Linguistics

This special issue highlights presentations from an organized session at the 2024 annual meeting of the LSA celebrating the LSA’s Centennial. The goal of the session, and consequently of this issue, was to provide a vision for what the future of linguistics pedagogy can be like by featuring evidence-based instructional approaches already in use by linguists, reflecting on these approaches and the challenges that they aim to address, and building capacity for more linguists to engage in these practices and improve our students’ learning experiences.

This paper offers suggestions on enhancing accessibility in our introductory linguistics courses, with a particular focus on teaching phonetics and phonology to students with hearing and visual disabilities. After reviewing some existing resources designed to make linguistics content more accessible, we address some of the practical constraints we experienced in trying to adopt these resources for our own courses. In light of such challenges, we offer practical strategies for improving accessibility both in the physical classroom as well as for online or hybrid courses. We suggest that implementing such strategies, which are in line with the principles of Universal Design for Learning, can p..

This paper embraces the premise in Mehl (2021: 331) that “linguists should care about the digital humanities … because collaborations between … linguistics and DH will be fruitful for all of us.” I discuss my incorporation of a selection of DH tools and practices into my teaching of three undergraduate linguistics courses, where in lieu of the traditional “research paper”, students learn about free web-based tools to create interactive exhibits and digitally edited volumes. These tools make multimodal writing and data presentation easy, and they are ideal for interactive presentation of ideas. They also allow students to weave concepts in linguistics with ways in which linguistic..

utoethnography is often used as a field research method and by educators to foster intersectionality in, and critical reflection upon, their own pedagogy. However, autoethnography is not commonly used as an assessment tool. There appears to be no literature on its use in a linguistics course, and this paper aims to address that gap. Analytic autoethnography is a productive assessment method for a linguistics course. The goal of analytic autoethnography is to connect one’s lived experience to theoretical concepts and research. I argue that using analytic autoethnography as an assessment method can help students critically reflect on their own lived linguistic and cultural experiences and to..

Video chat exams are a potential solution in online, general education introductory linguistics courses that seek to promote academic integrity, differentiate instruction, center student language and rhetorical practices, and offer multiple assessment modalities. Instructors who try video chat exams will want to clearly communicate expectations, offer practice exams, take steps to mitigate bias, and be sure this strategy aligns with their student learning outcomes as well as logistical concerns, like class size.

Our session, organized by the LSA’s Special Interest Group on Scholarly Teaching in Linguistics, brought together in-person and online participants for an exploration of linguistics pedagogy as an avenue for sustaining and advancing the continued growth of our field across a variety of academic institution types and student populations – from community colleges, small liberal arts colleges, and Tribal Colleges, to large-scale public and private universities.

Undergraduate linguistics courses often prioritize data from prestige varieties of English. This limits student learning to test cases of English and centers prestige varieties in the linguistics educational experience. We developed a method for de-centering English by exposing students to many languages in “language of the day” (LotD) activities. These activities broadened student knowledge of the world’s languages and improved student achievement on core analytical skills. This paper covers our implementation of LotD across two undergraduate phonetics and phonology courses, student and instructor reception, and suggestions for adaptation across subfields and course types.

In our paper, we focus on integrating topics directly relevant to students’ lives, a principle we consistently strive to embody in our pedagogical approach. Specifically, we explore the dynamics of appreciation and appropriation within the music industry, inspired by Garza’s (2021) work, as a leading topic for a module of a linguistic course. Through the implementation of in-class discussion activities, we utilized platforms such as TikTok, YouTube and Twitter (currently X), to center the modality and the topics that are of high importance for students and their lived experiences. Our paper highlights the benefits of effectively engaging students with topics that are related to their exp..

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools, especially generative tools based on large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, raise critical concerns for academic integrity, for ensuring genuine assessment of student learning, and for equity. Public understanding of these tools is clouded by hype about their capabilities, as they are often treated as knowledgeable and even sentient, and thus suitable for any human task. Of particular concern for instructors is how, and how much, students rely on these tools to complete their coursework. We address some of these issues in our classrooms by reporting on a recent pedagogical initiative within the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto..

Demonstration experiments are commonly used as a teaching tool in courses in experimental linguistics, cognitive psychology and cognitive science. This paper presents an inquiry into the impact of participating in demonstration experiments on student learning. This inquiry frames demonstration experiments as a form of experiential learning. As such, the experiment exercises were designed following the Co-Constructed Developmental Teaching Theory (Shenk & Cruikshank 2015), a model of experiential teaching inspired by the cognitive neuroscience of learning. One demonstration experiment exercise on the concept of categorical perception is presented in the context of an introductory-level co..

This special issue of Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America (PLSA) contains papers presented during an organized session on teaching history of linguistics in the 21st century at the 2024 LSA Annual Meeting. The session was organized as a session of the North American Association for the History of Language Sciences (NAAHoLS) with the aim of surveying current approaches to teaching history of linguistics and the provision of resources and insights for those who wish to do so themselves.

