Rere (Kordofanian, Sudan) has a complex system of grammatical tonal marking on verbs when both subject and object participants are expressed. There are verbs forms in which the position and segmental content of the participant markers are the same, but tone indicates whether the markers are interpreted as either subjects or objects. In addition, tone can distinguish the person/number of different subject markers. I will show how the verb is highly compositional in expressing multiple factors: tense/aspect/mood, lexical verb classes, subjects, objects and plurality. The expression of these categories, combined with tone spreading, results in several tonal minimal triplets, but a system that is highly regular.

Mondays 12-1pm (unless otherwise noted), Zoom (send email to Eric Baković for the link)

Mondays 1-2pm (unless otherwise noted), Field Lab (AP&M 2452)

Mondays 1-2pm (unless otherwise noted), Field Lab (AP&M 2452)

Mondays 12-1pm (unless otherwise noted), Fieldwork Lab (AP&M 2452)

Mondays 1-2pm (unless otherwise noted), Fieldwork Lab (AP&M 2452)

Monday, November 5, 2018
12:30pm, Field Lab

Wendy comes from San Cristóbal de Las Casas (Chiapas, Mexico) and is a native speaker of Sierra Popoluca, a Mixe-Zoquean language spoken in the southern part of the Mexican State of Veracruz. She recently received her MA in Linguistics at CIESAS Sureste in San Cristóbal de Las Casas with a thesis on “Morphosyntactic mechanisms of valency changes in Sierra Popoluca” with Roberto Zavala. If you want to know more about Wendy and her work, feel free to check the brief video interview she recorded for Ivano and his colleagues’ project, “Headless Relative Clauses in Mesoamerican Languages”. Wendy speaks in Sierra Popoluca up to 1:42 min, then repeats and further elaborates in Spanish.

If you would like to meet with Wendy during her visit, please let Sharon or Ivano know.

Mondays 12:30-1:30pm (unless otherwise noted), Fieldwork Lab (AP&M 2452)

Mondays 1-2pm (unless otherwise noted), Fieldwork Lab (AP&M 2452)

Please join us on Monday, Feb. 5, for Yuan Chai’s practice talk for BLS!

Title:
Less Proficient, More Gestures?

Abstract:
The theory of compensatory gesture (Brown & Gullberg, 2008; Gullberg, 1998) suggests that gesture facilitates speech. The lower the language proficiency is, the higher the gesture rate will be. However, gesture is not the only approach to solve expression difficulties. There are alternative strategies such as code-switching, using alternative words, or omitting the information. The current study asks whether people prioritize gesture for the purpose of compensation and tests this hypothesis by comparing the gesture frequency 1) between narrations in native (Mandarin) and non-native language (English), and 2) between people with different non-native language proficiencies. According to the compensatory gesture theory, Mandarin speakers will gesture more frequently in English than in Mandarin. Additionally, Mandarin speakers with a low English proficiency will gesture more frequently than those with a high English proficiency.

The results show that first, the subjects gesticulate more frequently on average in non-native language than in native language. Specifically, those gestures co-occur with word repetition, word correction, and stressed words and syllables, indicating that speakers use gesture for self-repair and sentence segmenting, both of which function as compensations to the oral skill deficiencies in the non-native language. Second, contrary to the hypothesis, the high-proficiency group on average produces a higher mean gesture rate than the low-proficiency group, though not statistically significant. A qualitative analysis suggests that it is because the low-proficiency group uses different compensatory strategies such as skipping complex details and code-switching to native language, both of which suppress the production of gestures.

This study acknowledges the compensatory function of gesture in speech. However, a low language proficiency does not always lead to a high gesture frequency because low-proficiency speakers may prefer other speech compensatory approaches. Using this study as a reference, language educators can encourage foreign language learners to adopt gesticulation when facilitating speech in order to improve their oral language skills.