Put it in the chart. I don't think anyone will.
OK, it's increasing now. So here numbers. Let's give it one more minute.
I'd say. Yeah, I think so, because there's a bit of a.
It's rapidly increasing, say. You know, we have 34 now.
Thirty six, thirty eight now, yes.
OK, great. I think it's time to start.
So it's a great pleasure to have Holly Kennard here.
You know her as a department lecturer. She teaches phonology, psycholinguistics and historical linguistics.
And I Googled her quickly to check when she submitted her defeat.
And I can't believe it's already 2013. I thought it was much more recent.
It was all Pratten Morphos syntax. Bratten is an insular Celtic language.
So that comes from the British Isles, originally belongs to the Britannic branch rather than Guidoni, which is Irish and Scots.
Gaelic and Breton speakers escaped or left these islands and moved on to Britain in France in the early Middle Ages.
Holly has recently been at a post doc working on gender and stress assignment,
especially in loanwords from French to Britain, and today she's going to talk about Habab more generally.
So thank you very much for agreeing to talk to us. And we're looking forward to your talk.
Thank you. Thank you for that introduction. And it's great to be able to be here and talk to you.
I'm going to share my screen. I hope it works. Is it working?
And yet you see this light excellent.
So today I'm going to talk to you about my research that it's research that I started during my postdoc and that I've been working on since then.
I did the field work during my postdoc and a lot of data still to analyse, but I'm getting there.
So for those of you who haven't heard of Britain before, and it's a Celtic language as well,
with with and unlike the other languages spoken in Western Brittanie,
the most recent survey of speakers was in twenty eighteen and there are thought to be around two hundred and ten thousand speakers,
which is actually more than the survey takers expected given the previous survey.
So it's a little bit healthier than when we kind of thought before this survey.
However, given that the population of Britain is about four point six million,
it's still very definitely an endangered language, and particularly because the majority of speakers are older.
So in 2013, seventy nine percent of the speakers who took part in the survey were aged over 60.
And this is because there's there's a history of language decline and now revitalisation,
which led to a gap in language transmission following the Second World War.
So this was a this is the an end to transmission from parent to child.
What Dorien calls the demographic tip. So this is the point at which several decades of language decline and negative
feelings surrounding the language lead lead to this break in transmission.
Following this, from about the 1960s onwards, there have been various language revitalisation efforts.
So these have led to the increased visibility of Britain.
So such as in Britain, signage in attempts to end the stigma that had become attached to being a Breton speaker.
The establishment of better medium education in the 1970s has led to a new generation of Russian speakers or, say, a generation.
It's a wide age range than that now, and these are often called the new speakers of Britain.
So new speakers or the Neopolitan or that the new speakers of Britain are those
who've acquired the language by means other than intergenerational transmission.
So they haven't acquired it from their parents at home in the normal way.
It's a they constitute a small number of today's speakers.
So in 2018, five percent of speakers were aged under 40, which is not very many.
However, of those speakers aged 15 to 20, for 90 percent of them were new speakers.
So speakers who did quite Britain through formal education.
So in Britain, medium education began in nineteen seventy seven with the establishment of the D1 school system.
So Daewon means germination. This idea that you're planting a seed to get new speakers of the language.
And it started with a single primary school today that are nearly nineteen thousand pupils across Britain and the North Atlantic Department,
which is not officially part of Britain anymore, and who are in some sort of Britain media of education,
which is about three percent of pupils in Britain. This doesn't sound very much, but it is actually there has actually been a year on year increase.
So I, I generally check the figures every year.
So in 2018 there were eighteen thousand three hundred and thirty seven pupils in Britain, media education.
And if I look back to 2015, there were fifteen thousand six hundred and ninety six pupils in Britain making education.
So it is increasing year on year, but it's still a very small proportion of the total number of pupils in Britain.
And it's been it's been commented on that younger speakers sound different in some way from older or traditional speakers.
So I'm interested in why this is and how this varieties different.
So various claims have been made in the literature about new speakers Britain,
and they generally come under two headings, purism and French influence.
So new speakers are said to use a very CELTA sized like to avoid French loanwords in Britain and to use words that are neologisms,
usually belt usually built on Welsh bits.
At the same time,
they are said to lack traditional phonological features such as Breton's dress patterns or patterns such as the on between words and good luck.
Came off of ideological features, including mutation,
so it has been claimed that new speakers don't use mutation in their bratten, they're said to lack parts of the verbal paradigm,
such as the different forms of the verb to be and to use a an analytical structure for prepositions,
not use the traditional inflected prepositions that the Celtic languages have.
They are also said to have a preference for subject initial word order. Now,
a lot of the research I've been doing since my default has looked at how far these claims are true because more recent research is
challenging these these claims and building a much more nuanced picture about what Newspeak is Breton is like and why that might be.
So today I want to talk to you about grammatical gender across the generations of speakers.
So Britain has two genders, masculine and feminine, typical.
And we're quite used to this this kind of gender system.
However, there are few cues to gender that it's hard to tell what gender a word is just from looking at it or knowing what it means.
There are some semantic links, so nouns that refer to women and girls and female animals tend to be feminine.
