The 8th Newcastle-upon-Tyne Postgraduate Conference in Linguistics

Programme and Papers

Auditorium, Herschel Building Newcastle University United Kingdom 5th April 2013

Programme Committee
This conference is organised by postgraduate students of Newcastle and Northumbria Universities, with the support of the Centre of Research in Linguistics and Language Sciences (CRiLLS). The organising committee is made up of the following: Tendai Charles (Chair) Enas Filimban (Vice chair) Tamader Hwaidi (Member) Sameerah Saeed (Member) Hadeel Awad (Member) Chisato Danjo (Member) Patchanok Kitikanan (Member)

Acknowledgements
The 8th International Newcastle-upon-Tyne Postgraduate Conference in Linguistics is made possible by the kind support of a number of organizations. We would like to extend our thanks to:

Content Programme Committee ........................................................................................ i Conference Schedule............................................................................................ 1 Keynote Presentations ......................................................................................... 3 Biographical information of keynote speakers ................................................. 4 Abstracts of oral presentations ........................................................................... 5 Abstracts of poster presentations..................................................................... 38 Map of conference venue to conference dinner ............................................ 59 Map of conference venue .................................................................................. 60

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Conference Schedule
8.30- 9.00 9:00 - 9:05 9:05 - 9:45 Registration and Poster set-up Conference opening (Curtis Auditorium) Dr. Steve Walsh: Current issues in the teaching of speaking (Curtis Auditorium) Lecture Theatre 1 L1/L2 Acquisition Perception and Processing of English Morphology in SLA (Kahoul) Investigating Aspectual/ temporal interpretations in L2 English by Saudi Arabic speakers (Alruwaili) Lecture Theatre 2 Syntax An incorporation analysis of object marking in Bembe (Iorio) Lecture Theatre 3 Sociolinguistics Variation in the Realisations of GOAT and FACE in Barrowin-Furness (McDougall) Curtis Auditorium Phonetics A real-time sociophonetic study of postvocalic /r/ in the speech of Glaswegian schoolchildren (Lennon) A Phonetic / Phonological Investigation of Grenadian English Creole (GEC) (Paterson)

9:50-10:20

10:20-10:50

Genitive case licensing in Pashto DPs (Masood)

Researching Language Attitudes in a Digital Age (Kostadinova)

10:50-11:10 L1/L2 Acquisition Formative assessment of Children with English as an Additional Language (EAL): Challenges and Opportunities (Pothin) Effectiveness of pushed/nonpushed spoken output tasks focussing on upper intermediate students in the EFL classroom (Byrne)

Coffee break Syntax Evidentiality in Interrogatives and Point of View shifting (Woods) Sociolinguistics Phonetics Training Adult L1-Mandarin of L2-English speakers to perceive English contrast/s/-// (Ying Li) Earwitnesses and their accent: do locals hear voices differently? (Atkinson)

11:10-11:40

Ode to a Dying Language? (Neises)

11:40-12:10

Preverbal WhElements in Late Archaic Chinese (Wang)

Singular you was/were variation in spoken English in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Widlitzki)

12.10-13:10

Lunch and Poster presentation (Poster session starts from 12:40)

13:10-13:50

Dr. Emma Marsden: An Introduction to IRIS (Curtis Auditorium) L1/L2 Acquisition Is the Observe Hypothesise Experiment cycle more effective than Presentation Practice Production when teaching chunks? (Golebiewska) An Investigation of Teachers? and Students? Attitudes towards the Use of L1, L2 and L1+L2 Subtitles in the L2 Classroom (Mingyue Li) L1/L2 Acquisition Syntax Deriving double Accusative: the Latin docere and the German lehren (Bertollo & Cavallo) Sociolinguistics Lexical innovation in a multicultural youth peer group: Romani influence in banlieue French (McAuley) Phonology

13:55-14:25

Final Devoicing in Kurdish: An OT Analysis (Hamid)

14:25-14:55

14:55-15:15

15:15-15:45

Problems of Cantonese object neg-wh quantifiers (Lee)

15:45-16:15

Developing Formative Assessment in Chinese Secondary English Classrooms to Facilitate Language (Chen)

The prosodic marking of Using Reference givenness in Corpora for English and Sociolinguistic Italian: a Research: the comparative Case of Class (Sierra) study (Harris) Coffee break Historical Morphology/ Linguistics Phonology Evaluating the role of the head The interaction and modifier of syntax and compounds and information nominal phrases structure in Old in English and Sardinian German (Wolfe) (AntonovaBaumann) Rules for Scribal Copying & Do vowel-initial Dialect syllables exist in Variance in Arabic (Hwaidi) 14th-Century Northumbria (Gilbert)

Effects of Development on CrossLanguage Speech Perception (Dar)

Psycholinguistics The Language of Neurons: Using Linguistics to Aid Understanding of the Neural Code (Williams)

N/A

16:20-17:20 17:20-17:30 18:00 -

Prof. Geoffrey Leech: Growth and decline: How grammar has been changing in recent standard English (Curtis Auditorium) Conference closing Dinner (pre-booking required) Leave for the restaurant at 17:40

Keynote Presentations (Curtis Auditorium)

Dr. Steve Walsh Newcastle University Current issues in the teaching of speaking 9:05-9:45

Dr. Emma Marsden University of York An Introduction to IRIS 13:10-13:50

Prof. Geoffrey Leech Lancaster University Growth and decline: How grammar has been changing in recent standard English 16:20-17:20
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Biographical information of keynote speakers

Dr. Steve Walsh Dr. Walsh joined the ECLS department at Newcastle University in March 2007 from Queen's University Belfast where he had been working for almost 10 years. Most of his working life has been spent abroad, working as an English language teacher and teacher educator in Spain, Hong Kong, Hungary, Ireland, Poland and China. Dr. Walsh is committed to teacher education, especially second language teacher education, and enjoys working with teachers to develop a closer understanding of teaching and learning in all contexts. Dr. Emma Marsden Dr. Marsden is interested in most aspects of second language teaching and learning including: second language acquisition, grammar pedagogy, implicit learning, morphosyntactic development, second language input processing, and second language education policy and practice. She is also interested in the role and design of experiments in educational research.

Prof. Geoffrey Leech Prof. Leechs main research area is English linguistics. Since 1970 he has been engaged in research on computer corpora, including the compilation of the LOB Corpus and the BNC (British National Corpus). Corpus linguistics over the decades has converged with English grammar, another of his major research interests. Apart from this, Prof. Leech has worked on pragmatics, where his interest has above all been in the linguistic theory of politeness. Recently he has returned to literary stylistics/poetics, a field to which he contributed from the 1960s, and on which he has collaborated with Lancaster colleague Mick Short. 4

Abstracts of oral presentations

Alphabetically by last name of the author

Ruwayshid Alruwaili University of York Investigating Aspectual/ temporal interpretations in L2 English by Saudi Arabics A number of L2 studies have mainly focused on whether L2 learners can acquire target-like functional categories and features. These studies have tended to observe the surface realization of functional morphology. However, it has become clear that surface manifestation is not necessarily a good indication of L2 abstract knowledge (Lardiere, 2000; Prvost & White, 2000). Therefore, investigation of L2 learners knowledge by observing the semantic consequences of functional categories and related features is of great significance. Hawkins (2009, p.220) pointed out that recent studies investigating learners interpretations associated with functional category distinctions are heading into a promising direction of inquiry and redirecting the focus from the syntactic to the semantic reflexes of functional categories. Accordingly, this study extends this line of inquiry by examining temporal and aspectual contrasts in English by Saudi-Arabic speakers. Arabic has a perfective/imperfective contrast whereas English distinguishes between past/non-past (Comrie, 1976). Therefore, Saudi L2 learners of English have to move from one way of representing the aspectual / temporal contrast into another different representation. Aspectual/ temporal syntactic and semantic content is assumed to be the same between the two languages but they differ in their overt morphological realizations which are language-specific (Fassi Fehri, 2004). Therefore, the two languages share the same underlying representation (involving the formal features associated with the distinctions), but they are different in the morphological configuration which determines which aspectual/temporal meaning is selected. Slabakova (2008) argued that functional morphology constitutes a relative difficulty for adult L2 acquisition and it is the bottleneck in particular mapping L2 morphemes to their related target meanings. Two different tasks were administered: an Acceptability Judgment task and a Gap-Filling task. The study was carefully designed to provide converging evidence about whether L2 interpretations are learnable or problems arise at the morphological level. The preliminary results from Acceptability Judgment task and Gap-Filling task suggest that functional morphology is the bottleneck and can account for the observed second language problems. They also will precisely test the predictive power of existing L2 theories by examining whether Saudi-

speaking learners of English can acquire knowledge of temporal/aspectual meanings of morphological forms.

Svetoslava Antonova-Baumann Northumbria University Evaluating the role of the head and modifier compounds and nominal phrases in English and German This proposal discusses the role of the head and modifier components in English compounds and nominal phrases and German compounds. The main question under consideration is whether a particular element of a compound or a phrase is the most salient one for language users. The majority of the literature on morphology and the processing of complex linguistic structures (e.g., compounds) has traditionally emphasised the important role of the head constituent, whereas the modifier is said to further specify the head (e.g., Marchand 1960, Bauer 1983, Dressler 2006). The present study seeks to empirically evaluate the dominant role which has been posited with respect to the head. For this purpose monolingual native speakers of English participated in a cued recall study. Findings revealed a significant interaction of modifier cues and target type (more specifically, compounds), suggesting that targets associated with modifiers are recalled better in compounds. This finding is consistent with a previous study, which revealed that modifier rather than head associates come most readily to speakers minds. The study was replicated with German speakers. Again, the findings revealed that targets related to the modifier element are recalled significantly better than those related to the head, which is interpreted as establishing that the modifier is more salient than the head. Two accounts for the salience of the modifier are put forward. On the one hand, the semantic information carried by the head often serves to anchor the whole structure to a particular category. The role of the modifier as an element which provides the head with further semantic specification is what contributes to its increased salience. On the other hand, the ordering of elements within the structure should also be taken into account. If the speakers attention is drawn more strongly to the beginning of a word, then in right-headed compounds, such as those typically found in German and English, the modifier would be in a more privileged position.

In conclusion, the present study casts doubt on the view that the head is the most dominant component in a complex structure. The suggestion that the modifier is semantically more salient should encourage linguists to reevaluate their concepts of the notion head and modifier.

