LWPL 5.1 (October 2008)
Contributions by Martine Bruil, Marieke Hoetjes, and Daphne Theijssen.
Editors
This special issue of LWPL was edited by Elizabeth Koier, Olivia Loonen, and Marieke Meelen.
Preface from the editors
On 13 April 2007 T.W.I.S.T., the study society for general and comparative (Indo-European) linguistics of Leiden University, organized its first national student conference on linguistics in honour of its five-year anniversary. Since then, organizing a student conference has already become a tradition: the second student conference took place in May 2008.
The present proceedings mirror the diversity in linguistic disciplines that characterized the conference and are typical for T.W.I.S.T. in general. There were presentations on theoretical linguistics as well as applied linguistics and the number of historical papers equalled the amount of synchronic work.
Three of the papers given on the conference made it into this special issue of the Leiden Working Papers in Linguistics. Martine Bruil wrote a paper on the origins of the Ecuadorian Spanish construction dar + gerund, in which she argued that although it was commonly assumed that this construction was a calque of the indigenous language Quichua, there are good structural arguments why this explanation is too simple. She shows that this case of language contact induced change as well as some closely related changes were influenced by both languages, although they did not contribute in the same way.
Marieke Hoetjes showed how gestures can be used to test whether representations of placement events are language dependent. This can be done, because in various languages we find different degrees of specialization in the verbs used for put and place events. The use of these verbs can be compared to the form of the hand gestures made. An especially interesting case is the gestures of people speaking a second language, which does not have the same specialization of verbs for put and place events as their mother tongue.
Daphne Theijssen, finally, employed syntax for the purpose of automatically classifying why-questions according to their answer type (CAUSE or MOTIVATION) with the help of automatically derived syntactic information.
We found the conference very inspiring and we hope that this new tradition will enable many generations to come to present their research for both Masters theses and PhD dissertations.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all speakers at our conference, but especially those who have written a paper for these proceedings, for their effort and their patience. In addition, we are grateful to the main editors of the LWPL for their guidance and their offer to publish our proceedings in LWPL.
Contributions
- Martine Bruil, Give + gerund in Ecuadorian Spanish. A calque from Quichua or a large process of contact induced change?, Leiden Working Papers in Linguistics 5.1, 1-23.
Abstract
In this article, I will discuss the use and origin of the Ecuadorian Spanish verbal periphrasis dar ‘to give’ plus a gerund. This verbal periphrasis has a benefactive use. It is not known in other varieties of Spanish. In the past, linguists have interpreted the verbal periphrasis as a calque from the indigenous language Quichua. However, there are clear indications that the benefactive verbal periphrasis dar + gerund is more predominant in Spanish than in Quichua. In this article an alternative hypothetical development process is presented which is due to both external influences from Quichua and internal developments in Spanish.
- Marieke Hoetjes, The use of gestures in placement events, Leiden Working Papers in Linguistics 5.1, 24-35.
Abstract
Slobin's 'thinking for speaking' hypothesis states that our language influences thought as we prepare to speak (Slobin 1991). Differences between languages can thus be hypothesised to cause differences in thought. The domain of placement events is an example where different languages use verbs with different semantic characteristics to describe the same event. Speakers of English for example, can use the verb put to describe all types of placement events, whereas speakers of Dutch need to choose between the more fine-grained placement verbs zetten 'set' and leggen 'lay'. In order to find out whether these linguistic differences reflect deeper representational differences, and to find out what happens to 'thinking for speaking' in an L2, gesture use during speech has been studied (Gullberg to appear, Gullberg submitted). This study uses English as a new language in which to examine these questions.
- Daphne Theijssen, Automatically classifying why-questions with the help of syntax, Leiden Working Papers in Linguistics 5.1, 36-52.
Abstract
This paper describes how syntactic information is used in a system that attempts to answer why-questions automatically. In this Question Answering system, machine learning algorithms classify why-questions according to their answer type (CAUSE or MOTIVATION), on the basis of deeper linguistic information such as syntactic structure. The aim of this paper is to establish how errors in the syntactic representations of the questions influence the performance of the why-question classifier. I employed the parsing system TOSCA (Oostdijk 1996) to obtain syntactic structures without human interference. From the classification accuracy we can conclude that the use of the parser module in TOSCA for distinguishing CAUSE and MOTIVATION is promising (86.8%) when provided with manually checked part-of-speech (word class) tags. Applying the whole TOSCA system – including POS tagging – fully automatically, however, seems troublesome due to the modularity of the system.