Whereas for men and boys, male animals, those sorts of things tend to be masculine.
There are also some morphological markers, so there are some feminine suffixes.
For example, the simulative marker n always makes the noun feminine as well as singular,
which is very interesting, but I'm fortunate to have time to go into it today.
And gender is expressed through limited patterns of agreement and the mutation of nouns and adjectives.
So you can see I've done this multicoloured diagram, so we've got gender that.
So we've got agreement with the numerals two, three and four.
We have mutation of the noun following the indefinite or definite article and we have mutation of a following adjective in brettler.
Most adjectives followed.
Now I've also drawn a little bubble going off to the side, which is to say that the noun itself mutates following the numerals.
So we've got a kind of interaction between the gender of the noun and the mutation patterns in different ways.
This is an opaque system which relies, as you can see, heavily on mutation.
So given that it's been claimed that younger speakers don't use mutation or don't use mutation correctly, what do younger speakers do?
Are they maintaining the mutation and therefore are they maintaining the traditional patterns of grammatical gender?
There are also various patterns of language change that have been observed not just amongst younger speakers,
but older speakers with respect to grammatical gender and mutation.
So I'm interested in those as well. So I've been talking about mutation as though everybody knows what it is.
But if you haven't come across Celtic languages before, you may not have come across mutation either.
So initial consonant mutation is found in all the Celtic languages.
It's a change in the initial consonant of a word under certain morphos syntactic conditions.
So although it's a phonological phenomenon, it's triggered by the syntactic context.
So for example, the word for house is T, but if I talk about his house, I would say a deep voice thing.
But if I talk about my house, I have Muzzi to have fricative. Bratten has four different types of mutation.
The two I'm interested in today are clinician and Spirent ization, but we also have production and the mixed mutation.
They're not relevant for gender. In addition, voiceless stops become voice stops or stops become fricatives.
The cluster GWAR is reduced and the Nazel also becomes a fricative, whereas inspirer integration voices, stops become fricatives.
And for those of you not familiar with Breton orthography, the C apostrophe H DiGRA is is a fricative.
So it's either glottal fricative or the vena fricative depending on the context and the speaker.
And I'm not going to worry too much about which it is in, but in particular examples.
As long as it's a fricative, it's been mutated. Spart analyzation is more structured in use.
The definition, as you could see in the previous slide, it affects fewer consonants, but it's also found in fewer contexts than the mission.
And there's a kind of current of change whereby winterisation is being replaced by clinician in its traditional contexts.
So replacement of sporran translation by the initial following, the numerals three four nine, for example, is well attested.
And sometimes this is attributed to language attrition, so Dresser, for example,
claims that this is because all the speakers aren't speaking Breton enough anymore and they're forgetting how to do the mutation properly.
Hennesy, on the other hand, claims that this is normal language change and it in fact,
it's attested in the language to the best Platania, the data which was gathered just before and just after the First World War.
And it's widespread in a largely central area of low brittanie.
And this change seems to have been in progress since at least the start of the 18th century.
It seems to begin with the numerals and then spread to other Spirent ization contexts.
And this is echoed by Ledoux, who talks about teenage speakers acquiring Spier integration late so it's somehow difficult to acquire.
So to give you an example, this is a page from the Atlas. I don't expect you to be able to see anything on this.
This is just to show you what it looks like. And then we can zoom in and see this area here.
And the I mean, the response is not in the IPA because this is much earlier than that.
But you can see that in these examples that I've ringed in red, the the consonant has been knighted.
This is obviously dogs, by the way, the key. And so they become a piggy.
But in these examples, it's the traditional hope. Hopefully you can see it ring in blue, the traditional he or he tricky.
So even in this quite small, small area, we've got variation.
So before I tell you about quite exactly what I did,
I want to show you the patterns of gender agreement and mutation that I'm going to be talking about.
So I've given you four nouns to masculine and feminine, and I've got them in four different contexts.
So following the indefinite article, following the numeral two, the numeral three, and with the adjective small.
So you can see, first of all, that the form of the numeral changes.
So the masculine and masculine nouns we have down three.
But for feminine nouns we have Du Antia so far straightfoward.
Then we move on to mutation and you can see that we get the mission of the of the noun for feminine nouns following the following the article,
unless they begin with duh with the coronal stop.
We also get the mission of all nouns following the numeral two and we get an admission of the adjective following the following.
A feminine now sorry. And in contrast we have Spirent ization of masculine nouns that begin with PCA with the V to stop the voices,
to stop following the article, not otherwise. And then we get Spirent ization following the numeral three.
So that goes across masculine and feminine nouns. And this is the system I'm going to be talking to you about today.
So this is Britain has an opaque gender system. The queues to gender are contradictory and they're not readily available.
For example, the nation can apply to both masculine and feminine and masculine nouns.
So usually it's a marker of feminine, singular nouns, but it also applies to masculine, plural nouns when they refer to humans.
So the nation is signalling both masculine and feminine and singular and plural, which is a very confusing system.
Added to this. Only certain consonants undergo each type of mutation.
So if the consonant doesn't mutate, if it's not a consonant that can mutate, there's no Q to gender from the mutation.