Nathan Atkinson University of York Earwitnesses and their accent: do locals hear voices differently? Earwitnesses, those who have heard speech during the course of a crime, may be tested on their recollection of the voice by means of a voice parade. They are exposed to usually eight voices and asked if any are that of the perpetrator. How successfully a person can remember a voice is dependent on a number of factors, such as type of exposure to the voice, time between exposure and recall, and familiarity with speaker (Bull and Clifford, 1984). Research also suggests that a listeners own accent relative to that of the voice heard can affect identification accuracy (e.g. Vanags et al., 2005) but is inconclusive in determining whether sharing an accent with the speaker is beneficial or detrimental to later identification The current study focuses on speakers of North East English (NEE). Participants listen to the voice of a speaker from one of three perceptual varieties in the area (Pearce, 2009) and are later asked if they can identify the same voice from a selection of eight (voices are from across the NE region). Euclidean distances are calculated for features to determine how similar the voices are to one another with respect to segmental and non-segmental features. Results show that neither NEE nor non-NEE listeners perform better at identifying the target voice. It does appear that the two listener groups are using different cues when remembering the voice. Inaccurate identifications made by local listeners involve selection of voices which match closely with the target voice with respect to phonetic features but differ in terms of suprasegmental features. This suggests that local listeners focus on the featural differences between the speakers which they may be more attuned to given their increased exposure to the accents spoken. The contrary is true for inaccurate identifications made by listeners not from the local area, where incorrectly chosen voices share with the target voice more holistic/suprasegmental than phonetic features.

Bull, R. & Clifford, B. 1984. Earwitness voice recognition accuracy. In: Wells, J. C. & Loftus, E. F. (eds.) Eyewitness Testimony: Psychological Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pearce, M. 2009. A perceptual dialect map of North East England. Journal of English Linguistics, 37(2), 162-192. Vanags, T.,Carrol, M. & Perfect, T. J. 2005. Verbal overshadowing: A sound theory in voice recognition? Applied Cognitive Psychology, 19, 1127-1144.

Sabrina Bertollo and Guido Cavallo Universit degli Studi di Padova Deriving double Accusative: the Latin docere and the German lehren Incorporation has been considered a productive mechanism in deriving verbal heads. Many inergative verbs are the result of a head-to-head incorporation process in which a noun is conflated into a verbal head generically meaning do or make. Incorporation is possible with complex predicates as well; in this case the result is a verbal head which is richer in features. In this presentation we would like to analyze an instance of incorporation, which gives rise to a causative complex predicate: the verbs docere and lehren (to teach) can be considered the result of a conflation in which a basic verb meaning to learn is absorbed in a higher head with a causative value (Hale and Keyser, 2002; Harley and Folli 2005). Doceo and lehren assign, in the first phase, three -roles: the Agent to DP0 which then receives the Nominative, the Patient to animate DP1,which is then assigned the Accusative1, and finally a compositional -role (with Instrumental, Source and Path features) to DP2, which receives the Accusative2. The standard structure requires the obligatory use of double Accusative.

DP2 passivization is extremely marginal in German (3), and not attested in Latin: the Accusative2 assigned to DP2 is inherent (Wooldorf 2006) and higher in the structure than Accusative1: DP2 is assigned Case in a higher projection (Cinque 2006). We suppose that the structure of docere and lehren derives from verbs

meaning to learn, whose structure is formed by a bi-argumental VP of the type in (3): (3) [DP1 TP [ VPto learn [P0 [CaseAcc P DP2]]. Here the arguments are assigned Case as in the prototypical pattern of accusative languages. If the verb is inserted in a causative structure, the Nominative is assigned to the external argument of the causative v, whereas the Vto learn is incorporated in the light head of vP which assumes a CAUSE learn value (4): (4) [DP0 TP vPCAUSElearn[DP1 [tlearn DP2]]]. DP1 receives the Accusative assigned by vP. Part of DP2 semantic features are transferred to the lexical verb. The incorporated vP contains therefore a Probe which is capable to trigger part of the features contained in DP2, as shown in (5)(6). DP2 receives Case in a higher Accusative projection, since the CaseAcc1P is already engaged.

Shelley Byrne University of Central Lancashire Study into the effectiveness of pushed/non-pushed spoken output tasks focussing on upper intermediate students in the EFL classroom Following investigation into Swains Comprehensible Output Hypothesis, existing literature appeared deficient in the areas of its effect on spoken rather than written output, its effects on students within a university setting and research combining both quantitative and qualitative data. This talk will describe a study which therefore investigated the effectiveness of pushed and non-pushed speaking tasks in a UK university setting with 21, B2 level students of EFL. Specifically, the study addressed a) if a pushed speaking task produced more language related episodes (LREs) than a non-pushed speaking task b) in what ways did pushed or non-pushed tasks vary in the type of LREs produced c) whether a pushed speaking task resulted in better performance in past narrative

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tenses and d) how student views regarding preference and effectiveness varied according to task type. The procedure comprised a pretest-speaking task treatment-posttest design involving a pushed or non-pushed storytelling task with a native English speaker teacher, a stimulated recall activity to ascertain student thoughts during the storytelling task and a concluding interview to obtain perceptions of each task. Questionnaire data was also obtained from 66 students from the same EFL course to acquire more student views. The talk will discuss the results by exploring both quantitative and qualitative data and will suggest some implications of its findings for classroom pedagogy.

Qi Chen Newcastle University Developing Formative Assessment in Chinese Secondary English Classrooms to Facilitate Language Learning: An Action Research This proposed research seeks to explore classroom formative assessment in secondary English classrooms, which is an under-developed field both in EFL classroom teaching and secondary education assessment in China as well as worldwide. It proposes to set out a collaborative action research involving the researcher and a team of English teachers in a secondary school noted for its communicative teaching approaches in China - Hangzhou Foreign Languages School. A previous case study has been conducted in the school, and findings revealed a predominance of teacher-led classroom organization with large amount of teacher talk time and a communicative teaching approach in conducting classroom activities with embedded formative assessment purposes. Further, inefficiencies were observed during classroom assessment activities (e.g., peer/self-assessment, student portfolio), especially little attention was paid to the quality of teacher language use. Therefore, it necessitates the needs to examine and develop ways to use formative assessment activities and to modify teacher language use, so as to maximize learning opportunities and facilitate language learning. The aims of this proposed research are to generate a working framework for conducting effective formative classroom assessment and developing classroom interactional competence for both teachers and learners, and most importantly to bring about changes in teachers classroom language use by providing ways for teachers to reflect upon their classroom language use during talk-in-interaction when conducting assessment activities, and potential strategies teachers can adopt

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to conduct effective classroom formative assessment. Three phases will be conducted: 1. Identification of problems; 2. Action planning; 3. Implementation and evaluation. A wide rage of data collection and analytic tools will be employed at each phase to focus on contextual, detailed linguistic and paralinguistic features, such as classroom observation with field notes, participant questionnaire and interview, simulated recalls and conversation analysis.

Mariam Dar University of York Effects of Development on Cross-Language Speech Perception The present study tested infants from English-speaking homes to examine effects of development on cross-language speech perception. Werker (1981) showed that 6-8-month-old infants are able to discriminate non-native speech sounds that adults cannot discriminate, but by 10-12 months the infants were no longer able to make the discrimination. According to Kuhl (2008), this decline in discrimination is due to infants increase in native-language exposure, which leads to neural commitment to the native language at this age. Many studies have shown a decline in discriminatory abilities of infants for non-native contrasts between 6 12 months of age but no study to date has tested a contrast in affricates in a cross-language perception test. Also, very little attempt has been made to show whether the experimental order of presentation of stimuli affects infants performance. An aspirated unaspirated contrast of Urdu /t / - /th/ was selected based on a pilot study with 20 English-speaking adults who were tested on a number of Urdu contrasts not found in English to identify the most difficult. Twenty-four 7- and 11-month olds were tested in a habituation procedure. Half of the infants were habituated to the voiceless aspirated affricate and tested on the contrasting voiceless unaspirated affricate while the remaining infants experienced the reverse pattern. Discrimination was assessed by comparing mean looking time during the last two habituation trials to mean looking time during the first two trials of the test phase. In agreement with the literature, the results indicated that 6-8-month-olds could discriminate the affricate pair but 11-month-olds could not. Infants presented with the nonprototypical consonant (the aspirated affricate, which does not occur in English) in the habituation phase showed better discrimination in the test phase than the infants presented with the prototypical consonant in the habituation phase. Werker, J. F., et al. (1981). Developmental aspects of cross-language speech

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perception. Child Development, 52(1), 349-355. Kuhl, P., et al. (2008). Phonetic learning as a pathway to language: new data and native language magnet theory expanded (NLM-e). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B-Biological Sciences, 363(1493), 979-1000.

Emma Gilbert University of Leicester Al e longage of e norumbres': Rules for Scribal Copying and Dialect Variance in 14th-Century Northumbria Very little work has been done on differentiating the various dialects loosely classifiable as 'fully northern English', as opposed to - and, indeed, in relation to Scots. In their 1972 study, A Descriptive Guide to the Manuscripts of the Prick of Conscience, Angus McIntosh and Robert Lewis identified thirteen 'fully northern' texts of this work, these being characterised broadly by their retention of an unrounded vowel, normally <a>, in words which had been spelled with <a> in Old English and Old Norse. They did not, however, make any attempt to differentiate the dialects of these texts, stating that they had not the means to go about this within the scope of their study. Nevertheless, dialectologists possess an invaluable and largely untapped resource in the manuscript tradition of the Pricke of Conscience, a devotional poem once so popular that it exists in 116 manuscripts, with nearly three quarters of the counties in England boasting at least one copy. This paper will analyse the potential of the Pricke of Conscience as a system of translations, capable of providing the scholar with word-geographical information which could be obtained from no other source. The popular nature of the text, combined with its length, mean that the scholar can find a very large number of common words from each dialect in every manuscript, along with a general idea of the lexical, morphological, and extrapolated phonological variation between dialects. Applied to the previously unexplored realm of Northern Middle English, the Pricke of Conscience manuscripts indicate that these dialects are far from homogenous, and linguistic tics enable us even to localise some of them specifically.

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Patrycja Golebiewska University of Central Lancashire Is the Observe Hypothesise Experiment (OHE) cycle more effective than Presentation Practice Production (PPP) when teaching chunks? The existence and significance of prefabs in native speakers language production is well known (e.g. Pawley and Syder, 1983, Nattinger and DeCarrico, 1992, Wray, 2002). The importance of teaching chunks to language students was perhaps most successfully introduced by Lewis and the Lexical Approach (1993) and is now widely agreed on. In spite of this, the research into pedagogy is limited and Lewis does not provide us with a clear methodology. Nonetheless, Lewis strongly advocates replacing PPP with OHE considering it most adequate for teaching formulae. However, the lack of empirical evidence supporting Lewis claims to date makes his assertions questionable. The study, which took form of classroom research, addresses this issue and compares the effectiveness of PPP and OHE when teaching fifteen chunks necessary for stalling and circumlocution. The investigation was conducted at a British university and involved twenty participants at B2 level enrolled on an EAP foundation programme. The learners were in their early twenties and of mixed nationalities. An experimental pre-test post-test delayed test design was chosen and two groups of ten students received 90 minute of instruction with the use of either PPP or OHE. A questionnaire and focus groups were also conducted to triangulate the results. While the test for statistical significance demonstrated no difference between the frameworks, it was discovered that overall the PPP group performed better on the delayed tests which coincided with more positive opinions about the treatment. Both PPP and OHE students indicated that it is practice which makes instruction more effective. It appears that Lewis disregard for practice is not reflected in the students views suggesting that perhaps it deserves more attention in ELT (DeKeyser, 2007). Secondly, the participants identified three word chunks as easiest to memorise, and these claims were confirmed by test results. Hence, it is argued that Lewis recommendation on teaching chunks as long as seven words should be revisited and research into the optimal length chunks for acquisition could be valuable. Lastly, the participants considered learning chunks beneficial for several reasons, thus while essential for language proficiency, chunks appear to be welcomed by EAP students and research into best means of incorporating them in EFL classrooms is seen as invaluable.

