Around 1.9% of the U.S. population is deaf, making for over 6 million deaf people in the U.S. Previous research has shown that deaf adults are consistently given inadequate mental healthcare, and that physicians overall do not have extensive knowledge of how to treat deaf patients. This study aims to examine mental health clinicians’ knowledge in specific, using both an online survey and semi-structured interviews. Mental health clinicians had an average correct answer score of only 17.56 out of 27 (65%). Participants scored particularly bad on questions asking about logistics of the ADA (such as payment) and interpreters.  Two thirds of respondents (21 out of 32) admit that they are either “not very confident” or “not at all confident” in providing the same level of care to a deaf person compared to a hearing person. Nearly half of respondents (14 out of 32) reported knowing little or nothing about their responsibilities under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). This indicates a need for change regarding psychologist training. Insights from the interviews revealed that a Continuing Education module about how to treat deaf patients would be the most useful, including information on the history of d/Deaf oppression, biological interactions between deafness and mental health, Deaf experience/culture, and working with interpreters.

Below are slides from a symposium presentation I gave on February 9 2024.

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Below is the PDF of the lead sheet for the song, and below that is a PDF of the lyrics and analysis. The analysis is also posted below the PDFs.

Analysis/Explanation

For this assignment, I wanted to explore music as an option to communicate about the relationship between ordinary citizens and experts as I both feel creatively motivated to explore it and I think that compared to some of the other possible mediums it is more engaging and attention-grabbing. I decided to center the song loosely around vaccines, as this is the subject of science denial I have heard about the most through parents of friends. I have written songs in the past and spend much of my time outside of classes involved in music and musical theater, so I was excited to use music as my medium. While my initial plan was to create an original song, this proved to be too much to accomplish in a short amount of time, so I decided to re-write lyrics to an existing song. “I Can Hear the Bells” has a section in which Tracy lists out the rounds she and Link will go through, and I thought that was perfect to repurpose for steps for citizens to follow when deciding whether they should trust experts. Additionally, I know that personally I am far more likely to listen to a fun parody song than I am to read an op-ed column or listen to a podcast/interview that a friend sends me. For this reason, I think this medium it would hold people’s attention more, would engage them more, and would be more memorable (case in point: I have had this song stuck in my head for the past two weeks) than some other mediums. Due to this, I decided to rewrite the lyrics to “I Can Hear the Bells.” In addition to writing the lyrics, I decided to create a lead sheet for my version since I changed some of the rhythms while changing the lyrics.

In the lyrics, I kept the title and hook (“I can hear the bells”) mostly the same, although in this case “bells” refers not to wedding bells, but to the warning bells that we can all perceive in “expertise” if we are vigilant (and would be accompanied musically by notification sounds from social media, as this is where a lot of misinformation spreads). In the section based around the six steps citizens can take to screen experts, I made reference to some of the authors we have read in class. For example, steps one through five are references to the different “sources of evidence” that novices can use in the Goldman text (Goldman, 2001, p. 93). Step one, “Do the rest support them too?” is a reference to Goldman’s “agreement from other experts” (Goldman, 2001, p. 97). Naomi Oreskes also writes on how we can use the standard of “consensus” to validate expert claims (Oreskes, 2019, p. 32). Step two, “Have their guesses all come true?” is a reference to Goldman’s discussion of using experts’ “past track records[…]to assess the likelihoods of their having correct answers to the current question” (Goldman, 2001, 106). Step three, “Can they debate their points with ease?” is a reference to Goldman’s indirect justification of “dialectical superiority” (Goldman, 2001, p. 95). In initially reading the text and reconstructing his arguments in class, I found that it was incredibly important to stress that citizens must not judge based on “greater debating skill,” but counterpoints to a contrary side’s arguments (Goldman, 2001, p. 95). For this reason, I clarified that it is “Not just rhetoric,” and in the beginning of the song I also allude to this with “When you analyze their points / You’ll find for one side there’s no counterpoint.”

Step four and five, “Does everyone get a say?” and “Who’s paying their way?” references the potential biases experts may have (for example, in the case of Andrew Wakefield who published a paper theorizing about a potential link between the MMR vaccine and autism, he was motivated to prove a link because he could make money from testing kits) (Deer, 2011). Step four is also a reference to Naomi Oreskes’ advocacy for diversity in science, as “A community with diverse values is more likely to identify and challenge prejudicial beliefs embedded in, or masquerading as, scientific theory (Oreskes, 2019, p. 38).

Step five, questioning where people are getting their financial support, is also a reference to Turner’s typology of experts, based on the different support systems that each relies upon (although this support is more than financial). Following where people receive their monetary support can often lead to identification of Type 3 and Type 4 experts, as Type 3 experts such as self-help authors get their financial support from their “following” that they create (Turner, 2001, p. 131). Type 4 experts are also identifiable through money ties since they are “subsidized to speak as experts” in order to convince a wider public and “thus impel them into some sort of political action or choice” (Turner, 2001, p. 133). Since Wakefield was advocating for individual parents (not for the citizenry as a whole to change regulations) to get separate vaccines instead of the full MMR vaccine, in this case he would seem to be more of a Type 3 expert, although one could argue his goal was to have the full population change over to separate vaccines. However, since he ultimately ended up discredited and giving talks to anti-vaccine groups, receiving his funds from followers, I would argue he is more of a Type 3 expert.

The final step, step six “What’s the risk if true? / If it’s riskier to not act then why / Not just try” summarizes Naomi Oreskes’ question that she believes people should ask themselves: “What are the relative risks of ignoring scientific claims that turn out to be true versus acting on claims that later turn out to have been incorrect?” (Oreskes, 2019, p. 46). This is also referenced in the stanza discussing how unvaccinated people pose a risk to all of us but “they don’t care / ‘Cause their risk’s too scary.” Oreskes suggests that the way we should reach people is “through their values,” and so I hoped that emphasizing that we all want to be safe but people are prioritizing their risk over others may help get through to people who are too focused on their individual risk and not on the collective risk of not being vaccinated, especially in light of the general lack of evidence for the autism/vaccine link (Oreskes, 2019, p. 47).

The lines “There’s no ‘value-neutral’[…]But some still can be useful” references Naomi Oreskes’ point in Why Trust Science? that “incomplete and even inaccurate knowledge may still be useful and reliable,” even in the face of some biases or lack of consensus (Oreskes, 2019, p. 7). The beginning of that line, that there is no value-neutral science, draws on many of the readings throughout the quarter, for example, Pamuk’s point that “there is no neutral way of aggregating, summarizing, and simplifying information” (Pamuk, 2021, p. 72). One of the points that I found most hopeful and inspiring from Oreskes was her point that in all her examples of false prior beliefs, “each of them [included] red flags that were evident at the time” (Oreskes, 2019, p. 7). By seeing the red flags (or hearing the bells), we can see the false beliefs now. This is referenced by the “But there were so many signs” line.

The last line that has a clear single influence is the stanza “Everybody says that / The news needs to be ‘fair’ / But fair can’t be fair / If one side’s not really there.” This references how the news will commonly present two sides of a scientific debate as equal, even if there is a general scientific consensus and a small fringe group on the other side. Pamuk discusses the media’s false claim to neutrality, saying “efforts to maintain neutrality through a balanced presentation of ‘both sides’ of an issue[…]can end up misleading readers as well as obscuring the truth” (Pamuk, 2021, p. 88). This issue with media representation of scientific claims particularly irks me, and so I wanted to include it in the song, to remind people that a “two-sides” issue may not actually be two equal sides.

For the parody song, I primarily drew on Oreskes and Goldman, as I found Oreskes’ discussion and Goldman’s five ways a public could evaluate experts to be compelling. I also drew on Pamuk and Turner, although to a lesser extent.

References

Deer, B. (2011, January 11). How the vaccine crisis was meant to make money. BMJ. https://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.c5258

Goldman, A. I. (2001). Experts: Which ones should you trust?. Philosophy and phenomenological research, 63(1), 85-110.

Oreskes, N. (2019). Why Trust Science?. Princeton University Press.

Pamuk, Z. (2021). Politics and expertise: how to use science in a democratic society. Princeton University Press.

Shaiman, M. (2002). I Can Hear the Bells [Recorded by M. Chenoweth]. On Hairspray (Original Broadway Cast Recording) [CD]. Sony BMG Music Entertainment.

Turner, S. (2001). What is the Problem with Experts?. Social studies of science, 31(1), 123-149.

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Additionally, below is a “poster” used at a semi-symposium to summarize the points of the paper:

1 Introduction

As of September 2019, there were more monthly users of YouTube than Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and Vimeo combined (Trendacosta, 2020). Nearly twenty percent of Americans watch YouTube for more than three hours a day (Trendacosta, 2020). In the U.S., YouTube has around 70% of the market share among online video platforms, and as such is the platform of choice for those looking to make money from online video creation (Chung, 2020). As of 2017, over two million U.S. creators posted on YouTube, earning about four billion dollars per year (Trendacosta, 2020). With its enormous influence, YouTube’s copyright policies not only affects its millions of creatosr, but also impact other platforms’ copyright policies (Chung, 2020).

