The call for submissions to the Proceedings of the 6th Annual Linguistics Conference at UGA is now closed. Watch this page for updates on the articles in this year's volume.
We thank you for your participation in LCUGA6 and look forward to publishing your manuscripts!
-The Editorial Board
Advance Publication
The following papers have been accepted for publication in the Proceedings of LCUGA6.
A Pragmatic Study of the Speech Act of Threatening between Jordanian and American Speakers
Othman Khalid Al Shboul, Jadara University (Jordan)
The present study investigates the speech act of threatening as used by native speakers of Jordanian Arabic (JA) and native speakers of American English (AE). The data of this study was elicited using Discourse Completion Test (DCT) taken from Beebe et al (1990). This test consists of ten imaginary situations drawn from real life. The data was analyzed using Chi-square value (value <0.05) which was conducted to determine whether the difference between the two groups for each threatening strategy was statistically significant. The subjects of Jordanian Arabic included 40 males and 40 females from three universities in Irbid district while American subjects included 15 males and 15 females from the University of Illinois in the United States. Five strategies were identified. Four of these strategies were shared between the two varieties: telling authority, committing harm, introducing options and warning. However, one of these strategies is confined to JA. This strategy is promise of vague consequence. In the discussion and findings section, many reasons were presented to justify the use of each strategy and to account for the differences between the speakers of JA and AE.
Assimilation in Úwù
Idris O̩láwálé Allison, Ekiti State University (Nigeria)
This paper describes and documents how the phonological process of assimilation manifests in Úwù, a minor and endangered language spoken by a minority ethnic group domiciled in Àyèré community in Ìjùmú Local Government Area of Kogí State, Nigeria. The data analyzed in the paper were sourced from the native speakers of Úwù who are very fluent in the language. With the aid of the 1000 word-list of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, about five hundred lexical items of Úwù were gathered. Analysis of data is premised on Autosegmental Phonology which assumes that prosodic features and segmental features are autonomous, and are usually synchronised by the Well-Formedness Condition (WFC). Findings in the paper show that assimilation is rarely observed in both verb + noun and noun + noun constructions unlike what obtains in most Benue-Congo languages with which Úwù shares affinities. However, the environments where the assimilation process manifests include: reduplication, negation and interrogative expressions. The process can also be observed in cases that involve nasalization, labialization and Affix harmony. The paper, therefore, validates the position of the earlier scholars who averred that assimilation is one of the most productive processes observed in the phonology of all languages.
Using Toponymic Correspondences to Understand the History of Albanian Settlement
Thomas Kingsley, University of Georgia
This study analyzes the place names in Albania and the surrounding countries in order to determine the area Albanians inhabited when the Slavs arrived in the Balkans. Investigating a hypothesis by Konstantin Jireček that Albanians at this time lived in the area between Shkodër, Prizren, Ohrid, and Vlorë, toponyms where Albanians currently live outside of modern Albania were compared with those inside of Albania and in the surrounding Slavic countries to determine whether Albanians were present prior to the Slavs. It is found that Jireček’s proposed settlement area correlates to the highest concentration of Albanian toponyms, suggesting that the Albanians living in Kosovo and North Macedonia were later arrivals to these lands.
A Comparison of Turn-of-the-Century and Turn-of-the-Millennium Speech in Georgia
Joseph A. Stanley, Brigham Young University
The Elsewhere Shift, defined here as the lowering and retraction of the front lax vowels, is a now-widespread phenomenon in North American English. However, few studies document its presence in the South. This study analyzes speech from two corpora of Georgians, one representing contemporary speech and another representing language from a century ago, to demonstrate the presence of the Elsewhere Shift in the South. Generalized additive mixed-effects models fit to formant measurements extracted from these corpora suggest a recession of traditional Southern dialect features (glide-weakening in price, the Southern Vowel Shift) and the adoption of the Elsewhere Shift (the low back merger, retracted front lax vowels), both in relative position in the F1-F2 space as well as formant trajectory shape. In addition to providing the first real-time analysis of English in urban Georgia, this study confirms the Elsewhere Shift’s status as a pan–North American dialect feature.