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Twana Hamid Newcastle University Final Devoicing in Kurdish: An OT Analysis As Selkirk (1986) states, final devoicing is a pattern of phonological distribution in which both voiced and voiceless obstruents occur in a language, but at the end of a particular prosodic domain only voiceless obstruents occur. The Phonological process of final devoicing has been a well-studied topic dating back to Trubetzkoy in 1933 and it has been cited by most phonologists as examples of neutralisation (Brockhaus 1991 inter alia). Many languages disfavour coda voiced phonemes; however, devoicing is subject to parametric variation (Myers 2010). Most languages resolve voiced coda in a similar fashion; by devoicing rather than nasalization, deletion, or epenthesis. This paper argues that Kurdish is one of the languages that undergoes final devoicing; it also claims that Kurdish resolves coda voicing by devoicing the voiced coda rather than other means mentioned above. For example, underlying /bd/ stone can become [bart] but not *[b], *[bm], *[bd]. Further, my analysis makes two theoretical claims: First, The prosodic domain within which coda devoicing occurs in Kurdish includes both syllable and Prosodic word. Second, coda devoicing in Kurdish, like many other languages (Steriade 2001/2008), can pose a hitherto unsolved problem to Optimality Theory. With the total absence of literature on this topic, I will recourse to Speech Perception Software (Praat) to support the claim that final devoicing is really occurring in Kurdish.

Katie Harris University of Cambridge The prosodic marking of givenness in English and Italian: a comparative study English renders repeated or contextually inferable (given) information less salient through the absence of a pitch accent in environments where it would otherwise be present. Conversely, in Romance languages such as Italian the correlation between prosody and information structure is less systematic. The investigation presented here considers the prosodic marking of givenness in Neapolitan Italian (NI), Standard Southern British English (SBE) and that of a native NI speaker of

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English as a second language (NI-EL2). New and given tokens were elicited through a semi-spontaneous card game. While native SBE speakers signalled given information through deaccentuation and decreased duration, no prosodic markers of givenness were identified in NI: accent distribution, pitch contour and duration were not predictive of information structure. The NI-EL2 speaker showcased accent distribution and intonation curves typical of NI in English L2 tokens, indicating that prosodic transfer persists even at advanced levels.

David Iorio Newcastle University An incorporation analysis of object marking in Bembe Object marking (OM) in Bantu, i.e. cross-referencing object arguments through verb morphology, has long resisted a unified analysis, with opinions diverging on whether it should be analysed as grammatical agreement (Baker 2008; Buell 2008; Henderson 2006; Riedel 2009) or pronominal incorporation (Adams 2010; Bax & Diercks 2012; Bresnan & Mchombo 1987; Julien 2002; van der Spuy 1993; Zerbian 2006). This paper proposes a pronominal analysis of OM in Bembe (D54), thereby challenging recent claims by Riedel (2009) that the agreementpronoun dichotomy is insufficient to account for the variation in Bantu, and should thus be abandoned in favour of an agreement analysis. Evidence that OM in Bembe is argumental comes in form of (a) obligatory phonological phraseboundaries with OM, (b) local co-occurrence restrictions between OM and indefinite, focused, relativised, passivised and negative-polarity elements, (c) the order of OMed objects with respect to other elements, and (d) interpretational differences.

The empirical facts are explained under an analysis that merges OMs as argumental, deficient pronoun clitics (Ps; Cardinaletti & Starke 1999) in verbcomplement position, which subsequently incorporate into v (Roberts 2010) and move with the verb to AspP (Julien 2002). An Agree relation between the unvalued -features on v and P is established, in the course of which of P is forced to incorporate into v, ultimately made possible by its defective nature.

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Selected References: Bresnan, J. & S. Mchombo (1987). Topic, Pronoun and Agreement in Chichewa. Language 63: 741782. Cardinaletti, A. & M. Starke (1999). The Typology of Structural Deficiency: A Case Study of the Three Classes of Pronouns. In H. van Riemsdijk (ed.). Clitics in the Languages of Europe. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 145233. Roberts, I. (2010) Agreement and Head Movement: Clitics, Incorporation, and Defective Goals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Tamader Hwaidi Newcastle University Do vowel-initial syllables exist in Arabic? In this study I claim, contrary to much of the literature on Arabic, that vowelinitial syllables do exist in Arabic, though these are restricted to very limited environments. The reason that linguists often claim that vowel-initial syllables are absent from Arabic, I argue, is because of the confusion of recognising the different types of hamza glottal stop- in Arabic. Recognition of these types of hamza will lead to a better understanding of the different behaviour of the initial glottal stop (or the glottal-stop-like gesture) that is often heard in underlyingly vowel-initial words. Thus, while hamzatu l-wali (HW) is a short vowel that might surface in different forms, depending on the context, hamzatu l-gai (HQ) is a glottal stop that must occupy the onset position of an epenthesised vowel , when added to verbs. This epenthesised vowel is either one of the short vowels: a, i, or u, or the long vowel . In standard Arabic, HQ does not usually lose its glottal stop nor is the glottal stop pronunciation weakened even when it is pronounced in non-initial position. HW, on the contrary, undergoes some post-lexical processes depending on its position

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in speech or the type of speech. The current study investigates these phonological processes in Standard Arabic with a view to extending this comparison later to the Arabic dialects. The difference in the behaviour of each type is illustrated in the examples below:
Q dn WHa1 elaT

HW HQ Word adding wa: and Gloss Word adding wa Gloss thank! I thank /u kur!/ wa kur a kur wa a kur hit! I hit /irib!/ wa rib! arib wa arib The table shows that when HW-initial words are preceded by a vowel, HW is lost while HQ is not lost in a similar environment. Moreover, these two types of hamza also have to be differentiated from the other two types of hamza; namely hamzated alif and non-hamzated alif (glottalised and non-glottalised). One of the differences between the two groups is that while the first two types are prefixes that are attached to certain types of verbs and nouns, the second two types constitute part of the stem in which they exist. Thus, for example iqra read! is formed by adding /i / to qara read and aqra I read is formed by adding /a/ to qara, while /i/ in ism name and // in ar earth are parts of the stems. Additionally, to differentiate between the second two types, non-hamzated alif exists only in the initial position of only ten nouns in SA while hamzated alif occurs in a much wider context: word-initially, medially or finally. Such examples for both types are listed in the table below: Table (2) Hamzated alif and Non-hamzated alif Non-hamzated alif Word word position Gloss initially hope amal medially got bored saim initially man port imre marfa finally Thus, the aim of this paper is to disambiguate the various sorts of glottal stop, leading ultimately to more focused analysis of the data. Word ibn or ibin ism Gloss son name Hamzated alif word position initially initially

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Walid Kahoul Newcastle University Perception and Processing of English Morphology in SLA It is widely observed that L2ers of English alternate between the inflected and stem forms of verbs in their production of third-person agreement and past tense. Some researchers hold that this non-native-like performance is due to absence of related syntactic representations (e.g., Vainikka and Young-Scholten, 1994; 1996) whereas others reject this view and attribute the alternation instead to processing failure between production of surface forms and the underlying representations (e.g., Prvost and White, 2000). The evidence for these proposals has primarily involved production data and the issue therefore remains far from being settled. The study this paper will report on aimed to find out the source of variability in the production of English verbal agreement and past tense morphology through testing proposals against perception and processing data collected via a computerized picture-choice task supplemented with reaction time and eyetracking data. The task consisted of 88 trials, each of which presented three pictures and an auditory sentence to the learner. Participants were asked to choose one picture, the choice of which depended on their perception of verbal morphology. Thirty-four L1 speakers of Chinese and thirty-one L1 speakers of Arabic, who were matched in L2 proficiency at low, mid and high levels, in addition to a control group of ten native speakers of English participated in the study. The accuracy results showed that while Chinese participants perceived the morphology variably at all levels, Arab participants did so only at low and mid levels, overcoming variability at the highest proficiency level. The reaction times revealed no differences between Chinese and Arabic speakers at the same proficiency levels. The eye-movement patterns of non-native groups revealed similarities in processing verbal agreement, but robust differences in processing past tense morphology. These results will be discussed in the light of different proposals on the source of variability.

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Viktorija Kostadinova Leiden University Centre for Linguistics Researching Language Attitudes in a Digital Age Attitudinal research in linguistics comprises very different perspectives and approaches, depending on the kinds of attitudes that are being investigated. The term language attitudes is used as a general designation in this context for a variety of different topics, from attitudes towards language variation, dialect and speech style, to attitudes towards language learning, or language preference (McKenzie, 2010: 26). These variations result in a plethora of approaches in the study of language attitudes based on some kind of interdisciplinarity.

The focus of this paper is to explore insights into the possible ways of investigating attitudes towards language mistakes and problematic usages, such as are mainly featured in prescriptive usage guides. The paper will give an overview of the existing research methods, ranging from sociolinguistic (McGroarty, 1996) to psychometric approaches (Bekker, 2004) and discuss in particular their possible application in the research of attitudes towards language usage. Finally, internet-based tools and methods will be discussed as well as their potential incorporation into existing methods. In this respect, special attention will be given to the possibility of using Social Network Sites (SNSs) data for research purposes. The overall goal of the paper is to arrive at a new model for researching language attitudes that combines existing approaches with new digital data, tools and techniques. Bekker, Ian. An attitude scale for measuring language attitudes at South African tertiary institutions. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies. 22.1-2 (2004): 4362. McGroarty, Mary. Language attitudes, motivation, and standards. In McKay, Sandra Lee, and Hornberger, Nancy H. (Eds.) Sociolinguistics and Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. McKenzie, Robert M. The Social Psychology of English as a Global Language. New York: Springer, 2010.