Copyright law in the U.S. began with article 1, section 8 of the Constitution, which allows Congress to enact legislation to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries” (U.S. Const. art. I, § 8). Even though copyright has begun incorporating more modern technologies under its umbrella, the underlying goal remains the progress of science and art. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) passed in 1998 was an example of a step to theoretically update copyright law for the new millennium (Seng, 2014).

However, this was before user-generated content became popular (around 2005), meaning that the DMCA still favored mass media copyright holders and provided limited protections for users (Solomon, 2015). Since the DMCA’s policies are the basis for YouTube’s copyright policies, YouTube’s copyright policies directly in line with the DMCA also favor mass media copyright holders and provide limited protections for users. YouTube also has copyright policies that go beyond the DMCA, such as Content ID, that reinforce this bias, and the DMCA has no regulation surrounding these policies, partly because in 1998 algorithms such as Content ID would not have been easy to foresee. YouTube’s copyright policies stifle the progress of science and useful arts, directly contradictory to the original spirit of copyright, by misidentifying fair use as copyright infringement, giving users a biased and threatening pathway in order to resolve these misidentifications, and providing users limited information, creating a culture of fear in which users have to be more concerned with appeasing the algorithm and mass media copyright holders than the actual law.

2 Background on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)

The Digitial Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was passed to update copyright law for the modern age, including limiting the liability of Internet intermediaries as service providers (Seng, 2014). It also serves as a template for similar defenses in the European Union, and the People’s Republic of China, and the legal foundation for YouTube’s copyright policies (although it does not prescribe all of them) (Seng, 2014). Under subsection 512(a) of the DMCA, Online Service Providers (OSPs) are not liable for users infringing copyright as long as they conform to several requirements (“Digital Millennium Copyright Act,” 1998).

The relevant requirements in the DMCA for this discussion of YouTube’s copyright policies are those concerning the takedown request system and the repeat infringer system. Subsection 512(c) prescribes that the OSP will not be liable as long as they: do not have “actual knowledge” that the material is infringing, “in the absence of such actual knowledge, is not aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent,” or when notified act “expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material” (“Digital Millennium Copyright Act,” 1998). Essentially, if they are notified about copyright infringement, they must act quickly to take it down, although they are not required to seek out instances of infringement.

The DMCA goes on to describe the necessary elements of a takedown notification, including that it be a “written communication,” with a “physical or electronic signature of a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed,” an “identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed,” a statement of good faith, and a statement that the information is accurate under penalty of perjury (“Digital Millennium Copyright Act,” 1998). If the alleged infringer wants to resist this takedown notification, they must provide a counter notification that has the signature of the user, their information, a statement of good faith, consent to the jurisdiction of the relevant federal district court, and identification of the material that was taken down (“Digital Millennium Copyright Act,” 1998). If the claimant wants to pursue a takedown after this counter notification, they must seek a court order to restrain the user, or the OSP must place the material back online or cease disabling access to it (Seng, 2014). This is the DMCA’s described takedown process. Takedown notice, counter notification, court order.

In addition to the takedown system, in order for OSPs to be covered under the safe harbor provisions, they must also have a “policy that provides for the termination[…]of subscribers and account holders of the service provider’s system[…]who are repeat infringers” (“Digital Millennium Copyright Act,” 1998). These two requirements—the takedown system and the repeat infringer system—form the basis of YouTube’s copyright policies, although YouTube’s policies are even more involved than what is required by law.

3 Content ID: Lack of Discretion

Content ID is one of the ways YouTube has gone beyond what is required of them by law, and in so doing introduced more problems into their copyright infringement policies, resulting in a bias towards large copyright holders and away from creators, resulting in the stifling of creativity on YouTube. Content ID serves as the first step in their copyright policies. Originating in 2007, Content ID is a collection of algorithms that scan uploaded YouTube videos and compares them against reference files provided by content owners (Boroughf, 2015). However, only certain righstholders are allowed to add content to the Content ID database: those who “’own a substantial body of material that is frequently uploaded by the YouTube creator community’” (Trendacosta, 2020). In practice, this means that “every major U.S. network broadcaster, movie studio, and record label” uses it, but not smaller individual creators (Boroughf, 2015). YouTube’s Content ID database has more than 25 million reference files totaling 100,000 hours of material from more than 5,000 partners (Boroughf, 2015). Content ID is responsible for around 99% of YouTube’s copyright claims, responsible for 757,993,607 claims in the first half of 2022 alone, so it is of the upmost importance to look for any flaws in it as YouTube’s first line of defense against copyright infringement (“YouTube Copyright Transparency Report”).

When Content ID finds a match, it will apply a Content ID claim to the video and either: add advertising and collect ad revenue, monitor viewership statistics, or block the video depending on the copyright owner’s Content ID settings (“How Content ID Works”). In the vast majority of cases, copyright owners will opt to monetize—in the first half of 2022, rightsholders chose to monetize over 90% of all Content ID claims (“YouTube Copyright Transparency Report”).

In theory, this policy makes sense—many copyright holders no longer view the DMCA as an effective solution to copyright protection because they must search out copyright infringement and then alert sites like YouTube, so it makes sense that they would want some review of material on YouTube in order to police copyright infringement for them (Boroughf, 2015). As of June 2022, more than 500 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube every minute, an amount that is unfeasible to have manually reviewed (Ceci, 2023). Content ID allows for copyright holders to control their copyrighted content without searching out content themselves and/or going through the arduous legal process and the normally high transaction costs associated with licensing (Boroughf, 2015). In addition, since it allows a copyright holder to track a video, it may encourage tolerated uses (Boroughf, 2015). However, in practice it allows for a few select copyright holders to block entire videos or take ad revenue from videos that fall under copyright exceptions such as fair use, those that license the material that they use, and those that were never intended to make any money in the first place without sharing any of those profits with creators regardless of the proportion of copyrighted content in the video. 

YouTube itself admits that Content ID cannot distinguish “what content was properly licensed and can’t determine what qualifies for exceptions to copyright, such as fair use or fair dealing” (“Disputing a Content ID Claim”). Since videos are automatically claimed by an automated system, the copyright holders in the Content ID system (who are, keep in mind, some of the largest and most powerful copyright holders with such recognizable names as Warner Brothers) do not have to burden themselves with knowing the intricacies of fair use and attempting to argue that videos fall under fair use. They can simply sit back and enjoy the stream of income they have set up. This protects the copyright holders from liability concerning their “good faith” takedowns both because copyright claims are not takedown notices and because they are automatic—there is no good or bad faith involved. 

The lack of discretion regarding fair use and licensing puts unearned money and control into the hands of large copyright holders at the expense of users. Users are entitled to their content if it falls under fair use or they have licensed the material they are using. Fair use allows for the limited use of copyrighted works for purposes such as criticism, commentary, news reporting, education, or research (“Copyright Law”). When determining whether a use falls under fair use or not, courts base their decision on factors such as: the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount and substantiality of the portion used, and the effect on the potential market for the copyrighted work (Chung, 2020). Fair use is particularly problematic for algorithms like Content ID because determining fair use requires weighing different factors to come to a conclusion in each case—discretion Content ID lacks. As a result, millions of videos are falsely claimed—in the first half of 2022 alone, over three and a half million Content ID claims were disputed, and 2,185,698 of those were resolved in favor of the uploader (“YouTube Copyright Transparency Report”). These false claims include such notable instances as Content ID blocking NASA’s mission to mars, Michelle Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention, and a live stream in which people were singing the “Happy Birthday” song (Boroughf, 2015). All of which were clear instances of fair use, and yet were taken down anyways. Each false claim represents possible revenue, viewers, and time lost because of an automated system that lacks discretion.

In the case of videos getting blocked or monetized, regardless of the proportion of copyrighted material contained in the video, the entire video gets blocked/monetized (Boroughf, 2015). So, even if a YouTuber has 99% original content in their video but happen to use a few seconds of a popular song, the music publisher can claim the video and reap the ad revenue, leaving the YouTuber with none—it can even put ads on a video that was not previously monetized and obtain ad revenue from a video that was never intended to make money. This is directly in contrast to the spirit of existing U.S. copyright law (although not in violation of it), as when a copyright holder seeks to obtain profits obtained by an infringer, they are “entitled to recover the actual damages suffered by him or her as a result of the infringement, and any profits of the infringer that are attributable to the infringement” (“Copyright Law”). Copyright holders are essentially entitled to the revenue that copyright infringers took from them by using their content—this is not meant to be a punitive reward. Yet, Content ID acts as a punitive reward for copyright holders, punishing users who want to use others’ content legally to create better videos (Boroughf, 2015). The punishment for legally using others’ content stifles creativity on YouTube by incentivizing users to make worse/less informative/less creative videos in order to hopefully keep the revenue/viewers from it, directly contradictory to the spirit of copyright law.

