Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
under embargo until 2025-01-31
2025-01-31T00:00:00Z
Vilela is a language isolate from El Chaco (Argentina) with just one semi-speaker left. Prof. Dr. Golluscio directed its documentation within the DOBES Programme (2003-2006) and is involved in its...Show moreVilela is a language isolate from El Chaco (Argentina) with just one semi-speaker left. Prof. Dr. Golluscio directed its documentation within the DOBES Programme (2003-2006) and is involved in its grammatical description. However, its phonology is understudied, and only a few observations (Llamas, 1910; Viegas Barros, 2001; Lozano, 1970/2006) and specific studies (Grawunder & Golluscio, 2014) have been made so far. In addition, and despite its endangerment level, only one article has focused on how language attrition affected the retrieved data (Golluscio & González, 2008), and only scarce mentions of phonological processes were made. Investigations of phonetics and phonology represent a relatively late arrival within the otherwise well-established field of language attrition studies (ca. the second half of the 2010s). Therefore, this thesis has a double aim. I will first describe the Vilela's (segmental) phonological system, analyzing the available acoustic and phonological information and my fieldwork data (bibliographic research and elicitation sessions in Resistencia). Next, I study how phonological and phonetic attrition has affected and is still affecting Vilela and what this can bring to current language attrition research.Show less
This thesis explores vowel mergers in the South Asian community of East Lancashire and the social factors affecting these realisations. Possible (non-)mergers north/force and face/goat are examined...Show moreThis thesis explores vowel mergers in the South Asian community of East Lancashire and the social factors affecting these realisations. Possible (non-)mergers north/force and face/goat are examined for a total of seven speakers by means of a word list reading, and sociolinguistic interviews with all speakers provided data on social factors such as socioeconomic background, social mobility, and identity. Like Standard British English, there is a merge of the lexical sets north and force, following what has been described as the first force merger. However, face and goat present a non-merger that behaves differently compared to the known northern English standard. Unlike a northern, monophthongised realisation of both vowels, all speakers gravitate towards a more southern, diphthongised realisation of face. Goat, however, remains a monophthong for all within this small dataset. The deviation found in the face lexical set might be explained through the social factor of social mobility, as all speakers express a desire to rise above the lower to working-class environment they have grown up in. At the same time, if the maintenance of monophthongised goat is an indication of loyalty to their identity, an argument can be made for the lacking desire of the younger second-generation British South Asians to give up their distinguishing dialectal features.Show less
This thesis identifies the social and phonetic variables that affect the learning process of Dutch L2 learners (second language acquisition). The native and non-native speakers who were asked to...Show moreThis thesis identifies the social and phonetic variables that affect the learning process of Dutch L2 learners (second language acquisition). The native and non-native speakers who were asked to participate in this research provided authentic audio recordings, which were added to the two online surveys that were used. The survey respondents that participated in this empirical study were asked to share their thoughts, via an online survey, on the individual speakers, with its primarily focus on the phonetic and social variables. By analysing the results of this research and examining the correlation between these results and the literature discussed, it was possible to draw a conclusion on which social and phonetic variables obstruct the learning process of Dutch L2 learners. This thesis concludes that the social variables (the division between a younger and older group of participants) and the phonetic variables (sounds that were identified as unintelligible and/or intolerable) that were recognized in this empirical research are collectively responsible for disrupting the comprehension and production of sounds for second language learners. Keywords: phonetic variables, sociolinguistic choices, sound systems, IPA, L1, L2Show less
Using a wide variety of languages I investigate numerous rhotic-vowel interactions and extrapolate that the account of Element Theory is quite successfull in dealing with rhotics as a class.^...Show moreUsing a wide variety of languages I investigate numerous rhotic-vowel interactions and extrapolate that the account of Element Theory is quite successfull in dealing with rhotics as a class.^^Rhotics are an interesting class of phones in the range of human speech sounds as they are tied together by their similar phonological behaviour rather than their phonetic proporties. For this reason previous generative phonological accounts have trouble defining and accounting for the class of rhotics. This thesis researches whether the phonological theory titled Element Theory is able to account for the unified behaviour of rhotics by interpreting rhotics as the vowel primitive (A)Show less
