|
|
 |
Col. 11 No 1, Spring 1999
The SGP has had the great fortune to receive a $10,000
grant from the Diebold Foundation. Some of the money will be used to provide
editorial assistance for the AJGLL and for GLAC 5 in Austin. The membership
will discuss how the rest should best be used at the General Meeting at
GLAC 5. Some sort of support for graduate students is envisaged; please
come to the meeting with specific suggestions to this end and any other
deserving purpose! For those who won’t make it to GLAC this year,
suggestions will also be gratefully received at jsalmons@facstaff.wisc.edu. The Society for Germanic Philology is soliciting nominations for the following positions in the Society:
All members of the Society can be nominated. If you would like to propose someone, please send your nomination by mail, email, or fax before March 25, 1999 to:
GLAC 5 Preparations are underway for GLAC 5, to be held April 16-18, 1999 at the University of Texas in Austin. The deadline for advance registration is March 15! For an up-to-date version of the program and for registration forms, please visit the conference website at www.utexas.edu/depts/courses/louden/glac.html Featured plenary speakers are Harald Clahsen (University
of Essex) and Geoffrey Russom (Brown University). Abstracts of both presentations
appear below. Plenary Presentations Harald Clahsen: Words, Rules and Paradigms in the German Mental Lexicon Much in linguistics assumes that the language faculty has a modular structure and consists of two basic components, a lexicon of (structured) entries and combinatorial operations to form larger linguistic expressions from lexical entries. Distinctions between lexical entries and combinatorial operations have also been made in psycho- and neurolinguistic research, with respect to the processing of language in real time, the acquisition of language by children and the representation of language in the brain. The view of the dual nature of the language faculty has recently come under attack from a group of researchers who seek to develop associative single-mechanism models of language and subscribe to a school of cognitive science known as connectionism (Elman et al. 1996, Rumelhart & McClelland 1986, Quartz & Sejnowski 1998). A conception of knowledge of language is advocated here that tries to make do without the machinery of internally-represented, symbol-manipulating combinatorial operations. Instead, it is argued that what looks like the application of symbolic principles or rules can better be represented in terms of associative networks operating without any directly implemented combinatorial principles. The present paper contributes to resolving these controversial issues by presenting results from a multidisciplinary investigation of German inflection. We have examined (i) its linguistic representation focussing on noun plurals and verb inflection, (ii) processes involved in the way adults produce and comprehend inflected words, (iii) brain potentials generated during the processing of inflected words and (iv) the way children acquire and use inflection. It will be shown that the evidence from all these sources converges and supports the distinction between lexical entries and combinatorial operations. Two sets of empirical findings will be reported. Firstly, results from psycholinguistic experiments on German noun plurals and participles. In these studies, we found that adults have access to two distinct processing routes, one accessing (irregularly) inflected entries from the mental lexicon, and another involving morphological decomposition of (regularly) inflected words into stem+affix representations. These two processing routes correspond to the dual structure of the linguistic system. With respect to childrenÌs language, we found these two processes also to be clearly dissociated and regular and irregular inflection to be used under different circumstances. The second set of findings is concerned with the question of how different but related regular word forms such as those in (a) and (b) are mentally represented and processed: a. wild - wildes - wildem (wild) b. lackiere - lackierst - lackiert (varnish) We will present results from psycholinguistic experiments to show that the human language processor makes use of morphological paradigms in dealing with such forms and that associative models of inflection (which try to do without morphological paradigms) are not supported. Our findings will be explained in terms of a linguistic model, which maintains the distinction between the lexical entries and combinatorial rules, but replaces the traditional view of the lexicon as a simple list of idiosyncrasies with the notion of internally structured lexical representations. Future Attractions … We are pleased to announce that preparations for the next annual meeting are already in full swing. GLAC 6, co-hosted by the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, will be held April 28-30, 2000 at the University Center for Continuing Education in downtown Milwaukee. Organizers and prospective partici-pants are anxiously awaiting the publication of the baseball schedule for next year. If the Brewers are at home that weekend they'll be playing in baseball’s newest retractable-roof stadium, Miller Park, which is scheduled to open that very month. Finally, keep in mind that GLAC will arrive at its most spectacular site yet in the year 2001. Close your eyes … and picture yourself in the serene setting of Banff, the conference site for the University of Calgary. Prepare for a sublime experience! Paul Schach, one of the pioneering scholars of German-American