In our doctoral program (one which largely trains students in sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and L2 acquisition, rather than phonological, syntactic, and semantic theory), history of linguistics leads students to a deeper understanding of linguistics than is possible without it. Through this course, our students gain, in one semester rather than several, a broad perspective on the evolution of linguistic theories and methodologies. The course also serves as an opportunity for students to delve into the history of their own subfield and for them to frame the literature review portion of their own dissertation. The outcome of having this course is that our graduates have a broader perspe..

Teaching the history of linguistics often involves talking about a large number of people – linguists and scholars in related fields – who are only hazily recognized by students, and often the teacher is no better off. A set of graphical networks can help enormously in the task of orienting oneself and keeping track of who is exactly who. Note: A video of the session in which this was presented and the associated slide deck are available in the foreword to this issue.

This paper considers options for positioning the present in relation to the past in teaching the history of linguistics. It proposes three approaches as having been demonstrably practiced (presentist, trajectorial and heliocentric), plus a fourth (antiquarian) that is less likely to be publicized. They are exemplified and explored through a look at how the history of linguistics has been taught within the history of linguistics, in particular by William Dwight Whitney (a presentist), Ferdinand de Saussure (a trajectorialist) and Noam Chomsky (a heliocentrist). Key questions that arise include: What strategies and tactics can be inferred from their treatment of their predecessors? And to what..

A history of linguistics course is as an opportunity to revisit some important linguistic concepts students have learned. Students are usually exposed to the larger goals of linguistic theory, but it is not the primary focus in syntax and phonology courses, for example. By examining the historical development of these concepts, e.g., phonemes, transformations, universal grammar, linguistic relativity etc., a history of linguistics course can be used to explore the nature of linguistics and the connections between linguistics and other disciplines. Note: A video of the session in which this was presented and the associated slide deck are available in the foreword to this issue.

While once a required part of programs in Linguistics, courses in the history of the field have largely fallen into desuetude. When such courses are offered, they tend to attempt to cover thousands of years of history or a vast range of diverse related fields in a single term. There is perhaps a place for such courses, but I argue here that a rather more limited and focused offering has a particularly important role to play in the education of future linguistic theorists. Note: A video of the session in which this was presented and the associated slide deck are available in the foreword to this issue.

This short commentary proposes that there is a need for convincing our colleagues in linguistics departments to include history of linguistics classes in our programmes. Once they are there, it is suggested that we also consider tailoring these classes to modern populations of students. Note: A video of the session in which this was presented and the associated slide deck are available in the foreword to this issue.

Many students of linguistics get their first classroom exposure to the field in courses with titles like Introduction to Linguistics or Survey of Linguistics. Such courses commonly employ textbooks that communicate the scope and methods of the discipline, and tacitly set students’ standards for what the discipline values. This article examines textbooks that have been employed from the 1950s to the early 21st century in U.S. college courses that introduce students to linguistics. The goal is to bring to light how the how the presence—or absence—of historical material shapes students’ assumptions about the value of the history of linguistics. Note: A video of the session in which this..

This paper examines the voice system of the Surakarta dialect of Javanese (SkJ) and proposes that both syntactic ergativity and a bundled C/T probe are necessary in interpreting the empirical facts in the language. We present an analysis along these facts, and further propose a decomposed voice structure based on the morphosyntactic realizations of Agents in SkJ voice system, which directly feeds the split ergativity analysis that underpins the extraction restriction observed in SkJ.

Phonological theories typically treat prefixes and suffixes as if phonological processes apply uniformly to both. However, previous studies have found clear asymmetries between the behavior of both affixes. We argue that this is due to phonological processes being easier to learn in suffix position rather than prefix position. To test this, an artificial language learning task was used to evaluate whether phonological learning is symmetrical between affixes. Results pattern in the direction of the hypothesis, namely, that phonological learning is asymmetrically facilitated in suffix position over prefix position, providing support to general cognitive mechanisms being responsible for strong ..

Research on the acquisition of complex syntactic structures in Southern English (SE) and Southern African-American English (SAAE) is near-absent, though an extensive body of literature is available on phenomena such as those of auxiliary and copula BE, and 3SG -(e)s. de Villiers et al. (2011) supported that characteristics found in AAE help avoid commonly observed developmental errors in the comprehension of wh-questions. Prior work on mainstream American English (MAE) has shown that where and what are acquired before who, how, why, which, and when. Research on passive voice revealed that children comprehend action verb passives earlier than non-action verb passives. We investigate the compr..

