semia semfak errixa errfxak astua astuak eskua eskuak This general system differs from the Lekeitio type (3.6) in having added the proc- ess of Low Vowel Assimilation. Low Vowel Raising Consonant Epenthesis Mid Vowel Raising Low Vowel Assimilation BERMEO (Bizkaian coast, also Busturia, Murueta) Bermeo (northcentral Bizkaia, coast) oC a ak gison gisona gisonak uC e ek lagun lagune lagiinek -a -ie -ak alaba alabie alabak -e -ie -iek seme semie semiek -i -ize -izek erri errize errfzek -o -ue -uek asto astue astiiek -u -ue -uek esku eskue eskiiek The same patterns are found in other northern Bizkaian areas, such as Bus- turia and Murueta. The translation into the Bermeo dialect of La doctrina cris- tiana, commissioned by L. L. Bonaparte and published in 1862-64 (reprinted in 5 4 STUDIES IN THE LINGUISTIC SCIENCES 28: 1 (SPRING 1998) Bonaparte 1991:11.45-60) shows that at that time the dialect had not acquired Low Vowel Assimilation. That is, the facts were as in present-day Lekeitio (3.6). This situation is still found in neighboring Mundaka. In Bermeo, accent is generally phrase-final, but plural suffixes are preac- centing. In the towns of Arteaga and Nabarriz the same system is found as in Bermeo, but in the plural the accent is retracted two syllables: gixond, gixonak; lagune, lagunek; alabie, aldbak; semie, semiek; errize, errizek; astue, cist nek; £ eskue, eskuek} 1 ^ EA. Same system as in Bermeo, but unmarked accent is penultimate instead of final and in the plural it has also been retracted: gisona, gisonak; txakurre, txdkurrek; alaba, alabie, aldbak; seme, semie, semiek; ardi, ardize, drdizek; asto, astue, dstuek; katu, katue, kdtuek. Gizaburuaga is also like Ea but accent retraction in the plural is less systematic. OTXANDIO, Euba, Iurreta, Berriz, Oleta, Nafarrate, Elosu: same as Bermeo, but accent falls on the second syllable in sg and pi (unless the 2nd syllable is the final one).: gisona, gisonak; lagune, lagunek; alabie, aldbak; semie, semiek; er- rize, errizek; astue, astuek; eskue, eskuek. Aramaio is also like this, but with de- voicing of z: errixe. ARAMAIO (Araba/Alava). Same as Bermeo, but zhas been devoiced to .v [s]. The accent falls on the second syllable unless it is the final syllable of the word. Aramaio (Araba) 13 oC a ak gison gisona gisonak uC e ek lagun lagune lagunek -a -ie -ak alaba alabie alabak -e -ie -iek seme semie semiek -i -ixe -ixek erri errixe errixek -o -ue -uek asto astue astuek -u -ue -uek esku eskue eskuek In rural areas of Arrasate, we find the same patterns as in Aramaio. In the ur- ban center, forms like neskia, semia, errixa, etc., without Low Vowel Assimilation, are found instead, but it appears that Low Vowel Assimilation is progressively spreading to the Arrasate urban center as well, and some speakers produce both assimilated and nonassimilated forms. 14 ABADINO. Same as Bermeo, but accent falls on 2nd in sg and 1st in pi: gisona, gisonak; lagune, lagunek; alabie, alabak; semie, semiek; errize, er- A rizek; astue, dstuek; eskue, eskuek. AZKOmA. Same as Bermeo, but with optional Second Vowel Deletion in closed syllables. Some speakers of this variety devoice [z] to [s]. Incidentally, a peculiar feature of this dialect is that the distinction between apico-alveolar s and laminal z has been lost in favor of z, whereas all other dialects that have lost the contrast (all Bizkaian and many Gipuzkoan varieties) have only apico-alveolar s. 15 Hualde & Gaminde: Vowel interaction in Basque 55 Azkoitia (central Gipuzkoa) oC a ak gizon gizona gizonak uC e ek lagun lagune lagunek -a -ie -ak alaba alabie alabak -e -ie -i(e)k zeme zemie zemi(e)k -i -ize -izek erri errize errizek -o -ue -u(e)k asto astue astu(e)k -u -ue -u(e)k esku eskue esku(e)k AZPEITIA, Urrestilla. Same as Azkoitia , but the epenthetic segment with i- final stems is the nonstrident palatal -y- (in the plural the accent is retracted only one syllable). Azpeitia (central Gipuzkoa) oC a ak gizon gizona gizonak uC e ek lagun lagune lagunek -a -ie -ak neska neskie neskak -e -ie -i(e)k seme semie semiek -i -iye -iyek erri erriye erriyek -o -ue -u(e)k asto astue astuek -u -ue -u(e)k esku eskue eskuek 3.8 Gernika type The only difference with respect to the Bermeo system is that the etymological sequence /o + a/ remains unaltered as [oa] (instead of becoming [ue]). That is. Mid Vowel Raising affects e-final stems, but not o-final stems. Low Vowel Raising Consonant Epenthesis (with /-final stems) Mid Vowel Raising (only with f-final stems) Low Vowel Assimilation This system is found in towns of the Gernika area such as Arratzu, Muxika, Forua, Errigoitia, Fruiz and Bakio. The accentual system is as in Bermeo (3.7). Arratzu (Gernika, northcentral Bizkaia) 16 oC a ak gixon gixona gixonak uC e ek lagun lagune lagunek -a -ie -ak alaba alabie alabak -e -ie -iek seme semie semiek -i -ize -izek erri errize errizek -o -oa -oak asto astoa astoak -u -ue -uek esku eskue eskuek ZOLLO. In this dialect we find the same sequences as in Arratzu, but the ac- centual system is different. The accent falls on the second syllable in sg and pi: gisona, gisonak; lagune, lagunek; alabie, alabak; semie, semiek; errize, errizek; astoa, astoak; eskue, eskuek. 56 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1998) 3.9 Ondarroa/Elantxobe type This is an evolution of the Bermeo type (3.7), characterized by the further change represented by the loss of final [e] in hiatus. Low Vowel Raising Consonant Epenthesis Mid Vowel Raising (only with e-final stems) Low Vowel Assimilation | Second Vowel Deletion Elantxobe (northcentral Bizkaia, coast) 17 oC a ak gixon gixona gixonak uC e ek lagun lagune lagunek -a -i -ak alaba alabi alabak -e -i -ik seme semi semik -i -ize -izek erri errize errfzek -o -u -uk asto astu astuk -u -u -uk esku esku eskuk MUNITIBAR. Same sequences as in Elantxobe. An accentual difference is that in the plural, the accent is retracted one more syllable: gison, gisona, gisonak; lagun, lagune, lagunek; aldba, alabi, alabak; seme, semi, semik; erri, errize, errizek; asto, astu, astuk; esku, esku, eskuk. In Berriatua we find the same forms as in Munitibar but with devoicing of z: errixe. The same system as in Elan- txobe is also found in Aulestia (with some accentual differences). ONDARROA. Same as Elantxobe, but (a) with devocing of z, and (b) Low Vowel Assimilation only affects word-final vowels (and thus it does not apply in the plurals lagunak, errixak): Ondarroa (northeastern Bizkaia, coast) 18 oC a ak gixon gixona gixonak uC e ak lagun lagune lagunak -a -i -ak alaba alabi alabak -e -i -ik seme semi semik -i -ixe -ixek erri errixe errixak -0 -u -uk asto astu astuk -u -u -uk esku/o esku eskuk In Ondarroa, the distinction between o-stems and w-stems has been lost to a great extent. 3.10 Larrauri type This system differs from the Gernika type (3.8) in that Low Vowel Assimilation does not apply in the sequences of e-final and a-final stems, which have singular forms in -ia, and not -ie. From a synchronic point of view, the interaction between Low Vowel Assimilation and Mid Vowel Raising is opaque in a generative analy- sis. It must be the case that this dialect acquired Low Vowel Assimilation before Mid Vowel Raising. t Hualde & Gaminde: Vowel interaction in Basque 57 Low Vowel Raising Low Vowel Assimilation Consonant Epenthesis (i-final stems) Mid Vowel Raising (e-final stems) Larrauri (western Bizkaia) I oC a ak gixon gixona gixonak uC e ek lagun lagune lagunek -a -ia -ak neska neskia neskak -e -ia -iak abade abadia abadiak -i -ize -izek idi idize idfzek -o -oa -oak asto astoa astoak -u -ue -uek esku eskue eskuek As indicated, it must be the case that historically Low Vowel Assimilation preceded the raising of [e]: Stage 1: abadea eskua Stage 2: LVA abadea eskue Stage 3: MVR abadia eskue The same system is also found in neighboring Menaka. LEZAMA. Same as Larrauri, but without Consonant Epenthesis. Lezama (western Bizkaia) oC a ak gixon gixona gixonak uC e ek lagun lagune lagunek -a -ia -ak alaba alabia alabak -e -ia -iak seme semia semfak -i -ie -ie erri errie erriek -o -oa -oa asto astoa astoak -u -ue -ue esku eskiie eskuek 3.11 Errezil > This system, found in the dialect of Errezil in the Urola valley of central Gipuzkoa. presents a couple of peculiarities with respect to those of other towns of the same valley (Azkoitia, Azpeitia, seen above in 3.7). First of all, it does not have Conso- nant Epenthesis with /-final stems. Secondly, it has acquired a process of Second Vowel Deletion, with all vowel-final stems in the pi, but only with stems ending in a high vowel in the sg. Errezil (central Gipuzkoa) oC a ak gizon gizona gizonak uC a ak txakur txakurra txakiirrak -a -ia -ak neska neskia neskak -e -ia -ek seme semia scmek -i -i -ik erri erri errik -0 -ua -uk asto astiia astuk -u -u -uak esku esku eskuk 58 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1998) 3.12 Urdiain Urdiain is one of the very few Navarrese towns to which the dissimilatory change aa > ea spread. There is also Mid Vowel Raising, so that, subsequently, ea > ia and oa > ua. Consonant Epenthesis with both /-final and w-final stems applies as an optional process. Low Vowel Assimilation applies in the plural (and, in general, in closed syllables). Low Vowel Raising (Consonant Epenthesis) Mid Vowel Raising Low Vowel Assimilation (only in closed syllables) Urdiain (western Navarre) 19 # oC a ak gizon gizona gizonak uC a ek lagun laguna lagunek -a -ia -ak alaba alabia alabak -e -ia -iek seme semia semiek -i -ia -iek erri erri(y)a erri(y)ek -0 -ua -uek asto astua astiiek -u -ua -uek esku esku(b)a esku(b)ek 3.13 Zumaia type In a few towns between the western area where aa > ea and the central area where aa > a, the original -aa sequence is preserved unchanged. In Zumaia, the double -aa is maintained when accented as in neskda, but it is usually shortened if unaccented. This is the only peculiarity of this system. Other than that, there is Consonant Epenthesis with /-final stems and Mid Vowel Raising, as in other western Gipuzkoan varieties. Zumaia (northcentral Gipuzkoa, coast) 20 oC a ak gison gisona gisonak uC a ak lagun laguna lagiinak -a -aa -aak neska neskaa neskaak alaba alaba alabak -e -ia -iak seme semia semiak -i -ixa -ixak erri errixa errixak -0 -ua -uak asto astiia astuak -u -ua -uak esku eskiia eskiiak The same situation is also found in Getaria (where the epenthetic segment with /-final stems has not been devoiced: erriza, errizak). 3.14 Zarautz type This is the typical northern Gipuzkoan system. As in the Lekeitio/Deba type (3.6), found to its west, there is Mid Vowel Raising and Consonant Epenthesis with /- final stems. There are, however, two differences that serve to separate this north- ern Gipuzkoan system from western types: (a) with a-final stems we do not find the western disimilation ea > aa, but simple reduction aa >a (although in Zarautz c I HUALDE & GAMINDE: VOWEL INTERACTION IN BASQUE 5 9 the oldest speakers maintain the etymological geminate vowel -act when stressed, as in Zumaia; e.g., neskda ~ neskd); (b) the epenthetic consonant with /-final stems is a nonstrident palatal, written -y-, and not the strident prepalatal -z- ~ -s-. As was already mentioned, in at least a large part of this territory, there used to be epenthesis with M-final stems as well. This is still found as a receding feature in some areas. Low Vowel Contraction: aa > a Consonant Epenthesis: ia > iya Mid Vowel Raising: ea > ia, oa > ua Zarautz (northcentral Gipuzkoa, coast) oC a ak gizon gizona gizonak uC a ak lagun lag una lagunak -a -a -ak alaba alaba alabak -e -ia -iak seme semia semiak -i -iya -iyak erri erriya erriyak -o -ua -uak asto astua astuak -u -ua -uak esku cskiia eskuak In Zestoa, the same patterns are found, with the difference that the accent is not consistently retracted in the pi. USURBIL provides an example of a variety with the same vowel sequences as in Zarautz, but the general accentual pattern is post-initial both in the singular and in the plural: Usurbil (northeastern Gipuzkoa) 21 oC a ak gizon gizona gizonak uC a ak lagun lag una lagiinak -a -a -ak alaba alaba alabak -e -ia -iak seme semia semiak -i -iya -iyak erri erri) a erriyak -o -ua -uak asto astua astuak -u -ua -uak esku cskiia eskiiak > The same patterns are also found in Hondarribia, lor instance." LARRAUL, Urnieta. Same patterns as in Zarautz, with the only difference that in the plural of /-stems there is no Consonant Epenthesis; rather, with stems ending in a high vowel, the vowel sequence is reduced by Second Vowel Dele- tion in the plural. Larraul (east-central Gipuzkoa) oC a ak gizon gizona gizonak uC a ak lagun laguna lagunak -a -a -ak alaba alaba alabak -e -ia -iak seme semia scmiak -i -iya -ik erri erriya errik -o -ua -uak asto astua astuak -u -ua -uk esku esku a eskuk 60 STUDIES IN THE LINGUISTIC SCIENCES 28: 1 (SPRING 1998) ORIO. In this variety, the treatment of sequences in the singular and the plu- ral differs even more radically than in Larraul and Urnieta. Neither Consonant Epenthesis nor Mid Vowel Raising applies in the plural (although both rules ap- ply in the singular). Instead all vowel sequences are reduced by Second Vowel Deletion in the plural. Orio (northcentral Gipuzkoa, coast) 23 oC a ak gizon gizona gizonak uC a ak lagun laguna lagunak -a -a -ak alaba alaba alabak -e -ia -ek seme semia semek -i -iya -ik erri erriya errik -o -ua -ok asto astua astok -u -ua -uk esku esku a eskuk ARANO. In this Navarrese town on the Gipuzkoan border, we find the Zarautz-type pattern in the singular. In the plural, sequences are reduced by Sec- ond Vowel Deletion, as in Orio immediately above, but Mid Vowel Raising ap- plies: -eak > -iak > -ik. (In a generative description, Mid Vowel Raising would be ordered before Second Vowel Deletion): Arano (western Navarre) oC a ak gizon gizona gizonak uC a ak egun eguna egunak -a -a -ak alaba alaba alabak -e -ia -ik seme semia semflc -i -iya -ik ogi ogiya ogik -o -ua -uk asto astua astuk -u -ua -uk esku eskiia eskuk 3.15 Alegia type This is the Gipuzkoan counterpart of the western Arratia type (3.3). As in Arratia, there is Low Vowel Assimilation, but no Mid Vowel Raising or Consonant Epen- thesis. The difference between both systems is found in a-final stems: 24 Low Vowel Contraction Low Vowel Assimilation In addition, in Alegia Second Vowel Deletion applies in the plural. Alegia (east-central Gipuzkoa) oC a ak gizon gizona gizonak uC e ek txakur txakurre txakurrek -a -ea -ak alaba alaba alabak -e -ea -ek seme semea semek -i -ie -ik erri errie errik -o -oa -ok asto astoa astok -u -ue -uk esku eskue eskuk t HUALDE & GAMINDE: VOWEL INTERACTION IN BASQUE LIZARTZA. The same patterns are also found in this dialect, with the differ- ence that Second Vowel Deletion applies in the plural of stems ending in a high vowel, but not with stems ending in a mid vowel; that is: -iek > -ik, -nek > -uk. but -eok, -oak are left unchanged. 61 ► Lizartza (east-central Gipuzkoa) oC a ak gizon gizona gizonak LlC e ek txakur txakurre txakiirrek -a -a -ak alaba alaba alabak -e -ea -eak seme semea semeak -i -ie -ik erri errie errik -o -oa -oak asto astoa astoak -Ll -ue -uk esku eskue eskuk 3.16 Etxarri type This system shows Consonant Epenthesis with stems ending in both high vowels. Mid Vowel Raising, and Low Vowel Assimilation. Low Vowel Contraction Consonant Epenthesis Mid Vowel Raising Low Vowel Assimilation Etxarri ( western Navarre) 1 ^ oC a ak gizon gizona gizonak uC e ek lagun lagune lagunek -a -a -ak alaba alaba alabak -e -ie -iek seme semfe semiek -i -iye -iyek em eiriye errfyek -o -ue -uek asto astiie astiiek -Li -ube -ubek esku eskube eskiibek 3.17 Eizarraga type Perhaps the most important High Navarrese innovation, which allows us to char- acterize most of the varieties of this territory (excluding the westernmost Navar- rese area), is the realization in a diphthong of sequences that are realized in hiatus in other dialects. Generally speaking, in High Navarrese varieties stem-final mid vowels become glides in inflected forms. In some varieties (but not all) stem-final high vowels also glide. The Lizarraga type is a subtype of this general High Navarrese type. In Lizarraga there is a maximal distinction between inflected forms of sienis ending in mid vowels and in high vowels: whereas stem-final mid vowels are re alized as glides before vowel-initial suffixes, with stems ending in a high vowel there is Consonant Epenthesis. It must he the case that historically Consonant Insertion was acquired before Gliding. In addition. Low Vowel Assimilation ap- plies in this dialect. 62 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1998) Low Vowel Contraction Consonant Epenthesis Gliding Low Vowel Assimilation Lizarraga (western Navarre). oC a ak gizon gizona gizonak uC e ek lagun lagune lagunek -a -a -ak alaba alaba alabak -e -ie -jek seme semie semiek -i -iye -iyek erri erriye erriyek -o -ue -uek asto astue astuek -u -ube -ubek esku eskube eskubek 3.18 Ultzama type In the dialect spoken in the Ultzama valley of the central Navarrese area, stems ending in mid vowels and high vowels also show very different sequences in in- flected forms. The patterns are different from those of Lizarraga (immediately above). There is Gliding with stems ending in a mid vowel, but stem-final high vowels are syllabic in inflected forms. Unlike in Lizarraga, there is no Consonant Epenthesis. On the other hand, Low Vowel Assimilation applies with stems end- ing in a high vowel, but not with stems ending in a mid-vowel, even if these mid vowels are realized as high glides (thus creating surface opacity in a generative analysis). Low Vowel Contraction Low Vowel Assimilation Gliding Ultzama (central Navarre) 26 oC a ak gizon gizona gizonak uC e ek egun egune egiinek -a -a -ak alaba alaba alabak -e -ja -jak seme semia semiak -i -ie -iek ogi ogie ogfek -0 -ue -uek otso otsua otsuak -u -ue -uek esku eskue eskuek The fact that mid vowels glide but high vowels do not is remarkable. The explanation may be that at the point the Gliding process was adopted, stem-final high vowels triggered Consonant Epenthesis (as in Lizarraga), which prevented^ their gliding. These epenthetic consonants were later lost. A possible historical evolution is the following: Stage 1: semea ogia Stage 2: LVA semea ogie Stage 3 CEp semea ogiye Stage 4: Gliding semea ogiye Stage 5 loss of CEp semea ~ semia ogie HUALDE & GAMINDE: VOWEL INTERACTION IN BASQUE 6 3 oC a ak u C e ek -a -a -ak -e -ea -eak -i -ie -ik -o -oa -oak -u -ue -uk gizona gizonak egune egunek alabak alabak semea semeak obie obik otsoa otsoak eskue eskuk ETXALEKU. In this neighboring variety, the patterns are similar to those of the Ultzama dialect, with some minor differences: (a) in the plural. Second Vowel Deletion applies with stems ending in a high vowel; (b) the result of Gliding is normally a nonsyllabic mid vocoid [e], [o]: Etxaleku gizon egun alaba seme obi otso esku 3.19 Basaburua type In this Navarrese system, the vowel of the suffix completely assimilates to the pre- ceding vowel with c-final. /-final, and //-final stems (Total Progressive Assimila- tion). With f-final stems the evolution has been ea > ia (> ie) > ii. On the other hand, the sequence -oa remains unchanged. This is reminiscent of the Gernika- type situation. This dialect also shows the effects of Low Vowel Assimilation, but only with consonant-final stems. Low Vowel Contraction Low Vowel Assimilation Mid Vowel Raising (only e-final stems) Total Progressive Assimilation Basaburua Vallev (central Navarre) oC a ak gizon gizona gizonak LlC e ek egun egune egunek -a -a -ak alaba alaba alabak -e -ii -ik seme semii semik -i -ii -ik obi 6b ii obik -o -oa -oak otso otsoa otsoak -u -LIU -uk esku eskuu eskuk In part of Basaburua (Arrarats), some stems in -a optionally end in -/'/' in the absolutive singular and in -ik in the absolutive plural. An -/' ending instead ol' -a is also used optionally with some consonant-final nouns, mostly borrowings: kartii ~ karta pastillii ~ pastilla ospitali ~ ospitala It appears that -i (the result of Total Progressive Assimilation with stems ending in a front vowel) is starting to compete with -// as the unmarked form ol the determiner suffix in this dialect. aC -ii -iik karta (-a -ak) pastilla -i -ik ospital kartik ~ kartak pastillik ~ pastillak ospitalik ~ ospitalak 'letter' •pill 'hospital' 6 4 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1998) 3.20 Beruete This is essentially the same system as in Basaburua (Beruete is a town in the Basaburua Valley), with the only difference that this dialect does not have Mid Vowel Raising in the singular and, consequently, with e-final stems Total Progres- sive Assimilation produces -ee. The only different with respect to the Basaburua system (3.19) is thus in the behavior of e-final stems. Low Vowel Contraction Low Vowel Assimilation Total Progressive Assimilation Beruete (central Navarre) « oC a ak gizon gizona gizonak uC e ek egun egune egunek -a -a -ak alaba alaba alabak -e -ee -ik seme semee semik -i -ii -ik obi obii obik -o -oa -oak otso otsoa otsoak -u -uu -uk esku eskuu eskuk 3.21 Baztan type In this system both high and mid stem-final vowels lose their syllabicity in vowel sequences. In careful speech, nonsyllabic mid vowels may not rise: semja ~ semea, otsua ~ otsoa. As in Ultzama (3.18), Low Vowel Assimilation applies with stems ending in a high vowel, but not with those ending in a mid vowel. Low Vowel Contraction Low Vowel Assimilation Gliding (both mid and high vowels) Baztan Valley (northern Navarre) 27 oC a ak gizon gizona gizonak uC e ek egun egune egunek -a -a -ak alaba alaba alabak -e -ja -jak seme semja semiak -i -je -iek ogi ogje ogiek -0 -ua -yak otso otsua otsuak -u -ue -uek esku eskue eskuek The same system is found in the Esteribar Valley, to the east of Baztan. . 3.22 Aezkoa type In Aezkoa, vowel sequences are for the most part left unmodified. Unlike in Baztan (3.21), there is no Low Vowel Assimilation. As in Baztan, hiatus is avoided by gliding. Low Vowel Contraction Gliding (both mid and high vowels) HUALDE & GAMINDE: VOWEL INTERACTION IN BASQUE Aezkoa (northeastern Navarre) 28 65 » oC a ak gizon gizona gizonak uC a ak egun egiina egunak -a -a -ak alaba alaba alabak -e -ea -eak seme semea semeak -i -ja -jak ogi ogi a ogiak -o -oa -oak otso otsoa otsoak -u -ua -uak esku eskua eskuak 3.23 Zaraitzu (Salazar) What characterizes the resolution of vowel sequences in the dialect of Salazar, or Zaraitzu, is that in the absolutive singular of a-final stems, instead of contraction there is an epenthetic segment -r-\ alabaa > alabara. Otherwise, we find the same results as in Aezkoa. The gliding of mid vowels may result in mid or high glides. Epenthesis a + a > ara Gliding (both mid and high vowels) Zaraitzu (Salazar, northeastern Navarre) 29 oC a ak gizon gizona gizonak uC a ak egun egiina egunak -a -ara -ak alaba alabara alabak -e -ea -eak seme semea semeak -ja -jak semja semjak -i -ja -jak ogi ogja ogjak -0 -oa -oak otso otsoa otsoak -ua -yak otsua otsuak -u -ua -uak esku eskua eskuak 3.24 Erronkari (Roncal) The extinct dialect spoken until recently in the Roncal Valley (in the north- easternmost corner of Navarre) was characterized by two features regarding vowel sequences that set it apart from the dialects of Aezkoa and Zaraitzu/ Salazar: (a) with a-final stems there is contraction, but uninflected and absolutive singular forms are not identical, because contraction produces contrastive oxy- tonic stress: alabaa > alaba (vs. alaba, uninflected) ; (b) u fronts and unrounds in prevocalic position Low Vowel Contraction: -aa > -a Unrounding: ua > ia Gliding (both mid and high vowels) The first of these to changes are shared with its northern neighbor Zuberoan (3.25), whereas Gliding (the change from hiatus to diphthong), which Zuberoan does not share, is a feature shared with other Navarrese varieties (Zaraitzu, Aezkoa, Baztan). It is likely that the last change is more recent in Roncalese and reflects a change in patterns of interaction with speakers of other varieties. 66 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: l (Spring 1998) Erronkari (Roncal, northeastern Navarre) 30 oC a ak gizon gizona gizonak uC a ak egun eguna egunak -a -a -ak alaba alaba alabak -e -ja -jak seme semja semjak -ea -eak semea semeak -i -ja -jak ogi ogia ogjak -0 -ua -yak otso otsua otsuak -oa -oak otsoa otsoak -u -ia -iak esku eskia eskiak • In southern Erronkari, stems in -u gave rise to a complex triphthong [-jwa]: esku, eskjua, and a variant -ioa is also attested. 3.25 Zuberoa (Soule) The northeastern Zuberoan dialect underwent a change by which u > ii in most positions. 31 This ii is unrounded to /' in prevocalic position: ua > ia. This dialect also has Mid Vowel Raising. A result of this combination of changes is that /'-final, w-final and e-final stems all produce a sequence -ia in the singular and plural. Stem-final vowels maintain their syllabicity in vowel sequences in Zuberoan, un- like in its neighbors south of the Pyrenees. As in Roncal/Erronkari Low Vowel Contraction produces oxytonic stress, against the regular paroxytonic pattern of this dialect. Low Vowel Contration: -aa > -a Unrounding: -Ua > -ia Mid Vowel Raising Zuberoa (Soule) 32 c a ak gizun gizuna giziinak -a -a -ak alhaba alhaba alhabak -e -ia -iak seme semia semiak -i -ia -iak mendi mendia mendiak -o -ua -uak asto astua astiia -ii -ia -iak eskii eskia eskiak Plural forms other than the absolutive have final stress: gizunek 'the men, eg pi', , gizuner 'to the men, dat pl\ semiek 'the sons, erg pl\ semier 'to the sons, dat pi'. 3.26 Sara type Wk In this dialect area of the Lapurdian inland region, as in Ultzama (3.18), mid vow- els lose their syllabicity in prevocalic inflectional contexts but high vowels do not. Nonsyllabic vocoids may be realized as mid or high glides: ea ~ ia, oa ~ ua. Low Vowel Contraction Gliding (only mid vowels) HUALDE & GAMINDE: VOWEL INTERACTION IN BASQUE Sara (Lapurdi inland region)" 67 c a ak gizon gizona gizonak -a -a -ak alaba alaba alabak -e -ea -eak seme semea semeak -ja -jak semja semjak -i -ia -iak mendi mendfa mendfak -0 -oa -oak asto astoa astoak -ua -yak astua astuak -Ll -ua -uak esku eskua eskuak As mentioned for Ultzama. the explanation for the lack of gliding with stems ending in a high vowel may be that at the relevant historical point when Gliding was introduced, there was Consonant Epenthesis in inflected forms of stems end- ing in a high vowel. The same results are also found in Biriatu and Ahetze. 3.27 Beskoitze type Here we group a number of Lapurdian systems of alternations that only differ from the Sara type in that the sequence u + a is modified in one of several ways: u + aua Sara esku/eskiia ua Lekorne esku/eskiia ia U repel esku/eskia uya Beskoitze esku/eskuya UREPEL. Like Sara but u + a - = ia Urepel (Low Navarre) C a ak gizon gizona gizonak -a -a -ak alaba alaba alabak -e -ea -eak seme semea semeak -i -ia -iak mendi mendfa mendfak -o -oa -oak asto astoa astoak -u -ia -iak esku eskia eskfak BESKOITZE. Like Sara, but u + a = uya. The same forms are also found in Milafranga and Mugerre, but with a greater tendency for o + a = ua. Beskoitze (Lapurdi) c a ak gizon gizona gizonak -a -a -ak alaba alaba alabak -e -ja -jak seme semja semjak -i -ia -iak mendi mendfa mendfak -o -oa -oak asto astoa astoak -u -ua -uak esku eskuya eskiiyak 3.28 Arbona This system differs from Sara in that there is Gliding only in e + a - ja. but o + a 68 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1998) Arbona (Lapurdi) c a ak gizon gizona gizonak -a -a -ak alaba alaba alabak -e -ja -jak seme semia semiak -i -ia -iak ogi ogfa ogiak -o -ua -uak asto astiia astuak -u -ua -uak esku eskiia eskuak 3.29 Aiherra (Low Navarre) This is a common system in the Low Navarrese area. It is found in Aiherra, Arboti, Armendaritze, Gabadi, Ilharre and Oragarre. As in Aezkoa (3.22), all stem-final vowels glide in vowel-initial inflected forms. In addition, stem-final -u produces -ia Low Vowel Contraction Gliding (both high and mid vowels) Unrounding: -ua > -ia Aiherra (Low Navarre) « c a ak gizon gizona gizonak -a -a -ak alaba alaba alabak -e -ja -jak seme semia semjak -i -ja -jak ogi ogj a ogiak -0 -ua -uak otso otsua otsuak -oa -oak otsoa otsoak -u -ia -iak esku eskia eskiak In some towns of this area, e + a = ja , o + a = ua appear to be systematic. In other towns, the raising on nonsyllabic mid vowels is less consistent. In Arboti, e + a = ja, but o + a = oa. 4. A note on the spread of sound changes The historical record shows that whereas some of the processes affecting vowel sequences have spread considerably during the last few centuries, some others have been lost in much of their former territory. A process that has lost much ground is Consonant Epenthesis in u + V sequences. When L. L. Bonaparte be- gan the systematic study of Basque dialects, this process was found over much of Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa, and also in areas of Navarre and Lapurdi. Nowadays, it is only found in a small area of Navarre and, as a receding process, in some northern^ Gipuzkoan towns. On the other hand, the process of Low Vowel Assimilation hasBJ spread noticeably during this same period. One of the best-documented varieties is that of Markina, for which, besides present-day data, we have Rollo's 1925 description and several earlier literary works, including J. A. Moguel's Peru Abarca, written around 1800. The treat- ment of vowel sequences in this variety has changed rather strikingly in the time for which we possess a historical record. The system found in Peru Abarca is the following: HUALDE & GAMINDE: VOWEL INTERACTION IN BASQUE 6 9 t Markina aroun id 1800 -c a ak gizon gizona gizonak lagun laguna lagunak -a -ia -aak alaba a labia alabaak -e -ia -iak seme semi a semiak -i -iza -izak eni erriza errizak -0 -ua -Liak ask) astna astuak -LI -ub a -Lihak esku eskuba eskubak Some fifty years later, the sequence -aak of the plural forms of a-final stems had been reduced, if we are to trust J. A. Uriarte's translation o\~ Salomon's Song into the Markina dialect. Bonaparte (1869:xxxi, In. 9 [1991, 1.259]) informs us that in forms such as eskuba the -b- could be deleted ("quoique phis rarement') in the variety of Markina at the time. Rollo's 1925 study shows that by the beginning of the 20th century, the following changes have taken place: (a) Epenthetic -b- has been lost. (b) Epenthetic -z- has been devoiced to -x- |s|. (c) The dialect has acquired Low Vowel Assimilation. Markina around 1900 oC a ak gixon gixona gixonak uC e ek lag u.n lagune lagunek -a -ie -ak alaba alabie alabak -e -ie -lek seme semie semiek -i -ixe -ixek erri errixe errixek -0 -ue -uek asto astue astuek -u -ue -uek esku eskue eskuek I Since then, a new change has been acquired: Second Vowel Deletion. This is still an optional process, which is favored by younger speakers. The forms found in present-day Markina are the following, where vowels in parenthesis are optionally (but frequently) deleted: Markina, present day gixon lagun alaba seme erri asto esku A related phenomenon is the partial loss of the etymological distinction be- tween (/-final and //-final stems, so thai in the uninflected form, variants such a esko, bum, etc. are heard. This has obviously been caused by the lack ol differen- tiation that these stems show m inflected forms. oC a ak LlC e ek -a -ie -ak -e -i(e) -i(e)k -i -ixe -ixek -o -ii(e) -u(e)k -Ll -u(e) -uieik gixona. gixonak lag line lagunek alabi(e) alabak semiiei semilelk errixe errixek astu(e) astute )k esku(e) eskm e |k 7 STUDIES IN THE LINGUISTIC SCIENCES 28: 1 (SPRING 1998) To give another interesting example, it appears that in the 19th century in the dialect spoken in rural areas of Orozko, Bizkaia, a bilabial nasal -m- was epen- thesized with stems ending in /-of; e.g.,: olio 'chicken', olloma 'the chicken', arto 'com', artoma 'the corn' (Bonaparte 1862:33-34, 1869:xxxi, fn. 9 [1991, 1.259], cf. also Elordui 1995). Nowadays there is no trace of this phenomenon, which, apparently, was already stigmatized and receding at the time. From all of this, it could be concluded that there is great instability in the^ treatment of vowel sequences. However, there are also signs of conservatism. The^ u + a = uya rule employed by the first book written in Basque, Linguae Vas- conum Primitiae 1545, by the Low Navarrese writer Bernard Dechepare, is still used in Low Navarre, four centuries later. NOTES * We are very grateful to Koldo Zuazo for his comments and to Elmer Antonsen for his editorial advice. 1 Orthographic correspondences, ii = IPA [y], s = voiceless apico-alveolar frica- tive, z = voiceless laminal fricative, x = [j], at = alveolar rhotic trill, r - alveolar rhotic flap in intervocalic position, // = palatal lateral, n - palatal nasal. 2 More precisely, as Zuazo (1998:213) indicates, this assimilation is found in all of Bizkaia (except for Mundaka, Lekeitio, Ermua, and Elorrio), in Araba, in all of southern Gipuzkoa, and in a large area of Navarre west of Aezkoa. On the other hand, there is no trace of this phenomenon in the northern dialects. 3 And, less consistently, also in neighboring Lakuntza and Arruazu. 4 In the paradigms in this section, the following examples are used: gizon 'man', lagun 'friend', txakur ~ zakur 'dog', alaba 'daughter', neska 'girl', seme 'son', ogi 'bread', mendi 'mountain', (h)erri 'village, country', asto 'donkey', baso 'forest', beso 'arm', otso 'wolf, esku 'hand', buru 'head'. 5 The dialect spoken in Zeberio is described in Etxebarria Ayesta 1991a, 1991b, cf. also Hualde 1992. 6 On the Zegama dialect, cf. 1998. This source does not give long vowels, which appear to be a receding feature in this dialect. For Ataun, see Azurmendi 1996. 7 The acoustic features of vowels in the Zaldibia dialect are studied in P. Etxeber- ria 1990. A 8 On the Getxo dialect, see Hualde & Bilbao 1992, 1993. For Sopela, see Markaida^ et al. 1993. For Gatika and Urduliz, see Gaminde 1993, 1994a. 9 For Lekeitio, see Hualde, Elordieta, & Elordieta 1994, Elordieta 1996. 10 For Eibar, see T Echebarria 1965-66, Laspiur 1979. For Bergara, see Elexpuru 1988 and other contributions in UNED-Bergara 1988. For Onati, see Izagirre 1970. For Ermua, Aranberri 1996. " The accentual system of the Elorrio variety is analyzed in Jansen 1992. I HUALDE & GAMINDE: VOWEL INTERACTION IN BASQUE 7 1 12 For the accentual system of coastal Bizkaian, see Hualde 1997b. 13 For the Basque dialects of Araba/Alava, see Zuazo 1997a, Knorr & Zuazo 1998. 14 For Arrasate, see Elortza & Ormaetxea 1995. 15 For accentuation in Azkoitia, see Hualde 1997a. 16 The phonological system of this dialect is analyzed in Hualde 1991. 17 The accentual system of the Elantxobe dialect is analyzed in Gaminde 1994b. 18 Studies on the variety of Ondarroa include Rotaetxe 1978, Hualde 1991, 1995a, 1996a. 19 On the varieties of this area of Navarre, see Zuazo 1995. 20 For Zumaia, see Gaminde & Hazas 1998. 21 For Lasarte-Oria, see Labaka et al. 1996. 22 For the Hondarribia dialect, see Hualde & Sagarzazu 1991, Sagarzazu 1994. See also Holmer 1964, Fraile & Fraile 1996 and Zuazo 1997b on the dialects on the Gipuzkoan/Navarrese boundary. 23 On the Orio dialect, see Iturain & Loidi 1995. 24 This pattern is also described by Jose M. Etxebarria 1985 for the Gaintza neighborhood of Arribe in Navarre. 25 On the dialect of Etxarri-Aranatz, see Karasatorre et al. 1991. The neighboring variety of Arbizu is studied in Hualde 1991, 1996b. See Pagola 1992, 1995 and Camino 1998 for an overview of the dialects of Navarre. 26 On the varieties of Ultzama and Basaburua, see Ibarra 1995a, 1995b, 1998, Izagirre 1966. 27 The Baztan dialect has been analyzed in N'Diaye 1970 and Salaburu 1984. For Esteribar, see Gaminde 1996. 28 Camino 1997 provides a detailed description of the Aezkoa dialect. 29 On the now moribund Salazar or Zaraitzu dialect, see Michelena 1967. 10 For the Roncal or Erronkari dialect, see Azkue 1931, Beloqui et al. 1953, Michelena 1954, Izagirre 1959-61, Gomez 1991, Hualde 1995b. I 3I On this historical change, see Lafon 1937. 32 On Zuberoan or Souletin, see Larrasquet 1934, 1939, Lafon 1958, Hualde 1993. Gaminde 1995. 13 The dialect of Sara was the subject of a monographic study by Schuchardl 1922. For several other varieties in the same geographical area, see Gaminde & Salaberria 1997. 34 For Munitibar and other neighboring varieties, see Gaminde 1994c. 7 2 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: l (Spring 1998) REFERENCES ANONYMOUS. 1596. Refranes y Sentencias. Pamplona: Pedro Porralis de Am- beres. [Critical edition by Joseba A. Lakarra, 1996. Bilbao: Euskaltzaindia]. ARANBERRI, Fernando. 1996. Ermua eta Eitzako euskara. Ermuko Udala. Arantzadi Zientzia Elkartea. 1984-1990. Euskalerriko atlas etnolinguistikoa (2 vols.). Donostia: Munibe.. M AZKUE, Resurrection Maria de. 1931. Particularidades del dialecto roncales.^ Euskera 2/4.207-406. AZURMENDI, Jose Migel. 1996. Ataungo euskara. Lazkao: Goiherriko Euskal Eskola Kultur Elkartea, Maizpide Euskaltegia & Lazkaoko Udaleko Kultur Batzordea. . 1998. Zegamako euskara. Lazkao: Goiherriko Euskal Eskola Kultur El- kartea, Maizpide Euskaltegia & Lazkaoko Udaleko Kultur Batzordea. BONAPARTE, Louis Lucien.1869. Le verbe basque en tableaux. London [Repr, in Bonaparte 1991:1.175-442]. . 1991. Opera Omnia Vasconice (4 vols.). Bilbao: Euskaltzaindia. BELOQUI, Juan Jose, Jesus ELOSEGUI, Luis MICHELENA, & Pilar SANSINENEA DE ELOSEGUI. 1953. Contribution al conocimiento del dialecto roncales. Boletin de la Real Sociedad Vascongada de Amigos del Pais 9.499-536. [Repr. in Michelena 1988:1.246-72.] CAMINO, Inaki. 1997. Aezkoako euskararen azterketa dialektologikoa. Irunea: Nafarroako Gobernua. . 1998. Nafarroako hizkerak. Bilbo: Udako Euskal Unibertsitatea. DECHEPARE, Bernard. 1545. Linguae Vasconum Primitiae. Bordeaux. (Critical edition by Patxi Altuna: Bilbao: Mensajero, 1987.) ECHEBARRIA, Toribio. 1965-66. Lexicon del euskera dialectal de Eibar (Arrate'tikuen izketia). Euskera 10:1. Bilbao: Euskaltzaindia. ELEXPURU, Juan Martin, 1988. Bergarakoa eta batua. Fonetika diferentzia nabarmenak. UNED-Bergara 1988:71-86. ELORDUI, Agurtzane. 1955. Bonapartek osaturiko bizkaieraren sailkapenak: itur- riak eta erizpideak. Euskal Dialektologiako Kongresua, ed. by Ricardo Gomez & Joseba Lakarra, 433-64. (Supplements to Anuario del Seminario de Filologia Vasca 'Julio de Urquijo', 28.) Donostia: Gipuzkoako Foru Aldundia. ELORDIETA, Gorka. 1996. Accent, tone and intonation in Lekeitio Basque. Issues in the Phonology and Morphology of the Major Iberian Languages, ed. by^ Fernando Martinez-Gil & Alfonso Morales-Front, 1-78. Washington, DC:^| Georgetown University Press. ELORTZA, Jenaro, & Jose Luis ORMAETXEA. 1995. EAEL eta Arrasateko hizk- era. Euskal dialektologiako kongresua, ed. by Ricardo Gomez & Joseba A. Lakarra, 479-523. (Supplements to Anuario del Seminario de Filologia Vasca 'Julio de Urquijo', 28.) Donostia: Gipuzkoako Foru Aldundia. ETXEBARRIA, Jose Maria. 1985. Gaintzako euskeraren alderdi fonetiko batzuk. Eusko-Ikaskuntza. Cuadernos de seccion, Hizkuntza eta literatura 4.127- 42. I HUALDE & GAMINDE: VOWEL INTERACTION IN BASQUE 7 3 ETXEBARRIA AYESTA, Juan Manuel. 1991a. Zeberio haraneko euskararen azterketa etno-linguistikoa. Euba: Ibaizabal. . 1991b. Zeberioko euskararen azentuaz. Memoriae L. Mitxelena magistri sacrum, ed. by Joseba A. Lakarra, 677-708. (Supplements to Anuario del Seminario de Filologia Vasca 'Julio de Urquijo', 14.) Donostia: Gipuzk- oako Foru Aldundia. ETXEBERRIA, Pilartxo. 1990. Zaldibiako bokalen azterketa akustikoa. Bilbao: University of Deusto. FRAILE, Idoia, & Ainhoa FRAILE. 1996. Oiartzungo hizkera. Oiartzun: Oiartzungo Udala. GAMINDE, Inaki. 1993. Urduliz eta Gatikako herri hizkeren azterketa linguistikoa. University of Deusto, Doctoral, dissertation. . 1994a. Urduliz eta Gatikako azentu ereduaz. Uztaro 1 1.55-1 10. . 1994b. Elantxobeko azentuaz. Ele 14.7-41. . 1994c. Munitibar eta inguruko azentuaz. Fontes Linguae Vasconum 65.81- 120. . 1995. Zubereraren azentuaz. Uztaro 13.107-28. . 1996. Esteribarko euskararen azentuaz. Uztaro 16.109-23. , & Amike HAZAS. 1998. Zumaiako azentuaz eta intonazioaz. Uztaro 24.59- 76. , & J. SALABERRIA. 1997. Ezpeleta, Lekorne eta Makeako azentu ereduez. Uztaro 20.93-103. GOMEZ Ricardo. 1991. Erronkarierazko dotrina argitaragabe bat: Edizioa eta azterketa. Memoriae L. Mitxelena Magistri Sacrum I, ed. by Joseba A. Lakarra & Inigo Ruiz Arzalluz, 375-426. (Supplements to Anuario del Seminario de Filologia Vasca 'Julio de Urquijo', 14.) Donostia: Gipuzk- oako Foru Aldundia. HOLMER, Nils. 1964. El idioma vasco hablado. (Supplements to Anuario del Seminario de Filologia Vasca 'Julio de Urquijo', 5.) Donostia: Gipuzk- oako Foru Aldundia. HUALDE, Jose Ignacio. 1991. Basque phonology. London: Routledge. . 1992. Notas sobre el sistema acentual de Zeberio. Anuario del Seminario de Filologia Vasca 'Julio de Urquijo' 26.767 '-76. . 1993. Topics in Souletin phonology. Generative studies in Basque linguis- tics, ed. by Jose Ignacio Hualde & Jon Ortiz de Urbina, 289-327. Amsterdam: Benjamins. . 1995a. Analisis del sistema acentual de Ondarroa. Anuario del Seminario de Filologia Vasca 'Julio de Urquijo' 29.319-44. . 1995b. Sobre el acento roncales. Anuario del Seminario de Filologia Vasca 'Julio de Urquijo' 29.499-525. . 1996a. Accentuation and empty vowels in Ondarroa Basque: Against the concept of phonological derivation. Lingua 99.197-206. . 1996b. Arbizuko hizkeraren zenbait soinu bereizgarriz. Uztaro 18.49-60. . 1997a. A gap filled: Postpostinitial accent in Azkoitia Basque. Linguistics 36.99-117. 7 4 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1 998) . 1997b. Euskararen azentuerak. (Supplements to Anuario del Seminario de Filologia Vasca 'Julio de Urquijo', 42.) Donostia & Bilbo: Gipuzkoako Foru Aldundia & Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea , & Xabier BILBAO. 1992. A phonological study of the Basque dialect of Getxo. Anuario del Seminario de Filologia Vasca 'Julio de Urquijo' 26:1- 117. , & Xabier BILBAO. 1993. The prosodic system of the Basque dialect of^ Getxo: a metrical analysis. Linguistics 31.59-85. ^ , Gorka ELORDIETA, & Arantzazu ELORDIETA. 1994. The Basque Dialect of Lekeitio. (Supplements to Anuario del Seminario de Filologia Vasca 'Julio de Urquijo', 34.) Bilbo & Donostia: Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea & Gipuzkoako Foru Aldundia , &Txomin SAGARZAZU. 1991. Acentos del Bidasoa: Hondarribia. Anuario del Seminario de Filologia Vasca 'Julio de Urquijo' 25: 139-52. IBARRA, Orreaga. 1995a. Ultzamera. Euskal dialektologiako kongresua, ed. by Ricardo Gomez & Joseba A. Lakarra, 553-78. (Supplements to Anuario del Seminario de Filologia Vasca 'Julio de Urquijo', 28.) Donostia: Gipuzk- oako Foru Aldundia . 1995b. Ultzamako hizkera. Iruiiea/Pamplona: Nafarroako Gobernua. . 1998. Ultzamako hizkeraren deskribapena. Nafarroako hizkerak, ed. by Camino & Iriaki, 89-1 10. Bilbo: Udako Euskal Unibertsitatea. ITURAIN, Inaki, & Loren LOIDI. 1995. Orioko euskara. Orio: Orioko Udala. IZAGIRRE, Kandido. 1959-61. Erronkariko euskal-ondakin batzuk. Boletin de la Real Sociedad Vascongada de Amigos del Pais 15.280-314, & 17.391-407. . 1966. Ultzamako euskeraren gai batzuk. Boletin de la Real Sociedad Vas- congada de Amigos del Pais 22.403-67. . 1968. Notas lexicograficas. Anuario del Seminario de Filologia Vasca 'Julio de Urquijo' 2.49-72. . 1970. El vocabulario vasco de Aranzazu-Onate y zonas colindantes. Anuario del Seminario de Filologia Vasca 'Julio de Urquijo' 4.1-248. JANSEN, Wim. 1992. Acento y entonacion en Elorrio. Anuario del Seminario de Filologia Vasca 'Julio de Urquijo' 26.391-440. KARASATORRE, Rafael, Jose Luis ERDOZIA, & Eugenio ULAIAR. Etxarri- Aranatzko euskara eta Aranaz elkarteko hiztegia. Tafalla: Altaffaylla Kultur Taldea. KENSTOWICZ, Michael. 1994. Phonology in Generative Grammar. Cambridge, MA, & Oxford: Blackwell. ^ KENSTOWICZ, Michael, & Charles KISSEBERTH. 1979. Generative Phonology.^ San Diego: Academic Press. KIRCHNER, Robert. 1997. Contrastiveness and faithfulness. Phonology 14.83- 112. KNORR, Henrike, & Koldo ZUAZO (eds.). 1998. Arabako euskararen lekukoak: Ikerketak eta testuak. Vitoria-Gasteiz: Eusko Legebiltzarra. LABAKA, Ana, Maria Eugenia AZURZA, & Juan Inazio BEREZIARTUA. 1996. Lasarte-Oriako euskararen azterketa. Lasarte-Oria: Lasarte-Oriako Udala. HUALDE & GAMINDE: VOWEL INTERACTION IN BASQUE 7 5 LAFON, Rene. 1937. Tendence a la palatalisation de la sonante u dans les parlers basques du nord-est. Revue de Linguistique Romane 13.73-82. . 1958. Contribution a l'etude phonologique du parler basque de Larrau (Haute-Soule). Estructuralismo e historia: Misceldnea homenaje a Andre Martinet II, ed. by Diego Catalan, 77-106. Tenerife: Universite de La Laguna. LAKOFF, George. 1993. Cognitive phonology. The Last Phonological Rule, ed. by John Goldsmith, 177-45. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. LANDUCCI, Niccolo. 1958 [1562]. Dictionarium Linguae Cantabricae, ed. by Manuel Agud & Luis Michelena. (Supplements to Anuario del Seminario de Filologia Vasca 'Julio de Urquijo', 3.) San Sebastian: Diputacion de Guipuzcoa. LARRASQUET, Jean. 1934. Le basque souletin nor d- oriental. Paris: Maison- neuve. . 1939. Le basque de la Basse-Soule orientale. (Collection Linguistique. 46). Paris: Societe de Linguistique de Paris. LASPIUR, Imanol. 1979. Azentu diakritikoa Eibarko euskaran. Euskera 24.175- 268. MARKAJDA, Bene, Inaki GAMINDE, & Eukene MARKAIDA. 1993. Sopelako euskaraz. Bilbao: Gertu. MICHELENA, Luis. 1954. La position fonetica del dialecto vasco del Roncal. Via Domitia 1.123-57. (Repr. in Michelena 1988:1.273-97). . 1967. Notas fonologicas sobre el salacenco. Anuario del Seminario de Filologia Vasca 'Julio de Urquijo' 1.163-77. (Repr. in Michelena 1987: 221-34). . 1977. Fonetica historica vasca, 2d ed. (Supplements to Anuario del Semi- nario de Filologia Vasca 'Julio de Urquijo', 4.) San Sebastian: Diputacion de Guipuzcoa. . 1981. Lengua comun y dialectos vascos. Anuario del Seminario de Filologia Vasca 'Julio de Urquijo 15.291-313. . 1987. Palabrasy textos. Leioa: Universidad del Pais Vasco. . 1988. Sobre historia de la lengua vasca (2 vols.). Donostia-San Sebastian: Diputacion de Gipuzkoa. MOGUEL, Juan Antonio. 1881. El doctor Peru Abarca. Durango: Eleizalde. N'DIAYE, Genevieve. 1970. Structure du dialecte basque de Maya. The Hague & Paris: Mouton. PAGOLA, Rosa Miren. 1992. Euskal fonetika Nafarroan (2 vols.). Irunea: Nafar- roako Gobernua. . 1995. Nafarroako hizkerak. Euskal dialektologiako kongresua, ed. by Ri- cardo Gomez & Joseba A. Lakarra, 255-96. (Supplements to Anuario del Seminario de Filologia Vasca 'Julio de Urquijo', 28.) Donostia: Gipuzk- oako Foru Aldundia. RIJK, Rudolf P. G. de. 1970. Vowel interaction in Bizcayan Basque. Fontes Lin- guae Vasconum 2:5.149-67. ROLLO, William. 1925. The Basque Dialect of Marquina. Amsterdam: H.J. Paris. 7 6 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1998) ROTAETXE, Karmele. 1978. Estudio estructural del euskara de Ondarroa. Durango: L. Zugaza. SAGARZAZU, Txomin. 1995. Hondarribiko mintzairazko ikuspegiak: Larramendi, Bonaparte, Azkue. Euskal dialektologiako kongresua, ed. by Ricardo Gomez & Joseba A. Lakarra, 589-631. (Supplements to Amtario del Semi- nario de Filologia Vasca 'Julio de Urquijo', 28.) Donostia: Gipuzkoako Foru Aldundia. ^ SALABURU, Pello. 1984. Hizkuntz teoria eta Baztango euskalkia: fonetika el am fonologia (2 vol.s). Leioa: Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea. SARASOLA, Ibon. 1990. Contribution al estudio y edition de textos antiguos vascos. (Supplements to Anuario del Seminario de Filologia Vasca 'Julio de Urquijo', 11; printed in a volume with a facsimile edition of Luis Miche- lena, Textos arcaicos vascos). Donostia: Gipuzkoako Foru Aldundia., SCHUCHARDT, Hugo. 1922. Zur Kenntnis des Baskischen von Sara (Labourd). Abhandlungen der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philoso- phisch-historische Klasse, Nr. 1. Berlin: Akademie der Wissenschaften. TRASK, R. L. 1996. Historical Linguistics. London: Arnold. UNED-Bergara. 1988. Bergarako Euskera. Bergara: UNED. URIARTE, Jose Antonio. 1862. Le Cantique des Cantiques de Salomon, traduit en basque biscayen central tel qu'il est communement parle aux environs de Bilbao, et acompagne d'une traduction en basque biscayen litter aire de Marquina. London: Strangeways & Walden. (Repr, in Bonaparte 1991, vol. IV.439-52). YRIZAR, Pedro de. 1981. Contribution a la dialectologia de la lengua vasca (2 vols.). Donostia-San Sebastian: Caja de Ahorros Provincial de Guipuzcoa / Gipuzkoako Aurrezki Kutxa Probintziala. . 1991. Morfologia del verbo auxiliar guipuzcoano. Estudio dialec- tologico (2 vols.) Zarutz: Euskaltzaindia. . 1992a. Morfologia del verbo auxiliar vizcaino. Estudio dialectologico (2 vols.) Zarautz: Euskaltzaindia. . 1992b. Morfologia del verbo auxiliar alto navarro septentrional (2vols.). Pamplona: Euskaltzaindia & Nafarroako Gobernua. . 1992c. Morfologia del verbo auxiliar alto navarro meridional (2 vols.). Pamplona: Euskaltzaindia & Nafarroako Gobernua. . 1992d. Morfologia del verbo auxiliar roncales. Pamplona: Euskaltzaindia & Nafarroako Gobernua. . 1997. Morfologia del verbo auxiliar labortano. Pamplona: Euskaltzaindia & Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea. m ZUAZO, Koldo. 1995. Burundako hizkera. Euskal dialektologiako kongresua, ed. by Ricardo Gomez & Joseba A. Lakarra, 297-366. (Supplements to Anuario del Seminario de Filologia Vasca 'Julio de Urquijo', 28.) Dono- stia: Gipuzkoako Foru Aldundia. . 1997a. Euskara Araban. Uztaro 21.79-95. . 1997b. Oiartzungo hizkeraren kokagunea. Fontes Linguae Vasconum 76.397-425. . 1998. Euskalkiak, gaur. Fontes Linguae Vasconum 78.191-233. HUALDE & GAMINDE: VOWEL INTERACTION IN BASQUE 7 7 ZUBIAUR ETXEBERRI, Estibaliz, Goizalde GEZURAGA FORURIA, Nere KALTZAKORTA AZTORKIA, & Aloiia ARRONATEGI AZURMENDI, 1992. Armonia bokalikoa: Markina. Enseiucarrean 8.55-93. ► > Studies in the Linguistic Sciences Volume 28, Number 1 (Spring 1998) CULTURE AND SPEECH ACTS: EVIDENCE FROM INDIAN AND SINGAPOREAN ENGLISH Yamuna Kachru University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ykachru@uiuc.edu This paper aims at exploring how varieties of a language differ along sociocultural parameters in language use. It focuses on bringing together research in regional and social variation by studying how the speech act of request is realized in two Outer Circle varieties of English: Indian and Singaporean. The empirical study reported herein shows significant effect of sociocultural factors on the choice of re- quest strategies by Indian and Singaporean subjects. The conclusion raises some questions regarding the methodology, especially the con- ceptualization of social distance and linear association between po- liteness and indirectness in crosscultural speech-act research. 1. Introduction There is a long tradition of research on language variation in linguistics, and the study of geographical and social dialects has resulted in a great deal of insight in how varieties differ from each other. The major focus of research on regional variation, however, has so far been on the structural parameters, i.e., how varieties differ in their phonology, lexicon, and grammatical structure. For instance, differ- ences between the newer (e.g., American) and older (e.g., British) varieties of English have generally been described with respect to such structural features only (e.g., in Quirk et al., 1985). The studies of social variation have focused on the frequency distribution of grammatical features, and have also, to some extent, looked at the ethnic variation in the use of language (e.g., Labov 1972). A great deal of work, however, still remains to be done on how varieties may differ along sociocultural parameters in language use. Not much systematic effort so far has been directed toward determining how conventions of language use differ across varieties, and how they may have a role in characterizing varieties as distinct. For instance, there is very little information available on questions such (as whether the American, British, and Canadian varieties differ as to when an apology or compliment or command is appropriate or what the instruments of these speech acts are, or how conventions of writing expository or argumentative prose differ in the three varieties. That such conventions vary across languages and cultures has been demonstrated by recent research on cross-linguistic strate- gies utilized for producing narratives (e.g., Chafe 1980), speech acts such as re- quest, apology, expressing gratitude, complaining, correction, etc. (e.g., Blum- Kulka et al. 1989, Blum-Kulka & Kasper 1990, Huang 1996, Silva 1998, Y. Kachru 1991, 1994, 1995a, Kajiwara 1994, Kasper & Blum-Kulka 1993, Okole 8 STUDIES IN THE LINGUISTIC SCIENCES 28: 1 (SPRING 1998) 1990, Rose 1992, K. K. Sridhar 1991, Wierzbicka 1985a, b, among others), and conventions of writing expository or argumentative prose (e.g., Choi 1986, 1988, Clyne 1983, 1987, Connor & Kaplan 1987, Hinds 1983, 1987, Y. Kachru 1987, 1988, 1992, 1995b, 1996, 1997, among others). Research on nonnative varieties of English is even more sketchy. Although some theoretical (e.g., B. Kachru 1986, 1987), small scale (e.g., Y. Kachru 1987, 1988, 1991, Valentine 1988) and large scale empirical studies (e.g., B. Kachru^ 1983, Chishimba 1983, Lowenberg 1984, Magura 1984, among others) on a few™ aspects of some of the varieties are available, I do not know of any systematic study that utilizes a large data base to demonstrate the relevance of sociocultural parameters in defining a variety (see, however, K. K. Sridhar 1991, S. N. Shridhar 1996 for a preliminary attempt in this direction). This paper is an attempt to fill this gap by bringing the traditions of research in regional and social variation together and focusing on the sociocultural con- ventions of linguistic interaction through English in the nonnative contexts of the Outer Circle varieties (B. Kachru 1985). The focus is on the speech act of re- quest in two Outer Circle varieties, Indian and Singaporean English. But, before discussing the study and its findings, it may be useful to review briefly the current state of research on crosscultural speech acts. This body of research is relevant for our purposes here because interactions in indigenized Outer Circle varieties of English represent a crosscultural phenomenon. Almost all users of Outer Circle varieties are bi/multilinguals, and live and function in communities socioculturally different from the Inner Circle English-speaking communities. 2. Crosscultural speech act research Recent research on crosscultural speech acts has raised serious questions about the universal applicability of several theoretical notions of pragmatics (Levinson 1983, Green 1989), including speech acts (Searle 1969), Gricean max- ims (Grice 1975), and politeness principles (Brown and Levinson 1987). Unlike theoretical discussions, where an implicit assumption is made that speech acts re- fer to the same social acts in all cultures, Fraser et al. (1980:78) explicitly claim that although languages may differ as to how and when speech acts are to be performed, every language 'makes available to the user the same basic set of speech acts ... the same set of strategies — semantic formulas — for performing a given speech act.' In contrast, Wierzbicka 1985a, 1985b claims that speech gen- res and speech acts are not comparable across cultures and suggests a semantic metalanguage for the crosscultural comparison of speech acts. Flowerdew 1990 A points out some of the central problems of speech act theory, including the basic^_ question of the number of speech acts. Wolfson et al. (1989:180) suggest that 'just as different cultures divide the color spectrum into noncorresponding over- lapping terms, so the repertoire of speech acts for each culture is differently or- ganized'. Matsumoto 1988, 1989 questions the adequacy of the theoretical no- tions of conversational implicature as proposed by Grice, and 'face' as postulated by Brown & Levinson 1987 to account for the politeness phenomena in Japa- nese conversational interactions. Wetzel 1988 concludes that the notion of i > Yamuna Kachru: Culture and speech acts 8 1 'power' as discussed in Brown & Gilman 1960 is culturally bound, and therefore, not applicable to a discussion of verbal interaction in Japanese (see also Ide 1984, McGloin 1984). Discussing the problems in attempting to use the speech act theory in the analysis of conversation, Schegloff 1988 claims that speech act theoretic analysis has no way of handling temporality and sequentiality of utterances in actual con- versation. Schmidt (1983:126) points out the limited applicability of speech act theory in the analysis of conversation because speech acts 'are usually defined in terms of speaker intentions and beliefs, whereas the nature of conversation de- pends crucially on interaction between speaker and hearer.' Furthermore, crosscultural speech act research so far has utilized only a lim- ited range of variables, e.g., those of social distance and dominance (Blum-Kulka, House, & Kasper 1989), and, as Rose 1992, 1994 points out, even those are not well-defined and the instruments are also problematic (Rose & Ono 1995). As regards the data for empirical research on speech acts, only a few studies have utilized the ethnographic method of observation and analysis of utterances produced in real life interactions. Notable among them are the studies of compli- ments in American English by Manes and Wolfson 1981, a comparative study of compliments in American and South African English by Herbert 1989 , invitations in American English by Wolfson et al. 1983, requests in Hebrew by Blum-Kulka etal. 1985, and apologies in New Zealand English by Holmes 1990. The bulk of speech act research, including crosscultural speech act research, has been con- ducted using either role play or written questionnaires. Furthermore, only a lim- ited range of speech acts have been researched, the most commonly studied ones being requests and apologies, as in Blum-Kulka, House, & Kasper 1989. Blum-Kulka, House, & Kasper 1989 represents the culmination of the proj- ect on Crosscultural Speech Act Realization Patterns (CCSARP) initiated in 1982 by a number of researchers in several countries. Data were collected from native speakers (NSs) of Danish, American, Australian, and British English, Canadian French, German, Hebrew and Argentinian Spanish, and normative speakers (NNSs) of English in Denmark, Germany, and the United States, NNSs of German in Denmark and NNSs of Hebrew in Israel. The instrument used for data collection was a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) consisting of scripted dialogues of six- teen situations, eight each for requests and apologies. The tasks were constructed to account for variation in speech act realization determined by social distance and domination. The tasks did involve some role play in that the subjects were, for example, asked to assume the roles of a waiter, a professor, etc. According to Blum-Kulka (1989:68), the results of the CCSARP data 'revealed the prominence of conventional indirectness as a highly favored requesting option exploited by all the languages studied.' For apologies, Olshtain (1989:171) claims that the CCSARP data showed 'surprising similarities in IFID flllocutionary Force Indi- cating Device] and expression of responsibility preferences.' In this study, I propose to demonstrate that an integrated approach utilizing the insights of sociolinguistics is better suited to make the interaction of sociocul- 8 2 STUDIES IN THE LINGUISTIC SCIENCES 28: 1 (SPRING 1998) tural parameters and strategies of performing speech acts in indigenized varieties of English clearer. The data are drawn from Indian and Singaporean varieties of English. 2 3. The study 3.1 The method A Discourse Completion Task (DCT) questionnaire — a modified version of A the DCT questionnaire used in Rose 1991 — was administered to approximatelyW 100 students at a constituent college of the Delhi University and the National University of Singapore in January 1993 (reproduced in Appendix A). It is differ- ent in two crucial respects from the CCSARP instrument: it does not contain any scripted dialogue, thereby forcing the subjects to come up with a verbal response, and it does not involve any role play. The questionnaire describes situations that students in an Indian or Singaporean college or university setting may encounter, and seeks to elicit responses to such situations. A subject, for example, does not have to pretend to be a police officer, or a university professor. The data consist of responses to the 9 request situations given in the questionnaire. Although a large number of responses were gathered, for various reasons, several responses had to be discarded. The reasons for discarding responses were select responses to only some of the items, reported request rather than direct request, and face- tious remarks (e.g., T will not say anything, I will dump all her things in the gar- bage' in response to item no. 2). The responses that were utilized for this study number 40 from India and 72 from Singapore. 3.2 The subjects The subjects were bachelors degree candidates in their respective institu- tions and a majority had commenced learning English at the age of three. They were bilinguals and a majority of them used a language other than English at home (See Appendix B (i) for a copy of the instrument used to elicit student data, and B (ii) for a summary profile of the subjects). Note that there were significant inter- and intra-group variations in the language use habits of the Indian and Sin- gaporean subjects. For instance, English was listed as a home language of 36% of Singaporeans, while no Indian subject listed it as such. 43% of Singaporean, but only 27.5% of Indian subjects reported using English for all purposes, including conversation with their parents, grandparents, and siblings. 3.3 The purpose The objective of the study was to determine whether there were any signifi-^ cant differences between the two cultural groups (Indian and Singaporean) in the use of request strategies in 'identical' situations, and whether the request strate- gies use varied significantly according to the social parameters of 'relative' social distance and social status. The two terms 'identical' and 'relative' need some ex- planation. It is difficult to claim a priori that any social situation can be deemed 'identical' across cultures in view of the fact that institutions such as family vary among cultures. Nevetheless, there are some 'universals' in that concepts such as Yamuna Kachru: Culture and speech acts 8 3 intimacy, social distance, status, rank, role, etc. have been found to be useful in discussing how social behavior varies in societies and cultures that have been studied so far. Subjects responding to the questionnaires in this study had dual membership: on the one hand, they were members of Indian and Singaporean cul- tures, respectively, and on the other, they were members of a community of col- lege/university students with shared characteristics. International students from various countries were consulted to ensure that the situations that figure in the questionnaire were such that any student could imagine himself/herself in them and respond accordingly. What is meant by 'relative' social status and distance is that there is no ab- solute scale to measure the differences between individuals ranked vertically in terms of status or horizontally in terms of social distance from a given subject in any culture. Status and intimacy/distance are negotiated on the basis of variables such as communicative situations. For instance, though an older sister has a higher status in the family, in a given academic or sports situation, her status may be lower to a younger sister who has the institutional role of, say, a chair of a committee or a captain of a team. Similarly, though a colleague at work may not be an intimate friend, he/she may be less 'distant' as compared to a fellow member of the same profession from a different institution. Conversely, members from dif- ferent institutions who share ideologies and approaches may feel more 'intimate' as compared to colleagues from the same institution who adhere to competing ideologies and approaches. Again, international students from many countries were consulted to ensure that social status and distance between interactants in the situations set up in the questionnaire would be perceived similarly in any group. 3.4 The analysis The methodology used to analyze the data comprises a variety of statistical tests to explore significant differences between the two cultural groups, viz., the Indian and the Singaporean. First, a Goodness-of-Fit Test was done by using the Chi-Square distribution for testing the hypothesis that significant differences ex- ist between the groups. Then, a Proportion Test was done to test the hypothesis that there are differences in the proportion of the use of one kind of request strat- egy (i.e., the use of Imposifives) between the two cultural groups. Lastly, Cate- gorical Analysis using Log Linear Modelling Techniques was done with a view to quantifying the magnitude of association among the variables of culture and response types (Direct Request, Desire Statement, Query Preparatory, and Hint). Hierarchical Log Linear Analysis was done to fit a Hierarchical Saturated Model and produce parameter estimates for such a model. The Log Linear Estimation was subjected to two Goodness-of-Fit Tests, Likelihood Ratio Chi-Square. and Pearson Chi-Square. 3.5 The results A simple analysis of the request strategy types adopted by the Indians and the Singaporeans shows that there were both similarities and differences between the two cultural groups (See Appendices C (i) and C (ii) for the distribution of re- 8 4 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1998) quest strategy types). In seven situations out of the nine (i.e., in all situations ex- cept 'Mess on the Bed', and 'Bus Trip'), the most favored request strategy in both the groups was the same: Query Preparatory (see Table 1). Table 1 Request Strategy Types Comparison of the Indian and Singaporean DCT Data Strategy Type Indian (N=360) Singaporean (N=648) A. Direct Request 22.22% 6.17% B. Desire Statement 6.95% 1.86% C. Impositive (A+B) 29.17% 8.03% D. Q-Preparatory 63.05% 75.15% E. Hint 7.78% 16.82% F. Q-Preparatory + Hint 70.83% 91.97% However, in a different combination of seven situations, (i.e., excluding the 'Bus Trip' and 'Dinner'), the second most favored strategy among the Indian subjects was Direct Request. Direct Request was also the first preference strategy in case of 'Bus trip' among the Indian subjects. Among the Singaporeans, the second most preferred strategy in six situations (except for 'Music', 'Test Post- ponement', and 'Bus') was hint, and in case of 'Bus Trip', it was the first prefer- ence response. Table 2 Distribution of Main Request Strategy Types Indian N=360; Singaporean N=648 Situation Subjects Direct Req Desire Stat Q-Prep Hint SI (Music) Indian .27% .00% .70% .03% Singaporean .20% .01% .72% .09% S2 (Bed) Indian .70% .08% .17% .05% Singaporean .22% .00% .49% .29% S3 (Test P) Indian .08% .00% .87% .05% Singaporean .00% .04% .96% .03% S4 (Photo) Indian .02% .02% .93% .03% Singaporean .00% .00% .99% .01% S5 (Test H) Indian .25% .05% .62% .08% Singaporean .04% .07% .79% .10% S6 (Bus) Indian .28% .02% .62% .08% Singaporean .01% .00% .44% .55% S7 (Dinner) Indian .02% .28% .50% .20% Singaporean .01% .03% .72% .24% S8 (Library) Indian .15% .00% .78% .07% Singaporean .01% .00% .87% .12% S9 (Menu) Indian .22% .18% .48% .12% Singaporean .05% .01% .79% .14% Yamuna Kachru: Culture and speech acts 8 5 Overall, the Singaporean subjects displayed a distinct preference for the strategies of Query Preparatory and Hint in contrast to the Indian subjects. Though the Query Preparatory was the preponderant request strategy among the Indian subjects, too, a significant number of these subjects used direct requests. If we exclude the situational factor, there was a substantial difference between the two groups in the choice of request strategies, and this is attributable to culture- specific factors. Whereas about 71% of the Indian subjects used Query Prepara- tory and Hint strategies, their use was a much higher 92% among the Singapore- ans. While the Indian preference for Impositives was 30%, only around 8% of the Singaporeans chose this strategy in the sample responses (see Table 2). Although this simple analysis does not reveal all the factors at play in the choice of request strategies, even this rough analysis points to the existence of significant cultural group-related differences in the choice of strategies for per- forming speech acts. A comparison of the use of Alerters in the request speech acts by the two groups also confirms this point of cultural group-specific differ- ences (see Table 3). Table 3 Comparison in the Use of Alerters Indian N=360; Singaporean N=648 Situation Indian Singaporean 1. Music (+D,=S) 45.0% 48.6% 2. Bed (-D, +S) 32.5% 40.3% 3.TestP(-D, +S) 2.5% 65.3% 4. Photo (+D, +S) 12.5% 76.4% 5. Test H (-D, =S) 62.5% 44.4% 6. Bus (+D, =S) 62.5% 61.1% 7. Dinner (-D, +S) 17.5% 68.0% 8. Library (+D, +S) 15.0% 70.8% 9. Menu (+D, -S) 30.0% 73.6% All 9 Situations 31.11% 60.96% Where D : Social Distance; S : Social Status; + : positive value for D; - : negative value for D~(+ and -: higher vs. lower for S); and = : equal. A Chi-Square Test was performed to test the null hypothesis that the cul- tural group membership of the subjects was irrelevant to the choice of request strategy types. The response types used by the two groups of subjects across the nine situations were regrouped in the form of a Contingency Table (see Table 4; numbers in parenthesis show the estimated expected frequency numbers). Thus results showed that the relevance of cultural group membership to the choice of request strategy type was statistically significant at 0.5 percent signifi- cance level. 8 6 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1998) Table 4 Contingency Table with Expected and Observed Numbers Strategy Culture Group Indian (CI) Singaporean (C2) l.Impositive 105(56.07)* 52(100.93)* 2. Query Preparatory 227 (255.36)* 487 (459.64)* 3. Hint 28 (48.93)* 109 (88.07)* I *Estimated Expected Frequency Numbers X 2 = 86.4279 and X 2 = 10.(r-l)(c-l), a 60 A proportions test also provides the empirical evidence for the significant association between culture group and request strategy. For the purpose of this test, we used the proportion of impositives in total request strategies adopted by each cultural group. Thus, the total number of request strategies used by the In- dian group is (Nx) = 360 and that used by the Singaporean group is (Ny) = 648. Results showed that there was statistically significant difference in the use of the impositive by the two cultural groups. Po = 8.819 Za = Thus the result provided evidence that the occurrence of impositive strategy is much higher in the Indian group as compared to the Singaporean group. A log linear analysis of the data was done with a view to ascertaining whether there is a significant association between the cultural group and the re- sponse type in each of the 9 situations. The data used for this purpose are given in Appendix D. The software package used for this and subsequent analyses was the SPSS window 5.0. The results of the analysis are summarised below (* indi- cates statistical significance): Table 5 Log Linear Analysis Association between cultural groups and RSType in S1-S9 S No. Situation Pearson ChiSquare P-value of the Test 0.518 0.000* 0.013* | 0.275 ' 0.012* 0.000* 0.001* not done due to empty cells 0.000* * indicates statistical significance SI Music 2.26 S2 Mess on the bed 34.29 S3 Test Postponement 10.86 S4 Photo 3.87 S5 Test Help 10.89 S6 Bus 34.74 S7 Dinner 15.84 S8 Library r S9 Menu 19.54 Yamuna Kachru: Culture and speech acts 8 7 The above results show that cultural group was a significant factor in de- termining the choice of the request strategy in all situations except SI, S4 and S8. A log linear analysis excluding the situation facor to test the association between cultural group and response type also resulted in suggesting that the null hy- pothesis can be rejected comfortably. In order to further test the nature of interaction between culture, social dis- tance, social status, and the choice of request strategy, a hierarchical analysis was performed on the combined data. In order to avoid too many zero cells, social dis- tance was collapsed into two levels: Equal and Non-Equal. Response type was collapsed into three: Impositive, Query Preparatory, and Hint. The fitted model is a four-way interaction saturated model, r-level interac- tion models were discarded because they would give inconsistent parameter esti- mates. What the fitted model shows is the four way interaction among the vari- ables: culture, social distance, request strategy, and social status. The Chi Square test results were as follows: Pearson x 2 = 7.01569 2 DF P = .030 ML x 2 = 6.45132 2DF P = .040 Thus, the null hypothesis of no four-way interaction among the factors can be rejected for both the Pearson Chi Square test and the Maximum Likelihood Chi Square test. 4. Discussion and conclusion The Contingency Table Goodness of Fit Tests and Proportions Tests pro- vide evidence for the presence of significant association between cultural group and response type. The log linear analysis also confirms this. Furthermore, from the hierarchical model fitting, evidence is found that the choice of the request speech act strategy is a very complex phenomenon in which not merely the cul- ture, but also social parameters, viz., social distance and social status interact in a multi-dimensional fashion. The model utilized here is very robust and has consid- erable predictive power. Some of the conclusions that can be derived from this model and the parameter estimates are the following: 1 . Members of the Indian cultural group in their request transactions with strang- ers who are of non-equal status are 1.78 times more likely to choose Impositives than Query Preparatory as the speech act strategy. In contrast, the Singaporean cultural group in the same situation is 1 .78 times more likely to choose the Query Preparatory strategy. 2. Members of the Indian cultural group in their request strategy with strangers who are of equal status are 1.43 times more likely to choose Hints than Query Preparatory. The Singaporean group, on the other hand, is more likely to choose the Query preparatory in the same situation. 3. Members of the Indian cultural group in their request speech act with strangers of non-equal status are 2.54 times more likely to choose Impositives than Hints. 8 8 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1 998) The Singaporeans in the same situation are 2.54 times more likely to choose Hints than Impositives. 4. The ratio of probability of choice of Impositives to Query Preparatory by the Indian group to that by the Singaporean group is 3.1684. Impressive as these results are, there are some problems with such studies. I will first mention a set of conceptual problems, and subsequently, a methodologi- cal issue. The conceptual problem has to do with the simpistic notion of social dis- tance and imposition. The conceptualization of D in Brown & Levinson 1987 conflates status, rank, and role, which interact in complex ways in many different languages and cultures. Also, there does not seem to be a strong association be- tween indirectness and politeness (Huang 1996, Silva 1998). Similarly, directness is not always associated with impoliteness (Silva 1998). A full treatment of these observations, however, is a topic for another paper. Methdologically, most studies on speech act research, including this one, use a captive pool of subject — the university or college students. Although there is nothing wrong with eliciting data from students, their verbal behavior can not be generalized to entire cultures. Therefore, these research efforts need to be supplemented by ethnographic observational studies, analyses of data elicited from diverse groups of users of English, and interview data. I have collected some interview data from another, smaller group of students in India and Singapore which is awaiting analysis. It would be interesting to see if the conclusions drawn from the study presented here are further corroborated by the interview data. NOTES 1 It is interesting to note that the same arguments can be made on the basis of data from varieties of English, certainly the indigenized varieties used in Africa, South Asia, South-East Asia, and other parts of the world. 2 Dr. Jean D'souza and Dr. Anne Pakir helped me in data collection in Singapore and Gaurav Kachru in India. Mr. S.S. Sacchidananda assisted me with the statisti- cal analysis of the data and Dr. Rosa Shim and Professor S. N. Sridhar gave me their comments on the statistical treatment. I am grateful to all of them. Earlier ver- sions of this paper were presented at the annual meeting of the American Associa- tion for Applied Linguistics, 1995, and the SEAMEO Regional Language Center (RELC) Seminar, Singapore, 1995. « > Yamuna Kachru: Culture and speech acts 8 9 REFERENCES BLUM-KULKA, Shoshana. 1989. Playing it safe: the role of conventionality in in- directness. In Blum-Kulka, House, & Kasper 1989:37-70. , B. DANET, and R. GHERSON. 1985. The language of requesting in Israel society. Language and Social Situation, ed. by J. Forgas, 113-41. New York: Springer Verlag. , J. HOUSE, & G. Kasper (eds.). 1989. Cross-cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex. , & G. KASPER (eds.). 1990. Politeness. Journal of Pragmatics 14:2. BROWN, R., & A. GILMAN. 1960. The pronouns of power and solidarity. Style in Language, ed. by T. A. Sebeok, 253-76. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. BROWN, Penelope, & S. C. LEVINSON. 1987. Politeness: Some Universal in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CHAFE, Wallace L. (ed.). 1980. The Pear Stories: Cognitive, Cultural and Lin- guistics Aspects of Narrative Production. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. CHISHIMBA, Maurice (1983) African varieties of English: Text in context. Uni- versity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Ph.D. dissertation. CHOI, Yeon-Hee. 1986. A study of coherence in Korean student's argumentative writing in English. Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 16:2.67-94. . 1988. Text structure in Korean students' argumentative writing in English. World Englishes 7.129-42. CLYNE, Michael G. 1983. Linguistics and written discourse in particular lan- guages: Contrastive studies: English and German. Annual Review of Ap- plied Linguistics 3.38-49. . 1987. Discourse structure and discourse expectations: Implications for An- glo-German academic communication. In Smith 1987:73-83. CONNOR, Ulla, & Robert KAPLAN (eds.). 1987. Writing Across Languages: Analysis of L2 Text. Reading, MA: Addison- Wesley. FLOWERDEW, John. 1990. Problems of speech act theory from an applied per- spective. Language Learning 40:1.79-105. FRASER, Bruce, Ellen RINTELL, & Joel WALTERS. 1980. An approach to con- ducting research on the acquisition of pragmatic competence in a second language. Discourse Analysis in Second Language Research, ed. by D. Larsen-Freeman, 75-91. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. GREEN, Georgia. 1989. Pragmatics and Natural Language Understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Larwrence Erlbaum. [2nd ed. 1996] GRICE, H. P. 1975. Logic and conversation. Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts, ed. by Peter Cole & Jerry L. Morgan. New York: Academic Press. 41- 58. HERBERT, Robert K. 1989. The ethnography of compliments and compliment re- sponses: A contrastive sketch. Contrastive Pragmatics, ed. by Wieslavv Olesky, 3-35. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. HINDS, John. 1983. Contrastive rhetoric: Japanese and English. Text. 3:2.183-95. . 1987. Reader versus writer responsibility: A new typology. In Connor and Kaplan 1987:141-52. 90 STUDIES IN THE LINGUISTIC SCIENCES 28: 1 (SPRING 1998) HOLMES, Janet. 1990. Apologies in New Zealand English. Language in Society 19:2.155-99. HUANG, Mei-chen. 1996. Achieving cross-cultural equivalence in a study of American and Taiwanese requests. University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, Ph.D. dissertation. IDE, Sachiko. 1982. Japanese sociolinguistics: Politeness and women's language. Lingua 57:357-85. KACHRU, Braj B. 1981. Socially realistic linguistics: The Firthian tradition. Inter- m national Journal of the Sociology of Language 31.65-89. . 1983. The Indianization of English: The English Language in India. Ox- ford: Oxford Univeristy Press. . 1985. Standards, codification, and sociolinguistic realism: The English lan- guage in the Outer Circle. English in the World: Teaching and Learning the Language and Literatures, ed. by Randolph Quirk & Henry Wid- dowson, 1 1-30. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press. . 1986. The Alchemy of English: The Spread, Functions and Models of Non-Native Englishes. Oxford: Pergamon Press. . 1987. The bilingual's creativity: Discoursal and stylistic strategies in con- tact literature. Discourse Across Cultures: Strategies in World Englishes, ed. by Larry E. Smith, 125-40. New York & London: Prentice Hall. [Earlier versions in The Alchemy of English 1986:159-73, Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 13:2.37-55 (1983), and Language Style and Discourse, ed. by O.N. Koul, 21-46, New Delhi: Bahri Publications, 1986.] (ed.). 1992. The Other Tongue: English Across Cultures. Urbana, IL: Uni- versity of Illinois Press. [2nd edition] KACHRU, Yamuna. 1987. Cross-cultural texts, discourse strategies and discourse interpretation. In Smith 1987: 87-100. . 1988. Writers in Hindi and English. In Purves. 1988:109-37. . 1991. Speech acts in world Englishes: Toward a framework for research. World Englishes 10:3.299-306. . 1992. Culture, style and discourse: Expanding noetics of English. In B. Kachru 1992:340-52. . 1993. Social meaning and creativity in Indian English. Language, Commu- nication and Social Meaning. GURT 1992, ed. by James Alatis, 378-87. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press. . 1994. Crosscultural speech act research and the classroom. Pragmatics and Language Learning Monograph 5, 1994:39-51. . 1995a. Lexical exponents of cultural contact: Speech act verbs in Hindi- M English dictionaries. Culture, Ideology and the Dictionary, ed. by Braj B.^ Kachru & Henry Kahane, 261-274. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. . 1995b. Contrastive rhetoric in world Englishes. English Today 1 1:1.21-31. . 1996. Language and cultural meaning: Expository writing in South Asian English. South Asian English: Structure, Use and Users, ed. by Robert J. Baumgradner, 127-40. Delhi: Oxford University Press. I Yamuna Kachru: Culture and speech acts 9 1 . 1997. Culture and argumentative writing in world Englishes. World Englishes 2000, ed. by Michael Forman & Larry E. Smith, 48-67. Hono- lulu: University of Hawaii Press. KAJIWARA, Kaori. 1994. Apologizing in the home: A cross-cultural study of American and Japanese families. University of Illinois at Urbana-Cham- paign, M.A. thesis in Linguistics. KASPER, G, & S. BLUM-KULKA (eds). 1993. Interlanguage Pragmatics. Ox- ford: Oxford University Press. LABOV, William. 1972. Rule for ritual insults. Studies in Social Interaction, ed. by David Sudnow, 120-69. New York: Free Press. LEVBNSON, Stephen C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. LOWENBERG, Peter H. 1984. English in the Malay Archipelago: Nativization and its functions in a sociolinguistic area. University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, Ph.D. dissertation in Linguistics. MAGURA, Benjamin. 1984. Style and meaning in African English: A socio- linguistic study. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Ph.D. disserta- tion in Linguistics. MANES, J., & N. WOLFSON. 1981. The compliment formula. In F. Coulmas (ed.). Conversational Routines, 115-32. The Hague: Mouton. MATSUMOTO, Yoshiko. 1988. Reexamination of the universality of face: Polite- ness phenomena in Japanese. Journal of Pragmatics 12.403-26. . 1989. Politeness and conversational universals: Observations from Japa- nese. Multilingua 8:207-21. MCGLOIN, Naomi H. 1984. Some politeness strategies in Japanese. Papers in Linguistics. 19:1.127-46. OKOLE, Bertram A. 1990. Self justification and denial of responsibility in conver- sational encounters: An Igbo example. Language Sciences 12:4.345-66. OLSHTAIN, E. 1989. Apologies across languages. In Blum-Kulka, House, & Kas- per 1989:155-73. QUIRK, Randolph, S. GREENBAUM, G. LEECH, & J. SVARTVIK. 1985. A Com- prehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman. ROSE, K. R. 1992. Method and scope in cross cultural speech act research: A contrastive study of requests in Japanese and English. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Ph.D. dissertation. . 1994. On the validity of DCTs in non-native contexts. Applied Linguistics 15.1-14. , & R. ONO. 1995. Eliciting speech act data in Japanese: The effect of ques- tionnaire type. Language Learning 45.191-223. SCHEGLOFF, Emanuel A. 1988. Presequences and indirection: Applying speech act theory to ordinary conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 12.55-62. SCHMIDT, Richard W. 1983. Interaction, acculturation, and the acquisition of communicative competence: A case study of an adult. In & Judd 1983: 137-74. SEARLE, John R. 1969. Speech acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University press. 