What Linguistic Universals Can Be True Of

Lahiri, Aditi; Plank, Frans

doi:10.1007/978-1-4020-8825-4_3

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…In this study, infants detected a fricative to stop change but not vice versa (see also Altvater-Mackensen, 2010). They interpreted these findings in terms of emerging phonological representations in early lexical development, upholding the view that stops are initially lexicallyphonologically unspecified, whereas fricatives are specified (see also Lahiri & Plank, 2009;Lahiri & Reetz, 2003). Altvater-Mackensen and Fikkert dismissed acoustic/perceptual salience as a factor contributing to the asymmetric performance in this study.…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 74%

The role of acoustic/perceptual salience in directional asymmetry in infant stop/fricative contrast perception

Nam¹,

Polka²

2013

Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics

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The presence of stops in a language implicates the presence of fricatives but the reverse is unattested. Similarly, infants' producing fricatives implies that they acquired stops. The privileged status of stops influences infants' stop/fricative perception. For example, Altvater-Mackensen and Fikkert (2010) reported that Dutch-learning 14-month-olds noticed a fricative to stop change but not vice versa. These findings were interpreted in terms of phonological specifications while dismissing acoustic/perceptual factors. In this study, we assessed whether prelinguistic infants show perceptual asymmetry. We tested English and French 4-5-month-olds using the look-while-listen procedure in which they were presented native nonsense syllables -/bas/ and /vas/. A mixed ANOVA showed a significant interaction between trial type and group (p=.027). Infants in /vas/-habituated group noticed the switch when the habituated fricative changed to a stop but infants in /bas/-habituated group did not notice the switch when the habituated stop changed to a fricative. This perceptual asymmetry in infants before babbling and word recognition stage indicates the potential role of acoustic/perceptual factors. We suggest that the above-mentioned privileged status of stops may reflect the possibility that stops are acoustically/perceptually more salient than fricatives. This salience difference is predicted to induce directional asymmetry in stop/fricative contrast perception.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 74%

The role of acoustic/perceptual salience in directional asymmetry in infant stop/fricative contrast perception

Nam¹,

Polka²

2013

Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics

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“…This type of Unrenderable task is eluded by giving up equivalence at the term level in pursuance of non-equivalent terms to attain a reasonable extent of equivalence at the new level. Wierzbicka,1991;Lahiri,& Plank, 2009). Culturally, Arabic and English vary markedly.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stylistic and Cultural Problems Encountered in Translating Quranic Arabic Pun tawriya التورية into English: A Linguistic Contrastive Study

Abdelkarim

Alhaj²

2023

TSSJ

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The translation is one of the most crucial and great cross-lingual and multicultural practices. One of these practices is the translation of Arabic puns into English in general and Quranic Arabic pun tawriya in particular which are the most vivid and sparkling parts of any tongue. Rendering Quranic Arabic pun tawriya into English increases many critical stylistic and cultural problems and challenges in renderings; these problems and challenges are attributable to the varying renditions of Arabic and English puns and the misunderstandings between the obvious references of a pun with obscure references, which could lead to a predetermined amount of ambiguity. This research paper assays to search stylistic and cultural problems confronted in translating Quranic Arabic pun tawriya التوريةinto English and to determine the translation procedures exerted in rendering the Quranic Arabic puns from Arabic into English. The study displayed translating the Quranic Arabic pun tawriya التوريةinto English and the equivalence of this Qur’anic Arabic pun is arduous and tricky. The results of the research paper also revealed that literal translation, zero translation, and a pun to non-pun translation are not always relevant and apt for rendering Quranic Arabic pun tawriya التوريةinto English because they have not efficiently maintained the dual meaning of the Qur’anic Arabic pun (QAP) into the Qur’an English pun (QEP).

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“…Language universals have been investigated from two different perspectives in linguistics: on the one hand, the typological, functional or Greenbergian approach; and on the other hand, the formal or Chomskyan approach [28]. From the typological point of view, taking into account the limited data available, the universals are derived inductively from a cross-linguistic sample of grammatical structures [29].…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As a consequence, "The empirical basis of universals research can only be (a sample of) a subset of the domain for which universals could maximally claim validity, and have traditionally been claiming validity: that of humanly possible languages. Therefore, the only viable domain for universals research, then, is all-languages-present-and-past-as-known-to-usnow" [33].…”

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confidence: 99%

A Fuzzy Grammar for Evaluating Universality and Complexity in Natural Language

et al. 2022

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The paper focuses on linguistic complexity and language universals, which are two important and controversial issues in language research. A Fuzzy Property Grammar for determining the degree of universality and complexity of a natural language is introduced. In this task, the Fuzzy Property Grammar operated only with syntactic constraints. Fuzzy Natural Logic sets the fundamentals to express the notions of universality and complexity as evaluative expressions. The Fuzzy Property Grammar computes the constraints in terms of weights of universality and calculates relative complexity. We present a proof-of-concept in which we have generated a grammar with 42B syntactic constraints. The model classifies constraints in terms of low, medium, and high universality and complexity. Degrees of relative complexity in terms of similarity from a correlation matrix have been obtained. The results show that the architecture of a Universal Fuzzy Property Grammar is flexible, reusable, and re-trainable, and it can easily take into account new sets of languages, perfecting the degree of universality and complexity of the linguistic constraints as well as the degree of complexity between languages.

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What Linguistic Universals Can Be True Of

Cited by 5 publications

References 18 publications

The role of acoustic/perceptual salience in directional asymmetry in infant stop/fricative contrast perception

The role of acoustic/perceptual salience in directional asymmetry in infant stop/fricative contrast perception

Stylistic and Cultural Problems Encountered in Translating Quranic Arabic Pun tawriya التورية into English: A Linguistic Contrastive Study

A Fuzzy Grammar for Evaluating Universality and Complexity in Natural Language

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