Language can convey both objective, fact-based information and subjective, opinion-based information. Previous research has focused on linguistic contexts that are associated with subjective information, such as information embedded under find. We aim to complement this existing work by exploring whether particular linguistic contexts are specifically associated with objective information. We report two psycholinguistic experiments testing the acceptability and processing of subjective and objective predicates embedded under the fact that. As a whole, the results suggest that subjective predicates embedded under the fact that are as acceptable and as easy-to-process as objective predicates, ..

The non-polarity “positive” anymore construction (NPAM; e.g., I write letters anymore, ‘I write letters nowadays’) is a vernacular feature found in the Midland dialect region. Analyses have suggested that while its negative polarity counterpart (I don’t write letters anymore) is associated with a positive presupposition and a negative assertion, NPAM contributes a negative presupposition and a positive assertion. This paper presents an experiment testing this hypothesis. The results provide initial support for the negative presupposition—positive assertion analysis of NPAM, but suggest that regional exposure is not necessary to know this feature does not share the same meaning as..

Polish inchoative deadjectival verb forms have been noted in Bobaljik (2012) to exemplify a potentially problematic paradigm for the Comparative-Change-of-State Generalization described within the same work. While Polish causative and anticausative deadjectival verbs formed from adjectives that display suppletion in the comparative form show the expected corresponding suppletion in the verb form as well, the inchoative deadjectival verbs display what appears to be an illicit ABA pattern. We argue that in these cases, Bobaljik’s Generalization can still be upheld, due to the two deadjectival verb types, anticausative and inchoatives, belonging to two different classes of anticausatives (Ale..

Cross-linguistically, secondary predicates may be distinguished from event-modifiers (e.g. adverbs or converbs) and individual-modifiers (e.g. attributive adjectives, participles, or prepositional phrases) via the presence or absence of prosodic processes and phonetic cues. This paper examines the prosodic behavior of secondary predicates in Modern Irish, which can form bare adjectival depictive and resultative secondary predicates. We show that Mod. Irish bare AP secondary predicates are distinguished from surface distributionally equivalent attributive modifiers through the morphophonological system of initial mutation and cues such as phrase-final lengthening and pauses. These facts suppo..

English famously has both wh- and nominal exclamatives (e.g., Portner & Zanuttini 2005). For instance, both What (strange) stories Nina tells! and The (strange) stories that Nina tells! are expressive speech acts about the very high degree that the stories that Nina tells have on some—explicit or implicit—scale. However, puzzlingly enough, Russian only has wh-, but not nominal exclamatives. I propose, partially following Esipova 2021, that both wh- and nominal exclamatives are instances of expressive intensification (akin to She is damn smart), with the expressive component of the expressive intensifier promoted to being the primary speech act (not unlike in Damn {she is / is she} sm..

Amid changing ideas about sex and gender, there is a growing need to reexamine norms around their operationalization and theorization. This talk presents results from a survey exploring linguists’ practices for collecting information about research participants’ sex/gender. Based on 157 complete responses to date, we explore the popularity of different methods for gathering information about sex/gender and the methodological and theoretical implications of those choices. We closely analyze the way questions around sex/gender are formulated and differences among linguists by subfield, training, identities, and gender politics, and offer best practices for ethical and inclusive approaches.

Glide-like formants can arise either through articulation of a glide or through articulation of hiatus, which often results in similar formant movements (e.g. she yachts, she ought). Davidson & Erker (2014) established that the glide-like formant movements are measurably different from actual, phonological glides. The current study compares a wider range of vowel environments to investigate the different realizations of [j]. Analysis of modal V#(j)V sequences finds significant differences in intensity change and duration in most vowel environments examined, and additionally finds significant differences in formant movements for one ambiguous vowel environment. However, the large degree o..

English Coronal Stop Deletion (CSD) has been a subject of debate in terms of whether it is categorical or gradient. Previous studies have overlooked the possibility that tongue tip raising during inaudible coronal stop may come from neutral tongue tip position rather than gradient CSD. The current study found that in sentence reading, that much involves word-initial tongue tip raising just prior to [m] that is significantly similar to the tongue tip behavior of much in isolation. We argue that English CSD should be analyzed as categorical deletion and that one can only argue for gradient deletion after considering the neutral position of the tongue tip. More generally, this study suggests th..

As for the order of verb (V), object (O), and oblique (X), Dryer (with Gensler) (2013) finds the asymmetry between VO and OV languages in terms of the position of X: VO languages are almost exclusively VOX, and OV languages are of all three types (XOV, OXV, and OVX). Hawkins (2008) argues that “[t]he OVX languages should be more head-initial and have head ordering correlations more like those of VO” (e.g., preposition: OVX 33%, VO 86%). However, we claim that high percentages of OVX languages have head-final orders unlike VO languages in complement-head orders (e.g., postposition: OVX 67%, VO 14%). We also claim that OVX languages have more head-initial orders than XOV and OXV languages ..