Post-colonial (American?) English Presence on the North-Western Pacific Island of Kosrae: A cross-linguistic analysis of the overlaps and divergences of Kosraean English compared to standard American English

Kosrae is the most remote island of the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), with a population of less than 7,000 inhabitants, located in the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and Guam. FSM is an independent sovereign nation consisting of four states in total: Pohnpei, Chuuk, Yap, and Kosrae. Having passed through the hands of Spain, Germany and Japan, the United States gained administrative control of FSM after WWII, as commissioned by the UN. The FSM became an independent nation in 1986 while still retaining affiliation with the US under a ‘Compact of Free Association’. Now both Kosraean and English are considered to be the two official languages and the variety of Kosraean English which has arisen proves for an interesting comparative study. In order to obtain the relevant data, I spent three months on the island of Kosrae, interviewing 90 local speakers, ranging in age (16-70), occupation, sex and time spent off island. The 45 minute long interviews were informal but supported by participant information to capture relevant data and conversations were guided in a way that aimed to reveal language and cultural attitudes. With reference to these samples, I examine the effects of American English on the language use in Kosrae. This paper aims to present a broad analysis of phonological, morphosyntactic and pragmatic features, such as pro-dropping, discourse markers and other practices in order to demonstrate the similarities and differences between the two varieties, which are coming to shape the variety developing on Kosrae. Having transcribed conversations using the tool Elan, I will put particular focus on [h] deletion and insertion, a rare occurrence found in a variety of post-colonial American English which I believe is of particular interest. I assess the presence of English in Kosrae with reference to sociological influences, past and present. First, I discuss the extralinguistic factors which have shaped the English that is currently used on Kosrae, including migration between US and FSM, and English as a language of administration, social media usage and visual media presence. Secondly, I assess the use of English in this community in light of Schneider’s (2007) ‘Dynamic Model’, with reference to America’s contribution as an ‘exploitation colony’ as defined by Mufwene (2001). Finally, an overview of the salient linguistic characteristics of Kosraean English, based on the data collected will be presented and compared to features associated with standard American English in view of examining overlap and divergence. The overall objective is to present a cross-linguistic description of a hitherto unexamined English emerging in a postcolonial environment with a juxtaposed contact variety. Mufwene, Salikoko S. 2001. The ecology of language evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schneider, E. (2007). Postcolonial Englishes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Segal, H.G. (1989) Kosrae, The Sleeping Lady Awakens. Kosrae: Kosrae Tourist Division, Dept. Of Conservation and Development. Keywords: American English, Global English, Pacific English, Morphosyntactic, Phonological, Variation, Discourse

A variationist approach to the examination of insertion and deletion of /h/ in Kosraean English

I report on language variation in the unresearched variety of English emerging on Kosrae, Federated States of Micronesia. English is spoken as the inter-island lingua franca throughout Micronesia and has been the official language of FSM since gaining its independence in 1986, though still retaining close ties with the US through and economic “compact” agreement. I present here an analysis of a corpus of over 90 Kosraean English speakers, compiled during a three month fieldwork trip to the island in the Western Pacific. The 45 minute sociolinguistically sensitive recordings are drawn from a corpus of old and young, with varying levels of education and occupations, and off-island experiences. In the paper I analyse two variables. The first variable is the realisation of /h/, often subject to deletion in both L1 and L2 varieties of English. Such occurrences are commonly associated with Cockney English, but also found in Caribbean English and the postcolonial English of Australia. For example:  Male, 31: yeah I build their house their local huts and they pay me /h/ deletion is frequent in Kosraean English, but, perhaps expectedly, occurs slightly less among people with higher contact with American English, through having spent longer periods off island. The second feature under scrutiny is the variable epenthesis of [h] to provide a consonantal onset to vowel-initial syllables.  Male, 31: that guy is really hold now This practice is also found beyond Kosraean English. Previous studies find h-epenthesis arising in L1 varieties including Newfoundland and Tristan de Cunha English, while similar manifestations are identified in Francophone L2 learners of English. My variationist statistical analysis has shown [h] insertion:  to disproportionately occur intervocalically;  to be constrained by both speaker gender and age: older males are much more likely to epenthesis [h] in their speech;  to be more likely in the onset of stressed as opposed to unstressed syllables. In light of the findings of my analysis, I consider the relationship between h-deletion and h-epenthesis, the plausibility of hypercorrection as a motivation for the variation, and the potential influence of the substrate language, alongside sociolinguistic factors such as attitudes towards the US based on mobility. The analysis sheds light on the extent to which different varieties share this characteristic and the comparability of them in terms of linguistic constraints and attributes. Clarke, S. (2010). Newfoundland and Labrador English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Hackert, S. (2004). Urban Bahamian Creole: System and Variation. Varieties of English Around the World G32. Amsterdam: Benjamins Milroy, J. (1983). On the Sociolinguistic History of H-dropping in English in Current topics in English historical linguistics: Odense UP