So then no one knows, for example, is free, but the foot doesn't mutate, so we just get a free.
There's no clue to gendered it. It's masculine, but we can't tell that from looking at it.
And in addition to this, there are some nouns we would expect to mutate that don't.
So this can be a systematic exception, such as feminine nouns beginning and following the article, or it can be one off.
So the noun plaque, which is the word for girl, is feminine,
but it doesn't mutate following the article APLA and it's just one of those idiosyncracies.
The mutation of adjectives is further conditioned by additional phonological factors.
And I'm going to tell you about those when we get to the discussion of adjectives so that it's fresh in your minds.
Opaque systems such as this are much more difficult for children to acquire.
And this is particularly true in the minority language context where the input is very reduced.
And this has been shown for Welsh by Thomson Gathercole, for example.
So given the claims that younger brettler speakers do not maintain mutation patterns, how to speak, use me,
use mutation in these gender dependent contexts, and do the younger speakers differ from all the speakers?
How much variation is there? So today I don't have to.
I would like to tell you about the numeral agreement as well, but I just don't think I've got time.
So I'm going to talk about mutation in these three contexts.
So mutations are now following the article mutation of the noun, following the numeral and mutation of the following object.
Descriptions of Standard Bratten maintain its prioritisation after the numeral maintains by intersession after the numeral sorry,
which contrasts with traditional varieties.
But we don't know what Breton's speakers today are actually doing and we don't know whether there are differences between older and younger speakers.
So to try and answer these questions,
I did fieldwork itself with Brittany and I worked with three groups of Breton's because of different ages and from different linguistic backgrounds.
So I had eight older adults, all of whom grew up speaking Gretton.
Most of them can't read and write Brechtian.
They were completely schooled in French and a lot of them didn't speak any French before they went to school and then had eight younger adults.
They all speak better on a daily basis, but most of them didn't speak Brechtian at home when they were growing up.
They've acquired it in some other way. So they are new speakers.
And then I have teenage speakers who I call my Lethe because they are students at the least.
So little student that if you want in, I suddenly say, like the French say.
So students age 15 to 18 and this is the only school of this level.
For Britain, it's an immersion school. The students come from a variety of linguistic backgrounds,
but few of them come from exclusively Breton speaking homes now over the course of several fieldwork visits.
I worked with about 60 students. But as is the nature of going into schools every time you go, it's a different set of students.
So I'll tell you as we go along, how many students took part in the different exercises that I did.
And when I go into my field work, here's a map of Brittany.
I'm usually based around here in Tampa. So when I work with my adults because I'm working in this sort of area here,
I've drawn a very wobbly ring around so as so as far west as that coastline and then east going up towards central Brittany and Cafe.
And so tearless my data are used for the nouns and the numerals to start with.
I used elicitation task where I selected 36 nouns and 16 masculine, 20 feminine,
18 mutating and 18 didn't mutate, which is because I was interested in the form of the numeral.
And to get these, I used a set of four pictures for every noun.
I had a single suffix, a cat, for example, the cat on its own, a cat and two cats and three cats.
And then something to give me the plural to give me an unmuted for cats.
I should say that in Britain and I think you know the Celtic languages as well, following the numeral, you use the singular form of the noun.
So we have ohis doggers, but the plural is Keesha.
Just in case that seems a little bit odd to elicit the adjective data,
I use a very similar elicitation task and I used almost the whole set of nouns again.
So there were 15 masculine and feminine nouns and I used a set of two pictures this time.
So I showed them both at once and I had a large example of something and a small example.
So a big chair and a small chair to get the mutation in two different adjectives.
I always use pictures because partly because my older speakers don't read and write better for the most part,
and also because given the regional variation there is in Britain, I'd much,
rather than used a noun they were familiar with was that normal noun rather than try and Mutata,
now that they're not familiar with as a result, I do get variation in the data.
So I've picked my 36 nouns, but I didn't necessarily get quite those nouns from everybody.
So there's a bit of variation, but I think it makes for more natural speech.
Right. Let's jump in straightaway and look at mutation in singular nouns following the indefinite article.
And so the expected pattern is that we get an admission of feminine nouns except those that begin with D and no mutation of masculine nouns,
except those that begin with K, in which case we get suburbanisation and largely but masculine nouns.
This is what we find very few masculine nouns when mutated. So we're getting perske or pest fish.
There are ten instances amongst the students where the noun is mutated and seven of them are equally, which is bad.
And we've a few of that I've given you.
I think this is because they tend to use the noun bed in the expression go to bed and the preposition ta da course is the mission.
So they hear it much more often as well. Then it's Grealy and I.
I haven't really analysed the plural data yet, but I did get when you say they been mutated,
known as the plural as well, which I shouldn't have gone got.
However, it's a really small proportion of of the data, six point twenty five percent of relevant responses.
So I think it's not terribly significant for masculine nouns, beginning with K,
this is entirely as expected, got universal corporatisation across my one hundred and forty two responses.
So this is alive and well this mutation. Let's look at feminine nouns because here we get a bit more variation.
So here we would. So this is only feminine nouns that we expect to mutate.