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Man Ki Theodora Lee University of York Problems of Cantonese object neg-wh quantifiers: evidence from the missing interpretation in English-Cantonese interlanguage This study tests Slabakovas Bottleneck Hypothesis\ (2008), that functional morphology at the syntax-semantics interface is particularly difficult for second language (L2) learners. I look at L2 acquisition of Cantonese negative whquantifier constructions (neg-whQ), which have the form [mou no + wh-word]. There is no one-to-one morphological mapping between neg-whQs and English lexical items that bear the same features. Neg-whQ as an object is variously interpreted as non-existential nothing or implied existential only a few depending on different contexts (e.g. tones or sentence final particle). It occurs obligatorily in preverbal position, resulting in an SOV structure rather than the canonical SVO structure. Following Sorace & Filiaci (2006) and Yuan (2007; 2008), I assume that the lack of one-to-one mapping between a target L2 item and an L1 equivalent may lead to deficits in the ultimate L2 knowledge. Moreover, acquisition of the facts of Cantonese neg-whQs by English speakers is a poverty of the stimulus problem, since the relevant facts are not evident from the input, nor are they covered in Cantonese teaching materials. Learner knowledge was investigated by means of grammaticality and contextbased judgment tasks. The participants included Cantonese natives and Englishspeaking (adult) learners of Cantonese at beginner and advanced levels. The focus is to test learner interpretability of Cantonese neg-whQ constructions and revisit the role of parameter resetting in L2 acquisition. Preliminary results suggest that learners are unaware of the implied existential reading of neg-whQs. In addition, there is evidence that the differences between Cantonese and English with respect to the expression of negative quantifiers affect learners knowledge of neg-whQs. Since neg-whQs integrate both syntax and semantics, they are an interface phenomenon. I interpret the findings as support for the BN hypothesis. Moreover, I explain the results in terms of Lardieres (2005, 2008, 2009) Feature Reassembly Hypothesis, that L2 acquisition is affected by how successful is the reconfiguration of the sets of lexical features transferred from L1 into associated feature sets for neg-whQs in the L2 grammar.

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Robert Lennon University of Glasgow A real-time sociophonetic study of postvocalic /r/ in the speech of Glaswegian schoolchildren In Scotland, speakers are said to pronounce the /r/ at the end of words such as car and hair: in other words, Scottish speech is rhotic. However, recent sociophonetic research indicates that there is a trend towards derhoticisation in working class Glaswegian speech (e.g. Stuart-Smith 2007), and an increase in rhoticity is hypothesised in the more standard variety spoken by many in the middle class areas of Scotlands Central Belt (e.g. Lawson et al. 2011). This paper presents the findings of a real time sociophonetic trend study, in which the change across time in the rhoticity of middle class Glaswegian schoolchildren (1314 years old) was investigated using two corpora of recordings made in 1997 and 2012 from one school. Tokens from a read word list (e.g. appear, near) from each corpus were subjected to acoustic and auditory analysis, and through direct comparisons of acoustic measures such as psychoacoustic Bark measurements alongside auditory classifications, the results show that rhoticity has increased in the fifteen years between the two corpora. While the females speech only shows a marginal increase in rhoticity, the males has displayed a dramatic increase in schwar and bunched-tongue articulations of postvocalic /r/ (as found in middle class Edinburgh speech (Lawson et al. 2011)), to catch up with the females. These results suggest that there is a socially-stratified divergence in rhoticity in Scotlands largest city. This may be a result of the socio-economic characteristics of Glasgow, where middle class and working class speakers are segregated in neighbouring areas, or because of the bipolar continuum (McArthur 1979) of the two dialects of Scottish Standard English and Scots, found in many Scottish conurbations. A further finding of this study is a method of acoustically classifying postvocalic /r/ variants, using a psychoacoustic Bark measurement. Lawson, E., Scobbie, J. M. and Stuart-Smith, J. (2011) The social stratification of tongue shape for postvocalic /r/ in Scottish English in Journal of Sociolinguistics 15:2, 256-268 McArthur, T. (1979) The Status of English in and furth of Scotland in A. J. Aitken and Tom McArthur Languages of Scotland Edinburgh: Chambers, 50-67 Stuart-Smith, J. (2007) A sociophonetic investigation of postvocalic /r/ in Glaswegian adolescents in 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences 1449-1452

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Mingyue Li University of Edinburgh "An Investigation of Teachers? and Students? Attitudes towards the Use of L1, L2 and L1+L2 Subtitles in the L2 Classroom" Subtitles in videos are widely used in the L2 classroom and in daily life in China. There are different types of subtitles: subtitles in the audiences first language (L1), subtitles in their second language (L2), and subtitles in both their first language and their second language (L1+L2). L1, L2 and L1+L2 subtitles are, to some extent, a type of written code-switching as well as a written form of parallel medium (Gafaranga and Torras, 2001). The purpose of this dissertation is to fill the literature gap regarding student and teacher attitudes towards bilingual (L1+L2) subtitles, by comparing their attitudes towards L1-only or L2-only subtitles in listening comprehension and vocabulary learning in the L2 classroom. This project involves two case studies of advanced level and intermediate level students and their teachers, seeking their perspectives on the use of subtitles in the L2 classroom. Three students and their teachers from each level were interviewed in depth, and a questionnaire was conducted to the whole class. Data was analysed by typology/category development in accordance with the literature review structure: subtitles in vocabulary learning, subtitles in listening learning, and subtitles in affective filter aspects. The results showed that both teachers and students prefer videos with L1+L2 subtitles for L2 learning in most situations. However, according to their perceptions, the efficiency of L1+L2 subtitles depended on several factors such as students current L2 level, the difficulty of the videos and the stages of teaching. L1+L2 subtitles were favoured by students and teachers from the vocabulary learning perspective. At the end of the study, some recommendations are given for teachers in their L2 teaching. Key words: subtitles; listening comprehension; vocabulary learning; video

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Ying Li Newcastle University Audiovisual Training in Improving Adult L1-Mandarin Speakers Capability in Perceiving English Contrast /s/-// It was widely documented that L1 (first language) speakers language experience may impede their perception of L2 (second language) speech sounds due to the variance of phoneme inventory between their L1 and L2 (e g. Flege, 1995; Guion et al., 2000). However, perceptual training was proved to be able to facilitate L2 learners perceiving of L2 speech sounds (e g. Bradlow, 1997). Moreover, it is assumed that articulatory gestures play critical role in listeners per ception of speech sounds. (e g. Bests (1995) Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM); Libermans et al., (1967) Motor theory). Therefore, audiovisual training, which provides the subjects with visual codes of target L2 speech sounds, may improve their ability of perceiving these sounds. This study aimed to examine to what extent, if only, L1-Mandarin speakers capability in perceiving L2-English contrast /s/-// can be improved by audiovisual training. Six adult L1-Mandarin speakers of L2 English were recruited in the study. Four 30-minutes training sessions were carried out, which included native English speakers demonstration of how to pronounce /s/-//; minimal pair discrimination of naturally and audiovisually produced words with /s/-// in different vowel environment with syllable structure of VC, VCV, CV. In the task, immediate feedback of the correctness of the subjects response was given. AXB task were designed for pre-/post-test (auditory modality only). Nonsense words were created: the target contrast was embedded in initial/medial/final position of different vowel context (/i, , u/). Compared with that in pre-test, the subjects perceptual performance in post-test was greatly improved, which was consistent with the findings in former relevant studies. The results further illustrated: (1) subjects capability in perceiving non-native speech sounds can be improved through training; (2) articulatory codes contributes to enhance subjects capability in perceiving L2 speech sounds.

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Talat Masood Newcastle University Genitive case licensing in Pashto DPs This paper studies the licensing of genitive Case in Pashto Determiner Phrases (DPs). There are two views regarding genitive Case assignment, namely, that Case is assigned from outside the DP and that it is assigned from inside the DP. I have adopted the later one as it is more akin to the Minimalist notions of Case assignment. In the recent Minimalist literature the assignment of structural Case has been attributed to different agencies, such as, functional categories (T and ) and their relevant features, tense, mood and modality, aspect, location and person. My contention is that genitive Case in Pashto DPs is assigned as a result of - feature agreement between the Pashto DPs functional layer D, phonetically realized as da, and the relevant noun. Pashto has two types of DPs that exhibit genitive Case. The first type can be characterized as those that show possession, while the second type is headed by nouns which denote processes and assign roles to arguments. The DP in Pashto has some unique properties, such as, it has no articles, no quantifying determiners, cardinals and ordinals act as adjectives, determiners are not mutually exclusive rather they can be staked with one another like adjectives, many ambiguities about the nature of different words whether they have been used as determiners or adjectives, determiners in most cases are not required for grammaticality, adjectives are not gradable, the possessive pronoun in Pashto occurs in the region between N/NP and D, and the determiners and adjectives in a Pashto DP follow a fixed order of a noun preceded by an adjective, an adjective preceded by a quantifier, a quantifier preceded by a demonstrative, and a demonstrative preceded by a possessive pronoun. A theory is proposed which can account for these properties, and, at the same time, explain the assignment of genitive Case in both the possessor type DPs and DPs that denote processes with -roles. Then derivations are made for the possessor type of DPs and licensing of genitive Case in these DPs is analysed according to my hypothesis. The same process is repeated for Pashto DPs that denote processes and -roles. The analyses of both the types give the desired results, namely, phi-features agreement between D and the relevant noun results in assigning genitive Case to the concerned noun. In order to deal with all types of Pashto DP constructions I have made some changes to the DP structures suggested by Adger (2004). These changes are: introduction of a non-empty functional layer D, proposing that in Pashto the noun remains in situ and does not move upwards to the specifier DP,

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use of selectional features in derivations, and proposing that Saxon genitive does not exist in Pashto. The paper also solves some other issues that surfaced, while analysing genitive Case in Pashto, and needed instant solution, such as the absence of the genitive marker da from 1st and 2nd Person Pronouns in the Northern varieties and subsequent empirical evidence from the Southern varieties to prove that it is still there; that only covert agreement exists in Pashto DPs for the licensing of genitive Case; and that the morphological form of a Pashto genitive remains the same irrespective of its place in a sentence.

Daniel McAuley Queen's University Lexical innovation in a multicultural youth peer group: Romani influence in banlieue French This paper discusses innovative lexical processes in use by adolescent speakers of diverse ethnic and cultural origins in the inner suburbs of Paris and Marseille, and forms part of a larger project which encompasses issues of language contact and exchange and linguistic and cultural identity among adolescent speakers in the peripheries of major urban settlements in metropolitan France. This research is informed by and complements work by teams in London (led by GardnerChloros & Cheshire) and Paris (led by Gadet) on the effects of long-term urban language contact. The paper focuses on innovative lexical items in French that demonstrate the influence of Romani. This contact-based influence is evident across regional boundaries, in similar social milieus, in a number of items borrowed from various Romani dialects. The suffix av is of particular interest, both sociolinguistically and morphologically, and raises a number of broader issues. It is an element of Romani origin which occurs in items borrowed in their entirety from Romani, as well as in a small number of pseudo-Romani items formed by suffixation of an pre-existing item with av. Items suffixed with av provide a useful case study for the broader issues targeted by my research since they entail crossing and cultural exchange, they exemplify the cryptic, playful and identifying functions of wordformation in youth speech, and they bring about problems of integration in the host language, French. I will discuss the morphosyntactic effects on the surrounding discourse of the inclusion of these lexical items which comprise a foreign verbal inflectional suffix. The issue of regional variation in the use of items showing Romani influence will be raised, with reference to borrowed and

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pseudo-Romani items as they occur in comparable sub-corpora from the Paris and Marseille metropolitan areas. Many of these Romani-influenced items have been noted and defined in dictionaries and glossaries of slang and youth language in the cits (Goudailler 1997, Lexik des Cits), but this paper examines the behaviour of such items in the context of spoken discourse, based on a number of examples attested in an oral corpus. Furthermore, the paper will consider the cultural significance both of integral or adapted borrowings from Romani and of pre-existing items suffixed with av in the social context of a marginalised multicultural youth group.

