LURA 2019 3

An Inside Guide to Everyday Text Talk: The Evolution of 'LOL'

Anonymous — Tue, 23 Apr 2019 04:02:11 +0000

An Inside Guide to Everyday Text Talk: The Evolution of 'LOL' Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 04/22/2019 - 22:02

Since when did ‘LOL’ become so not funny?

By Tansee Mcreynolds
Course: Language, Gender, and Sexuality (Ling 2400)
Advisor: Prof. Kira Hall, TA Velda Khoo
LURA 2019

[video:https://youtu.be/gbu0iirUqzQ]

In everyday text talk between my roommates and me, I began to notice that the acronym ‘LOL’, which stands for ‘Laugh Out Loud’, was being used in peculiar ways. From intense conversations where two texters were having an argument to seemingly ordinary conversations that lacked humor, ‘LOL’ frequently found its way into the text messages. So why do texters use ‘LOL’ when communicating about something that is not funny? What makes a certain group of friends use ‘LOL’ when communicating to each other? If ‘LOL’ is no longer an acronym for ‘Laugh Out Loud’, what is it now? My video essay explores the possible answers to these questions and many more while analyzing texting conversations from my personal group chats with my roommates.

In my project, I examine how a community of practice, a group of people who share a common interest, use language to communicate and connect with one another. My community of practice includes three of my roommates and myself, who are all college-aged females and friends at the ��. My essay analyzes how my community of practice uses ‘LOL’ while texting. Specifically, I explain how ‘LOL’ has moved beyond its purpose as an acronym and is transforming into an unmarked discourse marker that helps direct a conversation in everyday text talk. Further, in my research, I found that ‘LOL’ is used for three main purposes. ‘LOL’ is used to signify laughter, to mitigate an uncomfortable situation, and to indicate social presence. ‘LOL’ is used in modified terms like ‘lololol’ to show laughter. It is used when two roommates are in an argument with each other. Finally, I found that texters use it to say ‘I hear you’ when responding to a message. Essentially, ‘LOL’ is now being used in very different kinds of conversation for very diverse purposes. The wide variety of situations that ‘LOL’ is used in demonstrates just how unmarked the text phrase has become over the years. My research ultimately demonstrates how language can evolve and take on a new meaning just from people like you and me using it in a unique way.

In the period of one month, I collected data by taking screenshots of all instances when ‘LOL’ was used in a group message between my roommates and me. After data collection, I analyzed and sorted through 47 text message conversations resulting in an assortment of the most common uses of ‘LOL’. Using research from my Language, Gender, and Sexuality (LING 2400) class, and outside sources, I was able to categorize the uses of ‘LOL’. The next step was to pick out the messages that best exemplified the three categories that I found. Linguistics literature on discourse markers have helped support the conclusions that I have reached. The video essay was the perfect format to demonstrate my findings because of the ability to show my data. To respect the privacy of my roommates involved, I recreated the text messages and screen recorded them to provide footage for the video essay. The real-time footage of the incoming text messages allows the viewers to get a sense of how the conversation actually played out.

Opening photo credit
http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/3CE6/production/_84809551_lol_yellow_thinkstock.jpg

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Quantifier Scope Ambiguity in English and Turkish

Anonymous — Fri, 19 Apr 2019 02:32:29 +0000

Quantifier Scope Ambiguity in English and Turkish Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 04/18/2019 - 20:32

Here's something you may not have realized about language. Sometimes a sentence can be ambiguous, and you won't even realize it!

By Kieran Britt
Course: Morphology and Syntax (Ling 4420)
Advisor: Jared Desjardins
LURA 2019

For example, the following sentence lends itself to two possible interpretations:

(1) Old men and women left the theater.

What does “old” modify in this sentence? “Men” or “men and women”? In other words, does the sentence refer to

(2) ‘old men and old women’

(3) ‘old men and women of any age’?

Technically, both of these translations are still ambiguous, though one more controversially, because it would require double binding. However, for the purposes of this discussion, the example is sufficiently clear, and further explication would require formalism which is outside the scope of this article.

You probably prefer the reading in (2), though there may be contexts where you would choose (3). (1) is an example of a scope ambiguity. Scope, in layman’s terms, is the question of what parts of a sentence are modified by other parts of the sentence, in this case, determining what the adjective “old” modifies.

There are other sentences which are similar to the example above, in that they exhibit scope ambiguities. Example (4) is one such sentence:

(4) John didn’t find three guys.

You probably read this sentence to mean:

(5) John found something, but it wasn’t three guys. (Perhaps it was four guys, or three girls.)

But it’s possible that you could have read the sentence differently in a specific context. Perhaps if you knew John was playing hide and seek, and out of the ten people he was looking for, he found seven, in which case you might read it like this:

(6) There are three guys who John was looking for, who he didn’t find.

Similarly, if a third party had just said, “John found three guys” but you know that he found two, not three, you might say, “John didn’t find three guys. He found two,” and intend the first of the two readings (example 5). So it seems clear that both readings are viable, and your interpretation might depend on something outside of the sentence itself, such as context or your background knowledge about the world.

Sentences like (4) are called Quantifier Scope Ambiguities (QSAs). There are multiple types of QSA, but the one in example (4) arises when it isn’t clear whether a quantifier or a negating element takes scope over the other. In this case, the “not” in the contracted form “didn’t”, and the quantifier “three” are the competing parts of the sentence, because in the reading in (5), “not” takes scope over “three,” and in (6) “three” takes scope over “not.”