Content ID’s discretion-less claiming system not only hurts users but also hurts copyright holders who want to tolerate some uses of their content. For example, in late 2013 there was a wave of Content ID claims against video game videos, with some YouTubers reporting that up to fifteen percent of their content was now diverting ad revenues to third parties (Boroughf, 2015). This not only negatively affected the users whose videos were being claimed, but it also negatively affected game publishers. Numerous game publishers have publicly stated that they encourage game reviews and Let’s Play videos that use game footage, and yet game reviewers’ and gamers’ videos were being taken down for copyright infringement (Boroughf, 2015). This is partly because Content ID automatically claims all videos that match part of the reference file, not distinguishing between types of videos that the copyright holders may want to tolerate. In this case, while game publishers would want to claim videos that just uploaded game footage without any commentary, they did not want to claim Let’s Play videos and game reviews. However, Content ID has no way to distinguish these uses due to its lack of discretion. In this way, Content ID in fact does not encourage tolerated uses but works against tolerated uses, which once again works against creativity and creative progress on YouTube through stifling more forms of content.

Additionally, multiple rightsholders may add the same content to the Content ID database, resulting in multiple entities being able to make demands on a video, regardless of who the primary rightsholder is (Trendacosta, 2020). This is the other part of how Content ID failed both users and game publishers in 2013. In December of 2013, Ubisoft acknowledged that some of the matches may have been “’auto-matched against the music catalogue on our digital stores—it might show as being claimed by our distributor ‘idol’” (Boroughf, 2015). In this case, while Ubisoft had set it so that they were not claiming videos that used game footage, the music distributor was claiming the videos because of the game music in the background of game footage. Since Ubisoft and the music distributor are two separate entities, Ubisoft (and other similar game publishers) had to then discuss every claim with the music distributor so that they could get the music distributor to release the claim and have the videos stay up (Boroughf, 2015). In an analysis of videos taken down by Content ID claims and DMCA notices, researchers found that music claimants were 41% more likely to block gameplay videos than the average, even though overall gameplay videos are 83% less likely to be removed by a Content ID claim than an unclassified video (Gray & Suzor, 2020). These claims led to Ubisoft issuing a statement asking that YouTubers leave the video live and send them the information on the video and who flagged it so that they “’could get it cleared hopefully same day’” (Boroughf, 2015). The need for a public statement is indicative of the backlash Ubisoft was getting. Even though they had said that they tolerate uses of their content, YouTubers were still having their content claimed, leading to bad press for Ubisoft and more work for them in order to get the claims resolved. Content ID not only does not work for users because of its lack of discretion, but it also does not work for copyright holders who want to tolerate some uses of their content. Overall, it works for large copyright holders who want to passively take revenue from creators who use their content (legally or not) without being liable, and works against creators and copyright holders who want to tolerate uses, leading to stifling progress for content on YouTube.

4 Dispute System: Biased in Favor of Claimants

If a YouTuber gets falsely flagged due to Content ID’s lack of discretion with fair use and licensing, in order to attempt to resolve this false claim they must go through YouTube’s copyright claim dispute system. YouTube has provided a handy chart to see the general flowchart for disputes, found in Figure 1 below (“Dispute a Content ID claim”). 

A YouTuber must first dispute a Content ID claim, which YouTube notifies the copyright holder of. The copyright holder then decides if the claim is valid or not, or they let the claim expire after 30 days. If they decide the claim is invalid (upholding the claim), the creator can file for an appeal, after which the claimant again has 30 days to respond by either releasing the claim or filing a DMCA takedown request (Kaye & Gray, 2021). For videos where the Content ID claim resulted in the video being blocked, the uploader can skip the first step and begin at the appeal step to get the process resolved quicker (“Dispute a Content ID claim”). The final step—the “request takedown” option—is the only step of the process that takes place outside of YouTube, the rest are preliminary and are meant to stop the claim from escalating to a takedown request. Yet, there are flaws both in the DMCA’s takedown process, YouTube’s dispute process, and the way they are connected that creates a bias in favor of claimants.

      Under the DMCA, if a counter notice is issued against a claimant who has issued a takedown request, the claimant then has a choice between accepting the counter notification or filing legal action against the infringer (Chung, 2020). The DMCA’s approach in itself is already flawed since it gives the claimants—generally larger production companies with millions to spend on lawyers—the choice between suing and letting a perceived copyright claim go. However, while the cost of litigation is not as impactful for companies like MGM or Warner Bros., it can be life or death for a small YouTuber. The 2019 report of the economic surey conducted by the American Intellectual Property Law Association found that the median cost of litigating a copyright infringement case through trial ranged from $550,000 to $6.5 million—money that most YouTubers just do not have (Chung, 2020). Even for extremely popular YouTubers such as h3h3productions, with a whopping 6.6 million subscribers, they claimed they needed to start a fundraiser to cover their litigation costs for an infringement suit in 2017—a suit they won using the fair use defense (Chung, 2020). Additionally, filing a counter notification requires the filer to reveal their contact information (Trendacosta, 2020). For YouTubers who wish to remain anonymous, this enormously disincentivizes them from fighting any takedown notices. Since the DMCA’s takedown request system ends in a potential lawsuit, YouTubers are incentivized to avoid it at all costs, and accept takedown notices even if the content they are making is fair use. 

The DMCA has several main supposed safety valve provisions to prevent DMCA abuse from happening, but none provide an appealing or feasible option to creators. The first is that there is a requirement that a copyright owner submit any DMCA takedown under a “good faith belief” that they are infringing (Chung, 2020). This creates a cause of action against persons who “knowingly materially misrepresent” whether the content was infringing or taken down by mistake (Chung, 2020). However, in 2004, the ninth circuit ruled in Rossi v. Motion Picture Ass’n of America that the “good faith belief” and “knowing misrepresentation” standards required a demonstration of actual knowledge of misrepresentation on the part of a putative right holder (Chung, 2020). This is both difficult to prove for creators and requires legal action, which, as discussed above, is simply not something many creators would be able to comfortably pursue. Once again, this biases the DMCA takedown notice (and therefore the final end of YouTube’s dispute system) in favor of the claimants—generally large corporations.  

Another seeming safety valve is that “a putative right holder must consider fair use before submitting a takedown request” (Chung, 2020). However, in Lenz v. Universal, the ninth circuit held that a rightsholder’s determination as to fair use passes as long as they subjectively believe it to be true (Trendacosta, 2020). This once again places an enormous burden of proof on the creators to prove active belief that the takedown request was false, and once again requires legal action. Since creators would have to prove either bad faith or belief that the request they were issuing was invalid due to fair use, this renders attaining justice for invalid DMCA claims virtually inaccessible for most creators, and so it incentivizes creators to not counter notice if they receive a DMCA takedown request and to keep the Content ID claim within YouTube’s dispute system as much as possible. 

However, attaining justice within YouTube’s dispute system is also difficult. In the first two instances before a takedown request—the dispute and the appeal—the copyright holder presides over whether the dispute/appeal is valid or not (Kaye & Gray, 2021). As one YouTuber put it, “’it’s like a murderer going to court and deciding whether he is guilty or not’” (Kaye & Gray, 2021.) Copyright holders using Content ID—who are, remember, on YouTube mostly large companies—have no reason to release claims. Even if the claims are false, most YouTubers would not be able to sue them, and the fear of litigation is enough to deter YouTubers from following through on a dispute all the way to court.  

Additionally, YouTube further disincentives creators to pursue claims up through takedown requests through their interpretation of the DMCA’s required “repeat infringer” policy (“Digital Millennium Copyright Act,” 1998). On YouTube, if a creator receives a takedown request (which, again, even if it is erroneous creators are incentivized not to fight), their channel will receive a “copyright strike” (Kaye & Gray, 2021). One copyright strike results in the creator going through “Copyright School,” where they must watch videos about copyright law (Kaye & Gray, 2021). In addition, copyright strikes may affect creators’ ability to monetize their videos and their access to live streaming (“Copyright strike basics”). After three copyright strikes, the user’s account is terminated, all their videos are deleted, and they are not allowed to create new channels (“Copyright strike basics”). In this way, YouTubers are further disincentivized from following through on a dispute due to the increased chance that they will get a takedown request and their income (and possibly their channel) will be in jeopardy. Additionally, copyright holders can submit a takedown request at any point in the dispute process, they do not need to wait for the dispute and appeal to be resolved (Trendacosta, 2020). So, even by disputing a claim, YouTubers are drawing the attention of massive copyright holders, who can choose to issue a takedown request at any time, resulting in a copyright strike on their channel and loss of money, and they will most likely not choose to counter notify due to fear of litigation. 

Copyright holders are also able to schedule a DMCA takedown request, notifying the uploader that there will be a DMCA takedown request issued in 7 days if they do not delete the video or release the appeal (Trendacosta, 2020). This clearly threatens the user with potential litigation and provides an ultimatum for them to either release the appeal/delete the video or receive a copyright strike on their channel, which could lead to loss of revenue or account termination.