Fernanda McDougall Manchester University Variation in the Awareness of GOAT and FACE in Barrow-in-Furness This study investigates language variation and change in the vowel system of Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria. The variables under consideration in this paper are the GOAT and FACE vowels, which display stable variation in this dialect. Sociolinguistic interviews were conducted with twenty-two speakers and acoustic analyses carried out in order to understand the extent to which variation and change is taking place, with particular consideration of style-shifting. While Watt (2002) found GOAT and FACE to have similar social evaluations in Tyneside, it is not entirely clear whether this finding can be applied to all Northern varieties. It is possible that a different sociolinguistic set-up may result in different social evaluations. Results for the variable of style provide evidence for this idea as there are opposing patterns of style-shifting between social classes in Barrow-in-Furness. The social stratification of GOAT is as expected, with diphthongal variants favoured by middle class speakers and in more formal speech styles, and monophthongal variants favoured by working class speakers and in more casual speech. However, the FACE vowel appears to be evaluated differently by speakers from different social groups. An initial analysis shows similar social stratification for FACE as for GOAT, with diphthongs favoured by middle class speakers and in formal speech. Yet, the direction of style shifting is not the same for working class speakers as it is for middle class speakers. Middle class speakers shift in the direction one would expect, using diphthongal variants in more

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formal speech and monophthongal variants in more casual speech. By contrast, the pattern of style shifting for working class speakers is inverted. They favour diphthongal variants in casual speech and monophthongal variants in the word list. While the differences between the two appear above the level of awareness for middle class speakers, they appear below the level of awareness for working class speakers. These are intriguing findings with possible theoretical implications for a group-differential application of the concept of sociolinguistic awareness in English dialects. References Watt, D. 2002. I dont Speak With A Geordie Accent, I speak, like, the Northern Accent: Contact Induced Levelling in the Tyneside Vowel System. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 6/1, 44-63.

Diane Neises University of York Ode to a dying Language? The Shift of Luxembourgish from a Functional to a Tradition-Bearing Language in the American Midwest The presentation deals with the status and the situation of American Luxembourgish in the nineteenth-century immigrant communities in the American Midwest. Between 1840 and 1900, some 70,000 to 72,000 Luxembourgers left the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg for the United States, and mostly settled together in communities in Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota. In the multicultural setting of the Midwest, Luxembourgish at first managed to assert itself as a powerful symbol of national identity among the early immigrants from Luxembourg. Due to the acculturation of the settlers and their descendants over generations, however, Luxembourgish has lost ground as a native tongue in the American Midwest. Today, a mere one hundred native speakers of the variety are left, most of which are aged well above 70 years. My research is based on 16 Luxembourgish-speakers of Luxembourg ancestry who are resident in the Midwestern communities, and who either speak the language as L1, or have learned it as a late second language. By the means of a questionnaire, I studied the link between the participants linguistic background, their usage of Luxembourgish, and their perception of the language in a by now widely English-speaking environment in order to conclude on the future of Luxembourgish in the Midwestern Luxembourgish communities.

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My questionnaire exposed a stark contrast between the participants language attitude and their actual linguistic behaviour. While there was overall consent on the cultural importance of the American Luxembourgish variety, not a single of the native speakers has handed the variety down to their children. Despite the facts that the return to the communities Luxembourgish roots also linguistically has become a marker of prestige in the communities, and that people actively take up Luxembourgish as L2, the social and communicative roles of the language have been irrevocably reduced over the last decades. With the last generation of native speakers slowly disappearing from the demographic table, American Luxembourgish currently experiences an inevitable shift from a functional to a purely tradition-bearing language in the Midwestern immigrant communities.

Jill Paterson University of Cambridge A Phonetic / Phonological Investigation of Grenadian English Creole (GEC) This paper presents some phonetic and phonological documentation of Grenadian English Creole (GEC) based on a series of interviews carried out with GEC speakers on the island of Grenada. The paper focuses on acoustic analyses of phonemes, phonemic distribution and major phonological processes in GEC, much of which provide distinct demarcations in comparison with other Caribbean English Creoles. Many of the languages of the Caribbean receive very little attention from linguists. Among the sparsely described languages of the Anglophone Caribbean, is Grenadian English Creole (GEC) which functions as the deepest basilectal form in the Grenadian Creole continuum (cf. DeCamp 1971). GEC phonemic system shows a reduction of English phonemes as well as consistent free variation in monophthongal and diphthongal distribution; quite distinct from many creoles and non-creoles. Processes like vowel merging provide interesting cases of homophony and GEC displays a unique case of rhoticity which classifies the language as neither rhotic, neither non-rhotic nor semi rhotic but rather as; rhotic in isolated cases. This paper examines phonological behaviour like palatalization of velars, segmental deletion including: aphaeresis, syncope and apocope, dissimilation of alveolars to velars and occurrences of metathesis in the language.

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The phonological system of GEC, the principal vernacular in Grenada, features a range of interesting yet undocumented phenomena. In fact, linguistic investigation into the phonological system of GEC has only scratched the surface of the linguistic structure of this creole language (Holbrook, Grenada and Carriacou 7). However, this phonetic and phonological research venture contributes substantially to an undervalued yet actively used language as the paper helps to establish a tripartite function through its contribution to the field of phonetics/phonology, creole linguistics and language planning and education.

Deivis Pothin King's College London Formative assessment of Children with English as an Additional Language (EAL): Challenges and Opportunities Formative assessment (aka Assessment for Learning, AfL) has been regarded by researchers and educators as an effective way of promoting learning in the classroom. Its popularity has increased dramatically in the UK, especially after the publication of Inside the Black Box, by Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam in 1998. However, research on formative assessment within a wider range of contexts is still in its infancy and there is the need to further investigate how classroombased assessment can enhance the learning of pupils with EAL. The growing number of bilingual and multilingual children in mainstream education means that both teachers and school leaders increasingly need to find ways to assess the learning needs of this group of children and promote learning, despite feeling, at many times, unprepared. EAL pupils, on the other hand, also find it challenging to engage in their learning as they have the added task of learning the content being taught alongside its language of instruction. This presentation will look at what assessment for learning is and the implications for teaching and learning. It will explore why it is not always so straightforward for EAL learners (and their teachers) to engage in classroom-based assessment; what UK-based research on formative language assessment has found so far and the opportunities for future research.

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Rosa Escanes Sierra University of Sheffield Using Reference Corpora for Sociolinguistic Research: the Case of Class This paper discusses the potential use of large reference corpora as a tool to investigate the stereotypical construction (Mautner, 2007) of social class. To achieve this, I carried out an exploratory analysis of the terms working class, middle class and upper class in the British National Corpus (BNC), using the quantitative and qualitative tools available in this corpus. By looking at the occurrences per million words of the three keywords, analysing their collocation profile and concordance lines, the study aimed at answering the questions: what patterns can we observe in the use of these three terms? What are the most statistically relevant words to appear around them? In which contexts do they appear most commonly? What patterns regarding semantic prosody (Stubbs, 1996) can we find? A diachronic analysis (by comparing the periods 1960-1974, 1975-1984 and 19851993) of the occurrences per million words point to a progressive decrease in the use of class references. However, overall, working class is the most commonly used term compared to middle class and upper class. The latter is quite dramatically absent in the BNC (with only 4.8 occurrences per million words). These patterns of occurrences seem to point to a more 'problematised' (Mautner, 2007) vision of working class alongside the apparent trivialisation of upper class as anachronistic and only of marginal relevance. Moreover, the representative nature of reference corpora and its potential to uncover the most common uses of certain socially relevant keywords (Baker, 2006) is highlighted in this study, which contributes to the development of this line of research within sociolinguistics. References: Baker, P. (2006). Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis. London: Continuum. Mautner, G. (2007). Mining Large Corpora for Social Information: the Case of Elderly. Language in Society, 36: 51-72 Stubbs, M. (1996). Text and Corpus Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Aiqing Wang University of York Preverbal Wh-Elements in Late Archaic Chinese Late Archaic Chinese (5th-3rdc BC; LAC) is classified as an SVO language (Aldridge 2012, Djamouri et al 2012, Meisterernst 2010), but it requires partial fronting of postverbal wh-elements. This paper extends the theory of partial whmovement in LAC as clause-internal focus fronting to the edge of vP (Aldridge 2010). I propose that wh-elements in LAC have two distinct positions, internal topic and focus positions, in the lower INFL domain, assuming that a preposed object occupies the specifier of a functional projection below TP and above vP (Paul 2002, 2005). Evidence for two structural positions comes from the relative ordering of preposed constituents and negative/modal elements. I show that whphrases may be in either topic or focus position, as shown in the linear format of clausal positions in (1): (1) Subject > Internal Topic > Neg/Modal > Focus > vP

Bare wh-words can appear in either preverbal position in (1) (see (2) and (3)). Internally complex NPs, however, must be in the higher position (4): (2) h b [wi th] h? what not do Excl (4thc BC; Zhuangzi, Qiushui)

What do (I) not do? (3) wng jing h [wi th]? emperor will what do What will the emperor do? (4) yu [h y] zh nng [d th y]? (4th -3rdc BC; Chuci, Qijian) (5th -3rdc BC; Guoyu, Chu)

then what fish ZHI can catch Then what fish can (one) catch? If the wh-phrase is a PP, it is in the lower position (5), even if internally complex.

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(5)

q jing [h c] [[y th c] du]? (5thc BC; Chunqiuzuozhuan, Yin 3) 3. Subj will what utterance with reply What utterances will he reply with?

In the paper I explore the syntactic consequences of these observations.