dialects as well as a medievalist, and a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the AJGLL, died on October 13, 1998. A full obituary will appear in volume 10.2 of the AJGLL. News & Publications Paul Listen published The Emergence of German polite Sie. Cognitive and Sociolinguistic Parameters, with Peter Lang. Lisa Lane joined the English Department at Texas A & M as Assistant Professor of Linguistics. She teaches mostly historical linguistics as well as sociolinguistics. She is involved in cross-cultural and comparative research on limited industry maritime communities along the North Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico that continues to address questions relating to the actuation of linguistic change especially from an ethnodialectological perspective. Geoffrey Russom : A Bard’s-Eye View of the Germanic Syllable Prokosch (1938, 140) explains important rules of Germanic meter and phonology in terms of a tendency toward stressed syllables of exactly two moras. Open-syllable lengthening of vowels brings stressed syllables up to this normative length; shortening of vowels in closed syllables and reduction of consonant clusters brings syllables down to the norm or closer to it. The type of resolution that occurs in Germanic verse reflects a tendency to compensate for deficient length in a stressed syllable by inclusion of the following syllable in the stress domain. Dresher (1991, 282), who accepts and theorizes the two-mora minimum for Germanic stress, argues that a bimoraic norm would be unlearnable. Stressed syllables with more than two moras are attested in many languages, including the Germanic ones, and it isn’t clear how the learner could identify such syllables as anomalous by exposure to linguistic data. I suggest a refinement of Prokosch’s explanation with three principles: 1. The minimal length requirement for a syllable is one mora. 2. The minimal length requirement for primary stress is two moras. 3. Syllables with more than minimal length are subject to shortening by a principle of least effort. Principle 3 explains both shortening of stressed vowels in closed syllables and familiar vowel-shortening processes that brought unstressed syllables down towards their minimal length of one mora, as for example in shortening of Germanic inflectional vowels. Degemination in stressed monosyllables like OE cyn (cynn) can be compared to degemination in unstressed syllables of words like gyl.de.ne (gyl.den.ne). Dresher's objection is now met, since the minimalist principle 3 doesn’t have to be learned. In the main body of the paper, I show that rules of Germanic alliterative meter (Russom 1998) are sensitive to the three grades of stressed syllable length implicit in this analysis: short, long, and ultralong. Short stressed syllables may stand unresolved on a subordinate (rightward) arsis, a metrical position of intermediate prominence, neither fully strong nor fully weak. Without resolution, a short syllable cannot occupy the most prominent (leftward) arsis. Ultralong stressed syllables are the ones most likely to appear on the leftward arsis; and resolved sequences behave like ultralong syllables in this respect. In Norse skaldic meters, there are severe restrictions, first noticed by Craigie, on occupation of a subordinate arsis by an ultralong syllable. The analysis outlined in this paper tells against widely cited claims by Sievers about subordinate stress in non-root syllables -- claims that have posed unnecessary problems for theoretical phonology. The metrical evidence is compatible with a rule assigning stress to all non-root syllables meeting the minimal length requirement, with subordination of this stress to the stress on the root. As in previous accounts, word-final inflections need to be excluded as extrametrical from the domain of the stress rule. Research discussed in this talk will include the following items, each of which contains further relevant bibliography:Dresher, B. E. (1991) "The Germanic Foot: Metrical Coherence in Old English," Linguistic Inquiry 22. Fulk, R. D. (1992) A History Of Old English Meter, U of Pennsylvania P, Philadelphia. Gade, K. E. (1995) The Structure Of Old Norse Drottkvaett Poetry, Cornell UP, Ithaca, New York. Prokosch, E. (1938) A Comparative Germanic Grammar, Waverly Press, Baltimore, Maryland. Russom, G. (1998) ‘Beowulf’ and Old Germanic Metre, Cambridge UP, Cambridge, England. Sievers, E. (1893) Altgermanische Metrik, Niemeyer, Halle. Upcoming Meetings March 16-18, 1999. Sprache und neue Medien. Jahrestagung des Instituts für Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim. www.ids-mannheim.de April 19-25, 1999. International Colloquium in memoriam Leo Weisgerber (1899-1985), Moscow. Oleg Radchenko, RadchenkoO@ mgpu.ru. September 7-10, 1999. 34th Colloquium of Linguistics. Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. Deadline: May 31, 1999. More information available at http:/www.fask.uni-mainz-de/lk/. October 28-31, 1999: Semiotic Society of America Annual Meeting in Pittsburg. Deadline for abstracts: April 15. B. Pencak, wap1@psu.edu. November 5-7, 1999: Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association, Portland. Abstract deadline: March 15. I. Vandergriff, vdgriff@sfsu.edu. November 25-26, 1999: Languages in Contact, Groningen. Abstract deadline: April 1. John Nerbonne, nerbonne@let.rug.nl. December 27-30, 1999: General Linguistics Discussion Group, MLA Chicago. Deadline for abstracts: March 15, 1999. Papers in historical linguistics are preferred. Contact: Kurt Goblirsch, goblirschk@garnet. cla.sc.edu Return to the the SGP home page.
|