In this exploratory study, the productions of the phoneme /ʀ/ were examined in the speech samples of 25 children. All children (aged 2;11 - 6;3) have a (presumed) Developmental Language Disorder...Show moreIn this exploratory study, the productions of the phoneme /ʀ/ were examined in the speech samples of 25 children. All children (aged 2;11 - 6;3) have a (presumed) Developmental Language Disorder and were attending either a toddler Intervention Group or an Auris Language school. From each child a language sample was elicited twice in a play situation and during a picture naming task, by their speech therapist, with an interval of 3 months. The productions of target /ʀ/ within these speech samples were studied and analyzed in terms of correctness, substitutions and deletions. Productions revealed a wide variety of renditions of target /ʀ/, the most significant being /ʀ/ -> [l], [ʋ],and [j]. It was difficult to determine progress in the productions of /ʀ/ between the two recordings, which indicates the need for a longer interval between recordings, or more recordings. A deviating development of /ʀ/ could be observed in the data of this specific group of children.Show less
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 researches the pronunciation of the hard sign in the Russian language from the 1960's up until now on account of Russian grammars like Avanesov, Borunova, Kasatkin and Kasatkina, and...Show moreThis thesis researches the pronunciation of the hard sign in the Russian language from the 1960's up until now on account of Russian grammars like Avanesov, Borunova, Kasatkin and Kasatkina, and Kalenčuk. In Russian there is a tendency that consonants which are followed by a hard sign and a soft vowel are being pronounced hard again, despite the beforementioned grammars stating otherwise. By taking interviews with Russian people and analysing their pronunciation this research tests and challenges the existing grammars.Show less
The main focus of this thesis will lie on answering the question of how illness and health are linguistically expressed in the language of the Wayana, in order to acquire a more culturally...Show moreThe main focus of this thesis will lie on answering the question of how illness and health are linguistically expressed in the language of the Wayana, in order to acquire a more culturally appropriate understanding of the Wayana conceptualization of illness and health, which might result into an improvement of the health care system for the Wayana communities.Show less
The Ancient Greek lexicon contains words that cannot be explained by an Indo-European origin. Many of such words can be explained as loanwords of a Pre-Greek substrate or as Semitic loanwords....Show moreThe Ancient Greek lexicon contains words that cannot be explained by an Indo-European origin. Many of such words can be explained as loanwords of a Pre-Greek substrate or as Semitic loanwords. However, some Greek words seem to originate from a Semitic language, but the morphology and phonology point towards a Pre-Greek origin. To solve this apparent discrepancy, the possibility that Semitic loanwords entered the Greek lexicon via Pre-Greek is examined in this thesis. A sample of fourteen obscure Greek words confirms this hypothesis. The words share semantical and phonological features with equivalent words in Semitic languages, but share phonological and morphological features with Pre-Greek as well. Especially the occurrence of Pre-Greek suffixes that are not present in the Semitic equivalents are strong arguments in favor of this hypothesis. Besides examples of Semitic influence on Pre-Greek, this thesis provides two possible examples of Pre-Greek loanwords in Semitic languages. These findings develop our knowledge of language contact in the Mediterranean region during the Bronze and Iron Age.Show less
Het Helmonds is een taal (ook wel dialect genoemd) gesproken in de stad Helmond, gelegen in het oosten van de provincie Noord-Brabant. Het behoort tot de Peellandse tak van het Oost-Brabants. Deze...Show moreHet Helmonds is een taal (ook wel dialect genoemd) gesproken in de stad Helmond, gelegen in het oosten van de provincie Noord-Brabant. Het behoort tot de Peellandse tak van het Oost-Brabants. Deze scriptie beschrijft zijn fonologie, morfologie en morfofonologie. In deze domeinen verschilt het Helmonds het sterkst van het Standaardnederlands (SN). Zo heeft de taal veertien monoftongen, één meer dan de dertien die Booij (1995: 5) voor het SN beschrijft. Dit is ook typologisch opvallend. Maddiesons (2013) sample van 564 talen bevat bijvoorbeeld maar één taal met veertien klinkers. Daarmee is het Helmonds een zeldzaamheid onder de talen van de wereld. Naast de grotere klinkerinventaris verschilt het Helmonds van het SN op het gebied van flexie. Het heeft affixen die niet voorkomen in het SN. Ook wordt modificatie van de wortel van een woord veelvuldig gebruikt om bepaalde morfologische functies uit te drukken. Verder heeft de toevoeging