Volume 16, Winter 1994

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  • ItemOpen Access
    Calgary Working Papers in Linguistics, Volume 16, Winter 1994
    (University of Calgary, 1994-01) Kitch, Sandra; Rowsell, Lorna V; Vanderweide, Teresa
    The editors of this issue, Teresa Vanderweide, Sandra Kitch, and Lorna V. Rowsell, are pleased to present the sixteenth issue of the Calgary Working Papers in Linguistics published by the Department of Linguistics at the University of Calgary. The papers published here represent works in progress and as such should not be considered in any way final or definitive.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Research paradigms and linguistic research
    (University of Calgary, 1994-01) Archibald, John
    The following papers (Derwing, Dobrovolsky, Guilfoyle, and Prideaux) began as a panel discussion at the annual Alberta Conference on Language (ACOL) held in Banff on November 7th, 1992. The general theme of the panel was Research Paradigms and linguistic Research, and the original panel consisted of Bruce Derwing (U of A), John Archibald (U of C), John Ohala (U of A; Berkley), Eithne Guilfoyle (U of C), Gary Prideaux (U of A), and Michael Dobrovolsky (U of C). Each original talk was about fifteen minutes long. In this paper, I would like to combine the very brief opening remarks that I made, as well as my contribution: research paradigms and language acquisition research.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Properties of stuttered speech
    (University of Calgary, 1994-01) Crowe, A L; Dolson, J C
    The purpose of this study was to compare the fluent and nonfluent speech of stutterers with the fluent speech of nonstutterers in terms of their prosodic features and spectrogram analyses. Three adult stutterers were matched with three nonstutterers and were asked to perform three tasks: passage reading, wordlist reading, and free speech. Results demonstrated that polysyllabic words and stressed syllables were more often stuttered, and speaking rate was slower in stutterers fluent and nonfluent speech. No differences were found between content and function words or in consecutive readings of the same passage. Spectrogram analysis showed increased glottal tension, more abrupt onsets and greater intensity of vowels within a stuttered segment. These findings suggest that glottal tension plays a role in the prolongation of phonemes and repetition of segments.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Theory and research in phonology: a question of alternatives
    (University of Calgary, 1994-01) Derwing, Bruce L
    I've asked to go first because I wanted to open this discussion with some very general remarks about the relation between theory and research . In fact, what I propose to share with you is what I consider to be the most important lesson I've learned about research. I learned it many years ago, and oddly enough I didn't learn it from a linguist, philosopher, or scholar of any official strip. Actually, I learned it from a guy named Sherlock Holmes.
  • ItemOpen Access
    How do we science-or do we? Seven points.*
    (University of Calgary, 1994-01) Dobrovolsky, Michael
    I begin with this point because I believe we sometimes operate under the myth that science as we know it began in the Renaissance. There is no doubt that some elements of what we call Western science emerged from the cultural practices of that period. But even the most stripped down definition of scientific activity leads to the conclusion that the scientific approach to understanding the universe is ancient.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Acoustic correlates of the fortis/lenis contrast in Swiss German plosives
    (University of Calgary, 1994-01) Fulop, Sean A
    Several of the High Allemanic dialects of German, collectively known as Swiss German, exhibit consonantal contrasts which differ in nature from those in other German dialects. Through spectral analysis, the nature of the two Swiss German plosive series (/p, t, k/ contrasting with /b, d, g/) will be investigated. The manner in which these series contrast is not one of voicing or aspiration, and can best be characterized as fortis versus lenis. The acoustic character of the fortis/lenis contrast in Swiss German plosives will be explored by examining the main spectral features of each plosive in three phonetic environments: word-initially, word-medially, and word-finally.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Syntactic theory and linguistic research
    (University of Calgary, 1994-01) Guilfoyle, Eithne
    I have recently started working with data from young language-disordered children, a population who have received very little consideration from linguistics as a whole, and almost none from those working in a generative framework. In what follows I will discuss a few issues within each of these three areas that most interest me, because they all bear on the central questions of how many syntactic categories there are in natural language, how they are combined, and how children acquire them.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Two research paradigms for discourse analysis
    (University of Calgary, 1994-01) Prideaux, Gary D
    Discourse analysis covers a vast range of types of language use, including onversations, monologues of various sorts (lectures, sermons, political speeches), narratives, jokes, and much else in both oral and written modes. It is not surprising, therefore, that quite distinct approaches to discourse have evolved, often with very different research orientations, methodologies, and data sources. In this short contribution, a characterization is offered of two typical research paradigms in discourse analysis. One approach derives primarily from concerns of a sociological and sociolinguistic nature and the other from the perspective of experimental psycholinguistics and cognitive science.
  • ItemOpen Access
    A functional category analysis of the German acquisition data: a reply to Clahsen's Parameter Constraints
    (University of Calgary, 1994-01) Vanderweide, Teresa
    In this paper, I argue that Clahsen's proposals regarding syntactic development violate Universal Grammar (UG), and that an analysis based on Guilfoyle and Noonan 's (1992) Structure Building Hypothesis more satisfactorily accounts for the German acquisition data. I show that evidence from Stage I of German child language, which Clahsen ignores, suggests that early child grammars are lexical and therefore lack both an FP and an AGRP.