Bianca Widlitzki Justus Liebig University Giessen Singular you was/were variation in spoken English in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries This paper investigates the use of singular you was and you were in spoken English in the 18th and 19th centuries. While sentences like you was in town were perfectly acceptable and widely used in the early 18th century, you was became a socially stigmatized variant around mid-century and usage patterns changed. In contrast to previous work on the topic, which focused on written language and the role of normative grammarians and language professionals in this development (e.g. Laitinen 2009), the present study extends the investigation to the spoken register, with a particular focus on the social diffusion of this diachronic change. It takes a qualitative and quantitative corpus-linguistic approach and aims to complement existing research by providing a more comprehensive historical sociolinguistic perspective. The analysis is based on data from the 14-million-word Old Bailey Corpus (http://www.uni-giessen.de/oldbaileycorpus), which spans the years 1720-1913. The corpus is based on the Proceedings of the Old Bailey (http://www.oldbaileyonline.org), Londons central criminal court, and provides access to a reasonably close representation of spoken language. Its detailed utterance-level mark-up for sociolinguistic (e.g. gender and social class), pragmatic (role in the courtroom) and textual variables (e.g. publisher of individual Proceedings) permits investigation of a number of diverse factors that might have influenced variant choice. The corpus data will be analyzed for changes in frequencies of variants over time as well as for sociolinguistic variation and change in the use of was/were (i.e. were there social class and/or gender differences and how did they change over the

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two centuries?). Where appropriate, the potential influence of the linguistic cotext will also be investigated (e.g. do particular grammatical constructions promote the use of a specific variant?). References: Laitinien, Mikko. 2009. Singular You was/were variation and English normative grammars in the eighteenth century. In Nurmi, Arja, Minna Nevala and Minna Palander-Collin (eds.) The Language of Daily Life in England (1400-1800), 199-217. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

James Williams University of Nottingham The Language of Neurons: Using Linguistics to Aid Understanding of the Neural Code. One of the major problems facing Neuroscience and the Cognitive Sciences is that of neural encoding - the way in which sensory information about the environment and behaviour of organisms is encoded by the electrical and chemical mechanisms of the brain. All incoming sensory information, be it sight, touch, auditory etc, is encoded by neurons as a sequence of electrical impulses: Action Potentials or Spikes. Similarly all orders from the brain to other parts of the body also take the form of a series of Action Potentials. The problem is how to match the spike patterns to the stimulus or behaviour. Our specific project approaches this problem from a Linguistic angle - by using the analogy between the neural encoding and language to further our understanding of how neural networks process information. This talk explores the analogy made by some neuroscientists between neural spike sequences and language and comes to conclusion that although spike sequences are, unsurprisingly, not identical to a language there are enough similarities to make the comparison worthwhile. Given this, the talk argues that tools and theories from within Linguistics can be applied to aid neuroscientists in deciphering the neural code. By considering the architecture of language to be a hierarchical structure of interlinking levels of representation linguists have made great strides in understanding how a linguistic system results in successful communication. The aim, therefore, is to create an analogous system of hierarchical levels of representation for neural networks, with individual spikes at the lowest and behaviour at the highest level, with a number of intermediate

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levels of representation between the two and interface rules to show how relevant information is passed from one level to another. The talk concludes with some early ideas about how this may proceed, including frequency-based chunking resulting in grammatical structures (Bybee, 2010) and Discourse Representation Theory (Kamp, 1981). Overall, this talk argues that a interdisciplinary approach between the cognitive sciences is not only useful but crucial if we are ever going to better understand issues relating to the brain, language and cognition and to put forward one way in which collaborative enterprise may proceed by arguing for a linguisticallyinformed theory about information encoding in neural networks.

Sam Wolfe University of Cambridge The interaction of syntax and information structure in Old Sardinian Despite a large body of literature on Medieval Italo-Romance syntax (cf. Beninc 1983-4, 1995, 2004; Ledgeway 2007, 2008, 2009; Salvi 2004, 2011 inter alios), no detailed empirical study of the syntax of Old Sardinian exists in the literature. This presentation focusses on the results of a recent study of two Old Sardinian condaghes, legal documents used principally to record donations and court cases involving monasteries: Il Condaghe di San Nicola di Trulla and Il Condaghe di Santa Maria di Bonarcado. It will be proposed pace Lombardi (2007) that the textual evidence points to Old Sardinian having an unmarked Verb-initial word order. In addition it will be suggested that the Verb-Subject and Subject-Verb order alternations noted previously by Lombardi (2007) and Remberger (2012) are dependent on the Information Structure of the subjects in question. Evidence will be presented that the VSO order is derived by movement of the finite verb to the head of the C (Fin) projection within the C-domain of the clause. Competing S-V-O orders are derived by further movement of the subject to a specifier position higher than Fin. Such findings have several desirable consequences. Firstly they suggest that V-toFin movement may be a commonality across Old Romance, meaning that Old Sardinian is less anomalous than it might at first seem. Secondly, the presence

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of a competing S-V-O order in the texts highlights a way in which output from a V-S-O grammar could plausibly have been reanalysed as consistent with an S-VO grammar, yielding the unmarked S-V-O order we see today in Modern Sardinian (Jones 1993). Selected References Jones, M. A. (1993). Sardinian syntax. London; New York: Routledge. Ledgeway, A. (2009). Grammatica diacronica del napoletano. Tbingen: Niemeyer. Lombardi, A. (2007). Posizione dei clitici e ordine dei constituenti della lingua sarda medievale. In A. Ledgeway & D. Bentley (Eds.), Sui dialetti italoromanzi: Saggi in onore di Nigel B. Vincent (pp. 133148). Norfolk: Biddles. Remberger, E. M. (2012). Sardinian syntax in diachrony. Presented at the Italian Dialect Meeting, Leiden.

Rebecca Woods University of York Evidentiality in Interrogatives and Perspective shifting How evidential and illocutionary markers express speakers and addressees relationship to the discourse differs in declarative and interrogative utterances. This is true both in languages with grammaticalised evidentiality markers (e.g. Tibetan, in 1), and those with lexical means of expressing evidentiality and speech acts (e.g. English, in 2):

In both (a) cases, the evidentiality/speech act marker expresses the speakers perspective. However, in the interrogative (b) cases, the marker expresses the

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perspective expected of the addressee by the speaker. A formal syntactic account for this phenomenon is still lacking. This change in orientation in the (b) cases does not relate to movement triggered by the interrogative [+Q] feature because there is no movement in Tibetan, and illocutionary adverbs in English echo questions also orient to the addressee despite having the syntactic structure of a declarative. Therefore, the shift in orientation is due to the presence of the [+Q] feature itself. Focusing on English examples, I propose that a covert performative verb triggers covert that in the declarative and covert whether, which bears [+Q], in the interrogative. In interrogatives, the perspective shift then results from an operator-variable relation between the role in the subject of the covert performative verb and the illocutionary adverb, as illustrated below:

This analysis is supported by evidence including parallel effects seen in the interpretation of tense (Stowell, 2007) and perspective orientation in clauses with overt performative verbs. References Stowell, T. (2007). The syntactic expression of tense. Lingua, 117, 437463.

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Abstracts of poster presentations

Alphabetically by last name of the author

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Ahmed A. Al Khateeb University of Southampton "General academic writing in an EFL context: Analysing the development of joint texts and shared writing" Meeting new genres for teaching and learning of writing have become a need and necessity in the recent decades. Collaborative writing (CW) is one of those new genres peculiarly established for practising of writing, which created various issues of debate amongst educationalists and linguists. Collaborative authoring has been originated as a practice for creating a text or composition by more than one single writer. It differs from other genres in the following features: the intensity of efforts exerted, the ways of gaining information in respect of different minds, the nature of completing the writing tasks and the extent of the addressed audience. Furthermore, the concept of collabowriting has newly formed as a consequence of technology revolution especially in the subject of collaborative authoring tools and social networking media, which have given an emphasis on the written form since it is the a medium of communication. This paper intends to illuminate the mechanism and the fundamental aspects of Wiki-mediated collaborative writing, by focusing on the process approach as well as the distributed group-based learning. Since this action can be managed on different platforms of wikis, via tracking and rolling-back the contributions of the participants, this research, as a response, was performed to identify the actual nature of collaborative writing, among novice writers in Saudi Arabia. It also scrutinises the stages of development of peers shared texts by moving from the collaborative brainstorming and finishing with the collaborative editing and revising (or peer feedback). As the researcher examined the growth of the process of shared texts using Wikispaces, content analysis has been used for the texts produced collaboratively. The presentation will illustrate the most three domains, which were chiefly observed: act of cognition and knowledge construction, act of mutual expression and dialogues and act of collaboration and social interaction. These acts of communication will then be elucidating by more examples. Finally, a brief introduction details the types of assigned tasks and the strategies employed, for the completion of these given tasks will be exhibited.

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Shadiya Al-Hashmi University of York Residual effects of historical gutturals on the vowels of Arabic loanwords in Turkish Historical gutturals of Arabic loanwords tend to block the application of vowel raising in Turkish and trigger vowel backing. The examples in groups 1 and 2 illustrate vowel raising while those in groups 3 and 4 exemplify vowel backing.

In the first set of data (Groups 1& 2) the class of historical gutturals in Arabic loanwords in Turkish includes //, /x/, //, /t/, /d/, //, /s/ and /q/ but not // and /h/ which do not participate in the vowel blocking effect. Yet, in the second set of data (Groups 3 & 4) vowel backing is limited to the emphatic sounds (/t/, /d/, //, /s/) and /q/. Two questions this work addresses are whether historical gutturals form a natural class and why some guttural sounds have a backing and raising effect on Turkish vowels while others do not. My answer to these questions comes from the principles of constraints interactions; that is faithfulness and markedness constraints as set in Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993). It is expected that the analysis should yield interesting implications to feature theory and phonology in general.

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Mumtaz Ali Northumbria University Pakistani EFL learners Willingness to Communicate across Different Communication Contexts and Receiver Types The publication of the MacIntyre et als (1998) heuristic model of willingness to communicate (WTC) inspired researchers across the world to focus abundantly on the communication both as an essential process and a gaol of learning English as a foreign/second language (Yashima, 2005:54). Willingness to communicate is generally defined as an intention or readiness to enter into discourse when individual has a free choice to do so (MacIntyre et al, 1998:547). However, Kang (2005:291) argues that this intention or probability or even readiness to engage into communication may vary according to the interlocutor (s), topic, and conversational context, among other potential situational variables. Drawing upon that, this study sets out to investigate Pakistani University EFL students willingness to communicate in English across variety of contexts (i.e. One to one situation, small meetings, large meetings and group of people) under different types of interlocutors (i.e. Friends, acquaintances and strangers). 350 students of the Department of English, Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur, Pakistan participated in this study. This study was designed to be quantitatively driven mixed method research in which research questionnaire was pre-dominantly the main source of data collection and the inclusion of the qualitative component based on the in-depth semi-structured interviews was supplemental to core project. This paper would first highlight that how English language is taught and learnt in country like Pakistan together with the relevance of WTC construct into Pakistani context. In the end, some initial results/findings drawn from both questionnaires and semi-structured interviews would be discussed.