On every level, YouTubers are disincentivized from disputing Content ID claims, following through on those disputes, and going to court over those disputes. If they dispute a claim/follow up on a dispute, the claimant is presiding over it and so is more likely to say that the copyright claim was valid, and so they are then more likely to receive a copyright strike due to a takedown request being issued, which affects monetization and potentially the termination of their channel. Even if they are willing to take a copyright strike, if they counter notify, they must reveal personal information about themselves that they may not feel comfortable revealing. After the counter notification, the claimant can choose to start a legal action, which in most cases where the creator does not have access to a large amount of funds can spell financial ruin for a creator. Lastly, if they wanted to sue a company for DMCA abuse, they would both need to move through the federal legal system (since copyright law is federal) and prove bad faith or knowledge that the claim was invalid under fair use, both of which are high burdens of proof for the creator. Overall, creators are disincentivized from attempting to get retribution for false claims (which, as discussed earlier, are prevalent due to Content ID’s lack of discretion), and copyright holders can make false claims with near impunity since they do not fear legal retribution from small creators, and can make money off of content they may not be able to prove in court that they own. 

5 Lack of Information

The Content ID claim and dispute process discussed above are only the way those systems work for users if they have all the information they could have access to. However, in practice, YouTubers rarely have all the information, and there are many common misconceptions with regard to concepts such as fair use that lead to the claim and dispute system working even worse for content creators than it already does. 

For instance, YouTube says that due to “’agreements with certain music copyright owners[…]this may mean the Content ID appeals and counter notification processes won’t be available’” (Kaye & Gray, 2021). YouTube has shared no information about which copyright owners this applies to, and so creators may find themselves blindsided by not being able to appeal Content ID claims. Additionally, sometimes claimants can be difficult to contact, and YouTube does not give much help—this resulted in one YouTuber being unable to locate the claimant, saying “’How am I supposed to resolve the issue with the claimant when there’s no way to contact the claimant?’” (Kaye & Gray, 2021).  

Additionally, trade secret laws often prevent public access to automated private regulatory systems such as Content ID (Gray & Suzor, 2020). In order to find information about how Content ID works, creators mostly turn to “educated guesses made from experiencing the system first hand” (Trendacosta, 2020). This results in creators speculating about what will trigger the Content ID algorithm. In a study of 144 YouTube videos in which creators discuss YouTube’s copyright policies, creators often speculated about this, with some thinking it would only claim copyrighted material over 20 seconds long, and others arguing that it could be triggered by much smaller amounts (Kaye & Gray, 2021). In favor of the latter theory, in one instance a ten-hour video of white noise had less than a second claimed by a rightsholder (Trendacosta, 2020). Additionally, some YouTubers in the study warned that YouTube’s royalty free music library was untrustworthy, that the license could be revoked at any time, resulting in a video being claimed (Kaye & Gray, 2021). Since a Content ID claim, even an invalid one, will result in loss of revenue and views, creators are constantly trying to figure out the “rules” that they can abide by in order to stave off Content ID, yet there are no clear rules, resulting in a “’culture of fear’” as one YouTuber put it (Trendacosta, 2020). 

Due to the lack of clear rules from YouTube on what will get through Content ID and lack of information on fair use, YouTubers are essentially forced to become copyright experts if they want to be able to defend their use of copyrighted content. Creators must attempt to figure out what exactly constitutes fair use and what will result in them being sued—an example of this is the multitude of “fair use misconceptions” articles, which list things common on YouTube that technically are not fair use, such as giving credit in the description, the channel not making money, and making covers of songs (McDuff, 2015). It is easy to understand why creators would think this would protect them, as many videos using copyrighted content such as tv show edits can be left up since the Content ID copyright holder can choose to take no action on claims, and then creators are blindsided when, using the same tactics, their videos using other copyrighted material are claimed and their appeals are unsuccessful (Trendacosta, 2020). This contributes to the “’culture of fear’” as no one is exactly sure how it works, and the distinctions between Content ID copyright holders leads to uneven enforcement of copyright, increasing the doubt around what policies truly are even more.

Even when some YouTubers may feel that they have finally figured out Content ID’s rules, they may completely change on them. The Content ID filter changes constantly, so videos that once passed constantly need to be re-edited (Trendacosta, 2020). Todd Nathanson, who runs the YouTube account “Todd in the Shadows,” with over 300,000 subscribers, said that he can tell when there has been a major change to Content ID because hundreds of videos that had previously passed are suddenly flagged (Trendacosta, 2020). For Lindsay Ellis, a creator with millions of subscribers, after a major change to the Content ID system it took three weeks to deal with the new claims that came in (Trendacosta, 2020). In order to get these videos reinstated, creators either have to re-edit videos until they pass Content ID or go through the thoroughly flawed dispute process, which can take time. Internet publishing is time sensitive, and “an ill-timed block can severely impact views and, therefore, revenue,” therefore creators are incentivized to attempt to pass Content ID (Trendacosta, 2020). However, attempting to re-edit the video can be extremely frustrating, as Harry Brewis, who runs the YouTube channel “hbomberguy” found in July 2020 when he uploaded a video criticizing the animated series RWBY. In order to get past Content ID, he repeatedly edited and uploaded the video, and he said that “[t]he shocking part was every time it happened I thought, ‘Oh that’s great, it only got hit twice, that’s really encouraging’ and then the next one would get hit three times’” (Trendacosta, 2020). The infuriating nature of editing videos to get around Content ID is directly attributable to the lack of information available to YouTubers as to what will get through the filter and the filter constantly changing. 

Constantly reinforcing the culture of fear is the way YouTube presents the dispute process. In most of the YouTube help pages concerning the dispute process, it will contain a sentence to the effect of “This decision shouldn’t be taken lightly. Sometimes, you may need to carry that dispute through the appeal and DMCA counter notification process” (“Frequently asked questions about fair use”). YouTube also commonly warns creators that disputing matches can result in a strike, and, if enough strikes accumulate, the loss of their channel (Trendacosta, 2020). While this may seem like YouTube is simply informing creators of the risks, through this continual emphasis on the perils of disputing a claim while not emphasizing that it could result in them getting their revenue back or the video being put back incentivizes creators to accept invalid claims by invoking the fear of litigation and/or channel termination. For instance, when Lindsay Ellis first began disputing Content ID claims, she says, “[I was] scared to do it because of the way YouTube wants you to think it works. Like, ‘are you sure you want to do this? You could lose your channel’” (Trendacosta, 2020). This results in revenue going to copyright holders that YouTube works closely with, keeping YouTube’s relationships with them positive, which is good for YouTube. 

In addition to YouTube emphasizing the potential for channel termination/litigation, the user interface also constantly changes and presents problems for creators. During an interview with Lindsay Ellis and her producer Elisa Hansen, they found that the interface had changed since they last used it and they “could not even navigate to see how many Content ID claims Ellis’ channel had” (Trendacosta, 2020). Additionally, the interface has not provided enough information about the dispute process. Ellis’s account “sat with hundreds of Content ID claims for years because they did not know they could contest them” (Trendacosta, 2020). The dispute process is confusing and uninformative for creators, especially for those not well versed in YouTube. In January 2020, NYU Law School posted a video where they used portions of songs to discuss how experts analyze songs for similarity in cases of copyright infringement, which was flagged by Content ID. While those working in intellectual property law at NYU Law were certain the video did not infringe, they ended up “lost in the process of disputing and appealing Content ID matches[…]They could not figure out whether or not challenging Content ID to the end and losing would result in the channel being deleted” (Trendacosta, 2020). As an example of how the simple-looking dispute pathway in Figure 1 does not accurately represent how confusing the actual process can seem, the Electronic Frontier Foundation created a side-by-side comparison of YouTube’s given pathway with how the Content ID dispute system actually works, found in Figure 2 below (Trendacosta, 2020).

This illustrates how confusing it is for creators—especially those new to YouTube or not technologically savvy—to navigate Content ID and know how to keep themselves safe from copyright strikes, channel termination, and ultimately litigation. The lack of information available to users about Content ID, and the obfuscation of the dispute process in the user interface and help pages results in creators not disputing their claims because they are uninformed and fearful of what may happen to them and their channel. 

6 Policy Implications

A. CASE Act

The Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement (CASE) Act was passed in December of 2020, and is meant to help lower the costs of litigation of takedown requests (Henris, 2021). This would lessen the effect of threats of litigation and therefore lessen the potential threat that disputing a copyright claim poses to users. It sets up a small claims court, in which claims will be heard by a Copyright Claims Board made up of 3 full-time copyright claims officers (Henri, 2021). The board will be able to hear copyright infringement claims, actions for a declaration of noninfringement (such as a declaration of fair use), claims that a party knowingly sent false takedown notices, and related counterclaims (Henri, 20210. An attorney is not essential (lowering costs of litigation significantly) and proceedings do not require in-person appearances by parties (Henri, 2021). This looks to be a promising reform to lessen the financial threat of litigation. 