9 2 STUDIES IN THE LINGUISTIC SCIENCES 28: 1 (SPRING 1998) SILVA, Rosangela S. 1998. Pragmatic competence and transfer abilities: Native and non-native speakers of Portuguese. University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, Ph. D. dissertation. SMITH, Larry E. 1987. Discourse Across Culturess: Strategies in World Englishes. London: Prentice Hall International. SRIDHAR, Kamal K. 1991. Speech acts in an indigenized variety: Sociocultural values and language variation. English around the World: Sociolin-A guistic Perspectives, ed. by Jenny Cheshire, 308-18. Cambridge: Cam-| bridge University Press. SRIDHAR, S.N. 1996. Toward a syntax of South Asian English: Defining the lectal range. South Asian English: Structure, Use, and Users, ed. by Robert J. Baumgardner, 55-70. Oxford: Oxford University Press. THOMAS, Jenny. 1983. Cross-cultural pragmatic failure. Applied Linguistics 4:2. 91-112. VALENTINE, Tamara. 1991. Getting the message across: Discourse markers in In- dian English. World Englishes 10:3.325-34. WETZEL, Patricia J. 1988. Are 'powerless' communication strategies the Japanese norm? Language in Society 17.4.555-64. WDERZBICKA, Anna. 1985a. Different cultures, different langauges, different speech acts: Polish vs. English. Journal of Pragmatics 9:145-78. . 1985b. A semantic metalanguage for a cross-cultural comparison of speech acts and speech genres. Language in Society 14:491-514. WOLFSON, Nessa, L. D'AMICO-REISNER, & L. HUBER. 1983. How to arrange for social commitments in American English: The invitation. In Wolfson & Judd 1983:116-28. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. , & E. JUDD (eds.). 1983. Sociolinguistics and Language Acquisition, Rowley, MA: Newbury House. , T. MARMOR, & S. JONES. 1989. Problems in the comparison of speech acts across cultures. In Blum-Kulka, House, & Kasper (eds.) 1989: 174-96. I > Yamuna Kachru: Culture and speech acts 9 3 APPENDIX A DCT Questionnaire There are ten situations described below. Please read the descriptions of each situation and write down what you would say in that situation. 1. You are studying in your room for an important examination. You hear loud music coming from a room opposite your room. You don't know the student who ives there, but you want the loud music to be turned down. What would you say to the student? 2. You are on a school trip and you share a room with one of your friends. One evening when you come back to your room, you find your friend's clothes, books, etc. on your bed. You want the mess to be cleaned up. What would you say? 3. There is a test in class in two weeks, but you will miss class that day because you have to go out of town for your cousin's wedding. You want to know if your professor will allow you to take the test on another day. What would you say? 4. A friend from out of town is visiting you. You are showing your friend around the campus and the city. You want someone to take your photograph together. You see a man dressed in a suit with a briefcase. You want him to take your pic- ture. What would you say? 5. Next week there is a test in your class which is difficult for you. You know your friend is doing well in that subject. You and your friend are having lunch together and you want to see if your friend will help you prepare for the test. What would you say? 6. You get on the bus to go home and you are carrying a lot of books. You are tired and you would like to sit down. The bus seems full, but then you notice that a student is taking up two seats. What would you say to free the seat so that you can sit down? 7. You are having dinner with your friend's family. The food is delicious and you would like some more. What would you say to your friend's mother, who is serving the food? 8. You go to the library to return a lot of books, and your hands are full. You see someone who looks like a professor standing near the door of the library. You need help to open the door. What would you say to this person? 9. You go to a fancy restaurant to celebrate your birthday with some friends. You wait for fifteen minutes, but no one comes to ask you what you want. A waiter passes by. You want him to bring you copies of the menu. What would you say? Thank you very much. 94 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1998) APPENDIX B (i) Data Sheet Please fill in the following information. 1 . Name (optional) 2. Check One: Male Female 4 3. Class (e.g., 1st year BA, or whatever) 4. Home language 5. Age at which you began learning English 6. Medium of Education at High School 7. Languages in addition to English that you speak, read and write fluently: 8. Please circle the letters that represent the purposes for which you use English. A. Conversing with parents, grandparents, etc. B. Conversing with siblings C. Writing letters to members of family D. Conversing with friends E. Writing letters to friends F. Listening to Radio G. Viewing Television Programmes H. Reading for Pleasure I. Writing for Pleasure J. All academic work (Reading, Writing, Discussion, etc.) Thank you. Yamuna Kachru: Culture and speech acts APPENDIX B (ii) 95 I Profile of Subjects Indian Singaporean 1 . Total Number 40 72 2. Male 17 16 3. Female 23 56 4. 1st year 24 12 5. More Advanced 16 60 6. Home Languages* 7 2 7. HL+English# 5 11 8. Age at which E introduced 3 yrs. or below 31 32 4 yrs. 6 7 above 4 yrs. 3 33+ 9. Medium of Education English 40 69 Other Lg(s) - 3 10. E used for purposes A-J [see 8 in Appendix B (i)] All ten purposes 11 31 All other than A 5 7 All other than C - 6 All other than A & C - 6 Selective purposes® 24 22 > Notes: * Indian languages such as Hindi, Panjabi, etc., and Chinese dialects such as Mandarin and Cantonese in Singapore. # e.g., bi-/trilingual use of Hindi and/or Panjabi and English by Indian and Manda- rin and English by Singaporean subjects. + There was more variation among Singaporean subjects as regards the age at which English education began: 5 yrs. 19 6 yrs. 5 7 yrs. 7 Above 7 yrs. 2 @ There were 23 different combinations of purposes reported by Indian subjects and 17 different ones by Singaporean subjects. 96 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1998) APPENDIX C (i) Distributor! of Request Sequence Types Indian Data Strategy SI S2 S3 S4 S5 S6 S7 S8 S9 Direct Request 11 28 3 1 10 11 1 6 9 Desire Statement 3 1 2 1 11 7 Performative [Impositives 11 31 3 2 12 12 12 6 16] Q-Preparatory 28 1 35 37 25 25 20 31 19 Hint 1 2 2 1 3 3 8 3 5 [Q-P + Hint 29 9 37 38 28 28 28 34 247 APPENDIX C (i «) Distributon of Request Sequence Typt :s Singaporean Data Strategy SI S2 S3 S4 S5 S6 S7 S8 S9 Direct Request 14 16 3 1 1 1 4 Desire Statement 1 3 5 2 1 Performative [Impositives 15 16 3 8 1 3 7 51 Q- Preparatory 52 35 69 71 57 32 52 62 57 Hint 5 21 1 7 39 17 9 10 [Q-P + Hint 57 56 69 72 64 77 69 77 67/ Yamuna Kachru: Culture and speech acts APPENDIX D Data Used for Log Linear Analysis SITUATION CULTURE RSTYPE SOCDIST SOCSTAT COUNT 97 1 1 1 1 2 1 3 28 1 4 1 2 1 14 2 2 1 2 3 52 2 4 5 2 1 1 2 28 2 1 2 2 3 2 1 3 2 7 2 1 4 2 2 2 2 1 2 16 2 2 2 2 2 2 3 2 35 2 2 4 2 21 3 1 1 2 2 3 3 1 2 2 2 3 1 3 2 2 35 3 1 4 2 2 2 3 2 1 2 2 3 2 2 2 2 3 3 2 3 2 2 69 3 2 4 2 2 4 1 1 2 1 4 1 2 2 1 4 1 3 2 37 4 1 4 2 1 4 2 1 2 4 2 2 2 4 2 3 2 71 4 2 4 2 1 5 1 1 2 10 5 1 2 2 2 5 1 3 2 25 5 1 3 2 3 5 2 1 2 3 5 2 2 2 5 5 2 3 2 57 5 2 4 2 7 6 1 1 1 11 98 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1998) SITUATION CULTURE RSTYPE SOCDIST SOCSTAT COUNT 6 1 2 1 1 1 6 1 3 1 1 25 6 1 4 1 1 3 6 2 1 1 1 1 6 2 2 1 1 6 2 3 1 1 32 6 2 4 1 1 39 7 1 1 1 2 1 7 1 2 1 2 11 7 1 2 1 3 20 7 1 4 1 2 8 7 2 1 1 2 1 7 2 2 1 2 2 7 2 3 1 2 52 7 2 4 1 2 17 8 1 1 1 2 6 8 1 2 1 2 8 1 3 1 2 31 8 1 4 1 2 3 8 2 1 1 2 1 8 2 2 1 2 8 2 3 1 2 62 8 2 4 1 2 9 9 1 1 1 3 9 9 1 2 1 3 19 9 1 4 1 3 5 9 2 1 1 3 4 9 2 2 1 3 1 9 2 3 1 3 57 9 2 4 1 3 10 Note: R(equest) S(trate .gy) Type: = Direct Request, 2 = Desire Statement, 3 = Q-P, and 4 = Hint Soc(ial) Dist(ance): 1 = positive value, 2 = negative value Soc(ial) Stat(us): 1 = equal, 2 = unequal Studies in the Linguistic Sciences Volume 28, Number 1 (Spring 1998) ACQUISITION OF LINGALA TENSE/ASPECT BY AMERICAN COLLEGE STUDENTS 1 Moses K. Kambou I University of Ouagadougou kambou. moses@flashs.univ-ouaga.bf In the acquisition of tense/aspect, no study in the literature is re- ported on the acquisition of Lingala tense/aspect by non-African learners. This paper discusses the results of a pilot study, undertaken in 1995, on the acquisition of Lingala as a foreign language by American students. Twenty undergraduate students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) were involved. The results showed that the overall rate of accuracy was below 59% and the most difficult tense/aspect types were the remote past {-a} and the present habitual {-aka}, regardless of the number of semesters of exposure to Lingala. 1. Introduction This paper is a preliminary study of the acquisition of Lingala tense/aspect by American students learning Lingala as a foreign language at the University of Illi- nois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). By acquisition, I mean the correct usage of tense/aspect in Lingala as a native speaker would in a given context. To measure this, I conducted a written translation of 36 English sentences (6 per tense/aspect type) into Lingala. The focus of the test was on tense/aspect. The score was the frequency count of correct translations. The English sentences were printed in a booklet form, one sentence on each page; the test was taken during class time, 50 minutes. There were 20 subjects and they formed two groups of 10: group 1 was in its fourth semester of Lingala and group 2 in its second semester. I used both descriptive and inferential statistics to analyze the data. The independent vari- ables, group type and tense/aspect type, were in a nominal scale, the dependent variable, score, was in an interval scale. There are at least six tenses 2 in Lingala, five of which are denoted by suf- fixes to the verb and one by a prefix. The immediate past, 1 the imperfect, and the remote past of Lingala have no correspondences in English, whereas the use of the remaining tense/aspects are the same in the two languages.The progressive aspect is similar to that of English. The Lingala tense/aspect markers (in boldface) are: I. -i 'present': This tense is used to express an event that has just been com- pleted before the moment of speaking, i.e., within minutes of the moment ot speaking. It cannot be used for events that occurred earlier in the day. In Bantu syntax it is called the 'immediate past'. For example, 1 00 Studies in Linguistic Sciences 28. 1 (Spring 1998) (1) He is fine. (2) I just came from the market. Ye a-zal-i malamu. Ngai na-ut-i na zanda. V II. -aki 'past': It is very restricted in standard Lingala and is used to de- scribe events which have happened within a day with regard to the time of the utterance. It is called the 'imperfect' in Bantu syntax. For example, (3) I went to Chicago this morning. ^ Ngai na-kend-aki Chicago lelo na ntongo. m III. -aka 'past': This tense is used to express events that occurred anytime in the past, i.e., beyond 24 hours, but whose effect is still being felt or whose relation to a present event can still be talked about. The event may be interrupted with a subsequent past action. It is the 'simple past' in Bantu syntax. For example, (4) I went to Peoria yesterday. Ngai na-kend-aka Peoria lobi. IV. -a 'past': This tense is used to describe completed events that occurred in the distant past and for which there is, generally, no future recourse. The event, unlike the simple past, cannot be interrupted. In Bantu syntax this tense is called the 'remote past'. For example, (5) Our dog has a broken leg. Mbwa ya biso e-bukan-a lokolo. V. -aka 'habitual': Used to refer to re-occuring events in the present. This suffix is called the 'present habitual' in Bantu syntax. For example, (6) I speak Lingala every day. Ngai na-lob-aka Lingala mikolo minso. VI. -ko- 'future': This form is the most general future tense in Lingala and is used to describe events that will take place after the moment of speaking, even if an event will occur 3 minutes later. The event to be described must be probable. In Bantu syntax, this is called the 'simple future'. For example, (7) I will go to Chicago. Ngai na-ko-kende Chicago. VQ. auxiliary + infinitive of main verb present progressive': The auxil- iary is ko-zala 'to be', which must be inflected in the present tense followed by the infinitival form of the main verb. This aspect describes an event at the moment of speaking. A The results showed that the groups were not dissimilar and an effect size for tense/aspect type showed that the difference in the group scores was statistically significant. Effect size also showed that length of exposure to a language in the classroom is not statistically significant and could therefore be considered not a critical factor in foreign language acquisition. Kambou: Acquisition of Lingala tense/aspect 1 1 2. Literature review To my knowledge, no study on the acquisition of tense/aspect in Lingala by Americans has not been reported in the acquisition literature. Although compara- tive studies of tense and aspect have been reported in the literature (Bardovi- Harlig 1992), most of these studies have compared English tense/aspect with tense/aspect in Asian and European languages, as in Andrews 1992 and Dhon- gade 1984. The two related to African languages are Machobane 1985 and Botne 1981, which are descriptive studies. As can be seen, nothing has been re- ported in the literature with regard to acquisition of tense/aspect of African lan- guages. Some descriptive studies of tense/aspect of Bantu languages have been reported in the literature (Besha 1977, Bybee 1994, Johnson 1977, Mufwene 1978). 3. The study 3.1 Statement of purpose In SLA studies, the focus has nearly always been on the acquisition of English or some European languages by Africans. To my knowledge, studies in the acquisi- tion of tense/aspect in African languages, and especially in Lingala, by Americans has not yet been undertaken. Yet, Lingala and many African languages are taught in many universities in the United States, and Peace Corps personel are taught Lingala and other African languages when they are to serve in Africa. I hope such a study can help improve teaching not only in the U.S. and Europe, but also in Africa, since it concerns classroom foreign language teaching in both cases. 3.2 Research questions The main research question is: How do American students learn Lingala tense/as- pect. The other questions that follow are: (a) What tense/aspect type(s) will be difficult for them? (b) What tense/aspect type(s) will be easy for them? (c) What learning strategies do they employ? My guess/hypothesis will be that they will transfer their English (LI) tense/aspect usage into Lingala (L2). In Lingala, there are three past-tense markers as shown in table 1: one for past events within a day, {-aki}; one for past events beyond 24 hours, {-aka}; and another for past events in the distant past, {-a}. In these cases, English will use one past tense, {past}. It is the use of the appropriate tense/aspect marker in Lingala that will be difficult for the subjects, because in English we do not need to make the three distinctions in the past, as in Lingala. With regard to the struc- ture, the three affixes are suffixed to the verb, as in most English verbs, so this will not be a problem for the subjects, e.g., walk + {past) gives "walked" and 'bin'-t- {-aka} gives 'binaka', the equivalent of "dance" + {past} = "danced". The main problem for the subjects will be the semantic distinction oi the Lingala tense/aspect markers and the tones, especially the past tense ones. The closest past-tense/aspect form between English and Lingala is {-a}, hence it is likely to be the source of LI transfer. ♦ 102 Studies in Linguistic Sciences 28. 1 (Spring 1998) Table 1 Tense/aspect types in English and Lingala English Lingala Present -s, -0 -i -aka Past -ed/vowel change/0 -a -aka -aki Future will, V-ing -ko- Since Lingala is a tonal language and differs from English with regard to the use of the immediate past {-i}, imperfect {-aki}, simple past {-aka}, and remote past {-a}, the prediction is that most of the students will use these tense/aspects incorrectly in Lingala, e.g., the immediate past will be used to express English simple present and present perfect. The simple past {-aka} and the present habit- ual {-aka} tense/aspect markers are distinguished by high and low tones, respec- tively (see Appendix 1 for Lingala sentences used in the translation and their English equivalents). 3.3 Research design The research project was based on American students learning Lingala at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The research was an intact group de- sign — one group of subjects with two semesters of Lingala and another group with four semesters of Lingala. Both groups had the same instructor in the course of their learning Lingala. This design allowed me to make between-group and within-group comparisons. I also made causal inferences with regard to length of exposure influencing the acquisition of Lingala tense/aspect. The dependent variable was the test score from the translation test and the independent variable was the group type. The independent variable was measured as a nominal scale and the dependent variable as an interval scale. The moderator variable was the Lingala tense/aspect type. 3.4 Subjects There were 2 groups of learners: group 1 was in its fourth semester of Lingala, group 2 was in its second semester. The total number of learners was 20 — 10 in each group. They were all native speakers of American English; all the subjects except two in group 1 had never had exposure to Lingala prior to their taking the^ Lingala class. One in group 1 had had exposure to Kiswahili before taking Lin-^ gala. There were 7 male and 13 female subjects in total: group 1 had 5 males and 5 females, group 2 had 2 males and 8 females. 3.5 Test design I collected my data through a translation task; subjects translated 36 English sen- tences into Lingala. These sentences were printed in a booklet with one sentence on each page. Subjects worked at their own pace, but they had one class period (50-60 minutes) to translate all 36 sentences. Since subjects were bound by a time t ► Kambou: Acquisition of Lingala tense/aspect 103 constraint (50 minutes), I chose six short sentences of each tense/aspect type, us- ing verbs and other vocabulary items they were familiar with. This was to avoid their concentrating on vocabulary instead of tense/aspect. The English sentences and their Lingala translations are given in Appendix 1 ; the tense/aspect markers in Lingala are in boldface. The test was scored by the class instructor and this ex- perimenter. 3.6 Stimuli/materials The sentences subjects saw were in English (the source language) and they had to translate them into Lingala (the target language). The sentences were printed in a booklet with various randomization orders for each subject. Each page had an English sentence and a line below it for the Lingala translation, as shown in Appendix 2. 3.7 Method/procedure Subjects were given printed instructions on the cover page of the booklet. Sen- tences were randomly ordered for each subject and the booklets randomly pre- sented to the subjects. The randomizing was to prevent subjects from trying to guess what the test was about and to eliminate their having to translate all the sentences in the same order. Presenting the sentences one at a time prevented subjects from seeing all the sentences at one time; this procedure also prevented subjects from making use of previous sentences, and the shuffling avoided im- posing the same order of translation on all the subjects. 3.8 Data analysis 4 To grade the translations, I coded a correct translation of verb usage as 1 and a wrong one as 0. The score for each subject was the total frequecy count of Is and each subject could score between and 36 points. The group score was the sum of the total of Is for each subject in the group. With {-aka}, I considered a transla- tion as correct when the appropriate tone for the tense/aspect type was marked but with the others, tone was not considered because it is not phonemic. I used SPSS statistics software program for the descriptive and inferential statistics. I compared the translation scores of the two groups to see if length of exposure to a language in the classroom is a critical factor in acquisition. I calcu- lated effect size for gender, group, and tense/aspect type. I also calculated the re- liability coefficients for various variables under consideration as well as the rate of accuracy of tense/aspect usage. The dependent variable was the score on the translation test and the major independent variable was group type. 104 Studies in Linguistic Sciences 28.1 (Spring 1998) 3.9 Results The results are summarized below in Tables 2-7. Table 2 Distribution of : scores 1 for all subjects i Tense/aspect M SD Range k 1 Skew- KURTOSIS Rate Relia- type NESS correct bility Overall 17.45 6.79 8-30 36 .10 -1.12 48.5% .87 TA1 {-i} 4.15 1.04 2-6 6 -.02 -.18 75.0% .26 TA2{-aki} 3.55 2.06 0-6 6 -.32 -1.12 59.2% .79 TA3 {-aka} 3.70 1.53 0-6 6 -.92 .51 61.7% .57 TA4 {-a} .90 1.25 0-4 6 1.28 .63 15.0% .65 TA5 {-aka} 1.90 1.97 0-6 6 .70 -.73 31.7% .80 TA6{-ko-} 3.25 1.83 0-6 6 -.58 -.34 54.2% .71 k is the maximum number of points that an individual can obtain on the test. N = 20. « Table 3 Distribution of scores by group and tense/aspect type Tense/aspect M SD Range k 1 Skew- Kurtosis Rate Relia- TYPE NESS CORRECT BETTY Group 1 (4th semester; n = 10) Overall 17.70 7.76 8-30 36 .03 -1.35 49.2% .90 TA1 {-i} 4.00 .82 3-5 6 .00 -1.39 66.7% .04 TA2 {-aki} 3.30 2.45 0-6 6 -.21 -1.71 55.0% .89 TA3 {-aka} 3.90 1.91 0-6 6 -1.37 1.01 65.0% .74 TA4 {-a} 1.30 1.49 0-4 6 .86 -.78 21.7% .68 TA5 {-aka} 1.90 2.42 0-6 6 .96 -1.05 31.7% .92 TA6 {-ko-} 3.30 2.00 0-6 6 -.83 -.23 55.0% .78 Group 2 (2nd semester; n = 10) Overall 17.20 6.07 8-27 36 .19 -.95 47.8% .85 TA1 {-i} 4.30 1.25 2-4 6 -.28 -.07 71.7% .48 TA2 {-aki} 3.80 1.69 1-6 6 -.13 -.99 63.3% .59 TA3 {-aka} 3.50 1.08 2-5 6 .00 -1.03 58.3% .37 TA4 {-a} .50 .85 0-26 6 1.36 .11 8.3% .44 TA5 {-aka} 1.90 1.52 0-4 6 -.26 -1.71 31.7% .52 TA6{-ko-} 3.20 1.75 0-6 6 -.38 .33 53.3% .68 k is the maximum number of points that an individual can obtain on the test. Kambou: Acquisition of Lingala tense/aspect 105 Table 4 Distribution of scores by sex and tense/aspect type Tense/aspect M i SD Range k a Skew- Kurtosis Rate Relia- TYPE NESS CORRECT BILrTY Males (n = 7) Overall 17.29 6.16 10-24 36 -.12 -2.34 48.0% .82 TA1 {-1} 3.86 .90 3-5 6 .35 -1.82 64.3% -.07 TA2 {-aki} 3.29 2.29 0-6 6 -.14 -1.10 54.8% .84 TA3 {-aka} 4.00 1.00 2-5 6 -1.40 3.00 66.7% -.51 TA4 {-a} 1.29 1.60 0-4 6 1.05 -.38 21.5% .78 TA5 {aka} 1.86 1.95 0-5 6 .84 -.79 3 1 .0% .77 TA6{-ko-} 3.00 2.38 0-6 6 -.31 -1.59 50.0% .86 Females (r i= 13) Overall 17.54 7.34 8-30 36 .15 -1.03 48.7% .90 TA1 {-i} 4.31 1.11 2-6 6 -.29 .48 71.8% .35 TA2 {-aki} 3.69 2.02 0-6 6 -.44 -1.01 61.5% .76 TA3 {-aka} 3.54 1.76 0-6 6 -.67 -.22 59.0% .76 TA4{-a} .69 1.03 0-3 6 1.27 .46 11.5% .52 TA5 {aka} 1.92 2.06 0-6 6 .73 -.55 32.0% .82 TA6{-ko-} 3.38 1.56 0-6 6 -.77 1.19 56.3% .56 ' k is the maximum obtain on the test. Table 5 Effect size for tense/aspect type I -l -aki -aka -a -aka -ko- ■aki -aka -a -aka -ko- 39 .37 1.15* 1.49* .64 .08 1.60* .82* .15 2.01* 1.03* .62* .27 1.53 .71* * The effect size difference is at least half a standard deviation, hence of practical significance. 106 Studies in Linguistic Sciences 28. 1 (Spring 1998) Table 6 Effect size for group and sex Group Group 1 Group 2 Group 1 .07 Group 2 « Male Male Female Sex .04 Female Table 7 Correlations between tense/aspect types -l -aki -aka -a -aka ■ko- -aki -aka -a •aka -ko- .57** .40 -.23 .26 .45* .52* .12 .45* .63** .12 .36 .40 .39 .47* .33 * Correlation is significant at .05 (2-tailed) ** Correlation is significant at .01 (2-tailed) 4. Summary and discussion The results of this study show that length of exposure to a language in the class- room is not necessarily a critical factor in foreign language acquisition. The results in Table 2 show that the overall rate of accuracy for all the subjects was below ^ average and also that the scores were distributed normally (skewness of .10), theB negative kurtosis indicates that there were fewer extremely high or low scores than the normal distribution (flat peak), while the positive skewness indicates that the mean was higher than if the distribution were normal. Table 3 shows that the rate of accuracy for the fourth semester students, group 1, was 49% and that of the second semester students was 48%. The accuracy rate ranges from 21% to 66% in group 1 and from 8.3% to 71% in group 2. The reliability estimate of the two groups was acceptable, .90 and .85 for groups 1 and 2 respectively. The scores in groups 1 and 2 were normally distributed except for(-aka) and {-a} in I > Kambou: Acquisition ofLingala tense/ aspect 107 groups 1 and 2, respectively (normal distribution assumes skewness values of less than +/-1). Table 4 shows that the rate of accuracy for males was 48% and that of females was 49% with scores for both not normally distributed. However, the reli- ability estimates were acceptable, .82 and .90 for males and females, respectively. Table 5 shows the effect size for the different tense/aspect types while Table 6 shows that there was no significant difference between the two groups or be- tween males and females. Table 7 shows the correlation between the tense/aspect types, the statistically significant correlations were between -i and -aki; -i and -ko-; -aki and -aka, -aki and -aka; -aki and -ko; and then between -a and -ko. With individual sentences, group 1 had more correct translations (15 sen- tences) than group 2 (12 sentences); both groups did equally well in the remain- ing 9 sentences. This result shows that there are great individual differences among the subjects. But when the results are conflated showing group score for tense/aspect type, group 2 outscores group 1 in 3 out of the 6 tense/aspect types used in the translation test (Table 3) and performed equally well in one {-aka}. The second semester students did better than the fourth semester ones in the 'present tense' or technically the immediate past. This result gives partial support to the assumption that length of exposure to a language favors acquisition. Group 2 subjects did better than group 1 subjects on the immediate past marker, {-i}, maybe because they have retained set phrases in Lingala, since three of the six sentences (1, 4, 5) can be memorized as set phrases. They may have used the syntactic cues better than the group 1 students in the case of the imperfect, {-aki}. With the remote past, {-a}, subjects in group 2 had not studied this tense/aspect type, but all the same they were able to get some correct translations, whereas we would have expected them to get no translation correct. This could be due to the two students who were exposed to Lingala prior to taking this class and the one who had had a class in Kiswahili (a Bantu language, like Lingala). Maybe it is those students who read ahead of the class. We can say that group 1 outperformed group 2 in all tense/aspect types except for the immediate past, {-i} and the imperfect, {-aki}. But overall, the mean for group 1 and group 2 was not statistically significant and this raises serious concerns as to why this was so. This result could be due to the teaching style, presentation of the material in the text- book, or a combination of both. Do the students know English grammar well enough to take advantage of the similarities between the two languages? These are areas that need to be researched. Subjects could have done better if they had taken advantage of some syn- tactic cues in translating the past tenses and the present habitual from English into Lingala. For the past tense, we have the time adverbials 'this morning', 'earlier today', 'a while ago', which indicate that the time of the event is within the day, hence the use of {-aki} in Lingala. The time adverbials 'yesterday' and "last year' in the English sentences indicate that the the time of event was be- yond 24 hours, hence expressed by {-aka} in Lingala. The time adverbials 'every day', 'daily', 'weekly' in the English sentences indicated a repeated action, hence expressed by {-aka} in Lingala. Why did most of the learners not use this impor- tant strategy? Perhaps they do not knowhow to make use of them because they 108 Studies in Linguistic Sciences 28. 1 (Spring 1998) have not been taught by their instructor or because it is not mentioned in the textbook. With the future, some subjects used two tense/aspects: {-ko-} and the present progressive in translating sentences 33 and 35. Since the present progres- sive can express future time in English, they transfered this idea into Lingala, where unfortunately there is a single future tense/aspect marker, {-ko-}. On the whole, it is the remote past {-a} that was the most difficult tense/ as- pect type to translate. This is not surprising because there are no syntactic cues tof be used as strategies for this tense/aspect type, {-aki}, which is supposed to be^ the easiest of the three past forms (always used with a time adverbial indicating that the event is within the day), did not get the best translation, but rather {-aka}, which has some time adverbials that indicate that the time of event is be- yond 24 hours, got the most correct translations. The wrong translations in the past tense mainly used {-a} instead of the other two forms. This is also evidence of LI transfer, since in English the use of time adverbials in a past tense sentence is not very significant, whereas in Lingala it is very significant. The prediction that subjects will find the past tense/aspect difficult is borne out because most of them knew that the Lingala sentences should be in the past, but determining which tense/aspect type they should be in was a problem for them. So most of them seemed to be guessing, by suffixing one of the three mark- ers they knew to the verbs. Some subjects did not take advantage of syntactic cues in the English sentences. This is either because they did not know their sig- nificance, or because the subjects' motivation for learning Lingala was low, or even because they did not understand the sentences in English. The results show that it is the remote past {-a} and the present habitual {-aka} that are the most dif- ficult tense/aspect types to acquire, the easiest is the immediate past {-i}. The gen- eral hierarchy of tense/aspect in a descending order of difficulty is: {-a}, {-aka}, {-ko-}, {-aki}, {-aka}, {-i}. This order corresponds to the mean score of the tense/aspect types in Table 2 in an ascending order. However, the hierarchy of difficulty by group is: {-a}, {-aka}, {-ko-}/{-aki},{-aka}, {-i} for group 1 and {-a}, {-aka}, {-ko-}, {-aka}, {-aki}, {-i} for group 2. This progression could be followed in teaching, implying that for the 'present' and 'past' tenses, the ones with the higher or highest rate of accuracy should be introduced first. Table 5 shows that the effect size of the mean difference for {-i} and {-aka}, the present tense mark- ers, is of practical importance, as is that of the past tense markers, {-a}, {-aka}, and {-aki} and these need to be addressed. However, a 2-tailed Pearson correlation (Table 7) shows no statistically significant relationship between the different^ 'present tenses' ({-i} and {-aka}), but a significant correlation between the 'pastW tenses' {-aka} and {-aki}. There is rather a statistically significant relationship be- tween the 'immediate past' {-i} and the 'past' form {-aki}, and also between {-i} and the future {-ko-}. There is also a statistically significant correlation between the 'future' {-ko-} and the 'past' {-aki} and {-a}. The significant correlation be- tween the 'present tense' and the 'past tense' is with {-aka} and {-aki}. Al- though it is difficult to say why there is a significant correlation between the tenses, a tentative explanation for the correlation within tenses may be that in the I > Kambou: Acquisition of Lingala tense/aspect 109 past tense, some students were making use of the syntactic cues, hence the rela- tionship between their performance with {-aki} and {-aka}. 5. Conclusion The results of the study have shown that (a) in L2 learning LI transfer is part of the learner's strategy; (b) the rate of accuracy of tense/aspect usage is below av- erage even after three semesters of exposure; (c) the length of exposure to the oreign language is not a crucial factor in proficiency; (d) the level of difficulty is similar for both groups in this study. 6. Implications for future research In the future, it will be good to go through the textbook to see how tense/aspects are presented, audit the classes to see how the instructor teaches tense/aspect and then have a questionnaire and/or interview with learners to see how motivated they are and what they have understood in the class. The same translation test can be given to the Kiswahili classes with the same amount of language exposure to see if the results will be similar, since they are both Bantu languages. For future research, teaching materials could be based on the proposed hierarchy of diffi- culty, the instructors should be trained to use learning strategies like syntatic cues in their teaching, especially those who are not in linguistics or language- pedagogy programs. Equal sample sizes for males and females for both groups should be used to see if there is any gender effect. Similarly, it would be interest- ing to see if there is an age effect. The division of the past tense markers into three should be maintained, but the explanation with regard to the meaning should change, especially for {-aka} and {-a}. We could say that {-a} is used to express the result of a past event and {-aka} is used to express the time of an event (when there is a cue) or the result of an event (when there is no cue) beyond 24 hours. This may not solve the problems mentioned above, but could be the begining of a solution. The term "imperfect' should not be used for {-aki} because it can con- fuse the students. It should be called a 'past' tense, and students should be taught to recognize it with the syntactic cues that signal it. As for the 'present', technically called the 'immediate past', it should be presented in two parts: (a) a 'present' tense and (b) 'present perfect', which has a close counterpart in Eng- lish. If this is done, students could be told that {-i} is used with 'present' tense and with actions that in English are preceded by 'just'. For teaching purposes, ii is better to structure the tense/aspects as much as possible to correspond to the LI categories: present, past, future. This will enable the learners to make use of their previous knowledge in the new learning situation. 1 1 Studies in Linguistic Sciences 28. 1 (Spring 1998) NOTES 1 This paper was presented at the first ALTA Conference held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in April 1997. 2 Information concerning tense/aspect is taken from Bokamba 1981. 3 The technical terms used for tense/aspect, e.g. 'immediate past', are those used in ■ Bantu syntax and grammar. ™ 4 Raw scores for subjects and groups are presented in Appendix 3. REFERENCES Bardovi-Harlig, K. 1992. The relationship of form and meaning: A cross- sectional study of tense and aspect in the interlanguage of learners of Eng- lish as a second language. Applied Psycholinguistics 13:3.253-78. Besha, R. M. 1989. A study of tense and aspect in Shambala. Language and Dia- lect Studies in East Africa 10. [pp.?] Bokamba, E. G. 1981. Aspects of Bantu syntax. Department of Linguistics, Uni- versity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, MS. Borg, W. R., & M. D. Gall. 1983. Educational Research: An Introduction. 5th ed. New York: Longman. Botne, R. D. O. 1981. On the nature of tense and aspect: Studies in the semantics of temporal reference in English and Kinyarwanda. Northwestern Univer- sity, Ph.D dissertation in Linguistics. BYBEE, J. L. 1994. The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World. [Place: publisher?] DHONGADE, R. 1984. Tense, Aspect, and Mood in English and Murathi. Pune: Deccan College. Hatch, E., & A. Lazarton. 1994. The Research Manual: Statistics for Applied Linguistics. New York: Newbury House. Johnson, M. R. 1977. A semantic analysis of Kikuyu tense and aspect. Ann Ar- bor: University Microfilms International, 1979. Machobane, M. 1985. Tense and aspect in Sesotho. Studies in African Gram- A matical Systems. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Linguistics Club. ▼ Mufwene, S. S. 1978. A reconsideration of Lingala temporal inflections. Studies in African Linguistics 9:91-105. Kambou: Acquisition of Lingala tense/aspect 1 1 1 APPENDIX The English sentences to be translated and their expected Lingala equiva- lents I. Immediate past (-i). 1 . He is fine. Ye a-zal-i malamu. 2. 1 just came from the market. Ngai na-ut-i na zanda. 3. Ted hit me. Ted a-bet-i ngai Where are you? Yo o-zal-i wapi? I love you. Ngai na-ling-i yo They just wrote a letter. Bango ba-kom-i munkanda D. Imperfect (-aki). 7. I went to Chicago this morning. Ngai na-kend-aki Chicago lelo na ntongo. 8. They ate chicken a while ago. Bango ba-liy-aki nsoso mwa kala. 9. We bought a car early today. Biso to-somb-aki muntoka na ntongo. 10. I taught this morning. Ngai na-lakis-aki lelo na ntongo. 1 1 . Ted saw Tisia this morning. Ted a-mon-aki Tisia lelo na ntongo. 12. They talked to him earlier today. Bango ba-solol-aki na ye lelo na ntongo. IE. Simple past (-aka). 13. I went to Peoria yesterday. Ngai na-kend-aka Peoria lobi. 14. You taught Lingala last Monday. Yo o-lakis-aka Lingala moko moleki/mwa mosala. 15. Lawrence bought beer. Lawrence a-somb-aka masanga. I 16. Biko and Eyamba wrote to Lawrence. Biko na Eyamba ba-komel-aka Lawrence. 17. Moses called home yesterday. Moses a-beng-aka mboka lobi. 18. They danced to African music. Ba-bin-aka misiki ya afrika. 112 Studies in Linguistic Sciences 28. 1 (Spring 1998) IV. Remote past (-a). 19. Our dog has a broken leg. Mbwa ya biso e-bukan-a lokolo. 20. Many people went to Chicago. Bato mingi ba-kend-a Chicago. 21. Who did Lee marry? Lee a-bal-a nani? 22. Martin Luther King is dead. Martin Luther King a-kuf-a. 23. Mary divorced Paul. Mary a-boy-a Paul. 24. The war is finished. Bitumba e-sil-a. V. Present habitual (-aka). 25. I speak Lingala every day. Ngai na-lob-aka Lingala mikolo minso. 26. She goes to school every morning. Ye a-kend-aka sukulu/kelasi ntongo inso. 27. He passes here every day. Ye a-lek-aka awa mikolo minso. 28. Catrese reads weekly. Catrese a-tang-aka poso inso. 29. She cooks every day. Ye a-lamb-aka mikolo minso. 30. You drive your car daily. Yo o-kumb-aka muntuka mwa yo mikolo minso. VI. Simple future (-ko-). 31. I will go to Chicago. Ngai na-ko-kende Chicago. 32. She will eat chicken. Ye a-ko-liya nsoso. 33. I am going to buy a car. Ngai na-ko-somba muntuka. 34. Will it rain tomorrow? Mbula e-ko4Deta lobi? 35. Is she coming the day after tomorrow? Ye a-ko-yaa ndele? 36. He will graduate in May. Ye a-ko-silisa na sanza ya mitano. « Studies in the Linguistic Sciences Volume 28, Number 1 (Spring 1998) I PRENUCLEUS GLIDES IN KOREAN Hyo- Young Kim University of Michigan, Ann Arbor hyk@umich.edu This paper argues that prenucleus glides in Korean are part of the onset, forming a secondary articulation on the initial consonant. The present analysis assumes a simpler syllable structure than the pre- vious ones and provides an account for the wider range of phono- logical phenomena involving glides using the feature-geometric rep- resentation. 1. Introduction In the Korean language, glides are allowed only in the prenucleus position. On the analysis of prenucleus glides in Korean, there have been two proposals. Kim- Renaud 1978, Sohn 1987, Choe 1986, Kim & Kim 1991, and Nam & Southard 1994 argue that the Korean glides are a part of the nucleus. However, other scholars such as Lee 1982, Ahn 1986, and Lee 1993 favor the idea that the Ko- rean glides are a part of the onset, not of the nucleus. The former will be referred as the Nucleus Hypothesis (NH) and the latter as the Cluster Onset Hypothesis (COH). Lee 1993 calls this the Onset Hypothesis. I add the 'cluster' to differenti- ate it from the proposal which will be presented in this paper. Another reason for the addition of 'cluster' is that the onset hypothesis regards a sequence of a glide and a preceding consonant as a consonant cluster. In this paper, I will argue that glides are a part of the onset. The hypothesis will be called the Single Onset Hypothesis (SOH). The difference between the SOH and the COH is that in the SOH a consonant and the following glide do not form a consonant cluster but are just one complex segment. By a complex seg- ment I mean (la), but not (lb) nor (lc). I (l)a. Place b. X c. Lar / \ / \ / \ *Cor Dor Root Root [+H -H] (2) Syllable / \ Onset Rhyme / \ Nucleus Coda I I X X 114 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1998) This analysis leads to the more general claim that every constituent of a syllable is composed of just one segment; onset, nucleus or coda each has only one position as (2) shows. Following feature geometry, each segment is represented as a fea- ture tree in this paper. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In section 2, the previous analyses of the Korean glides are reviewed. In section 3, the problems with these analyses are pointed out. In section 4, a new analysis is presented. In section 5. 1 A illustrate the explanatory power of the present analysis. In the last section, I make W some concluding remarks. 2. Previous studies There has been much controversy over the analysis of glides in Korean. There are two views. The first view is that a glide can be assigned to one specific structure, under the nucleus or under the onset. The second view is that a glide can be anywhere in a syllable structure depending on the word in which a glide occurs. 1 This paper will take the first view. The second view will not be followed for three reasons. First, the first view presents a more restricted theory in the sense that it does not allow a rare structure which permits a rising diphthong. Second, for the Korean data we do not need all the other structures permitted by the second view other than a structure with a glide in the onset. Third, one of the structures admit- ted under the second view, the structure in which a glide is in the nucleus, is not acceptable for reasons which will become clear below. 2.1 Arguments for the Nucleus Hypothesis (NH) First of all, let us look at the arguments for the NH, which are from Kim & Kim 1991 andSohn 1987. First, there is no co-occurrence restriction between an onset consonant and a following glide, but there are constraints on the possible coda consonant clus- ters and complex nuclei. According to Kim & Kim 1991, any consonant can come before glides in Korean, while only a small number of consonant clusters are al- lowed to occur in coda position. Also there is negative restriction on the possible complex nuclei such as *ji or *wu. This suggests that an onset consonant and a following glide are not within one node in a syllable. 2 The assumption here is that if the more restricted constraint holds between two units, then these are closer units. 3 Second, Korean has a phenomenon called Consonant Cluster Reduction . (CCR). This phenomenon is seen as a strong argument for the NH. The NH as- m sumes that there is only one consonant both in the onset and in the coda. There- fore, the sequence of three consonants cannot be parsed in the syllable structure properly. One of the repair mechanisms put into operation is Consonant Cluster Reduction, which deletes the second consonant in a sequence of three. This is illustrated in (3). (3) kaps 'price: underlying form' kaps-i 'NOM' kap-man 'price only' nsks 'spirit: underlying form' noks-i 'NOM' nok-to 'soul also' ant?- 4 'to sit: underlying form' antc-otta 'PAST' an-kola 'IMP' I I Hyo Young Kim: Prenucleus glides in Korean 115 When a word ending underlyingly with a consonant cluster is followed by a word beginning with a consonant as in kaps-man, the resulting derived word comes to have three consonants. Then, one of the consonants, 5, is deleted by the operation of Consonant Cluster Reduction. Thus, the resulting word is kapman. In contrast, when the word is followed by a vowel-initial suffix, kaps-i, both members of the consonant cluster survive, kapsi. If a glide is in the onset, then -CCG- should be considered as a possible in- put to the Consonant Cluster Reduction, because they make a sequence of three consonants. However, CCR does not apply, as is seen in (4). That is, if Ipj or Ikw are considered a sequence of three consonants, one of three consonants must be deleted. (4) ol-pja 'this year's crop' sil-kwa 'fruit' The examples in (4) are interpreted to show that glides are not in the onset but in the nucleus. Third, the phenomena of ideophones also provide an argument in support of the NH. The ideophone is formed by reduplication of the base as shown below. 5 (5) k'opul-k'opul 'winding' 6 pintung-pintung 'idling' There are also partially reduplicated ideophones, as in (6), in which everything except the onset consonant is reduplicated. (6) aki-tcaki 'sweet' osun-tosun 'friendly' When the words beginning with CGV- are the base for the partial reduplication, every segment except word-initial C is reduplicated, suggesting that the glide is not a part of the onset. That can be seen in (7). That is, if the glide is in the onset, then it should disappear in the partially reduplicated form. However, it survives. (7) jam-njam 'tasty' 7 jok-ljsk 'vivid' jon-rjorj 'teasing' The fourth piece of evidence for the Nucleus Hypothesis comes from a lan- guage game in which CV is inserted after the first CV of each syllable. The C in the inserted CV is always p. V copies the vowel from the base syllable. Then, if there is a coda consonant, it is attached to the end of the inserted CV. A simple rule for this change would be C I V I C 2 ^ C,V, - pV,C 2 . This is illustrated in (8). (8) p h ato -> p h a-pa to-po 'waves' kongtc/ek -» ko-pong tc/e-pek 'notebook' (9) shows what happens in words that contain glides. This language game shows where the prenucleus G belongs. 116 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1998) (9) kwonse — > kws-pwon se - pe 'power' jaku — > ja-pja ku - pu 'baseball' According to Sohn, and as (8) illustrates, a glide is repeated in the inserted CV. 8 This means that a glide is not a part of the onset. Otherwise, along with the onset consonant, it should be replaced by p in the language game because the entire onset is replaced by p in the language game. The fifth argument for the Nucleus Hypothesis is found in the pronunciation W of the liquid /. The / is changed into [r] in pre-vocalic position (= syllable-initial onset position) but it remains [1] in coda position. (10) demonstrates this alterna- tion. (10) kil 'street' kil-to [kilto] 'street also' kil-e [kire] "LOC tal 'moon' tal-pitc/ 1 [talpit] 9 'moonlight' tal-i [tari] 'NOM' This / is changed into [r] without exception, even when / is followed by a glide- initial morpheme, supporting glides as a nucleus element. We can see this in ( 1 1 ). (11) il-jo-il 'Sunday' [irjoil] *[iljoil] kil-wol 'writing' [kirwol] *[kilw9l] The last supporting evidence for the NH is that, in Korean, no consonant cluster can occur in either the onset or the coda. As is seen in (12), some words have a consonant cluster in either the onset or the coda in their underlying repre- sentation. These words, however, do not retain two consonants at the surface level. No matter where the cluster is, one of the consonants has to be deleted. That is, the Korean syllable template has neither CCV(C) nor (C)VCC. (12) UNDERLYING FORM SURFACE FORM stok 'rice cake' 10 [t'sk] 11 skita 'be in between' [k'ita] noks 'spirit' [nak] talk 'hen' [tak] If we accept the glide as a member of the onset, 12 then we need the restricted condition: the consonant cluster is allowed only in the onset and the second member of the cluster has to be a glide. Assuming the NH, we do not need to ad- mit consonant clusters in the syllable template of Korean. 2.2 Arguments for the Cluster Onset Hypothesis (COH) Let us consider arguments for the Cluster Onset Hypothesis advanced by Lee A 1993. ▼ First, we can see why glide formation and glide insertion are triggered in Ko- rean if we assume that a glide provides an onset. Glide formation (13) and inser- tion (14) are natural syllable repair mechanisms when a hiatus happens to occur. In the NH, it is difficult to explain why a glide is inserted between vowels. (13) Glide formation tg h iu-3 [tc/iwa] 'to clean - IMP' o-a fwal 'to come - IMP' Hyo- Young Kim: Prenucleus glides in Korean 1 1 7 (14) Glide insertion Minsu-a [minsuja] 'Oh, Minsu' Minsu- Vocative Second, the vowel harmony feature [RTR] 13 does not affect the glide. If the glides are in the nucleus, they should be the targets for the harmony. However, the glide is not affected, as we can see in (15). (15) wirj wirj — > werj werj *oerj oerj 'buzzing' sjuq sjuq — > sjorj sjorj *S£orj seorj 'whizzing' k h wi khwi -> k h we k h we *k h oe k"oe 'foul smelling' Third, the advocates of the COH doubt the reliability of the language-game data presented by Kim & Kim 1991 and Sohn 1987 under the NH. According to Lee 1993, Korean speakers produce ja-pa kit-pu as the only correct form for jaku. To ihemja-pja ku-pu is not a possible form. Fourth, contrary to the arguments of the NH, there exists a co-occurrence restriction between a consonant and a following glide: *pw and *mw are not good clusters, though pit and mu are possible. Similarly, *sj and *tg h j are not pos- sible combinations, although si and tg h i are well-formed. u These show that glides are different from vowels in the nucleus. The co-occurrence restriction holding between a glide and a vowel, such as *ji, *ji, *\vu, and *wo, 15 can be explained by a universal tendency, such as avoidance of nonoptimal sounds. 16 Thus, this restriction cannot be used to sup- port the NH. Having observed that the COH is observationally more adequate than the NH, let us now turn to how the COH can handle the data presented as evidence for the NH. First, as for Cluster Simplification seen in (3), Lee 1993 argues the COH can also handle (3). According to his explanation, Cluster Simplification simply does not apply when the glide is involved because the syllable template of Korean al- lows a consonant-glide cluster in the onset. 17 Second, Lee's account of the 1/r alternation in (10) and (11) is that both (10) and (11) obey the Maximal Syllable Onset Principle. The representation by Lee is in (16). Thus, the data are not incompatible with the COH. Under both the NH and the COH approaches. / is in the onset position, where it is pronounced as [r] because it meets the structural description of the / to [r] rule. (16) a. COH approach 18 b. NH approach o <5 a o a a 118 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998) Third, with regard to the reduplication in ideophones in (6), Lee claims that those are not a case of partial reduplication, but rather of total reduplication. After that, the words are subject to two other subsequent phonological rules independ- ently required in Korean phonology. The first of these is the nasalization of liq- uids; liquids are changed into the homorganic nasal on the surface level when they occur in word initial position, as we can see in (17). (17) k"w£-lak 'pleasure' nak- won "paradise' m kin-lo 'work' no-tong 'labor' The second of these rules is the deletion of a nasal sound in word-initial position followed by a front vowel or front glide. 19 This is exemplified in (18). (18) su-njo 'nun' jo-tca 'woman' sip-njon '10 years' jon-mal 'year end' The derivation of joung-rjoung is given in (19). (19) rjong underlying form rjong-rjong full reduplication njong-rjong nasalization jong-rjong nasal deletion Giving this analysis, Lee 1993 points out that 'we do not have a single ideo- phone of this type, which has a consonant other than a liquid or an alveolar nasal. Given such restrictions, we may say that the deletion of liquids or an alveolar na- sal may not be the result of the ideophone-specific onset deletion process.' We will see why this analysis presents difficulties in section 3.2. 3. Problems with the previous studies Both the NH and the COH make strong arguments as we observed above. How- ever, both the NH and the COH encounter a theoretical problem. We need to consider the syllable structures suggested up to now for the Korean glides in or- der to grasp the theoretical consequences of these analyse. (20) a. Lee 1993 ♦ Ahn 1986 Lee 1982 Hyo- Young Kim: Prenucleus glides in Korean 119 Kim-Renaud 1978 O R Sohn 1987 Kim & Kim 1991 G V C All the above structures reserve a separate position for a glide, no matter where it is located (i.e., in the onset or in the nucleus). The first two structures can be subsumed into one structure containing the branching onset. Roughly, we can classify the above structures into two kinds: one has a branching nucleus and the other has a branching onset. 3.1 Problems with the NH The problems with the NH are clearly pointed out by Lee 1993. In this sub- section, two theoretical problems and two more factual problems will be added to Lee's. Let us consider first the theoretical problem. The NH postulates a branching nucleus with G and V. This has been called Short Rising Diphthong. But Short Rising Diphthong is very rare and is at best controversial. For example, Fu 1990, Harris 1983, and Kim & Kim 1991 argue for the diphthongal analysis of a prenu- cleus glide for Chinese, Spanish, and Korean respectively. However, these are challenged by Duamnu 1990, Carreira 1988, and Lee 1993, respectively. For French, Scullen 1993 proposes the onset analysis. The second problem is that the structure with a branching nucleus breaks the one-to-one relationship between a segment and a constituent of a syllable, giving rise to a more complicated structure. Theoretically, all else being equal, there is no reason to accept the more complicated model. In addition to the above-mentioned theoretical problem, the NH has some factual problems. First, contrary to what has been assumed in the NH, very strict co-occurrence restrictions hold between a consonant and a following glide. These restrictions are more restricted than those holding between a glide and the following vowel. 21 The vowel inventory of Korean is [i, e, e, 3, i, u, o, a]. 22 (21) shows the possi- ble glide-vowel combinations. (21) Possible GV sequences in Korean 23 a. je,je,J3,ju,jo.ja :4 *ji, *ji b. wi, we, we, wa, wa 25 *wu, *wo, *wi As we saw in the previous section, these restrictions are explained by the more general avoidance of non-optimal sounds, and do not provide an argument in support of the NH. Now, let us see what restrictions hold for a consonant and a following glide, as shown in (22). 120 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1998) (22) Impossible CGV sequences 26 in Korean 27 *t, t\ t',tc, tc\ tc',s' +jV 28 * pp h , p',m + wV 29 , The NH does not predict these co-occurrence restrictions between a consonant and a following glide. The second phenomenon that the NH cannot explain is rhyming in Korean poetry. Under the NH, it is predicted that [ rhyme GV(Q] in [(C)GV(C)] is a rhyme, but this prediction is not consistent with the facts. (23) shows a characteristic rhyming pattern of a famous modern poet named Yuk-Sa Lee analyzed by the Korean scholar Sang-Ho Lee 1984. The onset and the prenucleus G do not affect the rhyming pattern at all, that is, nja and da rhynme in (a), Ija and la rhyme in (b), and njo and ko rhyme in (c). (23) Rhyming pattern (Sang-Ho Lee 1984) a. nja-o-ga-o-da in Twilight 30 b. lja-la-ta-la-la in Wild Land 31 c. la-njo-la-la-ko in Spotted Cat 32 The rhyming patterns in (23) indicate that glides play no role in rhyming. This shows that the glide in Korean is not in the rime, but in the onset. Proponents of the NH might try to account for the rhyming within the NH. For example, ac- cording to Chao 1934, a syllable is comprised of an initial and a final. Then the final is composed of a glide and a rime, which in turn has a nucleus and a coda. The NH would require some such additional and unjustified stipulation, which is not needed in the OH. 3.2 Problems with COH There are also facts that cannot be accounted for by the COH, which considers C and G as a consonant cluster. First, consider the branching onset structure, which is a tenet of the COH. In Korean, consonant clusters are not allowed in either the onset or the coda. Underlyingly, a very small number of consonant clusters occur in the coda, but these clusters are simplified before they appear at the phonetic level. 33 The only possible surface syllable structures for Korean are V, CV, VC, and CVC. If we consider a glide to be in the onset, taking a separate position, then we must explain why there is no other consonant cluster. Consider the generalization made by Duanmu 1990, given here in (24). (24 ) There is a cross-linguistic tendency that if a language allows an onset cluster CG,, where the sonority distance between them is not the largest, then it should allow an onset cluster QCj, where the sonority distance is larger (Greenberg 1964, Harris 1983, Sel- kirk 1984, Steriade 1982). If we view a prenucleus glide and the preceding consonant as a consonant clus- ter, Ij and nj are clusters. Duanmu's generalization predicts that Korean should, therefore, have other consonant clusters, with sonority distances larger than those of Ij and nj, such as *pl or *pr. The sonority scales for the sounds relevant here is Hyo Young Kim: Prenucleus glides in Korean 121 that stops are 1, nasals are 2, liquids are 3, and glides are 4. However, there is no single consonant cluster in Korean except a cluster of a consonant and a glide. This is a serious problem for the COH. In section 5, we will examine this issue in more detail. Second, the COH cannot explain the language-game data presented by the NH and illustrated in (8) and (9); additional examples are given in (25). Koreans make two forms in the language game, (25) and (26). The only data the COH can account for is (26). The COH cannot explain (25), because in (25) the inserted CV does contain a glide. If a glide is in the onset, it should be replaced by p along with the other consonant in the onset. (25) Language Game I a. hakkjoe kajo 'go to school' ha-pak kjo-pjo e-pe ka-pa jo-pjo b. kwanjok ij hwal 'arrow in the target' kwa-pwa njo-pjak ij-pij hwa-pwal (26) Language Game II a. hakkjoe kajo 'go to school' ha-pak kjo-po e-pe ka-pa jo-po b. kwanjsk ij hwal 'arrow in the target' kwa-pa njo-pok ij-pij hwa-pal Third, the COH does not account for the ideophone forms in (27), which contain consonants other than liquids and nasals. The only consonants expected to participate in the special partial reduplication are liquids and nasals under the COH. 34 The data in (27) should not exist according to the COH. The rules for the special partial reduplication apply only to nasals and liquids. (27) joli-tc,oli 'here and there' or 'this way and that way' jomo-t^omo 'various sides' jomil-tcpmil 'meticulous' The evidence against the COH becomes even more compelling when considering the forms in (28), which contain w in the reduplicated part instead of j. The COH does not anticipate this occurrence, because the COH relies on the deletion of na- sal sounds before a front vowel or a front glide to explain the partial reduplica- tions in (7). 35 (28) wei]kilai]-tei]kilai] 'clinking' walkatak-talgatak 'rattling' waktal-paktal 'rudely' (27) and (28) also challenge the NH. That is, jam-nj 'am cannot be evidence for the NH, because we cannot be certain that the glide in jam comes from njam, since in (27) and (28), a glide appears in the reduplicated part even though the base- words do not have glides. 36 122 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998) 4. The present analysis My analysis agrees with the COH in that a glide is treated as a part of the onset. However, I also make three additional proposals. First, a glide in Korean is not a separate segment if another consonant precedes it. In such cases, the glide is a seconday articulation and does not form a consonant cluster. Thus, the represen- tation of p'aij 'bottle' would be as in (29a). (29b) is the syllable structure of a word jaij 'a sheep' to show the structure when a glide is in the onset without another consonant. (29) a. a b. a « () R N C P 1 s n J a A consonant cluster Cj and a consonant with secondary articulation C J are expected to have different timing structures. According to Ladefoged & Maddi- eson 1996, the total duration of a consonant with secondary articulation does not equal that of a sequence of two articulations in a cluster. Therefore, the claim that the Korean glide is a secondary articulation can be tested phonetically by meas- uring the time of C G and CC and compare them. However, the comparison would not be easy, because Korean has no consonant clusters at all if we assume glides are a secondary articulation. Second, along with the complex C G with a secondary articulation, I adopt a simplified model for Korean syllable structure, which has only one position per syllable constituent as seen in (2), repeated in (30). Notice there is neither a branching onset, a branching nucleus, nor a branching coda. Every terminal node dominates one segment. That is, a syllable can have at most three slots. (30) Syllable / Onset X \ Rhyme / \ Nucleus Coda I I X X Third, C G is represented in a feature tree. As an illustration, the tree for p is given in (31a). To contrast the structures of plain glides, j and w, their structures are given in-(31b). Hyo- Young Kim: Prenucleus glides in Korean 123 (31) a. pJ X -cont] Oral Laryngeal *Labial Coronal Glottal [-voice] b. j w X X [+son] [+son] [-cons] [-cons] I I Oral Oral *Cor * Lab Dor 5. Illustration of the present analysis In the following we will see how the present anaysis works. How does this new proposal explain the phenomena involving Korean glides? First, concerning phonotactic restrictions, we can predict which combina- tions are allowed to be considered one segment, and which ones are not. For ex- ample, as is exemplified in (32),/? and 7 can form one segment because the former is articulated by the labial and the latter by the coronal articulator. In this paper 1 follow the assumptions of the current feature geometry that every articulator can occur once in a sound. 37 However, if a consonant and a glide are both articulated by the labial, ihen it is difficult to express this combination within the current feature-geometrj framework. In fact, it is precisely these CG sequences that are impossible in Ko- rean, as shown in (33). The consonants that cannot precede ; arc all corona! ob- struents, while those that cannot precede w arc labials. 124 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998) (32) XXX I I I [+son] [-son] [-con] [+con] Nas Ora I *Cor I [-high] [+back] [-low] p j 3 (33) Impossible CGV sequences in Korean 38 a. * t, r\ t\ tc, tc h , tc/, or s' + jV 39 b. * p p h , p' or m + wV 40 , The feature-geometric representation of t and j are given in (34). (34) a. t X cont] Ora Dor « Oral *Coronal Laryngeal Glottal [-voice] b. j X [+son] [-cons] Oral *Coronal As these two sounds have Coronal as their articulator, they cannot be combined into one segment. The same is true of the other coronal consonants. In (33b), the consonant is a labial sound and the glide is also a labial. As expected, they cannot be a single segment. The analysis of this paper explains why there should be a ♦ Hyo- Young Kim: Prenucleus glides in Korean 125 gap in the combination of a consonant and a glide in Korean, and also describes which combination is possible. If advocates of the COH were to offer an explanation for the fact that some consonant clusters are allowed, but some are not, they would necessarily have to appeal to the sonority scale. But this approach inevitably encounters the prob- lem. For example, // and P are possible consonant clusters, but p' is not in Korean. Suppose the sonority of stops is 1 , that of liquids is 2, and that of glides is 3. The sonority distances of pj, pi, and Ij are 2, 1, and 1 respectively. Then how can the COH explain why P is allowed, but p 1 is not, in terms of sonority? This sonority argument is very weak. Under the SOH, the nonoccurrence of p' , p' , in 1 , p", and the other combina- tions of consonants is easily explained. According to Sagey 1986, as cited by Duanmu 1990, the structure in (35) is interpreted by default as [p 1 ], rather than [p 1 ], because the universal default values for a secondary articulation are [-cons] and [+son]. We also assume a bare secondary articulator, which does not domi- nate any offspring node. (35) X I [+con] [-son] Oral [-cont] /\ * Lab Cor Second, nothing special needs to be said about the Consonant Cluster Re- duction, which was presented in (4) and is repeated in (36). (36) ol-pja 'this year's crop' sil-kwa ' fruit' Even though we consider the glide as being in the onset, p' or k" is just one seg- ment. Thus, it is natural for the words in (36) not to be subject to the reduction rule. This was a little problematic for the COH because it posits two segment posi- tions in the onset. Third, the SOH can also account for the entire range of the data from the language game. For the speakers who discard a glide in the inserted CV, the rule governing the game is a deletion of the whole onset. For the speakers who keep a glide in the inserted CV, the governing rule is a deletion of only the primary ar- ticulator from the onset segment. 41 Fourth, when we use the feature tree, we do not need to refer to the higher node, such as the nucleus, for vowel harmony. Referring to a higher node is inevi- table in the COH. The explanation provided by Lee 1993 is the following: Korean vowel harmony involves spreading of the feature [RTR] to the nucleus segment. The reason harmony process skips the glide is that a glide is in the onset, not in 1 2 6 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1998) the nucleus. Under feature geometry, the representations of every vowel should have the Dorsal articulator as its major articulator while a glide has Cor or Lab as its primary articulator. The [RTR] feature just spreads to the primary *Dor and a glide is ignored by this spreading. Fifth, consider the partially reduplicated ideophones of (27) and (28), re- peated in (37) and (38). The previous analyses from the COH or the NH did not handle these data, as I pointed out above. (37) joli-tcoli 'here and there' or 'this way and that way' jomo-tcomo 'various sides' jomil-tcomil 'meticulous' (38) werjkilarj-terjkilarj 'clinking' walkatak-talgatak 'rattling' waktal-paktal 'rudely' My explanation for these data is as follows. First, delete the onset. Second, insert a minimal [+cons] element to satisfy the Onset principle, which is w before [-round] vowel and j before [+round] vowel. 42 In jam-njam, even though the vowel is [-round],;' appears. This might appear to be an exception, but it is not: w is replaced byy because *wam is not a permitted sequence in Korean. 43 The deri- vation is given in (39). (39) it 1 am base am-rfam partial reduplication for ideophone wam-rfam insertion of [+cons] element jam-n'am dissimilation Sixth, regarding the II r alternation (recall (10) and (11)), the SOH gives a simple explanation. Under the SOH, the segment is represented in the feature tree. The features of l w are not in strictly linear order. That is, l w is not a combination of / and w in order. This is followed from one of the basic assumptions of non-linear phonology, to which feature geometry belongs. The relevant assumption here is that a phonological representation is not linear but multi-dimensional, placing dif- ferent gestures at different tiers. Thus / can see the following vowel in spite of Lab of w. I in (40) meets the structural description of the / to [r] rule. As a result, it is changed into [r]. (40) k i l w o 1 'writing' « k i r 9 1 X X X X X Dor *Dor *CoX *Dor *Cor ♦ Lab Seventh, in respect to the glide formation and insertion in (13) and (14), the explanation of the SOH is almost the same as that offered by the COH. A glide is a part of the onset when it is preceded by another consonant, while it itself is an onset when it is the only member of the onset. Thus, it is an expected phenome- non that a glide is inserted or formed to resolve the hiatus when two vowels hap- pen to occur side by side. Hyo- Young Kim: Prenucleus glides in Korean 127 I turn now to potential problems of the SOH . First, for the speakers of the Chonnam dialect, the length of the vowel is phonemic, as shown by the Chonnam minimal pairs in (41). Recall that the syllable structure I propose has only three positions in it. The words such as p's.'ij , 171*9:11, and js-.nki seem to need four posi- tions within a syllable (two for vowel length). (41) p^n. 'disease' p'orj 'bottle' rrtein 'face, aspect' m J on 'cotton, noodle' ja:nki 'performance' jonki 'smoke' A possible solution to the Chonnam dialect case is illustrated by the representa- tions in (42) and (43). As we do not allow two places under one constituent of a syllable, the coda of p'd.-jj has no place to be linked to in the first syllable. There- fore, it forms an independent syllable with zero rhyme in (43). The analysis I fol- low in this paper is different from the traditional view of syllable structure; for ar- guments in favor of the new analysis, see Harris (1994:83) and Burzio (1994:55- 65). (42) o p'sn 'bottle' /\ O R /\ N C M (43) () R /\ N C p^rj 'disease' p> a n The prediction from the above representation is that the stranded consonant can be resyllabified with the following vowel when this word is suffixed by a vowel-initial morpheme. However, when this is followed by a consonant-initial morpheme, the stranded element cannot find a place in the second syllable to be linked to, thus, /; must be syllabified with the first syllable. In this case, the first syllable cannot hold a long vowel, as is seen in (44). 44 (44) XX -> X X P J 128 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998) The result would be that the length difference between the rninimal pairs would disappear. This prediction proves to be true, based on a preliminary analy- sis of a small set of minimal pairs. 45 The table in (45) gives the duration of four word pairs differing only in length. 46 Each pair was produced twice by a native speaker of the Chonnam dialect. (45) Phonetic measurement of duration of words in CGV(:)C + CV(CV) | WORD + SUFFIX REPETITION 1 REPETITION 2 AVERAGE pja:rj + to 'disease also' 360ms 300ms 330ms pjarj + to 'bottlel also' 300ms 280ms 290ms pja:rj + k'atci 'disease even' 500ms 400ms 450ms pjarj + k'atci 'bottle to' 480ms 480ms 480ms mja:n + to 'side also' 540ms 700ms 620ms mjon + to 'noodle also' 500ms 740ms 620ms mja:n + k'a tci 'side also' 500ms 460ms 480ms mjsn + k'a t^i 'cotton also' 500ms 460ms 480ms As predicted, we cannot find any systematic difference in duration between the words with a short vowel and those with a long vowel. The branching model cannot accommodate this result. The representations assumed under the branching nucleus would be as in (46). (46) a. a /\ O R /\ N C I I I I b. a O o /\ O R I N t o v i p 1 9 rj 'bottle also' ♦ Hyo- Young Kim: Prenucleus glides in Korean 129 According to the structures in (48), the length difference should be maintained after suffixation because the nucleus node can be branched and thus can house the long vowel, regardless of whether the following suffix begins with a vowel or a consonant. Thus, the duration measure, although based on a relatively few to- kens from a single speaker, provides the positive evidence for the argument that only one segment can come before and after the syllable peak (= vowel). Second, one might ask whether this analysis would posit additional conso- nants in the phonemic inventory of Korean. If it did, there would be no substan- tial gain in adopting a simpler syllable structure because, as a trade off, a simpler structure would inevitably increase the number of phonemes. However, this is not the case. We postulate the same number of phonemes, i.e., C's, w, and j. C w and C are not distinct phonemes. In the phonemic inventory there are only simple con- sonants and glides independently. The features, which compose these independ- ent phonemes, are combined to make a complex segment when a consonant is followed by a glide, because in the present analysis we permit only one position for an onset. As Duanmu (p.c.) points out, there may be an intermediate level, be- tween the phonemic and phonetic levels, the so-called syllabic level. In that level a glide and the preceding consonant are merged. This merged sound is realized as one sound at the phonetic level. This process is illustrated in (47). (47) Phonemic level : C G, V Syllabic level : O N (C) C G V (C) Phonetic level : C G V c Take kwai] 'barn' as an example. At the phonological level, we have k, w, a, and /;. At the syllable level, the most sonorous element, a, takes the nucleus position. It is important to remember that we have only three slots in the syllable, k and ij take the onset and the coda position, respectively. The problem is to assign a slot to a glide, w, which cannot be linked to the nucleus because these two sounds have contradictory and incompatible features: a is [+low] and [-high] but w is [- low] and [+high]. The only possible position for w is the onset 48 - w can be con- nected to k because the combination of these two sounds do not disobey any feature-geometric principles: w has a Labial articulation and k has a Dorsal articu- lation. The less sonorous element, it, is the main part of the onset and the more so- norous is added as a secondary articulation to it. 6. Implications The above analysis assumes a simpler syllable structure for Korean than do the NH and the COH. The simple structure is preferred as long as it has at least the same power of explanation as the more complicated structure. As has been ar- gued here, the simple structure provides an even more efficient way to account for phenomena involving glides in Korean. 130 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998) The simple syllable structure with one position per constituent of a syllable ac- counts for the new facts as well as the previously known facts. This is summa- rized in (48). (48) Comparison of explanatory power NH COH SOH Co-occurrence No Yes (in part) Yes (explains why) Consonant cluster reduction Yes Yes (as ex- ception) Yes (naturally) Ideophones with j and liquids Yes Yes Yes Ideophones with w and other Cs Yes No Yes Language Game Yes (for half the data) Yes (for half the data) Yes (for all the data) L/r alternation Yes Yes Yes No cons, cluster Yes No Yes Vowel harmony No Yes Yes (more naturally) Glide formation No Yes Yes Length neutraliza- tion No Yes Yes ♦ This paper has shown that a simpler syllable structure can explain a new set of the Korean data not dealt with previously and provides a better explanation for the facts already studied than do the NH and the COH. NOTES 1 This is the view suggested by Paul Newman at the 3 rd Mid-Continental Work- shop on Phonology, Indiana University, 1997. 2 Steriade (1988:121) points out that 'co-occurrence constraints based on sonority distance are found exclusively within the pre- or post-nuclear section and never ■ between the nucleus and the pre-nucleus section.' 3 This excludes the idea that a glide selects the element on its right side rather than on its left side in the flat structure. 4 tg is an affricate rather than two consonants, usually transcribed as c. In this paper, the IPA symbol is used. Hyo- Young Kim: Prenucleus glides in Korean 131 5 Lee 1993 analyzes the reduplication data based on the assumption that the sec- ond part of the ideophones is the base for the reduplication. For more detail, see Lee 1993. 6 I use the diacritic ' to indicate tenseness rather than an ejective. 7 Some native speakers of Korean disagree with the base form of these words. They think these words are formed through full reduplication of the base form with no onset consonant. For them, the word for 'tasty' is jam-jam, not jam- njam. 8 According to Lee 1993, (9) is not a correct form. I will return to this point. 9 In Korean only 7 consonants, [p], [t], [k], [m], [n], [1], and [rj], can occur in the coda position, where every fricative is realized as a stop and every obstruent loses its fortis or aspirated character. 10 The consonant cluster in the onset does not exist any longer in Modern Ko- rean. 1 ' The change from st to [t'j is due to Tensification. 12 Here the COH assums an onset consonant and a glide are in the onset as a con- sonant cluster, not as one complex segment. 1 3 [RTR] is dominated by the Radical articulator under the Pharyngeal cavity ac- cording to Halle 1992. 14 Lee 1993 contends that sj is not possible, but I do not agree. For details, see (22). 15 Lee 1993 postulates the phonotactic constraints such as *[+high, -round] [+high, -round] for *ji and *ji and *[+round][+round] for *wu and *wo: The second constraint does not work due to *wi . 1(1 Lee 1993 cites Ohala & Kawasaki 1984, who claim that combinations of similar sounds do not make a sufficient distinction. Thus, the combinations are rare. This also accounts for the nonoccurrence of uu and ii in Korean. 17 In kaps-to, st is not permissible in the Korean syllable template. Thus, this con- sonant cluster must be simplified. 18 Lee 1993 does not assign any mora for the coda consonant. 19 By a nasal sound, Lee 1993 seems to mean an alveolar nasal sound, because Korean has a labial nasal in word-initial position followed by a front glide or front vowel as in the name Mjjjdng. 20 Ahn 1986 and Lee 1982 assume two segments in the onset. 21 As mentioned in §2.2, some of these restrictions are pointed out by Lee 1993. 132 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998) 22 Some Korean phonologists claim there is one more vowel, 0. However, this sound is now not distinctive from we and we and is no longer a monophthong in the Seoul dialect. 23 Compare this with Lee's observation in § 2.2. 24 je and ye do not occur after a consonant in the onset. 25 we and we do not occur after a consonant in the onset. % 26 Compare this with Lee's observation in 2.2. 27 Here I refer to the phonological level. Orthographically tcjV, tg h jV, tc'jV, and s'jV axe possible but not at the phonological level. For example, the first letter of the Korean version of the English loanword chocolate is tc h jo orthographically, but is pronounced /t9 h o/. 28 Exceptionally, 5 can precede jV. I found that the pronunciation of s + jV is ex- actly the same as a palatal sound [9"] +V. This sheds some light on the apparent exception, implying that s and j form one palatal sound. For more details, see Duanmu [forthcoming], s 'jo is possible exceptionally only for the English loan- word show. 29 mw3 'what', pws 'pour + IMP', and pwa 'see + IMP' are permitted in the or- thography. It is noteworthy that these combinations are all a result of glide forma- tion from the underlying forms of mu +9 , pu + 9, and po + a, respectively. Ac- cording to the author's native-speaker intuition, these combinations are pro- nounced without a glide at the phonetic level, turning them into ma-, ps, and pa. 30 The name of a poem. 3 ' The name of a poem. 32 The name of a poem. 33 When this consonant cluster is followed by a vowel-initial morpheme, then one of the consonants is resyllabified as the onset of the following syllable. When the consonant cluster is followed by a consonant-initial morpheme, then one of the consonants is deleted. As a result, there appears to be no syllable with a conso- nant cluster at the surface level. 34 See § 2.2. 35 See (19). 36 The NH uses jam-njam to argue that the reason [j] remains in the reduplicated d part is that [j] is not in the onset. ^ 37 Beddor (p.c.) points out that there are languages which allow lip-rounding ges- ture as a secondary articulation even when the primary articulation is made at the lip. For examples of these languages, see Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996. Current feature-geometry theory does not provide a plausible explanation for the exis- tence of these sounds, which involve the same articulator both for a primary ar- ticulation and for a secondary articulation. However, as we can see in Ladefoged Hyo- Young Kim: Prenucleus glides in Korean 133 & Maddieson's report that labialization as a secondary articulation is especially common with velar or uvular consonants and that many languages permit labiali- zation only of back consonants, languages prefer the sounds produced by a dif- ferent articulator for a secondary articulation from a primary articulation. For ex- ample, labialization with other consonants than labial consonants is preferred. At least for the languages that show this preference, the current feature-geometry theory provides a good explanation. 38 See fn. 27. 39 See fn. 28. 4 ° See fn. 29. 41 What happens to the onset when it consists of a glide, not a complex segment with a glide in it? The ending suffix -jo gets the form jo-pjo or jo-po in the lan- guage game. Yo-po is produced by deleting the whole onset segment. For jo-pjo, Duanmu (p.c.) informs me that there is a proposal, which needs so-called feature recycling. When a segment is deleted, some features of the segment that are com- patible with the features in the following segment survive in the following seg- ment. For example, when [kj] is deleted before [p], features of [j] move into [p] be- cause the resulting sound [p] is a possible sound. However, the feature of [k] cannot survive on [p] because [p k ] is not a possible segment. Turning to the language game again, when the onset is deleted, the coronal feature survives on the new onset consonant. This is possible because [pj] is an admitted segment in Korean. That is, we can say that in one version of the lan- guage game, (25), features are recycled. Or we can say that in both versions of language games, (25) and (26), features are recycled, but in (26), a secondary ar- ticulator is not allowed in the output. 42 This is due to a kind of dissimilation. 43 This is due to a kind of dissimilation. Neither the sequence of wVp nor wVm is permitted in Korean. Although k w am is permitted, we may accommodate this ex- ception by suggesting that only the features of primary articulators are subject to dissimilation. I am indebted to C-W. Kim for this observation. 44 In my analysis, vowel shortening follows from syllable structure. Consider pj9..g, pjd:.rji, and pjsij.to. Vowel shortening occurs only in the third case be- cause the coda consonant cannot find room in the following syllable. If the vowel shortening were due to a loss of the vowel length distinction in modern Korean, it would be difficult to see how vowel shortening is accounted for in a simple man- ner without referring to syllable structure. For example, pjs: . ///', and pJQi] . to have two syllables, but vowel shortening occurs only in the second case. 45 The experiment is indeed a very small-scale pilot study, and a large-scale inves- tigation would be helpful. 46 Measurements were taken of the whole word not just of the first syllable or the vowel. 134 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1998) 47 Whether it is //or pj and whether it is in the onset or in the nucleus, the issue is not relevant here, because usually the element in the onset is not considered to be a mora, and a glide bears no mora according to the NH, either. Therefore, with re- gard to the length difference, it does not matter whether the onset has one seg- ment or two, or a glide is in the onset or in the nucleus. 48 wa is bad only when we analyze it as one sound in the nucleus, because w and a have contradictory features. Thus, the presence of aj, aw, and other falling diph- thongs is not a problem. According to the standard analysis, aj, aw, etc., are not one sound, but two, and are equal to a long vowel. Each of their components has a separate set of features, and in each feature set, there is no conflict of features. REFERENCES Ahn, S-C. 1986. Syllabification process in Korean. Papers from 1985 Mid- America Linguistics Conference, ed. by James L. Armagost, 1-12. Manhat- tan, KA: Kansas State University. Bao, Z. M. 1989. Fangie languages and reduplication. Linguistic Inquiry 20:2. Burzio, L. 1994. Principles of English Stress. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carreira, M. 1988. The representation of diphthongs in Spanish. Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 18:1.1-24. Chao, Y. R. 1934. The non-uniqueness of phonemic solutions of phonetic sys- tems, Bulletin of the Institute of History and Phonology, Academia Sinica 4:4. Choe, Jae-W. 1986. Syllabification and consonant cluster. University of Massa- chusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics 1 1:1-36. Davis, S., & M. Hammond. 