Mufleh Salem M. Alqahtani Newcastle University Sonority and Epenthesis in Najdi Arabic: an OT perspective Violation of the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP) in coda clusters of the superheavy syllable CVCC is one of the motivations for epenthesis in some Arabic dialects in general and in Najdi Arabic (NA) in particular, according to Ingham (1994), who states that epenthetic vowels occur between the last two consonants to create a new syllable in NA. According to him, epenthetic vowels

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occur in words that have final clusters, where the second member of these clusters is /r/, /l/, /w/, /j/, and /n/ (sonorants). Examining Ingham's examples, I observe that epenthetic vowels occur in the final clusters that include these sonorants as the second member and which therefore violate the Sonority Sequencing Principle. Take, for example, /masr/ Egypt in which the final cluster violates the Sonority Sequencing Principle due to the final voiced continuant liquid /r/ being more sonorous than the voiceless fricative /s /. This cluster has been broken up by inserting the vowel /u/; i.e., /masr/ [ma.sur]. This paper will shed the light on several aspects of the phonology of NA such as syllable structure and sonority in the language, OT constraints on sonority, lexical distinctness, and the identity of epenthetic vowels. First, the relationship between the syllable and sonority will be demonstrated in this study by identifying the syllable types that adhere to the SSP, and those that represent potential violations of the SSP by having consonant clusters finally. Also, I will show how syllable types that have potentially SSP-violating complex clusters motivate epenthesis. Third, vowel epenthesis prompted by the violation of the SSP will be accounted for within the framework of OT; hence, I will examine the interaction of certain universal constraints to account for the SSP and epenthesis including ONS, DEP-IO, MAX-IO, SON-SEQ, *COMPLEX, and NO-CODA. Also, I will refer to the family of Generalized Alignment of Constraints introduced by McCarthy and Prince (1993). Fourth, with reference to lexical distinctness, I will show cases in which vowel insertion leads to homonymy, and thus has an impact on the lexical category of words and their meanings. Finally, the identity of epenthetic vowels will be explained, exploring a connection between the identity of the epenthetic vowel and the factors conditioning it. In other words, I will show how cases in which the identity of the epenthetic vowel is determined by underlying vowels and the second members of final consonant clusters. Furthermore, I will show a case in which the identity of epenthetic vowel is neither determined by the underlying vowel nor the second member of the final consonant clusters, rather it is determined by grammatical and semantic conditions.

Mohammad Alqenai University of York Hypocoristics in Arabic: A derivational problem Hypocoristics have a strong social function in Arab communities, yet a few papers have attempted to give an account for such a phenomenon. Davis &

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Zawaydeh (1999; 2001) gave a descriptive account of hypocoristics using it as evidence for the psychological representation of the Semitic consonantal root. They showed that hypocoristics are morphologically derived by decomposing the name to its consonantal root and mapping it on to a template (1).

This claim is problematic from a semantic and morphological perspective. In all morphological frameworks, decomposition of complex lexical units requires reoccurrence of form and meaning: to claim that the noun baker can be decomposed into bake + the deverbal suffix er, both parts should have a meaning. This holds for the noun baker, but not for the proper name Baker. The Baker-baker paradox states that the proper name Baker is meaningless while the noun baker isnt (Izaute, 2004). Thus, proper names cannot have a morphologically complex structure, which can be morphologically decomposed. There are two possible solutions to this problem. Either find a phonological analysis of Arabic hypocoristics, to put them on a par with hypocoristics from every other language; or show that Arabic proper names are different because they do carry meaning. We will be presenting the results of a pilot semantic priming experiment that explores the latter. We will exploit the fact that some names have two hypocoristics depending on which consonantal root is used for the derivational process; ex. the name iimaan has two hypocoristics, ammuun from the root -m-n safety and mannuuj from the root m-n-j wish. Hence, a visual prime, which is semantically related to the root, would be presented to speakers before asking them to provide with the hypocoristics. In other words, a speaker would be shown an image of a safety sign and then asked about the hypocoristic of the name iimaan. We will expect the study to provide strong evidence for or against morphological derivation of Arabic hypocoristics if a priming effect is observed.

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Jaehyeok Choi Newcastle University The Voicing of Initial Fricatives in the History of English The initial voicing of fricatives as shown in the southern and south-western dialects of Old and Middle English, where it is generally been regarded as a phonological progression in those regions between two periods (Nielsen 1994: 19), is well known among English historical phonologists and philologists, and has long been discussed in the discourse of both historical and theoretical phonology (for example, Bennet 1955, Fisiak 1985, Lass 1991-93, Nielsen 1994 and Honeybone 2001, 2005). The process of voicing is considered as one of the points on lenition trajectories in phonology (e.g. Lass 1984: 178). In this presentation, I suggest a combined theoretic account of a lenition phenomenon involving the combination of two approaches namely Element Theory (e.g. Harris 1994) and Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993, henceforth OT), which differentiates this account from previous analyses. In fact, I argue that the constraint *COMPLEX[element], where element refers to one of the primitives of Element Theory, plays a central role in analysing lenition process here. The primary focus of this paper is to examine the nature of phonological weakening processes within the framework of OT. The key questions to be investigated in this talk are as follows; 1) how do we analyse lenition phenomena in terms of segmental representation? 2) how can these representational elements be integrated into the constraint ranking and evaluation mechanisms in OT? 3) do the data of Old English Fricative Voicing give us any insight in this regard? I will show that promising results emerge through the constraint interaction between positional faithfulness constraints such as IDENT[element] and the integrated constraint *COMPLEX[element] which I propose in this paper. In addition, there is support from Middle English examples such as uif / fif five (taken from Fisiak 1985: 5) which is regarded as spelling evidence for the initial fricative voicing in (southern) Old English. Examples such as these corroborate this claim, given that they show a change of the whole set of fricatives in one dialect of English (e.g. f, , s, > v, , z, ) since this is an important point for lenition theory to unify different types of changes.

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Wafya Hamouda Newcastle University Applying a knowledge-poor anaphora resolution algorithm on the Arabic reflexive nafs using web as a corpus Over the last two decades Arabic natural language processing gained a lot importance due to the need to deal with large amounts of Arabic documents by non-Arabic language speakers. Such importance was reflected in developing stateof-the-art systems for applications such as machine translation, and information retrieval. The developers of such applications faced challenges that resulted from the nature and structure of the Arabic language itself. One of the main problems that developers faced when dealing with Arabic is anaphora resolution. Anaphora resolution is process of determining the antecedent of a given anaphor (Mitkov 1999). Amphora resolution plays an important role in applications such as question answer, machine translation. Arabic is a rich language that has got several anaphor such as pronouns, reflexives, and reciprocals. Reflexives is, however an under studied area in Arabic natural language processing. Nafs (meaning soul) is a frequently-occurring anaphor in contemporary Arabic (Kremers, 1997), and any machine translation system, for example, from Arabic will need will need to be able to resolve it. The aim of this study is to design and implement a reliable and efficient resolution algorithm for nafs which can be used as a component in a computational system that translates Arabic into some target language in practical, real-world applications. Web is being used a corpus for reasons as availability and cost. A collection of texts from BBC Arabic and Al Jazeera Arabic is being collected, processed and a dictionary of nouns is formed in order to be feed into the algorithm to resolve nafs cases. The results showed very good percentage of recall and precision when being calculated. The overall evaluation of the algorithm showed that it as efficient, reliable and cost-effective. References Kremers , J. (1997). When Arabs talk to each other about themselves, unpublished Maters thesis Mitkov, R. (1999). Anaphora Resolution: The State of the Art. Technical Report based on COLING'98 and ACL'98 Tutorial on Anaphora Resolution: University of Wolverhampton.

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Shaimaa Mohamed Mahmoud Helal Newcastle University Stress in English: Prosodic and Rhythmic Complexity for Arab Learners Arab Learners of English as a second Language face various difficulties that hinder their acquisition of English. They are unable to perceive l2 differences that are not made in their L1 and consequently are unable to produce them (Major, 2008: 75). Among these difficulties is the prosodic and rhythmic complexity of English language, particularly stress assignment in English words. Much attention has been given to segmental contrasts in recent L2 literature (Strange 1995; Eckman et al 2003). While, little is said about L2 English stress. This paper studies the stress assignment in English words, the phenomenon that accompany it, and the cause/effect relationship between stress, on the one hand, and prominent vowel quality and quantity, and the resulting phonological changes, on the other hand. The study identifies a continuum or a hierarchy of the difficulties that Arab learners face in deciding the place of stress, with the aim of suggesting some corrective steps for avoiding their occurrences in the future and hence help the improvement of students performance in this field and enhance the process of learning. The study relies on four tests. The first two tests, one written test and one audiorecorded, are initial tests at the beginning of the academic term. The second two tests are at the end of the term. The students are divided into three groups to allow the researcher to see the differences between students with different degrees of instruction. The findings indicate, among other points, that word-length is associated with low performance, while vowel-length stands in contrast with word-length. The application of research findings has real implication for pedagogy since it helps Arab students in acquiring stress of English language. They see their errors, its reasons, and its corrections.

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Fan-Wei Kung Newcastle University Rhythms of American English for EFL learners: an Action Research Approach How to teach L2 speaking skills effectively has been a hotly discussed topic in Asia for decades. This has become more important because the typical Asian EFL settings lack environmental opportunities for actual L2 use (Chen, Warden & Chang, 2005). One of the methods utilized by many language teachers for L2 speaking instruction in the US is Jazz Chant. However, research which has empirically documented the link between the use of Jazz Chants to develop students listening and speaking skills in Asia has been scant. Therefore, this study explored students second language speaking skills in Taiwanese EFL settings using Jazz Chants. The current study was based on the data collected from a conversation class at a language institute in Taiwan. This current study aimed to explore (1) whether Jazz Chants could be used in Taiwanese EFL classrooms to improve students listening and speaking skills; (2) whether Jazz Chants could be used to boost students interests in learning English; (3) whether Jazz Chants could be used to give students more confidence in speaking English. The data were collected from students Pre-questionnaire, Post-questionnaire, Pre and Post-tests along with a semi-structured interview at the end of this study. This research found that using Jazz Chants as supplement in class helped students to become more fluent and willing to speak English with better listening comprehension, and their interests and confidence were also strengthened. To conclude, this study may be of importance in explaining the benefits of incorporating Jazz Chants in different ESL/EFL curricula for various purposes, as well as providing English teachers with a better understanding of how students perceived the acquisition of English through authentic input in a more interesting and interactive manner. Key words: Jazz Chants, L2 speaking, rhythms, intonation, supraegmental, pronunciation

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Ana Luiza Arajo Lopes University of Cambridge Topic and Agreement in Brazilian Portuguese Recently, generative literature has showed the possibility of verb and topic agreement in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), argumental or otherwise (Kato & Raposo, 2006; Avelar & Galves, 2011, among others). This type of construction supports the idea that BP could be a topic-prominent language.

Example 1 is a pseudo-transitive clause, meaning that an ergative verb is preceded by a NP, which is not an agent; although it could be understood as either an agent, as responsible for the process expressed by the verb, as locative or as the whole thing that the post-verbal element is part of, ie.: hands/ hand of the watch. Essentially, the topic works as the clause subject and the agreement is triggered by this topic. Another aspect that this work deals with is the curious fact that in BP, diverse thematic roles in the subject position may also occur. Recent works in Brazil have analyzed the verbal structure in bi-eventives sentences in BP, yet nearly nothing has been said about the subject in this construction. Therefore, this study has focused on analyzing these structures.

How are the phi-features checked in these examples? This work proposal is that BP is in the process of change, and because of that the language functions as a subject or topic of prominent language. This work proposes, in accordance with Myagawa (2010), that traces phi and topic / focus can be inherited by C or T, depending on the syntactic construction. That said, it is crucial to identify where the topics and subjects are located in constructions as presented above (1-2). In other words, their positions in BP. Avelar, J. D., & Galves, C. (2011). Tpico e Concordncia em Portugus Europeu e Brasileiro. Selected Papers of 26 Congresso da APL. Lisboa: MS.

