It’s our great pleasure to announce that on Thursday, 12th October, our SALT guest Barbara Vogt (Università degli Studi dell’Aquila) will give a talk about language games at 14.15 in room SVHUM A 1018.
‘The linear order in language games: rearrangement or reduplication and truncation?’
See abstract below.
If you can’t attend in person but don’t want to miss the talk, here is a Zoom invitation:
Topic: Barbara Vogt on language games
Time: Oct 12, 2023 14:00 Oslo
Join Zoom Meeting
https://uit.zoom.us/j/67487284085?pwd=czNaeGJmQ2xUcEwxekJIaENNeFlGQT09
Meeting ID: 674 8728 4085
Password: 812744
Everyone is very welcome!
The linear order in language games: rearrangement or reduplication and truncation?
Barbara Vogt, Università degli Studi dell’Aquila
In language games or ludlings (from Latin ludus ‘game’ and lingua ‘language’, Laycock 1972), existing words of a given language are concealed by inserting, replacing, rearranging, or repeating phonological material for the purpose of becoming unintelligible to outsiders. Linguists often use ludlings to argue for phonological representations and to better understand morphoprosodic processes like reduplication or infixation. When considering different types of language disguise, the ‘rearrangement’ type is underrepresented in typologies (Laycock 1972, Davis 1993, Bagemihl 1995, Frazier & Saba Kirchner 2011). The lower frequency, coupled with the apparent violation of linearity, explains why these forms of language disguise have received less attention in linguistic research so far. In this talk, I will present various types of so-called ‘rearranging’ (reversing, precedence modifying) ludlings, along with previous analyses (Nevins & Vaux 2003, Vaux 2011, Borowski 2012). With the help of prosodic constraints (anchoring and templatic) known from reduplication and truncation it is possible to get rid of the metalinguistic reversal (and splitting) operations and to explain restricted (intra-and interlinguistic) variation in the observed patterns.
Literature:
Bagemihl, Bruce. 1995. Language Games and Related Areas. In John Goldsmith (ed.), The Handbook of Phonological Theory, 697–713. Oxford: Blackwell.
Borowsky, Toni. 2012.Language Disguise in OT. Reversing and Truncating. Indigenous Language and Social Identity. Pacific Linguistics 626. 367–385.
Davis, Stuart. 1993. Language games. The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. 1980–1985. Oxford & New York: Pergamon Press.
Frazier, Melissa and Jesse Saba Kirchner. 2011. Correspondence and Reduplication in Language Play: Evidence from Tigrinya and Ludling Typology. Manuscript http://www.melfraz.com/ling/TigLudMs.pdf (accessed 28.09.2023)
Laycock, Don. 1972. Towards a typology of ludlings or play languages. Linguistic Communications 6. 61-113.
Nevins, Andrew and Bert Vaux. 2003. Underdetermination in language games: Survey analysis of Pig Latin dialects. Paper presented at the LSA https://www.academia.edu/300579/Underdetermination_and_Language_Games_Survey_and_Analysis_of_Pig_Latin_Dialects (accessed 28.09.2023)
Vaux, Bert. 2011. Language Games. In John Goldsmith, Jason Riggle & Alan C. L. Yu (eds), The Handbook of Phonological Theory, 2nd Edition, 722–750. Oxford, UK: Wiley- Blackwell.