1995. On the status of onglides in American English. Phonology 12.159-82. Duanmu, San. 1990. Formal study of syllable, tone, stress and domain in Chinese languages. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ph.D. dissertation. . [Forthcoming]. The Phonology of Standard Chinese. Fu, J.Q. 1990. Labial-labial co-occurrence restrictions and syllable structure. Ms., University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Greenberg, Joseph H. 1966. Universals of Language. Cambridge, MA: MJT Press. Halle, Morris. 1992. Phonological features. International Encyclopedia of Lin- guistics 3, ed. by W. Bright, 207-12. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harris, J. 1983. Syllable Structure and Stress in Spanish, Cambridge, MA: MYY Press. . 1994. English Sound Structure. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Kim, C-W., & H-Y. Kim. 1991. The character of Korean glides. Studies in the Lin- guistic Sciences 21:2.113-25. Kim, K-O., & M. Shibatani. 1976. Syllabification phenomena in Korean. Lan- guage Research 12:1 Hyo Young Kim: Prenucleus glides in Korean 135 Kim-Renaud, Y-K. 1978. Syllable in Korean phonology. Korean Linguistics, ed. by C. Kim, 85-98. Columbia. SC: Hornbeam Press. Kim, Y-S. 1984. Aspects of Korean morphology, University of Texas, Austin, Ph.D. dissertation. Ladefoged, P., & I. Maddieson. 1996. The Sounds of the World's Languages, Oxford: Blackwell. Lee, B-G. 1982 A well-formedness condition on syllable structure. Linguistics in the Morning Calm, ed. by I. S. Yang, 489-506. Seoul, Korea: Hanshin Pub- lishers. Lee, J-S. 1992. Phonology and sound symbolism of Korean ideophones. Indiana University, Ph.D. dissertation. Lee, S-H. 1984. Lee Yuk-Sa Yenku. Hankuk Hyendae Si Yenku [A Study of Modern Korean Poetry]. Seoul: Mincokmunhwasa. Lee, Y-S. 1993. Topics in the vowel phonology of Korean. Indiana University, Ph.D. dissertation,. Nam, Ji Young, & Bruce Southard. 1994. Orthographic representation and re- syllabification of English loan words in Korean. Language and Speech 37.259-81. Ohala, J., & H. Kawasaki. 1984. Prosodic phonology and phonetics. Phonology Yearbook 1:113-27. Sagey, E.C. 1986. The representaion of features and relations in nonlinear pho- nology. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ph. D dissertation. SCULLEN, M. 1993. The syllable. The Structure of Phonological Representation, ed. by H. van Hulst & N. Smith, 2.337-83. Dordrecht: Foris. Selkirk, E. 1984. Phonology and Syntax: The Relationship between Sound and Structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sohn, H-S. 1987. Underspecification in Korean phonology. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Ph.D. dissertation in linguistics. Steriade, D. 1982. Prosodies and the nature of syllabification. Massachusetts In- stitute of Technology, Ph.D. disseration. . 1988. Review of G. N. Clements & S. J. Keyser: CV Phonology. Language 64.118-29. Studies in the Linguistic Sciences Volume 28:1 (Spring 1998) ENGLISH TOUGH SENTENCE ANALYSIS OF JAPANESE TNTRANSITIVIZED' VERBAL GERUND + AR ('BE') SENTENCES' Hiroki Koga University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign h-koga@students.uiuc.edu The current paper proposes an analysis similar to Chomsky's (1981:308) analysis of the English tough sentence for analyzing in- transitivized verbal gerund + ar ('be') sentences in Japanese. It will be shown that Matsumoto's 1990 Argument Sharing Analysis is not adequate enough to explain the fact that it is impossible to u7?-extract an adverbial adjunct to the verbal gerund over the matrix verb ar ('be') for forming a relative clause. The proposed analysis, together with i) ECP in Lasnik & Saito 1992 and Chomsky 1986, and ii) an Empty Operator Analysis of Japanese relative clauses, explains the w/i-extraction phenomenon. The proposed analysis predicts an un- bounded dependency phenomenon, as in the English counterpart John is easy to forget to ... forget to please with an unbounded re- cursion of forget to. 0. Introduction Japanese has 'intransitivized' verbal gerund + ar ('be') sentences, as in (1), where yob he phonetically realizes as yonde. (1) danseekyaku ga paatii ni yob ite aru. male guest-NOM party-to invite-GER be-NONPERF 'Male guests have been invited to the party.' Lit., 'Male guests k are in the state of someone having invited them k to the party.' The verb yob ('invite') in (1) is a transitive verb, which subcategorizes for an ac- cusative-marked NP, as shown in (2). (2) mearii ga danseekyaku o paatii ni yob u. Mary-NOM male guest-ACC party-to invite-NONPERF 'Mary invites male guests to the party.' On the other hand, if the transitive verb yob ('invite') combines with -ite (gerund-marker) + ar ('be'), then the NP-o of the verb yob ('invite') is not ex- pressed, as in sentence (1). The ungrammatically of example (3) with the intended meaning that male guests have been invited to the party shows that the NP-o OF THE /7E-MARKED V IN THE 'INTRANSITIVIZED' -ITE AR SENTENCE, here yob ('invite'), as in ( 1 ), must not be expressed in the sentence. 138 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1 998) (3) *danseekyaku k ga karera k o paatii ni yob ite ar u. male guest-NOM they-ACC party-to invite-GER be-NONPERF Example (3) also shows that there is no pro of NP-o in (l). 2 3 Note that the NOMINATIVE-MARKED NP IN THE 'INTRANSITTVIZED' VERBAL GERUND + AR ('BE') SENTENCE, e.g., DANSEEKYAKU ('MALE GUEST'), IS UNDERSTOOD AS COREFERENTIAL WITH THE UNEXPRESSED NP-O OF THE 1TE-MARKED V, YOB ('INVITE') IN (1), IN TERMS OF INTERPRETATION. A 1. Argument sharing analysis by Matsumoto 1990 1.1 The argument structure of the or ('be') Matsumoto 1990 proposes that the verb ar of the 'intransitivized' -ite ar sentence has two arguments, theme and state, as represented in (4). (4) ar ( 'be' ) Ite (G£7?)-marked VP realizes the state argument of ar ('be'). For example, VP paatii ni yob ('party to invite') realizes the state argument in (1). The ga-marked NP realizes the theme argument; e.g., in (1), danseekyaku ('male guest') realizes the theme argument. As entailed by Matsumoto's 1990 analysis, it will be argued later that the ite (GER)-marked VP is not an adjunct. 1.2. Argument sharing between the Ite (GER)-marked V and the ar ('be') Then, Matsumoto 1990 proposes: 1 ) the /re-marked V has an argument structure that contains a patient argument, 2) the theme argument of matrix V ar ('be) is shared with the patient argument of the /re-marked V, and 3) the association of 'subjecthood' in a sentence as a whole to an argument of the secondary predicate (e.g., yob ('invite') in sentence (1)) is prohibited in the presence of an argument of a primary predicate (e.g., ar ('be') in (1)) that is asso- ciated with 'subject.' 4 Thus, for example, the argument structures of ar ('be') and yob ('invite') in ex- ample (1) can be represented in (5). (5) aru yob <(AGENT), LOCATIVE, (PATIENT)> I The agent argument of the /'re-marked V is implicit, by the clause for the associa- tion of subjecthood. The theme argument of ar ('be') and the patient argument of the /re-marked V are associated. If my understanding is correct, Matsumoto 1990 assumes that since the theme argument of matrix V ar ('be) is shared with the patient argument of the /7e-marked V, the ga-marked NP realizes both of the theme and patient arguments. Thus, no NP-o is expressed to realize the patient argument. This explains, e.g., the fact in example (1) that the ga-marked NP dan- seekyaku is understood as coreferential with the UNexpressed NP-o of verb yob ('invite'), in terms of interpretation, and that the NP-o must not be expressed. I Hiroki Koga: Japanese 'intransitivized' verbal gerund + ar ( 'be' ) sentences 1 3 9 2. Problems and an argument for Matsumoto 1990 2.1 An argument for the /te-marked phrase as a complement It will be argued in this section in favor that the /re-marked phrase of the -ite ar sentence in question is NOT an adjunct, but a complement. 5 Native speakers find that sentence (6) does not entail sentence (7), while sentence (8) entails sentence (9). (6) sake ga nomihos ite ar u. 6 rice wine-NOM drink up-GER be-NONPERF The rice wine has been drunk up.' (7) sake ga ar u. rice wine-NOM be-NONPERF There is rice wine.' If the rice wine has been drunk up, the rice wine is no more there. Thus, sentence (6) does not entail sentence (7). (8) sake ga atatamerar ete tukue no ue ni rice wine-NOM be made hot-GER desk-GEN-top-LOC- ar u be- NONPERF The rice wine is on the desk, having been made hot.' (9) sake ga tukue no ue ni ar u. rice wine-NOM desk-GEN-top-LOC be-NONPERF There is rice wine on the desk.' If there is rice wine on the desk, having been made hot, then it is necessarily the case that there is rice wine on the desk. Thus, sentence (8) entails sentence (9). Suppose that the /'re-marked phrase of the 'intransitivized' -ite ar sentence, as in example (6) and example ( 1 ), is not an adjunct, but a complement. Suppose further that such an /^-marked phrase as in example (8) is analyzed as an adjunct. 7 (Sentence (8) does not have the properties of the 'intransitivized' - ite ar sentence that were given in the introduction of this paper). These two as- sumptions explain the contrast between the non-entailment from (6) to (7) and the entailment from (8) to (9) in the following way. 8 Since the /7e-marked phrase in example (6) and example (1) is a complement, sentence (6) does not entail sen- tence (7), which does not have the /fe-marked phrase. 9 Every constituent of NP- ga, /^-marked VP, and ar ('be') in sentence (6) and sentence (1) is a necessary part for the sentence to describe an event. Since the //^-marked phrase in (8) is an adjunct to matrix verb phrase tsukue no ue ni ar ('be on the desk"), sentence (8) entails sentence (9), which does not have the //^-marked phrase. The //e-marked VP in (8) describes an event which the event described by the sentence without the /re-marked VP co-occurs with. Thus, the contrast between those entailments supports that the //c-marked phrase in the 'intransitivized' ite ar sentence is a complement, i.e., is not an adjunct. In other words, the content of the //(--marked 140 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998) phrase in the 'intransitivized' ite ar sentence is an argument, as entailed by Mat- sumoto's 1990 analysis. 2.2. Problems for Matsumoto's 1990 analysis There are phenomena that Matsumoto's 1990 Argument Sharing Analysis cannot make correct predictions of. For example, in a noun phrase, a head noun with a relative clause cannot be understood as an adverbial adjunct to the //^-marked VP in the 'intransitivized' -ite ar sentence. 10 Noun phrase (10), where kaw ite pho- netically realizes as katte and ar ita phonetically realizes as atta, which has a rela- tive clause adjoined, cannot be understood as meaning (11). (10) [ RC pan ga kaw ite arita] panya; (a noun phrase) bread-NOM buy-GER be-PERF bakery (11) *[RcP an g a Up r i Up kaw]] ite arita] panya; 11 bread-NOM buy-GER be-PERF bakery Lit., (Intended Meaning) 'the bakeryj where someone bought bread at the store; and he or she keeps the bread ,e.g., at home, for a future use. Rather, the head noun is understood as an adverbial adjunct to the matrix VP that contains ar, as shown by (12). (12) [ RC panga [ XP t i [ VP kaw ite ar]] ita] panya, bread-NOM buy-GER be-PERF bakery 'the bakery; where bread was at there; after it had been bought at some other store' Nothing in Matsumoto 1990 prevents the noun phrase (10) from being understood as (11). According to Matsumoto 1990, the argument structure of the relative clause in (10) is represented as below. (13) ar kaw <(AGENT), (PATIENT)> « As Matsumoto 1990 argues, an adverbial adjunct can adjoin to the /7e-marked phrase in the sentence, which realizes the state argument of the ar ('be'), as in (14). (14) pan ga sono panya de kaw ite arita. bread-NOM that bakery-LOC buy-GER be-PERF 'Bread had been bought at that bakery, and was, e.g., at the m speaker's house.' The adverbial adjunct sono panya de ('at that bakery') does not adjoin to the matrix verb ar ('be'), but adjoins to the ite-marked VP, as given in (14). The loca- tion where the bread was at last is the speaker's house, which may be different from that bakery. Then, the head noun in the noun phrase (10) should be able to be under- stood as meaning that it is adjoined to the /re-marked phrase in the Hiroki Koga: Japanese 'intransitivized' verbal gerund + ar ( 'be' ) sentences 141 'intransitivized' -ite ar sentence, as in other sentences containing a complex predicate. For example, noun phrase (15), where kaw ite phonetically realizes as katte and moraw ita phonetically realizes as moratta, contains V-ite moraw ('receive') in place of the V-ite ar ('be'). (15) [ RC zyon ga mamani pan o kaw ite moraw ita] John-NOM mom-DAT bread-ACC buy-GER receive-PERF panya bakery 'the bakery where John received from his mother the favor of buying bread In (15), the head noun panya ('bakery') is understood as the adjunct to the /re- marked phrase, as represented in (16). (16) [ RC zyon ga mama ni [ VP /j [ VP pan o kaw]] ite moraw ita] panyaj It is also the case that the PP adjunct is adjoined to the //e-marked V in the base- generated position, as shown in (17), where kaw ite phonetically realizes as katte and moraw ita as moratta as in the previous example. (17) zyon ga mamani sono panya de pan o kaw ite moraw ita. that-bakery-LOC 'John received from his mother the favor of buying bread at that bak- ery.' The contrast between the ungrammaticality of (11) and the grammaticality of (16) shows that the 'intransitivizing' -ite ar ('be') sentence is different from the typi- cal complex predicate sentences in Japanese, e.g., the V-ite moraw ('V-GER re- ceive') sentence as in (15). Matsumoto's 1990 Argument Sharing Analysis is thus not adequate to explain the ungrammaticality of ( 1 1 ). 2.3 A clarification of example (11) with an analysis of Japanese relative clauses An analysis of relative clauses clarifies the contrast between example (11) and ex- ample (16). Noun phrase (18) in English contains a relative clause counterpart of sentence (19). (18) the man (whom) John invited (a noun phrase) (19) John invited the man. The noun with such a relative clause as (18) is analyzed as in (20) in English (Chomsky 1993:529). (20) the man, [ Cl , {whom, Op), [, H John invited /,]] Whom or an empty operator Op moves to the [Spec, CP] from the base-generated position, in this case, from the object position of V invite. The operator at the head of the CP triggers the movement of the empty operator, by the SPEC-head rela- tionship. The N', in this case, man, obligatorily controls the u7j-phrase or the empty operator at the [Spec, CP]. 142 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1998) I assume that Japanese relative clause is analyzed the same way as in Eng- lish. Noun phrase (21) contains a relative-clause counterpart of sentence (22). (21) zyon ga yob u otoko (a noun phrase) John-NOM invite-NONPERF man 'the man John invites' (22) zyon ga otoko o yob u. John-NOM man-ACC invite-NONPERF 'John invites a man.' Since Japanese is a head-final language, the head noun is final in the noun phrase, as shown in (21). Noun phrase (21) is analyzed as in (23). (23) [ CP Op i [ IP zyon ga t x (-o) yob u]] otokOj The empty operator moves to [Spec, CP] from the base-generated position, in this case from the object position, triggered by [+ Operator] as C. The head noun obligatorily controls the empty operator, as coindexed. The Empty-Operator-Movement analysis of a relative clause is independ- ently motivated, for example, to explain the unbounded dependency between a head N' and a relative clause in Japanese. For example, a noun phrase (24), where omow ita phonetically realizes as omotta, is analyzed as in (25). (24) zyon ga yob u to mearii ga omow ita John-NOM invite-NONPERF-COMP Mary'-NOM think-PERF otoko (a noun phrase) man 'the man Mary thought John would invite.' It is assumed that [Spec, CP] with the head to ('that') is available for an empty operator or w/j-phrase to move through (Chomksy 1986; Lasnik & Saito 1992). Then, the empty operator, base-generated at the object position of verb yob ('invite'), moves through the [Spec, CP] of the head to ('that') to the [Spec, CP] of the head [+ Operator] (for a relative clause formation). (As will be discussed later, the ECP (Empty Category Principle) for the trace is satisfied because the trace is theta-governed by verb yob ('invite'). The trace is also antecedent- governed, as will be seen later.) It is possible to multiply the boldfaced configura- tion in the tree diagram arbitrarily, with a [Spec, CP] for each configuration of NP- ga to omow ('NP-NOM COMP-think') and the same number of [Spec, CP]s. All the [Spec, CP]s are occupied by the intermediate traces, which are antecedent- governed. Thus, the unboundedness phenomenon is explained. Hiroki Koga: Japanese 'intransitivized' verbal gerund + ar ('be') sentences 143 (25) NP I N' I Spec A 9p, N otoko, ('man'; C IP c [+Operator] NP A mearii ('Mary') Movement r VP I Spec A f, -ita (PERF) omow C ('think') Movement II' to lyon ga t, yob u ('that') > The analysis of relative clauses as above may clarify the contrast between example (11) and example (16), to some extent, in the following way. In (11) (= (26)), the matrix verb is the ar ('be'). As discussed, there must be no implicit accu- sative NP in the te arita clause in (26), and the sentence is understood as if the nominative NP is co-referential with the unexpressed NP-o, as coindexed with k. (26) *[ cp Op, [pan k ga [vr'itvptk kaw]] ite arita]] panya, I I I 1 1 brcad-NOM buy-GER be-PER bakery The relationship between the relative clause operator Op| and the adjunct trace t s is intervened by the co-index relationship between the nominative NP and the unexpressed accusative NP. On the other hand, in (16) (= (27)), the matrix verb is the moraw ('receive'), by which the NP-o pan o (or maybe as a pro of NP-o) is expressed in the clausal complement. 144 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998) (27) [ CP Op { [zyon ga mamani [ vp /, [ VP pan o kaw]] ite I I John-NOM mom-DAT bread- ACC buy-GER moraw ita]] panyaj receive-PERF bakery 'the bakery where John received from his mother the favor of buying bread' The relationship between the relative clause operator Op, and the adjunct trace t { V is intervened by no co-index relationship such as in (26). The details, i.e., the pre- diction of the proposal together with this analysis of relative clauses, will be given in the next section. 3. A proposal My proposal is that the Japanese 'intransitivized' verbal gerund + ar ('be') sen- tence is analyzed as similar to that of the tough construction in English by the first suggestion in Chomsky (1981:308). 12 Chomsky (1981:308) analyzes the complex-adjectival sentence (or the tough sentence), such as sentence (28), as in (29). (28) John is easy to please. (29) John k is easy [ CP Op k [ IP PRO aTb to [ VP please t k ]]] The empty operator moves from the object position of the embedded V to the [Spec, CP] in the clausal complement. 13 The matrix subject obligatorily controls the empty operator, as coindexed. The adjective easy subcategorizes for a CP complement with the following properties: a) The head of CP is the null [+ Operator], b) The head of INFL in the CP is infinitive, i.e., to, c) An empty operator is at [NP, V] of the CP, and d) PRO^ is located at the [NP, IP] of the CP. (It is not clear how Chomsky (1981; 1993:21) treats the subject, and the copula in (29).) I propose that the 'intransitivized' -ite ar sentence (1), repeated here as (30), is analyzed as in tree diagram (31), similar to Chomsky's 1981 tough analysis. An empty operator is base-generated at the object position (i.e., [NP, V']) of the /7 that the vr/z-phrase does antecedent-govern the intermediate trace, as in how did )) you fix the car in Chomsky (1986:19). This is because the matrix CP is not a bar- rier for the w/z-phrase to antecedent-govern the intermediate trace. The matrix CP is not excluded by the vr/z-phrase, by (32d). On the other hand, example (35) violates the ECP. Example (35) is analyzed as in (36). (35) *How, did John know which car m to [[fix t m ] r, ] (Chomsky 1986: 1 1 ) (36) *How, did John know which car m to [[fix t m ] r, ] The adjunct trace t t is not properly governed. It is not theta-governed since it is an adjunct. It is not antecedent-governed, either. In this case, the embedded CP is a barrier for the trace since the CP receives its barrierhood from the IP that it im- mediately dominates. The IP here is a blocking category since it is not L-marked. If which car did not occupy the [Spec, CP] in the embedded clause, then an in- termediate trace as t\, being there, could antecedent-govern the trace t { . Actually, which car occupies the [Spec, CP] in the embedded clause. 22 Similarly, the con- trast between example (37) and example (39) is explained by the ECP in the fol- lowing way. Example (37) satisfies the ECP. Example (37) is analyzed as (38). (37) Why, do you think that John [left /,]? (Lasnik & Saito 1992:29) (38) Why; do you think [ CP t\ that [John [left r,]]]? The initial trace is antecedent-governed by the intermediate trace. The intermedi- ate trace is also antecedent-governed by why. Example (39) violates the ECP. Example (39) is analyzed as (40). (39) *How did Bill wonder who wanted to [fix the car t]l (40) *How, did Bill wonder [ CP who wanted [/', to [fix the car ?,]]]]? The intermediate trace /', is not properly governed. It is not theta-governed since it is an adjunct. The intermediate trace t\ is not antecedent-governed, either. The embedded CP that immediately dominates the IP is a barrier for the vr/z-phrase how to antecedent-govern the intermediate trace. If the [Spec, CP] in the embed- m ded clause is not occupied by a vv/z-phrase. who in this case, another intermediate ^ trace t'\, being there, could antecedent-govern the intermediate trace t\, with it- self antecedent-governed by how. Given the ECP, the contrast between example (11) (= (26)) and example ( 16) (= (27)) is explained in the following way. Of Example (11) (=(26)): Example (11) violates the ECP. The operator of the intransitivized te am sentence within the relative clause prevents the relative clause operator from antecedent- 148 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998) governing its adjunct trace. See the tree diagram (41). The adjunct trace of the empty operator for the relative clause in the embedded clause, i.e., t p does not sat- isfy the ECP. The adjunct trace is not properly governed. It is not theta-governed since it is an adjunct. It is not antecedent-governed since the embedded CP, which is bold-faced, is a barrier for the operator Op, to antecedent-govern the trace. The CP obtains the barrierhood from the IP that it immediately dominates. If the [Spec, CP] were not occupied by the operator Op k , then there would be no4 violation of the ECP. W (41) V -u ('NONPERF') ar ('be') Movement V [+ Operator] -ite ('GER') J NP V kaw ('buy') OfExample(16)(=(27)): I assume that moraw ('receive') subcategorizes for PP[w ('DAT')] and infinitive CP, and that PRO is located at the [NP, V] in the clausal complement, obligatorily Hiroki Koga: Japanese 'intransitivized' verbal gerund + ar ('be') sentences 149 controlled by the PP. 23 The adjunct trace here is properly governed. See the tree diagram (42). There is an intermediate trace t\ at the embedded [Spec, CP]. The adjunct trace, although it is not theta-governed, is antecedent governed by the intermediate trace t' r The intermediate trace is also antecedent-governed by the operator. Thus, the two traces in example (16) satisfy the ECP. 24 I panya i ('baker/') Movement > -//c('GER') NP V pan ('bread') kaw ('buy') 150 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998) 4.2 An unbounded-dependency phenomenon Since it uses an empty operator movement, i.e., an instantiation of w/?-movement for analyzing the 'intransitivized' ite ar sentence, the proposed analysis pre- dicts: 25 The language should have a sentence that permits a new unbounded de- pendency between the empty operator at the [Spec, CP] the head of which the ar ^ ('be') subcategorizes for, and its trace. m This parallels the unbounded dependency, as in the bakery where I think Mary thinks Tom thinks his or her mom bought the bread at, with NP + think iterated. Actually, this is the case. For example, corresponding to sentence (44), where yob ite phonetically realizes as yonde, Japanese has such a sentence as (43), where yob ite phonetically realizes as yonde and moraw ite phonetically re- alizes as moratte. (43) danseekyaku ga (mearii ni) paatii ni yob ite male guest-NOM (Mary by) party-LOC invite-GER moraw ite ar u receive-GER be-NONPERF Lit., 'There are male guests k that someone has received, from Mary, the favor of inviting them k to the party.' (44) zyon ga (mearii ni) danseekyaku o paatii ni yob ite John-NOM (Mary by) male guest-ACC party-LOC invite-GER moraw u. receive-NONPERF 'John receives the favor of inviting male guests to the party from Mary.' Here Clause c) in the proposal given in Section 3, i.e., 'An empty operator is base- generated at [NP, V] of the CP complement,' is replaced with (45). (45) Clause c') An empty operator is base-generated at [NP, V] of the CP complement. If infinitive clause is located at the immediate [NP, V] of the CP complement, then an empty operator is located at the [NP, V] of the infinitive CLAUSE. If infinitive clauase is located at the [NP, V] of the infinitive clause, then an empty operator is lo- cated at the [NP, V] of this infinitive clause. And, so on. Given this, example (43) is analyzed as follows. See the tree diagram. (46). The^ ite-marked V of the 'intransitivized' ite ar sentence is a complex-predicate verb,B here moraw ('receive') and CP[infinitive]. Note that the CP as object here, which is the object of moraw ('receive') 26 , is not the trace of an empty operator move- ment. The trace is located at the object position of the verb that is /'/^-marked be- cause of moraw ('receive'), i.e., the object position of verb yob ('invite'). The subject of the verb moraw ('receve') is PRO lirh , i.e., is interpreted as someone. The initial trace is properly governed since it is theta-governed by the verb yob ('invite'). The operator governs the intermediate trace. Thus, the two traces sat- Hiroki Koga: Japanese 'iNTRANsmvizED' verbal gerund + ar('be') sentences 151 isfy the ECP. The sentence means that there are male guests k that someone has received the favor of inviting them k to the party from Mary. ite ('GER') yob (''invite'') Then, if another occurrence of the bold-faced configuration is located in place of the boldfaced and underlined configuration, Japanese has such a sentence that it has two occurrences of mearii ni ('from Mary') and moraw ('receive'), as be- low. 152 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1 998) (47) danseekyaku ga mearii ni mearii ni paatii ni yob ite moraw ite moraw ite ar u. The intermediate trace t\ and t'\ are both antecedent-governed in the same way. In the same vein, Japanese possesses such a sentence as below. (48) danseekyaku ga (mearii ni) n paatii ni yob ite (moraw ite) n ar u, where (mearii ni) n , e.g., is the ra-number of occurrences of mearii ni. ^ The intermediate traces /' k ... t" \ are all antecedent-governed in the same way. ™ Here mearii ni ('by Mary') and moraw ite ('receive GER') can be infinitely re- cursively iterated in the same number. 5. Implications There are three implications for syntactic theories in general. First, an analysis of a sentence in a particular language can be similar to an analysis of a sentence in an- other language that has a different meaning. The meaning of English 'Male guests are easy to invite' is different from that of Japanese danseekyaku ga yob ite ar u ('Male guest have been invited'). The latter does not contain the Japa- nese equivalent of English easy. However, there is a similarity between their syn- tactic structures. They both use the empty operator movement. Next, the predic- tion that the analysis made for Japanese in the last section should be also found for English tough sentences as long as the analysis of English tough sentences uses an empty operator movement. Actually, this is the case, as shown below. (49) John is easy to forget to please. Suppose that the baby called John always looks peaceful to everyone. It is ac- ceptable to utter the sentence in such a context as this. Or, suppose that the baby called John always looks restless. It is also acceptable to utter the sentence in such a context, too. Then, English further allows the following sentence. (50) John is easy to forget to forget to please. The sentence sounds odd, and is yet grammatical. 27 Thus, English allows the fol- lowing sentence, abstracting away from the semantic oddness. (51) John is easy to {forget to} n please, where {forget to}" is the concate- nation of the ^-number of occurrences of forget to, i.e., forget to for- get to ...forget to with forget to iterated /7-times. Lastly, accordingly, such a revision as clause c') in (45), in place of clause c) of the analysis that I proposed in Section 3, is also needed for the English tough sen- A tence analysis if sentence (5 1 ) is grammatical in English. ^ HirokiKoga: Japanese 'intransitivized' verbal gerund + ar ( 'be') sentences 153 NOTES 1 I wish to thank Professor Christopher Collins of Cornell University and Profes- sor James Yoon and Professor Peter Lasersohn of the University of Illinois at Ur- bana-Champaign for helpful comments on various versions of this paper. I also thank Kunio Nishiyama for an informal discussion. Yet, I am responsible for any shortcomings in this paper. 2 Japanese is a pro-drop language, as shown by the contrast between (ia) and (ib). For example, if context can provide who Mary invites to the party, Japanese may allow the implicit pronominal form of NP-o, as in (ib), while pro(nominal) them must appear in English, i.e., a non pro-drop language, as shown by the con- trast between (iia) and (iib). (ia) mearii ga karera o paatii ni yob u. Mary-NOM they-ACC party -to invite-NONPERF (ib) mearii ga paatii ni yob u. Mary-NOM party-to invite-NONPERF (iia) Mary invites them to the party, (iib) *Mary invites to the party. 3 Then, in GB, the implicit element must be a trace since PRO cannot be here be- cause the position is governed by the lexical head yob ('invite'). PRO must not be governed in GB. 4 Matsumoto 1990 proposes this as a general condition that must be satisfied in other complex predicate verbs than the 'intransitivized' -ite ar construction in question. 5 Inoue 1976 and Ono 1984 also agree with this point. 6 The failure of entailment from (i) to (ii) is another example, (i) zi ga kesi te ar u letter-NOM erase-GER be-NONPERF 'Letters have been erased.' (ii) zi ga ar u letter-NOM be-NONPERF 'There are letters.' 7 See Shibatani (1978:103) for the same claim concerning the adjunct //^-phrase as in sentence (8). 8 There is another possibility. It may be assumed that the /'te-phrase in the sen- tence in question is similar to, e.g., nearly, since sentence (i) does not entail sen- tence (ii). (i) Mary nearly hit John. (ii) Mary hit John. 9 Inoue 1976 proposes that matrix V ar ('be') subcategorizes for CP with un- specified subject. Tree diagram (ii) is the D-structure of (i). 154 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1998) (i) gohan ga taki te ar u. rice-NOM boil (i.e., cook)-GER be-NONPERF 'Rice has been cooked.' (ii) S2 NP SI NP NP dareka-ga gohan-o ('someone') ('rice') Pred (te) aru (GER)Cbe') Pred tak- ('cook') Only if the unspecified subject, realized by dareka ('someone'), is deleted, the ob- ject of the embedded V is raised and is adjoined to the matrix S, i.e., S2. The ob- ject of the embedded V eventually gets Case-marked with nominative. NP gohan ('rice') gets Case-marked with nominative, as shown in (iii). S2 gohan-o-ga taki- Thus, the output gohan ga taki te ar u ('Rice has been cooked.') results. I will not discuss Inoue's 1976 analysis on this paper. 10 Another example is the unbounded dependency phenomenon given in Section 4 in this paper that Matsumoto's 1990 analysis cannot make a correct prediction of. 1 ' (i) is another example, where kaw ite is realized phonetically as katte. (i) *omocha ga taroo ni [ yp t i [ VP kaw]] ite ar u misej toy-NOM Taroo-to buy-GER be-NONPERF store (i) cannot be understood as meaning the store in which someone bought a toy for Taroo, and he or she keeps it, e.g., at home. 12 See Chomsky (1981:312-314) for his second suggestion. It assumes that a re- analysis of [easy to V,] as AP takes place with the empty element being another type of anaphor. 13 The stipulation that an empty operator is base-generated at the object position in the clausal complement is motivated by (i), where the verb take subcategorizes for NP care as a QUASi-argument. (i) *?Much care is easy to take of the orphans. Hiroki Koga: Japanese 'intransitivized' verbal gerund + ar(' be') sentences 155 The tough sentence that contains a quasi-argument NP as subject cannot be formed, as not in a u/?-question with a quasi-argument NP, as w/z-phrase, as in (ii). (ii) *?What is easy to take of the orphans? See Chomsky (1981:31 1) for other motivations, e.g., vv/7-island effects. 14 As in English, there is a piece of evidence that supports the assumption that an empty operator is to be postulated as in a w/z-phrase. (i) *?zyuubunna ki ga mawari no hito ni sufficient consideration-NOM surrounding-GEN -people-DAT tsukaw ite ar ita. use-GER be-NONPERF Lit., 'Sufficient consideration is done toward the people around there.' (i) *?zyon ga mawari no hito ni nani o John-NOM surrounding-GEN -people-DAT what-ACC tsukaw ita ka. use-PERF-Question Lit., 'What did John use for people around him?' (iii) zyon ga mawari no hito ni zyuubun na ki o tsukaw ita. sufficient consideration- ACC 'John was sufficiently considerate to the people around him.' 15 Evidence for the empty operator movement will be given later. 16 Future research is needed to determine what the syntactic status of this ga- marked NP is, as in the English tough construction. 17 This is motivated by the fact that nominative cannot appear when the VP is an /f?-marked constituent, e.g., in sentences whose matrix verb is complex predicate ite moraw in Japanese. 18 Lasnik & Saito's 1992 ECP analysis and Chomsky's idea that non-lexical I(nflection) and C(omplementizer) also heads a maximal projection with Spec work together. 19 I assume here that the ECP is in effect determined at LF, differently from Chom- sky's 1986 analysis and Lasnik & Saito's 1992 y-marking analysis that the ECP is in effect determined at S-structure for A-positions, and at LF for adjuncts, perhaps as a consequence of the Projection Principle. Nothing in this paper motivates the assumption that intermediate traces for adjunct should be eliminated at LF, where- as intermediate traces for arguments should not be eliminated at LF. 20 This is an example from Chomsky (1986:20). Since the trace is not antecedent- governed, it must be theta-governed. In order for this to be possible, VP must be theta- governed by Infl. 21 If it is assumed that VP is not L-marked, then it can be a blocking category. However, in Chomsky 1986, VP-adjunction is used. In this case, another inter- mediate trace is postulated in the example in the text. See Chomsky 1986 for fur- ther discussion. 156 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1 998) 22 See Chomsky (1986:92) for the assumption that there is only one specifier po- sition in CP, as required by Who did John like her when? in contrast with *Who when did John like her? 23 If the moraw ('receive') is assumed to subcategorize for infinitive IP instead of CP, all the discussions in this paper hold the same for the ECP. 24 Note that the proposed analysis together with ECP also makes a correct predic- W tion of (i) in contrast with (ii). (i) nyuugaku ga yakusokus ite ar ita hitobito (a noun phrase) admission-NOM promise-GER be-PERF people 'those people who have been promised admission to' (ii) gakubu ga nyuugaku o sono hitobito ni yaskusokus ita. department-NOM admission-ACC those people-DAT promise-PERF 'The department promised admission to those people.' In (i), the trace is theta-governed since the verb yakusokusur ('promise') sub- categorizes for NP and PP[DAT ni ('to')]. Thus, ECP is satisfied. 25 This section is an answer to a question put by Christopher Collins and James Yoon to previous versions of this paper. 26 Shibatani 1978 proposes an analysis of the -ite moraw sentence. My analysis of the ite moraw ('receive') sentence basically follows his analysis, especially the claim that the ife-marked VP is the object of moraw. As he points out, the analysis parallels the typical sentence that contains moraw, as below, (i) zyon ga mearii ni hon o moraw. John-NOM Mary-LOC book-ACC receive-NONPERF 'John receives a book from Mary.' In the ite moraw sentence, /^-marked VP occurs in place of the accusative- marked NP in (i). 27 The sentence in the text may be hard to understand, and is yet grammatical, similar to The cat that the dog that the man hit hit hit fish. See Chomsky 1965 for such an example with his judgments. REFERENCES Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. a . 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht: Foris Publications. ▼ . 1986. Barriers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. . 1993. The theory of principles and parameters. Syntax: An International Handbook of Contemporary Research, ed. by J. Jacobs, A. von Stechow, W. Sternefeld, & T. Venemann, 506-69. Berlin: de Gruyter. . 1993. A minimalist program for linguistic theory. The View from Building 20, ed. by Kenneth Hale & Samuel Jay Keyser, 1-52. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hiroki Koga: Japanese Mntransitivized' verbal gerund + ar ('be') sentences 157 INOUE, Kazuko. 1976. Henkei bunpoo to Nihongo [Transformational Grammar and Japanese]. Tokyo: Taishuukan-shoten. Lasnik, Howard, & Mamoru Saito. 1992. Move a: Conditions on Its Application and Output. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Matsumoto, Yo. 1990. On the syntax of Japanese 'intransitivizing' -te am con- struction: Non-lexical function changing,' Chicago Linguistic Society 1:277-91. SHIBATANI, Masayoshi. 1978. Nihon go no Bunseki [Analyses of Japanese]: see- see-bunpoo no hoohoo [The Method of Generative Grammar]. Tokyo: Taishuu-kan. > Studies in the Linguistic Sciences Volume 28, Number 1 (Spring 1998) THE USE OF ENGLISH IN WRITTEN FRENCH ADVERTISING: A STUDY OF CODE-SWITCHING, CODE-MLXING, AND BORROWING IN A COMMERCIAL CONTEXT Elizabeth Martin University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign emartin@uiuc.edu This paper provides an analysis of language-mixing as it appears in written French advertising, using studies on the use of English as a pair-language with French and other languages (e.g., Spanish, Portu- guese, Hindi, Japanese, Thai, Arabic) as a point of departure. The analysis provided here suggests that the English used in non-Ang- lophone advertising is a rich source of linguistic data that is unique because of morpho-syntactic features generally untolerated in con- ventional written or spoken discourse. Evidence is presented to draw attention to the unusual structural techniques associated with English borrowings, code-mixing, and code-switching in specific ad- vertising slogans in France and the role that English plays in this par- ticular medium. Constraint-oriented theories and counter-arguments are also addressed, along with various socio-psychological motiva- tions for choosing language-mixing as an alternative communicative strategy. 1. Introduction Although linguistic investigation of code-mixing as it specifically applies to advertising has been somewhat limited thus far, the idea of promotional mate- rial being 'cross-cultural' is well-established. In their advertising textbook orgi- nally published in 1961, Dunn and Barban (1974:602) commented that: [In regard to] advertising activities that cut across national bounda- ries ... , it has been suggested that 'cross-cultural' is a better term than 'multinational' or 'international' in that markets are often better defined by cultural or demographic variables than by political boundaries. A large part of the research in code-mixing has, of course, been limited to spoken discourse (e.g., Poplack 1980; Pfaff 1979; Valdes-Fallis 1976). There are, however, a number of scholars who have taken an interest in this phenomenon in its writ- ten manifestation as it appears in advertising copy, including Bhatia 1987 who has studied the commercial use of English in India, Takashi 1990 who has con- ducted linguistic analyses of Japanese advertisements, and Martin 1998 whose Ph.D. dissertation treats English/French code-mixing in advertising in France. They are among the many researchers inspired by the work of Geoffrey N. Leech 1966 who devoted considerable time and effort to the detailed analysis of English used as a language of commercial persuasion. In the spirit of such research, this 160 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998) paper will suggest that the English used in the advertising of non-English speak- ing countries is a rich source of linguistic data that is unique because of the viola- tions of stylistic restrictions one often encounters. Furthermore, the linguistic and cultural content of advertising slogans discovered through a careful examination of phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic patterns also enables one to tap people's attitudes toward language and society. The analysis presented in this paper pertains specifically to the use of Eng- d lish elements in written French advertisements in France, a phenomenon that per- * sists despite the French government's repeated efforts to curb the influence of English on the French language.' After a brief review of previous research in this area, specific code-mixing techniques will be introduced as they apply directly to French advertising, using various slogans as examples. This discussion will also draw the reader's attention toward the unusual structural qualities of commercial language and the probable reasons for which English plays such an important role in advertising around the world. The data for this analysis were largely drawn from recent issues of the French weekly magazine L'Express. Also included are a number of code-mixed items discovered by Blanche Grunig (1990:73-226) in her linguistic investigation of advertising slogans in France. For the purposes of this analysis, written adver- tising was chosen over television and radio for several reasons. First of all, it is easier to manipulate than audio and visual recordings. Secondly, it is a relatively important marketing strategy. French companies generally spend approximately twice as much on newspaper and magazine advertising as on television and radio commercials (Mermet 1988). Thirdly, in the interest of providing as detailed an analysis as possible, it seemed more beneficial to focus on code-mixing and code- switching in written material, an area often ignored in research. Indeed, the struc- tural flexibility of the code-mixed slogans found in advertising makes it extremely interesting from a linguistic point of view. Those who write advertising copy en- joy what Leech 1966 referred to as 'copywriter's licence'. This carte blanche authorizes them to (i) experiment with orthography, (ii) invent new lexical items, (iii) produce language which appears nonsensical, and/or (iv) use the intrasenten- tial switching of roles and registers, in addition to many other options, all of which provides a fascinating linguistic mixture for analysis. 2. Code-mixing 'constraints' With regard to past research in code-switching and code-mixing, there are a number of issues that relate directly to advertising that warrant our attention,^ such as the controversy over code-mixing constraints, motivational factors, and general attitudes toward code-mixing. 2 Regarding code-mixing constraints, Poplack 1980 proposed what she referred to as 'equivalence', 'complementizer', 'free morpheme', and 'conjunction' constraints on code-mixing. Poplack and other proponents of constraint-oriented theory have claimed, for instance, that borrowed constituents must adhere to the constituent word order of the host lan- guage. However, in the following example of intrasentential switching in Kin- shasa-Lingala/French discourse (Bokamba 1989:279), the adjectival noun phrase Elizabeth Martin: The use of English in written French advertising 161 "deux fois" does not obey the Lingala constituent order, which would have been the opposite: Mobali na yo a-telephon-aka yd deux fois par jour. 'Your husband calls you twice a day.'' The following sentence, a mixture of English and French, reveals the same viola- tion of word order rules (Bokamba 1989:282): He presented a paper exceptionnel. 'He presented a(n) exceptional paper.' There are others who have suggested that these constraints are by no means uni- versal and fail to take into account the contexts in which switching occurs, among them Saville Troike (1982:65): The fact that exceptions have been reported for almost all constraints yet posited suggests that most researchers may have been sociolin- guistically naive in not taking the contexts of switching into account [and therefore] a study of variable contextual constraints on switch- ing may be fruitful. Written advertising is certainly one of these contexts. 3. Motivational factors that trigger language-mixing When using advertising copy as research data, it is also important to take into consideration possible motivations for code-switching and code-mixing with English. Much research has been done to determine precisely when bi- and mul- tilinguals engage in this behavior in various types of discourse. In his study of English words as they appear in the Arab press, Peters 1988 found that English is often used when referring to the following domains: science and technology, various consumer products (such as shampoo, perfume and after-shave), sports, games, architecture, most service industries, food, politics, clothing, the military, and business. Valdes-Fallis 1976 also considers switching as being related to topic and found, for instance, that English/Spanish bilinguals often lapse into English when discussing computers. Switching as it occurs in written advertising will often depend upon the tar- geted audience (e.g., age, sex, socio-economic status, etc.). Many have discovered the persuasive and manipulative power of English in advertising (Masavisut et al. 1986; Bhatia 1987; Larson 1990; Checri 1995; Martin 1998), which has been the object of detailed discourse analysis. The functions of code-switching and code- mixing are also discussed throughout the literature. Bokamba (1989: 287), for in- stance, describes the following motivations for switching and mixing of lan- guages: 1. To express the first word or idea that comes to mind 2. To convey more accurately one's emotional state 3. To appropriately obey rules governing interactional norms and communicative domains. 4. To communicate effectively in certain multilingual speech 162 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1998) communities where many languages are mutually unintelligible. Other reasons for engaging in code-switching and code-mixing, enumerated by Saville Troike 1982, include (i) ethnic or group identification, (ii) for 'humorous effect', and (iii) quotations, all of which are heavily exploited in advertising copy. To this list of code-switching functions, Cheng & Butler 1989 add the following: (i) the exclusion of other parties, (ii) the elevation of one's perceived social status, and/or (iii) a change in roles. Many of the different classifications of the func- tional aspects of conversational code-mixing found in the literature can be di- rectly applied to advertising. 4. Attitudes toward mixing One of the most relevant issues in advertising, however, is consumer reac- tion to advertising copy. What, precisely, are people's attitudes toward code- mixing in particular? Kachru 1986 claims that many of the attitudes toward lan- guage stem from the roles it has played in a given community and suggests the following categorizations: (i) dislocational (whereby English slowly replaces another language), (ii) CONFLICTIVE (as occurs in some instances in India when politicians use English as a bargaining tool) or (iii) parallel (the rarely equalized relationship between all existing languages in a country, such as in Switzerland). Kachru also proposes a number of models that can be utilized to relate a particular variety of language to society, notably the corrective model, the domain MODEL, the CONFLICT MODEL, the FUNCTIONAL MODEL, and the VERBAL-REPERTOIRE model. (For a more detailed discussion of these models, see Kachru 1986). Attitudes toward code-mixing differ from one communicative context to another. Whereas one's use of code-mixing in some instances may indicate a higher socio-economic status, Kamwangamalu 1989a, and Bokamba 1989 — among others — indicate that language-mixing has become the norm (and may even be necessary) in many multilingual areas, including those (such as the United States) where monolinguism is considered desirable. In some communities and/or communicative contexts, the mixing of English with one's native language indicates prestige, modernity, or solidarity. Bhatia 1992 has provided numerous examples of this in advertising in India, Takashi 1990 in Japanese advertising, Thonus 1991 in Brazilian business names, and Martin 1998 in French advertising, among others. 3 In their analysis of the influence of English in Thai media, Masavisut, Suk- wiwat, & Wongmontha 1986 discovered that products advertised in English are generally considered more reliable and of superior quality. Furthermore, for a number of items used for hygiene as well as various technical products, no ade- quate lexical items exist in Thai. These would include words such as: dental floss, shampoo, xerox, computers, etc. Additional problems include the rigid structure and meaning-specific tones of the Thai language that do not lend themselves eas- ily to creative rhyme schemes and/or seductive melodies. Those who write for the media are often guilty of exploiting various cultural and linguistic stereotypes. In India, for example, Bhatia 1987 reports that French Elizabeth Martin: The use of English in written French advertising 163 and Hindi are sometimes chosen over English to promote the idea of tradition and reliability, as the use of English in Indian advertising could convey the idea of shallowness often associated with westernization. Kachru 1986 provides an in- teresting list of stereotypical attitudes regarding the English language: Labels used to symbolize the power of English Positive Negative national identity anti-nationalism literary renaissance anti-native culture cultural mirror for native cultures materialism modernization westernization liberalism rootlessness universalism ethnocentricism technology permissiveness science divisiveness mobility alienation access code Generally speaking, researchers agree that English in advertising is inter- preted as a symbol of modernization, efficiency, and/or reliability. However, the situation is somewhat more complex than it appears. Bhatia 1992 reports, for in- stance, that writers of Hindi ad copy distinguish between modernization and westernization, carefully expressing the latter primarily through visual cues, rather than by inserting English elements. Reliability, on the other hand, is often associated with deep-rooted Indian tradition, an idea conveyed through the use of Sanskrit in Hindi advertising. As for Japanese advertising, foreign elements are often written in Katakana, rather than with the hiragana symbols commonly used for writing in Japanese (Bhatia 1992). Clearly, one must consider the possibility of using various scripts when analysing code-mixed advertising copy. Other issues that need to be taken into account are the products being advertised, the as- sumed degree of bi- or multilingualism of the targeted consumer population, and culture-specific attitudes toward a variety of languages, in addition to English. When examining advertising from a linguistic point of view, one finds that non-Anglophones' attitudes toward English in a general sense can also be re- vealing. A most intriguing survey on Asian attitudes toward English was con- ducted by Shaw 1981. Over 800 students from Singapore, India, and Thailand, studying in 12 different universities and colleges, completed a questionnaire de- signed to reveal the various reasons they had chosen to study English. The re- sults seem to indicate that the English language has taken on a life of its own, di- vorced, as it were, from its corresponding ideology. Out of a list of 25 possible reasons for studying English, the least popular among all three groups in Shaw's 1981 study were the following (Shaw 1981:111): 1. T studied English because I like the countries in which English is spoken. 7 2. T studied English because I like the people who are native speakers.' 164 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998) 3. 'I studied English because it will help me to think and behave as native speakers do.' The three MOST popular reasons for studying English were (Shaw 1981: 1 1 1-2): 1. 'Because I will need it for my work ...' 2. 'To talk to native speakers and/or foreigners for business and educa- tional reasons ...' 3. 'It is required in our system ...' Obviously, the strongest motivation for learning English in this case was a desire to use the language purely as a means of accessing and sharing information in an international market. 5. The appeal of English in French advertising: Some recent examples How do the French feel about English invading their culture? According to Mermet 1988, approximately 50% of the French population view British and American lexical borrowings as a threat to the French language. Nearly 45%, however, embrace the idea of welcoming such words into their language, consid- ering it a part of the natural evolution and enrichment of their native tongue. i Figure 1. Canon Starwriter votre Business Force. Indeed, new English words are being assimilated into the French language at every moment: tapper, zapping, fan-club, high-tech, joint-venture, top niveau, top secret (Mermet 1988:67). One could argue that a great number of them can Elizabeth Martin: The use of English in written French advertising 165 be linked to science, business, or technology. Indeed, many French copywriters today intersperse English business terminology with French copy to create an im- age of efficiency. Most likely, the English word business was inserted into the advertisement for Canon typewriters shown in Figure 1 to imply a certain com- petitive edge. Figure 2. Monsieur le President, vous avez Washington en ligne directe. Oui, Monsieur le President Directeur General, a partir du 19 mai, chaque lour a 12 h 35, vous pourrez entrer en com- munication directe avec Washington en prenant le nou- veau vol direct de United Airlines, venu s'aiouter a notre Pans-Chicago. Et en plus, Monsieur le President, etant donne que la grande compagnie americame a la volonte de faire decoller les affaires Internationales, United Airlines peut vous emmener egalement vers plus de 200 destinations aux Etats-Unis dont Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York et Miami... Alors, des que vos affaires vous appellent dans nos Etats, pensez United ! Avec encore 2 hgnes : numero telephone Paris : 48.97.82.82, numero vert: 05.01.91.38, appel gratuit. UJJ uiiitgd AtRLines PARIS CDQ 1 -WASHINGTON TOUS LES JOURS EN VOL DIRECT. Copywriters are also forced to consider certain consumer characteristics when designing code-mixed slogans. Stereotypes, self-fulfillment, intellectual cu- riosity, narcissism, etc., all are cleverly taken into account when targeting a par- ticular audience. For instance, those who write ad copy for French magazines are careful to avoid cultural references unfamiliar to their audience, well aware of the 166 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1998) prestige that intellect enjoys in French society. Through their choice of words, and indeed their choice of one language over another, advertising copywriters attempt to flatter their readers, leaving them with the impression of being well- informed and sophisticated, worthy of products that exude an aura of elegance and elitism. For instance, the mere mention of American cities in a French adver- tisement gives products a more modern, and almost inaccessible, image. The ad for United Airlines in Figure 2, in which Washington, D.C. is mentioned three times, accompanied by Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Miami, illustrates this technique. Figure 3. ROCHEBOBOIS. LE PREMIER ROLE DANS LA PIECE. son an. un canape Roche Bobois prend possession du decor. j ouani avec la lumicre et I'cspacc Cinape ^mbole LOUUIIU dc Hower en plume a piece soil clas- nporaine. U tien- e premier role. EDITION SPECIALE : 16450 F. Los Nouveaux Classiques. .,.„,;,:.; Elizabeth Martin: The use of English in written French advertising 167 Similarly, a string of American cities (Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Diego, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.) line the very top of the ad in Figure 3 for Roche Bobois leather sofas. If one looks carefully, one notices, however, that not a single one of the distributors listed at the bottom of the page is located in the United States. Although the use of English is extremely rare in French advertisements for food products, a recent advertisement for mustard (Figure 4) uses English in labels Figure 4. 1 si PARFUM DE 1 Sauci moutardt a la sutdoit a oast d'oiwfk tt depicts, dta pour It saumon. pot tit 200 g. 46.50 F (Fauchori). 2 Lout! grand clauiQut, moutardt OtaihaM, pot dt 200 g. II f. 3 Uorett Btcorttt : moutardt rugant compost* d'iptcts tt d< tomorti pour oceompogntr fondutt tr gniiodts : au citron ■ •n pour I'ttoborofton dti sauctt : au vtn dt xtrti idtolt pour im plan caltiatt. 200 g. 14,80 F (Id Grand a BUc Itt potssoiu. pot dt 215 a. 12 F. 5. Favchon ; oux trot* tp+cts, poor Itt vtandtt tt Itt vololDti. pot dt 200 g. 20 F 8. Utatartt vtottrtt dt Brtvt au mo*l dt raisin, pot dt 200 g. 21 F (Fouehon). 7 Htdiard : moutardt au lafran. idtolt pour Itt polstons. poi dt 100 a U 90 F oui ottvts tt oux anchoit, pour viandti tt ponsont frrrs, 13,50 F. 8. Monoprtx Gourmtt - a ''•sirogon troii. idtolt dam itt vinoiortnts. pot dt 200 g. ou au potvrt rtft idtolt pour dtgiactr Its fondi dt 10UCM. 4,75 F. 9. Faguott mitt, dt prtftrtnet avtc itt dandtt bionerttt oux htrtti pout Iti iductt Itgtrtt ; au itnouii poor itt poissons grillts, pot dt 200 a, 16 F 10. Cermon't Muiiord. Torino dt pot dt 113 g, 25 F (Faucnon). 11 Menes : moutardt de quaint. ottlo sttoetlon ; Btount enra- tont. vtnt a I'tstrogon et oux flntt rttfbts. pot dt 200 g, 15 f 12. Marts A Sponecf, moutardt angloist. pot dt 145 q. Saint Micnon. U.SOF. 13. Savoro : condlmtnt compost dt douit aromotts. 12 F environ. 14 Dtlouts Fits : au vinaigrt dt cidrt. idealt pour io cuisson dts poissons : 'ont ou potvrt vtri. pour its viandes rotttt. 5.65 F If pot dt 100 g i.LofavfPe Gourmtt) 15 Amora : moutardt Tint et font, grand ctautqut. pot dt 300 g, 11 F tmvon. !6 Dttoait Flit I'eirraqon tl ntrots dt Provttltt. 13.50 F AORESSES Hediara 21 o'ace de a Vace- eme. 75008 Par s Te- -1266 44 36 ta'aye'ie jour^ei. 52. 3d Haussmann "5009 D = rs Fauchon :6 ziace de a Madeleine "5CC3 Pans Tel 47 42.6011 Fagoais Ma*soi 30 rue ce La TYemoille, "5008 s ariS "e 47 2080 91 Aiben Me n ?s ii ca Uaiesref* oes 75003 Pai 42 5695 63 La Gfarde Ecicere :s 3 ^rs. 38 rue ce Sevres ":.07 =a*s "e- J5.W25.55 Marts i sse^cei 35 ~.z ^■abSsmann ?5CC9 = vs PAGES OIRIGEES PAR MART1NE ALBERT1N AVEC LA COLLABORATION 168 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1998) (see item No. 10) to lure customers who are finicky about their condiments to an exclusive, and extremely expensive, American supermarket (Fauchon) in Paris. Figure 5. i GRANDS AMATEURS DE PIN'S Venez chercher votre Pin's HILTON au Bugatti Bar en degustant le cocktail du "Jour" dans une atmosphere chaleureuse, detendue et musicale. L'equipe du Bar Bugatti VOTRE ESTOMAC VOUS RAPPELLE A L'ORDRE, l'equipe du restaurant LE JARDIN est a votre disposition jusqu'a 24 heures. (a Toccasion d'un concert ou d'un spectacle au Palais des Congres et de la Musique) Un buffet de salades, fromages et patisseries saura vous ravir avec un service efficace et rapide. BON AP PETIT ET BONNE FIN DE SOIREE ! STRASBOURG tti ton % Avenue Herrenschmidt k Strasbourg Telephone : 88.37.10.10. One also finds a number of morphological transformations in code-mixed advertising. Pin's, a very popular advertising tool in France, is used as a singular and plural noun indiscriminately in French advertising, ignoring altogether it's Elizabeth Martin: The use of English in written French advertising 169 possessive quality in English. The advertisement in Figure 5 promises the reader a free Hilton pin's if he or she comes in for a cocktail. Figure 6. ft NE QUITTE PAS, JE PRENJDS UN AUTRE PPEL.A* SIGNAL D'APPEL .-i:''.'' POUR PRENDRE UN APPEL QUAND VOUS ETES DEJA EN LIGNE. PQURiaFPARMaiS | Parents, amis, on cherche a vou jolndre, mais la Itgne esc occupee. Savez-vous que vous pouve: prendre cet appel meme si vou etes de|a en communication ? Avec le Signal d'Appel, un "blp' vous previent qu'un deuxlem< correspondant cherche a vou jolndre. II suffit d'appuyer sur deu: touches de vocre telephone pou prendre cet appel et passer d'ui Interlocuteur a I'autre. Pour en savoir plus, et pour t vous abonner, contactez votre Agence Commercial* FRANCE TELECOM (14, appel gratuit). Another code-mixing technique found in advertising which takes into care- ful consideration the phonological system of the host language (in this case, French) consists of spelling English loan-words a la frangaise, in other words, in such a way that a native French speaker who pronounces them will unknowingly 170 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998) produce an English word or phrase. Consider, for example, the France Telecom advertisement for call-waiting in Figure 6. Approximately halfway down the page we find the word beep, written bip in French, to elicit the desired pronunciation. TUBORG...YOU TOO?" For generations Tubcrg has been part of the noble art of beer drinking in all European countne: Elizabeth Martin: The use of English in written French advertising 171 Some French written advertising uses more English than others. The beer advertisement in Figure 7, for instance, uses advertising copy written entirely in English. As in most cases, the slogan appearing in bold print is as simplistic as possible, and is likely to be understood by the majority of its readers. In the clos- ing sentence, we find many cognates, used to facilitate comprehension. Figure 8. Marlboro Country. The Great Experience' vre la Grande Experience* nous oHrons l» catalogue de leurt plus beaux reves de voyages. Marlboro Country Travel Icfeserts A Marlboro cigarettes advertisement (Figure 8) also effectively uses English words that are readily intelligible to those who do not know the language. The story behind Marlboro's very successful international marketing campaign is an interesting one. When these cigarettes first appeared on the market, they were fa vored more by women than men. In order to increase their share of the market, the company hired a new agency whose objective it would be to create an image of Marlboro as a cigarette for the rugged outdoorsman. Executives from the agencj . 172 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1998) sporting tatoos, were among the first men to appear in these new Marlboro ads (Dunn & Barban 1974:238). Marlboro has since become a household word in France, where practically everyone is familiar with the rugged-looking cowboys associated with Marlboro advertisements. This Marlboro ad provides a classic ex- ample of code-switching. As is customary, the English words chosen are easily recognized and understood by non-English-speaking French readers, and effec- tively whet the consumer's appetite for 'la Grande Experience' awaiting them in the Western United States. Figure 9. L'Exclusif Beaucoup It recherchent Peu l'obtiennent Another slogan using easily recognizable English words appears in the ad- vertisement in Figure 9 in which the distillers of Ballantine's Whisky have chosen Elizabeth Martin: The use of English in written French advertising 173 to use the expression 17 years old, which — although it does not particularly re- semble its French equivalent — is likely to have been a part of everyone's Eng- lish lesson at school at one time or another, and has the additional advantage of conjuring up images of tradition and exclusivity. Figure 10. How do the French view advertising in general? Mermet 1988 argues that the younger generation is perhaps more appreciative of this creative medium of expression, but also that the French as a whole, though they consider it an eco- 174 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998) nomic necessity, tend to seek entertainment in this persuasive medium. For many French natives, advertising is appreciated as a form of art, and is meant to favora- bly mirror society in a way that is reassuring to them. As a result of this mutual understanding between copywriters and consumers, the latter often end up being Figure 11. Elizabeth Martin: The use of English in written French advertising 175 more enthusiastic about the decoding of criptic messages embedded in advertis- ing than about the actual product itself. Stretching the imagination is often of ut- most importance. To illustrate this point, compare the French ad for Benson and Hedges cigarettes in Figure 10 to the American cigarette ad in Figure 11 — pub- lished by the very same company in Newsweek. Indeed, it is not uncommon to encounter French advertising in which the product being promoted is neither mentioned nor visible. Specific code-mixing techniques applied to advertising copy Part of the beauty of French advertising is the choreographed quality of ad- vertising designs. Shapes, colors, lighting and text are meticulously juxtaposed to produce the most alluring effect possible. The text itself, however, reveals some intriguing structural characteristics when closely examined. Indeed, there are a number of systematic code-mixing techniques used in written French advertising to attract the reader's attention. These techniques may involve: (i) the strategic distancing of sounds and/or text (ii) the use of English to create rhyme and rhythm (iii) the integration of English words into the grammatical structure of the French language (iv) homophones (v) existing and deceptive cognates (vi) alternation of speech roles (vii) translation (viii) creative orthography (ix) slightly altered idiomatic expressions (x) irregular plural and possessive forms (xi) English brand names. A few recent slogans (Appendix 1) might be useful to illustrate these methods. (The English equivalents of these slogans also appear in Appendix 1): In Slogan 1, one immediately notices the English-looking word Hitburger. Slogan 1: Hitburger: le plus hit des burgers. [Hitburger] (Grunig 1990:73) A very subtle means of reinforcing the name of this product in the reader's mind is to repeat the brand name, in two separate parts, later in the slogan: ...le plus hit_ des burgers Slogan 2 appeared in a recent advertisement for France Telecom. Slogan 2: 1st page: Elle n est pas souvent chez safdle dans V Illinois 2nd page: Mais elles prennent souvent le cafe ensemble. [ATT] [ France Telecom International] (Grunig 1990:226) 176 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1998) In this particular case, the copywriter decided to spread the text across two pages instead of one, a very wise choice indeed in that it cleverly reflects the longing and separation felt by a mother in France and her daughter living across the At- lantic in the state of Illinois. Not only does one see an American state mentioned in this ad, but one also experiences a blending of cultures, as the daughter is so fortunately able to partake in those frequent long conversations over coffee, so typical in French society, directly from her American living room, because of tr^s telephone company's supposedly low rates. Those who write advertising copy often opt for code-mixed slogans in an effort to create rhyme and/or rhythm. Consider, for example, Slogans 3 and 4: Slogan 3: Coca cola, c'est ga [Coca Cola] Slogan 4: Quand j'entends le mot traffic, je sors mon automatic [Peugeot] (Grunig 1990:179-80) Whereas the Coca Cola slogan is simply a direct translation from English ("Coke is it!"), the Peugeot advertisement uses the words traffic and automatic accord- ing to the English spelling and definition. It should be noted, however, that trafic, normally spelled with one T in French, is a word associated with smuggling and/or drug trafficking, and when coupled with the English-looking word auto- matic conjures up images of gangsters in American movies, which have been quite popular in Europe. Sometimes an already assimilated English expression (such as sex appeal) will give birth to a new borrowing as part of the process of creating an enticing advertisement. In Slogan 5, sex appeal has been transformed into text appeal for the purpose of advertising a popular women's magazine: Slogan 5: Un magazine qui a du text-appeal [Femme] (Grunig 1990:123) Occasionally, as in Slogan 6, innovative French adjectives create the need for language-mixing in order to produce a desired rhyme: Slogan 6: Tres mode, tres fourmi, t res polo, t res fancy [Volkswagon "Polo"] (Grunig 1990:81) In this case, the English word fancy rhymes well with fourmi, (literally meaning 'ant-like'), when pronounced by the French. Another means by which copywriters attempt to lure customers is the shaping of English lexical items into typically French grammatical forms. In Slo- gans 7 and 8, English adjectives, nouns, and verbs are considered equally appro- priate as substitutions for French verb roots before the formal and/or plural sec- ond person verb ending -ez. Slogan 7: Free shoesez-vous [Free-Shoes] Elizabeth Martin: The use of English in written French advertising 177 Slogan 8: Snapez votrefil [DMC] (Grunig 1990:84-5) Homophonous words are also characteristic of code-mixed French advertising. Note, for instance. Slogan 9: Slogan 9: Les homines preferent lesfemmes au Lee [Lee jeans] (Grunig 1990:204) In this particular slogan, for an American jean company, Lee is pronounced the same way as the French word for 'bed' (lit), which not only creates seductive undertones but also clues the reader as to how the brand name should be pro- nounced. Also found in code-mixed French advertising are deceptive cognates. In Slogan 10, presumably for computer games on the French Minitel network, the English word GAME is a direct translation of jeu in French, and also rhymes with gamme (meaning 'selection' in English) when pronounced according to the French phonological system: Slogan 10: 36.15 + GAME. La plus grande gamme de jeux sur Minitel. [Minitel] (Grunig 1990:204) In Slogans 11, 12, and 13, we see a number of English loan-words that are easily intelligible to a native French speaker: Slogan 11: Original emotions are rare [MDM] Slogan 12: The nobel scotch whisky [Clan Campbell] Slogan 13: Oui, je swatch. En smoking, talking, dancing mais sans darling [Swatch] (Grunig 1990:204) This is quite possibly an attempt on the part of the copywriter to avoid any misin- terpretation. Indeed, it is very important in advertising to maintain a readable style that can be easily assimilated and heard in one's imagination. Chances are the English words in these slogans would be pronounced, or at least imagined, with a French accent. Furthermore, Slogans 1 1 and 12, written entirely in English, would seem to encourage readers to believe that the English language is nothing more than French words pronounced with a foreign accent, with the exception of a few articles and verbs, a ploy pointed out by Grunig 1990. This deceptive device is essentially a form of flattery, for the reader is left with the impression that he or she understands a certain level of English with no difficulty. As in Slogan 7, certain parts of speech in Slogan 13 adopt alternate roles For instance, the English-sounding brand name Swatch becomes a verb, and the English participle smoking becomes a noun ('tuxedo') in French. As an added effect, the word en has a double significance. En smoking referring to 'being dressed in a tuxedo', and en [...] talking ... dancing meaning 'while talking and 178 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998) dancing'. The final noun darling was probably imported by English-speaking soldiers during World War II, and creates the needed rhyme for the slogan. Although the majority of English loan-words embedded in French advertis- ing slogans are immediately understood by the reader, mysterious lexical items will sometimes require a certain amount of decoding. In Slogan 14, for instance, the English name of a French communication firm is simply inserted in the text (involving once again the use of an English verb as a French noun) as if it natu- J rally belonged there. Only those with some knowledge of English would catch " the subtle translation of the word become into French (devenir) appearing at the end. Slogan 14: Pour Become communiquer c'est devenir [Become] (Grunig 1990:204) In Slogan 15, we have another example of English expressions spelled a la frangaise, as we saw with the word beep in the France Telecom call-waiting ad earlier: Slogan 15: Let's truites again [Pays de Galle] (Grunig 1990:204) We have here an advertisement to lure tourists to Wales. As truites means 'trout' in French, the entire slogan, if literally translated, would be interpreted as 'Let's trout again', or 'Let's go trout fishing again.' However, the more likely intended message was probably 'Let's twist again', the title of a very popular song in the late 50s and early 60s known to most of the advertisement's targeted audience: middle-aged potential travelers. Similarly, to obtain the proper pronunciation of an English word, it may be embedded in a formulaic expression existing in the French language, as occurs in Slogan 16 for pens and pencils. Slogan 16: You see what I mine * (Vous voyez ce que je veux dear) [Stylomines Conte] (Grunig 1990:204) If each of the two sentences had been written in only one language (the first one in English and the second one in French), we would have had: You see what I mean (Vous voyez ce que je veux dire) The word mine (which, in French, actually carries several meanings, including the lead of a pencil) is essential to the slogan, for it refers the reader to the brand name I [Stylomines Conies]. Adding the English word dear on the end was a clever way to balance the slogan. One of the greatest joys of the French people (and indeed of many other cultures) is that of using idiomatic expressions in everyday communication. The French take great pride in the structural and phonological flexibility of their lan- guage, and enjoy manipulating it for humorous effect. This is particularly evident in advertising. A code-mixed version of this phenomenon appears in Slogan 17 , where the French word bouche (meaning 'mouth' in English) has been replaced Elizabeth Martin: The use of English in written French advertising 1 7 9 by a former American president's last name, pronounced, of course, a la frangaise, drawing it nearer to the pronunciation of the French word for 'mouth': Slogan 17: Buvez I'Amerique a pleine Bush; Bush la biere des hommes de I'Ouest [Busch beer] (Grunig 1990:203) \ change in spelling in the brand name (undoubtedly to accommodate the play n words) and the stereotypical image of the western United States make the slo- gan even more effective. 4 As we have seen in other slogans (for example, 7 and 14, above), products in France often carry English names that are, of course, easily articulated according to the French phonological system. Slogan 18 is yet another example: Slogan 18: Snacks. C'est tellement bon qu' on fait des bonds [Snacks] (Grunig 1990:201) The same is true in other countries around the world. In a 1987 study of 1200 Asian ads, for instance, Bhatia found 90% of product names appearing in English. In some cases, however, 'western-sounding' words used in Asian advertising copy are not English at all, but rather lexical innovations designed to create a fa- vorable brand image. The following are some pseudo-anglicisms recently used in product names in France (Martin 1998): Hydra-stick (lip balm) Pressing Pro (clothes iron) Silk-epil Comfort (woman's razor) Sat in- Up (bra) Miel Pops (breakfast cereal) Anniversong (personalized cassette with "Happy Birthday") In the case of the French, specifically, there are certain dangers one encoun- ters when composing code-mixed advertising copy. Regardless of the code- mixing techniques one chooses to use, there exist several traps that copywriters systematically avoid. First of all, an English word which is inserted in a French slogan without the necessary phonetic clues is likely to be pronounced a la frangaise. Upon reading Slogan 19 for [Well Stockings], for instance, a French reader will undoubtedly guess the vowel sound [e], in the word Well , due to the French word belle appearing at the end, but is very likely to pronounce the W as a V: Slogan 19: Je suis Well. Collant Well. Bien et belle. [Well Stockings] (Grunig 1990:202-3) The end result can sometimes be a product with a split personality, being referred to by some shoppers as Well and others as Veil (Grunig 1990:202-3). Another trap that is easy to fall into when writing ad copy is the over- indulgence in the creative aspect of the text, at the expense of actually convinc- ing the consumer to buy the product. The risk is that advertisements will become 180 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1998) pure art, instead of achieving their ultimate goal: selling the product! (Grunig 1990:238). Leech's (1966:71) advice to copywriters is direct and to the point: Keep the slogan short, simple, familiar, and concrete. 7. Implications and future research This brief analysis of code-mixed advertisements in France has shed light on several areas. It has already been recognized, for instance, that language-mixe* £ advertisements are essentially a mirror of society, enabling the observer to gain • % clearer understanding of attitudes toward language and culture. Comparative analyses of advertising from various cultures could also yield interesting results. Future analyses of code-mixed advertising could investigate the socio- psycholinguistic impact of the manipulative use of pair-languages for commercial purposes on readers of different linguistic and socio-economic backgrounds. The linguistic properties of code-mixed slogans that are actually processed by readers and the effect they have on memory are — with the exception of a small study by Petrof 1990 — unexplored areas of research. An interdiscisciplinary approach may be the most effective way of conducting such an analysis. Finally, it would be interesting to see whether the existing relationship between French and Eng- lish in the advertising medium is similar to that of other languages. The identifica- tion of cross-cultural lexical, syntactic, morphological, and/or phonological uni- versal in code-mixed advertising would provide a valuable set of guidelines for advertising copywriters, researchers interested in commercial and/or linguistic analysis, as well as foreign language teachers wishing to exploit advertising in their classroom. 8. Conclusion Indisputably, the English used in French slogans illustrates that advertising copy can be a rich source of linguistic data on code-switching, code-mixing, and loan-words because of the various morpho-syntactic and phonological features untolerated in conventional written or spoken language. It is also quite possible that the motivations for choosing English as a pair-language in code-mixing for the purpose of advertising are somewhat different from those involved in speech, and therefore warrant additional inquiry. Furthermore, it could be argued that by examining the phenomenon of code-mixing in French advertisements, one dis- covers the attachment French people feel to their native language as well as other aspects of their mentality. Their intellectual curiosity, insatiable appetite for des jeux de mots (puns) and appreciation for subtle nuances, for instance, are far more 4 evident in these code-mixed advertising slogans than any affinity for an Anglo- phone lifestyle. However, in spite of their mixed feelings regarding the materialism and superficiality so often ascribed to the American society, for example, the French seem to take great pleasure in incorporating new English words into their vocabulary, and are more than willing to utilize them to expand their repertoire of marketing strategies. Finally, in view of the specific (and often consistent) proper- ties and functions of code-switching, code-mixing and borrowings found in ad- vertising, it may be conceivable to label language-mixed advertising as a variety in its own right, rather than as an aberration. Elizabeth Martin: The use of English in written French advertising 181 NOTES 1 For discussions on language legislation in France, see Martin 1998; Nelms-Reyes 1996; and Kibbee 1993. 2 For an extensive bibliography of research on code-mixing and code-switching, see Kamwangamalu 1989b. 3 For a more detailed discussion of the 'power' of English in various communities throughout the world, see Kachru 1981, 1986 and Kamwangamalu 1989a. 4 For a more detailed discussion of anglicized product names in France, see Martin 1998. REFERENCES Bhatia, Tej K. 1987. English in advertising: Multiple mixing and media. World Englishes 6:1.33-48. . 1992. Discourse functions and pragmatics of mixing: Advertising across cultures. World Englishes 11:2/3.195-215. Bokamba, Eyamba G. 1989. Are there syntactic constraints on code-mixing? World Englishes 8:3.277-292. CHECRI, Carole. 1995. L'Expressivite de l'emprunt en publicite. Plurilingualis- mes: Les Emp runts 9/10. Paris: Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches en Planifi- cation Linguistique (CERPL). Cheng, Li-Rong, & Katherine Butler. 1989. Code-switching: A natural phe- nomenon vs. language 'deficiency'. World Englishes 8:3.293-309. Dunn, S. Watson, & Arnold M. Barban. 1974. Advertising: Its role in modern marketing. Hinsdale, IL: The Dryden Press. Grunig, Blanche. 1990. Les Mots de la Publicite: L 'Architecture du slogan. Paris: Presses du CNRS. Kachru, Braj B. 1981. The pragmatics of non-native varieties of English. English for Cross-Cultural Communication, ed. by Larry Smith, 15-39. New York: St. Martin's Press. . 1986. The power and politics of English. The power of English: Cross- cultural dimensions in literature and media, ed. by Braj B. Kachru & Larry E. Smith, 121-140. World Englishes 5:2/3. Kamwangamalu, Nkonko Mudipanu. 1989a. Code-mixing and modernization. World Englishes 8:3.321-32. . 1989b. A selected bibliography of studies on code-mixing and code- switching (1970-1988). World Englishes 8:3.433-39. Kibbee, Douglas A. 1993. World French takes on World English: Competing vi- sions of national and international languages. World Englishes 12:2.209-21. Larson, Ben E. 1990. Present-day influence of English on Swedish as found in Swedish job advertisements. World Englishes 9:3.367-69. 182 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998) Leech, Geoffrey N. 1966. English in Advertising: A Linguistic Study of Advertis- ing in Great Britain. London: Longmans, Green and Co. Ltd. Masavisut, Nitaya, Mayuri Sukwtwat, & Seti Wongmontha. 1986. The Power of the English Language in Thai Media. World Englishes 5:2/3.197-207. Martin, Elizabeth A. 1998. Code-mixing and imaging of America in France: The genre of advertising. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Ph.D. dis- sertation in French. 4 MERMET, Gerard. 1988. Francoscopie: Les Francais: Qui sont-ils? Oil vont-ils? fi Paris: Librairie Larousse. Nelms-Reyes, Loretta. 1996. Deal-making on French terms: How France's legisla- tive crusade to purge American terminology from French affects business transactions. California Western International Law Journal 26.273-311. Peters, Issa. 1988. English loan-words in the Arab press. The Journal for Inter- national Business 3:1. Petrof, John V. 1990. L'utilisation des langues etrangeres comme moyen d'aug- menter l'efficacite de la publicite: une approche experimentale. Recherche et applications en marketing 5:2/90. Pfaff, Carol W. 1979. Constraints of language mixing: Instrasentential code- switching and borrowing in Spanish/English. Language 55:2.291-318. Poplack, S. 1980. Sometimes I'll start a sentence in Spanish y termino en espanol: Toward a typology of code-switching. Linguistics 18.581-618. Savtlle-Troike, Muriel. 1982. The Ethnography of Communication: An Intro- duction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Shaw, Willard D. 1981. Asian student attitudes towards English. Larry E. Smith, ed., English for Cross-Cultural Communication. New York: St. Martin's Press. Takashi, Kyoko. 