Since the Copyright Claims Board only started accepting claims in June of 2022 and has not made its first decision, its efficacy cannot be determined (Mentzer & Keegan, 2022). Of the claims in the first two weeks of the Board going live, most of the claims are for the alleged infringement of photographs (Mentzer & Keegan, 2022). This may mean that YouTubers may not fully take advantage of this path, or that litigation is still too ominous for many, although it is difficult to make any determination in such early days. One major concern with the CASE Act was that either party is able to opt out of the small claims court, causing the dispute to be handled as normal. This was a concern since large companies with large amounts of money at their disposal could decide to opt out and pursue normal litigation, which would be much more intimidating for users. As of January 2023, almost 300 cases had been filed, and only 20 claims had ended with the respondents opting out of the Board’s jurisdiction, which is a positive sign for the Board (Setty, 2023). However, it is still too early to say whether the CASE Act will be effective or not. 

B. Proportional Monetization/Blocking 

A major concern discussed in section III is that Content ID claims block or monetize all of a video regardless of the proportion of copyrighted material contained therein. In order to help fix this, policy could change so that claimants can only claim revenue proportional to the amount of copyrighted material and can only block the portion of the video that is copyrighted material. While YouTube has little incentive to implement this, it could be changed by amending the DMCA to ensure that any monetization/blocking of videos will be proportional to the amount of copyrighted material in it (Solomon, 2015). While this would not eliminate the incentive for large copyright owners to place invalid Content ID claims, it would both mitigate the incentive for large copyright owners to abuse the DMCA/YouTube’s copyright claim dispute system and would mitigate the risk for creators to put clips into their videos. This would help protect fair use, something Content ID currently puts in peril, by ensuring that creators still get revenue from their original content. 

C. Education for Creators 

As discussed in section V, creators have little information on how exactly the Content ID/dispute system works. This could be fixed by amending the DMCA to add a provision that requires providers to educate content creators on their rights under the fair use doctrine as well as platform-specific policies (such as Content ID) (Solomon, 2015). Additionally, creators have mentioned a need for a dedicated helpline “with a human being on the other end” being needed (Trendacosta, 2020). This may not be feasible for smaller platforms, but the DMCA could have an amendment that requires platforms above a certain size to have a helpline. 

Depending on how much traffic this helpline would get, it may require significant manpower, and so figuring out the size cutoff may take some revisions. However, this would help with the lack of information YouTubers currently have about how their videos can get through Content ID and how the dispute process works. 

D. Penalize Copyright Holders for False Flags 

Some have proposed penalizing copyright holders when their flags turn out to be invalid (Solomon, 2015). However, this poses a problem. Content ID is automatic, and so any false claims would not be necessarily the fault of the copyright holders but of the algorithmic system. This could be amended to copyright holders getting penalized for dismissing valid disputes, although as discussed previously, creators are incentivized not to dispute, or to accept dismissed disputes as to avoid litigation or channel termination, and so invalid disputes may not get resolved correctly. In this way, while well-meaning, this proposed solution may have little impact on the efficacy of YouTube’s copyright policies. 

E. Oversight of Disputes 

The lack of oversight over disputes and counter notifications poses a problem for the impartiality of the decisions. For counter notifications, the DMCA could be changed to state that it will be presided over by a third party. However, who this third party is poses an issue. If it is a YouTube representative, then they may still be biased towards large corporations that they have relationships with. If it is a judge/lawyer/intellectual property expert, this may result in extra costs that would further deter creators from seeking justice.  

For disputes, these are not required by the DMCA and so are up to YouTube to decide how to run. In order to encourage impartiality in these decisions, some have suggested that a third-party website should be required to be set up similar to ChillingEffects.org (Boroughf, 2015). Blocking requests and monetization requests would be sent to the website along with information on who the claimant is, why the video is blocked/monetized, and any other information necessary to explain the story (Boroughf, 2015). The public would also be allowed to comment on a block/monetization, which would increase public pressure on claimants who make invalid claims (Boroughf, 2015). It would also provide more information on what exactly gets claimed by Content ID, who the main claimants are, and what types of claims get resolved in different ways (Boroughf, 2015). 

7 Conclusion

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act was a meaningful step towards bringing copyright law into the new millennium through protecting OSPs from being liable for user-uploaded copyright infringement. However, due to its bias towards copyright holders and its lack of regulation as to what sites such as YouTube could do to police copyright, it resulted in YouTube being able to create copyright policies that hurt millions of users and give unearned money to large copyright holders. Content ID’s lack of discretion leads to legal uses of copyrighted material being blocked or monetized in favor of the rightsholder. The dispute system biased towards claimants and ending in potential channel termination and/or litigation discourages creators from disputing invalid claims. On top of this, the lack of concrete information and advice for creators as to what gets flagged by Content ID and how to dispute claims prevents those who may want to dispute claims from doing so and creates a culture of fear. By providing more information, oversight, proportional monetization/blocking, and a lessened cost of litigation, copyright law may be able to more effectively protect content creators in the new millennium, not just copyright holders and platforms. The DMCA could then fall more in line with the goal of copyright law in general, promoting creativity and the progress of science and the arts.

8 References

Boroughf, B. (2015). The next great YouTube: improving content ID to Foster creativity, cooperation, and fair compensation. Alb. LJ Sci. & Tech., 25, 95.

Ceci, L. (2023, January 9). Hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/259477/hours-of-video-uploaded-to-youtube-every-minute/#statisticContainer

Chung, T. S. (2020). Fair Use Quotation Licenses: Private Sector Solution to DMCA Takedown Abuse on YouTube. Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts, 44(1), 69-92.

Copyright Law of the United States (Title 17), S. 94-553. https://www.copyright.gov/title17/title17.pdf

Copyright strike basics. (n.d.). YouTube Help. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2814000

Dispute a Content ID claim. (n.d.). YouTube Help. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797454

Frequently asked questions about fair use. (n.d.). YouTube Help. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6396261?hl=en#zippy=%2Chow-does-fair-use-work%2Cwhat-constitutes-fair-use%2Cwhen-does-fair-use-apply%2Chow-does-content-id-work-with-fair-use

Gray, J. E., & Suzor, N. P. (2020). Playing with machines: Using machine learning to understand automated copyright enforcement at scale. Big Data & Society, 7(1), 2053951720919963.

Henris, C. (2021). Oof! nice try congress the downfalls case act and why we should be looking to our cousins across the pond for guidance in updating our new small claims intellectual property court. Journal of Intellectual Property Law, 29(1), 175-208.

How Content ID Works. (n.d.). YouTube Help. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797370?hl=en

Kaye, D. B. V., & Gray, J. E. (2021). Copyright gossip: Exploring copyright opinions, theories, and strategies on YouTube. Social Media+ Society, 7(3), 20563051211036940.

McDuff, R. (2015, August 12). Debunking (YouTube) Copyright Myths. Medium. https://medium.com/the-video-creators/debunking-youtube-copyright-myths-4571df5a5bf7

Mentzer, S., & Keegan, T. (2022, July 6). The Copyright Claims Board goes live: early trends. White & Case. https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/copyright-claims-board-goes-live-early-trends

Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Administration. (1998, October 27). Public Law 105 – 304 – Digital Millennium Copyright Act. [Government]. U.S. Government Printing Office. https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/PLAW-105publ304

Seng, D. (2014). The State of the Discordant Union: An Empirical Analysis of DMCA Takedown Notices. Virginia Journal of Law & Technology, 18(3), 369-473.

Setty, R. (2023, January 13). New Copyright Venue Fields Hundreds of Claims, Evoking Optimism. Bloomberg Law. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/new-copyright-venue-fields-hundreds-of-claims-evoking-optimism

Solomon, L. (2015). Fair users or content abusers: The automatic flagging of non-infringing videos by content id on youtube. Hofstra L. Rev., 44, 237.

Trendacosta, K. (2020, December 10). Unfiltered: How YouTube’s Content ID Discourages Fair Use and Dictates What We See Online. Electronic Frontier Foundation. https://www.eff.org/wp/unfiltered-how-youtubes-content-id-discourages-fair-use-and-dictates-what-we-see-online

U.S. Const. art. I, § 8.

YouTube Copyright Transparency Report H12 2022. (2022). https://storage.googleapis.com/transparencyreport/report-downloads/pdf-report-22_2022-1-1_2022-6-30_en_v1.pdf

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The film is still being edited.

I wrote the music for the short film. The major ballad song that I am most proud of is Written By Those Stars. The PDF of the sheet music is below. Below the PDF is an explanation of some of the authorial intent that went into the lyrics and/or music of the song.

Written By Those Stars

Authorial Intent

Starting with the very first few measures. The flute motif is meant to mimic fluttering hearts (much like how the CW show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend utilized a similar flute motif), however the notes of the motif are a nod to the Dies Irae. This is an ancient chant associated with death and dying. The intervals are altered–instead of a half step and then a whole step interval it is a 2 whole step and 1 whole step interval. Additionally, instead of the same 1st and 3rd note, this note is made the 2nd and 4th note of the phrase. By changing these things, I ensured that it would not be too obvious but may contribute to a sense that this seemingly happy motif is not all that it seems–something sinister lies under the surface.

