Topic: Singapore English intonation: teasing out sources of prominence and variation  Speaker: Dr. Adam J. Chong (Senior lecturer, Department of Linguistics, Queen Mary University of London) Date: 16th November, 2023 (Thursday) Start time: 4:00 pm (HK time) Format: Zoom (Meeting link: https://hku.zoom.us/my/jonahlack)   Abstract:  Singapore English (SgE) is a nativised English variety that displays a number of systematic linguistic features that distinguish it from Western varieties (e.g. British English). In this talk, I present ongoing work on SgE intonation, an under-examined aspect of the linguistic system. I first present a proposal for a phonological model of SgE intonation couched in the Autosegmental Metrical framework. I then discuss the results of [...]

Attitude verbs, which typically describe mental states, like English think, want, and know, are found in languages around the world. These verbs pose a number of interesting puzzles. One long-standing puzzle is how children come to learn the meaning of these verbs, which describe highly abstract mental states and so cannot be easily learned by observation. An influential account explains this fact with syntactic bootstrapping: attitude verbs can be differentiated by their morphosyntax, and children can use easier-to-observe morphosyntactic distinctions to draw conclusions about harder-to-observe verb meanings. But to what extent do attitude verbs have distinctive syntactic properties? In fact, given cross-linguistic variation, [...]