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Kato, M., & Raposo, E. (2006). Topicalizaton in European and Brazilian Portugueses. In: J. Camacho, N. Flores-Ferrn, L. Sanchez, V. Deprez, & M. Cabrera, Cureent Issues in Linguistic Theory (pp. 205-218). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Miyagawa, S. (2010). Why Agree? Why move? Unifying Agreement-Based and Discourse Configurational Languages. Cambridge, Massachussetts: The MIT Press.

Winfred Mak University of York The Study of Positive Psychology of Chinese Students in Learning of English as Second Language at the UK Universities There is a general phenomenon of international students studying abroad in English speaking countries, for instance, the UK, the USA, Australia and Canada, in their practice of English Language as their second language acquisition. Since Chinese students is the largest national group of international students in the UK for higher education while the UK is actively joining the global education market, the research focus is hence narrowed down to Chinese Students studying at the UK universities. Rising number of Chinese students at the UK universities does have English language acquisition problems. Many British lecturers may have little knowledge or training on know-how in handling a great number of International students including Chinese students. Moreover, many Chinese students cannot cope with the teaching and learning methods or styles in the UK. To help Chinese students at the UK universities to better understand their English Language learning status, some personality variables which may psychologically affect the English Language acquisition of Chinese students is the highlight of the research study. The relationships among the interested factors of positive psychology (i.e., mindsets, psychological well-being and psychological adjustment) and self-determination will be identified according to the available research data. A longitudinal study will be conducted in which around 50 participants and 100 participants will be recruited from a UK vocational training school and a UK university respectively for the purpose of conducting interviews and filling in questionnaires at the beginning and at the end of the academic year. All subjects are Chinese students who have been staying in the UK for less than one year and are studying in various departments with various educational levels. The collected data will be analyzed by SPSS so as to compare the students positive

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psychology and self-determination in relation to their English Language learning in the UK.

Jennifer Martyn University College Dublin Foreign language learning and Discourses of Gender in a West of Ireland Secondary School Irish government and media reports emphasise how boys underperform in foreign languages at secondary school, in terms of both foreign language uptake and examination results (Irish Independent 2010; Royal Irish Academy 2011). Additionally, a binary gender discourse is present in the meta-language surrounding foreign languages across the Anglophone world (Kissau & Wierzalis 2008; Williams et al 2002). Drawing upon the ethnographic paradigm (Blommaert & Jie 2010), as well as contemporary language and gender research (Kiesling 2006; Cameron 2006), this research posits that gender is plural and indexed in a variety of ways, including through language practices, in a localised context such as the institution, a space where practices and ideologies are normalised and reproduced (Blommaert 1999:10). In order to deconstruct the binary gender-gap in foreign language learning discourse, ethnographic field research was undertaken in a West of Ireland secondary school, where observation and interviews with pupils and teachers were conducted over a period of 6 months. This paper will explore the gender identities of Junior Cycle (12-15 year old) pupils in a West of Ireland secondary school as they are manifest within routinised, institutional practices, and within the meta-discourse of language learning.

Ahlam Abdulhadi Menkabu University of Essex Stance and Engagement in Postgraduate Writing: A Comparative Study of L1 and L2 Student Writers Academic writing is now seen as a persuasive endeavor involving interaction between writers and readers. This interaction is managed, according to Hyland (2005a), in two main ways: by (i) stance, which refers to the ways writers project

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themselves and convey their commitments and their personal and professional attitudes, and (ii) engagement, which concerns the ways writers pull their readers into their discourse. Thus, in order to produce a persuasive text, writers need to understand and be familiar with the social, cultural and institutional contexts of their disciplines (Hyland, 2005a; Kuhi & Behnam, 2011). However, this may be a challenge for most students, particularly for those L2 learners who have previously had little exposure to the demands of academic writing, and who know little about the importance of interaction in academic argument and how to achieve it. Therefore, based on data from a corpus consisting of 40 high-grade masters dissertations (which earned a mark of 65 or above), this paper explores how L1 and L2 learners of English whose L1 is Arabic project themselves and engage readers in their writing. I study two different disciplines (linguistics and literature) and compare and contrast the elements of stance and engagement across and among the disciplines, and the L1 and L2 writers. Also, by using the discoursebased interview format (Odell et al, 1989), I interview some of the dissertation writers to reveal their preferences and perceptions about the use of these interactional resources. The results indicate that the two groups of student writers from both disciplines are generally aware of the importance of projecting themselves and conveying commitments in their discourse, employing hedges and attitude markers most frequently. However, a detailed analysis of the texts reveals that these L2 writers differ significantly from the L1 writers in relying on a more limited range of markers, depending heavily on widely used items with which they are familiar. I end the talk by discussing the pedagogical implications of my study.

Mamiko Noda University of London A sociocultural study of insiders discourses on English language teaching for Japanese senior high schools The aim of on-going research by the author is to give a more informed perspective of English language teaching in Japanese senior high schools from the inside, identifying the reasons why English language teaching has remained traditional, and uninfluenced by the requirement of a shift to more

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communicative language teaching by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). Since 1989 the Japanese government has consistently tried to make an improvement in English teaching in the public school system, so that the teaching approach will shift from the traditional method using Japanese translation (yakudoku) to communicative language teaching (CLT). Despite these governmental efforts, the situation has remained largely unchanged over twenty years; yakudoku is still widely used in English teaching, especially in senior high schools. Most recently, in 2009, the MEXT announced the new Course of Study to prescribe that classes, in principle, should be conducted in English and it would be implemented from April 2013. With a poststructuralist view of society and language, teaching a language is seen as a social and cultural action. The research will investigate the discourses of both the MEXT and Japanese teachers of English at senior high schools. As a method of data collection, strategies of a discourse-oriented ethnography for studying organisations are employed. The data collected from the government are: selected policy documents, semi-structured interviews for each three MEXT and local government officials and field notes. For the data from the school are: group discussions and semi-structured interviews for total 17 teachers, classroom observation, shadowing teachers, relevant texts and field notes. For the method of data analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis is employed. Some outcomes of the on-going data analysis on the discourse of MEXT show the rationales for the change, requirements for teachers, and how the alleged changes in the classroom can be achieved.

Narawan Promprakai Newcastle University Whatever thats not academic is interesting to us: DoTA as a potential motivator for Thai male university students in English writing classrooms The purpose of this study is to find out the attitudes of Thai male university students towards English classes they are currently taking and the potential of using the computer game DotA, a popular online real-time strategy game amongst Thai male university students in Thailand, as a motivator in English

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writing classrooms. This is based on various studies finding that male students tend to be less interested and achieve lower attainment levels in language learning than female students. The data was collected from Thai university male students by questionnaires (n=100) and interviews (n=12) in 2010. The results of the study show that most of students think English classes in general are not interesting because they are taught only from textbooks. Of all the students who completed the questionnaires, 70% of them play DotA. Amongst this 70% of students who play the game, the largest proportion of 29 students have been playing DotA for approximately 3-4 years by the time of the study. During the interviews, the majority of the students agreed that English writing classrooms will be more interesting to them if DotA is integrated into the class as a motivator and that they will be more willing to engage in writing tasks if they can write about the game rather than normal topics assigned by teachers. These findings suggest that more creative teaching and learning methods should be introduced into English writing classrooms to encourage male students to be more eager to participate and DotA has potential to be a motivational factor in English writing classes. Harold D. Thampoe Newcastle University Topicalization and Focussing in Tamil and Sinhala Tamil displays Topicalization and Focussing which are independent of each other: the former is a movement to the left, while the latter is a movement to the right (Sarma: 2003). The topic position (left peripheral) is indicated by a topic marker enraal as for X shortened in speech to -enda(l)/ -enaa, as in 1b below: (1) a. mary-kku mampalam nalla virupp-am very like-3sn

Mary-DAT mangoes

Mary likes mangoes very much b. mampalam-enda mary-kku nalla virupp-am Mangoes-TOP Mary-DAT very like-3sn Mangoes, Mary likes very much

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Focus (right peripheral) is assigned to a constituent in Tamil in two major ways: i. the constituent which needs to be focused is clefted; ii. contrastive focus is assigned to a constituent in situ by adding focus particle thaan to the constituent (Sharma 2003), as in (2) and (3) below:
(2) Nettu Marykku antha puthakaththai kodu-th-athu book-ACC give-PAST-NOM John John-FOC

Yesterday Mary-DAT that

It was John that gave the book to Mary yesterday (3) Nettu Marykku John -thaan antha puthakaththai that book-ACC kodu-th-thaan give-past-3sm

Yesterday Mary-DAT John -FOC

It was John that gave that book to Mary yesterday

Sinhala, an Indo-Aryan language, which has long been in contact with Tamil (Gair 1980) too exhibits these twin movements. Exploiting i. the VP movement (Jayaseelan (2010); ii. an IP internal functional projection of Focus above vP; and iii. an iterable Topic phrase above this Focus phrase (ii and iii. postulated in Jeyaseelan 2001), Jayaseelan (2010) attempts to explain the position of Focus in OV and VO languages. He argues that the VP movement to the (immediate) left of inflection (for the V to take the inflection) can strand or pied-pipe the stacked material, giving rise to VO or OV order Jayaseelan (2010). This poster examines Topicalization and Focussing in Tamil and Sinhala (both OV languages) in terms of the two projections posited in Jayaseelan (2001), and VP movement and its constituent operations mentioned above discussed in Jayaseelan (2010).

Zuleyha Unlu University of Warwick Teacher-student relationship patterns in classroom feedback interactions around EAP writing As indicated by Hedgcock (1994, p.141), research on writing has presented a great amount of empirical data including composing processes, text production, recursive procedures and the contribution of feedback to revision. Especially with regard to feedback, a number of researchers have questioned the value of

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feedback itself for writing while a number of other researchers have questioned the efficiency of different types of feedback on writing. However, spoken feedback especially on English for Academic Purposes (EAP) writing stands as an understudied issue. In this study, I attempt to theorize feedback interactions on EAP writing using the data I collected at a UK university. Working from the classroom observations, I describe and theorize actions used by both teachers and students in spoken feedback, and how a combination of these actions may be indicative of teacher-student relationship patterns. Using teacher and student interviews, I detail the possible influences and consequences of these relationship patterns. Thus, this presentation will have three basic parts. In the first part, I will talk about which aspects the previous research on spoken feedback on writing has focused on. In the second part, I will present the design of the data collection and analysis. Finally, I will detail the results of data analysis of the first phase of my research.

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Map of conference venue to conference dinner

The optional conference dinner will be held at 6:30 pm at the Aneesas Buffet restaurant. Address: Forster Street, The Quayside, Newcastle, NE1 2NH, (Next to the Travelodge) / Tel: 0191 222 1110

Map of conference venue