For this song, the director tasked me with recreating the feel of a Disney Channel song, and so I strove to make it bouncy and light, with nothing too complicated musically.

In measure 9, the octave hit on the and of beat 1 is meant to coincide with the two actors’ eyes meeting in the film, adding to the feeling of “fate”.

The chorus! Let’s talk about the title of the number! This is obviously a play on “written by the stars”, already a phrase associated with fate. By changing “the” to “those” I wanted to emphasize that they aren’t even following “fate”, the characters are following what they think to be fate based on different romantic comedies they have seen. They are following those writers’ ideas of fate. I had also recommended to the director that I had envisioned this number taking place in a hallway where there are different (parodied because of copyright) romantic comedy movie posters in the background to emphasize this point, but this had to be cut due to a lack of time and money.

Starting at measure 37, the line “I know we just met / but my one regret/ is how long it took me to see / that we were / written by those stars” is obviously poking fun at how quickly couples in romantic comedies move. However, it is also a reference to a similar parody line from the amazing musical Twisted, where during a couple’s love song (after they just met), the man proposes and the woman says “Took you long enough!”

Beginning at measure 69, the line “All we have to do is follow our hearts” was meant to be staged as such: during the scene, there are always subtle hearts in the background in front of the path of the actors. Maybe heart decals on the wall, or heart tiles on the floor, or even cartoon hearts. This is meant to emphasize that they are not following their flesh and blood hearts but instead are following the cartoonish, unrealistic path that has been set for them by movies.

Additionally, in the reprise (linked below), there is a line about “each note, each line each key change playing its part”–I personally am a huge fan of when characters in musicals–especially parody/self-aware musicals–reference what the music is doing to heighten the emotion. Since this is the reprise and a heightening of the emotion, it of course also comes with a key change.

Changing Weather

Changing Weather is the other big song of the show, although calling it a “big” song seems disingenous since despite its long run time, it is quite a “small” song. It only has voice, piano, guitar, and some violins, as opposed to Written By Those Stars, which is written to include drums, trombone, and trumpet (in reality we were unfortunately unable to find a trumpet player for our budget).

This song is written for the couple that serve as a foil to Girl and Guy (no, they never get names). Noah and Antoine (we ended up changing their names as we changed them from a gay couple to a lesbian couple). It serves to chronicle their love story, how they share their life together and how they continued to choose to love one another. This is inspired by a post I saw a while ago on tumblr that discussed how love is a choice rather than an emotion.

Authorial Intent

The beginning of the song starts with, well, the beginning. Before they were lovers, they were friends. The line “A daffodil path” references how daffodils are supposed to represent a new love/relationship. Two other flowers are used throughout the song to represent different phases in their relationship.

The beginning chronicles how they were both hesitant to make a move because they did not know the other liked them back. “A question, stolen daffodils, and a choice that we had to make” references how–in my version of the song–the two are shown in flashback walking along a path, before one plucks daffodils and presents them to the other. While the song plays, we would be able to see her mouthing “Would you like to go out with me?” or something similar–this is the choice that they have to make, whether to attempt a relationship or stay friends.

“It started to rain / We paid it no mind” Unlike Guy and Girl who interpret everything as a sign of it being “fate”, this couple don’t interpret immediate rain as a sign that their relationship shouldn’t happen. Instead, they make the most of it and dance with each other (badly, again they are not made for the romance musical genre). Instead of focusing on fate, they focus on each other and ignore the rain.

The bolded portions during the choruses mark which person has the melody during sections that are not in unison. I decided to have the two switch off having the melody, since they are equal partners in their relationship and therefore equal partners in the song.

“The daffodils wilted / but we stayed the same” Even though the ephemeral, worldly form of their love (the flowers) have died, they continue on. While Guy and Girl are entirely concerned with how their love appears, this couple is not. Instead they continue to “grow” (much like flowers) and choose to stay together, not having the decision made by some outside force (for instance, the weather).

In the second verse, one describes how the other would sing in broken French each night to her. I have always found the idea of someone singing love songs out of tune to their lover but their lover loving it even more that way extremely romantic. It is the love that is important, again it is not the appearance of it. While Guy and Girl’s song is overproduced and they sing well, this couple does not necessarily have to, they can rely on the love inside.

A note on the bad French: the director is a native French speaker so I put this in not only for the idea of “perfection in imperfection”, but also to get at him. The line “her own chansonner” is when this person is trying to use the French “chanson” meaning “song” and use the English suffix “-er” to make the word for “singer”, even though this is incorrect. There is another Bad French-ism when she mispronounces “et notre chat” as “ɛt nowtɹɛ ʃæt” because her pronunciation of “chat” is slang for female genitalia.

The second verse details how one person attempted a sweet gesture by giving the other a rose (which represents strong love, by the way) because her favorite song is “La vie en rose”, but her partner laughs at her. Her laughter is described as “thunderous” and there is a reference to a “storm in her eyes”, indicating how the weather has once again changed in their relationship, this time through a fight, or at least the beginnings of one. However, instead, they hold each other and talk it through in order to stay together. They don’t make rash decisions, they work to care for one another.

In the bridge, the line “I learned she liked love letters/She didn’t like love letters” sung at the same time is meant to represent how even partners with different love languages can learn to love each other in a way that makes each other feel loved if they talk about it. They are willing to put in the work.

The third verse references a pot of dahlias. Dahlias represent long-lasting love. Additionally, they are in a gardening pot, not pulled out of the ground or gifted as a one-time flower. Instead, even the flowers are staying around longer, since they have learned how to care for one another and cultivate a lasting relationship.

“We can hide from outside / with her by my side” They have created a life where they don’t have to worry about what the outside world thinks of them (this is emphasized by the fact that they are a queer couple while the main couple is straight), instead they can focus on each other inside.

The 6/8 time signature I chose because it has a very cyclical feeling, which suits this couple, as they go through cycles but always stay together.

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1 Introduction

Sign language morphology introduces a new hurdle for theories of morphosyntax to beat: the ability of sign languages to have a large number of simultaneous processes of morphology in addition to the sequential morphology in spoken languages (Aronoff, Meir, Sandler et al. 2005: 301). This poses a problem for concatenative theories of morphosyntax, as simultaneous morphology is not the concatenative adding of affixal phonological material, such as adding a marker on a noun to mark it as the agent of the sentence, but is rather changing the phonological form already present, such as altering where the movement of a verb sign starts in space to indicate which noun is the agent of the sentence. Thus, concatenative theories must attempt to describe how morphological processes where the original material is changed instead of adding affixal material occur. While sign languages such as American Sign Language (ASL) have some sequential morphology, this is rare and confined to derivational processes (Aronoff, Meir, Sandler 2005: 302). Simultaneous morphology, on the other hand, is productive, deals largely with inflectional morphology, and includes processes by which grammatical features are realized by “altering the direction, rhythm, or path shape of the base sign,” instead of sequentially adding new segments (Aronoff, Meir, Sandler 2005: 309). What exactly are the unique morphological and morphosyntactic structures present in ASL, and how could different theories of morphosyntax account for them? In this paper I will focus on four phenomena within ASL morphology: sequential morphology, verb agreement, nominalizing reduplication, and negation. For each I will give a brief overview of how they operate in ASL, and then turn to different morphosyntactic theories to give an idea of how they might approach these phenomena.

2 Sequential Morphology

American Sign Language has two main forms of sequential morphology: affixation and compounding. Sequential affixation is rare in ASL, with only about five affixes having been identified in the language (Aronoff, Meir, Sandler 2005: 313). One example of an affix in ASL is the agentive suffix, descended from an independent ASL word meaning ‘person’ (Aronoff, Meir, Sandler 2005: 329). This does not have the same distribution as the English -er agentive, as in ASL the verb OPERATE is combined with the agentive to form a word meaning ‘person who operates,’ but the word with the same meaning in English is surgeon, not *operater (Aronoff, Meir, Sandler 2005: 329). ASL affixes such as the agentive operate as an identifiable affix being added to the beginning or end of a base sign. In the example of TEACH + agentive ‘teacher’ in Figure 1, the agentive is clearly identifiable as an affix added onto the base sign TEACH (Aronoff, Meir, Sandler 2005: 312).

In sign languages, what researchers call a sign syllable is generally taken to be a hand configuration spanning a location-movement-location (LML) sequence (Aronoff, Meir, Sandler 2005: 309). The ASL suffixed sign TEACH + agentive above consists of two of these LML syllables, each with its own hand configuration and place of articulation. Some affixed signs further reduce to a monosyllabic structure, but the complex structure like in the sign in Figure 1 is clearly different from the simultaneous morphology found in ASL (Aronoff, Meir, Sandler 2005: 311).