1990. A sociolinguistic analysis of English borrowings in Japa- nese advertising texts. World Englishes 9:3.327-41. Thonus, Terese. 1991. Englishization of business names in Brazil. World Englishes 10:1.65-74. Valdes-Fallis, Guadalupe. 1976. Social interaction and code-switching patterns: A case study of Spanish/English alternation. Bilingualism in the Bicenten- nial and Beyond, ed. by Gary D. Keller, Richard V. Teschan, & Silvia Viera, 53-85. New York: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingiie. Elizabeth Martin: The use of English in written French advertising 183 APPENDIX 1. Code-mixed slogans (Grunig 1990:73-226): 1. Hitburger: le plus hit des burgers. [Hitburger] 'Hitburger: the popular burger.' 2. Elle n 'est pas souvent chez sa fille dans I 'Illinois. Mais elles prennent souvent le cafe ensemble. [ATT] [France Telecom International] 'She isn't often at her daughter's home in Illinois. But they often drink coffee together.' 3. Coca cola, c'est ca [Coca Cola] 'Coke is it!' 4: Quand j'entends le mot traffic, je sors mon automatic [Peugeot] 'When I hear the word "traffic", I get out my "automatic".' 5. Un magazine qui a du text-appeal [Femme] 'A magazine with text-appeal.' 6. Tres mode, tres fourmi, tres polo, tres fancy [Volkswagon "Polo"] 'Very stylish, very small (literally "ant-like"), very "Polo", very fancy.' 7. Free shoesez-vous [Free-Shoes] 'Put on some Free Shoes.' 8. Snapez voire fil [DMC] 'Snap your thread.' 9. Les homines preferent les femmes au Lee [Lee jeans] 'Men prefer women in Lee's.' 10. 36.15 + GAME. La plus grande gamine de jeux sur Minitel. [Minitel] '36.15 GAME. The largest selection of games on Minitel' 11. Original emotions are rare [MDM] 'Original emotions are rare.' 12. The nobel scotch whisky [Clan Campbell] 'The nobel scotch whisky.' 13. Oui, je swatch. En smoking, talking, dancing mais sans darling [Swatch] 'Yes, I wear my swatch. Dressed in a tuxedo, talking, dancing, but not with out my darling." 14. Pour Become communiquer c'est devenir [Become] 'For Become, communicating is becoming.' 15. Let's truites again [Pays de Galle Tourism] 'Let's go fishing for trout again.' 16. You see what I mine * (Vous voyez ce que je veux dear) [Stylomines Conte] 'You see what I mean. You see what I mean.' 184 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998) 17. Buvez I'Amerique a pleine Bush; Bush la biere des hommes de I'Ouest [Busch beer] 'Drink in America with intense pleasure. Bush, the western men's beer.' 18. Snacks. C'est tellement bon qu 'on fait des bonds [Snacks] 'Snacks. It's so good that you jump up and down.' 19. Je suis Well. Collant Well. Bien et belle. [Well Stockings] 1 'I look great. Well stockings. Nice and beautiful.' ^ {bien et belle also means 'undoubtedly') i Studies in the Linguistic Sciences Volume 28, Number 1 (Spring 1998) DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTIONS OF KISWAHILI-SPEAKERS IN UGANDAN POPULAR MEDIA* Edward A. Miner University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign e-miner@uiuc.edu While the Kiswahili language has played a key role in the lin- guistic 'decolonization' and national integration of postcolonial Kenya and Tanzania, its more dubious reputation in neighboring Uganda has stemmed from perceptions about its inherent 'deficiencies' and its use by imputedly dangerous or antisocial people (including the historically unpopular security forces). Dominant linguistic ideologies in Uganda, in contrast to those of its two neighbors, do not recognize local forms of Kiswahili as symbols of transethnic solidarity nor of local political identities. They cast them, rather, as linguistically and culturally defi- cient idioms that invoke coercive contexts, colonial class relations and official political terrorism. Representations of second-language speak- ers of Ugandan Kiswahili in popular media often draw upon stereo- types illustrating their supposed illiteracy, criminality, and 'foreigness' in constructing images of general linguistic, political, and moral decay. 0. Introduction In postcolonial Anglophone East Africa, the Kiswahili language has proved itself of increasing importance as a practical medium and symbol of national inte- gration and the decolonization of national political cultures. In terms of bridging social difference, Kiswahili has figured prominently, both in the formation of tran- sethnic, nationalist/Pan-Africanist consciousness (horizontal integration) and in the creation of economic opportunities for individuals who lack extensive formal schooling in English (vertical integration). In this sense, the Kiswahili language has been expropriated from its original (coastal Islamic) milieu to new politico- cultural contexts in which its functions and social meanings are locally emergent and sociohistorically specific. Mazrui and Shariff (1994:72) note: The historical development of Swahili has given rise to new varieties of the language that are gradually becoming native to an increasing num- ber of east Africans. The concept of a 'Swahili-speaking people', there- fore, has now transcended Swahili ethnicity in the narrower sense of the term, even though it fits perfectly well with the Swahili multidi- mensional concept of kabila. This then has created a complex situation of new public affirmations and counter-affirmations about the bounda- ries of Swahili identity. In colonial times, the East African military was a primary site of transethnic. regionalized identity formation, and its Kiswahili came be associated with a kind 186 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1998) of 'barracks solidarity'. This indexicality potentiated Kiswahili as political capital; it became the most conspicuous symbol of Nyerere's Ujamaa, or African social- ism, and in Kenya, where it was made co-official language with English, Kenyatta ventriloquized important aspects of Nyerere's discourse in articulating his Haram- bee. This image worked in favor of the reputation of Kiswahili(s) in Kenya and Tanzania, where the security personnel were more ethnically diverse, and there- fore perceived as more 'national'. But it worked perhaps to the detriment of Kiswahili(s) in Uganda, where the military was predominantly northern and Nilotic- or Sudanic-speaking, and in postcolonial times, was dominated in turn by the ethnicities of the successive regimes. Kiswahili's most dubious distinction came in 1973, when the military dictator Idi Amin Dada declared it to be Uganda's national language (although the decision was never implemented). When the East African Community broke down in 1977 (due to a riff in relations between Kenya and Tanzania), the regional impetus for the development of Kiswahili in Uganda did as well. More recently, however, the National Resistance Movement (which came to power in Uganda in 1985) has declared its intention to reintroduce Kiswahili as a compulsory subject in schools, and to informally pro- mote it as a national lingua franca. As will be discussed later, the NRM regime is 'softpeddling' a program to rehabilitate Kiswahili in Uganda by linking it to popular initiatives in East African political and economic integration. The nationalist/Pan-Africanist embrace of Kiswahili, however, has presented a perceived threat to the identity claims of the coastal ethnic Swahili communities on the one hand, and the multitude of inland ethnic communities on the other (most notably, the Baganda of Uganda). These respective lines of tension have been manifested in the emergence of a contested political terrain around defini- tions of Kiswahili identity, both between 'native' and second-language speakers and between second-language speakers and nonspeakers. Discursive anxieties around language use are very often the terms in which other sociopolitical strug- gles are waged; language issues become particularly sensitive in the context of competing sociopolitical interests finding political voice. Among the more than 20 recognized native Kiswahili dialects, the language of Zanzibar (Kiunguja) was chosen by the British as a model for the official administrative standard, and in the hands of post-independence Tanzanian language-planners it underwent rapid lexi- cal elaboration and syntactic codification. As an 'improved' linguistic technology, Kiswahili became ascriptively 'neutral', as standardized, literary languages are often assumed to be. In this, however, the emergent standard became discursively disassociated from its coastal sources. And as their political and economic futures in post-independence Kenya and Tanzania have faced periodic uncertainty, coastal Swahili communities have resisted transethnic readings of Swahili identity. They have found unexpected allies in cultural activists from the East African interior who resist the encroachment of a regionalized transethnic identity on their own cherished ethnic identity claims. The emergence of a standard Kiswahili has also figured in negative (Reval- uations of nonnative 'upcountry' (East African interior) varieties as corrupted ver- sions of their coastal counterparts. One dominant discourse constructs the nonna- EDWARD A. MINER: Discursive constructions of KiSwahili speakers 187 tive varieties as a continuum of progressive linguistic 'decay' from Zanzibar to the Congo River. The well-known adage runs: 'Kiswahili was born in Zanzibar, grew up in Tanzania, grew old in Kenya, died in Uganda, and was buried in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo).' And as nonnative varieties of Kiswahili have facilitated interethnic communication in increasingly multilingual urban contexts, perceptions have arisen about their role in the dilution of traditional ^"orms of rural-based authority (that find their cultural expression in 'mother- Bongues'). Thus, the constructed linguistic decay in urban centers (as manifested in Emergent sociolinguistic hybridity and various forms of code-switching) is coar- ticulated in certain moralistic discourses with images of generalized social and moral decay. In some locales, Muswahili 'Swahili person' has come to denote any 'outsider' with ascribed subversive characteristics. Mazrui and Shariff (1994:81) note: The other level of language attitudes has to do with how a language triggers certain stereotypes about its speaker(s) in the mind of the audi- ence. A classical example of this tendency with regard to the Swahili is described by Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, the first vice-president of Kenya, in his famous book Not Yet Uhuru. In particular, Odinga refers to some African adjuncts of the British colonial administration who used to 'invade' Luoland periodically to collect taxes. Precisely be- cause these people were themselves not Luo and had no proficiency in the Luo language, they were forced to use a transethnic language of the common Kenyan. To the Luo this created the impression that the tax collectors were Swahili even though there is no record that the Swahili ever participated in collecting taxes in Luoland or anywhere else in Kenya. As a result of this association of the language with the ethnicity of the tax collectors, however, Odinga tells us that the Luo referred to the 'Swahili' people as okoche (1967: 2), a Luo word meaning 'vaga- bond, rogue and cheat'. As far westwards as Uganda, in fact, the Swa- hili language conjures up images of the bayaye, the lumpenproletariat, the underclass. In as much as intensive multilingualism, sociolinguistic hybridity, and code- switching parallel the demographic and socioeconomic consequences of un- checked urban growth, moralistic discourses coarticulate images of linguistic de- cay with those of increased crime, prostitution, overcrowding, poor sanitation, al- coholism, the disintegration of families, and the miseducation of children. In this mvay, perceived linguistic problems are represented as the harbinger and/or source Wof more general social problems. 1. Kiswahili in Uganda In the linguistic economy of Uganda, to an extent unparalleled elsewhere along the Kiswahili periphery, these discourses have constructed the Kiswahili language (and its second-language speakers) as the source of untold social degen- eracy and mayhem. Ugandan Kiswahili, illiteracy, and criminality are three terms that commonly cooccur in social texts that take as a central theme Uganda's post- 188 STUDIES IN THE LINGUISTIC SCIENCES 28:1 (SPRING 1 998 ) colonial experiences of political turmoil and terrorism. Such texts appeal to a cer- tain common-sense knowledge about the relation between language and social be- havior. Fairclough (1992:84) argues: Texts postulate, and implicitly set up interpretive positions for inter- pretive subjects who are 'capable' of using assumptions from their prior experience to make connections across the intertextually diverse elements of a text, and to generate coherent interpretations. In this paper, the 'interpretive principles' under consideration construct unlettered, Ugandan, Kiswahili-speaking, criminal identity in opposition to a literate, civically responsible, elite, urban, Anglophone identity based on formal Westernized schooling. To a limited extent, this elite Anglophone identity, because it has emerged in Kampala, the Ugandan capital, is at times also associated with profi- ciency with the Luganda language (the language spoken around Kampala). In the opinion of one prominent Ugandan literary scholar, the image of the uneducated Kiswahili-speaking urban proletariat took hold before that of the Kiswahili- speaking bandit (Abbasi Kiyimba, personal communication). The older image emerged in colonial times as immigrants came from all over East Africa to build the Mombasa-Kampala railway and to work in the industrial areas in Kampala's south suburbs. The second image, arising in postcolonial times as a northern- dominated, Kiswahili-speaking military waged political terrorism in Kampala, drew on the ascribed 'foreigness' of Ugandan Kiswahili implicit in the first to cast them as bagwira 'foreigners', and to position military culture in opposition to the civic culture of Kampala. This oppositionality emerges in part from colonial linguistic ideologies that attribute to English efficacy as a tool of thought, in contradistinction to African languages, which are the idioms of emotional and cultural expression. In this sense, the languages that individuals command are understood to determine the extent of their intellectual abilities and leadership capacities. The discourses out- lined above construct second-language speakers of English (and by association, Luganda) to be more civically responsible than second-language speakers of Kiswahili. As Spitulnik (1992:338), taking the example of discourses around lan- guage in Zambian radio programming, argues: . . . some languages are constructed as more 'intellectually equipped' and others as better suited for 'cultural expression' through their exclu- sive use for certain program types. Significantly, these perceived qualities of languages are entangled with particular assessments of their speakers, e.g. as rural people, urban consumers, 'illiterate', 'sophisticated', 'insignificant', etc., and I would argue that the two modes of evaluation are not really separable. These evaluations do not emanate strictly from radio, however, but are more directly grounded in the overall political economy of languages in the country, as linguistic competence (and membership in certain speech communities) struc- tures access to education, labor markets, and political power. > EDWARD A. MINER: Discursive constructions of KiSwahili speakers 189 Rationalizations of linguistic hierarchies tend to invoke popular sociolinguistic stereotypes of certain kinds of social actors and their ascribed social characteris- tics. Mazrui and Mazrui (1998: 156) note: The Baganda elite have regarded Kiswahili openly as the language of 'the lower classes' (Bakopi, Luganda for peasants) since Kiswahili was the language of the workplace and the market, and the language of sol- diers from the barracks. Less openly, some Baganda aristocrats have ' also regarded Kiswahili as the language of 'lesser breeds' in the ethnic sense, the northern ethnic groups despised by such haughty aristocrats. Myers-Scotton (1990) argues that rationalizations for the continued political dominance of ex-colonial languages in African countries (which include argu- ments about their 'neutrality' and 'efficiency') tend to elide discussion of the vested interest that small Westernized elites hold in the maintenance of a sociolin- guistic 'glass ceiling' she terms 'elite closure'. Linguistic elite closure is one as- pect of a structural inequality imposed by the limited availability of educational opportunities within political economies for which schooled linguistic practice li- censes rights of speaking. Much of the complexity of nation-building in Uganda is imposed by the material consequences of uneven development across ethnolinguistic regions and the discursive practices that construct oppositional social identities out of them. There is a widespread perception that Baganda (Luganda-speaking individuals) have had greater access to education, employment opportunities and political in- fluence than other groups. This so-called 'Buganda Syndrome' continues to figure prominently in discussions about enduring structural inequalities and the feasibil- ity/desirability of legislated attempts to redress them. The economic and political importance of Buganda, (the historical territory of the Baganda), however, has en- sured the currency of Luganda as a lingua franca, primarily in southern (predominantly Bantu-speaking) Uganda. Kiswahili, the lingua franca of northern and eastern (predominantly Nilotic- and Sudanic-speaking) Uganda, the military and police forces, and the urban proletariat (including Kampala), has virtually no reading public and is allotted only two fifteen minute news slots a day only on the state-run Radio Uganda and Uganda TV stations. Rutooro, Luo, Teso, and more recently Lusoga have vernacular newspapers, and together with other Ugandan languages are well represented in Radio Uganda broadcasting, but not in privately owned radio broadcasting or any TV broadcasting. The simplified, lingua franca form of Kiswahili commonly spoken in Uganda has emerged from a sociohistori- cal context in which it has served the basic needs of interethnic communication, especially in the military and police barracks, trading centers, urban industrial ar- eas, ethnically heterogeneous neighborhoods, transportation, and cross-border trade. The location of Kampala, the colonial administrative and postcolonial na- tional capital, in central Buganda has created opportunities there coveted by non- Baganda, and also provided the context in which a Westernized/urbanized/Kigan- 4 190 STUDIES IN THE LINGUISTIC SCIENCES 28: 1 (SPRING 1998) daized 'town' culture has emerged, envisioned by some as a potential basis for a national culture. Mazrui and Zirimu (1978:439) argue: Because the Baganda under the colonial administration had been a privileged group, and were allowed to retain considerable influence and prestige, their language in turn commanded derivative prestige, and many of the workers who came into the capital of Uganda felt they had to learn Luganda. Indeed, Kiganda culture favored the linguistic and cultural assimilation of newcomers. In one or two generations many workers who were descended from non-Baganda became, to all intents and purposes, native Luganda speakers and were absorbed into the body politic of Buganda. In this way, issues of ethnolinguistic identity, urbanity, and social class intersect in the formation of linguistic elite closure, which in Uganda has in part regulated the boundaries of an elite, urban, Anglophone (and therefore partially Kiganda) iden- tity based in Kampala. As manifested in occasional calls for the promotion of Luganda as an indigenous National language, this expanded 'Kiganda identity', as if by default, has sometimes stood in for a truly 'national' identity. As successive northern-dominated regimes (Obote I, 1963-71; Amin, 1971- 79; Obote II, 1979-85) waged political terrorism in and around Kampala from the 1960's through the mid-80's, the ascribed civic and moral respectability of elite, urban, Anglophone culture was constructed in opposition to the 'degeneracy' of northern-dominated, Kiswahili-speaking, 'illiterate', and criminally-inclined mili- tary culture. This discourse operated upon common-sense knowledge about the efficacy of formal Westernized schooling, and its scribal practices, in instilling civic spirit and moral character. Ugandan soldiers, typically unsocialized to schooled linguistic practices, were represented as the very antithesis of an edu- cated citizenry. The language of the barracks suffered further disrepute. To this day, representations of Kiswahili-speakers in popular media generally cast them as criminals, illiterates, womanizers, prostitutes, drunks, or gun-happy (northern, non-Bantu) soldiers. This set of interdiscursive connections works up Oluswayiri (the Luganda word for Kiswahili) as an antisocial behavior. A distaste for the per- ceived language of both common and political criminals functions as a form of discursive resistance to the brutality and corruption of the postcolonial northern- dominated regimes. In linking the Kiswahili language with the street- and state- level criminality of non-Baganda immigrants and dictators, and positioning it in opposition to the literate, Westernized, civically responsible, urban, elite Anglo- phone (and Kigandaized) culture of Kampala, these discursive practices construct m Kiswahili-speakers as somehow 'foreign'. In Luganda, the word bagwira 'for- - eigners' can apply to both non-Ugandans and non-Baganda. The growth in the number of non-Baganda in Kampala is often noted in the context of increased lin- guistic 'anarchy', illiteracy, crime, overcrowding, poor sanitation, prostitution, and the breakdown of rural-based forms of traditional authority. EDWARD A. MINER: Discursive constructions of KiSwahili speakers 191 2. Discursive constructions of Kiswahili-speakers This paper will present a critical discourse analysis of three texts drawn from popular media (one an excerpt from a popular Luganda language TV sitcom, the second a newspaper article, the last a newspaper installment of a novel) that depict the two major ascribed characteristics of second-language speakers of Ugandan Kiswahili: their 'illiteracy 1 (constructed as a linguistic deficiency) and their criminality (constructed as a personal or cultural deficiency). 'Illiteracy' is used here in its most ideologically laden sense, i.e., as unschooled linguistic prac- tice, including oral performances of nonnative and nonstandard linguistic varieties. The three texts achieve their characterizations precisely through invoking well- worn sociolinguistic stereotypes, of the 'illiterate' domestic servant, drug-dealer, and military dictator, respectively. In each case, the constructed linguistic defi- ciency frames the participation of the stereotyped character in an antisocial or criminal activity. In the first text, transcribed from the TV sitcom That's Life — Mwattu, Olanya, a drunken, womanizing, northern-born domestic servant, abuses his wife (and humiliates himself) in a highly simplified Luganda, repetitively punctuated by a small repertoire of Kiswahili connectors, adverbs, and interjec- tions. The second sample, from the Health section of the state-run newspaper The New Vision, juxtaposes the inability to sustain a conversation in English (and re- course to Kiswahili) with the culture of drug abuse. And the third, from a book by Maria Karooro Okurut entitled The Invisible Weevil (which was prereleased in in- stallments in the privately-owned newspaper The Monitor), invokes the darkest humor in the linguistic cariacature of Idi Amin Dada himself. 2.1 The tongue of "Bagwira' and lousy husbands Although television stations have been operating in Uganda since the late 1950's, there has always been a dearth of locally produced programming, and es- pecially so in Ugandan languages. Radio has been the medium most accessible to rural areas, both technologically and linguistically; TV has been primarily an Eng- lish-language, government-run affair, and has always catered to the population in and around Kampala. Since the 1990's, however, with the advent of several pri- vately owned TV stations, there has been a certain noticable growth in program- ming variety, although still relatively little of it in local languages. One notable exception is the popular Luganda language TV sitcom That's Life — Mwattu . This program achieves at least some of its humor through invok- ing well-entrenched social stereotypes, such as those of the womanizing civil ser- vant, the greedy South Asian businessman, the 'quack' muganga ('traditional healer'), the scheming teenage gold-digger, and the northern (mugwira), Kiswa- hili-speaking domestic servant. This analysis will focus on the discursive con- struction of the last in the character of Olanya, an ethnic Acholi who lives in the 'boys' quarters' of a mansion belonging to a Pakistani-born businessman. When working in the Pakistani's mansion, Olanya is the image of stoic deference, never invited to sit, and never comfortable sitting on his employer's furniture. Commu- nication between the Pakistani employer and Olanya is always in English, gener- ally in the form of an aimless rant from the former and short expressions of com- 192 STUDIES IN THE LINGUISTIC SCIENCES 28: 1 (SPRING 1998) pliance from the latter. Olanya's wife Fiona, an ethnic Muganda, lives with him in the 'boy's quarters' and seldom interacts with her husband's Pakistani employer. The linguistic economy of the household is partly structured by gender: Olanya speaks enough English to communicate with his employer at a basic level, but Fiona speaks no English at all. This language barrier itself is used in certain epi- sodes to construct comic situations; it also defines a structural inequality between husband and wife in the realm of wage labor. In the 'boy's quarters', however, an altogether different linguistic economy V obtains. And as this second space is connected socially to the surrounding Luganda-speaking community, Olanya does not have exclusive control of the lin- guistic resources most valued there; rather, he has only a secondary (nonnative) socialization to their use. His tenuous grasp of the Luganda language continually places him at a disadvantage in dealing with Fiona's machinations, and those of her Baganda relatives and friends. Olanya's linguistic deficiency is juxtaposed to his general social ineptitude and gullibility. Olanya the compliant, subdued man- servant of the mansion is transposed into Olanya the surly, ill-mannered and mi- sogynist cuckold. Linguistically, Olanya the English-speaker becomes Olanya the Mugwira, the speaker of 'broken' Luganda laced with enough Kiswahili to make the intimation of linguistic deficiency and moral degeneracy complete. It is worth noting here that the character who plays Olanya is himself a highly educated, native Luganda speaker, and actually does not speak any form of Kiswahili very fluently. For purposes of playing his role, however, he has carica- turized the lingua franca form of Luganda commonly learned by non-Baganda working in Kampala, and has exaggerated selected marked features to nearly com- plete consistency. Most noticable of these is the severe reduction in grammatical agreement; it is also worth noting that reduced grammatical agreement is the most noticable difference between second-language and native forms of Kiswahili. In a sense, then, the character of Olanya is Oluswayiri-izing his Luganda. As do most Bantu languages, Luganda displays more than twenty grammatical classes;' in Olanya's speech, they are reduced to one or two (namely, classes 7 and 9), making cultural and linguistic purists cringe and less heritage-conscious Luganda speakers just snort. In the episode partially transcribed below, entitled 'Kwenda kwa dongo' (Kiswahili for 'sleep on the floor!'), Olanya has been 'sent' a 'second' wife (Lena) by his village elders back in Acholi (northern Uganda), because he has failed to produce children with Fiona. Because she is an urban-bred Muganda, the elders doubt Fiona's 'character' (adherence to rural norms for gendered behavior), and so m have found for Olanya a good 'village' wife. This development actually comes in ^ the context of Fiona's recent affair with a Muganda muganga 'traditional healer' named Kakinda, whose name Olanya usually mispronounces as Kakinda. Infuri- ated at having been made a cuckold, Olanya is taking his revenge by flaunting his affair with Lena in Fiona's face, and using it as a pretext for ejecting Fiona from her former rights in the household, including that of sleeping in her bed. Infuriated at now being treated like a domestic servant in her own house, Fiona becomes ag- gressively vocal, and so brings out the worst in her drunken, womanizing husband. EDWARD A. MINER: Discursive constructions of KiSwahili speakers 193 As the scene opens, Fiona is combing her hair on the bed late at night as she hears Olanya and Lena are coming in. As they enter, Fiona gets under the covers and pretends that she is asleep. Luganda is given in normal font, Kiswahili is italicized, and English is bold-faced. Instances of agreement reduction in Luganda forms are in- dicated with italicized boldface: in most cases, the reduction is in grammatical class 9, although there are some in grammatical class 7. ( 1 ) [Olanya and Lena enter, laughing drunkenly.] 01 O: Wo jamaa ! Genda wali, kwenda sana. oh brother go there go very 'Hey! Go there, go quickly.' 02 L: Olanya! Olanya!' [laughs] 03 O: Maama yangu, habari kwa muntu muzima sana. mother mine news of person sound very 'Goodness, what a very tough person (woman).' 04 L: Olanya! 'Olanya!' 05 O: Kweli wa-na-twnia bwana—sasa truly they-pres-use mister now 'Lord do they drink— and now' 06 L: Olanya! Olanya!' 07 O: Sasa ggwe e-yingir-e. Eh, maama, pole wuko, pole now you 9-enter-subj hey mama gently there gently 'Now you enter. Hey, mama, careful there, careful.' 08 L: Am tired. 'Am tired.' 09 O: You're very tired indeed you're very tired, pole wuko. You're very tired indeed you're very tired, careful there.' Lakini nze e-ba-dde t-e-manyi nti ggwe e-manyi ku-zinna sana. but I 9-be-perf neg-9-know that you 9-know inf-dance very But I didn't know that you really know how to dance.' Lakini ggwe e-ki-ko-ze bwe-n-ti. Now I've got a real woman. but you 9-7-do-perf like-I-do now i've got a real woman 'But you do it like I do. Now I've got a real woman.' Pole wuko. gently there 'Careful there." * 194 STUDIES IN THE LINGUISTIC SCIENCES 28: 1 (SPRING 1998) 10 L: Olanya, it's been the best day, the best night, it's been inter- esting! 1 1 O: Eee, alaah! Maama yangu Fatuma, sasa ggwey-ebak-ee-ko, yes god mother mine Fatuma now you 9-sleep-subj-17 'Yes, by God! My mother Fatuma, now you sleep a bit,' e-labika e-ko-ye nnyo. 9-seem 9-weary-perf very 'you seem to be very tired.' 12 L: Am even tired. 13 O: You're tired— ggwe e-ki-koz-e sana, sasa ggwe e-yingir-e you're tired you 9-7-do-perf very now you 9-enter-subj 'You're tired— you really did it, now you get in.' [Lena gets up and goes to change in the next room; Olanya no- tices Fiona covered in the bed behind him] Alaah! Wajamaa! Maama yangu mimi, hi-ki ni ki-tu gani?! god oh brother mother mine me this-7 is 7-thing what 'God! Oh brother! My mother, what is this thing?!' What are you?! Wee nani?! Alaah ! Kisirani, we toka what are you you who god curse you leave 'What are you?! Who are you?! My God? (You) curse, get out' kisirani wewe! curse you 'you curse!' [Fiona pretends to wake up.] 14 F: N-tok-e ku ki? I-leave-subj on what 'What should I leave?' 15 O: Toka kisirani! leave curse 'Get out, (you) curse!' 16 F: Ki-ki kye-'m-ba n-toka-ko? 7-what 7rel-I-be I-leave-17 'And what is it I am getting out of?' A 1 7 O: Wajaama, ani ey-a-ku-gamb-ye-ko oku-beera kwa ki-ntu e-nol ^ oh brother who 9-past-you-tell-perf-17 inf-stay on 7-thing 9-this 'Oh brother, who told you to stay on this thing?' Sasa nze fci-ma-zze oku-goba-ko ggwe, e-v-ee-ko! now I 7-finish-perf inf-chase-17 you 9-leave-subj-17 'Now, I've already told you, get out of here!' > EDWARD A. MINER: Discursive constructions of KiSwahili speakers 195 18 F: O-n-gob-ye-ko?! Ani gw'-o-manyiira?! you-me-chase-perf-17 who lrel-you-familiarizing 'You chased me from here?! Who do you think you are?!' Nti o-n-gob-ye-ko! that you-me-chase-perf- 1 7 'You chased me from here!' [incredulously] 19 O: Toka! Hi-i ni ki-tu y-ako? E-no mwana_y-a bendi ki-ee-se leave this-9 is 7-thing 9-yours 9-this child 9-of elder 7-bring-perf Get out! Is this thing (the bed) yours? This is a child of good family I've brought' ki-ntu mu-pya era na ki-ntu ki-pya! Leka ggwe e-yingir-e. 7-thing 1-new also and 7-thing 7-new stop you 9-enter-subj "a new person and a new thing (the bedding)! You get out!' Ggwe e-yagala ky-a bwerere— toka ! Nze n-ku-gamb-ye you 9-want (something) 7-of free leave I I-you-tell-perf 'You want something for free-get out! I told you' e-v-ee-yo! 9-leave-subj-loc 'to get out of there!' 20 F: Nga ku-ki kwe-n-va? so loc-what loc/rel-I-leave "So where am I getting out of?' 21 O: Wajamaa, o-na-taka ku-leta muntu taabu. Nze fci-ma-ze oh brother you-pres-want inf-bring person trouble I 7-finish- perf 'Oh brother, you want to bring a person problems. I've already' ku-gamba-ko ggwe, ku-mala ggwe, fo'-maz-e ku-genda na inf-tell-17 you inf-finish you 7-finish-perf inf-go with 'told you for good, I'm finished with you, you've done' ki-ntu WH-kambwe na Kabinda, ggwe t-e-genda ku-dda-yo 7-thing 1 -cruel with Kabinda you neg-9-go inf-return-23 'a cruel thing with Kabinda, you aren't going to again ku-laba nze. inf-see me 'to see me (my body).' 22 F: Ani gw'-o-manyiira?! who lrel-you-familiarizing 'Who do you think you are?!' 23 O: Nze t-e-yagala! I neg-9-want i don't want (you)!' 196 STUDIES IN THE LINGUISTIC SCIENCES 28: 1 (SPRING 1998) 24 F: T-o-manyiira, si-manyi n'-o-lyoka o-woza nti, neg-you-familiarizing (neg)I-know and-you-forever you-say that 'Don't test me, I don't know why you're always saying that' si-manyi, nze okw-ebaka. (neg)I-know, I inf-sleep 'I don't know, I'm sleeping.' 25 O: Kwenda kwa dongo! go to floor 'Get on the floor!' i As mentioned earlier, at least two characteristics of Olanya's speech set him apart from the more than fifty regularly appearing characters who speak at least partially in Luganda. First, Olanya is the only one whose speech evinces the kind of severe reduction in grammatical agreement seen in (1) above, and secondly, he is the only one who code-switches with a language other than English. Where grammatical agreement is entirely reduced to class 9 (as in line 09, partially repro- duced for convenience as (2) below), the logical relations of verbal arguments be- come somewhat opaque. (2) is rendered in ordinary, grammatically correct, non- code-switched Luganda in (3). (2) Lakini nze e-ba-dde t-e-manyi nti ggwe e-manyi ku-zinna sana. but I 9-be-perf neg-9-know that you 9-know inf-dance very 'But I didn't know that you really know how to dance.' Lakini ggwe e-ki-ko-ze bwe-n-ti. but you 9-7-do-perf like-I-do. 'But you do it like I do.' (3) Naye nze m-ba-dde si-manyi nti ggwe o-manyi ku-zinna nnyo. but I I-be-perf neg(I)-know that you you-know inf-dance very 'But I didn't know that you really know how to dance.' Naye ggwe o-ki-ko-ze bwe-n-ti. But you you-7-do-perf like-I-do. 'But you do it like I do.' A particularly comic use of unlikely codeswitching comes in lines 13-16 (partially reproduced in (4) below), when Fiona 'mimics' Olanya by embedding his Kiswa- hili 'order' toka ('get out') in a morphologically robust Luganda verbal form. (4) O: Kisirani, we toka kisirani wewe! ^ curse you leave curse you ■ '(You) curse, get out you curse!' [Fiona pretends to wake up.] F: N-tok-e ku ki? I-leave-subj on what 'What should I leave?' O: Toka kisirani! leave curse EDWARD A. MINER: Discursive constructions of KiSwahili speakers 197 'Get out, (you) curse!' F: Ki-ki kye-'m-ba n-toka-kol 7-what 7rel-I-be I-leave-17 'And what is it I am getting out of?' Ordinarily, Fiona never code-switches her Luganda with Kiswahili in the way that Olanya does. In embedding the root toka ('get out') in her verbal forms, she uses mimicry to belittle Olanya's domestic authority. In her revoicing of Olanya's ver- bal abuse, his attempt to project authority is represented as childish incompetence. There are two main points to be made here about the role of 'code-switching' in the construction of the interaction. First, Lena, in contrast to Fiona, has received some basic schooling, and so speaks English at times (as in lines 08, 10, and 12), perhaps to project her 'worldliness'. Olanya attempts to follow her (line 09), but quickly reverts to his Oluswayirized Luganda. This indexes his inability to handle English casually, when he is master of his own circumstances. Rather, his English is really only adequate for the social role of an underling, as his immediate re- course to Kiswahili, the language of colonial-style servitude, further suggests. Secondly, Olanya's use of Kiswahili lexical items is relatively sparse until he starts chastizing Fiona (see lines 13, 21, and 25). The harshest remark he makes is purely in Kiswahili: ' Kwenda kwa dongo'. The tendency of 'rough' Kiswahili to coincide with coercive contexts draws in historical memory of the circumstances of colonial class structure, when European and Asian settlers used to simply order Africans about without much concern for linguistic grace. 2.2 The tongue of the common criminal The newspaper article Mairungi causes jealousy (see Illustration 1) ad- dresses the recreational abuse, health consequences, and ambiguous legal status of the psychotropic plant known in the Luganda language as mairungi, and elsewhere in East Africa as khat. The article exhibits at least three major turns of voice: opening in an interaction between the journalist and mairungi traders in the bust- ling industrial area of Kisenyi in Kampala, it then moves to the discourse of medi- cal diagnosis in the commentary of the Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of London and of the Head of the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics. Makerere University Medical School, and finally to the discourse of legal regula- tion in the commentary of the Secretary/Registrar of the National Drug Authority. Although this article is published in the Health section of the newspaper, it exhib- its certain features more characteristic of a Leisure piece: beginning with the somewhat comical portrayal of the mairungi traders themselves (particularly their rough appearance and language), it moves to a general portrayal of the effects of chewing the plant (drawing upon popular images of drunken idlers), and finally refers to the infamous entropy with which the Uganda Police (fail to) approach law enforcement. For purposes of this analysis, the first two paragraphs are of the most immediate relevance, because it is here that the writer engages dominant common-sense knowledge about the relation between schooled vs. unschooled linguistic practice and social behavior. The journalist begins by portraying the in- toxicated, unkempt, somewhat menacing Rasta-like countenance of one trader. 198 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998) which is consonant with his inability to sustain a conversation in English: 'Obviously finding problems with English, he changes to Swahili ...' The trader's Kiswahili that follows is typical of that spoken in Kampala, but is comical in this context precisely because it is an inscribing of a generally unwritten variety. Fur- ther, its subject matter draws upon popular assumptions about what 'illiterate' people do with their time: get high, any way they can. (5) 01 02 O-na ku-wa wewe mwenyewe. Kama o-na ku-la yi, 2ps-pres inf-be you yourself if you-pres inf-eat this 'You become yourself. If you eat this, you talk with' o-na wongeya ya roho yako yote. 2ps-pres with talk soul your all 'all your soul'. Stymied in self-expression by both his 'high' and his lack of formal education, the trader calls over his colleagues for help in conversing with the journalist. The other traders proceed to take great delight in projecting the erratic behavior of the journalist after chewing the mairungi leaves. 18 The K«« Vbioo, M..»a. ? , V*ln*n >?, I 1 *? HEALTH Mairimm causes jealousy ») ija.lt. I. UV*tk> '""' >?, • 1 •■ ul"« 1 k« I -_' £ B) CJarlc. I. UV*tk> il.t bin am -TCl'Ulnl.. «ra lrrl b»,' «'•»"- ' « " UKfi Mvrowpt ilmtm C*tf W* : > ibijgtu Mil ir.ln on k,.„ " ■•••Utv; lUnni, hn Mrt'W^I r>rt jt&r ico u.km.* tkCMtd WA braMfed hji'i IteriTJ III! J..1.4 . f ... uLjiik i In* (liuj EITECTS OF MAIRUNGI COttt.BSOUl^ clwwt I he •i.m. rr«av (IrCAtHlttg l rr !* i : t y ly l» feafaww UMMwdMgm _ , , *twl (ctWnhl* "I** perception bhJ'JLt a|ci) 1 >»f» I Mill W03MM- )*W* irai » ti If jna tie* tfco, jow i|.«A out fWta inlar l »r Wrfiu-ji ,vt/Ml, mnl mrnnrnp t»" w doe* Artri c&ruv^ « ronuKMi foiMtl i> South Exit Asm, i i»'/aW , « ft] r ^ h%<. ukI Mr Afc*- M ^..>; ., I f(..iu wn l . JuK 21 - 14. ««> Amin's reign of terror unfolds ^ I LM^Mb U kl riU| «r Inwli » NMynkMS »•!*' mM ■>•..-,, 1 1. . « J . '•'ti"*»'»" Amn •»* p«i«S •*< t-. $h titnw.it it.* t>t * * »'■ *v»f»- Oft •**£)«* aMokPMn wtfesftMsyiMi SmIM ■ k»feMMV< LitHAp»iiw Ymmm^aaIi ■ : h riim « Ttifff Ml I r >v^ | mm! t ird Mat **) MHtattk gwiWiM f mttn N«ima hum ■. •_ • i OT&7'. MM . ■ IMSTOTXAT TEMStl'VlCLb R.OT87KLAP0A0 KAMPA.J. Illustration 2. Kiswahili-speakers as political criminals. 202 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1998) Tomorrow I write to Mr. Queen of Englanda. I to tell her now Uganda also good Obote to go. Obote he thief, tribes (tribalism), drunco etc. Sunk you asante sana ("thanks very much'). I tell to you again kesho ('tomorrow '), for tomorrow. I sunk you very big. The listeners' commentary following Amin's speech, on the other hand, ar- ticulates essentially two voices: the first speaks to common-sense knowledge about the relation between colonial education and the 'training' of the African mind; the second resists that interpretation, pointing to the failure of the colonial education system to actually produce politically competent leaders. As noted above, formal schooling in English literacy had been widely assumed to engage and prepare the rational faculties of the African mind in a way that socialization to orality in indigenous languages did not. In early colonial times, the British admini- stration and missionary establishment had exhibited a preference for Baganda re- cruits into the civil service, based upon essentialist assumptions about their 'educability'. Similarly essentialist notions about the 'warlike' nature of Nilotic- and Sudanic-speaking cultures (including Obote' s Langi group and Amin's Kakwa group, respectively) dictated a preference for military recruits from northern Uganda. At the eve of independence in 1963, non-Baganda politicians suffered from a certain deficit of politico-cultural capital, whatever their actual educational qualifications, and so sought to compensate in symbolic ways for the perceived 'roughness' of their background. Amin's predecessor, Milton Apollo Obote (born Apollo Obote, but in his political career known as Milton Obote), so as to under- score his personal erudition, had added his first name after becoming enamored of the works of the English writer John Milton. The second commentator in the pas- sage below gives voice to the disenchantment with such educated political strongmen, in whom formal Western schooling had apparently done nothing to in- still a vision of indigenous democracy or sense of civic responsibility toward their fellow Ugandans. There was thunderous applause. Genesis and Mzee had kept on pinch- ing each other as Amin spoke on almost unintelligibly. One man re- marked: 'Eh, this fellow who does not know English, how will he rule us? ' 'But is it English which rules us? Look, Obote knew English and yet he has ruled badly,' said another. 'Eh, but at least the President should be educated!' persisted the first. 'Look where the educated landed us, in trouble. Maybe the uneducated one will rule better', answered the other. That evening, BBC com- mented that on his swearing in ceremony, Amin spoke in a language 'similar to English'. 'That does not worry me. Even if he spoke in vernacular, it would not matter, what we want is somebody who will rule us without us keeping in constant fear of being killed. And Amin looks so kind we shall live EDWARD A. MINER: Discursive constructions of KiSwahili speakers 203 peacefully', said one. 'I am not sure about that. There are so many dead bodies and they say things which start in blood draw more blood". The words of Amin's detractor are prescient: within months, the state-run newspaper would abound with reports of 'rebel kidnappings' of politicians and ci- vilians alike, and Amin would stage mock trials and very real executions of al- leged perpetrators. Ugandan Kiswahili would now be indelibly associated in the national political imagination with the banging of rifle butts on the door in the dead of night, and the disappearance of family members who would never be seen again. 3. Conclusion The three texts, in progressively stronger degrees, show the cooccurence of Kiswahili linguistic material in popular media together with representations of an- tisocial or criminal behavior. In this, they draw on discourses that have constructed oppositional sociopolitical identities out of sociolinguistic stereotypes, which ulti- mately place the source of Uganda's political turmoil of the last 30 years on the relative lack of formal Westernized education among the predominantly non- Baganda urban proletiariat and military. This represents a local adaptation of an received colonial ideology that equates schooled linguistic practice to intelligence and urban, elite social practice to the spirit of civic responsibility. As has been noted, this linguistic economy stands in partial contrast to those of Kenya and Tanzania, where Kiswahili is more deeply-entrenched, both as a first and a second language. In 1995, a motion was introduced into the Constitutional Assembly to install Kiswahili as the national language of Uganda, and although it received a simple majority of delegate votes, it did not attain the 2/3 majority needed to pass. The vote broke down largely along regional lines: the north and east voted over- whelmingly for Kiswahili, the west supported it rather less overwhelmingly, and delegates from Buganda (central region) voted against it as a block. The discus- sions around the issue revived all of the old discourses that construct what has been referred to above as the 'Buganda Syndrome' — that Baganda have benefited inordinately from a political economy in which formal Western schooling and English literacy license rights of speaking, and that the installation of a 'neutral' indigenous lingua franca is necessary to 'level the playing field'. The delegates from Buganda, for their part, denigrated Kiswahili as spoken in Uganda as lin- guistically deficient and morally repugnant, and so unsuitable for any serious po- litical or civic purpose. Failing in its constitutional initiative, the ruling NRM un- dertook to promote it as a mandatory subject in primary and secondary schools. An important aspect of the rehabilitation of Ugandan Kiswahili is the re- building of public trust in the security forces, which continue to suffer from a reputation for corruption and indisciplined use of force. Interestingly, promotion in both the Uganda People's Defense Force and the Uganda Police is now tied to demonstrated ability to read and write standard Kiswahili as well as English. Since the East African Community was resuscitated as the East Africa Cooperation in 1996, the NRM has staked its political future within the ideological framework of 204 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1998) regional integration, a kind of step-child of the Pan- Africanism of the 1960's and 70' s. In hitching its wagon to the sociopolitical and socioeconomic futures of Kenya and Tanzania, the NRM is participating in an attempt to redefine Swahili identity in transethnic and transnational terms. In doing so successfully, however, it will ultimately have to accommodate the cherished identity claims of politically powerful groups like the Baganda of Uganda. NOTES * An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 6th Annual Symposium on Language and Society — Austin (SALSA VI), on April 12, 1998,. ' Luganda, like other Bantu languages, has up to twenty three grammatical gen- ders. The chains of agreement that the respective grammatical genders condition are illustrated in the examples below. CLASS EXAMPLE 1 Omw-ana w-ange o-no omu-rungi a-buze. 1 -child 1-mine 1-this 1-good 1-lost 'This good child of mine is lost'. 2 Aba-ana ba-ange ba-no aba-rungi ba-buze. These good children of mine are lost'. 3 Omu-kwano gw-ange gu-no omu-rungi gu-buze. 'This good friend of mine is lost'. 4 Emi-kwano gy-ange gi-no emi-rungi gi-buze. 'These good friends of mine are lost'. 5 Ef-fumo ly-ange li-no eli-rungi li-buze. 'This good spear of mine is lost'. 6 Ama-fumo ga-ange ga-no ama-rungi ga-buze. 'These good spears of mine are lost'. 7 Eki-taabo ky-ange ki-no ki-rungi ki-buze. 'This good book of mine is lost'. 8 Ebi-taabo by-ange bi-no bi-rungi bi-buze. 'These good books of mine are lost'. 9 En-koko y-ange e-no en-nungi e-buze. 'This good chicken of mine is lost'. 1 En-koko z-ange zi-no en-nungi zi-buze. 'These good chickens of mine are lost'. 1 1 Olu-limi Iw-ange lu-no olu-rungi lu-buze. 'This good language of mine is lost'. 1 2 Aka-saale k-ange ka-no aka-rungi ka-buze. 'This good arrow of mine is lost'. J I > > EDWARD A. MINER: Discursive constructions of KiSwahili speakers 205 13 Otu-lo tw-ange tu-no otu-rungi tu-buze. 'This good sleep of mine is lost'. 14 Obu-saale bw-ange bu-no obu-rungi bu-buze. 'These good arrows of mine are lost'. 1 5 Oku-fumba kw-ange ku-no oku-rungi ku-buze. 'This good cooking of mine is lost'. 16 Wa-kati wa-no wa-li-wo emicungwa. 16-middle 16-this 16-be- 16 oranges 'Right here in the middle are oranges'. 1 7 Ku-kitaabo ku-no ku-li-ko ebigambo. 17-book 17-this 17-be-17 words 'Right (there) on the book are some words'. 1 8 Mu-kitaabo mu-no mu-li-mu ebigambo. 18-book 18-this 18-be- 18 words 'Right (there) in the book are some words'. 20 Ogu-sajja gw-ange gu-no ogu-nmgi gu-buze. 'This good giant of mine is lost'. 22 Aga-sajja ga-ange ga-no aga-rungi ga-buze. 'These good giants of mine are lost'. 23 E-Kampala e-no e-ri-yo abantu abangi. 23-Kampala 23-this 23-be-23 people many 'Right there in Kampala are many people'. REFERENCES FAIRCLOUGH, Norman. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press. KATENDE, Paul. 1997. Kwenda kwa dongo. That's Life — Mwattu. Kampala: VCL Productions. MAZRUI, Alamin M., and Ibrahim Noor SHARIFF. 1994. The Swahili: Idiom and Identity of an African People. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. MAZRUI, Ali A. 1975. The Political Sociology of the English Language: An Afri- can Perspective. The Hague: Mouton. , Ali A., and Alamin M. MAZRUI. 1998. The Power of Babel: Language & Governance in the African Experience. Oxford: James Currey. MAZRUI, Ali A., and Pio ZIRIMU. 1978. Church, state, and marketplace in the spread of Kiswahili: Comparative educational perspectives. Case Studies in Bilingualism, ed. by Bernard Spolsky and Robert L. Cooper, 427-53. Row- ley, MA: Newberry. MYERS-SCOTTON, Carol. 1990. Elite closure as boundary maintenance: The case of Africa. Language Policy and Political Development, ed. by Brian Wein- stein, 25-42. 206 STUDIES IN THE LINGUISTIC SCIENCES 28: 1 (SPRING 1998) OKURUT, Maria K. 1996. Amin's reign of terror unfolds. The Monitor, Monday, July 22-24, 1996:9. SPITULNIK, Debra. 1992. Radio time sharing and the negotiation of linguistic plu- ralism in Zambia. Pragmatics 2:3.335-54. WENDO, Charles L. 1997. Mairungi causes jealousy. The New Vision, Monday, February 17, 1997:18. Studies in the Linguistic Sciences Volume 28, Number 1 (Spring 1998) AFRICAN LANGUAGES, ENGLISH, AND EDUCATIONAL POLICY IN NAMIBIA Joyce B. G. Sukumane University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign sukum@uiuc.edu This paper takes issue with the assumptions underlying the Eng- lish-only language policy stipulated in Article 3 (1) of The Constitu- tion of the Republic of Namibia (1990), which provides for the edu- cation of Namibians, who belong to multilingual ethnolinguistic and socio-economic groups. Since this provision results from an interac- tion between the central government's espoused values and its per- ceptions of political and economic needs, the policy decision was ar- guably based on a reactive rather than a proactive approach to those needs. The emergence of English as the sole official language in Na- mibia was, therefore, not planned. Socio-political events shaped the needs of the country, and the language most capable of fulfilling those needs was therefore chosen. At no time was there a plan or planners to formulate language policy or implement change. This pa- per argues that (1) the policy is formulated vaguely, (2) it is a contra- diction in terms with respect to cultural pluralism, on the one hand, and assimilation, on the other; and (3) there is an apparent neglect of the learners' first languages. The conclusion is reached that the choice of English as the main language of schooling in Namibia is not a result of planning within a more general plan of national develop- ment. A realistic approach might be to establish a body of planners, among them linguists and interested parties, that would study lan- guage needs in the country and seek to meet those needs, recogniz- ing the status and development of ethnic languages for use in differ- ent domains, especially the formal system of education. Provision for language in education should be specified systematically through an overt language plan. 0. Introduction From the beginning of German colonization in 1884 until the present time, there has never been an attempt by either the German or South African government to construct a national educational system based on equal opportunity for all Na- mibians regardless of racial or ethnic group. Moreover, South Africa not only maintained the separation that was present during the earlier occupation but in- tensified it, adding to it a tribal division. In the case of education, this division is seen clearly in the differing structures of separate commissions of inquiry, separate laws, the different types of schools and methods of financing, the differing de- i 208 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1998) grees of compulsory education, differing standards and terms of service and pay for teachers that existed before independence; and differing provisions for the training of those teachers. Discrimination in education was not only the means by which knowledge was controlled by the apartheid regime, but also one of the ways by which a cheap labor workforce was maintained. After independence in 1990, the present government of the South West Af- rican People's Organization (SWAPO), declared in its constitution for the country that the 'official language for Namibia shall be English' (Article 3: Constitution, The Republic of Namibia). Two criteria, unity and national development, seem to have influenced the choice of the English-only policy. The criterion of unity has not only influenced the formulation and propagation of the policy, but also the lack of any provision in the policy for vernacular languages for educational pur- poses, while the criterion of national development restricts the role of indigenous languages in education and emphasizes the importance of European languages. Three assumptions seem to have been made by SWAPO regarding the role of indigenous languages in education from the viewpoint of national unity. First, it is assumed that in a multilingual context the choice of one of the indigenous languages as the national language is politically a highly divisive undertaking, since it will be interpreted by other language groups as a rejection of their lan- guages. The second assumption concerns the colonial languages of wider com- munication. It is assumed that these languages, being foreign, are neutral, whereas the indigenous languages are associated with ethnicity, different social identities, and local loyalties. It is feared that the use of indigenous languages in education will encourage another form of apartheid and thus contribute to political instabil- ity. It is therefore suggested that the use of English in Namibia should be encour- aged to promote national unity. However, some scholars (e.g., Bokamba and Tlou 1977) point out that in the case of Africa, the continued reliance on English as a unifying upper-class language may not provide a permanent solution, since it is socially restrictive and does not meet the need for national consolidation and popular participation. They also point out that the Europeanization of the media of instruction in African countries for the sake of national unity merely evades the central issue of national unity and the development of a comprehensive language education policy to fulfill complementary communicative roles of African lan- guages The assumption on which the criterion of unity seems to have been based not only favors the colonial languages of wider communication in one way or the A other, but also ignores the multilingual reality of linguistically heterogeneous de- ^ veloping nations by imposing a one-language policy for national unity. The sec- ond criterion, national development, is based on favoring the languages of wider communication, such as English and French. These are considered languages of science and technology, of commerce and industry, of upward mobility and social prestige, and of diplomacy and international communication. The advantages, namely, accelerated economic growth and technological achievements, among others, it is argued, can be realized by the promotion of education through the European languages as the media of instruction. The emphasis on these Ian- Joyce B. G. Sukumane: African languages and English in Namibia 209 guages implies that the use of indigenous languages as media of instruction would lower the standard of education, impede growth of science and technol- ogy, and retard the rate of national development. This is based on the further as- sumption that indigenous languages are not adequately developed. The implica- tions of these assumptions will be examined below. 1. Language policy before and after independence The legacy of the colonial language policy is so all-pervading that in most sub- Saharan African countries it affected, and in some cases paralyzed, subsequent policy decisions. Any examination of language policy therefore has to begin with the policy of the colonial administration. Namibia became independent in 1990. With a population of approximately 1.6 million inhabitants (Fourie 1997), it has over 18 indigenous languages and three foreign languages, namely German, Afri- kaans, and English. Putz 1995 reports that there are seven main identifiable local language groups, namely Oshiwambo, Nama/Damara, Otjiherero, Kavango. the Caprivian languages (e.g., Lozi), Khoisan and Setswana, which comprise 87.8% of Namibia's speakers, and three groups speaking 'imposed languages' namely German, Afrikaans, and English comprising 11.2%. Of the total population, only 0.8% speak English as a mother tongue, whereas more than 50% of the popula- tion speak Owambo (Putz 1995). There are three phases of language policy development evident from the pe- riod of colonial rule to independence. First, the arrival of the missionary groups and the role they played in the codification of the mother tongues. This phase in- cluded steps taken by the German colonial rulers (1884-1915) to support mission- ary efforts to use Namibian ethnic languages for basic education in a situation characterized by lack of teaching materials and qualified teachers. The second phase covers the period of the Union of South Africa's mandate from the League of Nations that lasted from 1915 to independence in 1990. During this period, apartheid policies of racial and ethnic discrimination led to the Bantu Education Act of 1953, which emphasized the development of indigenous languages as school subjects and media of instruction up to the primary school level. English and Afrikaans became official languages with greater emphasis on Afrikaans, while English, Afrikaans, and German were declared national languages. The in- digenous languages were relegated to the status of tribal/ethnic languages with no socio-economic power of mobility. Upon independence, English was declared the official language and the main language of educational instruction from the fourth year of primary school up through the university level. Indigenous lan- guages are to be used as media of instruction up to the third year of education and as subjects of study throughout the education system. These are the policies that are responsible for either encouraging or hindering the development of Na- mibian ethnic languages, education, culture, and modernization. Although the sentiment behind the choice of English to play the role of official and main lan- guage in education is understandable, it cannot, however, be condoned. The rea- sons for this have been discussed at length in (Bagmbose 1991; Bokamba & Tlou 210 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998) 1977; Bokamba 1981, 1984, 1995; Phillipson 1991; Phillipson & Skutnabb- Kangas 1995). 1.1 Vagueness of policy The situation discussed in the foregoing section shows how complicated and unique the problem of language in education in Namibia is in comparison to other African countries. It is a heavily politicized issue as a result of factors such as apartheid, social inequality, and the war that was waged against the continued colonial occupation of the territory at the time the Constitution was drafted. So- cio-political problems must have contributed to the failure of the present govern- ment to plan for language use in education. The emergence of English as the sole official language in the background of Namibia's linguistic heterogeneity and his- torical past was clearly not planned. Socio-political events shaped the needs of the country and the language best able to fulfill that need was therefore chosen. Consequently, an examination of the policy guideline as stated in the Con- stitution shows that while the commitment to multilingualism is welcomed by the Namibian government, which is the body defining the language problems of this country, the policy does not make clear how it hopes to cultivate multilingualism in a balanced way. There is no demonstration of what specific language problems of the linguistic repertoires were perceived, hence the apparent failure to define and to characterize those problems. Therefore, no clear strategies and solutions are suggested to solve the problems. In essence this means that in Namibia, lan- guage-education policy and planning are not based on sound decisions, and it then follows that there cannot be suitable implementation strategies to effect the present decisions, and multilingualism is threatened with extinction and indige- nous languages will survive only marginally or disappear altogether. Therefore, the situation created by the Namibian language-education policy contradicts the very philosophy of language planning. In order to exist and survive, multilin- gualism, a natural feature of linguistically heterogeneous societies, depends on the recognition of language diversity and its function in multilingual societies such as Namibia. However, we should point out here that the Namibian government is in step with many sub-Saharan African countries in following a colonial model of lan- guage in education in which the continued reliance on a European language, in this case English, is perceived as a unifying factor in nation-building, since that language is perceived as neutral. Other arguments for retaining colonial lan- guages involve modernization, efficiency, and expediency, where it is argued that European languages are the most developed and cost-efficient, and therefore the best qualified as media of instruction. Bokamba & Tlou 1977 observe that the continued use of English in Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, and the use of French in Congo (former Zaire), to name just a few countries, has been justified for the same reasons. Nevertheless, although there is some validity to some of the claims, there are those (Bagmbose 1991; Bokamba & Tlou 1977; Bokamba 1981, 1984, 1995) who think it is unwarranted to conclude that English, or any other European lan- guage, must therefore serve as the medium of instruction,. According to Bokamba Joyce B. G. Sukumane: African languages and English in Namibia 211 & Tlou 1977 such policies not only constitute a major obstacle to the develop- ment of education in Africa, they actually militate against the establishment of mass education and permanent literacy (Bokamba 1981). Within Namibia, discussion about language planning is only a recently ac- knowledged phenomenon. Putz 1995 reports that almost ten years before the ad- vent of Namibian independence on March 21, 1990, the decision to implement English as the sole official language in the country had already been decreed in the document of the South Western Africa People's Organization (SWAPO) To- ward a language policy for Namibia. English as the official language: Per- spectives and strategies (UNIN 1981). Even though linguistic and functional ar- guments were outlined in the document as the main criteria for choosing English as the official language in Namibia, Putz states that it also has become obvious that the principal reasons for doing ideological and political. Here again, Namibia seems to be in step with the ideologies of other African countries. The political ideologies are often couched in the three arguments referred to earlier, efficiency and expediency, national integration, and modernization or national development (cf. Bokamba & Tlou 1977). Typically, governments avoid definitive statements in policy formulation. Bamgbose (1991:1 13) notes: If the policy is couched in sufficiently general terms, it may go down well, since it will be a 'catch-all' formula that may be interpreted in a flexible manner. Apart from the policy being vague, implementation is not likely to be a burden to anyone since it may not happen. An example of a vague policy is Namibia's decision to adopt English as its sole official language and the main language of instruction in primary education with- out a prior inquiry as to its feasibility, given the country's historical background. 1. 2 Language status According to Haacke, the views and sentiments of the government regard- ing the role of ethnic languages as attested in the policies are not echoed by the broad population. He states (1994:245): This can be ascribed to the fact that the language policy in its essence was developed by party leaders who in exile were exposed to trends in post-colonial Africa and international debates on education. Un- derstandably, Namibians generally assess their mother tongue in eco- nomic terms. Hence these are held in low esteem as they are not con- ducive to upward social mobility From the foregoing discussion it can be seen that, among other things, the choice of English as sole official language, follows a colonial trend. Within Na- mibia there has never been planning, but merely reaction to events. Even today, there are no obvious language planners in the country and really no plans, only education policies. Thus Namibia has what Kaplan 1990 describes as a language- in-cducation policy, as opposed to a language plan. The decision to make English the main language has been made, and it is now up to the government, through the Ministry of Education, to implement it. 212 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1998) Concerning mother-tongue (MT) education for the school beginner, Fourie 1997 observes that its cognitive value cannot be obvious for most parents. It therefore ought to be a crucial aspect of the implementation phase that the gov- ernment launch a campaign to make parents aware of the issue. Other issues of cultural transmission, African identity, and self perception ought to be raised as being necessary for in a proper language plan. On the whole, language policy within Namibia must conform to the spirit of the language provision in the Consti- a tution, which calls for multilingualism. I From what Haacke 1994 reports to be the attitudes of the people towards their own languages, there are problems of implementation in the horizon. The need to articulate the place of ethnic languages is now apparent: as a response to what might be considered encroachment by the English language into domains that were historically exclusively MT domains, and to attempts by industry to de- termine employee profiles and requirements. Language planning in Namibia mir- rors the observation that Das Gupta & Ferguson (1977:4) have made about plan- ning in other countries: 'Language planning is a latecomer to the family of national devel- opment planning. Although deliberate attempts to change or preserve languages and their use may be as old as economic policy making ef- forts in human societies, ... it is only recently that these activities in the language area have been recognized as an aspect national plan- ning which can be investigated with the same conceptual tools that are appropriate for general development planning.' 1.3 Contradiction in policy: Assimilationist or pluralist? Before approaching the question of policy options, it is necessary to diverge for a moment in order to consider the contradiction in terms contained in the vague language policy. The contradiction between the identity function of language, its ability to express and evoke solidarity, and its power function are at the root of all ambivalent attitudes towards co-existing languages which have filled so many pages of sociolingusitic literature. For example, to understand the language be- havior and attitudes of the Tunisian elite, as described by Stevens 1983, one need only ask the question: which of the three co-existing linguistic varieties fulfills the power function in the post-colonial context? Certainly not the Tunisian dialect of Arabic, nor Classical Arabic, even though the latter is considered to be a prestige language. French alone is associated with modernity, authority, and power. Through language policy (Stevens mentions that though education is bilingual, A French takes up 70% of the curriculum by the end of the secondary school and ™ more at the university), entry into the ranks of the elite is tightly controlled. Why does the Tunisian elite and that of other African countries consider their own MT to be inferior? Because it does not provide them with access to power, and since the main goal of an elite is to remain in power and to give their children the same chances, such an attitude is not very surprising. Thus there seems to be a belief that this inferiority is inherent and cannot be redressed (Bokamba & Tlou 1977). Joyce B. G. Sukumane: African languages and English in Namibia 2 ^3 In the whole history of language planning, not just in the third world, many a language policy that is assimilationist on the surface in fact serves to exclude sections of the community, to place them in a situation of permanent exploitation. It is very likely that the debate about language loyalty and identity will erupt in Namibia as increasing numbers of school children fail to graduate with profi- ciency in English. Fishman 1971 has noted how nationalism and a need for iden- tity in the face of introduced languages in a community leads to protectionism and promotion of the authenticity of the local language. On the basis of the preceding discussion concerning the ambiguous lan- guage functions in the Namibian policy, it becomes clear that linguistic identifica- tion with a sub-national collectivity is essentially the result of socio-economic and political pressures. However, when a society is split into two diametrically op- posed classes, the rulers and the ruled, maintenance of linguistic differences be- comes a signal that social cleavages exist. The more emphasis is placed on the power function of language, in the sense that the acquisition of a prestige variety is the prerequisite for economic success and political participation, the greater the gap between the two classes and the two linguistic varieties. Publications by Bagmbose 1991, Bokamba & Tlou 1977, Bokamba 1981, 1984, 1995, Tollefson 1991, and Phillipson 1992 have examined some of the broader issues relating to language, language planning, language dominance, and society. Whatever else they achieve, these publications draw attention to some of the less obvious and generally unintentioned roles of individuals involved in language planning. Given the reservations about language planning and English in sub-Saharan Af- rica, it would seem pertinent to address some of the more important issues these publications raise that have a bearing on this study, seeking as it does to analyze language planning in Namibia, and indirectly at least, the role of English. The authorities named above suggest very strongly that the continued ex- pansion of the English language might be to the disadvantage of those countries that are promoting its use. They question the link between development (= mod- ernization) and English language teaching. Tollefson 1991 maintains that mod- ernization and the English language have become inextricably linked, arguing that most developing countries equate one with the other. There is much truth in this concept as far as Namibia is concerned. English, as we have seen so far, is the sole official language. It is therefore the language of business, commerce, science, technology, and international relations, and these are precisely the reasons its use is promoted in the country. However, Tollefson (1991:82) argues that 'the central idea of modernization is that '"underdeveloped" societies must break free of "traditional" structures that limit economic development and prosperity'. He goes on to argue that modernization is sometimes seen as being identical to 'Westernization' and that 'underdevelopment' can best be overcome by adopt- ing institutions and patterns of behavior found in industrial societies. Tollefson's hypothesis suggests that in achieving development, a country must lose its iden- tity. He cites countries such as China and Iran as examples. While it is not possi- ble to verify this claim on the basis of more empirical studies, it seems that Namibia is headed in that direction in replacing ethnic-language curricula with an English 214 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1998) one. It is actively promoting English in its schools and seeking ways in which English might gain dominance instead of complementing the indigenous lan- guages. Tollefson's contention therefore that 'monolingualism', preferably Eng- lish, is seen as a practical advantage for modern social organization, while multil- ingualism is seen as a 'characteristic' of 'unmodernized', 'traditional' societies is true of Namibia, as borne out by Haacke's 1994 observations about language at- titudes in Namibia. . Defenders of the position of English in the world (e.g., Jones, 1997) do not ™ necessarily agree with such claims as Tollefson's and others. They argue that while inequality between nations and within nations is self-evident, to criticize the role of English in this equality suggests that language is at the root of the problem. English, they say, has certainly empowered some groups and individuals within countries and placed them in positions where they have been able to ex- ploit their neighbors, however, they say, such inequality and the misuse of power would exist with or without English. However, this is still no argument to defend the continued colonial policies in most African countries characterized by 'pervasive multilingualism'. Bokamba (1995:19) states that: the biggest and the most important threat arising from the elevation of a particular language or group of languages as national/official lan- guages over others is the perceived de-empowerment that such a lan- guage or languages accord to the speakers, especially LI speakers. The selection of an official language for administration and education allocates two crucial speech domains to that language, thereby makes accessible employment and political opportunity to those citizens who command the language concerned. Specifically by serving as the lan- guage of instruction the official language(s) determine(s) a student's chances for academic success and upward mobility. Similarly, by func- tioning as the language of administration the official language(s) de- termine^) language policy in the public as well as the private sector, including the judicial system, political programs, church-related serv- ices, and mass media. As such, it becomes a benefit for its speakers, but an obstacle to various opportunities for non-speakers. This indeed has been the primary issue in the linguistic conflict in places like India in the 1950s and 1960s, and in Belgium and Canada in the last two decades. Therefore, what Bokamba is pointing out here is that language empowerment re- sulting from the anticipation and implementation of a language policy applies to any language, indigenous or non-indigenous. For this reason, Bokamba 1995 m concludes that the solution does not lie in opting for a European language of wider communication (ELWC), because in the case of Africa, these have pro- duced a distinct elite that receives most of the benefits, while the non-speakers of these languages have been and continue to be marginalized. Therefore the 'solution to language empowerment through a policy of exclusion is to adopt a calculated multilingual policy that allocates different functions to the selected languages and thereby allows a wider access to the resources and opportunities to the interested and capable citizens' (Bokamba 1995:20). Bokamba goes on to Joyce B. G. Sukumane: African languages and English in Namibia 2 * 5 say that this type of plan has been successfully implemented by India in its three- language formula, where Hindi is a national and official language; English is a co- official language, and 16 languages from the different regions are state languages. It can be seen therefore, that a multilingual policy such as this one, although not without problems, is designed to offer more opportunities for more people than a monolingual one. 1.4 Towards a Namibian language plan In Namibia there ought to be growing awareness that language has to be taken into account in any national development plan. The dictates of trade, industry, commerce, and education recognize the role of English, but it is doubtful that those of culture, religion, and national unity will require a similar role of English. A problem arising from the development of language as a factor in national planning concerns the nature of language planning itself. Important questions about the role of languages in society and the impact they are likely to have need to be ad- dressed. The question as to who should be asking the questions and organizing the planning is open to debate. Kaplan (1990:4) observes that language planning is an attempt by some organized body (most commonly, some level of government) to introduce systematic language change for some more of less clearly articulated purpose (commonly stated in altruistic terms but often not based on altruistic intents. Kaplan's definition suggests self-interest as an important factor in language plan- ning: planning by the elite for the elite. Cooper (1989:45), having considered twelve different definitions from earlier works, concludes that language planning 'refers to deliberate efforts to influence the behavior of others with respect to the acquisition, structure, or functional allocation of other language codes' In the context of Namibia, Cooper's linguistic rather than Kaplan's politi- cally influenced definition seems more plausible, but does not explain why lan- guage has to be planned. Kaplans' s suggestion that planning is done by govern- ment to propagate its objectives seems to be particularly relevant to Namibia. However, it is the duty of any government to strive to make language plans meet the goals articulated in their constitutions. This can only be achieved through systematic planning of language. As currently understood, according to Christian 1988, language planning is characterized by an explicit and systematic effort to resolve perceived language problems and achieve related goals through institu- tionally organized intervention in the use and usage of languages. Also, language planning is future-oriented. It involves the consideration of the structure and function of the linguistic repertoires of a speech community or a nation and its socio-cultural and political setting, and envisages deliberate changes in the lin- guistic repertoires, keeping in view the future image of the society at large. Char- acterization of the present Namibian socio-linguistic situation, projection of the future image of society, and the scope of change will determine the nature, struc- ture, and function of the the linguistic repertoires in the future. Therefore crucial in this process is who defines language problems; what language problems of the 216 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998) the linguistic repertoires are perceived and projected; why certain language problems are characterized; what strategies and solutions are suggested to solve the problems, and so on. Several such questions need to be properly understood within a systematic framework of a sound theory of language planning. The con- sideration of goals, values, ideologies, and criteria provides such a framework and forms the basis for the existence and growth of multilingualism. The setting of goals, their precise formulation, and the degree of consistency among them with regard to resources, social objectives, evaluation of alternatives, and instruments for achieving the goals constitute perhaps the most crucial and complex component of language planning. The discussion of goals themselves is incomplete without the consideration of various criteria that have been suggested or proposed in decision-making about issues related to language-status planning. This is not only because these criteria support different, conflicting goals, values, or ideologies, but also because they may be employed without any proper weighting toward achieving certain ends. For instance, Neustupny 1968 men- tions four criteria: development, democratization, unity, and foreign relations. Skutnabb-Kangas & Phillipson 1986 offer a list of criteria consisting of: unity, ac- cessibility, farniliarity, feasibility, science and technology, pan-Africanism, wider communication, and United Nations, which have been suggested in the context of the choice of an official language for independent Namibia. They show how these criteria focus more on the international functions of the official language and less on the socio-cultural and educational factors as part of an overall multi- lingual policy. They point out that some criteria that would have been extremely relevant have been excluded from the list. These include: ease of learning, Na- mibian cultural authenticity, empowering the underprivileged, and self-reliance. They claim that the selective checklist of criteria is skewed in favor of English. Thus there is a gap between the ideal and reality. In situations of language-status planning, the allocative decisions to use and develop certain languages have failed either because they were not realistically formulated in the first place, or because an adequate consensus could not be sus- tained in the process of their elaboration and implementation, or because the hid- den constraints and socio-political consequences flowing from them were not fully grasped at the time the decisions were taken, hence the gap between the ideal and reality. This gap is not properly perceived because the relationship be- tween policy and practice is characterized, as pointed out by Afolayan 1984, by the three-headed monster of underrating, overrating, and self-deception. Thus he finds a transparent skewness between the ideological position of indigenous lan- guages of Nigeria and the status of the English language, and therefore requires a very clear, well-balanced policy on the English language as the nation's second language, such that the indigenous Nigerian languages would also play their most meaningful roles side by side. In short, the quality of language planning and con- sequently the future of multilingualism depend upon the nature and scope of de- cisions about the status and function of various languages in the domain of edu- cation. Language planning can play a constructive role in establishing meaning- ful interdependence between ethnic languages and English in Namibia on the ba- Joyce B. G. Sukumane: African languages and English in Namibia 217 sis of their educational, cultural, socio-political, and communicative roles rather than considering their functions in oppositional terms. 