So no exceptions like plus and no nouns that begin with D so we should expect the whole of this graph to be light blue.
And you can see there are some exceptions. But for the adults, well, for starters, there's not really a difference between older and younger adults.
They there's a little there's a small proportion of words where the mutation is not used and we would expect it to be used.
A lot of these are this noun. Monic, which is a glove and the dictionary says this is feminine, and about half of my speech was that it was feminine,
but about half thought it was masculine, or at least they treated it like a masculine noun because I also got the masculine numerals with it.
So this is just a bit of a funny noun. And you'll see the Nisei students of 32 took part in this task.
And you see there's a little bit of Spirent ization such as this,
mostly nouns that begin with K actually then this is obviously a very strong pull
towards prioritisation with these conditional nouns and then some odd ones as well.
And I can't show you the English speaker variation as a graph.
It's too it's too there's too many speakers for the adults.
There isn't much into speaker variation. They all look pretty much like this for the students.
There's a range from thirty three point three percent to 100 percent commission, but for twenty nine speakers, that's at least 50 percent.
In addition, for 17 speakers, at least seventy five percent of the nation.
So there is a big range, but they're sort of they're concentrated at the more limited and rather than less manageable.
So for the most part, this pattern seems to be being maintained now,
I did wonder if the Nishan following the numeral two would be easier for speakers.
You don't need to know anything about the noun to use the nation following the numeral two.
It's all it's always there, and however, that's not what I found.
In fact, following the following the numeral two, we get much more of a much more unexpected mutation creeping in, so much more corporatisation.
So we're getting this pattern where we get a hostile Doha's instead of us.
And this is true of all three groups, although, as you can see, much,
much more common amongst the students and they're emitting the mutation much more often as well.
Interestingly, the younger adults are using clinician more bilic by a small amount than the older adults.
So it's almost like that that they're doing the will even more than the traditional speakers.
I have this category unknown.
There weren't very many nouns in this category, but there were a few where I just got a really weird excuse me mutation here.
And so like Pearl, which is Spayd, I get Duvalle from from one speaker.
It's almost like they've done the mutation twice. But then what? They're so few and I'm not terribly worried about these.
I'm not I don't think there's a pattern to to be seen.
So I I'm going to show you some of the anti speaker variation I get amongst the students for this.
So this is a horrible graph. But what I'm trying to show you is that that the range of mutation goes from mostly clinician
on the left to hardly any clinician on the right and quite a lot of admitted mutation.
So I'll come back to why that might be in a moment. Looking now at mutation following the numeral three, so this is only nouns that can Spirent ties,
and so we would expect the holder of this graph would be dark blue.
That's not what we find. And that shouldn't be a surprise, actually, because as I showed you earlier on,
Late Edition has been replacing Spier integration for at least 100 years.
So the older adults, as we would expect as traditional speakers used mostly in the younger adults,
a kind of half and half, which again, isn't very surprising because they're getting input in Britain,
both from traditional speakers and from books about Brett on the the standardised form of the language,
the norm, which says that you should get Spirent ization following three.
So I'll show you the older adults by speaker. You can see there's a little bit of variation on this.
These two speakers at the end, I thought were particularly interesting because they have more spine winterisation
than the others that both speakers who interact with younger speakers much more.
So one of them plays better music and one of them is involved in brettler medium theatre.
And so I thought it was interesting that they're sort of that the people that they talk to, their interlocutor's include younger speakers.
And I don't think that's true of any of the others. Looking at the younger adults, you'll see that there are some speakers who use a lot more.
Nishan So they're much more like all the speakers. And then I have a bit of an outlier there who just omits the mutation a lot.
So I thought this was interesting because one of my speakers commented on it. So said who's the speaker towards the left?
This is what she said to me about mutation.
So after we've done the task with what she seemed a bit worried about, about how she'd done and it's not a test.
I tell them it's not a test, but people still worry that they can do it wrong.
And she said, I wanted to tell you something about the mutation of the area because I mixed between the normal form,
the ordinary form and the form used in the pig go down, which is not the same.
And so I do a bit of both sometimes. And so the pig is a region in the south of Brittanie.
My map isn't very clear, but the best one I could find. But the we go down is the kind of dark blue bit, the very bottom that sort of goes to a point.
So that's the the area the area she's talking about.
And so that's where she grew up. And so she switched.
She knows that she's doing a little bit of both the so she doing back the standard and the traditional for looking at the leaf, the students.
Unsurprisingly, we get quite a lot of quite a mixture.
There's.
There's more prioritisation than a mission on the whole, but for a lot of speakers, that's just mutation or mutation at all in most of these contexts.
So. When I compared the data from the D.C. students,
it looked like some of the speakers were doing Spirent imitation after three, but not an admission after two,
which seemed a bit confusing because intuitively I felt like if they could do mutation after three, that was almost harder than mutation.
After two, because it's prioritisation, there's much more. So it's less widely used and there's much more variation in the input.
So I was left wondering whether speakers were applying the mutation rules.
And what I found was that some of them were using just a single form.
So it was like they had the UN mutated form and the mutated form and that was it.
So for feminine nouns, they this wasn't a problem.
