Shawntel Barreiro (QP1), Salvadorans in Los Angeles: The effects of diasporic identity and place of birth on lexical accommodation
Abstract: Since the 1980s, Salvadorans have migrated en masse to Los Angeles (Lipski 2008),
bringing Salvadorans and Mexicans into contact regularly. Though they share similar linguistic
resources, scant economic opportunities have created tensions where features of Salvadoran
Spanish are perceived as inferior to their Mexican Spanish equivalents (Acuña 1996; Arias 2003;
Olivia-Alvarado 2013). This often leads Salvadorans to suppress their ethnic identities through
the linguistic accommodation of Salvadoran Spanish towards Mexican Spanish (Parodi 2004;
Raymond 2012; Osuna 2015). This project examines the ways in which Salvadoran-diasporic
identity is reflected through the use of lexical items. 81 first- and second-generation
Salvadorans residing in L.A. were surveyed via an online picture-naming task. They were also
asked Likert-scale questions regarding diasporic identity, the importance of Salvadoran words,
and community relations between Mexicans and Salvadorans in Los Angeles.
Findings suggest that while some lexical items showed a pattern of accommodation, other
items did not, demonstrating that lexical accommodation was not a totality for the Salvadoran
participants. Participants, however, did show a preference to use Salvadoran words with both
Salvadoran and Mexican interlocutors. Contrasting previous studies (Parodi 2004; Raymond
2012; Osuna 2015), these results suggest that Salvadoran participants maintain the use of
Salvadoran vocabulary regardless of the interlocutor’s ethnicity. Results also demonstrated
interactions between participants' choices in the picture naming task, and responses on
diasporic identity and place of birth. These latter two results demonstrate that perceptions of
the importance of Salvadoran Spanish vary as it relates to their diasporic identities, place of
birth, and whether they chose Mexican or Salvadoran words. With regard to previous
scholarship, these results may further suggest that the accommodation of Salvadoran Spanish
towards Mexican Spanish is not a given for Salvadorans in Los Angeles, even for those who
were born and raised in the Mexican-dominant city.
Gina Ndoci (QP2), The Greek of Albanian immigrants and what they meme.
Abstract: Since their arrival in Greece, Albanian immigrants have been negatively characterized and stereotyped in their host country. A small corpus of internet memes collected for this project shows that the stereotyping is very much reproduced and reinforced in the online discourse. This is done to a large extent through a set of lexical items (such as the words for ‘village’ and ‘knife’) that seem to be perceived as stereotypically Albanian. Memes also comment on a set of Albanian imposition features that are perceived by their creators to show up in the Albanians’ variety of Greek (e.g. the substitution of Greek voiceless palatal fricatives with voiceless velar stops). These features are not consistent, however, even within the same meme as variation in the substitution strategies is observed (e.g. the substitution of Greek voiceless palatal fricatives with voiceless palatal affricates). Based on the meme corpus findings, a perception experiment was created which solicited Albanian-Greek bilinguals and Greek monolinguals’ evaluations of the speakers. We find that the negative stereotyping does not show up in the participant’s own characterizations of the Albanian-Greek guises. Moreover, the survey findings suggest that the presence of stereotypically Albanian lexical items, variation in the manner of articulation of Greek fricatives in the Albanian’s variety of Greek, and the ethnicity of the participants appear to play a role in the identification of the Albanian origin of the speakers. Finally, future directions to better understand the social meaning of Albanian features will be discussed in this presentation.
Junyu Ruan (QP1), Applying Albright's Minimal Generalization Learner to analogy in Middle High German inflectional paradigm
Abstract: Factors determining the direction of analogical change (leveling, in particular) in paradigm have long been studied in field of historical linguistics. To explain certain patterns of leveling attested in the history of several languages, Albright (2002) assumed that in language acquisition, speakers select a single surface form in the paradigm as a global base to derive the rest of the forms in the paradigm across all lexical items, and the base is supposed to be the most informative form in the paradigm, i.e. it preserves most contrasts and permits the most accurate prediction of forms in the paradigm. Under these assumptions, Albright (2002) developed the Minimal Generalization Learner, proposed in Albright and Hayes (2002), into a computational model capable of selecting the base form in the paradigm and thus predicting possible directions of leveling. In this study, Albright’s Minimal Generalization Learner was applied to the selection of base form in the inflectional paradigm of Middle High German, which showed multiple directions of leveling across strong verb classes in its development into Modern High German, and data were collected from corpora of two Middle High German dialects (Alemannic and Upper German). The results showed that the prediction of the model was not well consistent with the attested change in the history of German, indicating that cell informativeness might not be the decisive factor in determining the direction of leveling from Middle High German to Modern High German.