5. Conclusion and policy recommendation A close look at the Namibian policy in education has revealed certain ambiguities, vagueness, and inconsistencies in its formulation, not unlike findings reported in the analysis of educational policies in most sub-Saharan African countries. First, a general vagueness is manifested in the policy. There are two different aspects to this vagueness: ambiguous agency regarding responsibility for actions, and lack of clear guidelines and explicit strategies. Second, the policy makes recommenda- tions that misrepresent the current economic situation and are not coherent with available resources. For example there is still no provision for community lan- guage teaching, and the first languages of learners are neglected. Third, there is a contradiction in terms as to the nature of the policy. It is not clear if it is assimila- tionist or culturally pluralistic. However, the continuation of a colonial heritage, in which rulers maintain hegemonic relations with their subjects, is apparent from the policymaker's lack of inclusiveness. It may be what Haacke 1994 suggests, that perhaps the influence came from what was perceived as the trend in policy mak- ing, from watching other post-colonial African countries, and listening to interna- tional debates on education. From the preceding discussion, we conclude that like many other African nations, Namibia faces the problem of choosing a national language as well as in- troducing several languages at the level of school education with an express view to preserve and promote multilingualism and multiculturalism, even at the level of formal education. As this paper has shown, prevalent in the discourse about African language policies is the idea that no policy should seek to eliminate the diversity of language repertoires within most African contexts. Bagmbose 1991, Bokamba 1981, Bokamba & Tlou 1977. Phillipson 1992, and Tollefson 1991, among many others, have emphasized the equal rights of all languages and sug- gest that all citizens have the right to political participation, education, and serv- ices in their own language. Furthermore, they insist that all members of a multilin- gual speech community have a right to the use of their language as a medium of instruction, as well as of the other official interactions mentioned above. The pro- posal offered by Bokamba & Tlou 1977 has a reality to it that is desirable for most African states. They propose that each sub-Saharan African state set up a lan- guage planning commission of linguists, educators, anthropologists, sociologists, economists, and political scientists to survey the relevant languages and make recommendations to the government concerning the selection of a single national language. On the basis of a statistical and attitudinal survey, the national lan- guage selected from the pool of the nation's linguae francae should be used as the medium of instruction. The remaining should be taught as compulsory sub- jects in the school system and used in certain other specified functions. In the case of Namibia, this includes Afrikaans, which enjoyed co-official status with English before independence, and German, which was used along with English and Afrikaans in the administration of Whites. The relevant international Ian- 218 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1998) guage, English in the case of Namibia, should be introduced as a compulsory subject only from grade four onwards. Bokamba & Tlou (1977:47) maintain that if the initial work is carried out carefully, and the government cooperates, the kind of language policy that will emerge from such a plan 'will be comprehensive in that it will be based on the objective realities of the society concerned'. REFERENCES g Afolayan, A. 1984. The English language in Nigerian education as an agent of proper multilingual and multicultural development. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 5:1.1-22. BAGMBOSE, A. 1991. Language and the Nation: The Language Question in Sub- Saharan Africa. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bokamba, E. G. 1981. Language policies and national development in sub- Saharan Africa: Issues for the 1980s. Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 11: 1.1-25. . 1984. French colonial language policy in Africa and its legacies. Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 14:2.1-36. . 1995. The politics of language planning in Africa: Critical choices for the 21st century. Discrimination through Language in Africa? Perspectives on the Namibian Experience, ed. by M. Putz, 11-27. New York: Mouton de Gruyter , & J. S. Tlou. 1977. The consequences of the language policies of African states vis-a-vis education. Language and Linguistic Problems in Africa (Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on African Linguistics), ed. by P. A. Kotey & H. der-Houssikian, 35-53. Columbia: Hornbeam Press. Christian, D.(1988. Language planning: The view from linguistics. Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey TV: Language, the Sociocultural Contextl. ed. by F. J. Newmeyer, 193-209. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cooper, R. L. 1989. Language Planning and Social Change. Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press. Das Gupta, J., & C. A. Ferguson. 1977. Problems of language planning. Lan- guage Planning Processes, ed. by J. Rubin, B. H. Jernudd, J. Das Gupta, J. A. Fishman, & C. A. Ferguson , 3-8. The Hague: Mouton. Fishman, J. A. 1971. The impact of nationalism on language planning. Can Lan- guage Be Planned, ed. by J. Rubin & B. H. Jernudd, 3-20. Hawaii: Univer- sity Press of Hawaii. ^ Fourie, D. J. 1997. Educational language policy and the indigenous languages of I Namibia. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 125.29-42. Haacke. W. 1994. Language policy and planning in independent Namibia. An- nual Review of Applied Linguistics (1993/1994) 14.240-53. Jones, G. M. 1997. The evolution of a language plan: Brunei Darussalam in Fo- cus. Language Problems and Language Planning 23.197-215. Kaplan, R. 1990. Introduction: Language planning in theory and practice. Lan- guage Planning and Education in Australasia and the South Pacific, ed. by R. Baldauf & A. Luke, 3-13. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Joyce B. G. Sukumane: African languages and English in Namibia 219 Namibia. UNIN Report. 1981. Toward a Language Policy in Namibia. English as the Official Language : Perspectives and Strategies. Lusaka: UNIN. Neustupny, J. V. 1968. Some general aspects of language problems and language policy in developing societies. Language Problems of Developing Nations. ed. by J. A. Fishman, C. A. Ferguson, & Das Gupta, 39-61. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Phillipson, R. 1992. Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Skutnabb-Kangas, T., & R. Phillipson. 1986. Linguisticism Rules in Education. Roskilde: Institute VI, Roskilde University Center. Stevens. P. 1983. Ambivalence, modernization and language attitudes: French and Arabic in Tunisia. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Devel- opment 4.2-3. TOLLEFSON, J. W. 1991. Planning Language, Planning Inequality. London: Longman. > Errata to Hartkemeyer, Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1.221-34 The editors greatly regret that, through an unfortunate font-change, certain ghonetic/phonological symbols were improperly reproduced in Dale Hartke- ^yer's review article. Please make the following changes: >a /©A [©]>#, fe] 0,11,14, [6], /6/ >[/(],//(/ p. 222, lines 10, 1 1, 14, 31 p. 227, line 27 p. 228, lines 13, 21, 23 p. 226, lines 1, 2, 28 Pl>ffl p. 227, lines 1 8, 22, 26, 27, 43 p. 228, lines 40, 43 p. 228, lines 1,6, 11, 12, 13, 16, 18, 19, 20, 22, 25, 30, 34, 35, l$rl > /"r/ 36,37,38,39,43,44 p. 229, lines 3, 26, 30, 43, 44 p - ZJU ' lmes l3 ' Z4 p. 230, line 16 „ , . , / n/ > /rjn/ l-cl, [-c] > /c7, [6] p. 232, line 7 from below p. 225, lines 8,9, 1 1 Bp. 226, line 32 l0l>hl p. 221, lines 1 1, 7, 6 fr. below p. 226, lines 28, 32 p. 227, lines 18, 19, 26 p. 233, line 24 p. 228, lines 6, 25, 45 p. 234, line 19 /-s/,[-s] >/§/,[?] i i Studies in the Linguistic Sciences Volume 28, Number 1 (Spring 1998) REVIEW ARTICLE Kenneth J. Wireback: The Role of Phonological Structure in Sound Change from Latin to Spanish and Portuguese. (American University Studies, Series H, Romance Languages & Literature, 215.) New York: Peter Lang, 1997. Pp. xii + 139. $33.95. Dale Hartkemeyer University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign hartkeme @ uiuc.edu As the title clearly discloses, the concern in this book is with an investi- gation into, and illustration of, the role played by phonological structure in the evolution from Latin of the two chief representatives of Hispano-Romance, Spanish and Portuguese. W's underlying premise throughout is that 'the role of phonological structure in sound change is primarily responsive rather than causa- tive' (p. 6). In other words, the causes of diachronic sound shifts are to be sought and identified originally at the phonetic surface level, and shifts at the phonemic level and reorganization of the phonology (more specifically, 'the abstract un- derlying phonological representations that are stored in the lexicon plus the phonological rules that link the underlying representations to their surface pho- netic form' pp. 6-7) constitute essentially subsequent responses to phonetic-level changes and altered relationships. In this context, it may perhaps be useful to lay out here W's conception of sound change as a three-stage process (p. ix): ( 1 ) "... a phonological rule is added to the system as a representation of consistent phonetic mutation in some direction.' (2) '... this rule may be extended to new phonological environments and segments.' (3) "... the rule may be lost with the subsequent restructuring of a phonological representation.' For example, with regard to ( 1 ), the high palatal vowel /i/ often phonetically con- ditions affrication of a preceding fkJ > l-d. When a listener is no longer able to perceive the context for this change, i.e., immediately before /i/, s/he will be unable to factor out the phonetic palatalization and arrive at the abstract, underlying Ik/, and so, in assigning a lexical representation to the sound heard, will take the pho- netic [-c] to be the phoneme l-d rather than the original /k/. In W's conception, this response of 'restructuring' l\J to l-d simply stems from the speaker's percep- tion of the surface output. In connection with (2) above, W maintains that the speaker's faulty perception, when acquiring a phonological rule, must be behind the extension (through generalization) of a rule to new inputs. This can occur when a speaker fails to pick up accurately on the original specific context, mis- taking it for a more general environment. Finally, with reference to (3), when a 222 STUDIES IN THE LINGUISTIC SCIENCES 28: 1 (SPRING 1998) phonetically conditioned allophone of a segment in a particular environment is 'restructured' as an independent phoneme, it may subsequently become difficult or impossible for a listener to recover either the operation of the earlier rule condi- tioning the allophone, or that rule's input, in such a way that, for all intents and purposes, the rule has been lost, or in the terminology of Hock (1986), has under- gone atrophy. But importantly, in all three stages of the sound change process, W regards the addition of or changes in the phonological rule as arising in reaction or response to a phonetic state of affairs already obtaining on the surface. W cites an example, originally discussed in Hock (1986:266-7), of rule reor- dering in German, involving final devoicing and ®-loss. The earlier standard Ger- man rule ordering had final devoicing before (optional) ®-loss and so derived sur- face [ta:k] sg. nom. and [ta:g] sg. dat. from /tag/ and /tage/ respectively. However, a later development in German makes [ta:k] acceptable for many speakers as both the sg. nom. and dat. form. What this means is that for these speakers, ®-loss has been reordered before final devoicing. W draws on this example (pp. 2-3) to demonstrate his point that the structural changes in the phonology (here, the rule reordering which brings about the extension of the final devoicing rule to addi- tional segments not before subject to it) 'are responses to perceived analogical relationships on the surface'. That is, German speakers have an abiding intuition that all final obstruents should be voiceless, and thus the surface sg. dat. [ta:g], even though it derives from underlying /tage/, should also conform to the final- obstruent devoicing. Thus, the extension of devoicing to forms showing a surface violation of a rule, in a movement which is quite evidently in the direction of en- hancing rule transparency in surface forms, forces the reordering of the two rules. W is emphatic here that it is not some internal phonological structure motivation which occasions the rule reordering, and just coincidentally the subsequent ex- tension of final devoicing to surface forms violating this rule. Thus, the increased surface regularity and the structure of the output appear to be what is really driving changes, not some internal and abstract phonological structure or princi- ple. Again, in W's view the role of the latter is to respond to those changes arising on the phonetic surface (in the present example, by reordering ©-loss before final devoicing, so as to bring about greater surface regularity in the application of fi- nal devoicing, a rule of considerable perceptual salience for speakers of German). In like fashion, W seriously questions a couple of other examples of ac- counts of diachronic changes (i.e.., appeals to the Obligatory Contour Principle and the notion of push chains) that are founded on what he considers the mis- guided notion, tempting though it is, of 'attributing] causality to principles of structural organization' (p. 4). Attempts to make abstract phonological principles (such as the OCP, with its avoidance of adjacent identical segments on a melody tier, or the chain shift, viewed as a response to an impending phonemic merger), he claims, are uniformly fraught with the paradox of having to be at the same time sufficiently strong and sufficiently weak. In the case of diachronic accounts re- lying on the OCP (e.g., Schane 1989) and other such phonological principles, he observes that 'the principle in question must be weak enough to allow for excep- tions to it, but strong enough to cause language change by attempting to elimi- ♦ Dale Hartkemeyer: Review of Wireb ack ( 1 997) 223 nate exceptions to it' (p. 5). According to the push-chain notion, the threat of merger and loss of phonological contrasts must be of such gravity that the re- sponse of the phonological system is a chain reaction among phonemes, and yet phonemic mergers are by no means rare occurrences. To rather striking effect, W wonders aloud: 'if push-chain theory is weak enough in terms of its inability to apply when merger does occur, then why in other cases is it employed to prevent merger at all costs?' (p. 6). The solution to the paradoxes posed, W maintains, is to recognize that constructs pertaining to the domain of the phonology (such as the OCP, push chains, rule ordering) are clearly not strong enough to block certain violations, and therefore are unlikely to be the prime movers, the chief causation, behind sound changes. Even while granting that 'principles of phonological or- ganization' can nevertheless INFLUENCE sound change, W hastens to bring the reader back to his main thesis: phonological structure adapts to phonetic developments on the surface rather than constraining or blocking them due to purely phonemic principles of organization, perhaps because speaker awareness is attuned to the phonetic surface rather than the more abstract phonological level. Thus, even though W, in essential agreement with Labov (1994), does acknowl- edge the possibility that 'teleological factors' like concern about avoiding pho- nemic-contrast neutralization may have some role to play in diachronic changes, he insists on the view that sound change per se is, in the main, mechanical, oper- ating outside of and independently of some systemic preoccupation regarding the preservation of phonemic contrasts. W recognizes the complexity of all linguistic change, including sound change, admitting frankly that any one theoretical focus cannot possibly hope to provide an all-encompassing picture of this complexity, but he offers us in the three central chapters of the book his examination, from the theoretical perspec- tive outlined here, of three selected sound changes that developed in the transi- tion from Latin to Spanish and Portuguese — ( 1 ) consonant + yod sequences and their various outcomes, (2) palatalization of /pi/, /kl/, and /fl/ clusters, and (3) evolu- tion toward the 'strong word boundary' and 'strength pattern', and the so-called 'initial sonorant strengthening' — in the hope that his investigation, which is in- deed noteworthy for its detail and thoroughness, may furnish scholars of dia- chronic Hispano-Romance with valuable new insights into some mechanics of sound change not previously highlighted, or insufficiently highlighted, in the lit- erature. In each of the three core chapters (2, 3, and 4), W presents a set of dia- chronic data for Spanish and Portuguese illustrative of the sound change under discussion and then proceeds to a detailed consideration of these data — rich in references to the work of previous researchers — from his perspective on sound change and the responsive-rather-than-causative role that 'phonological struc- ture' plays within that process of sound change. Space here does not allow an elaborate report of many of the details presented; instead, I shall limit myself to 224 STUDIES IN THE LINGUISTIC SCIENCES 28: 1 (SPRING 1998) identifying a number of key points from each of the core chapters and attempt to show briefly how W argues for his theoretical perspective on the basis of his ac- count of the data. In chapter 2, 'The interaction of consonants and yod in Hispano-Romance: metathesis, epenthesis, and palatalization', W considers data of this sort: CASEU > Sp. (caiso) > queso, Pg. queijo 'cheese' AREA > Sp. (aira) > era, Pg. eira 'threshing floor' 1 NOVRJ > Sp. novio, Pg. noivo 'boyfriend' * APIU > Sp. apio, Pg. aipo 'celery' SAPIAT > Sp. (saipa >) sepa, Pg. saiba (subj.) 's/he knows' and one of his key conclusions drawn in support of his thesis is that even though such transpositions of the yod within the string (more frequent in Portuguese than in Spanish) most likely originated in Hispano-Romance sporadically in con- figurations of coronal C + yod through the mistiming of individual features (e.g., BASIU > /basjo/ > /baJsio/ > /bajso/ ... > Sp. beso 'kiss'; CORIU > /korjo/ > /koirJo/ > /kojro/ Pg. coiro 'leather'), along the lines of previous analyses by Hock (1985, 1986) and Wanner (1989) with his notion of the 'supersegment', extension of a similar 'glide epenthesis' to additional lexical items nevertheless may well have proceeded more in the nature of a phonological process of segment insertion. W examines in detail the issue of how such a process that began on the phonetic surface as sporadic articulatory mistimings would have come to achieve its later phonological regularity, and he concludes again, in accord with his overall per- spective, that it was a case of the phonology responding to and regularizing de- velopments which were already occurring on the phonetic level. Appealing to particular feature-geometrical representations and explaining details of the pala- talizations and glide transpositions evident in the above examples involving coronal Cs, in terms of leftward spreading of the Coronal articulator under the /s/ or /r/, and of spreading of the [+high] feature under the Dorsal node of the palatal glide (yod) onto the preceding V (yielding, e.g., [baisjo]), W suggests that there was an adjacency restriction on Coronal spreading in Hispano-Romance, meaning that labial + yod sequences like those in NOVRJ, APIU, and SAPIAT did not un- dergo Coronal spreading (i.e., palatalization and glide epenthesis), since in W's feature-geometrical representations labials lack a Coronal articulator that could spread onto the preceding V. [It might be remarked here in passing that the ap- proach suggested in more recent work like that of Browman & Goldstein (1991) in terms of articulatory gestures and their overlaps would seem to offer a more explanatory and promising conceptual fit for the phenomena under discussion I here than the highly abstract feature-geometrical framework adopted by W] The leftward yod transpositions we note in items with labials, like Pg. noivo, aipo, and Sp./Pg. sepa, saiba, W therefore attributes not to feature spreading, but to straightforward 'structural metathesis', i.e., whole-segment inversion between the yod and the preceding labial consonant, so as to achieve what W believes was a prevailing preference in Hispano-Romance (stronger in Portuguese than in Span- ish) for a (C)VG syllable shape over a (C)GV one (making, e.g., ai.po in Portu- guese preferred over a.pio). A good portion of the chapter is devoted to moti- Dale H artkemeyer: Review of Wireb ack (1997) 225 vating and clarifying this distinction between the two types of yod transposi- tions. W also hypothesizes that in the case of the evolution of the sequences /s:j/ (as in QUASSIARE > OSp. quexar, Pg. queixar) and /skj/ (as in FASCIA > Pg. faixa), we have instances of palatalization with subsequent anticipatory epenthe- sis of an off-glide. In other words, the postconsonantal yods in the original Latin forms were absorbed in the early palatalization process, and the yods that appear before the palatal Is/ in the later Romance forms (mostly in Portuguese) arose by epenthesis in anticipation of the following palatal C (i.e., /s:j/, /skj/ > [-s] > [j-s]), a process most probably spurred along analogically by a number of already existing lexical items showing [j-s] which had derived from original Lat. /ks/ (e.g.. MATAXA > OSp. (madaixa >) madexa, Pg. madeixa 'skein'; TAXO > OSp. (taixo >) texo, Pg. teixo 'yew'). W likewise addresses the question of just how the epentheses or metatheses evident in the data acquired regularity in early Hispano-Romance. In this regard he outlines two possible scenarios: 1) Through CG mistimings, a supersegment arises (e.g., /sj/ > [Jsi]), gradually being extended to new inputs throughout the lexicon, and over time speakers' perception plays a role in the regularization, as they begin to perceive the supersegment as a GC sequence in more and more of the lexical inputs containing it. Under this scenario, the regularization process of glide epenthesis would involve intermediate forms in all cases. Or, alternatively: 2) Quite early on, given its instability, the supersegment is perceived and reanalyzed as a GC sequence, even before the mistiming process and resulting supersegment status have had a chance to make their way through the lexicon to achieve regularity, and so the emergence of a clear GC sequence in a FEW lexical items may bring on a more sudden metathesis (rather than glide epenthesis) in other lexical items containing the relevant CG sequences. W speculates that both of these scenarios are likely to have been played out in the early days of the devel- opment of Romance languages, and he notes that evidence of lexical variation at early stages (e.g., CATENATU > cadnado, candado, cannado //]/, calnado, ex- amples from Wanner 1989 indicating a likely supersegment [ d n d ]) seems to sug- gest differing outcomes from a mistiming process, and presumably regularization at the supersegment stage. On the other hand, W considers that for C + yod se- quences, an early reanalysis to GC sequences was probable, so that the inversion observed in labial + yod sequences was implemented via metathesis. Here again. W wants to stress that at its inception glide inversion was essentially a phonetic phenomenon, growing out of articulatory mistimings, but that over time the in- creasing frequency of and preference for a (C)VG syllable shape gave rise to purely phonological rules of complete-segment inversion, so that what started out as a sporadic phonetic phenomenon came to take on a certain phonological regularity, once the phonological system began to respond to the initial phonetic developments and extend a pattern. In chapter 3, 'The development of the Latin and Romance obstruent + lat- eral clusters from Latin to Spanish and Portuguese', W examines Spanish and Por- tuguese data involving the palatalization of ROMANCE clusters like those in: 226 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998) OSp. o[d]o, Pg. olho 'eye' OSp. cua[6]o, Pg. coalho 'curds' Sp./Pg. concha 'shell' Sp. una, Pg. unha 'fingernail' OC'LU > COAG'LU > CONCH'LA > UNG'LA > :11 as of the similar L ATE CLAVE > PLORARE > FLAMMA > AMPLU > INFLARE > Sp. Have, Pg. chave 'key' Sp. llorar, Pg. chorar 'to cry' Sp. llama, Pg. chama 'flame' Sp./Pg. ancho 'wide' Sp. hinchar, Pg. inchar 'to swell' and cases of Latin clusters in which palatalization has apparently failed to occur, as in: CLAVU > Sp. clavo, Pg. cravo 'nail' PLATEA > Sp. plaza, Pg. praga 'town square' FLORE > Sp./Pg. flor 'flower' Surveying broadly the Romance data, both Eastern and Western, regarding the fate of these obstruent + lateral clusters, W finds that Italian shows regular pala- talization of all such clusters (both Romance and Latin), Rumanian shows pala- talization only of velar clusters (both Romance and Latin), Spanish and Portu- guese show regular palatalization of the Romance clusters and irregular (i.e., not universal or consistent) palatalization of the Latin voiceless-obstruent clusters, whereas Gallo-Romance dialects like French and Catalan show palatalization only of intervocalic Romance clusters. These comparisons lead him to pose a few interesting questions which turn out to have rather complicated answers, regard- ing the relative irregularity of the palatalization sound change in Hispano- Romance, when compared with its highly regular outcome observed in Italian; the importance of the cluster's position in the word in determining its outcome in Hispano-Romance (e.g., in Spanish we get /6/ word-initially (llamar) and l-cl word-medially {hinchar), but in Portuguese there is no positional differentiation in the outcomes: chamar, inchar); and the factor of obstruent voicing in the sound change. [It should be noted here that in Old Portuguese the digraph ch in- dicated the sound [-c], but the phoneme has since been deaffricated to [-s].] In considering the numerous exceptions to cluster palatalization (like clavo/cravo, flor, etc.) that we find in Hispano-Romance, W cites a number of factors identified by previous scholars as possible explanations for the irregular- ity, such as learned influence, position of primary stress in the word, avoidance of the threat of homonymic clash (e.g., CLAVE > Have, chave vs. CLAVU > clavo. cravo) or phonetic clash, whereby palatalization of the cluster is blocked when two palatal Cs within a single word would result (e.g., PLANGERE > Sp. planir, not Hlahir), and the development of doublets like plegar : llegar in response to a perceived need to resolve cases of polysemy. W is particularly struck by the contrast in the palatalization developments observed between Italian and His- pano-Romance, and he expresses curiosity as to why none of these various fac- Dale Hartkemeyer: Review of Wireback ( 1 997) 227 tors operated to mar the regularity of the sound change in Italian. What was dif- ferent, he wonders, about the spread and evolution of the sound change in the Iberian Peninsula that caused these various factors to interfere so powerfully with the regular extension of palatalization to all the possible contexts that might have undergone the process? He expounds and considers some competing views from the literature on the nature of the spread of the palatalization change, dismissing hypotheses claiming that it actually was regular early on, but that its effects then became masked in many cases by later restoration of the original clusters, perhaps under Gallo-Romance influence, and he decides instead to explore the other pos- sibility, viz. that 'palatalization of the primary Latin clusters never reached full regularity in those Gallo- and Hispano-Romance varieties that show preservation of the original, unpalatalized cluster' (p. 90, fn 4). Given this premise, he sets out as his goals for the chapter to determine what aspect of the palatalization rule made for its differences in rate of diffusion across the lexicons in Spanish/Portuguese vs. Italian, a condition presumably working along with the language-specific factors cited above (avoidance of homonymic clash, etc.); and the clarification of the differing outcomes, depending on word position and phonetic environment, of the original clusters in Sp. (/6/ and l-cl) and in Pg. {l-cl only). W assumes that throughout Romania the first step in the evolu- tion of the obstruent + lateral clusters was the palatalization of the lateral, so that in the case of Hispano-Romance, there was an early stage at which the clusters were /p6/, /f6/, IkOl. W rejects some previous analyses of Hispano-Romance that have given a fundamentally differing treatment respectively to Latin clusters like kl, pl,fl vs. the Romance clusters k'l, g'l (resulting from syncope, often of diminu- tives), motivated by the different reflexes of each type of cluster: e.g., in Spanish for Latin clusters: /6/ word-initially and l-cl medially; for Romance clusters (which were by definition medial): 16/ intervocalically, later > /©/ in Old Spanish. One line of analysis of the Romance clusters has attempted to regard their development as parallel to that of Lat. /kt/ and /ks/ sequences, involving weak- ening and vocalization of coda velars to yod, often with subsequent palataliza- tion of the following C (e.g., AXE [ak.se] > *[ajse] > Sp. eje, Pg. eixo). This line of analysis, as W very rightly points out, relies for its success on the questionable as- sumption of a cross-linguistically unmotivated syllable structure like oc.lu ( < OCULU). There is indeed no good reason why the Ik/ or /g/ of such clusters should not have been recruited automatically into the onset of the following syl- lable, given that /kl/ and /gl/, unlike /kt/ and /ks/, were perfectly acceptable onsets in Latin. The key to a unified account for the differing outcomes of Romance and Latin clusters by the same mechanisms, he believes, is the phenomenon of ob- struent lenition and the recognition that word-initial position came to be regarded as predominantly strong (i.e., immune to the kind of lenition found in medial, in- tervocalic positions). Thus, after the palatalization of the lateral in both the Ro- mance and the Latin clusters, there was what he terms a 'heavy onset cluster' (e.g., [k6]), simplification of which was a natural tendency; it is here that lenition played a crucial role. In weak (medial, intervocalic) contexts, Ik/ weakened to /g/ thus merging with original Igl, then spirantized to lyl and was eventually lost alto- 228 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998) gether (thus, /k'l, kl/ > Ikbl > Igbl >/y6/ > Ibl). By contrast, in strong contexts (word-initially or postconsonantally) the left word boundary or the preceding C served to support the obstruent, so simplification of the cluster would be ex- pected to proceed via weakening of the palatal lateral, which became delateral- ized to the glide /j/, with subsequent fusion of the glide with the obstruent to yield l-cl (thus in the strong context, /k'l, kl/ > Ikbl > /kj/ > l-cf). Portuguese, W claims, illustrates these two different contextually-conditioned lines of develop- ment precisely: OC'LU > olho, CLAVE > chave, and CONCH'LA > concha. Castilian, however, poses a difficulty for a unified approach to the palatali- zation of both Lat. /kl/, /pi/, /fl/ and Rom. /k'l/, /g'l/, for there we find different out- comes for these two types of clusters: the former proceed to Ibl and remain there (CLAVE > Have), while the latter also proceed to Ibl but then go further by assi- bilation to OSp. /©/ (OVIC'LA > *ove[0]a > ove[©]a). W contends that ob- struent lenition can again account for the outcome difference here. Since the Ro- mance clusters were always word-medial, lenition applied much more regularly to their obstruents, quickly eroding them down to Ibl. However, the word-initial Latin clusters, because they were in strong contexts, were unable to lenite so quickly to Ibl. In the meantime, once the medial Romance clusters had lenited to Ibl, they soon diverged from the Latin clusters and merged with the Ibl deriving from earlier /lj/ (e.g., foOa < folja < FOLIA), undergoing delateralization and assi- bilation to /©/, while the original word-initial Latin clusters still remained at the heavy-cluster stage, unable to follow directly the medial Ibl (from the Romance clusters) on its way to /©/. This approach, however, poses another question for W, i.e., why in Spanish do we find the word-initial Latin clusters resulting in Ibl, rather than the fortis l-cl, as we find in Portuguese and as we would really expect to find, in W's view, given that word-initial position is a strong one that tends to preserve obstruent articulations. He is committed to the strength-pattern analysis (as becomes abun- dantly clear in chapter 4) and believes that it warrants acceptance, even though this necessitates a further explanation for the anomalous Castilian word-initial Ibl, which he then proceeds to offer, drawing largely on the analysis in Torreblanca (1990). On the basis of the unidirectionality of certain 13th-century scribal errors, he concludes that the scenario for the development of the word-initial Latin clus- ters was roughly along the following lines. First, in the cluster Ikbl the velar ob- struent palatalized in contact with the following Ibl causing a more forward ar- ticulation of the velar, *[t6] (along the lines of the generally assumed develop- ment of /kj/ > /tj/), but since *[td] was a difficult cluster articulatorily, it continued further to the even more fronted articulation [p6]. At this stage, there would have been just two remaining reflexes of the three original clusters: /p6/ and libl. After the weakening process /p/ > [i] > [h] > posited by Torreblanca for these clusters (which runs in part quite parallel to that involved in the eventual loss of word- initial /f/ in Castilian), there is a merger of the two reflexes of the earlier clusters, and then aspiration, and eventual loss of the earlier obstruent: [i'6] > [h6] > [6]. This, then, is W's answer to the question of why Spanish opted for Ibl instead of the fortis l-cl word-initially. As he explains it (p. 78), Dale H artkemeyer: Review of Wireb ack (1997) 229 Thus, the weakening of /f/ as an aspiration rule played a central role in the loss of the obstruent in the initial clusters in Spanish, as it effectively ties initial /p6/ and /f6/ into a weakening process that in Iberian terms is strictly a Spanish (Castilian) phenomenon. W proposes that the palatalization of the obstruent + lateral clusters began with the intervocalic Romance clusters k'l, g'l, and then the rule was gradually extended in certain speech areas to more contexts (Gallo-Romance, exceptionally, failing to extend it at all). Italian extended the rule with the greatest regularity, so that obstruent + lateral clusters, voiceless and voiced, in all environments eventu- ally underwent the rule. W hypothesizes that something, however, arose in the development of Hispano-Romance which occasioned the less regular application of palatalization. As a preliminary to getting at what this factor might be, W first reviews the distinction between two types of sound change elucidated in Labov (1981): so- called 'Neogrammarian-style changes' and diffusing changes. The former are characterized by phonetic conditioning, absence of lexical exceptions, and un- awareness on the part of speakers that the change is underway; the latter are characterized by lexical exceptions and a high degree of lexical variation, as well as awareness of the change and observability by speakers. W is convinced that cluster palatalization in Hisp. -Romance began as a Neogrammarian change but then, as a result of some development, shifted into a diffusing mode of propaga- tion. What was this factor, this development that spelled the end of the Neogrammarian stage of the sound change and opened the way to the less regu- lar, diffusing phase of rule extension? Essentially, it was the relatively quick voicing, lenition, and loss of the obstruent in the intervocalic /k'l/, /g'l/ clusters, leading to the restructuring of these clusters as /6/, vs. the quite different outcome for postconsonantal /k'l/, /g'l/ clusters, where the onset obstruent was more pro- tected from lenition, and thus preserved longer. After the intervocalic Romance clusters had undergone palatalization and the reflexes had been restructured to /6/, the rule had little input left, leading to rule atrophy (as per Hock 1986). It was at this point, W believes, that cluster palatalization ceased to be strictly rule- governed and became a diffusing type of change. He discusses in considerable detail how the original conditions on the rule, including stress position, became reinterpreted and more generalized during this diffusing, lexically irregular phase of "rule extension' when palatalization came to affect now the Latin clusters. It is here too that those factors mentioned earlier, such as homonymic clash avoidance, etc., came to enjoy a certain influence, since now that speakers were quite openly aware and observant of the diffusing change underway, these factors that pre- suppose conscious efforts on the part of speakers could come into full play to im- pede the diffusion of palatalized variants. This chapter ties in with W's overriding main thesis regarding the role of phonological structure, in the sense that the phonological developments involv- ing the intervocalic Romance clusters (the split-off of /6/ and the restructuring of the remaining postconsonantal reflexes as /CkO/, /Cg6/) brought about a state of affairs which interrupted what had been a Neogrammarian type of sound change 230 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1998) and opened the way for other 'conscious' factors like homonymic clash avoid- ance, polysemy resolution, etc. to interfere with the regular extension of the pala- talization rule to new contexts, unlike the situation of highly regular rule exten- sion we find in Italian. In chapter 4, 'Lenition and the strong word boundary in Hispano- Romance', W introduces the topic by noting that the lenition observed in Span- ish and Portuguese encompasses four distinct processes (viz. degemination, voicing of voiceless obstruents, spirantization of simple voiced obstruents, and deletion, usually of the voiced spirants [(3], [3], [y]) and that the lenition of inter- vocalic word-medial obstruents, simple and geminate, set up in the Iberian speech area a strength pattern, according to which word-initial position is regarded as 'strong' (i.e., obstruents there do not weaken), and medial, intervocalic position is 'weak' (i.e., lenition takes place there); furthermore, this strength pattern then plays some kind of role in the development of sonorant strengthening, so that throughout Hispano-Romance word-initial kl > /#/; in Catalan, Aragonese, and Leonese word-initial IV > /6/; and in Leonese word-initial Inl > /n7. W goes on then to identify two ways in which the relationship linking the strength pattern, voicing, and medial geminates is problematic: (1) Although in modern Spanish and Portuguese word-initial /p,t,k/ are consistently unvoiced, the general assumption among scholars is that at an early stage of Hispano-Romance, these initial Cs also were subject to lenition when they were intervocalic due to a preceding V-final word; thus, UNUM TEMPUS would have given un tempos pronounced [un#tempos], whereas ILLA TERRA > la terra would have been [la#de|ra]. The problem with this analysis, W points out, is that in allowing for a stage at which voicing of word-initial /p,t,k/ occurred as regularly as it did in word-medial (weak) position, we run counter to the notion of a developing strength pattern: speakers could not become aware of the 'strength' of word- initial position if lenition occurred there as well as word-medially. Thus, W argues, there had to be a stage when the allophonic voicing of the word-medial ob- struents was NOT operating in tandem with a voicing of obstruents word-initially. (2) The other problematic issue is how to explain just how the obstruent strength pattern became extended to the sonorants /r,l,n/, since with obstruents the pattern developed in terms of a contrast in [voice] (voiceless word-initially, voiced word- medially), but for sonorants both the strong and weak variants are voiced. Surely the development of strengthened variants of the sonorants out of earlier Latin in- tervocalic geminates like -rr, -//-, -nn- had a role to play in the actual form that the strengthened word-initial sonorants would eventually take, but there is another fundamental difficulty in trying to unify the strength patterns of obstruents and sonorants, for with the obstruents there was only a weakening word-medially and no actual strengthening, while for sonorants there was only a strengthening word-initially and no actual weakening in any position. Nonetheless, W feels in- tuitively that there must be a real and identifiable connection between the two different strength patterns in Hispano-Romance. The attempt at a resolution, then, of these several core issues constitutes W's aim here and the gist of this chapter. Dale H artkemeyer: Review of Wireback ( 1 997) 231 The author describes certain modern-day Italian and Rhaeto-Romance dia- lects which have the lenition-type voicing of obstruents in word-initial position and considers in detail the various possible scenarios regarding the development/ disappearance of this kind of lenition process throughout Romania, and the rea- sons for such. Drawing on work by Walsh (1991), he concludes that the rule voicing /p,t,k/ word-medially was most probably lost in Hispano-Romance (perhaps through the phonologization of the word-medial voiced allophones) be- fore it had a chance to become extended widely, if at all, in word-initial position. This way, as W explains (p. 1 12), the obstruent strength pattern could survive intact from the be- ginning of voicing in medial position until the reassignment of the voiced allophones of /p,t,k/ to /b,d,g/, and it was during this period that the pattern was extended to the sonorants. In trying to come to an understanding of how the strength pattern that arose from the obstruents came to apply to sonorants, a development motivated presumably by the aim of establishing a more general pattern symmetry within the grammar, as Hock (1986) proposes, W takes up a suggestion by Hall (1964) to the effect that Western Romance may at one stage have shared with Italo-Romance the process called syntactic doubling (s.d.), involving both obstruents and sono- rants (e.g., ad padre [ap#padre] 'to father', et rabia [er#rabja] 'and anger'). W notes, however, that Hall reported that he estimated the frequency of s.d. at only about 19% and therefore dismissed it as insufficient to lead to the generalization of the strengthened forms rr-, //-, nn- to word-initial cases in Hispano-Romance. W, however, believes there is a way to salvage this approach, which he considers quite promising, in effect by taking into account what might have been a higher PERCEIVED frequency of s.d. in early Hispano-Romance. One way this might have operated, he claims, relates to the identification of word-initial voiceless and word-medial geminate obstruents; after medial single /p,t,k/ had voiced to [b,d,g], initial /p,t,k/ and medial /pp,tt,kk/ were both left bearing the feature [-voice]. There must have been a stage, he argues, when postvocalic word-initial [p,t,k] as well as initial doubled [pp,tt,kk] (from cases like [ap#padre]) were both regarded as strong (exponents of strength being length and lack of voicing); in this way strong initial /p,t,k/ may have come to be perceived as long, even in postvocalic contexts like [meo#padre], thus enhancing the perceptual frequency of the phe- nomenon. A parallel development of doubling is proposed for the sonorants: through analogy with the strong obstruents, sequences like mea rabia may have come to be pronounced as [mear#rabja]. W summarizes his proposal in these terms (p. 118): Thus, the strong word boundary, defined for the obstruents pri- marily according to [voice] and secondarily by syntactic doub- ling, could have been extended to postvocalic word-initial sono- rants as lengthening, especially since voicing would not have been extended because the sonorants were already voiced. 232 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998) Given W's proposal, one might be prompted to inquire into the feasibility of the chronology here; for example, how early is the stage of s.d. conceived to be, and would function words like Lat. ad and et still be C-final, to induce the doubling, at that stage? Another way W explains for enhancing the frequency of word-initial /rr, U, nn/ is related to the fact that /r/, IV, and /n/ were permissible word-final Cs in His- pano-Romance, so cases like /r#r/ could easily arise across word boundaries (e.g., * OSp.fablar raudo 'to speak rapidly'). Cases like this involving Ixl would be par- I ticularly common, he claims, given that infinitives end in l-xl. Again, it would be well here to consider the chronological stage at which this s.d. process is envi- sioned; it is more likely that at the presumably early stage when it might have oc- curred, infinitives had not yet undergone apocope and so would more likely still have ended in /-are, -ere, -ire/. In sum, W holds that these and other lexical items with word-final Ixl could have given s.d. 'the support it needed to achieve gener- alization to all word-initial hi phonemes', and he notes that if the obstruent strength pattern really did play a key role in the phenomenon of sonorant strengthening, Ixl undoubtedly was the first of the sonorants affected by this pat- tern extension, since it is the one sonorant that has been universally strengthened in Hispano-Romance. Although he admits the possibility that HI and /n/ may have become strengthened — in those languages/dialects that show strengthened variants — directly through adoption of the obstruent pattern, he regards it as more likely that word-initial variants like those in, say, Cat. lluna 'moon' or Leonese hadar 'to swim', arose through analogy with the strengthened initial Ixl. The material in this chapter relates to W's thesis that phonological changes arise in response to surface phonetic variations, particularly in regard to his claim that the strength pattern had to arise at a stage during which allophonic voicing of medial /p,t,k/ was occurring without the simultaneous voicing of these ob- struents in word-initial position. The phonological obstruent strength pattern thus arose out of the PERCEPTION of the surface allophonic voicing variations that speakers noted in the two different contexts; and then later on, it was the PERCEIVED length of word-initial obstruents in postvocalic contexts (and on that pattern, of word-initial sonorants as well) that played a key role, in W's concep- tion, in the establishment of the phonological pattern of sonorant strengthening. In general, the exposition throughout is clear and organized, and the text reads well. There are, however, a few points at which minor lapses might momen- tarily stymie the reader or evoke some reasonable doubt. On p. 17 in the context of discussion of Latin forms like LIGNA, SIGNA, W describes the nasal as being M preceded by 'a velar.. ./g/'. There is, of course, some doubt that the Latin ortho- ^ graphic sequence GN should be taken at face value; an alternate reading /°n/ has been proposed (cf. Lloyd 1984: 244). On p. 34 in his discussion of intrusive stops in Eng. words like rinse [rlnts] and warmth [warmpQ], W describes the intrusive oral stop [t] in rinse as 'homorganic with the following fricative'. How then does one explain the labial [p] preceding the interdental [0] in warmth! Rather it ap- pears that the excrescent stops in these cases are homorganic with the preceding nasals. On p. 66 W gives the derivation PLAGA > Sp. playa 'beach' and on p. 67 Dale Hartkemeyer: Review of Wireback (1997) 233 PLAGA > Pg. praia, whereas on p. 60 he provides the derivation PLAGIA > It. spiaggia 'beach'. Despite the fact that both Lloyd (1984) and Williams (1962) give Lat. PLAGA as the source for the Hispano-Romance words for 'beach', I would rather favor the form PLAGIA, as Penny (1991: 70) gives, since the pho- netic developments into the daughter languages are then much more straightfor- ward, and the inconsistency with the derivation of the Italian form given is thus eliminated. On p. 68 W provides the derivation FLAGRARE > Pg. cheirar 'to smell'. A brief note here to explain the, at first sight, baffling developments in- volving the cluster liquids in this and the word FLAGRANTE (also on this page) would help to orient the reader better: V.L. FLAGRARE derives from earlier C.L. FRAGRARE by liquid dissimilation; later, the Portuguese-specific rhotacism proc- ess applies to V.L. FLAGRANTE >fragrante, thus bringing this reflex full-circle back to its original C.L. /fr/-shape. On p. 80 Ital. maschio is incorrectly glossed as 'skull' rather than 'male'. This appears to be merely a word-processing mixup of some sort, since the Italian word for 'skull' is teschio, a form illustrating the same Italian cluster which is under discussion in the passage. On p. 100 in the data set toward the middle of the page, the last two Latin examples RTVU and CANTAVI seem not really to belong in the grouping since they do not illustrate spirantiza- tion of original voiced occlusives. Finally, underlining or otherwise highlighting the segment/cluster of interest in the data lists would help in better focusing the reader's attention on the particular phonemes exemplifying the sound changes under discussion in the various passages. A few sporadic errata were noted (p. 36, bottom of page: text should read 'replaces the [+low] of the low-mid ld\ not /0/, as the text has; p. 38, last line, par. 2: 'complete', not 'compete'; p. 103, middle of page: upper case for LUPU; p. 103: should the a# in [a#begora] properly be la#?), but for the most part, the print and the overall text is clean and easy to read. An important strength of this book, a work fairly short in terms of pages, though conceptually replete, lies in identifying and treating in depth and detail, with copious references to the work of other important Romance linguists, three select and specific, but complex and thought-provoking issues in Spanish and Portuguese diachronic phonology. In a sense, the work serves as a concentrated and valuable survey of the literature on these three issues. Throughout, the author shows a knack for asking good, probing questions and then implementing his investigation well by systematically laying out the various possibilities, sce- narios, and hypotheses involved in the different lines of his search, carrying on a fascinating dialog with the many other researchers he cites in his work, and ex- amining carefully the strengths and weaknesses of the various possible ap- proaches to the issues under discussion, in terms of the supporting evidence available. REFERENCES BROWMAN. Catherine, & Louis GOLDSTEIN. 1991. Gestural structures: Distinct- iveness, phonological processes, and historical change. Modularity and the 234 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998) Motor Theory of Speech Perception: Proceedings of a Conference to Honor Alvin M. Liberman, ed. by Ignatius G. Mattingly & Michael Stud- dert-Kennedy, 313-338. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. HALL, Robert A., Jr. 1964. Initial consonants and syntactic doubling in West Ro- mance. Language 40.551-56. HOCK, Hans H. 1985. Regular metathesis. Linguistics 23.529-46. . 1986. Principles of Historical Linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. LABOV, William. 1981. Resolving the Neogrammarian controversy. Language 57.267-308. . 1994. Principles of Linguistic Change: Internal and External Evidence. Oxford: Blackwell. LLOYD, Paul M. 1987. From Latin to Spanish. Philadelphia: The American Philo- sophical Society. PENNY, Ralph. 1991. A History of the Spanish Language. Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press. SCHANE, Sanford A. 1989. Diphthongs and monophthongs in early Romance. Studies in Romance Linguistics, ed. by Carl Kirschner & Janet DeCesaris, 365-76. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. TORREBLANCA, Maximo. 1990. La evolution /kl-, pi-, fl-/ > /O/ en espanol. Re- vista de filologia espahola 70.317-27. WALSH, Thomas J. 1991. The demise of lenition as a productive phonological process in Hispano-Romance. Linguistic Studies in Medieval Spanish, ed. by Ray Harris-Northall & Thomas D. Cravens, 149-63. Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies. WANNER, Dieter. 1989. On metathesis in diachrony. Papers from the 25th An- nual Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society: The General Session, ed. by Caroline Wiltshire, Randolph Graczyk, & Bradley Music, 434-50. Chicago: CLS. WILLIAMS, Edwin B. 1962. From Latin to Portuguese. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Inventory reduction sale! Available back issues of Studies in the Linguistic Sciences are now being offered at greatly reduced prices as long as quantities last. (Contributors to any issue of SLS receive an additional 25% discount.) See the Order Form on the next page. For a listing of the contents of each issue, consult our Homepage: http://www.cogsci.uiuc.edu/linguistics/SLS/sls.html ♦ * * * Educational Institutions in Developing Countries: A set of all available issues may be obtained upon payment Of SHIPPING COSTS ONLY. Contact Studies in the Linguistic Sciences at our postal address or e-mail: deptling@uiuc.edu or fax: [USA] 217-333-3466 Inventory Sale as Long as Issues are Available! Studies in the Linguistic Sciences University of Illinois - Department of Linguistics 4088 FLB, 707 South Mathews Avenue Urbana, IL 61801 Please fill out this form and return it with the correct payment plus postage . Please send me the following copies of Studies in the Linguistic Sciences: 7.2 Papers in General Linguistics $2, 50 /$ 1.00 8.1 Papers in General Linguistics $2,50 /$ 1.00 8.2 Papers in General Linguistics $2.50 /$1.00 9:1 Papers in General Linguistics $2. 50 /$ 1.00 9.2 Papers on Relational Grammar and Semantics $2,50 /$ 1.00 10.1 Papers in General Linguistics $2 , 50 /$ 1.00 10.2 Studies in Arabic Linguistics $2 50/ $ 1.00 11.1 Papers in General Linguistics $2, 50 /$ 1.00 11.2 Dimensions of South Asian Linguistics $2,50 /$ 1.00 12.1 Papers in General Linguistics $2.50 /$1.00 12.2 Papers on Diachronic Syntax: Six Case Studies $2.50/ $ 1.00 13.1 Papers in General Linguistics $2. 50/ $ 1.00 13.2 Studies in Language Variation: Nonwestern Case Studies $2. 50 /$ 1.00 14.1 Papers in General Linguistics $2.50/ $ 1.00 14.2 Language in African Culture and Society $2, 50/ $ 1.00 15.1 Papers in General Linguistics $2. 50/ $ 1.00 15.2 Linguistic Studies in Memory of Theodore M. Lighter $2, 50/ $ 1.00 16.1 Papers in General Linguistics $3.00/$ 1 .00 16.2 Illinois Studies in Korean Linguistics $3.00/$ 1 .00 17.1 Papers from the 1986 Asian Languages Analysis Roundtable $3.00/$ 1 .00 17.2 Papers in General Linguistics $3.00/$ 1 .00 18.1 Papers in General Linguistic $3.00/$ 1 .00 18.2 Papers in General Linguistics $3,00/$ 1 .00 19.1 Papers in General Linguistics $3,75/$ 1 .00 19.2 The Contributions of African Linguistics to Linguistic Theory 1 $3.75/$ 1 .00 20.1 The Contributions of African Linguistics to Linguistic Theory 2 $3.75/$ 1 .00 20.2 Linguistics for the Nineties, Papers from a Lecture Series in Celebration of the Department's 25th Anniversary $3.75/$ 1 .00 20.3 Meeting Handbook: 13th South Asian Languages Analysis Roundtable, 25-27 May, 1991, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign $5, 00 /$ 1.00 21.1 Spring 1991 Papers in General Linguistics $3.75/$ 1.00 21.2 Fall 1991 Illinois Studies in Korean Linguistics, II $3.75/$ 1 .00 22.1 Spring 1992 Papers in General Linguistics $3,75/$ 1 .00 23.1 Spring 1993 Papers in General Linguistics $8.00 24.1/2 Spring/Fall 1994 (double issue) Proceedings of the 4th FLSMA $16.00 25.1 Spring 1995 Papers in General Linguistics $8.00 25.2 Fall 1995 Language and Gender $8.00 26.1/2 Spring/Fall 1996 (double issue) Studies in Chinese Linguistics $20.00 27:1 Spring 1997 Papers in Phonology $10.00 27:2 Fall 1997 Papers in General Linguistics $10.00 28:1 Spring 1998 Papers in General Linguistics $10.00 NOTE: Sales Tax must be included as follows (excluding organizations): IL 7-1/4%; IN 5%; MI 6%; MN 6.5%; OH 5% and WI 5%. Checks or money orders in U.S. Dollars, drawn on a U.S. Bank, payable to: University of Illinois. Check or money order enclosed $ (Please add postage: $2.00 first issue, $1.50 for each additional issue.) Name: □ Contributor to SLS (25% off) Vol. , No. e-mail: Visit our HOMEPAGE: http://www.cogsci.uiuc.edu/linguistics/SLS/sls.html for information on SLS, including: Editorial policy, StyleSheet, Contents of each issue to date, Complete Author Index, Ordering information and Order Form STUDIES IN THE LINGUISTIC SCIENCES VOLUME 28, NO. 1 (SPRING 1998) PAPERS IN GENERAL LINGUISTICS CONTENTS GEORGIA GREEN: Unnatural kind terms and a theory of the lexicon MOLLY HOMER: Conditioning factors for progressive and regressive nasal harmony JOSE IGNACIO HUALDE & INAKI GAMINDE: Vowel interaction in Basque: A nearly exhaustive catalogue YAMUNA KACHRU: Culture and speech acts: Evidence fom Indian and Singaporean English MOSES K. KAMBOU: The acquisition of Lingala tense-aspect by American college students HYO- YOUNG KIM: Prenucleus glides in Korean HIROKI KOGA: English Tough Sentence Analysis of Japanese 'Intransitivized' Verbal Gerund +Ar('be') Sentences ELIZABETH MARTIN: The use of English in written French advertising: A study of code-switching, code-mixing, and borrowing in a commercial context EDWARD A. MINER: Discursive constructions of Kiswahili-speakers in Ugandan popular media JOYCE B. G. SUKUMANE: African Languages, English, and educational policy in Namibia REVIEW ARTICLE Kenneth J. Wireback: The Role of Phonological Structure in Sound Change from Latin to Spanish and Portuguese. (American University Studies, Series II, Romance Languages & Literature, 215.) New York: Peter Lang, 1997. (Dale Hartkemeyer) Studies in The Linguistic Sciences VOLUME 28, NUMBER 2 (FALL 1998) DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URB ANA-CHAMPAIGN ST, 28 IHfl T?*l X>PY 2 r* m % '$ "•:•:- i STUDIES IN THE LINGUISTIC SCIENCES (ISSN 0049-2388) publication of the department of linguistics in the College of liberal arts and Sciences of the university of illinois at urbana-champaign GENERAL EDITOR: Elmer H. Antonsen EDITORIAL ASSISTANT: Jennifer Griffith EDrrORIAL BOARD: Elabbas Benmamoun, Eyamba G. Bokamba, Chin-Chuan Cheng, Jennifer S. Cole, Adele Goldberg, Georgia M. Green, Hans Henrich Hock, Braj B. Kachru, Yamuna Kachru, Chin-W. Kim, Charles W. Kisseberth, Peter Lasersohn, Howard Maclay, Jerry L. Morgan, Rajeshwari Pandharipande, Daniel Silverman, James H. Yoon, and Ladislav Zgusta. AIM: SLS is intended as a forum for the presentation of the latest original re- search by the faculty and students of the Department of Linguistics, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Scholars outside the Department and from other institutions are also cordially invited to submit original linguistic research for consideration. In all cases, articles submitted for publication will be reviewed by a panel of at least two experts in the appropriate field to determine suitability for publication. Copyright remains with the individual authors. Authors of articles will receive one copy of the particular issue and 10 offprints of their individual contributions. SLS appears twice a year, and one issue is traditionally devoted to restricted, specialized topics. A complete list of available back issues is on the last page of this issue. BOOKS FOR REVIEW: Review copies of books may be sent to: Editor, Studies in the Linguistic Sciences Department of Linguistics, 4088 For. Lang. Bldg., University of Illinois 707 S. Mathews, Urbana, IL 61801, USA SUBSCRIPTION: Requests for subscriptions should be addressed to SLS Sub- scriptions, Department of Linguistics, 4088 Foreign Languages Building, Univer- a sity of Illinois, 707 South Mathews, Urbana, Illinois 61801. Price: $10.00 per single issue. e-mail address: deptling@uiuc.edu Telephone: (217) 333-3563 Fax: (217) 333-3466 Homepage: http://www.cogsci.uiuc.edu/linguistics/SLS/sls.html STUDIES IN THE LINGUISTIC SCIENCES Papers from the Symposium: 'The Linguistic Sciences in a Changing Context' EDITORS Jerry Morgan Elmer H. Antonsen and Papers in General Linguistics EDITOR Elmer H. Antonsen EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Jennifer Griffith VOLUME 28, NUMBER 2 (FALL 1998) DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN > > CONTENTS PAPERS FROM THE SYMPOSIUM: 'THE LINGUISTIC SCIENCES IN A CHANGING CONTEXT' Edited by Jerry L. Morgan & Elmer H. Antonsen PREFACE: Braj B. Kachru, Director, Center for Advanced Study 3 FOREWORD: Jerry L. Morgan, Head, Department of Linguistics 7 PAUL NEWMAN: We has seen the enemy and it is us: The endangered languages issue as a hopeless cause 11 WILLIAM D. DAVIES: Strengthening the ties that exist: Reexploring charted territory 23 DONNA CHRISTIAN: Applying linguistics and applied liinguistics in 2000 and beyond 31 MOLLY MACK: If I only had a brain: Examination of the past, present, and future roles of the neurosciences in the linguistic sciences 41 STEPHEN E. LEVINSON: Human-machine communication by voice 93 DANIEL JURAFSKY: Linguistics in a computational world 107 LISE MENN: Linguistics and interdisciplinary initiatives at Colorado: Obstacles and opportunities 117 BRIAN D. JOSEPH: Linguistics for 'everystudent' 123 SALIKOKO S. MUFWENE: The ecology of language: New imperatives in linguistics curricula 135 PAPERS IN GENERAL LINGUISTICS Edited by Elmer H. Antonsen LEE S. BICKMORE: Metathesis and Dahl's law in Ekegusii 149 GERARD KEDREBEOGO: Language maintenance and language shift in Burkina Faso: The case of the Koromba 1 69 I Papers from the Symposium: 'The Linguistic Sciences in a Changing Context' 30-31 October 1998 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign A symposium in the Center for Advanced Study Series: 'Territories & Boundaries: Cross-Disciplinary Research and Curriculum' EDITORS Jerry L. Morgan & Elmer H. Antonsen i PREFACE It was during the academic year 1997-98 that the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, initiated an ongoing seminar series for exploration of Territories and Boundaries: Cross-Disciplinary Research and Curriculum'. The focus of this series is on selected theoretical, methodological, and curriculum-related aspects of cross-disciplinary research. As part of the se- mester-long seminars in which students and faculty participate, the Center also organizes thematic symposia related to the topic of the seminars. The inaugural symposium, devoted to 'The Linguistic Sciences in a Changing Context', was held on October 30 and 31, 1998, in the University's Levis Faculty Center. This symposium brought together several department chairs and others in Linguistics and related disciplines, primarily from the Midwest, with the goal of furthering discussion of future directions which the field of linguistics should take in order to stay current and relevant in a broader, challenging academic context. That the linguistic sciences should be the first choice for this series need not be emphasized here. It is generally recognized that language — and language- related issues — touch us all internationally as professionals, as social activists, and as members of the larger society. That decision, therefore, was easy to make. What was, however, difficult — and agonizing — to determine was the list of pos- sible participants in the symposium: Which school of linguistics? Which sub- fields? Which paradigms? How many? As we know, no two linguists agree on these points. What we finally did was to apply a zoologist colleague's response to the celebrated British phoneti- cian Daniel Jones. When asked how a zoologist would define a dog, Jones was told that 'A dog is a four-footed mammal recognized as a dog by another dog.' The dogness, however, forms a cline, and each breed of dog has shared charac- teristics. That is what distinguishes one breed from another. Daniel Jones, I am told, liked this definition and used to define other phoneticians by this standard. If it was good for the venerable Jones, I believe, it is good for us. In selecting the program and participants, we may not have been able to be all-encompassing, but let me assure you that the committee (Jerry Morgan, Chair, Adele Goldberg, Braj B. Kachru) had a somewhat complex task and we did our best within our resources and time-frame. The symposium was broadly structured around four themes: 1. Current status and direction 2. Crossing borders: Exploring links with other disciplines 3. Curriculum design 4. Endangered world languages, linguistic curriculum and professional responsibility Additional topics which were not formally included in the program were not ex- cluded and were insightfully discussed during the meetings. 4 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1999) One major motivation for this symposium was to initiate a forum for the ex- change of ideas and proposals, and to discuss various perspectives for the direc- tion of the profession in the coming decades. One criticism that our profession faces is that we do not generally engage in self-evaluation, as do sister disciplines, such as anthropology, sociology, and psychology, and, indeed, most of the hard sciences. Linguists have an eagle-eye for minute dissection, analysis, and interpreta- m tion of language data. But critics outside the profession — and many within the ™ profession as well — express frustration that the linguistics profession in general tends to follow an ostrich-like attitude about the social responsibilities of their discipline and the design of the curriculum. One wonders with Bolinger whether linguists tend to function essentially as 'social sideliners'. The major concerns are about responsibility of the profession, and relevance of the curriculum and its flexibility — for both national and international students. It was over a generation ago, in 1964, during the peak of the Structuralist phase in linguistics, that six architects of the discipline in the USA conceded in the Report of the Commission on the Humanities submitted to the American Council of the Learned Societies that 'a fair portion of highly educated laymen see in linguistics the great enemy of all they hold dear'. These six gurus, Charles Ferguson, Morris Halle, Eric Hemp, Archibald Hill, Thomas Sebeok, and William Moulton, have in one role or another been our teachers. And now, one might ask: after more than three decades has the situation changed? Has linguistics in a seri- ous sense impacted language-related fields? Perhaps not. In 1980, Bolinger la- mented that: In language there are no licensed practitioners but the woods are full of midwives, herbalists, colonic irrigationists, bone setters and general purpose witch doctors — some abysmally ignorant, others with a rich fund of practical knowledge — whom one shall lump together and call SHAMANS. (Dwight L. Bolinger. 1980. Language: The Loaded Weapon: The Use and Abuse of Language Today, p. 1. London: Longman,) These are sobering words from a very sober linguist of our times. In recent years a significant number of young linguistics graduates are ab- sorbed in the departments of English — both language and literature — nation- ally and internationally. And more specifically, they are employed in what the Australian lexicographer Susan Butler has called the 'ELT Empire'. This enter- m prise is not restricted to the USA or the UK but is present in most of resurgent ^ Asia and Africa. It was for this reason, and for strengthening interdisciplinary foundations with this fast emerging field, that Robert King of the Department of Linguistics at Texas made a plea, not too long ago, that linguists establish strong links with this swiftly expanding field. King's suggestion was not motivated ex- clusively for crossing over to greener pastures of this emerging international field. There were serious interdisciplinary academic arguments, too. And, of course, Preface 5 there are many other fields in which the linguistic sciences are relevant. The 'ELT Empire' is just one example. This volume discusses some of these fields in detail. At the University of Illinois, at the first retreat of the faculty of the depart- ment — just two years ago — Jerry Morgan raised the issues of relevance, inter- disciplinary collaboration, and evaluation of the linguistic curriculum. Morgan's concern was one reason that contributed to the idea and design of this sympo- sium. The Center for Advanced Study is grateful to Jerry Morgan and Adele Goldberg for their collaboration and active interest in organizing this symposium. This step — no doubt a modest step — will perhaps initiate more delibera- tions on this vital topic here at Illinois and elsewhere. Perhaps at the 1999 Lin- guistic Institute of the Linguistic Society of America we can meet again on this campus. At that Institute a larger international group of scholars will be present here with a variety of perspectives and varied experiences in the USA and else- where. My gratitude, appreciation and thanks for the success of the symposium are particularly due to the following: to Elmer H. Antonsen, Editor of the Studies in the Linguistic Sciences (SLS), for devoting an issue of the SLS to this symposium, and for editing the final version of the papers presented at the symposium: to Jesse G. Delia, Dean, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Illinois, and to the Department of Linguistics for their support; to H. Jeanie Taylor, Asso- ciate Director of the Center for Advanced Study for coordinating the seminar and bringing this excellent group of scholars together, and to Liesel Wildhagen, Jackie R. Jenkins, Nancy Sarabi and Duane Swenson of the Center for doing one- hundred-and-one things with their usual efficiency and dedication for making this symposium on 'The Linguistic Sciences in a Changing Context' a memorable academic — and social — event . Braj B. Kachru Director and Professor Center for Advanced Study University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign # > FOREWORD Most departments of linguistics in North America were founded after the initial rush of enthusiasm for linguistics generated by the sudden emergence in the early 1960's of generative linguistics, and it is likely that most departments are still or- ganized around the view of the 60's and 70's of linguistics and its role in intellec- tual life. But a lot has changed since those heady days, not just in linguistics and its influence on other fields, but in American academia in general. The aim of our symposium was to take a look at where we are now by bringing together lin- guists and scholars in related fields for an exchange of views on the changing role of linguistics in the intellectual world, in academe, and in society; to discuss its current status, future directions, its relations to neighboring fields, its role in the education of non-linguists. The selection of speakers included active scholars both from linguistics and from other fields, and several linguists who are, or have been, involved in planning in departments of linguistics. Our hope was that the result would be useful to the field at large, in planning for the coming decades. This hope is realized in the papers presented in this volume. The topic of endangered languages was included as one of the few areas where linguistic research can have very direct social relevance. Both of our pa- pers on this topic, by Paul Newman and by Salikoko Mufwene, take a pessimistic view of the current state of affairs in work by linguists on endangered languages. Newman argues that in spite of the lip-service given to the problem by individual linguists and by the profession, it is unlikely that much will be done to build a sci- entific record of dying languages. Mufwene argues that linguists are ill-prepared by their training to offer solutions for problems of endangerment. Both papers implicitly and explicitly suggest directions for improvement. Several papers touch on the relation of linguistics to other disciplines. Wil- liam Davies discusses ways to strengthen existing cross-disciplinary ties. Molly Mack's much-expanded paper provides a useful survey of issues in the neu- rosciences, focussing on potential areas of interaction between neuroscience and linguistics. Lise Menn discusses the nuts-and-bolts issues of interdisciplinary re- search, based on her own experiences in the Institute for Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Donna Christian discusses the interdiscipli- nary nature of applied linguistics, suggesting that training of students in linguis- tics should equip them to work in applied domains. Two papers, one by Steve Levinson and the other by Daniel Jurafsky, discuss the growing role of computation in linguistics; Jurafsky with a perspective from within linguistics, Levinson from the viewpoint of an engineer. Levinson calls for more collaboration between engineers and linguists in research on natural lan- guage processing by computers, and suggests the roles each field might play in successful collaboration. Jurafsky surveys the current role of computation in lin- guistic research and in the classroom, and takes a look at the job market. All the papers in this volume touch upon issues in teaching linguistics. Brian Jo- seph's insightful paper addresses the problem of teaching linguistics, offering 8 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) proposals for making such courses more appealing to undergraduate non-lin- guists, by emphasizing issues and perspectives that relate most closely to the ex- periences of daily life and the common basis of humanity. Our thanks to the participants for taking time from their teaching and research to reflect on these neglected issues. We hope the record of these reflections will be of use to the field in the coming years. A Jerry L. Morgan, Professor and Head Department of Linguistics University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign i > > Session I: Current Status and Direction Chair: Adele Goldberg Friday, 30 October 1999 9:00 a.m. -11:40 a.m. Studies in the Linguistic Sciences Volume 28, Number 2 (Fall 1998) WE HAS SEEN THE ENEMY AND IT IS US: THE ENDANGERED LANGUAGES ISSUE AS A HOPELESS CAUSE Paul Newman Indiana University pnxxpn @ indiana.edu Linguists claim to be concerned about the endangered languages issue. In reality, nothing substantial is being done about it. There are three main reasons for this. First, linguistics as a discipline is domi- nated by abstract theoretical concerns in which fieldwork plays a mi- nor part. Second, those dedicated linguists who are involved in basic documentation of endangered languages are drawn into and have their time sapped by language revitalization and linguistic social work proj- ects. Third, linguistic Ph.D. students from non-Western developing countries have been allowed to write grammars of their own languages by introspection and thus have not been trained in field work tech- niques. Nor have they been encouraged to conduct basic research on other (often endangered) languages in their home countries. In sum, linguists will continue to hold conference after conference in which they decry the inexorable loss of human languages around the globe, but in fact little will be done to provide a scientific record of these languages before they die away. 1.0 Introduction The figure often bandied about, taken from statements by Michael Krauss 1992, is that there are some 6,000 languages in the world, half of which are likely to be lost within the next century. But, as he points out, the situation is even worse: of these 3,000 remaining, only 600 have a real chance of survival, i.e., if the trend persists, some 90% of the world's languages will be lost. The question Krauss (1992: 7) poses is: 'What are we linguists doing to prepare for this or to prevent this cata- strophic destruction of the linguistic world?' It is only within the past ten or so years that linguists have begun to focus on this issue and to stress the point that the disappearance of languages and linguistic diversity is a major loss to linguistic scholarship and science. Since the endan- gered languages issue was brought to the fore, however, it has caught the attention of the linguistics profession and has stimulated a large amount of activity. There have been a variety of conferences on the subject and the appearance of a number of major publications, including Brenzinger, Heine, & Sommer 1991, Fishman 1991, Robins & Uhlenbeck 1991, Brenzinger 1998, Grenoble & Whaley 1998, and Matsumura 1998. The lead article in the March 1992 issue of Language, written 12 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) by a group of distinguished linguists, was devoted to the matter (see Hale et al. 1992). Even more striking as been the creation of organizations and activities de- voted to the topic. For example, the Linguistic Society of America has a standing Committee on Endangered Languages and their Preservation; there is a Founda- tion for Endangered Languages at the University of Bristol, UK, and an Interna- tional Clearing House for Endangered Languages at the University of Tokyo. UNESCO is involved in the preparation of an Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger of Disappearing. Non-profit foundations are also springing up, e.g., the Endangered Languages Fund (New Haven) and Terralingua, Partnerships for Lin- guistic and Biological Diversity (Hancock, Michigan). Although I think that Marianne Mithun (1998:163) is stretching it when she states, 'At long last the tragedy of language loss worldwide has begun to enter the public conscious [sic],' it is true that awareness of the issue is starting to extend beyond the narrow confines of professional linguists. Here one can cite the infor- mative article that appeared in the New York Times (Brooke 1998) and a short piece found in Newsweek (Raymond 1998). My intention here is not to raise the question of why languages disappear (see Mufwene, this volume). Nor do I want to get into the sensitive question of whether it makes any sense to try to renew or revive dying languages (see Lade- foged 1992): once one leaves the realm of emotional hand twisting by overly sen- timental scholars, the question is much more debatable than appears at first sight. However, I think that professional linguists can agree that the disappearance of a language without documentation is a huge scientific loss. Our linguistic scientific enterprise depends on the multiplicity of languages and the knowledge of linguis- tic diversity. It is only though knowledge of diverse languages with different structures and belonging to different language families that we can truly begin to gain an understanding of universal grammar, i.e., the nature of the human lan- guage capacity. Similarly, our understanding of linguistic typology and our ability to accurately classify languages and reconstruct proto-forms depends on the avail- ability of a wide array of languages. If one believes this, if one takes the position that no language should be al- lowed to become extinct without having been scientifically preserved, then one has to acknowledge that the task is urgent. Speakers of endangered languages are not only dying away — the most obvious and final loss — but they are also for- getting their languages and losing command of the richness that defined that lan- guage as opposed to the one down the road. As Dixon (1997: 147n) correctly points out, 'A sad lesson that has been learnt from the study of language-death situations is that a community does not realize its language is threatened until it is too late to do anything to remedy the situation.' Dixon's view about what needs to be done is stated in unequivocal terms (p. 144): 'The most important task in linguistics today — indeed, the only really im- portant task — is to get out in the field and describe languages, while this still can Paul Newman: The endangered languages issue 13 be done. Self-admiration in the looking glass of formalist theory can wait; that will always be possible. Linguistic description must be undertaken now.' Even if one puts some of the hyperbole aside, the truth is that the problem is real and we linguists are doing very little about it, apart from discussing the matter among ourselves so as to assuage our guilt. This is clearly a case where we cannot shift the blame to someone else: the failure to tackle the endangered languages cri- sis is not due to some budget dean nor to some philistine of a congressman nor to a CEO of some big corporation. The fault lies with us linguists, the people who should be up in arms about the problem. In essence, to quote Pogo, 'We has seen the enemy, and it is us.' What I would like to do now is discuss three areas in which we as linguists exacerbate rather than solve the problem. The discussions fall under three head- ings: First, we linguists don't care; second, we linguists care too much; and third, our non- western colleagues don't care and would be unprepared to help out even if they did. 2.0 We linguists don't care 2.1 Theory One hates to make blanket generalizations about a discipline as varied and with so many subfields as linguistics. Nevertheless, it is probably fair to say that in terms of overall world view and intellectual orientation, linguistics as a field is funda- mentally theory driven as opposed to data driven. There was a time when linguis- tics was inextricably tied up with the study of non-written, non-western languages; but this is not the case today. General linguists aren't opposed to the study of these languages; it's just that it isn't important to them. What is viewed as important is trying to characterize the species-shared human language capability, i.e., linguis- tics has branched off from its anthropological and philological roots and has es- sentially become a branch of cognitive psychology. The lack of concern about the endangered languages problem is an extension of the general lack of interest in de- scriptive empirical research, whatever the language might be. This lack of interest is reflected in the structure of graduate linguistics curricula (and particularly the marginal position of field methods classes, see Newman 1992), the content of lin- guistics courses at the introductory as well as advanced levels, and in professional hiring practices. Someone might legitimately ask whether there is any objective evidence to document my claim that the empirical study of 'exotic' languages oc- cupies a marginal position in linguistics. To check this out, I decided to look at Ph.D. dissertations, since what students work on is probably a reasonable reflec- tion of the current ethos in a field and the interests of their teachers. I went through the linguistics section of Dissertation Abstracts International beginning in January 1997 and running through June, 1998, i.e., 18 months' worth of entries. Based primarily on the titles, with a quick glance at the abstracts themselves, I classified the dissertations into a number of crude categories, such as English/theoretical, so- ciolinguistics, ESL, Romance, African, Native American, etc. Granted that my methodology was a bit haphazard and unsystematic, the results were nevertheless instructive. In the year and a half, there were a total of 485 dissertations. Of these, 14 STUDIES IN THE LINGUISTIC SCIENCES 28:2 (FALL 1998) 280 were concerned with English or general linguistic matters; 97 were on Euro- pean languages, 83 of which were on the big three, namely, Romance, Slavic, Germanic; 78 were on Asian languages, of which 69 were also limited to three groups, namely, Chinese, Japanese, Korean. These three macro categories account for 455 of the dissertations, i.e., 94% of the total. The other 30 dissertations, i.e., the remaining 6%, were on languages of Austronesia (3), Australia (2), Native America (13) and Africa (12). But not all of these 30 represent fieldwork on small A 'exotic' languages, since (a) they included studies of major national languages V such as Quechua, Hausa, Swahili, and Sango, and (b) it was not always possible to determine from the abstract whether fieldwork was involved or whether it was a theoretical study drawing on secondary materials. 