So they would get so Barch boat, we'd get a whole Thuc, which mutated, mutates following the article,
and then we would get an admission following the numeral two, but didn't sound like class.
So Kat, this is a masculine now.
So you get Aloha's but then we dect Doha's because it's like that's the mutated form that they just repeat following the numeral two,
even though we would expect clinician here. So I think it's safe to say.
That these speakers have not fully acquired the mutation rules,
they're sort of on a stepping stone towards full proficiency and the quick summary of the now the patented nouns before we talk about objectives.
So all the speakers maintain the mission following numeral two, but they also use the mission for Voiceless stops in when for three,
there's some very variability for speakers who interact with Standardbred on younger speakers either
maintain the mission in 2x and superimposition three X or they maintain the mission following two.
But then they use the additional voices stops in following three and most use the mission at least some of the time after three.
So even if they use prioritisation intimidation some of the time. They they most speak because are using litigation as well,
and there's a lot of variation amongst the U.S. that there's a combination of negligence prioritisation.
They admit the mutation a lot. And I think that's not really a surprise because they're getting different sorts of input from different speakers.
So this is just summarises what I said. This is what the older adults are doing most in the nation.
We only really see corporatisation of masculine thinking announced following the article,
whereas the younger adults, we have a little bit of spiritism following three.
We don't get with the older and the older adults, I should say.
Also, although we're getting clinician following through, it's only affect those stops that would be affected by Spirent causation.
So it's only the voiceless stops.
Even though normal nutrition affects more consonants than this, it's only affecting those stops that would be affected by the Nishan.
So I hope that's clear. So I'm going to move on and talk about mutation in adjectives.
So I was really interested to see what happens with adjectives.
A lot of research that's been done into mutation in Keltic because he just looked at nouns.
And so I was interested to look at adjectives also because they're a bit more complicated.
So this is in a similar way to the nominal mutation.
We get delineation of adjectives following feminine thinking, nouns, masculine, plural nouns that refer to humans.
And this is the same context. But there are phonological constraints.
So all adjectives, Canaanite following feminine singular nouns and in vowels or sonorants.
But if the noun ends in an obstruents, only adjectives beginning but got GWAR into the night.
So that's the voiced stops and the cluster minus does.
So you might remember that there are additional restrictions on.
There are actually some varieties of Breton would never, never land rights, even where the books should say it should.
So I've given you a little table here to have plus and course and you can see that plus
mutates following both feminine nouns but not following the masculine noun or its course.
Only you Tait's following the noun that ends in a sonorant.
So I hope that that's clear. In this study I'm going to tell you about today, I'm only using adjectives to begin with,
but it's already clear that mutation can be very valuable across because I want to reduce the factors that might induce further variation.
But it would be interesting to go back and look at other adjectives as well.
One thing at a time. So following feminine nouns, we expect adjectives to mutate.
So these adjectives begin with Bayt. So we would expect this whole graph to be light blue, but that's obviously not what we find.
So for all speakers, there's quite a few cases where they don't mutate the adjective.
And you'll see again,
we get this kind of almost like a hyper correction pattern amongst the younger adults they're doing are doing it more than the traditional speakers.
What's interesting is that unlike some of the other groups that I've shown you, there is nothing to speak of variation amongst all three groups.
So these are the older adults. You can see it varies a bit between sort of half and half, lots of attention and no mutation at all.
There's less variation amongst the younger adults, but we still we're still seeing a bit xq, for example, who's the speaker seconded from the right?
This was my speaker who did slightly odd things following the numeral three.
So I think there's something going on with the mutation patterns there for that speaker and then the students.
I'm sorry, it's another horrible graph. And you don't need to take in anything other than the fact that there's a speaker variation.
So, OK, for example, uses quite a lot of emotion, rather like the the adults.
But then there are a lot of speakers who have to use any at all. So I wondered what was conditioning this variation, if anything.
And so I looked first at whether or not the noun mutates.
Now the adjectives should mutate, if not as feminine, regardless of what form that noun takes.
But I found that for the adults, they were more likely to mutate the adjective if the noun itself mutated.
So yes, the noun mutates. No, it doesn't. You can say it does make a difference for both groups of adults, but not for the students.
And actually, I had some speakers comment on this. It's obviously a cue just to whether they should be type the adjective.
So I was doing this interview with H X, but her husband, A.J., was there.
He wasn't really taking part, but he was sort of nosily watching over her shoulder.
And they have this interaction where they discuss this this particular picture.
So the then the picture was a family,
but actually he chimes in with a big household before she used the word family and she says, yes, so and teargas costs.
And then she wonders to herself, is it not vasts?
Is it should it not be meakem? You take it mutated form. And he says, well, oh, no, no.
And then he said he works through it point by point, you say, and teargassed.
Yes. You don't say undig with a mutation.
She agrees. No, no. It's on teargassed. So it's glass.
It's it's big without any mutation, she says. Oh, yes.
Yes, very well then. And she said again. But then she tries it out with another noun.
So family family's feminine actually doesn't mutate, but she still knows that it's feminine, a foamy pass.
And he agrees that if I wasn't doing this over the Internet, I'd have played the excerpt because it's quite funny.