This paper examines through an empirical research whether Dutch students exhibited the pronunciation issues mentioned by sources in the field of applied phonetics such as Collins and Mees (2003),...Show moreThis paper examines through an empirical research whether Dutch students exhibited the pronunciation issues mentioned by sources in the field of applied phonetics such as Collins and Mees (2003), and Swan and Smith (2001). In addition, the students’ opinions were tested to see how they judged aesthetic appreciation for another speaker who exhibited the pronunciation features in an exaggerated way. After reviewing the literature, the ten most significant problems that could complicate mutual intelligence were collected, and a list of ten sentences with each five tokens of the same phenomena were used to test if 30 students in the South-West part of the Netherlands exhibited these ten specific pronunciation difficulties. The students read the ten sentences aloud and their speech was recorded and analysed. Additionally, the students filled in a questionnaire grading a native Dutch speaker who consciously exhibited these problems on a scale from 1 (ugly) to 5 (beautiful), and accounted for their reasoning. Only five out of these ten problems were distributed by the students, namely, final devoicing of [z], [d] to [s] and [t], [ae] realised as [a] or [e], the [ð] becomes [d], the voiced fricative [v] is realised as the voiceless counterpart [f] , and lastly, voiced [b], [d] and [g] for aspirated [pʰ], [tʰ] and [kʰ]. This paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of this study and suggestions for further study.Show less
Assimilation phenomena often attract phonologists’ interest, as they are common in every language. However, various assimilation phenomena remain unstudied, especially in terms of experimental...Show moreAssimilation phenomena often attract phonologists’ interest, as they are common in every language. However, various assimilation phenomena remain unstudied, especially in terms of experimental phonology and phonetics. One of the most common cases is /s/-voicing in Standard Modern Greek (SMG), i.e. the conversion of a voiceless [s] to a voiced /z/ when followed by a voiced consonant as a result of regressive voice assimilation. Most of the previous research indicates variability across speakers and across different types of consonants. Overall, the realization of /s/-voicing is described as gradient rather than categorical. Previous studies have only focused on /s/-voicing across word boundaries. However, /s/-voicing also occurs within the boundaries of a word. In many cases, clusters containing a sibilant and a voiced consonant are formed by morphological processes. This study aims to investigate the /s/-voicing across word boundaries, morpheme boundaries, and stem internally in order to describe the application of /s/-voicing in SMG in different morphological environments. For the goals of this study, native speakers of SMG were recorded during a production experiment. The speakers read aloud a number of passages designed to contain different cases of /s/-voicing. Various acoustic correlates were examined in order to describe the tokens phonetically and compare the assimilated tokens with the sibilant phonemes /s/ and /z/ of SMG. The applicaiton of voicing was measured as the ratio of the voiced part of over the total duration of the sibilant. The different morphological boundaries did not seem to clearly affect the application of /s/-voicing. However, the voicing ratio differs across the different types of following consonants as well as across speakers. These results confirm the previous literature in regard to the effect of the following consonant and between-speaker variability. The center of gravity was the most distinctive characteristic between assimilated and non-assimilated tokens and differences in terms of duration and intensity were found between the non-assimilated and [s] tokens as well as between assimilated and [z] tokens.Show less
The phonetic-pragmatic interface has provided linguistics with an interesting question that the literature has not yet been able to answer conclusively: Does intonation directly communicate meaning...Show moreThe phonetic-pragmatic interface has provided linguistics with an interesting question that the literature has not yet been able to answer conclusively: Does intonation directly communicate meaning? This thesis describes an exploratory elicitation experiment in which the effects of two pragmatic dimensions on the production of Dutch intonation is examined within three core meanings: “testing”, “selection”, “selection plus”. The productions of native speakers – realised on two-syllable proper names – were recorded in four pragmatic dimension combinations: default or vocative (orientation), and formal or informal (politeness). The meanings and pragmatic dimensions were embodied in situational contexts that served to elicit individual intonation contours for each meaning configuration. Additionally, the effect of word length was considered in a secondary experiment by employing one- and three-syllable proper names in a constant pragmatic environment. Results show a main effect of orientation across core meanings caused by different contextual variables. Politeness yielded only one main effect as a result of the configuration of speaker-hearer relations. Productions were found to be consistent across word lengths. The effects of the pragmatic dimensions are of definite influence on the production of Dutch intonation contours, but they could not be generalised across core meanings due to context discrepancies, indicating the importance of situational background.Show less