Now we know a bit about QSAs, but there is more to the tale. Sometimes the translation of an ambiguous sentence in one language will be unambiguous in another. Turkish is a language where, when compared to English, this can happen – sentences like example (1) are ambiguous in English but not in Turkish. I tried to figure out why, and I hypothesized that it was something having to do with the typology of Turkish: the way that Turkish expresses meaning through morphology (word formation) and syntax (word order). In order test my hypothesis, I analyzed Turkish QSAs and compared them to their English counterparts, hoping to find a causal link between some typological feature of Turkish and the lack of ambiguity of these kinds of sentences.

Take the following sentence:

(7) Donald didn’t find two guys.

It should be permissible to, by adding an accusative marker to “two guys,” switch the order of “two guys” and “Donald,” but I wasn’t able to test this for grammaticality in my original research.

Clearly, this sentence is ambiguous in the same sense as example (4). But the Turkish version of this sentence only has one reading: Donald found something, but it wasn’t two guys, analogous to the first reading of example (1). The alternative reading is not permitted.

(8) Donald iki çocuk bul-ma-dı.
Donald two child find-NEG-PAST
‘Donald didn’t find two guys.’
( ~(∃2x: x is a guy) (Donald found x); *(∃2x: x is a guy) ~(Donald found x))

This sentence, its interlinear gloss and analysis taken from: Özçelik, Öner. 2017. "Interface Hypothesis and the L2 Acquisition of Quantificational Scope at the Syntax-semantics-pragmatics Interface." Language Acquisition 25 (2): 215. doi:10.1080/10489223.2016.1273936.

It is interesting to note that the reading which is allowed corresponds to the syntax of the sentence, as shown in example (9). However, as Turkish is a language with very free word order, other orders are permissible, so it isn’t clear how meaningful this is.

(9)

However, if you add an accusative marker (which denotes the direct object of the sentence) to “two guys”, it marks for specificity, and you get the other reading. The reason for this seems to be an interaction between usually obligatory morphological markings and syntactic convention due to the free word order of Turkish. When the direct object of a sentence in Turkish is in its “normal” position (for example, in 8, directly preceding the verb), the usually obligatory accusative marker on the direct object becomes optional, and begins to mark for specificity. And curiously, this effect can be duplicated in English as well, via different means. In place of example (7), take the sentence:

(10) Donald didn’t find the two guys.

This sentence seems to permit only the reading where Donald was searching for two guys, and didn’t find them. This is because the ‘the’ in the sentence marks for specificity, by presupposing that there are two guys who are referenced. So, one conclusion we can draw is that specificity effects serve to disambiguate Quantifier Scope Ambiguous sentences, both in English and in Turkish.

There is another conclusion to be drawn from this example. Though in both English and Turkish specificity can disambiguate the readings, in Turkish, the sentence in (7) is unambiguously interpreted from the get-go. This isn’t fully understood, but my hypothesis is that, because of the free word-order of Turkish and because the marking of the direct object is morphological and optional (specifically when in the default position), the sentence has room to default to a given reading. This isn’t true of English, which must mark specificity with definite descriptions. Further research must be done to know if this is the correct explanation.

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A Child's Acquisition of Polysemy: "of", "with", and "by" in Child English

Anonymous — Mon, 15 Apr 2019 23:23:03 +0000

A Child's Acquisition of Polysemy: "of", "with", and "by" in Child English Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 04/15/2019 - 17:23

How do children learn words without "seeing" them in the real world?

By Megan Pielke
Lab: Language, Development and Cognition Lab
Advisor: Norielle Adricula
LURA 2019

Prepositions differ from other parts of speech in that they cannot be “seen” in the real world. They are used to mark and indicate relationships and are less tangible than concrete nouns or verbs, which point out objects or actions that we can see. In English, prepositions are highly polysemous, meaning that the same word can have different meanings, uses, and senses. Given these factors, how do children acquire these elusive terms in their everyday speech?

To tackle this question, we analyzed a longitudinal corpus of data (a collection of language data over time) of naturally occurring, spontaneous interactions of one child and his two primary caregivers (mother and father). We examined the usage patterns of prepositions for the child and his parents to determine whether caregiver input influenced the child’s acquisition and subsequent production of these prepositions. A number of studies have examined the prepositions on and in due to their prevalence in everyday speech; however, this project primarily focused on the less-frequent and less-studied prepositions of, with, and by.

In order to examine this question, we annotated examples of the prepositions of, with, and by from the aforementioned longitudinal corpus, targeting the senses in which they are used, the grammatical structures in which they occur, and the nouns and verbs that co-occur with each preposition. Below are examples of the annotation coding scheme used in this project. We annotated the data for the child, his mother, and his father in order to analyze the role of caregiver input on the production of the child.

Overall, we found that caregiver frequency and type of use were reflected in the child's production of two prepositions: of and with. The graphs below demonstrate this pattern.

Figure 1. Overall relative frequencies of of-senses across production and input

Figure 2. Frequent co-occurring semantic elements for frequent of-senses.

Figure 3. Overall relative frequencies of with-senses for Abe and his parents.

Figure 4. Prototypical syntactic contexts for most frequent with senses

The production of the preposition by was relatively infrequent compared to the other two prepositions considered in this study. Additionally, the child used the preposition by differently in comparison to his caregivers (i.e. mother and father).

When considering the prepositions of and with, we found that the input frequencies of preposition sense and syntactic contexts are highly correlated with these same variables in the child’s production. The results of this study suggest that caregiver input may play an important role in the acquisition of these senses of prepositions.

This study is part of a larger project that examines how children acquire functional words – words that are small but important! For more information on this and other related studies, please contact Norielle Adricula (norielle.adricula@colorado.edu) or Megan Pielke (megan.pielke@colorado.edu) and check out our article on this study coming out in BUCLD 43!

Opening Photo Credit
https://st.depositphotos.com/2087445/2349/v/600/depositphotos_23498015-stock-video-doting-parents-and-child-playing.jpg

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