2.2 The culture of linguists (as opposed to anthropologists) When linguistics was a part of anthropology, as it was for Boas, Sapir, Voegelin, Lounsbury, et al., fieldwork was a natural component of work in the discipline. Anthropology graduate students have traditionally been expected to go into the field; a student who wanted to do an 'arm-chair' dissertation was viewed as a pro- fessional misfit. Crediting Kroeber, Geertz (1984:265) speaks of the 'centrifugal impulse of anthropology — distant places, distant times, distant species ... distant grammars.' Clearly there are problems with basing scholarly pursuits on the ap- peal of the 'exotic' (consider, for example, the concerns expressed by Said 1978), but what is striking about linguistics nowadays, as opposed to anthropology, is its total separation from fieldwork. My personal experience with linguistics graduate students is that they display a singular lack of venturesomeness. Students aren't attracted by the idea of fieldwork for the simple reason that they don't want to go to the field. I suspect that if I had funding to send a dozen graduate students to re- mote places to do work on dying languages, I would have trouble giving the money away. The students whom I have met would much rather stay in the com- fort of a safe place such as Bloomington or Champaign-Urbana or Evanston working within the comfortable confines of the latest (and thus non-risky) linguis- tic theory. Dixon's charge for linguistics to get out in the field will fall on deaf ears because it runs counter to the prevailing culture and personality of the people who now make up the discipline of linguistics. 3.0 We linguists care too much When Emmon Bach, a well-known and distinguished linguist, was working on Wakashan, an endangered language of British Columbia, he was challenged by one of the elders as to why he and his community should care about the linguistic m work being done. Bach's response was to formulate the following principle (Bach ^ 1995): T will try to put at least half of my time and effort in working in a commu- nity into things that make sense for the community. What that work might be can range from things as simple as copying tapes for people who want them, through preparing texts, etc., in ways that are accessible, to helping out with language pro- grams etc' This quotation has been repeated with approbation (and without chal- lenge) by various linguists since, e.g., by a speaker at a fieldwork and ethics sym- posium held at the 1998 meeting of the Linguistic Society of America and by the Paul Newman: The endangered languages issue 15 author of a chapter submitted to a volume in preparation on linguistic fieldwork (Newman & Ratliff forthcoming). Whereas fieldwork does entail real ethical and professional responsibilities to the people whom one is studying (see Greaves 1994; Newman 1992), I am troubled by the notion that we should spend half our time doing what I would call linguistic social work. I know that this is an unfashionable position in the late 1990s, but I would argue that there is a value in pure fundamental research and that as scientists we have to resist the ever-present pressure to justify our work on grounds of immediate social relevance. The justification for doing research on an endangered language has to be the scientific value of providing that documenta- tion and in preserving aspects of that language and culture for posterity. The pur- pose cannot be to make the few remaining speakers feel good. Having said this — and in principle, I do believe strongly in the correctness of this viewpoint — the reality is that it is impossible to escape the practical and emotional pressures to behave like a caring human being in the field, nor would one want to (see Grinewald 1998:157). In many cases, languages are dying be- cause communities are dying, and they are dying because they are poor and have been neglected, if not directly exploited. The linguist who is welcomed into such a situation will either fail to establish rapport, in which case the research will be a failure, or will establish rapport, in which case he/she will increasingly acquire so- cial and professional responsibilities that will compete for research time. The re- sult is that the good-hearted, well-meaning linguist, for whom we can all extend our admiration, will do less of a job of basic documentation than one would have hoped for. One might argue that in the case of endangered languages, the intertwining of language preservation as a social goal and language documentation as a scien- tific goal is, if not beneficial, at least harmless. I think otherwise. To begin with, language preservation projects drain resources from the im- portant linguistic task of primary documentation, both in terms of personnel and in terms of funding. A case in point is the American Indian Studies Research Institute at Indiana University. For the past half a dozen years or so, the Institute's directors (Ray Demallie and Douglas Parks) and various research associates and research assistants have been doing intensive work on six native American languages, two of which, Lakota and Dakota, are holding their own, four of which, Nakoda (= Assiniboine), Pawnee, (South Bend) Skirii, and Arikara are down to the last few speakers. One should be pleased that such an active research unit exists. However, one needs to point out that a major portion of the Institute's work, work that has received generous funding, has been devoted to the preparation of language teaching materials in Arikara and Nakoda for use in the schools. If one looks at the Arikara materials, for example, one cannot help but be impressed. They are mas- terfully done with beautiful typography and graphics, and with interactive record- ings, etc. Given the quality of the work, which had to have been labor intensive, one can easily appreciate that over half the time and half the money of the Institute has been devoted to the preparation these materials. But what are these materials? 1 6 STUDIES IN THE LINGUISTIC SCIENCES 28:2 (FALL 1 998 ) Mostly they are language lessons intended to be used in culture enrichment classes for Arikara students who no longer speak the language and who are not about to revive it. So, although the mood at the Institute is uplifting (and when people from the project go to the Arikara reservation in North Dakota, they are appreciated for the work that they are doing) the fact is that the time and energy of highly skilled and deeply committed field linguists are being dissipated. Resources that could have been used for the basic linguistic description of a goodly number of endan- gered languages have been devoted to what are in reality ethnic awareness/cultural heritage projects. The above remarks are not intended to be critical of my colleagues at Indi- ana. In fact, they are also seriously involved in the preparation of dictionaries and text collection of the kind that we so desperately need for endangered languages. The point that I want to make, and which I feel is valid, is that language preserva- tion/revival as a socially relevant issue has more 'sex appeal' than pure linguistics and thus is bound to seduce well-meaning scholars, especially when the appeal is accompanied by money. Just recently, for example, the Administration for Native Americans announced the availability of substantial grants (up to $125,000 per year for three years) in support of projects that will 'promote the survival and con- tinuing vitality of Native American languages' and will encourage the 'establishment and support of community Native American language projects to bring older and younger Native Americans together to facilitate and encourage the transfer of Native American language skills from one generation to another. . . ' (e- mail distribution from SMARTS grantline, fall, 1998). Given the paucity of funds from the National Science Foundation, etc., for basic research, one can understand why linguists would be thrilled to apply for such grants and, if successful, would gladly embark on the work. But, one can be sure that the Administration for Na- tive Americans is not going to fund revival projects on essentially moribund lan- guages spoken by the last 4 or 5 octogenarians — the money is more likely to go to support seemingly viable languages such as Navajo and Lakota. Moreover, even if funds were to be provided for work with truly endangered languages, such as Ari- kara, the applied nature of the projects would leave little room for pure research. Once one leaves the realm of North America, there is also a troublesome question regarding the appropriateness of an activist policy regarding preservation and revitalization of minority languages. A westerner who gets permission to con- duct basic linguistic research in Africa (or Asia or Latin America) is a guest in someone else's country who has been allowed to go there for specific scholarly purposes. Language policy in fragile multi-ethnic states is not a simple sociolin- guistic matter; rather, it is a serious, highly contentious political matter with which a foreigner should not become embroiled. If as part of its educational and eco- nomic policy, a country such as Nigeria should choose to promote its big lan- guages (e.g., Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo) at the expense of the small ones, the west- ern linguist who takes a 'proactive' role in defense of the smaller, endangered lan- guages is not only being presumptuous, but is also being personally reckless, thereby risking the continuation and success of the field research project, not to mention his/her own safety and welfare. As linguists, we can attempt to educate ♦ < Paul Newman: The endangered languages issue 17 and inform responsible persons in government, education, and business about the significance and value of linguistic diversity in their countries, but we have no right to intervene in domestic policy matters nor to undertake linguistic social work under the guise of scientific research. 4.0 Our non-western colleagues don't care and would be unprepared to help out even if they did It is now 1998, but generally speaking we American (and European) linguists function in many ways just as if it were 1968 or 1948 or even 1928. That is to say, although languages are dying in Brazil and India and Nigeria and Indonesia, we operate as if both the problem and the solution were ours and not the Brazilians', the Indians', the Nigerians', or the Indonesians'. We're way off the mark. Colette Grinevald (1998:151) has written: To accept the fact that South American linguistics should be carried out as much as possible by South Ameri- cans has in fact deep implications for the way we conduct our business and the way we basically conceive of our role as linguists.' One could argue whether this necessarily 'should' be the case, but for very real practical matters, this has to be the case, and part of our inability to address the endangered languages problem in any meaningful way is due to the failure to recognize this point. Even if we — by which I mean we Americans and western Europeans — had the will to carry out the needed empirical research on endangered languages around the world, there is no way that we could do it because of political and economic impediments. Most scholars are too well aware of the political and social realities of working in the developing world, namely the persistent hostility to foreign researchers. In many countries, it is a major hassle to get a visa, not to mention official permission to conduct research, and even if these are forthcoming, there are problems in getting in-country cooperation and support. A more serious problem, however, is research funding: it just costs too much money for an American scholar to go abroad to carry out field research. One might be lucky in getting funds for one person to work one year on one endangered language, but who is going to attend to the other 10 or 20 or 30 languages? The only way endangered languages in Africa, for ex- ample, are going to get described is if African linguists and their African students do the work. Otherwise it can't get done. In some sense linguistics in the African area, to which I will limit myself for purposes of the discussion, is already falling into the hands of Africans. Anyone who now attends the Annual Conference on African Linguistics (soon to celebrate its 30th anniversary) cannot help but be struck by the shift in the balance of the participants as opposed to twenty or so years ago. At that time, most of the partici- pants where white (and white males at that); nowadays Africans (some established scholars, some Ph.D. students) generally constitute at least half of the people pres- ent. Further evidence of the importance of Africans in African linguistic research can be gathered by looking at recent Ph.D. dissertations. A count of dissertations on African languages (excluding Arabic) listed in the African Studies Association Newsletter from 1990 to the present (which includes theses from Canada and the 18 STUDIES IN THE LINGUISTIC SCIENCES 28:2 (FALL 1998) United Kingdom as well as the U.S.) gives a total of 95 theses. Of these, 55 were by Africans and only 40 by non-Africans. At first sight, these figures might be heartening. However, there is a fact of real importance for the endangered languages question that does not come out of the raw numbers. When one looks at the topics and languages treated by the Afri- cans, it turns out that, as best as one can surmise from peoples' names, almost all of the theses are descriptions of the writer's own language. In effect, having said A that the study of endangered languages in Africa has to be done by Africans, we ^ find that these people are no more qualified and ready to undertake the task than the most abstract, theoretical MIT linguist. What went wrong? I would suggest that we western linguists have unwittingly distorted the intellectual development and orientation of non-western linguists studying in the U.S. (and Europe) so as to exclude them from any involvement in the endangered languages issue. For an African to write on his own language, e.g., an Igbo speaker to write on Igbo, is essentially the same as an English speaker writing on English. Those of use who consider ourselves descriptive field linguists and who have little patience with the English speaker who does the umpteenth study of reflexives or what have you in English — obviously in light of the latest theory — have failed to recognize that what characterizes our work is the excitement of discovery with regard to a language that is outside of ourselves, and that the Igbo person who writes on Igbo is not partaking of the same enterprise. Those of us who are quick to say, 'Who needs another study of English?' or 'Why can't that person go to the field and do something of real value such as describing a poorly known language?' do not pass judgment on our African students for what they are doing. We forget that whereas Hausa may be exotic for me, it is not for the Hausa speaker. And by allowing the African students to work exclusively on their own languages, we fail to communi- cate the importance (and excitement) of fieldwork, which is essential if the person is ever going to do basic research when he/she returns home. In effect, we never encourage or cajole our African students who speak major languages, such as Hausa or Yoruba or Swahili or Lingala or Oromo, to accept the view that what they must do when they finish their degrees and return home is undertake the study of minority languages and, moreover, that they must pressure their own students in their home universities to do the same. For a variety of reasons, the students going to universities and studying linguistics (whether in their own countries or abroad) are rarely members of these minority communities themselves; it is members of dominant groups who have these opportunities. As members of our discipline, with all the rights and interests and responsibilities thereof, they should have been A brought into the endangered languages fold. Unfortunately, in the absence of vi- ™ sionary scholars who fervently believe that language loss is indeed a culturally and intellectually catastrophic matter, language centers in Africa (and Asia and Latin America) will continue to devote their energies to the promotion and development of large national and regional languages, with scant attention to the languages speeding towards extinction. Apart from the matter of attitude is the fact that we here in America do not properly train our African students in fieldwork procedures. Since most of our Af- Paul Newman: The endangered languages issue 19 rican Ph.D. students are writing on their own languages, generally using them- selves as informants, we usually fail to give them training in empirical scientific methodology. They are not given solid training in phonetic transcription, witness the fact that those who do not speak a tone language — and even some who do — are seldom trained in hearing and transcribing tone. They are not taught how to manage a corpus (since they are basing their theses on personal introspection) nor how to collect and preserve primary data. Nor are they taught how to collect and transcribe texts and what to do with them once they have them. In short, even if we could convince our African colleagues of the seriousness of the endangered languages question, the Ph.D. education that we have provided them, with its heavy dose of modern theory and elegant formalism, has not equipped them to un- dertake the task. 5.0 Conclusion In sum, I am afraid that I have to close on a somber note. Those of us who are concerned about the endangered languages question and would like to see some- thing constructive done about it are up against a formidable enemy, and that en- emy is the discipline of linguistics and the individuals who make it up. We can continue to talk about the matter — as surely will be done again and again at meeting after meeting — but given the odds against us, the chances of concrete results are pitifully small. REFERENCES BACH, Emmon. 1995. Posting. Endangered Languages List (posting 12 February 1995) BRENZINGER, Matthias. 1998. Endangered Languages in Africa. Cologne: Riidi- ger Koppe. , Bernd HEINE, & Gabriele SOMMER. 1991. Language death in Africa. En- dangered Languages, ed. by Robert H. Robins & Eugenius M. Uhlenbeck, 19-44. Oxford & New York: Berg. BROOKE, James. 1998. Indians striving to save their languages. New York Times, April 9, pp. Al, A20. DIXON, R. M. W. 1997. The Rise and Fall of Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. FISHMAN, Joshua A. 1991. Reversing Language Shift: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of Assistance to Threatened Languages. Clevedon, Avon: Mul- tilingual Matters. GEERTZ, Clifford. 1984. Distinguished lecture: Anti anti-relativism. American Anthropologist 86.263-78. GREAVES, Tom (ed.). 1994. Intellectual Property Rights for Indigenous Peoples: A Sourcebook. Oklahoma City: Society for Applied Anthropology. GRENOBLE, Lenore A., & Lindsay J. WHALEY (eds.). 1998. Endangered Lan- guages: Current Issues and Future Prospects. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press. 20 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) GRINEVALD, Colette. 1998. Language endangerment in South America: A pro- gramatic approach. Endangered Languages: Current Issues and Future Prospects, ed. by Lenore A. Grenoble & Lindsay J. Whaley, 124-59. Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press. HALE, Kenneth, et al. 1992. Endangered languages. Language 68.1-42. KRAUSS, Michael. 1992. The world's languages in crisis. Language 68.4-10. LADEFOGED, Peter. 1992. Another view of endangered languages. Language 68. 809-11. MATSUMURA, Kazuto (ed.). 1998. Studies in Endangered Languages. Papers from the International Symposium on Endangered Languages, Tokyo, No- vember 18-20, 1995. Tokyo: The International Clearing House for Endan- gered Languages, University of Tokyo. MITHUN, Marianne. 1998. The significance of diversity in language endanger- ment and preservation. Endangered Languages: Current Issues and Future Prospects, ed. by Lenore A. Grenoble & Lindsay J. Whaley, 163-91. Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press. NEWMAN, Paul. 1992. Fieldwork and field methods in linguistics. California Linguistic Notes 23:2.1-8. , & Martha RATLIFF (eds.). Forthcoming. Linguistic Fieldwork: A Collection of Essays on the Practice of Empirical Linguistic Research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. RAYMOND, Joan. 1998. Say what? Preserving endangered languages. Newsweek (September 14): 14. ROBINS, Robert H., & Eugenius M. UHLENBECK (eds.). 1991. Endangered Lan- guages. Oxford & New York: Berg. SAID, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. > Session II: Crossing Borders & Traditional Links: Exploring Fresh Links with Other Disciplines Friday, 30 October 1999 1:00 p.m. -5:00 p.m. Chair: Jerry Morgan Saturday, 31 October 1999 9:00 a.m.- 11:45 a.m. Chair: Braj Kachru > ♦ < Studies in the Linguistic Sciences Volume 28, Number 2 (Fall, 1998) STRENGTHENING THE TIES THAT EXIST: REEXPLORING CHARTED TERRITORY William D. Davies University of Iowa william-davies@uiowa.edu Determining new ways to expand the reach of linguistics and the most appropriate ways to position linguistics in a changing intellec- tual landscape are particularly important in the face of diminishing budgets and increased business-oriented planning at American uni- versities. However, at the same time, it is important to ensure that lin- guistics programs have made the most of opportunities that currently exist. The point of this paper is to encourage administrators of lin- guistics programs to reexplore some of these areas with an eye to- ward strengthening some of the more traditional cross-disciplinary ties. I have no handout. I have no overheads. I have no laser pointer or powerpoint presentation. I come to you today as a cranky old linguist. The topic of this sym- posium 'Territories and Boundaries' evokes a call for us to be forward thinking, considering new possibilities for collaboration in research and teaching as we ap- proach a new millennium — wanting to build that bridge, and so on. And of course in these times of relatively tight budgets at academic institutions, cross- disciplinary programs and research are encouraged as a way of maximizing the impact of scarce resources. Thus, the more new connections we can make to other disciplines the more secure we can feel in continued funding, and perhaps even the possibility of a new tenure-track line now and then. Also as we must produce new graduates to help ensure our survival, so must we hope that those we are educating will someday all have fulfilling jobs with acceptable salaries. So it be- hooves us to look forward, think imaginatively, and consider new possibilities. But I am largely going to leave that for others to speculate on in their contribu- tions to this symposium. As I said, I come to you today as a cranky old linguist. As such I will mainly look backward and share with you a little of what I am feeling cranky about, because I want to urge us to also consider the possibility of strengthening ties that already exist, ties that are many times underdeveloped and underutilized. Linguistics has long had the opportunity to cross disciplinary lines. This is something amply recognized by institutions: linguistics programs without de- partmental standing have been housed in a variety of departments, and scholars and teachers who identify themselves as linguists are members of even more de- partments. In fact, a search of linguistics department websites and catalogues from around the country reveals that the majority feature a section under faculty enti- 2 4 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) tied 'Linguists in Other Departments'. A cursory glance that the past few decades of the Linguistic Society of America's Directory of Programs in Linguistics shows that this has long been the case in this field. This is something that until recently was not found in most other disciplines that have achieved departmental status and still is found in relatively few. So, as we all already know, linguistics is a dis- cipline rife with opportunities for crossing boundaries. I think, however, that as a discipline we have been more reluctant to embrace some of these opportunities A than perhaps we should have been. V One of the things that must be kept in mind is the tension that exists be- tween establishing linguistics as an independent discipline — a discipline with an identifiable identity of its own — and the need to support cross-disciplinary ini- tiatives. Many scholars have expended not a little effort over the past 30-40 years trying to do the former. However, with each new administration that comes into place at our institutions, many of us find ourselves in the position of once again trying to explain what it is linguists do and why we do it (but hopefully not why anyone should care). So, in some regards we have not been as successful as we might have wished in establishing this identity. Naturally, this varies from in- stitution to institution. But while we think about crossing boundaries in the sense of interdisciplinary efforts and so on, it is absolutely essential that we retain the autonomy of the field and foster the notion that we are the experts on language and that is what we bring to cross-disciplinary efforts. At any rate, there are a number of areas where I think linguists could have made more of a presence felt, but for me chief among them is in the area of lan- guage teaching. Now this might strike some as odd. After all, in some ways it might seem that language teaching and acquisition is a realm in which linguists have had quite a presence. And surely the past 15 years or so has seen an explo- sion in the second language acquisition field with a number of linguistically so- phisticated approaches to SLA cropping up, a spate of new conferences, a seem- ingly revitalized American Association for Applied Linguistics, and the emergence of a number of new second language acquisition and teaching programs around the country. In fact, another contributor to this symposium may give a somewhat different perspective on all this. The problem, as I see it, however, is that the an- tipathy or at least the mutual disrespect that grew between the fields of theoreti- cal linguistics and language teaching in the 1960's and blossomed in the 1970's remains — albeit somewhat more covertly at times. The distrust surfaces in a number of ways. A somewhat subtle but notice- able piece of evidence is the fact that the AAAL switched from holding its annual A meeting in conjunction with the LSA winter meeting to holding the meeting dur- ^ ing a week adjacent to the annual TESOL convention, either in the same city or a nearby locale. However, one fairly obvious and public place one can find the dis- trust played out is the SLART-L list on the internet. For those who are unfamiliar with it, this is an internet list devoted to discussion of issues in second language acquisition research and teaching. There have been flare-ups here from time to time over the past five years or so. The flare-up generally comes about as the re- sult of someone with some formal theoretical linguistic training who by accident William D. Davies: Strengthening the ties that exist 2 5 or design happens to inhabit the world of language teaching as well as the world of theoretical second language acquisition (two worlds which are all too often disparate domains). This hopefully well-intentioned person will ask for a bit more evidence for some position than an interlocutor cares to give (or perhaps is able to give), and then it's off to the races with the usual flaming, name calling, and re- crimination. One exchange a while back started innocuously enough. A relative newcomer posted a request for information on the literature regarding first lan- guage attrition — the effect of learning a second language on one's first lan- guage. One public response was that such a query had no place on the list be- cause there was no direct relevance to language teaching and that's what this list should be all about. A UG type shot back about the possible interest to the ques- tion of parameter setting and the UG SLA theory, and the fact that some folks really need to understand what theory is all about and why it is important. So, the war of words began, with all the usual navel contemplation that happens when there's an upset on a not-too-closely moderated list. And what has this got to do with this symposium? I firmly believe that more linguists with serious interests in mainline, mainstream theoretical linguistics need to take a greater interest and role in the education of those who will teach second and foreign languages. As one looks at the new programs that have sprouted up around the coun- try in response to a perceived need (and more than likely a little niche building), one is immediately impressed by the number of linguists who on paper are in- volved. The problem is that in many instances the long list of linguists (and for that matter anthropologists, psychologists, and so on) who appear as affiliated faculty is likely largely a public relations effort to convince administrators to fund this interdisciplinary effort and to convince prospective students of the valuable opportunities if one attends them. These are not really idle speculations. My sus- picions are fueled by reports I have received from a couple of recent graduates of the Iowa linguistics program who have entered such programs to pursue ad- vanced degrees, and from my experience with a number of graduates of these programs whom I have interviewed in the past five to six years in trying to fill po- sitions in second language acquisition in the Iowa Department of Linguistics. Having experience as an ESL teacher, and as a current administrator of ESL programs and someone actively involved in the training of ESL teachers, I am thoroughly convinced of the importance of language teachers' learning how to analyze language, the importance of bringing the rigors of thinking about lan- guage from the perspective of linguistic theory. This is as true from the perspec- tive of phonetics and phonology as from that of morphology and syntax. Bring- ing to bear rigorous analysis brings students an important understanding about how language is structured, and the possibility of including a typological per- spective permits prospective language teachers to experience the ways in which languages are similar and how they differ. While this may not translate into a classroom activity on Tuesday (and hopefully it will not), it can greatly inform the approach a teacher can take to an unexpected question from a student. During a practicum observation this past summer, I watched a fledgling teacher fully en- gage two students in a bit of linguistic problem solving when one of the students i 2 6 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) posed a question about appropriate adverb placement. After the class I discussed the point with the teacher-in-training and asked why he had handled the situa- tion as he had. He reported that he simply approached the question as he might have one of his syntactic analysis problems and cajoled the students to do a little analysis with him. And my fledgling teacher was right on the money (and he taught two classes each semester this year in our ESL credit program despite his undergraduate status). So of equal importance to the specific linguistic knowledge gained, the in- tellectual rigor that is the hallmark of 'serious' linguistic study and analysis can inform the general approach that teachers take to their classroom situations and teaching methodologies and to their dealings with students and administrators. Of equal importance, the intellectual rigor informs the kind of classroom-based or other research graduates of these programs are equipped to undertake. It also helps determine the kind of research these graduates will be able to read and profit from. It is this aspect of things that often goes lacking in some of our train- ing programs. It is this aspect of things that linguists can and must contribute to these programs. This has been a guiding principle in our TESL training program at Iowa, where students pursuing a Master's take a core linguistics curriculum that in- cludes phonetics, two semesters of phonology, two semesters of syntax, and a linguistic typology course in addition to specialized courses to prepare them to teach English as a second language. Now, this may be more than some feel they can afford to include in their programs or perhaps are able to include. However, our students have responded extremely positively, much as the practicum student I just described, infusing methods of problem solving and analytical thinking to guide their ESL student's learning in a structured, coherent way. Our students have a wonderful track record of getting good jobs and retaining them. And in the past 10 years I have received a wide variety of offers from our graduates to provide testimonials for the effectiveness of the program. The latter is, of course, quite gratifying, but it stems from their awareness that some students whose pri- mary focus is second language teaching fail at first to appreciate the relevance of some of their linguistic study to what they plan to do in the classroom. Needless to say, these types of considerations guide our hiring practice in our intensive English program as well and we have been quite pleased with the results. All of this is relevant to an initiative at Iowa recently approved by the Graduate Council and the faculty of the Graduate School to begin an interdisci- plinary PhD program in foreign language acquisition research and education m (FLARE). As is true of a number of institutions, a sizable number of language ^ teaching and linguistics faculty have been hired in the language departments on campus. The FLARE initiative is an attempt to bring these faculty together in a structured way and to meet the challenge of internationalizing the campus. The Linguistics Department has taken an active role on the FLARE steering commit- tee and in the development of the core curriculum, which contains a healthy dose of core linguistics and also affords a rigorous linguistics track. Mainstream, main- line linguistics is represented here as well as more specialized SLA types of William D. Davies: Strengthening the tees that exist 2 7 courses. This will ensure the active participation of many members of the linguis- tics faculty as well as engendering the possibility of more cross-disciplinary re- search among students and faculty. So, this is one area where I would suggest that we can reexplore opportu- nities available to linguists to cross the boundaries of the narrowly circumscribed domains that we sometimes set for ourselves. Linguistics can and should make a ^trong positive contribution to these programs. Another area that should most likely come as no surprise, but is one cur- rently under exploration at Iowa, is translation studies. In September 1998 a workshop conducted by the American Translation Association was held at the University of Iowa. This workshop brought together people from language de- partments, writing programs, information science, communication studies, and lin- guistics, in addition to translators to consider the topic 'Programs in Translator Education'. The group explored various possible curricular models for graduate programs in translation and information about these various models will be avail- able in a book being produced by the ATA entitled Programs in Translation Studies: ATA Guidelines, with publication tentatively scheduled for the fall of 1999. One of the models, and that heavily favored by the head of the Iowa Translation Laboratory and head of the ATA includes linguistics in a founda- tional role. This is largely due to one of the issues that arose in the workshop: while many students come to translation programs with excellent language skills (obviously such skills are a prerequisite for admission), they come with little knowledge of language and languages; that is, many apparently have little knowledge about the richness of morphological and syntactic systems available to human language. This, then, creates difficulties in their education as translators and their abilities in translation. According to the guidelines to be formulated, the most critical areas are morphology, syntax, and discourse analysis. The reasoning here is that while lexi- cal retrieval clearly plays an important role in the translation process (and there- fore information science contributes to the collaborative effort), it is important for translators to recognize the syntactic devices a particular language may have at its disposal that can most effectively be used to translate a passage from a non- cognate language. Solid grounding in syntactic analysis and discourse analysis will provide translators with the theoretical foundation necessary to accomplish this. It strikes me again that a typological approach to morphology and syntax could be particularly effective here. It remains to be seen precisely what morphol- ogy, syntax, typology, and/or discourse analysis courses might be the best suited in such a program, but it is clear from the ATA guidelines and my discussions with these translators that there is an pivotal role for linguists to play in these programs that they have apparently up to now not been playing. As the head of the Iowa Translation Lab put it to me 'It's vital that translators have a firm theoretical grounding, not only to apply to their translation work but also so that they can go back to theory from time to time to refresh themselves.' > 2 8 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) Another traditional link for linguistics is with departments of speech pa- thology. Given our particular circumstances, there is a fairly active link between Linguistics and the Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology at Iowa. At the curricular level, Speech Pathology students at one time took their phonetics class in the Linguistics Department and current graduate and undergraduate Speech Pathology majors take our upper level introduction to linguistics course as preparation for psycholinguistic courses and developmental courses. We have ^ a fairly large number of cross-listed courses which students take advantage of. At m the graduate level, our MA in Linguistics requires a focus area of 4 courses in ad- dition to the core curriculum, intended to get students more deeply involved in a subdiscipline. Other than the TESL focus, which usually engages roughly half of our Master's students, the pyscholinguistics focus is quite popular with students, most of these courses coming from Speech Pathology offerings in speech percep- tion, learning, memory and cognition, and others. At Iowa, the kind of cross- fertilization that we share with Speech Pathology yields a large number of under- graduate double majors and graduates of each department seeking opportunities to do graduate work in programs in the opposite discipline. Some of our graduate students have also had opportunities to work in Speech Pathology labs. In addition to curricular matters, there are research opportunities as well. Work on Specific Language Impairment has benefitted greatly from interaction with linguistics faculty. More recently, our TESL students and professional staff in our ESL programs have begun to cooperate with members of the clinical fac- ulty in exploring ways to apply some of the clinical techniques used to work with patients with severe speech impediments in teaching pronunciation. While this is still largely in the exploratory stage, it has been found that some of these clinical techniques can be used effectively in helping the ESL student overcome some particularly troubling pronunciation difficulties. This area may hold some promise for interdisciplinary research for students and our professional staff, and more im- portantly provide an important resource to the classroom that will ultimately benefit ESL students. There are, of course, other linkages at Iowa and other opportunities, largely in language departments and neuroscience, but we'll be hearing about some pos- sibilities in these areas from other participants in this symposium. So I will not delve into those. It can be somewhat difficult to make these links, and the kinds of links one wishes to make will depend on the local situation — the particular resources available and the predilections of the faculty. One program which has recently^ become very active in establishing links with traditionally allied disciplines is the™ Linguistics Program at the University of South Carolina, currently being headed up by my sometime collaborator in syntactic research Stan Dubinsky. Stan and the South Carolina faculty have recently undertaken a vigorous program in set- ting up cooperative endeavors with graduate programs in the French Department, the experimental psychology division of the Psychology Department, the English Department; and there are a number of other combinations currently being nego- tiated. Now, since South Carolina has the structure of being an interdepartmental William D. Da vies: Strengthening the ties that exist 2 9 discipline, and thus draws its core faculty from nine different departments and has consulting faculty in yet more, this is a fairly natural kind of development. How- ever, it also strikes me that the kind of courses of study being proposed at South Carolina provide some excellent examples of how we can reexplore some of the natural and currently existing ties. One of these new programs, a joint venture with French, provides either ^opportunities for a French MA with concentration in French linguistics, or a PhD Fin linguistics with a minor specialization in French literature. The programs make good curricular use of existing courses with the aim of producing students well- trained in linguistic theory, French linguistics, and French literature. The stated goal of the PhD is to develop potential faculty members for French or foreign lan- guage departments. In addition to being forward thinking from the standpoint of training students with marketable skills in a shrinking job market, such coopera- tion brings with it new funding opportunities for MA and doctoral level students. According to the USC website, other areas currently under development include anthropological linguistics, English composition and rhetoric, philosophy, speech pathology, and other language departments. An issue that must be kept in mind when thinking along the lines of inter- disciplinary curricula is, of course, the impact of setting up such links on our core curriculum and the impact of interdisciplinary curricula on our identity as a field. To what degree does any particular link require modification of existing courses or creation of new courses? What is the impact of admitting or inviting non- linguistics students into linguistics courses, especially if one has a fairly small pro- gram? While these must be concerns and must be considered carefully, I would maintain that it is frequently unnecessary to make that many modifications. Again, I would advocate infusion of full-bore linguistics into other disciplines. One area where we have had a bit of experience with that at Iowa is ESL teacher certifica- tion. In the mid- 1 980' s, I was one of the few people on the Iowa campus doing any research or teaching in the area of second language acquisition, so I essen- tially taught the second language acquisition theory course that was available on campus. While this course always included one or two non-linguistics students in each class (usually someone from education or Asian Languages and Literature or one of the other language departments), the class was always relatively small — about 10-13 graduate students or advanced undergraduate majors. The year that the School of Education started ESL certification, there were 30 students enrolled on the first day of class, and more were asking to add. This was quite a shock to k the system to say the least. My first inclination was to try to change the course W content and the way I delivered it to fit this new clientele. But I resisted that temptation, if only because I still had my linguistics students (albeit as a minority now) to be concerned about. In the end, I was glad to have resisted that tempta- tion. For the most part, the students did fine, and the majority reported appreciat- ing the rigor of the course. Brian Joseph and Greg Ward have described ways in which we can get linguistics into everyone's course of study through the design of classes that reach out to students who usually do not take a linguistics course, classes that explore some of the edges of linguistics. By exposing more students 3 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) to linguistics, we might feel a little less compelled to tailor our course offerings to particular groups when they show up in our regular courses. But all that aside, as we approach the issue of crossing boundaries and the nature of the role linguists can take in interdisciplinary efforts, I would hope that we take care not to lose the autonomy we've developed as a discipline, certainly far from a necessary move. However, more importantly, in addition to looking for new and untested alliances, I would urge us to re-explore some of the territory A that's already been charted but underutilized or underappreciated — we may find ^ some fertile old ground in which to establish some strong new roots. I Studies in the Linguistic Sciences Volume 28, Number 2 (Fall 1998) APPLYING LINGUISTICS AND APPLIED LINGUISTICS IN 2000 AND BEYOND > > Donna Christian Center for Applied Linguistics donna@cal.org In this paper, I consider how applied linguistics is evolving in our 'changing context', the topic of this symposium, as well as how this field connects to other domains of linguistics. My objectives are to: ( 1 ) argue that applying linguistics and applied linguistics are not identical and the relation between the two has changed over time; (2) consider the interdisciplinary nature of applied linguistics; (3) review some of the current issues that are receiving attention in applied linguistics; (4) look to future issues that will concern us in the 'changing context' we are dealing with; and (5) suggest that the preparation of students in linguistics should equip them with the knowledge, skills, and disposition to work in applied domains — as a matter of employability and of professional responsibility. Introduction To begin, it is interesting to note that questions about preparing linguistics stu- dents to work on real world problems are by no means new. Roger Shuy, at the 1974 Georgetown University Roundtable on Languages and Linguistics, ob- served: 'As a result of its isolative behavior, linguistics is now beginning to suffer from not having a natural apprenticeship domain, making it difficult for graduates to find work' (cited in Byrd 1982:1). A few years later, Raskin (1982:3) com- mented in a similar fashion on the difficulty of even the 'best graduates' in find- ing an academic position and 'the nature of these graduates' training, which was exclusively "pure linguistics", made them virtually unemployable in any alterna- tive professional capacity'. The topic of professional responsibility has recently drawn some attention as well. This theme can be found in the anthropological fieldwork tradition where 'giving back' to the community is an important concern. It is also voiced in edu- cational research where knowledge gained by studying schools, students, and educators, is expected to benefit those subjects. A recent symposium on ethics at the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) included such a discus- sion (Connor-Linton and Adger 1993), and other linguists have raised similar is- sues (Rickford 1997; Labov 1982). Sociolinguists like Walt Wolfram and Carolyn Adger have emphasized the importance of bringing vernacular dialect information * 3 2 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) back to benefit the community of speakers and working to document endangered dialects, like the English of the Outer Banks in North Carolina, as well as endan- gered languages (Wolfram 1993). Applying linguistics and applied linguistics The field of applied linguistics (as a labeled discipline) was christened in 1946 at the University of Michigan as a term for taking a 'scientific' approach to lan- guage teaching. Over the years, the scope of the term gradually expanded — the first international applied linguistics conference in 1964 invited papers in two strands: foreign language teaching and automatic translation (Tucker 1996). When the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) was founded in 1959, its first director, Charles Ferguson, described CAL's scope of work as 'to cover any- thing that had to do with solving practical language problems' (Ferguson 1998). The initial mandate specifically named language education (to improve the teaching of English around the world and to encourage and improve the teaching and learning of the less commonly taught languages), but added more general goals (to address social and educational problems involving language issues through research and to serve as a clearinghouse of information and convener of diverse groups around language-related issues). The context then was post- Sputnik, and increased global awareness was accompanied by concerns in this country that our educational system was not producing the language compe- tence or the math and science abilities that our nation needed in order to compete with the powers of the world. As the field continued to develop in the mid 1970s, its interdisciplinary roots became evident, as a group of professional organizations (including the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), along with CAL, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), the American Speech and Hearing Association (ASHA), Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), and the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL)), came together to discuss forming a new association. In late 1977, the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) was established, and it held its first annual meeting in 1978 with the LSA. In a retrospective look at applied linguistics in his plenary address at AAAL's 25 th annual meeting in 1993, Tucker noted a shift in emphasis in AAAL programs from the 1970s/ 1980s to the late 1980s/ 1990s, from a focus on language teaching to a broader range of issues including second language acqui- sition, language testing, language for specific purposes, and language policy and planning. The expansion was not just a U. S. phenomenon, however. Rampton m (1995:233) recalls that: " In 1985, the chairperson of the British Association for Applied Lin- guistics (BAAL) noted: 'We need to be sure that there is not too heavy a bias towards language teaching'. Just five years later, the then chair observed: 'We may have to be careful not to exclude more traditional BAAL interests in EFL/ESOL/ESL'. > Donna Christian: Applying linguistics and applied linguistics 3 3 Rampton suggests that there was a shift away from language pedagogy and lin- guistics toward language and social phenomena more generally, 'drawing on an- thropology, sociology, and media studies' (Rampton 1995:234). And in 1992, AILA described applied linguistics 'as a means to help solve specific problems in society ... in which language plays a role' (from AILA Vademecum, quoted in Tucker 1996). Thus, the changing context in the latter half of the 20 ,h century reframes language issues that emerge from practical social problems. It is not enough to 'apply linguistics' to these problems — we must build on insights from linguistics in conjunction with insights from other fields in interdisciplinary efforts. One way of looking at it is that applied linguistics ultimately seeks to answer questions outside of linguistics, in another arena, to which linguistic data, methods, or theo- ries may be applied. Applied linguistics as an interdisciplinary enterprise Grabe and Kaplan (1992) in their Introduction to Applied Linguistics compare applied linguistics to engineering. Engineering gathers expertise from various dis- ciplines (such as physics and chemistry), and engineers of different types rely on certain disciplines of science and mathematics to solve specific problems (physics to design and build a bridge, for example). In a similar fashion, we can think of applied linguistics as using the expertise developed in various fields of linguistics, and then adding insights from other disciplines for different language-related problems (such as anthropology or psychometrics). In other words, applied lin- guistics is inherently interdisciplinary. There is considerable recent consensus about applied linguistics as interdis- ciplinary — Tucker (1996) applauds the field's 'rapid growth as an interdiscipli- nary field' in his entry on 'applied linguistics' on the LSA website; TESOL's Ap- plied Linguistics Forum newsletter comments on its 'vitality and growth as an interdisciplinary field' (Thomas-Ruzic 1997:15). At the Center for Applied Linguistics, we reflect that interdisciplinary trend — we find we must in order to address real world problems effectively. In a quick review of degrees held by current staff (which numbers about 55), we have a good number holding graduate degrees in linguistics, some in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, but also degrees in specific languages, cognitive and social psychology, educational psychology, multicultural/bilingual/English as a second language education, educational measurement, health administration, among oth- ers. We frequently work with consultants from other fields as well, including law, sociology, and political science. Current issues in applied linguistics As we consider areas of current interest in applied linguistics, the changing con- text becomes very evident in its reflection in the 'real world' problems being ad- dressed. « 3 4 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) Consider, for example, language issues that arise related to the movement of refugees around the world. Although by no means a new phenomenon, concerns about refugees in the United States skyrocketed in the mid-1970s in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. There were tremendous demands for materials and services to help meet the language, cultural, and educational needs of Southeast Asian refu- gees. A huge amount of work was stimulated in adult and vocational education, instruction and assessment in English as a second language (ESL), and the devel- opment of native language resources while the concentrated flow of refugees continued from Southeast Asia. There are clearly many language issues embedded in addressing the needs of refugees, and this is an important arena for applied lin- guistics involvement. At the end of the 20 th century, the refugee situation is quite different, and the language problems that come to the fore are different as well. With smaller numbers of refugees headed for the United States from diverse lan- guage/culture backgrounds, the strategies for assistance have to change. Shifts in the policy context affect the way in which government support is provided (for example, welfare policy reform in the U.S.) and create new priorities (greater em- phasis on skills and language for employment, for example). As a result, serving the current needs of refugee families raises new issues in applied linguistics. As applied linguistics reaches out to address language problems that arise in fields outside linguistics, numerous areas of ongoing work will take us well into the next millennium. Innovative language education and assessment The need for people from different language backgrounds to communicate is be- coming even stronger as populations move, meet, and interact with more fre- quency. Expertise in language education and assessment is needed to help peo- ple achieve their linguistic goals and make good use of linguistic resources. A deeper understanding of language acquisition, first and additional, remains an im- portant goal, to provide the grounding for innovative language education and assessment. A promising trend in language instruction has been the movement toward integrating language and content. This manifests itself in many forms. Content- based language teaching uses interesting and appropriate subject matter as the vehicle for developing mastery of language forms and functions. It emphasizes meaning and meaningful uses of language that provide a scaffold for the learner to higher levels of language proficiency (differing considerably from earlier meth- ^ odologies that emphasized drill and practice with rote memorization). For minority m learners of the majority language in a society (English language learners in the ^ United States, for example), this approach brings the advantage of incorporating content learning (school subjects or employment skills) into language teaching. Refinements of this approach continue to be investigated, including adjustments for proficiency and cognitive levels, attention to specific language forms that may be needed, and the use of authentic and/or accommodated materials (Christian & Rhodes 1998; Short 1991). > » Donna Christian: Applying linguistics and applied linguistics 3 5 A stronger orientation toward proficiency as a goal of language instruction has brought a parallel emphasis on proficiency in assessment. As a result, rating language proficiency (both oral and written) continues to be explored. Profi- ciency levels are divided into finer distinctions and are being modified for new purposes and new groups of learners (see, for example, recent work on oral profi- ciency ratings for young children in Swender & Duncan 1998). Ways of adminis- tering assessments are also evolving. The basic, face-to-face, oral proficiency in- terview has been augmented by tape-mediated methods (both audio and video) (Stansfield & Kenyon 1996), and now computer-based proficiency testing is be- ing developed. The changing technology context has obvious implications for both language teaching and assessment. Crafting sensible approaches to linguistic diversity Improved understanding of, and sensible approaches to, linguistic and cultural diversity in society are increasingly critical, particularly in schools and work- places. Language is at the core, both in the real language differences that come into play and in the symbolic proxy it provides. Headlines in recent years on the hot issues of Ebonics and bilingual education demonstrate the widespread mis- understanding of the underpinnings of those issues and of language in general. As a member of LSA's Committee on Language in the School Curriculum from 1996 to 1998, I noted that most of the committee's discussion focused on lan- guage issues stemming from diversity. While we understand many of the linguistic principles underlying variation in language (vernacular and prestige dialects) and multilingualism in society, addressing the many educational and social issues that arise in connection with diversity remains a complex undertaking. Our research, for example, points to an array of advantages stemming from the instruction of immigrant students through their native language while they learn English (and beyond). In the real world of schools in the United States, however, we find a serious shortage of qualified teachers who know the lan- guages of students who are in the process of learning English, among other limita- tions in their readiness to work with second language learners. We cannot afford to offer a simple 'either/or' statement or prescription; we must consider the full picture and explore ways of tackling such issues using all the knowledge and re- sources that can be mustered from applied fields (in this example, through such means as increasing the preparation of bilingual teachers or finding alternative instructional methods and supports for the students) (Genesee 1999). Issues re- lated to language diversity in schooling arise in many countries, of course, and it is common for students around the world to encounter schools where the lan- guage of instruction is not their mother tongue (Dutcher 1995). Policy and planning in language-related contexts Closely related to the two areas just discussed are policy and planning concerns in language-related contexts, an important area of applied linguistics application. Increases in diversity related to political developments call for policies to promote the welfare of individuals, groups, and societies. The movement of populations 3 6 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) around the world (the 20 th Century has been called 'The Century of the Refu- gee') and the realignment of national boundaries has created enormous needs for policies to address educational, social, and political matters, and then planning to implement these policies. The decisions to be made require substantial information about languages, language use, and language learning, not to mention clarifica- tion of misunderstandings and debunking of myths in all of those areas. There are obvious language-policy decisions, such as the designation of an official Ian- A guage, as well as policy decisions where the role of language is less obvious, such ™ as financial decisions about providing interpreters in court proceedings. As we know, the United States does not have an explicit formally stated language pol- icy, but there are implicit language policies embodied in diverse federal, state, and local laws and regulations (Christian [Forthcoming]). Policy formulation and analysis that is informed by linguistic expertise is increasingly needed. It is clear that much better information and understanding of how language works and how people learn languages is needed. Many myths and misconcep- tions about language pervade public discourse and underlie policy decisions at all levels. Many arguments against bilingual education, for example, can be traced to a belief that maintaining a native language lessens the 'space available' for mas- tering the majority language. There is also a popular conception that standard va- rieties of a language are somehow inherently better than vernacular varieties ('good' and 'bad' English, as we've all heard about) (Wolfram et al 1999). The link needs to be made between social/political issues and accurate linguistic in- formation, a connection that can be found in the scope of applied linguistics. Issues in business and the workplace It has become almost a cliche to talk about the 'global' economy and globaliza- tion of business. As corporations and governments work multinationally, under- standing how to accomplish communication across languages and cultures be- comes increasingly important. Translation, interpretation, and language learning for specific purposes are skills that more and more businesses value. Many com- panies are themselves multinational and face situations not unlike multilingual so- cieties. One such corporation, for example, grappled with a corporate language policy, deciding what language would be the common language across offices around the world (not surprisingly, English was chosen), and what levels of lan- guage skills were needed by staff in different positions in the various offices. Language issues in the workplace have also grown in salience recently. In ^ the mid-1980s, Shirley Brice Heath and Charles Ferguson organized and taught a m course on 'Language in Professional Contexts' at the LSA Institute at the Uni- versity of Illinois — Urbana/Champaign, one of the first attempts to bring together developing knowledge about professional varieties (primarily of English), in- cluding those in law, insurance, medicine, and so on, with a particular view to- ward what linguistics could contribute. Interest in discourse in professional set- tings is growing, and technology contexts (and applications) are of great concern now. As linguistic diversity in the workplace has gotten more attention, cross- > Donna Christian: Applying linguistics and applied linguistics 3 7 cultural communication, vocational language learning, and language assessment are emerging as bigger issues in need of input from applied linguists. Future directions in applied linguistics Working on the issues outlined in the last section is clearly going to take us well into the next millennium. For future directions in applied linguistics, we should also consider features of the changing context that will have implications for our work, as we think about problems outside linguistics that would benefit from lin- guistic tools and information. A recent study of trends for non-profit organizations illuminated some of these changes underway. KPMG Peat Marwick 1997 undertook the study to in- form public service organizations of the forces that will affect their work in the next decade. Several of the themes they consider relate clearly to language issues (demographic, economic, and technological), although the authors do not specifi- cally draw those connections. A brief look at their conclusions can highlight focal areas — some ongoing, some new — that may call for attention from applied lin- guists. Within the demographic theme, two trends are noteworthy here. First, the population will continue to grow more diverse, but the notion of a 'melting pot' is being transformed into an expectation of multiculturalism, where cultural diver- sity is appreciated and individuals take pride in their heritage. We may look for- ward to increasing interest in language revitalization and better cross-cultural communication. Second, the population will be significantly older: 'While one in every 25 people was over age 65 in 1900, by 2040, one in every four or five Americans will be over 65' (KPMG Peat Marwick 1997:2). Language issues re- lated to aging will not only be medical in origin (language pathologies), but also social (cross-group communication patterns), and cognitive (language learning and development). The economic theme highlights a 'growing demand for knowledge work- ers' and an 'increase in international competition' for the United States. Prepar- ing students and workers for 'knowledge' industries calls for different types of skills than workers have needed in the past, many of which depend on language- related competencies. They include new types of communication processes, liter- acy skills, and technical language skills, that need to be better understood so that they may be developed and assessed. Finally, the technological theme points out trends that may be having the most dramatic effects upon our lives. Technology is 'changing the way we learn, work, and govern' (KPMG Peat Marwick 1997:7). As people and institutions are increasingly linked through technology, communication and education are be- coming independent of time and location, causing a transformation in our habits and expectations. This trend affects both the demands on language, as the me- dium of communication, and the ways in which we learn and assess language. For example, conceptions of what constitute 'literacy' are changing, as it expands to include visual, non-print, as well as print domains (consider the use of icons on 3 8 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) computers, fast-food restaurant cash registers, and elsewhere). There is also 'increased public access to information', that calls for more sophisticated systems for organizing and presenting information to diverse audiences. In a review closer to home, a National Science Foundation report in 1996 looked at linguistics from the perspective of developing human capital, identify- ing research questions for the future and potential areas for contributions from linguistics (Wolfram & Schilling-Estes 1996). The panel was convened by Walt A Wolfram and set its premise as follows: ▼ Given the cognitive basis of the human language faculty and the so- ciocultural context in which language use is embedded, linguistic in- vestigation has played and should continue to play a central role in advancing our basic understanding of the effective utilization of hu- man capital. (Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 1996:1) The panel found strong links between areas of linguistic research and po- tential contributions to inter-related issues that are basic to building human capi- tal. These themes provide another perspective on issues outside linguistics that applied linguists can positively affect. They include: 'fostering successful families' (p. 4) 'building strong neighborhoods' (p. 5) 'educating for the future' (p. 6) 'employing a productive workforce' (p. 8) 'reducing disadvantage in a diverse society' (p. 9) 'overcoming poverty and deprivation' (p. 10) Conclusion This brief review is by no means exhaustive. Issues have been mentioned as in- dicative of the kinds of topics applied linguistics can and should be addressing, particularly as we move into through the changing contexts of the future. Lin- guists need to play a role in applied linguistics — if they don't, others will deal with language issues and not nearly as well — but they must be prepared to work with specialists from other disciplines and to draw on other knowledge-bases in addition to linguistics. Students of linguistics must be allowed and encouraged to explore both ap- plied and theoretical issues as they make their ways to their degrees and decide where to specialize. Part of the changing context is, of course, the changing stu- ^ dent population. The typical graduate or even undergraduate students have sig- m nificantly more work experience than in the past, and many are working profes- sionally while they pursue their studies. This provides a natural venue for taking a problem-solving approach to linguistics learning. Internships or practica would also provide real experiences in real life problems, in areas of business, govern- ment, education, social services, and a wide variety of other settings. Linguistics departments should also make excellent courses available to students in other specialties, to inspire knowledgeable and interested collabora- > Donna Christian: Applying linguistics and applied linguistics 3 9 tors in our future interdisciplinary efforts (as well as to help develop a better- informed citizenry). Students of linguistics need to get into the field and work on theoretical is- sues (these are not mutually exclusive by any means!) to appreciate the value of both. If they head toward applied linguistics areas, in particular, they must be given the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to identify and address language problems in interdisciplinary ways. They also must understand the need to moni- tor the changing context to look for signs that will tell us where the practical lan- guage problems of the future lie. We must ensure that the accumulated knowl- edge and tools of linguistics remain at the table when language-related problems are taken up. REFERENCES Byrd, Donald. 1982. What color can your parachute be? Panels describe linguis- tic careers outside academia. The Linguistic Reporter 24:9.1-4. Christian, Donna. [Forthcoming]. Looking at federal education legislation from a language policy/planning perspective. Language Policy and Planning: Sociolinguistic Perspectives, ed. by Thorn Huebner, Joe LoBianco, and Kathy Davis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. , & Nancy Rhodes. 1998. Innovative second language education in North America. Encyclopedia of Language and Education 4: Second Language Education, ed. by G. Richard Tucker & David Corson. Amsterdam: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Connor-Linton, Jeff, and Carolyn Temple Adger. 1993. Ethical issues for apply- ing linguistics. Issues in Applied Linguistics 4:2. Dutcher, Nadine. 1995. The use of first and second languages in education: A review of international experience. Pacific Islands Discussion Paper Se- ries 1. Washington, DC: The World Bank. Ferguson, Charles A. 1998. Long-term commitment and lucky events. First per- son singular IE: Autobiographies by North American scholars in the lan- guage sciences. Studies in the History of the Language Sciences 88, ed. by Konrad Koerner. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. GENESEE, Fred (ed.) 1999. Program Alternatives for Linguistically Diverse Stu- dents. Washington, DC & Santa Cruz, CA: Center for Research on Educa- tion, Diversity, and Excellence. Grabe, William, and Robert Kaplan. 1992. Introduction to Applied Linguistics. \ Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. KPMG Peat Marwick. 1997. Organizations Serving the Public: Transformation to the 21 s ' Century. Washington, DC: Author. Labov, William. 1982. Objectivity and commitment in linguistic science. Lan- guage in Society 1 1.165-201. Rampton, Ben. 1995. Politics and change in research in applied linguistics. Ap- plied Linguistics 16:2.233-56. Raskin, Victor. 1982. Linguistic careers and linguistic applications in the 1980s — One man's view. Linguistic Reporter 24:9.3 & 11-12. 4 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) Rickford, John. 1997. Unequal partnership: Sociolinguistics and the African American speech community. Language in Society 26.161-97. Short, Deborah J. 1991. How to Integrate Language and Content Instruction: A Training Manual. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Stansfield, Charles W., & Dorry M. Kenyon. 1996. Simulated oral proficiency interviews: An update. Washington, DC: ERIC Clearinghouse on Lan- guages and Linguistics. ^ Swender, Elvira, & Greg Duncan. 1998. ACTFL performance guidelines for K-12 m learners. Foreign Language Annals 31:4.479-91. Thomas-Ruzic, Maria. 1997. Applied linguistics turns 40. TESOL Matters 7(2). 15. Tucker, G. Richard. 1996. Applied linguistics, . Washington, DC: Linguistic Society of America. Wolfram, Walt. 1993. Ethical considerations in language awareness programs. Issues in Applied Linguistics 4:2.225-55. , Carolyn Temple Adger, & Donna Christian. 1999. Dialects in Schools and Communities. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. ,& Natalie SCHILLING- ESTES. 1996. Linguistics and the Human Capital Ini- tiative. A Report to the National Science Foundation. Arlington, VA: Na- tional Science Foundation. Also available at: http://www.cal.org/public/pubs/lhci.htm i > > Studies in the Linguistic Sciences Volume 28, Number 2 (Fall 1998) CONSIDERATION OF THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE ROLES OF THE NEUROSCIENCES IN THE LINGUISTIC SCIENCES Molly Mack University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign m-mackl @uiuc.edu For thousands of years, the human brain has caused both bewil- derment and fascination. And although the brain is the ultimate source, arbiter, and conduit of human language, an understanding of even the rudiments of its role in language comprehension and production has been a relatively recent development, arguably dating to the latter half of the nineteenth century. In the present discussion, a review of sig- nificant approaches to the human brain will be considered from a dia- chronic perspective. Particular emphasis will be placed upon develop- ments which have provided the foundation for interaction between the neurosciences and linguistic sciences. Consideration of emerging approaches to the study of the brain will also be made for, it is main- tained, such approaches will be particularly fruitful in providing new and important insights into the brain/language relationship. 0. Introduction: Our universe within In his ambitiously compendious volume, How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker (1997:24) wryly notes that, while 'the 1990s have been named the Decade of the Brain, ... there will never be a Decade of the Pancreas'. While the relative impor- tance of the investigation of the brain versus the pancreas may be eminently ob- vious, Pinker's observation actually belies a truism about the human brain. That is, unlike any other organ, the brain has what Pinker terms 'special status' which de- rives 'from a special thing the brain does, which makes us see, think, feel, choose, and act. That special thing is information processing, or computation' (1997:24). Indeed, the brain's computational ability is one of the reasons why the mul- tifarious functions of this organ have been difficult to understand. Even gaining rudimentary insights into how the nervous system transforms simple sensory in- puts into complex mental constructs has taken decades of research. For example, in the auditory system, a word to be perceived begins (simply) as a series of sound waves causing vibrations which impinge upon the tympanic membrane (eardrum) of the hearer. These vibrations are transduced, transformed, and relayed to higher centers of the brain where they are ultimately interpreted as a lexical unit (Rosenberg 1982; Lieberman & Blumstein 1988; Mack 1991). This unit has asso- ciated with it often rich denotative and connotative meanings, an understanding of the rules governing the syntactic and thematic roles to which it may be as- « 4 2 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) signed, and specific acoustic cues enabling the listener to engage not only in speech recognition, but speaker recognition. The human brain is remarkable not only computationally but structurally as can be demonstrated by an examination of the primary building block of the brain, the neuron (nerve cell). Although an adult brain weighs just three to four pounds, it contains a total of approximately one trillion cells, of which about 100 billion are neurons — nerve cells which transmit electrochemical signals throughout the peripheral and central nervous system (CNS). Neurons are gen- erated at an average rate of about 250,000 per minute prior to birth (Cowan 1979), a fact which helps provide some perspective on the magnitude of the numbers of neurons in the developing brain. Moreover, neurons vary consid- erably in shape, size, and function (Fischbach 1992). The complexity of the hu- man brain becomes especially apparent in view of the number of other neurons with which each neuron connects: Any given neuron may connect, via syn- apses, to approximately 1,000 other neurons, and each neuron may have thou- sands of synapses (Stevens 1979; Lamb 1998). In addition, the scale of the neu- ral components of the brain is exceedingly small. For example, approximately 20,000 to 25,000 neurons occupy one cubic millimeter of cerebral cortex (Lamb 1998), and the width of the synaptic cleft — the juncture between neurons — is less than one ten-millionths of an inch. (The cortex, whose name is derived from the Latin word for plant bark, is the outer layer of the brain — a thin sheet of gray matter containing the nerve cell bodies.) Hence, gaining an understanding not only of individual neurons but of the functions of inter-related networks of neurons can be highly difficult due, in part, to the complexity of the brain's 'wiring system' and to the extremely small scale of the components involved. In addition, as Francis Crick 1979 has aptly indicated, introspection about the brain is remarkably unrevealing. Indeed, he states that 'we are deceived at every level by our introspection' (1979: 132). For example, Crick 1979 and Crick & Koch 1992 note that most individuals do not realize that they have a 'blind spot' in each visual field caused by an absence of photoreceptors in a small area of the retina — that area in which the optic nerve projects to the brain. The blind spot is undetected because the brain interpolates the missing information. Moreover, one of the most anatomically striking features of the brain is a deep longitudinal fissure dividing the brain into a left and right hemisphere, each of which has specialized functions and preferred processing modes (Springer & Deutsch 1993). Further, each hemisphere subserves the functions of the body contralaterally (i.e., the right half of the brain controls the left side of the body A and the left half of the brain controls the right side of the body). Thus the brain is ™ bifurcated both anatomically and functionally. Yet, unless one obtains explicit information about the anatomical bifurcation and functional lateralization of the brain, an awareness of the fact that the brain has two discrete hemispheres re- mains entirely inaccessible to introspection or consciousness. These relatively simple examples reveal why Crick (1979:132) concludes that 'our capacity for deceiving ourselves about the operation of our brain is al- most limitless, mainly because what we can report is only a minute fraction of > Molly Mack: Past, present, & future roles of the neurosciences 4 3 what goes on in our head.' He adds that 'this is why much of philosophy has been barren for more than 2,000 years and is likely to remain so until philosophers learn to understand the language of information processing'. Although enormous strides in understanding the brain have been made since Crick wrote these words (and although it can be argued that philosophy has hardly been 'barren' for the past two millennia), it is the case that, throughout most of the history of Homo Sapiens, the role of the brain — our 'universe within' — has been variously mis- understood, misinterpreted, and even maligned. 1.0 Where is language? Historical perspectives Archeological evidence has revealed that in many Old- and New-World prehis- toric cultures a crude form of surgery, trepanation, was practiced relatively fre- quently. Trepanation, in which a hole is bored into the skull, was carried out pos- sibly for ritualistic or medicinal purposes. What is remarkable about this is not only the frequency with which trepanation occurred (one wonders at the temer- ity of those who dared to carry out — and to undergo — the procedure!), but the fact that it had a fairly high survival rate. (This is revealed by signs of healing around the site on the skull.) Trepanation suggests that prehistoric societies pos- sessed 'strong beliefs about the brain and behavior' (Finger 1994:5) since the procedure may have been used to treat headaches, seizures, and mental distur- bances. However, this interpretation is mitigated by the observation that 'these disorders were likely to have been attributed to demons, and it is conceivable that the holes were made to provide the evil spirits with an easy way out' (Finger 1994:5). Thus there is no clear evidence that the 'trepaners' understood the func- tion of the brain or why trepanation was efficacious, if indeed it was. However, an ancient Egyptian text dealing with head injuries, the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus (parts of which date from at least 2000 B.C.), does reveal some insightful perspectives on the central nervous system. Finger (1994:8) says that early Egyptian physicians were aware that 'symptoms of central nervous system injuries could occur far from the locus of damage', suggesting a relatively advanced understanding of the relationship between the central and peripheral nervous systems. Yet in spite of their apparent insights into the physiology of these systems, the ancient Egyptians still that believed the heart, not the brain, was the paramount organ — an organ that recorded all of one's good and evil deeds. And, as evidence from mummification indicates, the heart was accorded higher status than the brain which, unlike the heart and other organs, was virtu- . ally never preserved. Early written records of medical practices from other cultures also reveal some knowledge about the brain. For example, the ancient Indian work, the Atharvaveda, 'provides descriptions of epilepsy, insanity, neuralgia, headaches, and blindness' (Finger 1994:11) but again, the heart was viewed as more impor- tant than the head, as revealed in evidence from Vedic collections on medicine. The ancient Chinese also emphasized the primacy of the heart which they be- lieved would cause memory lapses and insomnia if it were not filled with energy and blood. i 4 4 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) Moreover, in words dating from well over two thousand years ago and at- tributed to or inspired by Hippocrates — long acknowledged as the father of modern medicine — these assertions are made: It follows that southerly winds relax the brain and make it flabby, re- laxing the blood-vessels at the same time. Northerly winds, on the other hand, solidify the healthy part of the brain while any morbid part is separated out and forms a fluid layer round the outside. ... The brain may be attacked both by phlegm and by bile and the two types of dis- order which result may be distinguished thus: those whose madness results from phlegm are quiet and neither shout nor make a distur- bance; those whose madness results from bile shout, play tricks and will not keep still but are always up to some mischief. ... Warming of the brain ... takes place when a plethora of blood finds its way to the brain and boils (Lloyd 1978:248-9). Thus, the brain was not only believed to alternate in consistency (from 'flabby' to solid) due to atmospheric changes, but was deemed capable of housing a caul- dron of boiling blood. It was also believed to cause insanity should it be attacked by two of the four 'humors' — one now known to be respiratory-system mucosa and the other an alkaline fluid secreted by the liver. On the other hand, Hip- pocrates and his followers accurately understood that the brain controlled the body, and they rejected the idea that gods and demons caused seizures (Finger 1994). In spite of such insights, the ancient Greeks (as well as the ancient philoso- phers and linguists of India) fared better in their understanding of language than they did of the brain. For example, Aristotle's Poetics, a commentary on literary theory dating from the third century B.C., provides an extensive and relatively sophisticated discussion of rhetoric, diction, stylistics, morphology, syntax, meta- phor, grammatical gender, word coinage, and articulatory phonetics. Moreover, Aristotle clearly and often accurately defines such units as free and bound mor- phemes, syllables, and sentences. Yet at the same time he believed that the heart, not the brain, was the body's nerve center and the seat of intelligence and that the function of the brain was to cool the blood (Adams 1971). (By contrast, Aris- totle's mentor, Plato, correctly identified the brain as the seat of the intellect [Longrigg 1998].) Considerable advances in understanding the brain came with the 2nd- century Greek physician and anatomist, Galen, who actively practiced as a sur- A geon in Pergamon and later served as court physician to four Roman emperors. In^ his teachings, which prevailed for approximately 1,500 years, Galen correctly concluded that both motoric and sensory functions originated in the brain, and many of his theories provided the foundation for later work on the CNS. Further, he demonstrated a perspicacious understanding of the value of combining logos (reason) with experience in the healing arts (Walzer 1946). Nonetheless, his work still represented 'a reservoir of medicine mixed with myth and magic' (Fincher 1984:13), for Galen maintained that 'vital spirits' produced in the heart were > ► Molly Mack: Past, present, & future roles of the neurosciences 4 5 transformed into 'animal spirits' in the brain where they were stored in the ventri- cles until needed (Finger 1994). 