The sequentially affixal morphology in ASL works well within concatenative frameworks such as Distributed Morphology. In Distributed Morphology, they would most likely model affixes such as the agentive by having the phonological material associated with the agentive (the hand configuration and LML sequence) be associated with a set of features in a list of Vocabulary Items (VIs), while TEACH would be stored as a Root ÖTEACH, associated with the semantic meaning of the verb. Both the Root and the VI would then be inserted into nodes, where the VI has a subset of the node’s features. Since this process is concatenative and yields a non-idiosyncratic meaning, this poses no problem for DM. The only problem is that the agentive suffix does not attach to every verb, which DM could tackle through restricting the roots the agentive VI could combine with, as in English plurals, where the VI -en can only combine with a select number of roots such as ÖCHILD and ÖOX.

In inferential-realizational theories like Paradigm Function Morphology, the word ‘teacher’ may be stored in a cell as <TEACH, {agentive}> ® teacher. The agentive suffix in ASL does not pose a problem for such theories. For those verbs to which the agentive suffix does not attach, there is simply no cell to refer to. In Lexicalist theories there may be lexical rules where in the Lexicon the phonological material associated with the agentive suffix is chosen because it makes a verb into an agent, and then is added to the verb TEACH to create the sign for ‘teacher.’ In Strong Lexicalist theories the ungrammatical forms where the suffix attaches to verbs it should not attach to may be blocked by something akin to the Filter (Siddiqi 2014: 348).

The other type of sequential morphology in ASL is compounding. Compounds in ASL can be distinguished from phrasal combinations in several ways: ASL compound signs cannot be interrupted with the insertion of other signs, compound signs have different rhythmic properties (for example, the first sign is commonly reduced and the transitions are abbreviated), and compound signs typically have idiosyncratic meaning (Bellugi & Newkirk 1981: 8-9). Compounding in ASL is used as a highly productive way of expanding the lexicon from existing lexical roots (lexical compounds), a way to express size and shape (referred to size-and-shape specifiers (SASS’s), and a way to refer to superordinate concepts of a string of signs (coordinate compounds) (Bellugi & Newkirk 1981: 8-14). An example of a lexical compound is a compound formed of the signs BED and SOFT, meaning ‘pillow’ or ‘mattress’, glossed BED^SOFT (Bellugi & Newkirk 1981: 10). Lexicalized compounds tend to have a specialized idiomatic meaning, which seemingly poses a problem for concatenative frameworks such as Distributed Morphology. This is because the combination of the two words yields a meaning that is not achieved from simply putting together the meaning of the two words. For example, with ‘mattress,’ the literal meaning gotten from the compound BED^SOFT might be ‘soft bed,’ and not ‘mattress’. Since Distributed Morphology is concatenative, it needs an additional process that can assign a new meaning to a compound. Coordinate compounds also pose a problem for a similar reason, as they consist of a string of signs followed by the sign glossed as ETC., with the whole compound referring to superordinate concepts (Bellugi & Newkirk 1981: 14). An example of this is the sign for ‘appliances’, signed WASHER^DRYER^STOVE^ETC.

Distributed Morphology attempts to explain the problem of compounding by proposing that compounds are formed when Root-containing heads incorporate, which accounts for why compounds cannot be broken up and their unique phonological features (Harley 2009: 133). However, in Harley’s analysis of compound formation in Distributed Morphology, all the compounds were compositional, in that their meaning was a sum of the parts. For example, in the compound nurse shoes, ‘nurse’ describes a type of shoes—shoes for nurses (Harley 2009: 139). But in compounds like BED^SOFT ‘mattress’, this is not the case. A mattress is not a soft type of bed, so it cannot be created the same way as the compounds Harley discusses. The non-compositional compounds found in ASL are hard to explain in Distributed Morphology because it is a purely concatenative theory. They could possibly be explained through “contextual allosemy,” where words have multiple meanings that are chosen in different contexts (Marantz 2020). In this case, different meanings for either BED, SOFT, or both would be chosen that would combine to form the compound BED^SOFT meaning ‘mattress’. In Lexicalist theories, derivational morphology such as compounding typically takes place in the Lexicon, with Halle’s Strong Lexicalism theory positing that in the Lexicon there are Word Formation Rules (WFRs) which would form the compounds, and the Filter, which would both prevent ungrammatical compounds and assign idiosyncratic meaning to the compounds (Siddiqi 2014: 348). So, BED^SOFT would be formed through a WFR that combines BED and SOFT, and then the Filter would assign the meaning of ‘mattress’ to the compound.

3 Verb Agreement

Morphological verb agreement is the realization of the “universally agreeing syntactic indices, mediated by the partly arbitrary referential and classificatory morphosyntactic categories” of each individual language (Aronoff, Meir, Sandler 2005: 316). To understand how verb agreement works in ASL, it is first necessary to understand how R(eferential)-loci work, as in sign languages the referential indices are realized by means of these R-loci (Aronoff, Meir, Sandler 2005: 317). R-loci are used for anaphoric reference to the referents associated with them, and are regarded as the visual manifestation of the pronominal features of the nominals representing these referents (Aronoff, Meir, Sandler 2005: 317). These associations are often made by producing the sign for the nominal, then pointing to or gazing at a specific location in space. If the referent is present, the actual location of the referent determines its R-locus (e.g. for first person it would be the chest) (Aronoff, Meir, Sandler 2005: 317). While in spoken languages, nominals are categorized based on shared morphosyntactic features, with the pronominal reference to all members of a given category being made using the same pronoun, this is not the case in sign languages. In sign languages, each referent is paired with a unique location in space (its R-locus) and so it can be uniquely identified. A pronoun or agreement marker directed toward or away from a specific R-locus uniquely refers to the referent associated with that locus (Aronoff, Meir, Sandler 2005: 317). Since the assignment of these R-loci does not involve classification, they are overt indices rather than gender classes, and so sign languages have agreement without gender (Aronoff, Meir, Sandler 2005: 318).

For verbs that have agreement in ASL, they have two open L(ocation) spots at the two end points of the verb, which are filled morphologically by copying the location specifications of the R-loci of the arguments of the verb into the slots. The R-loci determine the path movement of the verb: the verb moves from an R-locus associated with one argument to an R-locus associated with another (Aronoff, Meir, Sandler 2005: 318). For example, in the sentence ‘I give the book to her,’ the verb give moves from the R-locus for the subject ‘I’ which has an R-locus of the signer’s chest to the R-locus for the object ‘her’ which would either have an R-locus of a specific point in space chosen by the signer or would have an R-locus of the person referred to if the person is present.  However, not all verbs have agreement in ASL Sign languages have three verb classes: plain verbs, spatial verbs, and agreement verbs. Plain verbs have invariant beginning and end points, and the movement path does not vary with the R-loci of the arguments. Spatial verbs have beginning and end points that are determined by spatial referents, rather than by grammatical arguments (Aronoff, Meir, Sandler 2005: 321).  Only agreement verbs agree with the arguments functioning as the syntactic subject and object (Aronoff, Meir, Sandler 2005: 321). For agreement verbs, the facing of the hands and the path movement are the two agreement mechanisms. As stated above, the direction of the path movement is determined by the thematic roles of the arguments: from the R-locus of the source argument to the R-locus of the goal argument. The facing of the hand(s) is determined by the syntactic role of the arguments: the hands face towards the object of the verb (or indirect object in the case of ditransitive agreement verbs) (Aronoff, Meir, Sandler 2005: 321-22).

The classification of verbs into these three categories is semantically determined: verbs denoting motion in space are spatial verbs, those denoting transfer are agreement verbs, and those that neither denote transfer nor motion are plain verbs (Aronoff, Meir, Padden et al. 2005: 28). While there are apparent counter-examples to these generalizations, they can be explained on phonological grounds. For example, some verbs denoting transfer fail to inflect for agreement because of constraints imposed by their phonological structure (Aronoff, Meir, Padden et al. 2005: 28).

The classification of the different types of verb seems like it would be ideal for a Distributed Morphology approach, as they are semantically determined. Each class of verb could be assigned a bundle of semantic features that represent that class of verb, and then verbs with those features would be inflected for agreement based on if they have the features of the plain, spatial, or agreement class of verbs. However, the R-loci pose a problem for Distributed Morphology. Distributed Morphology could explain the first-peron, as the first-person R-locus does not change (it is always the signer’s chest). The Vocabulary Item associated with the first-person could then just be the phonological material representing pointing to one’s chest. However, second- and third-person R-loci pose a problem. The R-locus for the second person (the place in space where the person the signer is conversing with is located) changes with where the person is positioned. There is a similar problem with third-person R-locus when the person/people being spoken about are present, as the R-locus would similarly be wherever the person/people are located, which is subject to change. If the person/people being spoken about are not present, however, the R-locus has no one place in space that is always the R-locus for the third-person. For the third-person where the people are not present, this could be adjusted for by having this R-locus be an ‘elsewhere’ item, such that when the people being referred to are not present, this VI would be inserted. However, it would be difficult to define this VI in a satisfactory way, as the R-locus chosen varies not only signer to signer but from conversation to conversation. Additionally, if there are multiple third-person referents that are not present, the same ‘elsewhere’ item could not be introduced, as each referent would have a different point in space to serve as their R-locus. Theoretically, there could be a near-infinite number of third-person R-loci in a conversation, each with its own point in space to serve as its R-locus. This is a problem for using an ‘elsewhere’ item or any specific VI for the third-person referent since there is a possibility of needing multiple different R-loci for different absent third-person referents. Thus, trying to define the absent third-person R-locus with a single Vocabulary Item or even multiple Vocabulary Items will falls short since there needs to be a way to have a near-infinite number of R-loci to pick from for sentences with multiple absent third-person referents. The previous problem of second- and third-person R-loci when the referents are present poses a problem for DM as DM tries to avoid rules of referral, which seem like they would be key to verb agreement in ASL. The agreement of the verb depends entirely on where the person is situated in space, and based on that the verb either starts or ends there. It is difficult to see how DM would attempt to solve this problem as there are conceivably an infinite number of R-loci and therefore an infinite number of Vocabulary Items if the theory attempts to avoid rules of referral.