van morfologie vaak invloed op de realisatie van de wortel, waardoor de fonetische realisatie van de taal vaak afwijkt van haar onderliggende structuur. De morfofonologie is daarmee erg complex. Ondanks deze complexiteit is deze scriptie toch een erg volledige beschrijving van de eerdergenoemde domeinen. De data waar deze beschrijving zich op baseert is door de auteur zelf verzameld in Helmond. Hierbij heeft hij rekening gehouden met sociolinguïstische factoren als gender en plaats van geboorte binnen Helmond. Uit dit onderzoek is daarmee ook gebleken dat er twee variëteiten in Helmond gesproken worden, hier Perifeer Helmonds (PH) en Centraal Helmonds (CH) genoemd. Deze variëteiten zijn te verbinden met de plaats van geboorte van de spreker. Deze beschrijving is de eerste volledige beschrijving van de fonologie, morfologie en morfofonologie van het Helmonds. Het is daarmee een onmisbare bron voor eenieder die geïnteresseerd is in het Helmonds, maar ook in Noord-Brabantse dialectologie in het algemeen. Verder is de sectie over fonologie ook interessant voor het vakgebied van de taaltypologie.Show 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
In deze scriptie is onderzocht in hoeverre gemeenschappelijke terminologie in Keltisch en Germaans, en dan met name de onderlinge ontlening van termen, ons inzicht zou kunnen geven in de vroege...Show moreIn deze scriptie is onderzocht in hoeverre gemeenschappelijke terminologie in Keltisch en Germaans, en dan met name de onderlinge ontlening van termen, ons inzicht zou kunnen geven in de vroege fonologie van beide taalgroepen.Show less
This thesis contains the research for a teaching method of teaching Japanese pitch-accent to Dutch students which language is stress based, between the age of 12-18 years. It compares 3 existing...Show moreThis thesis contains the research for a teaching method of teaching Japanese pitch-accent to Dutch students which language is stress based, between the age of 12-18 years. It compares 3 existing methods for a different motherlanguage but with the same target language of Japanese, to criteria that have been constructed by using literature research and the pedagogical framework of Pawlak (2011). The existing teaching method of Hirano Cook (2011) was best suited for teaching the pitch-accent to the target age group and was used in order to make a theoretical good teaching method for the Dutch students. The main adjustments to the teaching method of Hirano Cook, consists of using phonological features of the stress-accent and creating a positive transfer to the Japanese pitch-accent.Show less
The triggering of a phonological rule by a sonority related feature might provide insight into the phonological process behind the input and output of a phonological rule. Is a sonority-based...Show moreThe triggering of a phonological rule by a sonority related feature might provide insight into the phonological process behind the input and output of a phonological rule. Is a sonority-based feature possibly a key factor in the change towards sonorant sounds in a language? One of the ways of finding a possible influence of sonority would be to look at sounds that change from being phonologically [-sonorant] to [+sonorant], and analyzing whether this change can be attributed to the presence of a sonorous sound as described above for the SV theory. Or if this change might be better explained by other phonological theories like Element Theory, or by looking at different phonological processes like lenition? This paper wil argue that analyzing changes to sonorant segments can be explained intuitively by using Element Theory and a lenition based viewpoint.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
open access
This thesis presents a corpus-based description of the use of kong2 in present-day Taiwanese Southern Mǐn (TSM). First a description of TSM phonology is given. This is followed by the synchronic...Show moreThis thesis presents a corpus-based description of the use of kong2 in present-day Taiwanese Southern Mǐn (TSM). First a description of TSM phonology is given. This is followed by the synchronic description of the use of kong2 in TSM. Finally, a brief overview of the process of its grammaticalization is presented.Show less
This thesis will provide a basic phonology and orthography of Bano’o. Bano’o is one of three dialects that are part of Batanga. Bano’o is spoken along the south-west coast of Cameroon. The first...Show moreThis thesis will provide a basic phonology and orthography of Bano’o. Bano’o is one of three dialects that are part of Batanga. Bano’o is spoken along the south-west coast of Cameroon. The first section of this thesis describes the process of data collection. Following the data collection, the thesis will present a basic phonology of Bano’o, with focus on vowels, consonants and tone. Subsequently the thesis will concentrate on syllable and word structure. The last part of the thesis contains a brief orthography of the language.Show less