Structural Organization of the Corpus Callosum Predicts Attentional Shifts after Continuous Theta Burst Stimulation

Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) applied over the right posterior parietal cortex (PPC) in healthy participants has been shown to trigger a significant rightward shift in the spatial allocation of visual attention, temporarily mimicking spatial deficits observed in neglect. In contrast, rTMS applied over the left PPC triggers a weaker or null attentional shift. However, large interindividual differences in responses to rTMS have been reported. Studies measuring changes in brain activation suggest that the effects of rTMS may depend on both interhemispheric and intrahemispheric interactions between cortical loci controlling visual attention. Here, we investigated whether variability in the structural organization of human white matter pathways subserving visual attention, as assessed by diffusion magnetic resonance imaging and tractography, could explain interindividual differences in the effects of rTMS. Most participants showed a rightward shift in the allocation of spatial attention after rTMS over the right intraparietal sulcus (IPS), but the size of this effect varied largely across participants. Conversely, rTMS over the left IPS resulted in strikingly opposed individual responses, with some participants responding with rightward and some with leftward attentional shifts. We demonstrate that microstructural and macrostructural variability within the corpus callosum, consistent with differential effects on cross-hemispheric interactions, predicts both the extent and the direction of the response to rTMS. Together, our findings suggest that the corpus callosum may have a dual inhibitory and excitatory function in maintaining the interhemispheric dynamics that underlie the allocation of spatial attention. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT: The posterior parietal cortex (PPC) controls allocation of attention across left versus right visual fields. Damage to this area results in neglect, characterized by a lack of spatial awareness of the side of space contralateral to the brain injury. Transcranial magnetic stimulation over the PPC is used to study cognitive mechanisms of spatial attention and to examine the potential of this technique to treat neglect. However, large individual differences in behavioral responses to stimulation have been reported. We demonstrate that the variability in the structural organization of the corpus callosum accounts for these differences. Our findings suggest novel dual mechanism of the corpus callosum function in spatial attention and have broader implications for the use of stimulation in neglect rehabilitation.

Annotating the meaning of discourse connectives in multilingual corpora

Discourse connectives are lexical items indicating coherence relations between discourse segments. Even though many languages possess a whole range of connectives, important divergences exist cross-linguistically in the number of connectives that are used to express a given relation. For this reason, connectives are not easily paired with a univocal translation equivalent across languages. This paper is a first attempt to design a reliable method to annotate the meaning of discourse connectives cross-linguistically using corpus data. We present the methodological choices made to reach this aim and report three annotation experiments using the framework of the Penn Discourse Tree Bank.

Discourse-level Annotation over Europarl for Machine Translation: Connectives and Pronouns

This paper describes methods and results for the annotation of two discourse-level phenomena, connectives and pronouns, over a multilingual parallel corpus. Excerpts from Europarl in English and French have been annotated with disambiguation information for connectives and pronouns, for about 3600 tokens. This data is then used in several ways: for cross-linguistic studies, for training automatic disambiguation software, and ultimately for training and testing discourse-aware statistical machine translation systems. The paper presents the annotation procedures and their results in detail, and overviews the first systems trained on the annotated resources and their use for machine translation.