Language and Linguistics - Volume 20, Issue 4, 2019

Japhug, like other Gyalrong languages, is one of the very few languages with both a full-fledged person indexation system and an egophoric evidential category. A detailed account of the uses and meanings of the Egophoric and its interaction with person is thus of interest to the typology of evidential systems. This paper describes the uses of Egophoric marking in Japhug and of the other two evidential categories with which it contrasts (Factual and Sensory), as well as their interaction with person indexation. Due to the limited distribution of the Egophoric in Japhug (it only occurs in present contexts), the present paper exclusively focuses on the uses of evidentials with stative verbs in present (imperfective) contexts, where minimal pairs are available in the corpus.

Previous studies on Chinese dialect variation have mostly focused on the description of dialects, the regions where these dialects are spoken, attitudes towards dialects, and acoustic differences across dialects. The present study draws on experimental evidence concerning a vowel difference in two Taiwan Southern Min (TSM) dialects to provide more understanding on how non-contrastive, dialectal variations may affect speakers’ processing of speech. The variation of interest is a phonemic difference, [ə] and [ɔ], in the vowel inventory in two TSM dialects, in which the difference signals a lexical contrast in one dialect (e.g. [ə-a] ‘oyster’ vs. [ɔ-a] ‘taro’) but not in the other ([ɔ-a] ‘oyster, taro’). A long-term repetition-priming experiment investigating the word recognition involving the two vowels revealed a dialect effect on TSM speakers’ word recognition in accordance with prior exposure, native-ness and variant frequency. Implications of the findings are provided.

Two perceptual experiments investigated how the suprasegmental information of monosyllables is perceived and exploited in spoken English word recognition by listeners of English and Taiwan Mandarin (TM). Using an auditory lexical decision task in which correctly stressed English words and mis-stressed nonwords (e.g. camPAIGN vs. *CAMpaign) were presented for lexical decisions, Experiment I demonstrated that TM listeners could perceive the differences between stressed and unstressed syllables with native-like accuracy and rapidity. To examine how the perceived suprasegmental contrast would constrain English lexical access, Experiment II was conducted. It used a cross-modal fragment priming task in which a lexical decision had to be made for a visually presented English word or nonword following an auditory prime, which was a spoken word-initial syllable. The results showed that English and TM listeners recognized the displayed word (e.g. campus) faster both after a stress-matching (e.g. CAM-) prime and a stress-mismatching (e.g. cam-) prime than after a control prime (e.g. MOUN-, with mismatching segments). This indicates that suprasegmental information does not inhibit a segmentally matching but suprasegmentally mismatching word candidate for both the two groups, although TM is a language where lexical prosody is expressed syllabically and its listeners tend to interpret lexical stress tonally. Yet, the two groups’ responses were slower after the stressed primes than after the unstressed ones, presumably because the former generally had more possible continuations than the latter do. It is therefore concluded that when recognizing spoken English words, both the native and non-native (TM-speaking) listeners can exploit the suprasegmental cues of monosyllables, which, however, are not so effective that they will outweigh the segmental cues.

This paper investigates the position of adjectives in noun phrases in Truku Seediq, proposing that the two documented positions correspond to different semantics as well as a difference in syntax. While post-nominal adjectives, corresponding to basic word-order in Truku Seediq, may be either restrictive or descriptive, pre-nominal adjectives, seen as an innovation, are semantically restrictive. This paper also argues for a difference in syntactic structure for both kinds of adjectives, restrictive adjectives heading their own projection while descriptive adjectives are bare adjectives standing in a closer relationship to the modified noun. This paper further identifies a syntactic constraint for pre-nominal adjectival placement that applies regardless of restrictivity of the modifier, namely the presence of a possessive clitic to the right of the modified noun. Data collection is achieved through both a traditional elicitation method and an experimental task-based method. Data are further digitalized in order to ensure systematic searchability. The data thus collected are apt to support semantic analysis as well as an investigation of age-group-related variation. It is claimed that language contact with Mandarin Chinese may be one of the triggering factors for the development of a pre-nominal position for modifying adjectives in Truku Seediq.

One way to classify person systems across languages is by means of the semantic category of person and/or number, where person forms, with distinct referential values, are supposed to be in complementary distribution to each other. However, when we look into some finer details in a language-particular person system, i.e. that of the Puxian dialect in Chinese, there are person forms or expressions that are engaged in supplementary distribution and have meanings beyond what is literally said (Grice 1989). Different from previous approaches, which tended to analyze a person system into separate domains of study, e.g. reflexivity, intensification, logophoricity, empathy, etc., the author proposes that all the person-related meanings (semantics & pragmatics) constitute a “function inventory”, which has a stable structure called “inventory structure”. In the structure, each of the overtly expressed person meanings is assigned to a choice of node, from which multiple outcomes can be developed. The significance of this approach is that it tries to circumvent some pre-established categories and focuses instead on meaningful differences in a system (Sausurre 1983).

Negation in Longxi Qiang shows distinctive features in comparison to other recorded Qiang varieties. The choice between the two negative prefixes /mí-/ and /mì-/ and the volition indicated by these two negative markers in Longxi Qiang are similar to those of negators pu³¹ and mei⁵⁵ in Wenchuan Mandarin. To a large extent, pu³¹ corresponds to /mí-/ and mei⁵⁵ corresponds to /mì-/. Moreover, two negative constructions with positive meaning in Wenchuan Mandarin are borrowed into Longxi Qiang. I believe that the development of a negation system similar to Wenchuan Mandarin in Longxi Qiang is not a coincidence; language contact is an important factor accounting for it.