1 By the Middle Ages in Europe, most physicians still made erroneous as- sumptions about the structure and function of the brain. Although Medieval sketches of the brain depict the ventricles (cavities in the brain filled with cere- brospinal fluid), they were believed to be 'a cluster of psychic cells charged with powers of memorativa, imaginativa, cogitatia and sensus communis'' (Fincher 1984: 11). However, in 1543, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels published De humani corporis fabrica, a goldmine of anatomical illustrations and woodcuts (some pos- sibly by Titian or the school of Titian) depicting the brain and body (Tarshis 1969). Most significantly, the central nervous system was, at last, portrayed and described relatively accurately, and Vesalius' book revealed detailed knowledge of the structure of the brain, the spinal cord, and even the cranio-facial nerves (Lind 1949). Finally Descartes, one of the founders of the Enlightenment, refers to the functions of the central nervous system in his 1664 work, Description du corps humain. His views reflect a synthesis of philosophy, religion, physiology, and neuroanatomy, as is revealed in the following description of his beliefs about the soul and cognition (Carter 1983:138): In order to act reasonably [Descartes believed that] the soul must act through the agency of some part of the body. ... In order to will, the soul acts on the pineal gland, so that it pushes the surrounding spirits, ... which then mechanically control the body's movements in such a way that the soul can consequently perceive the objects of its volition. ... Ideas are corporeal impressions caused by configurations of individual impresses made by spirits issuing from similar configurations of nerve endings in ventricle III, the middle ventricle of the brain. In truth, in light of the complexity of the human brain (or, in fact, of the cen- tral nervous system which includes the brain and spinal cord), it is not surprising that a relative lack of understanding endured for thousands of years about its structure and function. And although some microscopic views of nerve tissues were made in the Netherlands by Anton van Leeuwenhoek and in Italy by Mar- cello Malphighi as early as the 17th century, it has been little more than one hun- dred years since Camillo Golgi devised a method for selectively staining nerve tis- sue so that individual neurons could be viewed microscopically and in great de- tail (Hubel 1979). And it was not until the 19th century that differential functions of brain regions — particularly as they related to language — were fairly well understood. It is thus understandable that early physicians, anatomists, and philosophers knew relatively little about the brain's neural architecture, its physiology, or its role in acquiring, perceiving, and producing language. What is also relevant to the present discussion is that, from the time of the ancients to the mid-19 th century, those interested in understanding the brain and those interested in understanding language had relatively little substantive infor- mation to provide one another. Arguably, it was not until physicians undertook # 4 6 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) systematic observations of aphasia (language impairment due to specific types of brain damage) that meaningful insights about the brain-language relationship be- gan to emerge. One early commentary on aphasic-like symptoms was made by a French physician, Lordat, and appeared in the 1 843 Journal de la societe de medecine- pratique de Montpellier (excerpted in Paradis 1983). In this commentary, Lordat writes of an apparently aphasic patient who had lost all language functions, save the ability to use swear words one of which, according to Lordat, was 'the most energetic swear- word in our language, ... which our dictionaries have never dared to print' (Paradis 1983:4). Lordat also assumed that the patient was unaware of the meaning of what he was saying since the man was both intelligent and a priest. It is unlikely that either intelligence or religious persuasion correlates with type of language loss in aphasia, but Lordat' s observations about the linguistic abilities of his 'apoplectic' patient presaged thousands of subsequent studies — clinical, psycholinguistic, and neurolinguistic — of the relationship between brain damage and the use of language. Specifically, serious neurological study which had a profound impact upon the linguistic sciences emerged in the late 19 th century when a French physician, Paul Broca, observed that a specific region of the left frontal lobe (now known as Broca's area) was apparently responsible for certain types of speech production. This area has been implicated in non-fluent and agrammatic speech and in some language-processing deficits (now recognized as 'Broca's aphasia). And in the 1 890s, a German physician, Carl Wernicke, provided further information regarding the relationship of brain structure to language behavior when he observed an- other form of aphasia — one largely characterized by fluent but meaningless speech and usually resulting from damage to the temporo-parietal region of the left hemisphere. This is termed 'Wernicke's aphasia'. 2 The importance of the study of aphasia in the linguistic sciences cannot be overestimated. As will be indicated below, investigations of aphasia were largely responsible for the emergence of several major research foci which, by the mid- 20th century, dominated much of the work that furthered an understanding of the brain/language relationship. 2.0 Language is found: Major trends in the mid-20' h century, 1950-1980 Anecdotal evidence suggests that some linguists look back wistfully upon the 1950s through the 1970s as a 'golden era' in the linguistic sciences. How- ^ ever, this 'golden era' may have had a major competitor. As Greene maintains W (1974:497,499], The events of the very late eighteenth century and the early nine- teenth century [are ones] which all linguists seem to recognize as revolutionary, formative, and "paradigmatic" in the sense defined by Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. ... With respect to the situation in linguistics since about 1870, there seems to be general agreement that there have been revolutionary de- > > Molly Mack: Past, present, & future roles of the neurosciences 4 7 velopments, though not of a kind that can be fitted into Kuhn's model of anomaly, crisis, and paradigm substitution. What has taken place is not a revolution within the framework of historically oriented com- parative philology but rather a dramatic shift of interest and attention from diachronic to synchronic studies. Yet even if a full-fledged Kuhnian revolution did not occur in linguistics in the 20 lh century, there was a relative explosion of linguistic study in numerous areas of language inquiry during this time. For example, Newmeyer 1980 notes that, while official membership in the Linguistic Society of America stood at 829 in 1950, it rose to 4,166 by 1968. And while only sixteen doctorates in linguistics were awarded in the United States in 1956-57, 177 were awarded in 1972-73. While this was still a small percentage (.51%) of all doctorates awarded in 1972- 73, it did represent an elevenfold increase over a sixteen-year period. (During the same period, the number of doctorates awarded in all fields increased only four- fold.) It is tempting to date the onset of widespread interest in linguistics, at least in the U.S., to the appearance of Noam Chomksy's 1957 seminal work, Syntactic Structures. Here he presents his theory of transformational-generative grammar — a rationalist approach to the study of language diametrically opposed to that of, for example, the empirical behaviorist approach of B.F. Skinner (whose vol- ume, Verbal Behavior, appeared in the same year). Indeed, by the time Chom- sky's next major work, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, was published in 1965, linguistics graduate students were already fervidly memorizing transformations, drawing often-complex inverted tree diagrams, and ardently debating about the psychological reality of deep structures. Meanwhile, fresh ideas were emerging (or had recently emerged) from nu- merous fields within linguistics as evidenced by a sampling of works which are now standards. These included volumes on phonetics and phonology (Jakobson & Halle 1956; Chomsky & Halle 1968); sociolinguistics and dialectology (Hymes 1964; Labov 1966); historical linguistics (Robins 1967); psycholinguistics (Whorf 1956; Brown 1970); child-language acquisition (Smith & Miller 1966); bilingual- ism and second-language acquisition (Weinreich 1953; Albert & Obler 1978); language universals (Greenberg 1966); the philosophy of language (Searle 1969); the origins of language (Lieberman 1975); animal communication (Seebeok 1977); and neurolinguistics (Lenneberg 1965; Whitaker & Whitaker 1977). The neurosciences informed (if sometimes only tangentially) research in vir- tually all of the above areas. But it is here maintained that in the mid-20 th century the neurosciences had their greatest impact upon three major topics of inquiry, all of which fell under the rubric of neurolinguistics. These included (1) the use of insights gleaned from the study of brain-damaged individuals, particularly those with aphasia; (2) the view of language as anatomically localized and functionally discrete; and (3) a belief in the pre-eminent status of the left cerebral hemisphere as the 'control center' for language. I 4 8 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) 2.1. Brain damage: A window on the brain Brain damage has long been one of the primary sources of information about the organization of language in the brain, and myriad types of language impairment resulting from brain damage have been documented. These include, but are not limited to, agraphia (impairment in writing with possible preservation of the ability to read), alexia (impairment in reading with possible preservation of the ability to write), anomia (impairment in the retrieval of lexical items from memory), aprosody (impairment in the ability to use suprasegmentals), and aphasia (impairment in the production and/or perception of language manifested, e.g., selectively or primarily as mild to severe difficulties in the comprehension and production of morphosyn- tax, as in Broca's aphasia, or as mild to severe difficulties in the comprehension and production of semantically meaningful speech, as in Wernicke's aphasia). There are, of course, problems with extrapolating about intact brains using information based upon damaged brains — an approach known as 'deficit analy- sis' (e.g., Gazzaniga 1984; Caplan 1987). To determine the locus of damage, ex- amine its behavioral consequences, and then infer that the locus involved is re- sponsible for the lost or impaired abilities reflected in the behavior overlooks sev- eral widely accepted facts. First, damage to a particular region of the brain does not produce identical results in all individuals. Second, various sites of damage in different individuals may yield strikingly similar impairments. Third, brain- damaged patients may employ compensatory strategies that can mask the severity of their problems. And fourth, establishing a correlation between the site of neu- rological damage and a behavioral deficit is often based upon the assumption that the lesion is in the region that subserves the previously normal behavior when, in fact, the damage has caused a disruption in the neural connections which imple- ment the behavior. A simple analogy is the following: Cutting the cable connecting a computer to its monitor results in an immediate loss of the visual display (assuming that the computer is on). If one only observed the site of damage (the 'lesion' in the ca- ble) he/she might conclude that the visual display resided in or originated from the cable which, of course, it does not; it is merely the conduit for information stored at some distance from it. Of course, neurologists are far more informed about the functions of the brain (and most people know far more about comput- ers) than this analogy might imply. Still, there is a long tradition of using the 'lesion method' (Banich 1997) and deficit analysis to correlate neurological dam- age with specific behaviors, and such an approach is still providing new informa- ^ tion and insights (e.g., Saffran forthcoming). fl Of all language disorders, aphasia has attracted the greatest interest among linguists not only due to the relatively high frequency with which it occurs — often as a result of a cerebral-vascular accident (stroke) — but because of its po- tentially devastating behavioral consequences. (For example, global aphasia can render an individual essentially completely unable to understand or produce lan- guage.) In addition, because the locus of brain damage can often be determined, at least generally, neuroscientists and aphasiologists have used aphasia as a > > Molly Mack: Past, present, & future roles of the neurosciences 4 9 'window on the brain' — a window which can reveal at least some aspects of the relationship between brain regions and language functions. The prolific polymath, Roman Jakobson, may be credited with emphasizing very strongly how insights from neurology — through the application of the le- sion method in the study of aphasia — could inform linguistic theory (e.g., Jakob- son & Halle 1956; Jakobson 1971). He asserts, however, that 'the neurobiologist Hughlings Jackson (1835-1911) was the first to discern with insistence the lin- guistic aspect of aphasia' (1973:59). Still, Jakobson's primacy in advocating the potential value of interaction between the neurosciences and linguistics cannot be ignored. For example, one of the chapters in the book he co-authored with Morris Halle in 1956, Fundamentals of Language, is entitled, 'Aphasia as a linguistic Problem' [emphasis added]. In this chapter, he decries the current state of affairs in aphasiology, stating that linguists are 'responsible for the delay in undertaking a joint inquiry into aphasia' in spite of the fact that 'the aphasic dis- integration of the verbal pattern may provide the linguist with new insights into the general laws of language' (1956:56). In other words, even by the 1950s, the neurological data were bountiful, but few linguists were helping with the harvest. In all fairness, as the aphasiologist Ruth Lesser 1978 points out, it was not merely a stubborn resistance to acquiring information from the neurosciences that impeded cross-disciplinary interaction in aphasiology in the mid-20 th century. Lesser (1978:ix) observes that aphasiology 'includes within its sphere some rich complexities, notably the physiology of the human brain, the psychology of the individual, and linguistic science', which complexities may (understandably) have induced some individuals in potentially relevant disciplines to 'shy away' from the topic. And, from a more applied perspective, she notes that — at least as of the 1970s — the examination of aphasic patients was often 'undertaken heuristically within a medical [not linguistic] tradition which emphasize[d] physical improve- ment, diagnostic labeling and the perpetuation of simplistic formulae for language disorders'. However, even by the time Lesser penned the above comments, a sea- change was apparent: Jakobson 1971 notes that, as early as the 1940s, both A.R. Luria and Kurt Goldstein had attempted to apply principles of linguistic analysis to aphasia. And, by the 1960s, Jakobson and other linguists were relating types of aphasia to specific linguistic deficits, an approach later reflected in what would become one of the most widely administered aphasia test batteries ever used, the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination (Goodglass & Kaplan 1983). This change was also evident in the scores of studies on aphasia conducted by lin- guists in the 1970s. One prominent linguist, Sheila Blumstein, contributed to many of these (e.g., Blumstein 1973; Blumstein, Baker, & Goodglass 1977; Blumstein et al. 1977) and is still doing so today (Blumstein, et al. 1991; Blumstein 1997). An- other well-known linguist, Michel Paradis, also stimulated interaction between neurology and linguistics with the appearance in 1977 of his extensive survey and analysis of bi- and multilingual aphasics, and his work in this area has contin- ued unabated. In addition, examination of the contents of major journals dealing with studies of the brain and language reveals that, by the 1970s, hundreds of 5 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) cross-disciplinary studies in the neurosciences and linguistic sciences were being undertaken in the U.S. and abroad — many of these on the subject of aphasia. Thus the mid-20th century witnessed the application of insights from the neurosciences to the investigation of language breakdown and, more specifically, to aphasia. Concurrent with this was a dramatic increase of interest in the extent to which language was localized in the brain. 2.2. A locationist view of language V Due to insights gleaned largely from the study of aphasia, a still-pervasive view of language organization (long ago articulated by Wernicke) is that language is situated in 'anatomically discrete [but] interconnected centers' (Zurif & Swinney 1994:1056). It can be argued that such an approach had its roots in the work of the 18 lh -century anatomist, Franz Joseph Gall, whose work revealed a strongly locationist interpretation of brain functions. This is evidenced in the 'pseudoscience' he practiced — phrenology — in which the contours of the skull were correlated with aptitudes, abilities, and personality traits. While phre- nology has understandably fallen into disrepute, Gall's notions about locationism actually presaged the direction and research foci of much of the 'real' brain sci- ence that followed. In the 1960s and 1970s, the locationist view found one of its strongest voices in the work of the neurologist Norman Geschwind (e.g., Geschwind 1979; Geschwind & Galaburda 1985a, 1985b, 1985c). Geschwind not only delineated regions of the cortex by function, but described pathways taken in the execution of certain language-related behaviors. For example, he states (1979:111) that 'lesions in the angular gyrus have the effect of disconnecting the systems in- volved in auditory language and written language.' He also asserts that in [Wernicke's] model the underlying structure of an utterance arises in Wernicke's area. It is then transferred through the arcuate fasciculus to Broca's area, where it evokes a detailed and coordinated program for vocalization. The program is passed on to the adjacent face area of the motor cortex, which activates the appropriate muscles of the mouth, the lips, the tongue, the larynx and so on. Geschwind' s position, then, was that linguistic behaviors are anatomically and functionally localized and that cortical regions subserving language are con- nected to one another in highly specifiable ways. Some qualification is required however. According to Geschwind (1979:112), although 'the partitioning of lin- ^ guistic functions among several sites in the cortex is . . . supported by much evi- ^ dence, the rigidity of these assignments should not be overemphasized'. A related point is made by Banich (1997:53) who notes that a locationist interpretation may be more appropriate for certain cognitive functions, such as language, than for others, such as 'certain aspects of memory' which may be more diffusely rep- resented. Still, the belief that language is anatomically localizable has been a powerful one, and it pervaded much of the research in neurolinguistics in the mid- 20 th century. > > Molly Mack: Past, present, & future roles of the neurosciences 5 1 For example, a locationist approach is evident in the early work of Penfield and Roberts 1959 who used electrocortical stimulation — the application of low- voltage currents to the cortex via electrodes placed on its surface during neuro- surgery — to induce transient aphasic arrest. (During many neurosurgical proce- dures, the patient is awake, facilitating the assessment of linguistic functions in- traoperatively; however there are newer variants of this procedure which permit electrocorticographic analysis post-operatively [Ojemann 1994].) With this pro- cedure, Penfield and Roberts mapped the cortices of approximately 200 patients. 3 Results revealed well-defined cortical regions that yielded aphasic arrest, usually in response to stimulation in the left hemisphere. These regions were the posterior portion of the third frontal convolution, a larger region in the posterior temporal and inferior parietal lobe, and an area in the mid-saggital fissure, which Penfield and Roberts characterized as Broca's, Wernicke's and the supplementary speech areas, respectively. In 1978, Ojemann and Whitaker utilized electrocortical stimulation to map the language areas of two bilingual patients. Their comments, and of course the procedure they used, clearly reflected a locationist view of the brain. They state (1978:409) that 'in most people, the cortical language zones include portions of the left hemisphere surrounding the Sylvian fissure, particularly the posterior infe- rior frontal lobe and posterior temporal lobe'. However, they also note that the precise extent in any one individual to which specific brain areas are involved in language remains a matter of controversy. Nonetheless, a major and still oft-cited finding in this study bears mention: Although Ojemann and Whitaker' s patients had different language backgrounds and neurological pathologies, they exhibited similar patterns of language organization as exhibited in their performance on naming tasks in their two languages during electrocortical stimulation. That is, in both patients, naming in the second language was impaired over a wider area of cortex than was naming in the first. Ojemann and Whitaker interpreted this as evidence of more diffuse representation of the second than of the first language. The belief that language functions, and indeed specific languages, can be associated with certain brain regions was a pervasive one, and it still finds com- pelling support from clinical evidence. This is dramatically demonstrated in the performance of an aphasic patient (DL) examined over a course of years by the present author. This patient had, as a consequence of a stroke, undergone left- hemisphere damage and had right-sided paralysis (hemiplegia). He exhibited Broca's-like symptoms primarily manifested as non-fluent agrammatic speech. Below are samples of his writing (Figure 1) and drawing (Figure 2) produced years after the onset of his aphasia and after extensive language therapy. (Prior to his stroke, DL had been a noted architect and had been an artist by avocation.) 5 2 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) CO FLovj « Figure 1 : Attempts by DL, at approximately twelve years after the on- set of aphasia, to write the words cube, Florida, Molly, and Mack, dictated to him by the present author. He had considerable trouble writing the words so the author assisted by spelling them aloud. Note that DL's first attempt to write the letter <1> was . Perhaps re- vealingly, these letters are acoustically similar when pronounced. (Both represent liquids). And, in response to hearing the sound of the letter when Mack was spelled to him, DL wrote , presumably reflecting the initial vowel sound when the letter is pronounced. (This was just after he had successfully written the in Molly, and reveals an inconsistency typical of much of his performance.) Since DL was right-handed and had right hemiplegia, he had to use his left hand for all manual tasks. Evidence of the often remarkable specificity of functional impairments sub- sequent to brain damage (as graphically demonstrated in the figures above) no doubt contributed, particularly in the 1970s, to growing interest in the neu- rosciences and linguistic sciences in the laterality of functions in the human brain (see, e.g., Geschwind 1979). In fact, one could easily argue that at least several of the dominant research paradigms of the period from 1950 to 1980 involving the brain/language relationship were devoted to the study of cerebral laterality. Ac- A companying the increase in attention to laterality was an emphasis on left-hemi- ^ sphere specialization for language. Molly Mack: Past, present, & future roles of the neurosciences 5 3 > W S, > Figure 2: A watercolor depicting a pastoral scene with a covered bridge, painted by DL after the onset of aphasia. According to re- ports by his wife, such paintings required hours of laborious effort, in part because they had to be rendered with his non-dominant hand. The contrast between DL's orthographic/linguistic and artistic abili- ties is quite obvious and strongly suggests differential localization of function for the abilities involved. 2.3. Language and the 'left brain' Although the cause of the evolutionary development of cerebral dominance for language remains disputed (MacNeilage et al. 1993; Provins 1997; Lieberman 1998), clinical evidence has revealed that, for most right-handed individuals (about 95%), the left hemisphere subserves major language functions. It also does so for most left-handed individuals, although with a slightly smaller frequently (about 70%). In fact, for many years, the left hemisphere was termed the 'dominant' hemisphere while the right hemisphere was believed to play a negli- gible or ancillary role in language. (In fact, Penfield [1965] refers to the right hemisphere as the 'uncommitted cortex'.) 4 Even into the 1980s, Geschwind was ardently discussing the brain from a perspective in which the left hemisphere was deemed solely or largely responsible for language (e.g., Geschwind and Galaburda 1985a,b,c). Moreover, the now- common use of the term, 'left brain/right brain' belies a belief that the cranium houses two distinct brains, and it reflects a popularized interpretation of lateral- ity (e.g., 'Are you a left-brained or a right-brained person?'). In truth, the left- brain/right-brain dichotomy over-simplifies the extent to which the two hemi- 5 4 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) spheres interact during language processing and other cognitive functions; it ig- nores the fact that under certain conditions the right hemisphere can exhibit a 'left-hemisphere' processing mode (Trope et al. 1992); and it underestimates the role of the right hemisphere in language use (Code 1997). Nonetheless, the view that the two halves of the brain possess different ca- pabilities (the left hemisphere being specialized for analytic and sequential proc- essing and the right hemisphere for holistic and parallel processing, for example) has been captivating and abiding. (See Springer & Deutsch 1993 for an excellent overview.) It is also one that, especially prior to the 1990s, received substantial attention and support from neurologists and linguists as revealed by some of the prominent research paradigms applied to the study of cerebral functions. In terms of assessing laterality and its relationship to the organization of language, the queen of all tests was, in the 1960s and 1970s, a non-invasive tech- nique developed by Doreen Kimura called dichotic listening. This technique proved extremely popular because it was non-invasive and could be used in an experimental rather than clinical setting (and, perhaps to its detriment, by linguists with little or no training in neurology). Through the simultaneous presentation of competing stimuli to either ear — such as the presentation of the word one to the right ear and the presentation of nine to the left — it was believed that dichotic listening and its visual counterpart, the tachistoscopic presentation of stimuli to the left and right visual hemifields (Caplan, et al. 1974; Soares & Grosjean 1981), could reveal the extent to which various types of stimuli were subserved by the right or left hemisphere. Specifically, Kimura (1961, 1967) found that among patients with left- or right-temporal-lobe damage, as well as among normal subjects, stimuli presented to the right ear were generally reported more accurately than those presented to the left. This finding emerged if the stimuli had certain acoustic properties and the magnitude of the effect was related to the types of linguistic stimuli used. For ex- ample, stop consonants were found to yield a fairly strong right-ear advantage (Blumstein et al. 1975), while some types of musical sounds resulted in a left-ear advantage (Kimura 1964; Gordon 1980), and vowels produced a weak or unreli- able ear advantage (Blumstein et al. 1975). Kimura and scores of others who ad- ministered dichotic-listening tests thus concluded that this technique provided an excellent method for determining not only which hemisphere was dominant for language, but to what extent, under what testing conditions and task demands, and with what types of stimuli and subjects (e.g., Van Lancker & Fromkin 1978; Springer & Searleman 1978). Not surprisingly, the dichotic listening test grew rapidly in popularity and application (see the extensive review by Berlin & McNeil 1976) and continued to be used even to test the now-refuted hypothesis that language is lateralized dif- ferently in monolinguals and bilinguals (e.g., Albert & Obler 1978; Vaid & Lam- bert 1979). However, as Zatorre 1989 indicates, some dichotic tests lacked meth- odological rigor and their results may have been unreliable or invalid. For exam- ple, what appear to be laterality effects may, in some cases, be nothing more than > I Molly Mack: Past, present, & future roles of the neuroscdbnces 5 5 a reflection of attentional bias favoring one or the other ear (Bryden et al. 1983). Thus, in recent years, this approach has been used less extensively than it was its heyday of the 1970s (see however Bruder 1991; Yund et al. 1999) and is now rarely interpreted as providing an unambiguous view of cerebral laterality. Another non-invasive approach, the measurement of brain waves as de- tected by electrodes placed on the scalp, was also applied to the study of cerebral laterality (e.g., Donchin et al. 1977; Molfese 1978; Molfese & Schmidt 1983). One application of this method, the electroencephalogram (EEG), was used to measure alpha wave activity — low-frequency waves whose amplitude is inversely corre- lated with activity. Thus, the more activation, the less the alpha- wave activity. With this approach, researchers concluded that the left hemisphere was more highly activated than the right during verbal tasks (Galin & Ornstein 1972.) It is important to note that, in later years, substantial improvements were made upon this method, primarily involving the repeated presentation of similar stimuli so that averaging techniques could be utilized, as is done in a procedure using event- related potentials (ERPs). The ERP maps 'regularities in external stimuli or events onto the regularities in brain activity time-locked to those events', and these regularities 'are mirrored, in part, in the modulations of electrical activity' dis- played visually as waveforms (Kutas & Van Petten 1994:83). Although, as Garn- sey 1993 notes, not all of the processing that takes place in the brain is observ- able in ERP waveforms, ERPs are still used by some researchers in evaluating hemispheric effects (Kutas, Hillyard, & Gazzaniga 1988; Neville et al. 1997), and they remain a valuable source of information about how the brain deals with lin- guistic information (e.g., Kounias & Holcomb 1994; Kutas & Van Petten 1994; Gevins 1998). Concurrent with the emergence, in the mid- 20 th century, of the dichotic- listening technique and the measurement of brain-wave activity was a neurologi- cal procedure, the Wada test. This test provided particularly strong support for the belief that the left hemisphere was dominant for language (Wada 1949; Wada & Rasmussen 1958). In this procedure, a barbiturate (sodium amytal) is injected into the carotid artery prior to neurosurgery in order to determine to what extent the left (or right) hemisphere subserves language. Injection of the drug into the artery results in a temporary anesthetizing of the hemisphere ipsilateral to the ar- tery. If the anesthetized hemisphere controls language, the patient becomes tem- porarily mute. This test, which generally yields robust effects, served as a major source of data regarding the relationship of handedness to the lateralization of language (at least in the spoken mode) and it is still in use (Berthier et al. 1990; Ravdin et al. 1997; Wada 1997). The mid-20 th century also witnessed the application of another medical pro- cedure that permitted researchers to investigate cerebral laterality (Sperry et al. 1969; Levy et al. 1972; Sperry 1974, 1982). That is, neurologists, psychologists, and linguists examined the behavior of commissurotomized or 'split-brain' pa- tients — patients who had had part or all of the corpus callosum (and in some cases other commissures) severed to alleviate intractable epileptic seizures. (The corpus callosum is a major tract of millions of nerve fibers connecting the cortices t 5 6 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) of the two hemispheres.) This procedure yielded highly informative results about the specialized functions of the two hemispheres since it effectively prevents the hemispheres from communicating with one another via the cortex. For example, a commissurotomized patient might be unable to name an object, placed out of view, which he/she is palpating with the left hand: The sensory information is re- layed to the right hemisphere subcortically but cannot be transmitted via cortical connections to the left hemisphere for production as a spoken word. Nonetheless, the patient knows what the object is, as can be demonstrated if he/she is asked to draw it. Split-brain patients thus revealed the extent to which language is sub- served by the left hemisphere and provided valuable information about the lin- guistic abilities of the disconnected hemispheres. Indeed, although the right hemi- sphere has at least some linguistic abilities (e.g., Zaidel 1978; Kutas et al. 1988; Hutner & Liederman 1991), the behavior of commissurotomized patients revealed significant left-hemisphere dominance for most language functions. It also dem- onstrated that the two hemispheres subserve different albeit highly complemen- tary functions — an observation supported by a considerable body of subse- quent research (e.g., Code 1997; Vargha-Khadem et al. 1997; Karbe et al. 1998; Kurowski et al. 1998). If one could imagine a technique particularly well suited for providing in- formation about the differential functions of each hemisphere, it would perhaps involve the absence of part or all of one half of the brain. Indeed, since the 1970s, such situations have been the topic of considerable interest and research and have appeared as a consequence of a surgical procedure, a hemispherectomy, in which much or all of one hemisphere is removed. (Removal only of the cortex is called 'hemidecortication', although many researchers apply the term 'hemispherectomy' to the removal of the cortex or to the removal of a much more substantial portion of one hemisphere.) A procedure as radical as this is only un- dertaken in cases of severe brain pathology or damage, as for example, in Sturge- Weber-Dimitri syndrome (Dennis & Whitaker 1977) or Rasmussen encephalitis (Stark et al. 1995; Caplan et al, 1996). These and certain other neurological disor- ders may cause intractable epileptic seizures for which hemispherectomy may be the only means of obtaining partial or complete relief. In the 1970s, reports of pa- tients (usually children) who had undergone such procedures generated particu- lar interest because they provided relatively direct evidence of the capabilities not only of the disconnected hemispheres, as with 'split-brain patients', but of the capabilities of entirely isolated cortices or hemispheres. For example, Dennis & Whitaker (1977:102-3) observed that, of the three children whom they examined, the two who had undergone removal of the left hemisphere exhibited 'difficulty m in utilizing the syntactic information conveyed by words like when, after, and be- ^ fore, and in analyzing examples of overt instrumentals, ... especially those in which the surface word order was not the same as the temporal order of the ac- tion'. By contrast they found that 'the isolated right hemisphere appearfed] to acquire certain components of auditory language less well, especially the ability to respond to the structural or syntactic aspects of heard utterances'. > I Molly Mack: Past, present, & future roles of the neurosciences 5 7 However, as compelling as these results were (and continue to be), infer- ences about normal brains (and hemispheres) based on hemispherectomized pa- tients must be made with care. That is, hemispherectomies are undertaken only in cases of severe brain pathology so, prior to surgery, certain functions otherwise subserved by the impaired hemisphere may have been reallocated to the intact hemisphere. In addition, brain pathology is not always confined to one hemi- sphere or, subsequent to the removal of a hemisphere, there may be a shift of the remaining hemisphere over the midline and a concomitant enlargement of the lat- eral ventricle (Strauss & Verity 1983:2). Finally, removal of one hemisphere may result in the amelioration of presurgical glucose hypometabolism (Caplan et al. 1996) or in the disinhibition of functions in the remaining hemisphere. In any of these situations, post-operative behavior may not accurately reflect the abilities of a normal hemisphere in an intact brain. In sum, the mid-20 th century was an era rich with hypotheses about and methods for analyzing brain structure and function. And, by the beginning of the 1980s, work in the neurosciences had provided fertile ground for the emergence of fresh perspectives and new research paradigms relevant to the future of the linguistic sciences. 3.0 Back to the future: Recent and emerging developments Nearly thirty years ago, Noam Chomsky (1972:1) commented about interdiscipli- nary efforts involving linguistics when he observed that there were signs 'that the rather artificial separation of disciplines may be coming to an end. It is no longer a point of honor for each to demonstrate its absolute independence of the others'. He also said that 'there is more of a healthy ferment in ... the particular branch of cognitive psychology known as linguistics ... than there has been for many years'. Chomsky's observations may have be been somewhat premature (see, e.g., Mack 1990), but they are now applicable to the blossoming relationship between the neurosciences and linguistic sciences. (This is not to overlook pro- ductive interdisciplinary work by linguists in other areas — for example, by those who have applied theoretical models from linguistics and cognitive science to the study of second-language acquisition [e.g., Flynn 1987; White 1990] or those who have used neurological constructs to inform language pedagogy [Danesi 1988]. However, discussion of such work is beyond the scope of the present pa- per.) That is, concurrent with a virtual explosion of information about the human brain in recent decades, there has been a marked increase in inter- and multidisci- plinary initiatives involving inquiries into the brain and language. One example of this was a weekly seminar held in the spring of 1998 at the University of Illinois under the auspices the University's Center for Advanced Study. Entitled 'Mind, Brain, and Language', this seminar was designed to explore ways in which the neurosciences (and the behavioral sciences) could inform theory and research in the linguistic sciences — and vice versa. Students and faculty from twelve aca- demic units engaged in an exchange of information on selected topics from lan- guage evolution and child-language acquisition to computational modeling and 5 8 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) brain-imaging techniques. The culmination of this endeavor was a major confer- ence devoted to the topic of mind, brain, and language. These initiatives, and oth- ers occurring worldwide, reveal a growing recognition of the fact that much of the 'cutting-edge' work in the neurosciences and linguistic sciences is now oc- curring at the interstices of once-insular (and insulating) disciplines. It is therefore of interest to consider those areas in the neurosciences that are currently proving particularly rewarding in terms of informing the linguistic M sciences and which, in so doing, are blurring or even erasing the lines between V traditionally defined academic disciplines. These include the following topics and approaches: biologically based maturational effects upon language acquisition, the modularity of language, brain-imaging techniques, and the bilingual brain. A. Youth is not wasted on the young: Biologically-based maturational effects on language acquisition While individual differences in the structure and function of the brain have long been recognized, the systematic study of such differences has been particularly vibrant since the early 1980s. (See, e.g., Hartlage & Telzrow 1985.) Dean (1985:9) describes this work as follows: The study of individual differences with its foundation in biology is concerned more directly with 'naturally' occurring variation in be- havior and brain function than differences observed through manipu- lation of the examination of neuropathology. ... The objective ... is the portrayal of variation in brain function that can more heuristically be attributed to an interaction of genetic and environmental factors. Indeed, in recent years, researchers have explored individual differences in work dealing with the effect of genetic and environmental factors on behavior. For ex- ample, some researchers have examined handedness (Gur & Gur 1980; Herron 1980; Witelson 1980; Basso et al. 1990; Murphy & Peters 1994; Driesen & Raz 1995), while others have investigated gender (Wittig & Peterson 1979; McGlone 1980; Kimura 1983; Pizzamiglio et al. 1985; Habib et al. 1991; Shaywitz et al. 1995; Witelson et al. 1995). Results of such studies have revealed interesting and sometimes controversial findings about the brain/behavior relationship and about the possible effects of genetic versus environmental variables. Yet one type of individual difference that has generated an enormous amount of attention is age or, more specifically, the relationship between brain maturation and language acquisition. Many researchers have explored this rela- tionship by testing the critical-period hypothesis (CPH) for language acquisition,^ and some have sought to provide neurological explanations for such a period. ^ Although the notion that there is a critical period for language acquisition is not new, it continues to generate a great deal of interest and debate and it is a topic ripe for neurolinguistic investigation. The concept of a critical period, originating from work in embryology and ethology, is based upon the premise that there is a circumscribed period of time in the development of an organism during which it must be exposed to specific ex- > » Molly Mack: Past, present, & future roles of the neuroscences 5 9 ternal stimuli or internal events if it is to develop normally. In addition, it has been proposed that a critical period should have an observable onset and offset and a specifiable duration (e.g., Mack 1997). Empirical investigations of the CPH have been conducted for years, as exemplified by Stockard's 1921 study of fish em- bryo, the oft-cited work of Lorenz 1937 on bird imprinting, and Hubel and Wie- sel's acclaimed studies with the visual system of cats (e.g., Hubel and Wiesel 1963, 1970). Work such as this and the work of many others (see, e.g., Bornstein 1987) has amply demonstrated the existence of critical periods in animal studies. What remains disputed is the extent to which evidence based upon animal onto- geny is relevant to human behavior — specifically, to the acquisition of language. But before proceeding, it is important to clarify several points. First, the term 'critical period' is often used interchangeably with the term 'sensitive period', and some researchers use the latter term when others would use the former (e.g., Bateson 1979). A general convention, however, is to use the term 'critical period' to denote a period that ends abruptly and 'sensitive period' to denote one that ends gradually. But it is quite difficult to operationalize 'abruptly' and 'gradually'. For example, a 24-hour period of susceptibility to en- vironmental influences would certainly seem to qualify as one that ends abruptly. Yet if that 24 hours represents 80% of the life span of the organism involved (as in an insect responding to pheromones in a mating cycle), the ending of the pe- riod might well be interpreted as gradual. In other words, 'abrupt' and 'gradual' are relative terms — a point almost never made in discussions of the CPH. There- fore, it seems more reasonable view a critical period as that time during which complete development (of a physical structure or a behavior) is possible, and a sensitive period as that time during which partial development is possible. Be- cause studies designed to test the CPH in language-acquisition research invaria- bly find evidence that at least some language acquisition can occur throughout the life span, the term 'sensitive period' (and 'sensitive-period hypothesis' or SPH) will be used in the present discussion. Second, it is possible to assert that there are age-based (maturational) con- straints on language acquisition without agreeing that these constraints are the consequence of neurobiological factors. For example, some second-language re- searchers have proposed that adult L2 acquisition is less successful than child- hood L2 acquisition for reasons involving social, affective, personality, cultural, testing and/or pedagogical variables (e.g., Snow 1987; Singleton 1989; Brown 1994). Certainly, these variables and countless others contribute in some measure to age-based effects. But, because the focus here is on the role of brain-based language behaviors, maturational constraints are treated as neurobiologically based maturational constraints. On a related note, it is possible to maintain that there are maturational con- straints on language acquisition without positing the existence of a critical (or sensitive) period. For example, it might be the case that language proficiency cor- relates inversely with age at the onset of language acquisition (i.e., the younger one is when he/she acquires language, the more proficient he/she will be) and that an age-based decrement in proficiency is reflected as a linear function. If this were 6 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) the case, then acquisition at age 25 should result in better performance than ac- quisition at age 30, and acquisition at age 35 should result in better performance than acquisition at age 40. But to date, there is little evidence of this. Finally, no strong distinction is made here between a sensitive period for a first or a second language. A number of studies designed to test the SPH for lan- guage acquisition have, in fact, been conducted using the L2 of bilinguals or sec- ond-language learners. Of course, there are many ways in which first-language (LI) and second-language acquisition differ. For example, apparent age-related difficulties — if they exist — in adult L2 acquisition may be due as much to trans- fer from the LI as to biological constraints on late language learning. But, with the application of appropriate methods for testing and evaluation and the use of large numbers of subjects from different language backgrounds, it should be pos- sible to control or account for at least some of the variance caused by non- maturational factors. Some of the earliest observations about a sensitive (or, in their terms, critical) period for language were made by Penfield 1953 and Lenneberg 1967. Both maintained that there were maturationally based constraints on language acquisi- tion, and Lenneberg clearly associated these constraints with neurological vari- ables. However, two of Lenneberg's proposals have not withstood empirical in- vestigation although they are often cited as fact in the literature. These are (1) that the critical period for language acquisition ends at puberty, and (2) that the end of the critical period is correlated with or caused by an increase in the later- alization of language to the left hemisphere. (If there is a critical period, it proba- bly ends much earlier than puberty, at least with respect to certain linguistic com- ponents and modalities. Furthermore, it is unlikely that there is a single critical or sensitive period for the entire linguistic system.) But importantly, Lenneberg (1967:176) also conjectures that 'the time limitations postulated for language ac- quisition' probably do not function 'across the board for all types of human learning'. This is a central premise underlying most studies designed to test the SPH for language acquisition. There is now such a large body of work on the relationship between age and language acquisition that much of the evidence cited to support the SPH is well known, so examples here will be kept to a minimum. Pertinent studies include the comparative analysis of brain damage in children versus adults (e.g., Robinson 1981); examination of language acquisition and behavior in language-deprived children and adults (Lane 1976; Curtiss 1977, 1994; Newport 1988, 1990; Em- morey et al. 1995; Grimshaw et al. 1998); and examination of neurological func- tions in individuals whose exposure to language occurred at different ages (Weber-Fox & Neville 1996; Neville et al. 1997, 1998). In addition, inferential support can be found in some psycholinguistic studies of individuals who ac- quired their L2 at different ages (e.g., Oyama 1976; Patkowski 1980; Johnson & Newport 1989; Flege 1991; Kim 1994; Shim 1995; Flege, Munro, & MacKay 1995; Munro et al. 1996; E. Kim 1997; Mack 1998: Mack et al. 1999). And, as will be considered in Section 3.3., relevant evidence is now emerging from brain- imaging studies of bilinguals. « > > Molly Mack: Past, present, & future roles of the neurosciences 6 1 A frequently cited study regarding the SPH and L2 acquisition was con- ducted by Johnson & Newport 1989 using 46 native speakers of Korean and Chinese who arrived in the U.S. between the ages of 3 and 39. Subjects were tested on a grammaticality judgment task (GJT) in English. Those who had arrived in the U.S. between the ages of 3 and 7 performed as accurately as did native speakers of English. Those whose age of arrival was 8 to 10 performed less accu- rately, those who arrived from age 11 to 15 performed even less accurately, and those who arrived after age 15 performed the least accurately. Johnson & New- port interpret their findings as support for the SPH not only because of these findings, but because age was a stronger predictor of subjects' performance than were other variables examined, including duration of exposure to English and at- titudinal and motivational variables. The findings of Shim 1995 and E. Kim 1997 who also used a GJT with Korean-English bilinguals differing in age of exposure to English supported the results of Johnson and Newport's study although they observed earlier age-based effects. That is, subjects who were exposed to English as early as age 6 did not perform, in all respects, as did the native speakers to whom they were compared. In an experiment designed to test the SPH for the phonological component, Mack 1998 and Mack et al. 1999 tested 15 adult English native speakers and 60 adult Korean-English bilinguals who were native speakers of Korean. The bilin- guals were divided into four groups of 15 each, based upon age of arrival in the U.S. Subjects were required to discriminate and identify stimuli in computer- synthesized /i-I/ and /u-U/ continua. (These sets of vowels were used primarily be- cause neither fU nor /U/ exists in the Korean vowel system.) To control for one po- tentially major confounding variable, ANCOVAs were used for the data analysis with length of exposure to English as the covariate. Results revealed that all five groups discriminated the vowels similarly, but differences emerged in their identi- fication of the /i-I/ continuum, with only those bilinguals who had been exposed to English between ages 4 and 7 performing as the native speakers did. (No dif- ference in the identification of the /u-U/ continuum was observed possibly be- cause the bilinguals associated the English /U/ with the Korean high back un- rounded vowel.) Moreover, partial correlations revealed that age was more strongly correlated with /i-I/ identification among the bilinguals than was duration of exposure to English, Korean proficiency self-rating, or the amount of Korean used in the home. Hence the results are interpreted as support for the SPH for language acquisition. But there are even stronger sources of evidence for the SPH — and hence for maturationally based constraints on language acquisition — than these psy- cholinguistic studies of bilinguals. These can be found in studies detailing the language deficits of individuals whose exposure to a native (first) language did not occur until relatively late in life. The most well-documented of these cases is that of Genie (Curtiss 1977) who, from the age of twenty months to thirteen years, was kept in isolation and received almost no linguistic input. At the time she was discovered and rescued 6 2 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) from her physical and social imprisonment, she could neither produce nor under- stand language. Yet, in response to intensive language therapy, within several months she could produce at least 100 words and she could combine words in simple utterances. Moreover, according to Curtiss (1994:228), Genie's 'acquisition of lexicon and the expression of meaning relations, including mul- tipropositionality, steadily increased'. On the other hand, 'her utterances re- mained largely agrammatic and hierarchically flat.' And, Curtiss notes, 'her A speech, even after eight years, remained essentially devoid of "closed-class" w morphology and of most syntactic devices and operations'. Clearly, Genie did not acquire a complete language system. Most interpretations of her linguistic abilities (or lack thereof) are based upon the notion that Genie's 'window of opportu- nity' for acquiring language had closed at least partially by the time she was ex- posed to language. Curtiss (1994:229) discusses a related case, that of Chelsea, whose language acquisition did not, through an unfortunate set of circumstances, begin until she was fitted with hearing aids when in her thirties. Like Genie, Chelsea was able to acquire lexical items fairly rapidly, but her multiword utterances were 'almost without exception, unacceptable grammatically and quite often propositionally unclear or ill formed'. In contrast to Genie, Chelsea's 'lexical knowledge seem[ed] limited to (denotative) definitional cores and [did] not appear to encom- pass either subcategorization information or logical structure constraints'. More recently, Grimshaw et al. 1998 presented the case of a hearing-impaired individual who was fitted with hearing aids at a relatively late age (although much earlier than Chelsea had been). The focus of their study was E.M., a young man who had been profoundly deaf since birth. At age 15, he was fitted with hearing aids and was then exposed to Spanish, the language of relatives with whom he re- sided, in a naturalistic context in the home. Yet, even after he had been exposed to spoken Spanish for four years, E.M. exhibited severe linguistic deficits and his MLU (mean length of utterance) was less than 2. (By contrast, as the authors point out, a normal four-year-old child has a mean MLU of 4.4.) Taken together, evidence from studies such the above strongly suggests that there are maturational constraints on language acquisition and that there is a sensitive period for language acquisition. (See however Vargha-Khadem et al. 1997 on the acquisition of language by a nine-year-old child after left hemidecor- tication and Locke 1997 for a discussion of problems with the interpretation of the SPH.) But what how might these constraints be represented at the neurobi- ological level? At present, speculation must suffice, as the illustration below re- A veals. ™ In a recent publication, individuals involved in national policy-making or- ganizations devoted to an understanding of child development stressed the role of neurological changes as they relate to early childhood (Melmed 1997; New- berger 1997). For example, Newberger (1997:5) asserts that, 'if a child receives little stimulation early on, synapses will not sprout or develop, and the brain will make fewer connections. Therefore, a child's experiences during the first few days, months, and years may be more decisive than scientists once believed'. Al- > > Molly Mack: Past, present, & future roles of the neurosciences 6 3 though Newberger may be correct, she cites no supporting data (for example, from the study of infant and child brains) because the data simply do not exist. That is, to systematically relate numbers of synapses in young human brains to specific amounts of environmental stimulation would require healthy brain tissue obtained post-mortem and prepared for examination with electron microscopy. These samples would be taken from the brains of individuals who had been classi- fied, prior to death, with respect to the amount of environmental stimulation re- ceived, such as no exposure to linguistic input, large amounts of linguistic input, etc. (An even better design would entail the random selection and random as- signment of subjects to groups whose environmental stimulation was then care- fully controlled.) Such a study is theoretically feasible but, especially for meth- odological reasons, it would be difficult to implement. In fact, some the best evidence currently available regarding the effect of experience on cellular changes in the brain has been obtained in animal studies (e.g., Greenough 1986; Greenough et al. 1987; Greenough & Black 1992). Greenough and colleagues conducted studies of rats raised in a variety of envi- ronments. As Greenough et al. 1987 explain, they studied environmental com- plexity (EC) rats, social cage (SC) rats, and individual cage (IC) rats. The EC rats were housed with others and had ready access to play objects; the SC rats were housed in small groups or pairs in nearly empty cages; and the IC rats were alone in cages and had no play objects. Morphological examination of the animals' brains revealed that the EC rats had about 20% more dendrites (and hence about 20% more synapses) per neuron in the upper visual cortex than did the IC rats. This amounts to a difference of about 2,000 synapses per neuron. (When one re- calls the size and density of neurons, the magnitude of this effect becomes espe- cially apparent.) This type of experience-based change is termed by Greenough et al. (1987:550) to be an 'experience-dependent process' — one characterized by the development of new synapses (synaptogenesis). They contrast this with an 'experience-expectant process' as follows: The data . . . suggest that there is a fundamental difference between the processes governing the formation of synapses in early, age-locked sensory system development and those governing synapse formation during later development and adulthood. Experience-expectant proc- esses found in early development appear to produce a surplus of syn- apses, which are then pruned back by experience to a functional sub- set. In later development and adulthood, synapses appear to be gener- ated in response to events that provide information to be encoded in the nervous system. Thus the susceptibility of the brain to certain types of extrinsic influence is matu- rationally based and involves synaptic pruning (elimination of synapses). This may be the neurological substrate of a sensitive period for language acquisition (and one of the reasons why, after childhood, second-language learners almost invariably exhibit an accent in their L2!). While such a suggestion may seem speculative, Greenough et al. (1987:553) make a related point: « 6 4 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) A conjecture that a particular developmental process has a sensitive period(s) (e.g., language acquisition) can now generate testable hy- potheses about neural changes that must accompany it. For example, a fixed time course for language acquisition would suggest a peak in cortical thickness of synaptic numbers shortly before the start of a hy- pothetical experience-expectant period. This proposed hypothesis provides a compelling argument for the neurobiological , study of a proposed sensitive period (or periods) for language and, in fact, finds some empirical support in the work of Huttenlocher & Dabholkar 1997 who studied synaptogenesis in the auditory and prefrontal cortices of fetal, infant, and child brains. Among their major findings were that neither synapse formation nor synapse elimination followed one time course in all regions of the cortex and, in the auditory cortex (but not in the prefrontal cortex) synapse elimination ap- peared to be complete by the age of 12. They also note that 'synapse elimination, in contrast to synaptogenesis, seems to be ... environmentally related' (117). In this regard, they refer to findings of permanent visual defects resulting from visu- ally deprived input occurring during a period of synapse elimination. It appears then that synapse elimination (as in experience-expectant processes) is a crucial neurological feature associated with sensitive (or critical) periods. Thus empirical evidence is emerging that may eventually support (or refute) the sensitive-period hypothesis for language acquisition. What is now needed are (1) additional age-based studies to better determine developmental milestones in language behaviors (such as the well-documented early-childhood loss of the ability to discriminate non-native speech sounds [Werker & Tees 1984; Werker 1995]), and (2) the correlation of such milestones with changes in the brain. Re- sults of such studies could also be used to help reconcile apparent discrepancies between the above-cited work and evidence from neuroimaging (see 3.4. below) regarding age-related effects and the brain. 3.2. Einstein's brain: Is there a language module? Recently, Albert Einstein was featured in news reports on national television, on the radio, and in news magazines. Or, more accurately, Albert Einstein's brain was featured. Sandra Witelson and colleagues have been studying Einstein's brain (kept, in a remarkable act of foresight, by the pathologist who conducted the autopsy after Einstein's death in 1955). Their objective has been to determine if his brain has any anatomically distinct characteristics — characteristics that could be related to the type and or extent of his intellectual abilities. ^ These researchers found that, while the overall size of Einstein's brain was^ within the range of the brains to which his was compared, one region in the parie- tal lobe, the parietal operculum, was absent and the inferior parietal lobule was 15% larger than average (Witelson et al. 1999). This lobule provides for associa- tions across sensory, visual, and somesthetic modalities and has been implicated in visuospatial, mathematical, and 'imagery of movement' cognitive functions. Witelson et al. suggest that its apparent enlargement in Einstein's brain may be causally related to his intelligence and, more specifically, to the way in which Ein- > > Molly Mack: Past, present, & future roles of the neurosciences 6 5 stein conceptualized scientific problems. In other words, researchers may have discovered the neurological substrates of the theory of relativity. Of course, proposing a causal connection between neuroanatomy and cog- nitive function can be problematic. In this case, for example, Einstein's vibrant life-long intellectual activities may have stimulated the development of neural networks (although Witelson et al. indicate that the extensive development of Einstein's posterior parietal lobes probably occurred early in development). It is also possible that the unusual structure of Einstein's brain is an anatomical acci- dent completely unrelated to his cognitive abilities. But, as this discovery sug- gests, the linking of highly specific brain regions to highly specific brain functions is not only tempting but is, at least in part, warranted on the basis of what has long been known about the relationships between brain structure and function. Consider again the work of Ojemann and colleagues (Ojemann 1980, 1981, 1983, 1994; Ojemann & Whitaker 1978; Ojemann & Mateer 1979). This work, using electrocortical stimulation to map the relationship between brain regions and language functions, has yielded some provocative results largely supportive of a highly locationist interpretation of language organization and function. For example, Ojemann found that 'at a few sites [in the cortex] only conjunctions, prepositions, and verb endings were altered during stimulation' (Ojemann 1983:71-2). Such an assertion is somewhat difficult to accommodate in light of Ojemann's own acknowledgment of frequently observed between-subject vari- ability in the cortical representation of language (Ojemann et al. 1989; Ojemann 1994). Still his work remains widely cited and has even inspired studies designed to determine whether or not a bilingual's two languages have distinct spatial rep- resentations in the brain (e.g., Rapport et al. 1983). In fact, a related type of cortical mapping is now being used to assist neuro- surgeons in delineating brain regions responsible for various functions (Grimson 1999). With this procedure, a transcranial magnetic stimulator with a pair of elec- tomagnets induces electrical currents in specific regions of the brain, such as the motor cortex. Electrical 'pickups' affixed, for example, to a patient's hand can then reveal to what extent muscles respond to cortical stimulation, thereby ena- bling the surgeon to distinguish brain regions which generate the strongest re- sponses from the more peripheral regions which generate weaker responses. Ap- plication of this procedure helps reduce the likelihood of paralysis which could result if core regions of the primary motor cortex were excised during neurosur- gery. Localization of neurological functions is similar, but not identical, to the theory of modularity that gained prominence in the 1980s. A modular cognitive system, as articulated by Fodor (1983:37) is 'domain specific, innately specified, hardwired, autonomous, and not assembled' (i.e., the system has not been 'put together from some stock of more elementary subprocesses'). And, for decades, Chomsky (1972, 1984, 1986) has premised his theories upon a view of the lan- guage faculty as modular or 'informationally encapsulated' . He states (1972:70) that 'as far as we know, possession of human language is associated with a spe- « 6 6 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28 : 2 (Fall 1 998) cific type of mental organization, not simply a higher degree of intelligence'. And, in a discussion of Chomsky's theory of language and the mind (and, more specifi- cally, of his conception of the principles of Universal Grammar) Cook (1988:20) says the following: It is not at all clear that ... UG [Universal Grammar] principles could op- erate in areas of the mind other than language. Speakers can entertain mathematical or logical possibilities that [unlike language] are not structure-dependent. ... The language faculty has particular properties that do not belong to other faculties. Further arguments for independ- ence come from language acquisition; principles such as structure- dependency do not appear to be learnable by the same means that, say, children [use when learning] to walk or to do arithmetic. 5 In recent years, evidence from selectively impaired and preserved language func- tions has been cited as support for an interpretation of language as a modular sys- tem — and one which may be composed of sub-modules. For example, Curtiss (1982, 1988) presents the case of a child who had pervasive mental retardation accompanied by motor, social, and cognitive delay but showed evidence of pre- served linguistic abilities. She also cites the cases of three four-year olds, all ex- hibiting normal conversational abilities but deficits in morphosyntax as revealed in such utterances as, Him bite mine head off, He little than me, and Want go show Papa (1988:89). To account for such evidence, Curtiss 1994 proposes a tri- partite model of language comprising a grammatical, referential/propositional, and social/communicative component — each one of which may be selectively im- paired or preserved. Yet modularity has not been embraced by all researchers in the neu- rosciences and linguistic sciences, as Lieberman (1984:21) makes eminently clear: The human brain is a complex, interconnected structure that has a long evolutionary history. It was not designed by a team of engineers who were aiming to produce a device that would operate by using discrete modules that each independently carried out the computations for some cognitive act. The data that have been acquired by neuro- physiologists are not consistent with the assumption that the human brain functions by using discrete 'modules' — that is neural devices like a language module, a space perception module, a number system module — that abruptly evolved as Chomsky ... proposes. Farah (1994:46) takes a related position by using the parallel distributed proc- A essing (PDP) framework proposed by Rumelhart & McClelland 1986 'as a source ™ of principled constraints on the ways in which the remaining parts of the [neural] system behave after local damage'. The components of this model, as applied by Farah, are that (1) the representation of knowledge is distributed rather than lo- calized; (2) information is processed in a graded rather than in an all-or-none manner; and (3) the units in the system function interactively rather than in isola- tion. On the basis of work conducted with McClelland (Farah & McClelland 1991) in which a computational two-component (visual and functional) model of > > Molly Mack: Past, present, & future roles of the neurosciences 6 7 semantic memory was lesioned, Farah (1994:50) concludes that damage to the visual semantic system results in impairment in the (non-damaged) functional se- mantic system — a finding contrary to the 'locality assumption'. She provides further evidence, based upon computer models, in support of the PDP framework and, in so doing, concludes that the locality assumption and at least certain inter- pretations of language modularity are not tenable. This approach is related to a connectionist model of language (Dell 1985; Elman 1991; Plaut 1995; Nobre & Plunkett 1997). A highly simplified description of connectionism is that it represents cognitive functions, such as language proc- essing, using interactive neural networks. These are activated as a function of the strength ('weights') of the connections among (in some approaches) various types of nodes, such as word or feature nodes. Nobre & Plunkett (1997:263) state that, by demonstrating 'how a high degree of integration can be achieved across disparate knowledge domains', connectionist modeling 'challenges the com- monly held assumption that the fractionation of behavior [including linguistic be- havior] reflects an underlying fractionation of the brain systems that control such behavior'. Another point is that while, for some researchers 'modularity' is simply a terminological variant of iocationism', for others it is deemed particularly insight- ful because it interprets linguistic deficits within the framework of specific theo- ries of grammar and/or models of knowledge representation (e.g., Rapp & Caramazza 1997; Smith forthcoming). However, it must be emphasized that, as originally formulated, modularity was a theory of the mind, not of the brain. Moreover, the term has been used, sometimes confusingly, in various ways. As Lieberman (1998:109) points out, 'Neurophysiologists often use module to char- acterize a functional neural circuit that carries out a particular task' while linguists may use the term to refer to 'a genetically specified part of the brain that carries out some specific aspect of behavior, such as coding the rules of grammar.' In ad- dition, it is possible that certain cognitive processes may be functionally modu- lar while being subserved by massively interconnected neural networks. In conclusion, as Karmiloff-Smith 1992 proposes, a reasonable theory of cognition may ultimately need to encompass both domain-specific nativist and domain- general empiricist interpretations. In such a system, modular and non-modular ap- proaches to knowledge are not treated as mutually exclusive but as complemen- tary. Emerging findings from the neurosciences can help determine whether or not such an interpretation is reasonable and, if it is, how it can be applied to lin- guistic theory. 3.3. A new window on the brain: Insights from neuroimaging The past two decades have witnessed an energetic emergence and enthusiastic application of a variety of brain-imaging techniques. (For general overviews and descriptions see Binder & Rao 1994; Raichle 1994; Toga & Mazziotta 1996; Za- torre et al. 1996; Lester et al. 1997.) These techniques have, at lasL permitted re- searchers to obtain high-resolution images of intact brains using relatively non- invasive procedures. Some of these procedures are CT (computerized tomogra- 68 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) phy), MEG (magnetoencephalography), SPECT (single-photon emission to- mography), PET (positron-emission tomography), NMR (nuclear magnetic reso- nance) and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging). Capable of providing detailed maps of the brain, these revolutionary techniques have been increasingly used since the early 1980s. 6 This is clearly revealed in the following figure pre- senting the number of studies in a standard database referring, over a five-decade period, to a once highly utilized procedure — dichotic listening — and to newer ^ techniques involving brain imaging. m 500 400 300 200 100 D Dichotic Listening! □ Brain Imaging I 1 1 2* 1950-59 1960-69 1970-79 1980-89 1990-99 Years Figure 3: The total number of studies referring to dichotic listening and brain imaging, by decade, found in the Psychlnfo database. Note the complete absence of references to brain imaging up to 1980, followed by a dramatic increase from 1980 to 1999. Concurrent with this is a marked decrease, particularly in the past decade, to studies referring to dichotic listening. One type of 'map', the CT scan (developed in the early 1970s), is obtained by passing a beam of x-rays through the brain (or other tissue) at many angles through a specific plane and then reconstructing the resulting information as a three-dimensional image. Computerized tomography provides information based upon the density of the tissue observed. Thus the CT scan can clearly reveal ana- tomical features of soft tissue and is particularly well suited for locating brain le- sions. Two other scanning techniques, PET and fMRI, have generated particular interest because, by revealing changes in metabolic activity resulting from ex- perimentally manipulated cognitive and behavioral tasks, they can be used for ob- taining images of the intact dynamic brain. Put simply, they can take a picture of A a resting brain, a thinking brain, a listening brain, a visualizing brain, even an ob- ^ sessive-compulsive brain. Specifically, PET utilizes a technique in which (for example) water is labeled with a radioisotope injected into a vein. Certain activities result in an increase of regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF); PET detects the radioactive material and takes multiple pictures of the functioning brain, revealing changes in activity with an accuracy of within several millimeters. (It does, however, have relatively poor > Molly Mack: Past, present, & future roles of the neurosciences 6 9 temporal resolution.) Similarly, fMRI scans are generated through, in one method, the detection of small fluctuations in the magnetic properties of oxygen-carrying hemoglobin (Raichle 1994). Thus, fMRI reveals changes in metabolic activity in the brain, and it does so with a high degree of spatial resolution. It can also be combined with a standard MRI so that both structural (anatomical) and func- tional information is represented. Moreover, because fMRI does not involve the introduction of a radioactive substance, multiple scans can be obtained from one individual resulting in increased precision (Banich 1997). Particularly in the past decade, both PET and fMRI have provided valuable data about how the brain processes language (e.g., Metter 1991; Fiez & Peterson 1993, Klein et al. 1995; Damasioetal. 1996; Habib & Demonet 1996; Stromswold et al. 1996; FitzGerald et al. 1997; Friedman et al. 1998; Zatorre forthcoming). For example, one PET-based study has recently been conducted by Jaeger et al. 1996 to test competing models of past-tense formation in English. As they state (1996:454) single-system theories posit that both the regular and irregular past tense are handled 'by a single cognitive mechanism or system,' while dual- system theories propose 'that regular and irregular past tense production are each handled by a separate cognitive mechanism or system.' In the latter case, regular past tense verbs could either be generated by rule while irregular past tense forms are stored in the lexicon with their stems (Pinker 1991), or regular and irregular verbs could be generated by two different submodules for each of the rule types (Ling & Marinov 1993). The prediction made by Jaeger et al. is that dual-systems theories entail two processes that are so computationally distinct that they should be subserved 'by functionally different systems' (457). Thus, in the Jaeger et al. study, subjects read aloud regular and irregular verb stems as well as nonce forms and were required to produce the past tense form of the words. A major finding was that the irregular past resulted in activation of the largest region of the brain (and in the longest reaction times). The authors con- clude that their findings are consistent with dual-systems theories and inconsis- tent with single-systems theories (and connectionist models). Although a subse- quent critique of this study (Seidenberg & Hoeffner 1998) claims that it is theo- retically and methodologically flawed, the findings are supported in a study of a lexical-decision test with priming administered to aphasics (Marslen-Wilson & Tyler 1997). Regardless of the ultimate interpretation of the status of past-tense formation in English, the use of PET to address this issue represents a valiant at- tempt to apply neuroimaging in testing competing hypotheses about how the brain processes certain types of linguistic information. In an fMRI study, Binder et al. 1997 have addressed a somewhat different linguistic topic — namely, the identification of as many of the receptive language regions of the brain as possible, thereby testing the 'classical model' of language localization. Subjects were required to make decisions about two types of audi- torily presented stimuli. In one condition, they were to indicate by key press when they heard any sequence of two 750-Hz tones; in another condition they were to indicate by key press which of the nouns presented (all names of animals) designated animals both native to the U.S. and used by humans. « 7 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) Results revealed extensive bilateral activation, both cortically and subcorti- cally, on the tone-decision task. Areas more strongly activated in the semantic- decision than in the tone task were found almost exclusively in the left hemi- sphere or right cerebellum, and the researchers observed quite extensive activa- tion of regions in the left frontal lobe — regions 'historically considered respon- sible for language production' (355). They further conclude that 'left frontal re- gions may participate in receptive language processing in the normal, uninjured state, playing a "language executive" role in coordinating the sensory and se- mantic processes occurring in posterior areas' (359). In this case, neuroimaging may provide important information about language organization in the intact brain, since these results are not entirely consistent with those obtained from studies of language impairment. What is apparent from both of these neuroimaging studies, as well as from scores of other related studies now underway, is that functional brain imaging is the preferred research technique (for relating brain structure and function) of the present and the wave of the future. Objections about its application are faint and few. Yet the psychologist, Richard DeGrandpre, maintains that the use of brain scans can 'promote a dangerous institutional bias toward neurological reduc- tionism, ... by implying that any simple physiological correlate of behavior is good evidence of cause' (1999:15). But until the fundamental assumptions underlying the interpretation of brain scans prove invalid, studies using these techniques will continue to proliferate at an exponential rate. The temptation to peer, at long last, inside 'the black box' is simply too great, the technology is too dazzling, and the observations are too exciting for anyone to abandon — or even seriously ques- tion — this research paradigm in the foreseeable future. 3.4. The bilingual brain For years, researchers have been intrigued by the co-existence of two languages in one brain. The questions most often asked are deceptively straightforward: (1) How are a bilingual' s languages functionally and/or anatomically organized? (2) How and to what extent are a bilingual' s languages kept separate? 7 To date, countless studies using a variety of methodologies — particularly in the fields of psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics — have been undertaken in an attempt to answer these questions (e.g., Paradis 1985, 1987, 1989, forthcoming; Paivio & Desrochers 1980; Rapport et al. 1983; Potter et al. 1984; Mack 1984, 1988, 1989, 1992; 1998; Nilipour & Ashayer 1989; Flege & Eefting 1987; Flege 1993, 1995; Mack et al. 1995; Wulfeck, Bates, & Capasso 1991; Schmidt & Flege 1995; Kim et ^ al. 1997; Mack et al. 1999). Among the most promising avenues of research are fl the (continued) study of language behavior in bilingual aphasics and the exami- nation of the brains of normal healthy bilinguals using neuroimaging. Michel Paradis' seminal 1977 description of patterns of language loss and restitution, based upon case studies of 138 bilingual aphasics, was a clear manifes- tation of over a century of interest in and research on language deficits in bi- and multilingual aphasics (e.g., Ribot 1882; Pitres 1885; Gloning & Gloning 1965; Minkowski 1965; Albert & Obler 1975; Lebrun 1976; Paradis 1977, 1983, 1987, > Molly Mack: Past, present, & future roles of the neurosciences 7 1 1989, forthcoming; Paradis et al. 1982; Paradis & Goldblum, 1989; Eviatar et al. 1999; Roberts & Deslauriers 1999). 