But I hope you can see how they're using this information about whether they now mutex or not.
I also looked at whether the final consonant makes a difference.
Now, it shouldn't make a difference because these are adjectives that begin with B, so they should mutate regardless.
However, it does seem to make a difference. So if the noun ends in a sonorant, speakers are more likely to mutate the adjective.
I think it's probably that the the rule for adjectives that begin with voice to is sort of bleeding into all adjectives.
There's some confusion over when to apply this rule about word, final sonorants and vowels and when not.
So I think that's probably what's going on here. As a final point, I looked at whether adjectives would be mutated following masculine nouns.
I've already been looking at the context where we expect the nation.
What about when we don't expect it? Well, largely we don't get it.
So it's not that speakers just randomly mutate it.
They are there's not very much mutation of masculine adjectives following masculine nouns, which is what what we would expect.
And we have to bear in mind, of course, there are some instances of nouns that speakers seem to think are feminine,
even though the the books in the masculine. So that happens as well.
So let me give you a quick summary. So the results are showing lots of variation in the mutation of attributive adjectives.
The mutation is largely maintained by the adults, but there's a lot of variation amongst the students.
And it seems to matter whether the noun mutates because there's a link that tells you tells you about the gender of the noun and.
That's the end of the now and also seems to make a difference,
even though we don't expect it to be relevant for adjectives that begin with, B, it still seems to play a role.
So I hope I just got time to tell you a little bit about variation amongst Berniece,
because as we saw on a few of the graphs as a lot of variation from one speaker to another.
So I looked at their linguistic background and very briefly, so I asked them whether they spoke Breton at home.
If so, how much and with whom and whether their parents or grandparents spoke Breton.
And to some extent, I found students who use Bressan at home with their parents are more likely to maintain the expected mutation patterns.
So I have this table which tells you about some of my some of the students I worked with, whether they had Bratten at home, how much they used it.
And I used it with how their interlocutor's how how that these fellow Breton's because bratten and how much they use mutation.
And so I could compare for example,
epee who uses mutation almost 100 percent following the article and over half of the time on the objective with Speaker Cuvee for example,
who there's a fair bit of mutation following the article,
but he never mutates the adjective and we can compare how much they use Bratten at home, who they use it with and how their parents know better.
However,
it's very clear that this is a kind of broad brush approach and it's much more there's much more to it than just do your parents be Breton to you?
There are issues with self reporting, how much is sometimes what do they mean when they tell me they speak better and
sometimes it's hard to unpack that and it's certainly not true of all speakers.
So some seem to use mutation much more, much less than others who seem to have very similar home backgrounds based on what they've told me.
I also found that having a sibling who spoke and seemed to make no difference at all.
So this is all kind of it's it's starting to get quite interesting.
But I would need much more information about linguistic linguistic background to have a a more accurate assessment of the role that that plays.
So in conclusion, Britain has complex patterns of gender and initial consonant mutation and an opaque
system of grammatical gender so that cues are not readily available to speakers.
All the speakers have quite clear intuitions about gender, but younger speakers may not.
And linguistic linguistic change has led to competing mutation patterns, for example, following the numeral three.
But despite this opaque system, adult new speakers are maintaining traditional patterns.
So this is counter to what has been claimed about new Russian speakers.
And this is true of mutation of nouns following articles and numerals.
Although there's some disagreement and there's a combination of prioritisation following three.
Not a surprise, given the input,
the patterns of adjectival mutations to show a high degree of variation in all speaking groups so that both groups of adults and the students,
because it's a more complex system, I suspect, and and there's a lot of variation that I can be observed amongst the teenage speakers,
which I think reflects an extended process of acquisition and a low level of input in Britain and a variety of backgrounds.
So just leads me to say thank you very much with two different mutation patterns for listening.
Thank you, Holly. That was fascinating. We have a bit of time for questions, so if you could indicate raise your hands.
Yes, Kastin, please. I don't know if I should be asking the first question, because in a way,
it's perhaps not something directly that you might speak to directly given your paper,
but you had to extend it acquisition there as that on your last slide.
And I was just wondering, given the complexity of the mutation system and given that gender is a trigger for mutation,
what do we know, if anything, about a native acquisition?
So first language acquisition and the acquisition of gender and the acquisition of the mutation patterns.
It seems to me that they have to be linked. Right, that you couldn't have done that then.
And it seems to me that you'd almost have to kind of acquired on a one on an item by item basis, but I don't know.
So do you ever find that, you know, do children overgeneralised these patterns in the finitely overgeneralise mutation patterns?
Young children often use only the mutated form of the noun, whether or not there's a trigger for mutation.
So they use just the mutated form when they we would expect in a mutated form.
I think so all the speakers seem to have quite clear intuitions about the gender of nouns,
whereas from speaking to younger speakers, they tell me that mutation, not gender, is hard.
It's hard to know the gender of a noun, and if it doesn't mutate, they don't really know what the gender should be.
So they have. So I wasn't able to tell you about the form of the numeral,
but that data seems to show that when the noun when the noun doesn't mutate, speakers aren't really very sure of what.
