Events

The talk reports on a typological study of negative indefinites, i.e., the counterparts to standard English nobody and nothing, in Englishes, primarily the New Englishes, and in English Creoles. Particular attention goes to “Negative Concord” (“NC”), i.e., the exponence of negation through both a negative indefinite and a verbal negator. The study confirms that NC is widespread in both Englishes and English Creoles and claims that although this holds for both Englishes and English Creoles, they have to be considered separately and that there is a lot of variation with respect to NC subtypes.  Important, but mostly for the New Englishes, […]

This talk investigates a set of phonological patterns in the SFU Speech Error Database (SFUSED), with the goal of understanding if and how phonological grammar is involved in phonological encoding. It assesses 2,076 sound errors in English of various types (phonological substitutions, deletions, additions, etc.) for their phonological regularity (do they violated English phonotactics?) and their sensitivity to a variety of markedness constraints commonly used in speech error analysis. The results show that sound errors are much less regular (violate phonotactics more often) than reported in prior work, and they reveal no significant effects from eight distinct measures of phonological markedness. […]