8 The work of Paradis and others has garned considered attention because it is now clear that information from aphasiology can provide insights into how languages are organized, functionally and/or ana- tomically, in the bilingual brain. Specifically, Paradis 1977 identified five basic patterns of language loss and restitution in bilingual aphasics — synergistic (subdivided into parallel and differ- ential), successive, selective, antagonistic, and mixed. He describes these as fol- lows (1989:117): Recovery is said to be parallel when both (or all) languages are simi- larly impaired and restored at the same rate; differential when impair- ment is of a different degree in each language relative to premoribd mastery; successive when one language does not begin to reappear until another has been maximally recovered; antagonistic when one language regresses as the other progresses; selective when patients do not regain the use of one or more of their languages; and mixed when patients systematically [but inappropriately] mix or blend features of their languages at any or all levels of linguistic structure. As of 1989, Paradis had described three more types — alternate antagonis- tic, differential aphasia, and selective aphasia. An alternate antagonistic pattern is characterized by the patient's temporary and alternating inability to produce one or the other of the two languages. In differential aphasia, the patient exhibits symptoms typical of one type of aphasia in one of the languages and of another type in the other language. (See however a reanalysis of this type in Paradis 1998.) Selective aphasia occurs when a patient has 'obvious impairments in one language without any measurable deficit in the other(s)' (Paradis 1989:1 17). 9 In an attempt to account for the observed patterns of language deficit and preservation in bilingual aphasics, Paradis 1987, 1998 has posited four hypothe- ses, each of which makes different claims about the neural substrates underlying the bilingual' s languages. These are the Extended System, Dual System, Tripartite, and Subset Hypotheses. Paradis (1998:47) maintains that, of the four, only the Subset Hypothesis is compatible with all patterns of bilingual aphasia (as well as with 'unilingual phenomena') reported to date. This hypothesis is based upon the premise that 'each language constitutes a subsystem of the larger cognitive sys- tem known as language, in the same way that various registers constitute subsys- ^ terns of the overall language competence of an individual'. And 'each subsystem Bean be selectively impaired by pathology'. On the other hand, Paradis frequently takes pains to distinguish between the functional and anatomical organization of language. For example, in discuss- ing selective language impairment in a trilingual patient, he maintains (1987:342) that 'selective impairment does not necessarily suggest different anatomical sub- strates for the representation of two languages'. To illustrate, he cites a case of selective aphasia in which only one of the patient's three languages exhibited aphasic symptoms postoperatively. This language recovered spontaneously, yet < 7 2 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) one of the previously unimpaired languages then became impaired. He observes, 'It is unlikely that the two affected languages exchanged location over this pe- riod' . Green's 'inhibitory control model' 1986, 1993 can account for such a selec- tive type of impairment, for it proposes the following: Two classes of resource [are] identified: excitatory resources which can be used to increase the activation level and inhibitory resources which can be used to decrease the activation level. In producing or comprehending speech, resources are used up and unless they are re- plenished the system will fail. One effect of brain damage, or other stressors, is to reduce the availability of resources. According to the framework, individual performance is constrained by the availability of resources to effect the control of activation levels (1993:262-3). Paradis similarly accounts for a pattern of language loss such as the one described above using the 'activation threshold hypothesis'. This hypothesis proposes that the ability to perceive or produce a linguistically meaningful unit may be impaired not due to its complete absence, but due to the improper functioning of neural networks responsible for activating traces left (in this case) by linguistic experi- ence. The advantage of Green's and Paradis' hypotheses is that they can account for impaired language behavior in bilinguals, such as inadvertent mixing of the languages, as well as the behavior of normal bilinguals, such as volitional code- switching. Still it must be acknowledged that some aphasias — in any type of language user — are due to a substantial loss of neural tissue. In such cases, re- gions subserving language may be destroyed to the extent that no amount of ac- tivation or resource allocation can compensate. It should also be noted that some researchers initially proposed that at least one of the bilingual' s two languages might be subserved by, or actually located in, the right hemisphere (e.g., Gloning & Gloning 1965; Albert & Obler 1978). Such separation of the two languages would help explain, for example, the ob- served loss or preservation of (only) one of the languages in some bilingual apha- sics. However, such a gross anatomical distinction in the neural representation of the two languages has not been supported by recent studies (e.g., Rapport et al. 1983; McKeever & Hunt 1984; Berthier et al. 1990: Chee et al. 1999). Indeed, most now believe that a bilingual' s two languages are subserved by the same hemisphere (usually the left) and that interesting neurologically based features of bilingual language organization will be observed as intra- (rather than inter-) ^ hemispheric differences or similarities. m In light of admitted difficulties associated with 'locating' language in the brains of bilingual aphasics (see, for example, the excellent discussion by Zatorre 1989), it is not surprising that neuroimaging is now being used, with increasing frequency, to help address fundamental questions about the neurological sub- strates of language in the intact bilingual brain. An already notable neuroimaging study has recently been conducted by Kim et al. 1997. Its objective was to determine if, among bilinguals, age at the on- » Molly Mack: Past, present, & future roles of the neurosciences 7 3 set of the acquisition of the two languages affects the cortical representation of those languages. Thus, using fMRI, these researchers compared the extent of spa- tial separation of the languages in bilinguals who had acquired both languages in infancy (termed 'early bilinguals') and in bilinguals who had acquired their first language in infancy and a second language in adolescence or early adulthood (termed 'late bilinguals'). The regions examined were the 'classic' language areas — Broca's area in the inferior frontal gyrus (Brodmann's area 44 and, for one subject, areas 44 and 46) and Wernicke's area in the superior temporal gyrus (Broadmann's area 22). Spatial separation was operationalized as the center-to- center distance in millimeters (mm) between centroids of activity as measured during linguistic tasks carried out in the subjects' two languages. To minimize ar- tifacts resulting from head movement, yet to engage subjects in a language-based task, the researchers had the subjects use internal speech in each of their two lan- guages to describe, without vocalizing, what they had done at a specified time the previous day. Results revealed no difference in the distance between the center-of-mass centroids in Wernicke's area for the two languages of the early and late bilin- guals, with the mean amount of spatial separation being 1.6 mm for the early bi- linguals and 1.9 mm for the late bilinguals. But a substantial difference was ob- served for the two groups in Broca's area. Here the mean amount of spatial sepa- ration was 1.5 mm for the early bilinguals and 7.4 mm for the late bilinguals. These researchers conclude that, at least with respect to Broca's area, the early acquisi- tion of two (native) languages may result in the use of a common language area responsible for phonetic processing and may render the two languages relatively impervious to subsequent neural modification. On the other hand, late acquisition of a (second) language may necessitate the utilization of additional cortical tissue since, presumably, language in the core area cannot be reorganized. 10 These re- sults obtained regardless of the handnesses or gender of the subjects, and across a variety of language pairs examined. (They are also reminiscent of the findings ob- tained in the electrocortical stimulation study of Ojemann & Whitaker 1978.) Related results have been obtained from other neuroimaging studies of bi- linguals. For example, in their pilot fMRI study of five multilinguals, all of whom were fluent in a native and second language but non-fluent in a third, Yetkin et al. 1996 found that the largest regions of fronto-parietal and frontal lobe activa- tion were associated with speech production in the third (non-fluent) language. And the smallest regions of activation were associated with speech production in the two fluent languages. (For all subjects, the non-fluent language had been used for fewer than five years and was not, at the time of testing, used regularly.) Thus, for the two fluent languages, the regions of activation appeared to be more centralized. Although not designed to evaluate the extent of cortical involvement in a bilingual's two languages, an fMRI study conducted by Schlosser et al. 1998 also yields indirect support for the notion that a more familiar language results in stronger activation of frontal brain regions than does an unfamiliar one. They provided fourteen subjects with auditorily presented sentences in English (the 7 4 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) subjects' native language) and in Turkish (a language which none of the subjects understood). While the English sentences produced strong left-superior sulcus activation in all subjects, the Turkish sentences evoked no coherent pattern of activation in any of the subjects. Based upon these studies, it seems that language fluency — as reflected in age of language acquisition, years of language study and/or use, and language familiarity — is a crucial determinant of the neural representation of the languages m of a bilingual. This conclusion finds at least indirect support in the work of Perani ^ et al. 1998 who carried out a study, using PET, of high-proficiency early and high-proficiency late bilinguals. They found that, regardless of age of acquisition, all subjects appeared to utilize the same neural substrates, as reflected in left- hemispheric foci of activation, when listening to stories told in their two lan- guages. A similar finding was obtained by Chee et al. in their 1999 fMRI study of the processing, by 24 Mandarin-English bilinguals, of single visually presented words. They conclude (1999:3052) that 'common cortical areas are activated when fluent Mandarin-English bilinguals perform cued word generation. This is true of early, as well as late, onset bilinguals'. Again, while the bilinguals differed in age of L2 acquisition, all used English and Mandarin on a daily basis and all were characterized as fluent in both languages. Clearly, brain-imaging studies designed to reveal the functional representa- tion of languages in the bilingual brain have a promising future. These should prove especially revealing when their results are combined with data obtained from other approaches such as the study of aphasia in bilinguals. In 1953, Uriel Weinreich presented a linguistically based model of 'languages in contact' by proposing three ways in which a bilingual's language systems could be related to one another. He classified these as Types A B, and C. For example, Type A would obtain if the bilingual had two separate representa- tional systems for units in each language, Type B if there were two shared sys- tems, and Type C if one system were subserved by or mediated through another. These types later came to be known as coordinate, compound, and subordinate bilingualism, and numerous studies were conducted to compare the psycholin- guistic performance of, for example, coordinate and compound bilinguals. Wein- reich' s typological constructs now appear naively simplistic. Moreover, the terms 'coordinate', 'compound', and 'subordinate' have fallen out of use, in part be- cause they are difficult to validate empirically (at least as originally formulated). Yet analysis of the organization of the bilingual's two languages is as warranted ^ today as it was nearly fifty years ago. All that is required is a simple emendation of m one of the questions underlying Weinreich' s work. That is, in addition to asking, 'How are a bilingual's two languages represented as linguistic systems?' re- searchers can now ask, 'How are a bilingual's two languages represented as neuro-functional and neuroanatomical systems?' Answers are already ap- pearing on the horizon. » » Molly Mack: Past, present, & future roles of the neurosciences 7 5 3.5. Y2K and beyond: Other developments Three decades ago, Roman Jakobson — insightful, creative, and prescient — stated that 'the deepest discernment of the relation between the human organism and its verbal abilities and activities is achieved by the mutual help of neuro- biologists [sic] and linguists in a comparative inquiry' (1971:688). A major objec- tive of the above discussion of new and emerging issues and techniques has been to demonstrate the importance of such 'mutual help'. Thus four particularly promising areas of research have been discussed — areas in which the neu- rosciences have informed, and are likely to continue to inform, the linguistic sci- ences. These include maturational effects on language acquisition, language modularity (and connectionism), neuroimaging techniques, and the bilingual brain. Yet as important as each of these is to the future of linguistics, this is hardly an exhaustive list with which one can march confidently into the new millennium. Other topics which may prove particularly fruitful in the coming years are these: (1) continued study of the role of genetic versus environmental factors in child language acquisition; (2) additional examination of the contribution of the right hemisphere (as well as subcortical and cerebellar structures) to language use; (3) application of techniques involving neurogenesis — the growth of new neurons — in older brains (once thought an impossibility) to human brains; and (4) deter- mination of the extent to which research in Artificial Life (the computational modeling of cognitive processes as biological phenomena) can provide insights relevant to theories of language development and evolution. 4. Conclusion In the Introduction above, some of history's more blatant misconceptions about the role of the human brain were presented. Given the complexity of the brain's functions and the extremely small scale of its basic building block, the neuron, it is hardly surprising that ancient philosophers and physicians had major misconcep- tions about what the brain does and how it does it. Indeed, as Crick (1994:3) points out in his book, The Astonishing Hypothesis, each of us is 'no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules', a fact that went unrecognized for thousands of years. Nonetheless one of the ancients did, at least in part, get it right. In a com- mentary attributed to Hippocrates, glimpses of an early understanding of the function of the brain are clearly revealed: The source of our pleasure, merriment, laughter and amusement, as of our grief, pain, anxiety and tears, is none other than the brain. It is spe- cially the organ which enables us to think, see and hear, and to distin- guish the ugly and the beautiful, the bad and the good, pleasant and unpleasant (Lloyd 1978:248). Thus, even more than 2,000 years ago, 'the father of modern medicine' recog- nized the remarkable function of the 'vast assembly' residing inside the head. It is now axiomatic that without the brain there can be no emotion, thought, or Ian- 7 6 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) guage and that, without an understanding of the brain, there can be no complete understanding of emotion, thought, or language. Also considered above have been selected developments in the neu- rosciences which have had a significant impact on the linguistic sciences. Infor- mation from the neurosciences has been emerging at an ever-accelerating rate, relegating Jakobson's 1973 observation that 'so far, almost nothing is known ^ about the internal network of verbal communication' to the dustbin of history.^ Thus, although one author states that 'faculty members have long been blissfully^ ignorant about the folks in the building next door' (Nelson 1998:3), most lin- guists are not only aware of the folks in the building next door (in this case, the neuroscientists) but are happy to have them as neighbors. Moreover there is now an increasing awareness of the importance of cross- disciplinary interaction among a variety of fields, as Edward O. Wilson makes clear in his book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Borrowing from William Whewell's 1840 work, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Wilson main- tains that intellectual inquiry must be based upon 'consilience' or the 'jumping together' of knowledge across disciplines. He even advocates a grand theory of knowledge which entails no less that the unification of the sciences and humani- ties. Whether or not Wilson's 'grand theory' will be realized, it is apparent that, although the Decade of the Brain is drawing to a close, coming decades will wit- ness a plethora of new discoveries and insights from the neurosciences. And some of these discoveries and insights will provide answers to abiding questions about how language is organized and how it functions in the brain. Yet, as this new age of interdisciplinary exploration dawns, the words of the noted author Arthur Koestler (1967:254) come to mind: 'Once a scientist loses his sense of mystery, he can be an excellent technician, but he ceases to be a savant.'' It is hoped that, even as researchers in the neurosciences and linguistic sciences cast about in seas roiling with new information, hypotheses, models, and theories, they will retain a sense of mystery about the human brain — and about how language at once in- habits, shapes, and reflects our remarkable 'universe within'. NOTES *This paper is a revised and expanded version of a presentation given October^ 31, 1998, in the University of Illinois Center for Advanced Study symposium, m 'Territories and Boundaries': Cross-disciplinary Research and Curriculum'. I thank Braj B. Kachru and Jerry Morgan for inviting me to participate in the sym- posium, Adele Goldberg for ideas about the presentation, Pavel Trofimovich for his bibliographic assistance, and Elmer Antonsen for his patience and encourage- ment. Finally, I extend my gratitude to Wendy Baker for her unflagging good will and cheer as she spent days typing, formatting, and copy-editing — to say noth- ing of enduring my numerous requests for assistance in locating 'just one more article'. > » Molly Mack: Past, present, & future roles of the neurosciences 7 7 1 Interestingly, Galen was not only an accomplished physician, but a philosopher and logician who discussed the concepts of ambiguity and fallacy, and who had a theory about spoken and written language (Edlow 1977). 2 Examination of aphasia in terms of Broca's and Wernicke's aphasia is known as the 'classical view' of aphasia. Yet it has long been known that (1) there are sev- eral to many other types of aphasia depending upon one's classification criteria (Doody 1993); (2) pure forms of Broca's and Wernicke's aphasia are relatively rare; and (3) at least for Broca's aphasia, 'the underlying pathology is ... exten- sive and varied' (Alexander et al. 1989:676). Thus, although this basic dichoto- mous typology is still widely cited and utilized, its inherent limitations must be ac- knowledged. 3 It should be noted that cortical mapping using electrocortical stimulation was not done capriciously. Mapping was originally conducted prior to the excision of areas believed to be causing epileptic seizures, permitting a 'safer and more exact' cortical excision (Penfield & Roberts 1959:107), although its value in mapping the language areas soon became apparent. 4 Moreover, it has long been recognized that the two hemispheres of the brain are anatomically asymmetical and that, in most individuals, the planum temporale is larger on the left than the right (Geschwind & Levitsky 1968; Witelson 1977; Kertesz & Naeser 1994) — a feature which may be related to left-hemisphere spe- cialization for language. 5 Structure-dependency, one of the first principles proposed in the UG approach, is based upon an interpretation of how elements of a sentence are moved. For ex- ample, to form a passive sentence, the direct object is moved to sentence-initial position (Jane loves cats — > Cats are loved by Jane). This movement necessi- tates knowledge of the structural relationships among lexical items rather than the sequence in which they occur. For example, there would never be a rule (in Eng- lish or any other natural language) such as, 'To form the passive, move the n th word in the sentence to sentence-initial position.' It must be noted that move- ment rules have undergone substantial re-evaluation and reformulation in the past several decades, although this example still sufficies for illustrating the nature of principles in UG. 6 Magnetic resonance imaging is derived from a technique called nuclear magnetic resonance imaging (NMR) which yielded its developers, Felix Bloch and Edward Purcell, a 1952 Nobel Prize. Less than two decades later, Allan Cormack and Sir Dogfrey Housfield received a Nobel Prize for their work on the CT. Clearly, the development of enhanced in vivo imaging techniques represented a major mile- stone in the neurosciences — one whose importance was appropriately recog- nized by the scientific community. 7 In the present discussion, the term 'bilingual' is used to denote a individual who is reasonably fluent in two OR more languages. (See Mack 1997 for further defi- nitions pertaining to bilingualism.) 7 8 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) 8 For extensive reviews of the literature also see Paradis 1977, 1989, and Albert & Obler 1978; for selections from primary sources on the topic see Paradis 1983; and for discussion of the limitations of cross-linguistic research in aphasia see Bates et al. 1991. 9 In fact, Paradis' 1987 Bilingual Aphasia Test has been administered in over 60 language pairs to thousands of bilinguals worldwide and is now yielding signifi- cant findings about language loss and restitution in bilingual aphasics. 10 In a seemingly prescient observation about the organization of language in the brains of bilinguals, Pitres (1895:895) states that 'on pouvait supposer que, le pied de la troisieme circonvolution frontale contenant la totalite de I'appareil utilize par V acquisition de la langue maternelle, le reste de cette circonvulu- tion restait libre pour V acquisition des autres langues\ That is, he surmised that a portion of the third frontal convolution, a region in Broca's area, is allocated for the 'mother tongue' (native language), while the remainder is free for the acquisi- tion of other (non-native) languages — a conclusion remarkably similar to that drawn by Kim et al. 1997. REFERENCES Adams, Hazard, ed. 1971. Critical Theory Since Plato. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. Albert, Martin L., & Loraine K. Obler. 1975. Mixed polyglot aphasia. Paper pre- sented at Academy of Aphasia. Victoria, B. C. . 1978. The Bilingual Brain: Neuropsychological Aspects of Bilingualism. Orlando: Academic Press, Inc. Alexander, Michael, D. Frank Benson, & Donald T. Stuss. 1989. Frontal lobes and language. Brain and Language 37.656-91. Banich, Marie T. 1997. Neuropsychology: The Neural Bases of Mental Func- tion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Basso, Alan, Mario Farabola, Maria Pia Grassi, Marcella Laiacona, & M. Ester Zanobio. 1990. Aphasia in left-handers: Comparison of aphasia profiles and language recovery in non-right-handed and matched right-handed patients. Brain and Language 38.233-52. Bates, Elizabeth, Beverly Wulfeck, & Brian MacWhinney. 1991. Cross- linguistic research in aphasia: An overview. Brain and Language 41.123- 48. Bateson, Patrick. 1979. How do sensitive periods arise and what are they for? Animal Behavior 27:2.470-86. Berlin, Charles I., & Malcolm R. McNeil. 1976. Dichotic listening. Contempo- rary Issues in Experimental Phonetics, ed. by N. J. Lass, 327-87. New York: Academic Press. Berthier, Marcelo L., Sergio E. Starkstein, Pedro Lylyk, & Ramon Leiguarda. 1990. Differential recovery of languages in a bilingual patient: A case study using selective amytal test. Brain and Language 38.449-53. « > » Molly Mack: Past, present, & future roles of the neurosciences 7 9 Binder, Jeffrey R., Julie A. Frost, Thomas A. Hammeke, Robert W. Cox, Stephen M. Rao, & Thomas Prieto. 1997. Human brain language areas identified by functional magnetic resonance imaging. Journal of N euro science 17.353- 62. , & Stephen M. Rao. 1994. Human brain mapping with functional magnetic resonance imaging. Localization and Neuroimaging in Neuropsychology, ed. by Andrew Kertesz, 185-212. San Diego: Academic Press. Blumstein, Sheila E. 1973. A Phonological Investigation of Aphasic Speech. The Hague: Mouton. . 1997. A perspective on the neurobiology of language. Brain and Lan- guage 60.335-46. , E. Baker, & Harold Goodglass. 1977. Phonological factors in auditory comprehension in aphasia. Neuropsychologia 15.19-30. , Harold Goodglass, & Vivien Tartter. 1975. The reliability of ear advan- tage in dichotic listening. Brain and Language 2.226-36. , William E. Cooper, Edgar Zurif, & Alfonzo Caramazza. 1977. The percep- tion and production of voice-onset time in aphasia. Neuropsychologia 15.371-83. , William P. Milberg, Barbara Dworetky, Allyson Rosen, & Felicia Gershberg. 1991. Syntactic priming effects in aphasia: An investigation of local syntactic dependencies. Brain and Language 40.393-421. Bornsteen, Marc H, ed. 1987. Sensitive Periods in Development: Interdiscipli- nary Perspectives. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Pub. Brown, H. Douglas. 1994. Principles of Language Learning and Teaching. 3 rd Edition. New Jersey: Prentice Hall Regents. Brown, Roger. 1970. Psycholinguistics. New York: The Free Press. Bruder, Gerard E. 1991. Dichotic listening: New developments and applications in clinical research. Windows on the Brain: Neuropsychology's Techno- logical Frontiers, ed. by R. A. Zappulla, F. F. LeFever, J. Jaeger, & R. Bilder, 217-32. Bryden, M. P., Kevin Munhall, & F. Allard. 1983. Attentional biases and the right-ear effect in dichotic listening. Brain and Language 18.236-48. Caplan, David. 1987. Neurolingistics and Linguistic Aphasiology: An Introduc- tion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. , Jane M. Holmes, & John C. Marshall. 1974. Word classes and hemi- spheric specialization. Neuropyschologia 12.331-7. Caplan, Rochelle, Susan Curttss, Harry T. Chugani, & Harry V. Vinters. 1996. Pediatric Rasmussen Encephalitis: Social communication, language, PET, and pathology before and after hemispherectomy. Brain and Cognition 32.45-66. Carter, Richard B. 1983. Descartes' Medical Philosophy: The Organic Solu- tion to the Mind-Body Problem. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Chee, Michael W. L., Edsel W. L. Tan, & Thorsten Thiel. 1999. Mandarin and English single word processing studied with functional magnetic resonance imaging. The Journal of N euro science 19.3050-56. « 8 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton. . 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. . 1972. Language and Mind. Enlarged Edition. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. . 1984. Modular Approaches to the Study of Mind. San Diego: San Diego State University Press. . 1986. Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use. New York: Praeger Special Studies. , & Morris Halle. 1968. The Sound Pattern of English. New York: Harper & Row. Code, Chris. 1997. Can the right hemisphere speak? Brain and Language 57.38- 59. COOK, Vivian J. 1988. Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd. Cowan, W. Maxwell. 1979. The development of the brain. The Brain: A Scien- tific American Book, 51-67. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company. Crick, Francis H. C. 1979. Thinking about the brain. The Brain: A Scientific American Book, 130-7. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company. . 1994. The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. New York: Simon & Schuster. , & Christof Koch. 1992. The problem of consciousness. Scientific American September. 153-9. CURTISS, Susan. 1977. Genie: A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-Day 'Wild Child. ' New York: Academic Press. . 1982. Developmental dissociations of language and cognition. Exceptional Language and Linguistic Theory, ed. by L. Obler & L. Menn, 285-312. New York: Academic Press. . 1988. Abnormal language acquisition and grammar: Evidence for the modularity of language. Language, Speech, and Mind: Studies in Honour of Victoria A. Fromkin, ed. by L. M. Hyman & C. N. Li, 81-102. . 1994. Language as a cognitive system: Its independence and selective vul- nerability. Noam Chomsky: Critical Assessments, ed. by C. P. Otero, 211-55. London: Routledge. Damasio, Hanna, Thomas J. Grabowski, Daniel Tranel, Richard D. Hichwa, & Antonio R. Damasio. 1996. A neural basis for lexical retrieval. Nature 380.499-505. Danesi, Marcel. 1988. Neurological bimodality and theories of language teaching. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 10.13-31. Mk Dean, Raymond S. 1985. Foundation and rationale for neuropsychological basest of individual differences. The Neuropsychology of Individual Differences: A Developmental Perspective, ed. by L. C. Hartlage & C. F. Telzrow, 7-39. New York: Plenum Press. Degrandpre, Richard J. 1999. Just cause? The Sciences March/April.14-18. Dell, Gary. 1985. Positive feedback in hierarchical connectionist models: Appli- cations to language production. Cognitive Science 9.3-23. > » Molly Mack: Past, present, & future roles of the neurosciences 8 1 Demeurisse, G. 1997. Contribution of functional imaging techniques to the study of subcortical aphasia. Journal of Neurolinguistics 10.301-1 1. Dennis, Maureen, & Harry A. Whttaker. 1977. Hemispheric equipotentiality and language acquisition. Language Development and Neurological Theory, ed. by S Segalowitz and F. Gruber, 93-106. New York: Academic Press. Doody, Rachelle Smith. 1993. A reappraisal of localization theory with reference to aphasia: Part 1, Historical Considerations. Brain and Language 44.296- 326. Donchin, Emanuel, Gregory McCarthy, & Marta Kutas. 1977. Electroencepha- lographic investigations of hemispheric specialization. Language and Hemi- spheric Specialization in Man: Cerebral ERPs: Prog. Clinical Neuro- physiology^, ed. by J. E. Desmedt, 212-42. Karger: Basel. Driesen, Naomi R., & Naftali Raz. 1995. The influence of sex, age, and handed- ness on corpus callosum morphology: A meta-analysis. Psychobiology 23.240-7. Edlow, Robert B. 1977. Galen on Language and Ambiguity: An English Trans- lation of Galen's 'De Captionibus (On Fallacies)' with Introduction, Text, and Commentary. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Elman, Jeffrey L. 1991. Distributed representations, simple recurrent networks, and grammatical structure. Machine Learning 7.195-225. Emmorey, Karen, Ursula Bellugi, Angela Friederici, & Petra Horn. 1995. Effects of age of acquisition on grammatical sensitivity: Evidence from on-line and off-line tasks. Applied Psycholinguistics 16:1.1-23. Eviatar, Zohar, Mark Lekin, & Raphiq Ibrahim. 1999. Phonological processing of second language phonemes: A selective deficit in a bilingual aphasic. Language Learning 49.121-41. Farah, Martha J. 1994. Neuropsychological inference with an interactive brain: A critique of the 'locality' assumption. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17.43- 104. , & Jay L. McClelland. 1991. A computational model of semantic memory impairment: Modality-specificity and emergent category-specificity. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 120:4.339-57. Fiez, Julie A, & Steven E. Petersen. 1993. PET as part of an interdisciplinary ap- proach to understanding processes involved in reading. Psychological Sci- ence 4.287-93. Fincher, Jack. 1984. The Brain: Mystery of Matter and Mind. New York: Torstar Books, Inc. Finger, Stanley. 1994. Origins of Neuroscience: A History of Exploration into Brain Function. New York: Oxford University Press. Fischbach, Gerald D. 1992. Mind and brain. Scientific American, September, 48- 57. FitzGerald, David B., G. Rees Cosgrove, Steven Ronner, Hong Jiang, Brad R. Buchbinder, John W. Belliveau, Bruce R. Rosen, & Randall R. Benson. 1997. Location of language in the cortex: A comparison between functional MR imaging and electrocortical stimulation. American Journal of Neuro- logical Research 18.1529-39. ♦ 8 2 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) Flege, James E. 1991. Age of learning effects the authenticity of voice-onset time (VOT) in stop consonants produced in a second language. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 89: 1 .395-41 1. . 1993. Production and perception of a novel, second-language phonetic contrast. The Journal of the Acoustic Society of America 93:3.1589-1608. . Second language theory of speech learning: Theory, findings, and prob- lems. Speech Perception and Linguistic Experience: Issues in Cross- Language Research, ed. by W. Strange, 233-77 '. Timoium, MD: York Press. , & Wieke Efting. 1987. Production and perception of English stops by na- tive Spanish speakers. Journal of Phonetics 15:1.67-83. , Murray J. Munro, & Ian R. A. MacKay. 1995. Effects of age of second- language learning on the production of English consonants. Speech Com- munication 16.1-26. Flynn, Susan. 1987. A Parameter-Setting Model of L2 Acquisition: Experimen- tal Studies in Anaphora. Dordrecht: Reidel. Friedman, Lee, John T. Kenny, Alexandria L. Wise, Dee Wu, Traci A. Stuve, David A. Miller, John A. Jesberger, & Jonathan S. Lewin. 1998. Brain ac- tivation during silent word generation evaluated with functional MRI. Brain and Language 64.231-56. Fodor, Jerry A. 1983. The Modularity of Mind. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Galin, D., & R. Ornstein. 1972. Lateral specialization of cognitive mode: An EEG study. Psychophysiology 9.412-8. Garnsey, Susan M. 1993. Event-related brain potentials in the study of language: An introduction. Language and Cognitive Processes 8.337-56. Gazzaniga, Michael S. 1984. Advances in cognitive neurosciences: The problem of information storage in the human brain. Neurobiology of learning and memory, ed. by G. Lynch, J. L. McGaugh, & N. M. Weinberger, 78-88. New York: The Guilford Press. Geschwind, Norman. 1979. Specializations of the human brain. The Brain: A Sci- entific American Book, 108-17. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Com- pany. — — , & Albert M. Galaburda. 1985a. Cerebral lateralization: Biological mecha- nisms, associations, and pathology: I. A hypothesis and a program for re- search. Archives of Neurology 42.428-59. . 1985b. Cerebral lateralization: Biological mechanisms, associations, and pa- thology: II. A hypothesis and a program for research. Archives of Neurol- ogy 42.521-52. . 1985c. Cerebral lateralization: Biological mechanisms, associations, and pa-^ thology: HI. A hypothesis and a program for research. Archives of Neurol-^Q ogy 42.634-54. , & W. Levitsky. 1968. Human brain: Left-right asymmetries in temporal speech region. Science 161.186-87. Gevtns, Alan. 1998. The future of electroencephalography in assessing neuro- cognitive functioning. Electroencephalography and Clinical Neuro- physiology 106.165-72. ♦ Molly Mack: Past, present, & future roles of the neurosciences 8 3 Gloning, Use, & Karl Gloning. 1965. Aphasien bei polyglotten: Beitrag zur dy- namik des Sprachabbaus sowie zur Lokalisationsfrage dieser Storungen. Wiener Zeitschrift fiir Nervenheilkunde und deren Grezgebiete 22.362-97 '. Goodglass, Harold, & Edith Kaplan. 1983. Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Exami- nation (BDAE). Philadelphia: Lea & Febiger. Distributed by Psychological Assessment Resources, Odessa, FLA. Gordon, H. W. 1980. Degree of ear asymmetries for perception of dichotic chords and for illusory chord localization in musicians of different levels of compe- tence. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Per- formance 6.516-27. Green, David. W. 1986. Control, activation, and resource: A framework and a model for the control of speech in bilinguals. Brain and Language 27.210- 23. . 1993. Towards a model of L2 comprehension and production. The Bilin- gual Lexicon, ed. by R. Schreuder & B. Weltens, 249-78. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Greenberg, Joseph H. ed. 1966. Universals of Language. 2 nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Greene, John C. 1974. The history of science and the history of linguistics. Stud- ies in the History of Linguistics: Traditions and Paradigms, ed. by D. Hy- mes, 487-510. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Greenough, William T. 1986. What's special about development? Thoughts on the bases of experience-sensitive synaptic plasticity. Developmental Neuropsychobiology, ed. by W. T. Greenough and J. M. Juraska, 387-407. Orlando: Academic Press, Inc. , James E. Black, & Christopher S. Wallace. 1987. Experience and brain development. Child Development 58:3.539-59. , & James E. Black. 1992. Induction of brain structure by experience: Sub- strates for cognitive development. Developmental Behavioral Neurosci- ence: Minnesota Symposia on Child Psychology, 24, ed. by G. Gunnar and C. Nelson, 155-200. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Grtmshaw, Gina M., Ana Adelstein, M. Philip Bryden, & G. E. MacKinnon. 1998. First-language acquisition in adolescence: Evidence for a critical pe- riod for verbal language development. Brain and Language 63.237-55. Grimson, W. Eric L., Ron Kikinis, Ferenc A. Jolesz, & Peter McL. Black. 1999. Image-guided surgery. Scientific American June. 62-9. Gur, Ruben C, & Raquel E. Gur. 1980. Handedness and individual differences in \ hemispheric activation. Neuropsychology of Left-Handedness, ed. by Jean- nine Herron, 211-31. New York: Academic Press. Habib, Michel, & Jean-Francois Demonet. 1996. Cognitive neuroanatomy of lan- guage: The contribution of functional neuroimaging. Aphasiology 3.217- 34. , D. Gayraud, A. Oliva, J. Regis, G. Salamon, & R. Khalil. 1991. Effects of handedness and sex on the morphology of the corpus callosum: A study with brain magnetic resonance imaging. Brain and Cognition 16.41-61. ♦ 84 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) Hartlage, Lawrence C, & Cathy F. Telzrow, eds. 1985. The Neuropsychology of Individual Differences: A Developmental Perspective. New York: Ple- num Press. HERRON, Jeannine, ed. 1980. Neuropsychology of Left-Handedness. New York: Academic Press. Hubel, David H. 1979. The brain. Scientific American, September, 5-11. , & Torsten N. Wiesel. 1963. Receptive fields of cells in striate cortex of very young, visually inexperienced kittens. Journal of Neurophysiology 26:6.994-1002. . 1970. The period of susceptibility to the physiological effect of unilateral eye closure in kittens. Journal of Physiology 206.410-36. Hutner, Nancy, & Liederman, Jacqueline. 1991. Right hemisphere participation in reading. Brain and Language 41.475-95. Huttenlocher, Peter R., & Arun S. Dabholkar. 1997. Regional differences in synaptogenesis in human cerebral cortex. The Journal of Comparative Neurology 387.167-87. FJymes, Dell. 1964. Language in Culture and Society. New York: Harper and Row. Jackendoff, Ray. 1994. Patterns in the Mind: Language and Human Nature. New York: Harper Collins, Pub. Jaeger, Jeri J., Alan H. Lockwood, David L. Kemmerer, Robert D. Van Valin, Jr., Brian W. Murphy, & Hanif G. Khalak. 1996. A positron emission to- mographic study of regular and irregular verb morphology in English. Lan- guage 72.451-97. Jakobson, Roman. 1971. Selected Writings: II. Word and Language. The Hague: Mouton. . 1973. Main Trends in the Science of Language. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. , & Morris Halle. 1956. Fundamentals of Language. The Hague: Mouton & Co. Johnson, Jacqueline S., & Elissa L. Newport. 1989. Critical period effects in sec- ond language learning: The influence of maturational state on the acquisi- tion of English as a second language. Cognitive Psychology 21:1.60-99. Karbe, Hans, Alexander Thiel, Gerald Weber-Luxenburger, Karl Herholz, Josef Kessler, & Wolf-Dieter Heiss. 1998. Brain plasticity in poststroke aphasia: What is the contribution of the right hemisphere? Brain and Language 64.215-30. Karmiloff-Smith, Annette. 1992. Beyond Modularity. Cambridge, MA: The MIT A Press. ^ Kertesz, Andrew, & Naeser, Margaret A. 1994. Anatomical asymmetries and cerebral lateralization. Localization and Neuroimaging in Neuropsychol- ogy, ed. by Andrew Kertesz, 213-43. San Diego: Academic Press. Kjm, Eun Joo. 1997. Maturational constraints on second-language acquisition: A reaction-time (RT) study of lexical-decision and grammaticality-judgment test. Journal of the Applied Linguistics Association of Korea 13:1.1-34. Molly Mack: Past, present, & future roles of the neuroscences 8 5 Km, Karl H. S., Norman R. Relkin, Kyoung-Min Lee, & Joy Hirsch. 1997. Dis- tinct cortical areas associated with native and second languages. Nature 388.171-4. Kjm, Ryonhee. 1994. The sensitive period hypothesis in L2 production: N versus HI and voicing-dependent vowel duration in the English speech produced by Korean speakers of English. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, PhD dissertation in linguistics. ' Kimura, Doreen. 1961. Cerebral dominance and the perception of verbal stimuli. Canadian Journal of Psychology 15.166-71. . 1964. Left-right differences in the presentation of melodies. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 16, 355-8. . 1967. Function asymmetry of the brain in dichotic listening. Cortex 3.163- 78. . 1983. Sex differences in cerebral organization for speech and praxic func- tions. Canadian Journal of Psychology 37.19-35. Klein, Denise, Robert J. Zatorre, Brenda Milner, Ernst Meyer, & Alan C. Evans. 1995. The neural substrates of bilingual language processing: Evi- dence from positron emission tomography. Aspects of Bilingual Aphasia, ed. by M. Paradis, 23-36. Oxford: Pergamon. Koestler, Arthur. 1967. The Ghost in the Machine. London: Hutchinson Pub- lishing Group Ltd. Kounios, John, & Phillip J. Holcomb. 1994. Concreteness effects in semantic processing: ERP evidence supporting dual-coding theory. Journal of Ex- perimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 20:4.804-23. Kurowski, Kathleen M., Sheila E. Blumstein, & Helen Mathison. 1998. Conso- nant and vowel production of right hemisphere patients. Brain and Lan- guage 63.276-300. Kutas, Marta S. A. Hillyard, & Michael S. Gazzaniga. 1988. Processing of se- mantic anomaly by right and left hemispheres of commissurotomy patients. Brain 111.553-76. , & Cyma K. Van Petten. 1994. Psycholinguistics electrified: Event-related brain potential investigations. Handbook of Psycholinguistics, ed. by M. A. Gernsbacher, 83-144. San Diego: Academic Press. Labov, William. 1966. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Lamb, Sydney M. 1998. Pathways of the Brain: The Neurocognitive Basis of Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Lane, Harlan. 1976. Wild Boy of Aveyron. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lebrun, Yvan. 1976. Recovery in polyglot aphasics. Recovery in Aphasics, ed. by Y. Lebrun & R. Hoops, 96-108. Amsterdam: Swetz and Zeitlinger. Lenneberg, Eric H. 1967. Biological Foundations of Language. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Lesser, Ruth. 1978. Linguistic Investigations of Aphasia. New York: Elsevier. 8 6 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) Lester, David S., Christian C. Felder, & E. Neil Lewis, eds. 1997. Imaging Brain Structure and Function: Emerging Technologies in the Neurosciences. New York: The New York Academy of Sciences. Levy, J., C. Trevarthen, & Roger W. Sperry. 1972. Perception of bilateral chimeric figures following hemispheric disconnection. Brain 95.61-78. LlEBERMAN, Philip. 1975. On the Origins of Language: An Introduction to the Evolution of Human Speech. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company. . 1984. The Biology and Evolution of Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. . 1998. Eve Spoke. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. , & Sheila E. Blumstein. 1988. Speech Physiology, Speech Perception, and Acoustic Phonetics. (Cambridge Studies in Speech Science and Communi- cation.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. LrND, L. R., trans. 1949. The Epitome of Andreas Vesalius. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Ling, Charles, & Marin Marinov. 1993. Answering the connectionist challenge: A symbolic model of learning the past tenses of English verbs. Cognition 49.235-90. Lloyd, G. E. R., ed. 1978. Hippocratic Writings. Great Britain: Penguin Books. Locke, John L. 1997. A theory of neurolinguistic development. Brain and Lan- guage 58.265-326. LONGRIGG, James. 1998. Greek Medicine: From the Heroic to the Hellenistic Age. Great Britain: Redwood Books Ltd. Lorenz, Konrad Z. 1937. The companion in the bird's world. The Auk 54.245-73. Mack, Molly. 1984. Early bilinguals: How monolingual-like are they? Early Bil- ingualism and Child Development, ed. by M. Paradis and I. Lebrun, 161-73. Lisse: Swets and Zeitlinger B. V. . 1988. Sentence processing by non-native speakers of English: Evidence from the perception of natural and computer-generated anomalous L2 sen- tences. Journal of Neurolinguistics 2.293-316. . 1989. Consonant and vowel perception and production: Early English- French bilinguals and English monolinguals. Perception & Psychophysics 46.187-200. . 1990. Phonetic transfer in a French-English bilingual child. Language Atti- tudes and Language Conflict, ed. by P. H. Nelde, 107-24. Bonn: Diimmler. . 1991. Auditory phonetics. Linguistics Encyclopedia, ed. by K. Malmkjaer & J. M. Anderson, 42-8. New York: Routledge. . 1992. How well is computer-processed speech understood?: A cross- 1 linguistic and cross-dialectal analysis. World Englishes 1 1.285-301. , Sandra Bott, & Consuelo B. Boronat. 1995. Mother, Ed rather do it my- self, maybe: An analysis of voice-onset time produced by early French- English bilinguals. IDEAL Issues and Developments in English Applied Linguistics 8.23-55. . 1997. The monolingual native speaker: Not a norm, but still a necessity. Studies in the Linguistics Sciences 27.113-46. ♦ > » Molly Mack: Past, present, & future roles of the neurosciences 8 7 . 1998. English vowel perception in early Korean-English bilinguals and English monolinguals: Is there a difference? Paper presented at the Ameri- can Association for Applied Linguistics 1998 Annual Conference. Seattle. , Sandra Bott, Pavel Trofimovich, & Wendy Baker. 1999. The effect of age on the perception of English vowels among Korean-English bilinguals. Uni- versity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, MS. MacNeilage, Peter F., Michael G. Studdert-Kennedy, & Bjorn Lindblom. 1993. Hand signals: Right side, left brain and the origin of language. The Sciences J anu ary /Febru ary . 3 2 - 7 . Marslen-Wilson, William D, & Lorraine K. Tyler. 1997. Dissociating types of mental computation. Nature 387.592-4. McKeever, Walter F., & Lester J. Hunt. 1984. Failure to replicature the Scott et al. fndings of reversed ear dominance in the Native American Navaho. Neuropsychologic! 22.539-41. McGlone, Jeannette. 1980. Sex differences in human brain asymmetry: a critical survey. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3.215-63. Melmed, Matthew. 1997. Parents speak: Zero to Three's findings from research on parents' views of early childhood development. Young Children, July, 46-9. Metter, E. Jeffrey. 1991. Brain-behavior relationships in aphasia studied by posi- tron emission tomography. Windows on the Brain: Neuropsychology's Technological Frontiers, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Volume 620, ed. by R. A. Zappulla, F. Frank LeFever, J. Jaeger, & R. Binder, 153-64. Minkowski, Mieczyslaw. 1965. Considerations sur l'aphasie des polyglottes. Re- vue Neurologique 112.486-95. Molfese, Dennis L. 1978. Left and right hemisphere involvement in speech per- ception: Electrophysiological correlates. Perception & Psychophysics 23.237-43. , & Albert Schmidt. 1983. An auditory evoked potential study of consonant perception in different vowel environments. Brain and Language 18.57-70. Munro, Murray J., & James E. Flege, & Ian R. A. MacKay. 1996. The effects of age of second language learning on the production of English vowels. Ap- plied Psycholinguistics 17:3.313-34. Murphy, Kelly, & Michael Peters. 1994. Right-handers and left-handers show differences and important similarities in task integration when performing manual and vocal tasks concurrently. Neuropsychologia 32.663-74. Nelson, Cary. Fall, 1998. Is disciplinarity a professional cul-de-sac? Footnotes: A Publication of the American Association of University Professors 19.3. Neville, Helen J., Sharon A. Coffey, Donald S. Lawson, Andrew Fischer, Karen Emmorey, & Ursula Bellugi. 1997. Neural systems mediating American Sign Language: Effects of sensory experience and age of acquisition. Brain and Language 57.285-308. , D. Bavelier, D. Corina, J. Rauschecker, A. Karni, A. Lalwani, A. Braun, V. Clark, P. Jezzard, & R. Turner. 1998. Cerebral organization for Ian- « 8 8 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) guage in deaf and hearing subjects: Biological constraints and effects of ex- perience. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, USA 95.922-9. Newberger, Julee J. 1997. New brain development research — A wonderful win- dow of opportunity to build public support for early childhood education! Young Children, May, 4-9. Newmeyer, Frederick J. 1980. Linguistic Theory in America: The First Quarter- Century of Transformational Generative Grammar. New York: Academic Press. Newport, Elissa L. 1988. Constraints on learning and their role in language ac- quisition: Studies of the acquisition of American Sign Language. Language Sciences 10:1.147-72. . 1990. Maturational constraints on language learning. Cognitive Science 14:1.11-28. Nilipour, Reza, & Hassan Ashayeri. 1989. Alternating antagonism between two languages with successive recovery of a third in a trilingual aphasic patient. Brain and Language 36:1.23-48. Nobre, Anna C, & Kim Plunkett. 1997. The neural system of language: Struc- ture and development. Current Biology 7.262-8. Ojemann, George A. 1980. Brain mechanisms for language: Observations during neurosurgery. Epilepsy: A Window to Brain Mechanisms, ed. by J. S. Lockard & A. A. Ward, Jr., 243-60. New York: Raven Press. . 1981. Intrahemispheric localization of language and visuospatial functions: Evidence from stimulation mapping during craniotomies for epilepsy. Ad- vances in Epilepsiology, XII. New York: Raven Press. . 1983. Brain orgnizaion for language from the perspective of electrical stimulation mapping The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 6.189-230. . 1994. Cortical stimulation and recording in language. Localization and Neuroimaging in Neuropsychology, ed. by A. Kertesz, 35-55. San Diego: Academic Press. , & C. Mateer. 1979. Human language cortex: Localization of memory, syn- tax, and sequential motor-phoneme identification systems. Science 205.1401-3. , J. Ojemann, E. Lettich, & M. Berger. 1989. Cortical language localization in left-dominant hemisphere. Journal of Neurosurgery 71.316-26. , & Harry A. Whjtaker. 1978. The bilingual brain. Archives of Neurology 35.409-12. Oyama, Susan. 1976. A sensitive period for the acquisition of a nonnative phonological system. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 5:3.261-83. A Patvio, Allan, & Alain Desrochers. 1980. A dual-coding approach to bilingual fl memory. Canadian Journal of Psychology 34:4.388-99. Paradis, Michel. 1977. Bilingualism and aphasia. Studies in Neurolinguistics, vol. 3, ed. by H. Whitaker & H. Whitaker, 65-121. New York: Academic Press. , ed. 1983. Readings on Aphasia in Bilinguals and Polygots. Montreal: Didier. ► Molly Mack: Past, present, & future roles of the neuroscences 8 9 -. 1985. On the representation of two languages in one brain. Language Sci- ences 7.1-39. -. 1987. The Assessment of Bilingual Aphasia. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Pubs. -. 1989. Bilingual and polyglot aphasia. Handbook of Neuropsychology, ed. by F. Boiler and J. Grafman, 2:1 17-40. New York: Elsevier. -. 1998. Aphasia in bilinguals: How atypical is it? Aphasia in Atypical Popu- lations, ed. by P. Coppens, Y. Lebrun, & A. Basso, 34-66. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Pubs. . [forthcoming]. Differential use of cerebral mechanisms in bilinguals. Mind, Brain, and Language: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, ed. by M. T. Banich and M. Mack. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. , Marie-Claire GOLDBLUM. 1989. Selective crossed aphasia in one of a trilin- gual's languages followed by antagonistic recovery. Brain and Language 36.62-75. , Marie-Claire Goldblum, & Raouf Abidi. 1982. Alternate antagonism with paradoxical translation behavior in two bilingual aphasic patients. Brain and Language 15.55-69. Patowski, Mark S. 1980. The sensitive period for the acquisition of syntax in a second language. Language Learning 30:2.449-72. Penfield, Wilder. 1953. A consideration of the neurophysiological mechanisms of speech and some educational consequences. Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 82.201-14. . 1965. Conditioning the uncommitted cortex for language learning. Brain 88.787-98. , & Lamar Roberts. 1959. Speech and Brain-Mechanisms. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Perani, Daniela, Eraldo Paulesu, Nuria Sebastian Gau.ES, Emmanuel Dupoux, Stanslas Dehaene, Valentino Bettinardi, Stefano F. Cappa, Ferruccio Fazio, & Jacques Mehler. 1998. The bilingual brain: Proficiency and age of acqui- sition of the second language. Brain 121.1841-52. Pinker, Steven. 1991. Rules of language. Science 253.530-5. . 1997. How the Mind Works. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Pttres, A. 1895. Etude sur l'aphasie: Chez les polygottes. Revue de Medicine, 15, 873-99. Pizzamiglio, L., A. Mammucari, & C. Razzano. 1985. Evidence for sex differ- ences in brain organization in recovery in aphasia. Brain and Language 25.213-23. Plaut, David C. 1995. Double dissociation without modularity: Evidence from connectionist neuropsychology. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology 17.291-321. Potter, Mary C, Kwok-Fai So, Barbara Von Eckardt, & Laurie B. Feldman. 1984. Lexical and conceptual representation in beginning and proficient bi- linguals. Journal of Verbal Learning and Behavior 23.23-38. 9 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) Provins, K. A. 1997. Handedness and speech: A critical reappraisal of the role of genetic and environmental factors in the cerebral lateralization of function. Psychological Review 104.554-71. Raichle, Marcus E. 1994. Visualizing the mind. Scientific American, April, 58-64. Rapp, Brenda, & Alfonso Caramazza. 1997. The modality-specific organizaiton of grammatical categories: Evidence from impaired soken and written sen- tence production. Brain and Language 56.248-86. Rapport, R. L., C. T. Tan, Harry A. Whitaker. 1983. Language function and dys- function among Chinese and English speaking polyglots: Cortical stimula- tion, Wada testing, and clinical studies. Brain and Language 18.342-66. Ravdin, Lisa D., Keneth Perrine, Cornelia Santschi Haywood, Janet Ger- shengorn, Peter Kim Nelson, & Orrin Devinsky. 1997. Serial recovery of language during the intracarotid amobarbital procedure. Brain and Cogni- tion 33.151-60. RlBOT, T. 1882. Diseases of Memory: An Essay in the Positive Psychology. Lon- don: Paul. Roberts, Patricia M., & Lousie Deslauriers. 1999. Picture naming of cognate and non-cognate nouns in bilingual aphasia. Journal of Communication Disorders 32.1-23. Robins, R[obert] H[enry]. 1967. A Short History of Linguistics. London: Long- man. Robinson, Richard O. 1981. Equal recovery in child and adult brain? Develop- ment Medicine and Child Neurology 23:3.379-83. Rosenberg, Martin E. 1982. Sound and Hearing. London: Edward Arnold (Pub.), Ltd. Rummelhart, David E., & Jay L. McClellend. 1986. On learning the past tenses of English verbs. Parallel Distributed Processing: Vol. 2, Psychological and Biological Models, ed. by J. L. McClellend, D. E. Rummelhart, & PDP Research Group, 216-71. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Saffran, Eleanor M. [forthcoming]. Evidence from language breakdown: Impli- cations for the neural and functional organization of language. Mind, Brain, and Language: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, ed. by M. T. Banich and M. Mack. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Schlosser, Michael J., Nobuhisa Aoyagi, Robert K. Fulbright, John C. Gore, & Gregory McCarthy. 1998. Functional MRI studies on auditory compre- hension. Human Brain Mapping 6.1-13. Schmidt, Anne Marie, & James E. Flege. 1995. Effects of speaking rate changes on native and nonnative speech production. Phonetica 52:1.41-54. Searle, John R. 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. London: Cambridge University Press. Seebeok, T. A., ed. 1977. How Animals Communicate. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press. Seidenberg, Mark S. 1997. Language acquisition and use: Learning and applying probabilistic constraints. Science 275.1599-1603. , & James H. Hoeffner. 1998. Evaluating behavioral and neuroimaging data on past tense processing. Language 74.104-22. » Molly Mack: Past, present, & future roles of the neurosciences 9 1 Shaywttz, Bennett A., Sally E. Shaywttz, Kenneth R. Pugh, R. Todd Constable, Pawel Skudlarski, Robert K. Fulbright, Richard A. Bronen, Jack M. Fletcher, Donald P. Shankweller, Leonard Katz, & John C. Gore. 1995. Sex differences in the functional organization of the brain for language. Na- ture 373.607-9. Shim, Rosa Jinyoung. 1995. The Sensitive Period for Second-Language Acquisi- tion: An Experimental Study of Age Effects on Universal Grammar and Language Transfer. Seoul: Thaehaksa. Singleton, David. 1989. Language Acquisition: The Age Factor. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, Ltd. Skinner, B. F. 1957. Verbal Behavior. New York: Apple-Century-Crofts. Smith, F., & George A. Miller, eds. 1966. The Genesis of Language: A Psychol- inguistic Approach. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Smith, Neil, [forthcoming]. Dissociation and modularity: Reflections on language and mind. Mind, Brain, and Language: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, ed. by M. T. Banich and M. Mack. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Snow, Catherine. 1987. Relevance of the notion of a critical period to language acquisition. Sensitive Periods in Development, ed. by Marc H. Bornstein, 183-209. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Pubs. Soares, Carlos, & Francois Grosjean. 1981. Left hemisphere language lateraliza- tion in bilinguals and monolinguals. Perception & Psychophysics 29.599- 604. Sperry, Roger W. 1974. Lateral specialization in the surgically separated hemi- spheres. The Neurosciences Third Study Program, ed. by F. O. Schmitt & F. C. Worden. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. . 1982. Some effects of disconnecting the cerebral hemispheres. Science 217.1223-6. , Michael S. Gazzaniga, & Joseph E. Bogen. 1969. Interhemispheric relation- ships: The neocortical commissures; syndromes of disconnection. Handbook of Clinical Neurology 4.273-90. Springer, Sally P., & Georg Deutsch. 1993. Left Brain, Right Brain. New York: W. H. Freeman & Company. , & Alan Searleman. 1978. The ontongeny of hemispheric specialization: Evidence from dichotic listening in twins. Neuropychologia 16.269-81. Stark, Rachel E, Ken Bleile, Jason Brandt, John Freeman, & Eileen P. G. Vining. 1995. Speech-language outcomes of hemispherectomy in children and adults. Brain and Language 51.406-21. Stevens, Charles F. 1979. The neuron. The Brain: A Scientific American Book, 14-25. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company. Stockard, Charles R. 1921. Developmental rate and structural expression: An experimental study of twins, 'double monsters' and single deformities, and the interaction among embryonic organs during their origin and develop- ment. American Journal of Anatomy 28.1 15-277. Strauss, Esther, & Chris Verity. 1983. Effects of hemispherectomy in infantile hemiplegics. Brain and Language 20.1-1 1. 9 2 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) Stromswold, Karin, David Caplan, Nathaniel Alpert, & Scott Rauch. 1996. Lo- calization of syntactic comprehension by positron emission tomography. Brain and Language 52.452-73. Tarshis, Jerome. 1969. Father of Modern Anatomy: Andreas Vesalius. New York: The Dial Press, Inc. TOGA, Arthur W., & John C. Mazziotta, eds. 1996. Brain Mapping: The Meth- ods. San Diego: Academic Press. Trope, Idit, Paul Rozin, Deborah Kemler-Nelson, & Ruben C. Gur. 1992. Infor- mation processing in the separated hemispheres of callosotomy patients: Does the analytic-holistic dichotomy hold? Brain and Cognition 19.123- 47. Vaid, Jyotsna, & Wallace E. Lambert. 1979. Differential cerebral involvement in the cognitive functioning of bilinguals. Brain and Language 8.92-1 10. , & Victoria A. Fromkin. 1978. Cerebral dominance for pitch contrasts in tone language speakers and in musically untrained and trained English speakers. Journal of Phonetics 6.19-23. Vargha-Khadem, Faraneh, Lucinda J. Carr, Elizabeth Isaacs, Edward Brett, Christopher Adams, & Mortimer Mishkin. 1997. Onset of speech after left hemispherectomy in a nine-year-old boy. Brain 120.159-82. Wada, Juhn. 1949. A new method for the determination of the side of cerebral speech dominance: A preliminary report on the intracarotid injection of so- dium amytal in man. Medical Biology 14.221-2. . 1997. Clinical experimental observations of carotid artery injections of so- dium amytal. Brain and Cognition 33.1 1-3. , & Theodore Rasmussen. 1958. Intracarotid injection of sodium amytal for the lateralization of cerebral speech dominance: Experimental and clinical observations. Journal of Neurosurgery 17.266-82. Walzer, R. 1946. Galen on Medical Experience: First Edition of the Arabic Version with English Translation and Notes. London: Oxford University Press. Weber-Fox, Christine M., & Helen J. Neville. 1996. Maturational constraints on functional specializations for language processing: ERP and behavioral evi- dence in bilingual speakers. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 8:3.231- 56. Weinreich, Uriel. 1953. Language in Contact: Findings and Problems. New York: Mouton Publishers. Werker, Janet F. 1995. Age-related changes in cross-language speech percep- tion: Standing at the crossroads. Speech Perception and Linguistic Experi- ence, ed. by W. Strange, 155-169. Timonium, MD: York Press. ,& Richard C. Tees. 1984. Cross-language speech perception: Evidence for perceptual reorganization during first year of life. Infant Behavior and De- velopment 7.49-63. Whitaker, Harry A., & Haiganoosh Whitaker, eds. 1977. Studies in Neurolin- guistics, volume 3. New York: Academic Press. White, Lydia. 1990 Second langauge acquisition and universal grammar. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 12.121-33. Studies in the Linguistic Sciences Volume 28, Number 2 (Fall 1998) HUMAN-MACHINE COMMUNICATION BY VOICE S. E. Levinson University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign sel@ifp.uiuc.edu One way to gain an understanding of natural spoken language is to derive a constructive theory of it by building a language engine. The more nearly this artificial language engine simulates human lin- guistic behavior, the more of language it may be said to explain. A constructive theory of language must have two important features. It must capture known linguistic structure and it must express this struc- ture in an elegant and computationally tractable mathematical frame- work. Complete constructive theories of language do not yet exist. However, interesting ones do exist and there is reason to hope that they will improve. This paper describes the state-of-the-art in auto- matic speech synthesis and speech recognition and explains some of the mathematical models on which their underlying theories rest. 1. Introduction The motivation for this article is the need for engineers and linguists to collabo- rate. In particular, the topic on which the two disciplines have mutual interests is spoken dialog between humans and machines. It is immediately apparent that the construction of machines that produce and understand natural spoken language is a holy grail for electrical and computer engineers. It is further obvious that the science of linguistics has a great deal to say on the subject. Linguistics offers not only technical advice on precisely what human-machine dialog entails, but also theoretical considerations of the architecture of the human language engine. This view of the collaboration might be interpreted as simply a consultation in which engineers have much to learn and little to teach. Fortunately, the collaboration may legitimately be seen as mutually beneficial. The very thought of building a machine capable of speaking and understanding speech is nothing less than a constructive theory of language. The more nearly the attempt succeeds, the more light it sheds on the linguists'central questions. Indeed, there have been some successful collaborations between linguists and engineers on this very topic. Unfortunately, these collaborations have been fragile and thus have not achieved their promise. Here we explore some of the joint efforts and suggest ways in which they can be less fragile and more effec- tive. With respect to the problem of human-machine communication by voice, engineering and linguistics make the following contributions. Engineering offers 9 4 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) the mathematics and physics required to make quantitative models of the proc- esses involved in speech communication. Linguistics provides detailed qualitative descriptions of the structure and usage of language. While these insights are certainly necessary to a scientific understanding of language, they cannot be applied blindly. Engineers must realize that mathemati- cal models, no matter how elegant and sophisticated they may be, are useful only m to the extent that they capture the essential structure of the phenomenon under ^ consideration, in this case, spoken language. On the other hand, the linguist's tax- onomy of structures and usages, rules, and examples, no matter how exhaustive, are merely annecdotal evidence and, as such, of limited value unless they can be embedded in a rational computational framework. These characterizations will, no doubt, be criticized as simplistic and stereo- typical. Linguistics is sometimes rigorous and quantitative. Nor is Engineering al- ways brute force calculation. The best way to see some of the subtleties is to ex- amine some case histories. In particular, it is useful to consider the state-of-the-art in text-to- speech synthesis (TTS) and automatic speech recognition (ASR). As used here, TTS refers to the process of generating an acoustic speech signal with- out regard for its meaning. The generated speech should be intelligible to a hu- man listener, sound natural, and convey useful information, all despite the fact that the generation process has no means to represent semantics. Similarly, ASR is intended to refer to the inverse process, that of transcribing speech into text without regard for meaning. It is expected that the accuracy of transcription should be nearly perfect, independent of speaker and topic. It is not at all certain that these problems, as stated, can be solved. In fact, it is not even clear that, were they solved, the solutions would be of any practical value. The debate, of course, hinges on the absence of semantic processes in both cases. Some research efforts have acknowledged these difficulties and have ad- dressed the more complex problems of speech synthesis from concept and auto- matic speech understanding. For the purposes of exploring the interaction of en- gineering and linguistics, it is not necessary to consider these additional complica- tions. 2. Speech Synthesis The best example of a collaboration of linguistics and engineering is that of fl speech synthesis from text. The state-of-the-art in TTS is quite advanced. Speech synthesizers can read absolutely any text with a high degree of intelligibility in several different voices. The naturalness of the voices is quite good but would never be mistaken for a human voice by even the most naive of listeners. Strangely enough, TTS has been less of a commercial success than its companion technology (ASR), even though the latter is technically far less proficient. Levinson: Human-machine communication by voice 95 ♦ Speech synthesis is far more intuitively comprehensible than is ASR. The generation of sound was well understood by ancient musicians and the analogy of musical instruments to the vocal apparatus led, as early as the 18th century, to mechanical speaking devices (von Kempelen 1791). As for translating the written word to a sequence of sounds, anyone taught to read phonetically finds the concept quite natural. The mechanical embodiment of these ideas is shown in the diagram of Fig- ure 1 (van Santen & Sproat 1998). It is understood that all of the processes indi- cated in the figure are carried out on a digital computer. TEXT-TO-SPEECH SYNTHESIS u I Ascttnrr 1 TEXT NORMALIZATION "Dr. SmMttwaaaMU p u Smith Dr.' L_ g^"™ i SYNTACTIC PARSER Itv— ' (v*t>)v». p *Hwa* (noun) ' 1 DICTIONARY pronunciation dtetfonaiy morphemic dMOfflpotflfM rhyrrtJnQ phonamaa ♦ LETTER TO 80UND RULES ^ rulaa used where ^ dttonaty derivation tale 1 ( -40) | 1 1« PROSODY RULES Intonation and P duration 1 1 1 i( J Ml ill i it dlphono and poiyphona — * SPEECH 8YNTHESI8 LmMMULM J • r F" p"r"r SPEECH OUTPUT Figure 1. The first five of the processes account for the transliteration of standard or- thography into its phonetic equivalent. These processes taken as a whole repre- sent, very possibly, the best compendium of the linguist's knowledge of phonet- ics, phonology, phonotactics, morphology, and prosody. The last box represents the engineer's best understanding of the physics of sound generation in the hu- man voice apparatus. The details of the operation of this system are instructive. The conversion of graphemes to phonemes, although it spans several levels of linguistic structure, is virtually monolithic, namely table look-up. The tables are large pronouncing dic- tionaries. Thus text normalization is simply a list of abbreviations, acronyms, « 9 6 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1 998) counting numbers and non-alphameric symbols along with their usages and pro- nunciations. In text normalization as well as lexical access and syntactico-semantic analysis, there are always ambiguities that affect pronunciation. For example, Dr. can be pronounced as doctor or drive (as in an address). The word bass will be pronounced differently when it means a fish or a stringed instrument. And, of course, read will be pronounced differently when it is present or past tense. All of these issues are resolved by the same mechanism, concordances based on the information-theoretic property of mutual information. The mutual informa- tion between two words is the negative binary logarithm of the ratio of their joint probability to the product of their prior probabilities. Thus when two words are likely to appear together they have high mutual information. The words with which a given word has high mutual information determine its usage, hence its pronunciation and/or its prosodic features. For example, if Dr. appears with a nu- meral it should be pronounced drive. If bank appears with river, it should be un- stressed. There are, of course, vast numbers of such ambiguities in natural lan- guage. The mutual information coefficients needed to resolve them are computed exhaustively from large textual corpora. In addition to the primary lexical and syntactico-semantic analysis described above, there is a secondary syntactic analysis required. This is a crude parse used to find phrase boundaries which, in turn, are used to assign pitch contours and accents. Note that a full syntactic parse into parts of speech is not required. The phonetic and phonological analyses are also largely accomplished by table-look-up. First, however, a morphological analysis must be performed to make the table-look-up more efficient. The rule-based morphological analysis de- composes words into their base forms and their inflections thereby reducing the number of entries needed in the pronouncing dictionary. Unfortunately, it is not practical to store the pronunciations of all mor- phemes. To account for this, two alternate methods of phonetic analysis are pro- vided. The first is to use a pronunciation of a morpheme that rhymes with the missing one. The second is a set of letter-to-sound rules. Such rules are not reli- able and thus are used only as a last resort. Once the phonetic pronunciation has been determined from the dictionary, phonological analysis is performed. In order to understand how this is accom- plished as a table-look-up, it is first necessary to recall that the acoustic/phonetic units are actually sequences of allophones called polyads. There are about 2500 m such units stored as sequences of frames of linear prediction coefficients excised ^ from natural speech (Olive et al. 1998). The phonology is implicit in the selection of the units. That is, the units are selected to give the broadest coverage of the phonology of the entire language. When synthesizing fluent speech, a morpheme is realized by selecting the sequence of polyads that most closely matches its phonological context. The selection of the inventory of polyads is carried out automatically by an optimal algorithm. Levinson: Human-machine communication by voice 9 7 Finally, after a sentence or paragraph has been analyzed with respect to phonetics and phonology, the suprasegmental prosodic features are superim- posed. That is, each of the frames, i.e. LPC vectors, of each polyad is marked im- mediately with pitch, intensity, and duration. Acoustic synthesis follows by con- ventional LPC methods. The parameters of the synthesizer may be adjusted to produce different stereotypical voices. It is appropriate to comment here about the mathematics of the acoustic syn- thesis procedure. The method of linear prediction was originally derived for the purpose of analyzing time series such as sunspot activity (Yule 1927). When so used, linear prediction is nothing more than brute-force curve-fitting with no un- derlying model. However, it can be shown (Wakita 1973) that the abstract mathematics has a very interesting interpretation, namely, it is the solution to the linear wave equation in a hard-walled tube of varying cross-sectional area. Here, then, is an excellent example of mathematical analysis working well in linguistics, because it captures a fundamental property of the phenomenon under considera- tion. The method of synthesis described above is, for obvious reasons, called concatenative synthesis. One might be tempted to object that it is not true syn- thesis, because it is really just a sophisticated recording device which reproduces speech as sequences of brief stored segments. An alternative method called ar- ticulatory synthesis addresses this criticism by synthesizing speech directly from the physics of an articulatory model (Figure 2) (Coker 1976) without any pre- recording of any kind. Using the very same linguistic analysis as outlined above, as you might guess, the resulting synthetic speech, while intelligible, is of far worse quality than that generated by concatenative methods. Figure 2. 98 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) In summary, then, speech synthesis can be accomplished by a careful, de- tailed, exhaustive encapsulation of linguistic knowledge in 'dictionaries' of vari- ous kinds constructed by well-chosen mathematical analysis. This significant technical accomplishment is the result of an ideal collaboration between engi- neers and linguists. Based on that joint accomplishment, one may dare to hope that the problem of articulatory synthesis will also be solved. 3. Speech Recognition The practice of speech recognition does not present so cheerful a picture as does speech synthesis. The state-of-the-art is not nearly as advanced and the interac- tion of engineering and linguistics not nearly as cooperative. The result is best de- scribed as an engineering tour-de-force with a condescending tip of the hat to linguistics. Still, the status quo is instructive. First, we must admit that for machines, as for people, listening is harder than talking (both literally and figuratively). In the case of synthesis, we need only produce one voice, whereas in recognition we must accept any voice. In the ear- liest work on recognition of acoustic patterns, little attention was paid to the high degree of variability in the speech signal. In fact, quite the opposite was true. The foundation of ASR, which lies in the seminal work of Visible Speech (Potter, Kopp, & Green 1968), is essentially a catalog of the 'invariant' spectrographic features of speech. The early electronic devices for ASR were based on capturing these 'reliable' features (Dudley & Balashek 1958). However, in the 1960's, the emphasis shifted from cataloging and recognizing invariant features to character- izing speech as a stochastic process and using highly developed mathematical techniques for detection, estimation, and classification to analyze it (Sebestyen 1962). This transformation set up an almost insurmountable barrier between lin- guists and engineers that stands to this very day. Little information flowed across this barrier in either direction. However, the descriptive aspects of linguistics were accessible to some engineers, while the rigorous mathematics of engineering were of little concern to linguists. Happily this situation is now beginning to change. « SPECTRUM ANALYSIS PHONETIC DECODER ACOUSTIC PHONETIC MODEL LEXICAL ACCESS PROCEDURE T Mien CUES T LEXICON WORD LATTICE PARSER T RULES 1 GRAMMAR Figure 3. ♦ Levinson: Human-machine communication by voice 9 9 Skipping over the early history of ASR, let us look at the modern state-of- the-art. Today, large vocabulary recognition of fluent speech is accomplished by systems of the architecture shown in Figure 3. The interesting thing about this diagram is that linguists could have drawn it two or three decades ago. Unfortu- nately, they had no tools with which to implement it. The earliest attempts at an implementation were based on compiling an exhaustive list of rules for acous- tic/phonetics, phonology, phonotactics, morphology, and syntax. These rules were applied by an ad hoc logical mechanism and followed by another ad hoc decision strategy to choose the best transcription for the utterance. The basic strategy is outlined in Newell et al. 1973, but no working version of the proposed system was ever constructed. In the absence of a rational mathematical frame- work, no amount of linguistic knowledge, regardless how detailed and compre- hensive, can enable transcription of fluent speech. The problem is one of combi- natorics. A large collection of heterogeneous rules is required. The rules have sig- nificant interactions with each other. The number of dependencies amongst the rules grows exponentially with the size of the rule set. No ad hoc procedure can ever be designed to apply and test these rules in an optimal, yet computationally efficient, way. And so, the early programs failed with linguists often blamed. In the early 1970's, the mathematical technique known as Hidden Markov Modeling was applied to speech recognition (Baker 1975, Jelinek 1976). The mathematics was known a decade earlier but, once again, it is especially appropri- ate to speech analysis because it naturally captures many aspects of linguistic structure. Unfortunately, the engineers and mathematicians who applied the method- ology to ASR, did so in a very clumsy way which uses the HMM to capture only the statistical structure of the speech signal. The early implementations of the HMM rested on the observation that speech is a quasi-stationary process, i.e., one in which the statistics of the signal are nearly constant over intervals of from tens to hundreds of milliseconds in duration. The hidden states of the HMM were therefore identified with the quasi-stationary regions. In order to force all aspects of linguistic structure to conform to this single notion, the system architecture of Figure 3 was revised as shown in Figure 4, in which all levels of linguistic struc- ture are combined uniformly into a single vast HMM. In order to accomplish this compilation, one assumes that all phonetic units (phonemes) have three parts, an onset, a steady state or target, and a decay. These are represented by a three-state non-ergodic HMM. It is further assumed that I phonology is accounted for by triphonic variation, that is each phonetic unit is influenced only by its immediate predecessor and successor. A different HMM for each phonetic unit is generated for each such phonetic environment. Finally, phonotactic structure is imposed by allowing only those sequences of phonetic units that appear in valid word sequences. A valid word sequence is one whose trigram probability is non-zero. 100 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:2 (Fall 1998) Overall block diagram of subword unit based continuous speech recognizer. Figure 4. The result of these assumptions is a huge HMM with millions of parameters whose values are automatically estimated from hours of unlabeled (i.e., unseg- mented) speech of many different speakers. It is another engineering tour-de- force that such a model can be built. Even more impressive is the fact that the method works vastly better than its early rule-based ancestors. In fact, for vocabularies of tens of thousands of words, fluently read speech of almost any speaker (i.e., native speaker of American Eng- lish) will be transcribed with 90% accuracy. Considering that the transcription is performed without any knowledge of the meaning of the utterance, this result is remarkable. 4. Conclusion As noted earlier, this method works because it is based on linguistic structure, al- beit highly oversimplified. The lesson that engineers learned from their success was that rudimentary linguistics embedded in a powerful mathematical framework is all that is required. Linguistic subtleties can be safely ignored. A more interesting implementation of Figure 3 captures a great deal more ^ linguistic reality. Based on the Cave-Neuwirth experiments (Cave & NeuwirthM 1980), it uses the more complex HMM shown in Figure 5 (Levinson 1986). This model is ergodic, with each state corresponding to a unique phonetic unit (allophone). Phonotactics is much more faithfully represented by the state transi- tion matrix and segmental duration is explicitly represented by appropriate prob- ability density functions. Furthermore, the system retains the modularity implicit in the diagram by using separate but mathematically optimal algorithms for lexical access and pars- Levinson: Human-machine communication by voice 101 « ing, the latter based on a formal grammar of English. One encouraging result of this method is that, unlike the system of Figure 4, this system can produce pho- netic transcriptions of words not in the lexicon. Yet, for all its linguistic sophistication, this method yields the same perform- ance as the single HMM technique. True enough, this system is more amenable to the addition of linguistic structure, but its observed behavior is not appreciably better, even though from a psychological and linguistic perspective, it is much more natural. t a \i'°