You also have the example of glove, right, where you can say, well,
maybe there's a defined variation there, but at the same time, it kind of seems an unlikely item.
Right. And it struck me as odd.
And I I talked about this research in Brittany, and before I did my kind of reveal, I asked the audience what what they thought.
Did they think it was a masculine and feminine noun? And they were all amazed to find that they didn't agree like.
So I don't know what it is about love. It's a very weird one, but there are a few others that behave like that as well,
including so Kryten is a whistle and it has a feminine looking ending.
It's a feminine. A lot of people thought it was masculine. OK, so there's this there's some variation goes on.
And can I just follow up with, again, the kind of somewhat off the piece?
The question is when judging competence in Britain, just so I'm asking in part their studies about German, that actually, you know,
you can be quite a poor speaker, but if you've mastered the gender system like German speakers, think you a better German speaker than you are.
And I was wondering if that holds true for mutation patterns or whether or whether they're any kind of any information on them.
Oh, I think so. This is so purely anecdotally, I think it depends on the mutation.
So I think that's reflected in the data. So if you don't do a mutation following the article when you should, that really stands out,
whereas mutation in other contexts following two and three, I think there's a bit more leeway there.
And I think that's reflected in what I'm seeing actually. Yes, I think it depends on the context.
Yeah. OK, thank you. OK, Charles is next.
Thanks for the talk and all the interesting data. I was curious about the Rodeck, and you had a lot of these cases with this dealer fricative,
and I'm wondering if that interacts with the mutation at all, because you have this.
If the product is more like the French one and it's a dorsal,
is that going to lead to some kind of more germination like pattern like you saw in the other kids?
Yeah, and so so it kind of depends on the speed at the the speakers don't have a right to that, although it's spelt with an off, it's just a vowel.
So I was the youngest because it varies from speaker to speaker.
So some of them are very influenced by the spelling.
So you do get an erratic. Whether that leads to germination, I don't know, I can't think off the top of my head,
but you would think you would more usually get the glottal fricative in that context following the robotic than you would get the vena fricative.
So a traditional speaker would definitely use a glottal fricative. A younger speaker might not because they've learnt that C apostrophe H equals her.
And so they just do that everywhere regardless. I don't want to answer your question.
Yes. More. Great and Ross.
Sorry, nothing hugely profound to say, but I'm just so there's so many similarities, of course,
including the work for Glove's, but today's rules apply to plurals at all or just to singular.
It's just well, yeah, it's just a singular nouns, because you don't get the same pattern of mutation with plural nouns,
so masculine plural nouns that refer to humans mutate.
So I know. Yeah, yeah. So the gloves come in pairs.
I speak as one who struggles with gender roles, but also struggle. And.
I wanted to say I've lost my blood travels a lot, not knowing, not knowing the gender that just had a couple of comments.
There are huge parallels. And the young people I know are there in the gap, but they're in your generation gap.
So so it's difficult to compare. Exactly.
But what struck me was hearing no, I've heard over many, many years parents correcting gender in young people and their were one speakers.
So this is it language change or is it an L2 effect?
Is is an interesting one.
And I found myself wondering towards the end of your talk whether actually that mutation is going to survive longer and or is that,
I think, overstating the case a bit. But that was that was just a minor quote, contribute.
That's me. So really interesting stuff. You.
Thank you. And RTT. Yes. Thank you. Thank you, honey.
That was that was pretty amazing. Can I can I ask a question about the interaction of your gender and mutation and Mexico and the stress patterns.
So you heard I remember correctly there was a difference between the simulative and suffix
and the non cingulate and the shift in the property or the metrical stress versus the gender.
Now, when you put this together, I was just wondering if you had any correlation between making errors in mutation versus metrical patterns.
Were there any were they more consistent with the let's see what the Mexico partners ought to be more?
Were the variations sort of equal? Yeah.
So there are so there are certain speakers. It's particularly obvious amongst the younger adults because there's fewer of them.
So I have more data on each speaker and there are some speakers who stand out who don't use the mutation as often as you expect.
And you also transfer French strength into Bratten so that we get word final stress.
So the type of pattern I'm looking at here should have an ultimate stress, should have.
And that's what the old speakers do. But the some of the younger speakers use final stress.
So there are those speakers who sort of stand out as sounding quite second language like.
But in general, I would say that speakers are better at mutation and they are at maintaining stress patterns.
So it's that that's sort of more easily acquired than the stress.
And but it is interesting because obviously, if you had a single active suffix,
you've made a word longer and your stress shifts and then that makes the noun feminine as well.
So it's yeah, they they do sort of go together.
Yeah. That's what I was thinking, because you make it longer, you would stress would shift,
then you have a gender shift and on top of mutation you think you can ask about the gloves again.
So you have to manage. Right. And so the ECUs is a suffix I suppose.
No, it looks like a suffix and that is the diminutive suffix though.
That's a diminutive Exxaro one. Yes, but so it sounds like a suffix, but it's not.
And it is also a singular form. But that doesn't stop speakers from adding the singular suffix.
Now that makes sense. Yeah. So minigun.
So if you get a shift in stress and it definitely becomes feminine and then speakers do treat it as a feminine now, but not all speakers do that, OK?
That makes sense. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. And I see Rose has a hand up again.
But that Victorinox. I've asked the question yet. Thank you.
Thanks. It was very interesting talk.
I was wondering whether you found cases of transference of gender from French as revealed on the the mutation processes and.
So, no, not as much as I would expect, but I think that's because there's variation in the mutation anyway.
So there are for example, there are some students who don't do the expected mutation even in nouns like I go so well, not so.
There are two ways to go, one of which mutates and one which doesn't. But yet we still we're still not getting mutation there.
So I think the semantics is not playing as big as much of a role as I kind of expected that it would.
I I've looked a little bit at loanwords from French because obviously, unlike which borrowing from English, from Britain,
is borrowing from French and French has gender, though, do they maintain the gender of the noun when they borrow it?
And while sometimes they do, but sometimes they don't.
And I think that's partly due to the fact that Britain has a lot more masculine and feminine nouns.
It's a very unequal split. So there's a tendency to make things masculine.
And unless they think in which case they might be feminine, I would think because of just, you know, if they borrowed that gender,
not the loanword, not not the whole world, just the just the gender they apply, you know, gender that you find in the French correspondence.
For now, don't mutate, maybe. And what's more interesting is that the oldest, because they do everything, as you would expect,
for masculine and feminine nouns, but for their masculine and feminine labels that belong to French.
And so they will tell you that tree is masculine, despite the fact that they're using a feminine numeral, a mutating it following the article.
I'm finding that in Catalan Spanish. It's super interesting. Thank you.
Thanks. And if I can come in, it's also interesting that I mean, a few years ago,
I came across somebody who's doing some psycholinguistic experiments on gender wells and this idea that gender kind of means mean something.
And then I went and did some experiments and they some of the speakers spontaneously commented to me that they
thought it was really bizarre to be asked whether chairs or clubs or whatever were masculine or feminine.
And incidentally, Glove's shows that if people are making that feminine, then there's not a contact from French.
But the last question I had was, um, whether are notoriously in worst dictionaries.
I've just looked up a small one. I've got there are that there is an abbreviation for a masculine noun, its abbreviation for feminine noun,
and then there's an igby, which is both because a lot of nouns vary in gender according to where they are.
And so they can tell you more about that. I just wondered, is that the case in Britain or is that just not enough?
Yes. So there are some things that you say can be masculine and feminine.
And so Buckett site is one of them and they're usually nouns that don't mutate.
I, I would hesitate to say they're all nouns that don't mutate. But that makes sense, right?
Exactly. Q But then I found some in my data that the dictionary was very clear that said they were feminine or masculine and that I found variation.
So I don't quite I think there's more variation than the dictionaries let on even.
Oh interesting. Yeah. I think you can ask about the orthography.
So you mentioned the older speakers are schooled in French and they're not comfortable reading or writing Breton.
To what extent do they struggle reading it? I would have thought it's a fairly shallow orthography, right?
Yeah. They'd be able to speak of struggle to to read.
And it's it's quite regular, but it's not the same as French.
So it's like for English speakers reading Welsh. Right.
Well, she's quite, quite regular. But you have to know what the rules are in the first place.
So yeah, they they struggle to read and write better,
which is then a shame because there's a whole area of Britain that's not accessible to them because because they're not literate.
So, yeah, I can see there's a question from the chat if the concept of a masculine feminine distinction is bizarre
to these speakers because they have a more native nomenclature for these genders and not that I know of.
No, they I mean, so these little these little snippets that I get from them while while we're chatting about the task in the middle of the task,
they don't then volunteer. I would I would call it this. They just say things like, oh, you know, it's really odd because trees are masculine noun.
And yet in Britain we're treating it like it's a feminine. Isn't Britain strange and some kind of comment?
OK, great. Are there any more questions? I can see chart and see how that just says thank you, Tumbi, yes.
Yes, hello, Holly, I just wondering about the I think my cameras aren't working, but I guess you can hear me.
Yeah, right. I did it. So the phonetics of of the nation and sort of the how how sort of categorically
one might be knighting as opposed to just doing connected speech processes.
Do you have do you have a nightmare trying to decide whether something is in fact a voiced version of what it otherwise would be?
Is there do you have to do a lot of sort of acoustic analysis to decide whether you have a case of the nation?
And so I have done some acoustic analysis.
Largely, it's quite clear that it's more difficult with the kind of voice stops to fricatives actually in connected speech.
And it yeah, it's largely it's clear if I'm not if I'm really not sure and I can't tell from the from looking at the waveform.
And I just excluded from the from the data.
And largely it is clear and I did I did some work where I, I looked at whether the whether the mutated form of the phonemes had the tattoo done,
for example, whether that was the same as you got in a word where the other mutated form, where it was the normal, um, mutated.
And they do seem to be the same if you look at things like the voice onset time and the duration.
So it is a proper phonemic. Change, if that makes sense.
Yeah, yeah, OK, that's great. Thank you. Thanks. OK, great.
I think we should all thank you very, very much for a very informative and clear talk, very clear model of clarity today and.
Yeah, thank you. Peter.