Verb agreement in ASL seems to be uniquely suited to any type of theory that uses rules of referral, such as Paradigm Function Morphology (PFM). The cell for <ASK, {from first-person to third-person}> could not have a simply stipulated realization, but instead be a function of the cell for the first- and third-person pronouns, where the location of the realizations of the cell for the first- and third-person pronouns are added to the verb ASK, with the verb beginning in the location for first-person and ending in the location for third-person. If the person being referred to is present, the realization of the cell for the third-person pronoun would be a function of the person’s location in space, with a pointed handshape facing that person’s location. In Weak Lexicalist theories, inflection takes place in the syntax, and so those theories would most likely fall into similar problems as DM if they did not use rules of referral. In Strong Lexicalism, however, the word-formation rules in the Lexicon could account for verb agreement in ASL. For instance, in the example discussed for PFM the rule for the verb ASK could be written as ASK + point to chest+ person’s location in space=ASK.1p.3p. This functions similarly to the cell in PFM except that it is written as a rule and not the realization of a cell. This rule could then be applied to other verbs, for example GIVE + point to chest + person’s location in space=GIVE.1p.3p. In this way, any theories of morphosyntax that use rules of referral and/or refer to the real-world location of a person and not be contained to the syntax or sets of features would be better at explaining verb agreement in ASL. The importance of referring to the real-world location of a person may indicate that ASL needs to access semantic interpretation at an earlier stage than spoken languages. This may be one reason as to why Distributed Morphology has difficulty explaining ASL morphology, as in DM the creation of the phonological form and the semantic interpretation of the sentence are separate from one another.

4 Nominalizing Reduplication

Part of ASL derivational morphology is nominalizing reduplication, a process though which verbs become nouns (Abner 2017: 317). This process is where an aspect of the movement of the verb is reduplicated to produce the noun form. The reduplicated movement is characterized by a short spatial trajectory compared to the verbal form and increased muscular tension of the articulators (Abner 2017: 318). This process yields both concrete object-denoting and result-denoting outputs (Abner 2017: 318). For a verb whose denoted action is performed with an object or on an object, concrete object-denoting outputs express that object (Abner 2017: 321). An example of a concrete object-denoting output is the nominal [_N SIT.NMLZ-RED] ‘chair’ that comes from the verb [_V SIT] ‘sit’ (Abner 2017: 318). The reduplication process derives the object the action is performed on—one sits on a chair. Result-denoting nominals, on the other hand, are where the noun derived is the result of the verb, as is the case with [_N DEVELOP.NMLZ-RED] ‘development’ from the verb [_V DEVELOP] ‘develop’ (Abner 2017: 322). For both of these categories, the process of nominalizing reduplication is allomorphic. There are three types of these nouns, separated according to which component is reduplicated: movement, aperture change, and orientation (Abner 2017: 330). The class to which a noun formed through reduplication belongs is not semantically determined, but is phonologically predictable from the form of the verbal predicate (Abner 2017: 330).

An additional problem for theories of morphosyntax to contend with in nominalizing reduplication is the fact that for a single output there may be some ambiguity with regard to the meaning. Some derived nominals can receive both a concrete object- and result-denoting interpretation, as in the case of MOVE-IN-AIR-BY-PLANE.NMLZ-RED, in which the sign PLANE.NMLZ-RED can be interpreted as either ‘airplane’ (concrete object-denoting) or ‘flight’ (result-denoting) (Abner 2017: 331). The absence of a classifier handshape does mitigate this, as if there is not a classifier handshape present, only a result-denoting interpretation is possible (Abner 2017: 331-33). However, if a classifier handshape is present, either a concrete object-denoting interpretation is taken or there is an ambiguous result—it could be either concrete object-denoting or result-denoting (Abner 2017: 333). Reduplication is a phenomenon present in many spoken languages as well, although reduplication in spoken languages is used more frequently for inflectional morphology—plurals, verb tenses, intensity, etc.—while in ASL nominalizing reduplication is a derivational process (Kauffman 2015).

Thus, theories of morphosyntax have two main issues to resolve with nominals derived in this way: the way they are formed and the ambiguity in their interpretation. In Distributed Morphology, the fact that the derivational process is not affixal but instead is repeating a part of the verb makes it difficult to fit within a purely syntactic framework without rules of referral, similar to verb agreement. DM may attempt to explain this by stating that, similar to ablative cases like ‘sing’/’sang’ in English, there is an affix added that does not have phonological material associated with it, but is realized through changing the material it affixes to. So, when the Vocabulary Item associated with nominalizing reduplication is inserted, it affects the node next to it by causing part of the phonological material in that node to reduplicate. There would need to be either three variations of this affix to account for the three different components that are reduplicated, or it simply surfaces in three different ways. With regard to the question of ambiguity, the reduplication morpheme that creates a concrete object-denoting output would most likely be stored as a separate morpheme from the reduplication morpheme that would create a result-denoting output. This, however, creates a problem since if these are two separate morphemes, there should be no ambiguity for whether a noun is concrete object-denoting or result-denoting. This could be explained by accidental homophony, where the morphemes happen to result in outputs that are the same sign, but have two different meanings, resulting in ambiguity due to the fact that they appear to be the same sign.

Paradigm Function Morphology would explain the derivation of these nouns through a process that copies a specific part of the root. For example, the realization of the cell <SIT, {nmlz}> would be realized through copying a piece of the root SIT. Which piece of the root gets copied would depend on the root. Since forming the word is a process, not the concatenative addition of morphemes, Paradigm Function Morphology has fewer problems explaining ASL nominalizing reduplication, since it is changing the phonological material already present through reduplication, and not adding affixal material.

For Lexicalist theories, there may be a rule in the Lexicon that states that to nominalize a verb, a specific part of that verb is reduplicated. They may posit that there are three rules, such that each rule specifies a different part of the verb to be reduplicated, which are based on the phonology of the verb. For the ambiguity, it may be that the result from the nominalizing rule is, in some cases, actually two results, which are stored as two separate units in the Lexicon. For instance, PLANE.NMLZ-RED would be stored both as ‘airplane’ and as ‘flight’.

5 Negation

ASL has two main avenues of negation: non-manual negation and manual negation. In ASL, non-manual negative markers consist of a side-to-side headshake as the primary negator, which is coupled with various facial expressions such as furrowed brows, the corner of the mouth down or a wrinkled nose, among others (Bembridge 2016: 2). The negative headshake is used in two ways: to negate a positive sentence, and to emphasize the negation of a negative sentence (Bembridge 2016: 2). It is important to note that the headshake can be the only indicator of negation in a sentence, or it can be used in conjunction with a negative lexical item such as NOT (Bembridge 2016: 2). If there is no lexically negative sign present, the negative headshake spreads over the entire verbal domain (Bembridge 2016: 2-3).

There are also a number of lexically negative manual signs (e.g. NEVER, DON’T), although Bembridge focuses on the negative lexical item NOT, formed by the thumb extended from a closed fist under the chin, with the hand moving quickly outward a few inches (2016: 3). Clausal negation can be indicated manually with a negative particle NOT. However, manual negation cannot exist without non-manual negation, as it results in ungrammaticality, as indicated in Figure 2 (Bembridge 2016: 3). For example, the lexical sign NOT must be accompanied by a negative headshake.

ASL has another variety of manual negation: negation by negative incorporation or reverse of orientation. For a small group of predicates (e.g. KNOW, WANT, LIKE, HAVE, GOOD) they are customarily negated through a reverse in the orientation of hand or hands, for example a twisting outward or downward movement (Bembridge 2016: 3). This phenomenon has been termed negative incorporation, and is written as in Figure 3.

The spreading of the non-manual negative marker over the entire verbal domain as in part (b) of Figure 2 poses a problem for Strong Lexicalist theories, which posit that inflectional morphology such as negation takes place in the Lexicon through WFRs. However, the non-manual marker spreads over a syntactic domain—the entire verb phrase—which cannot be modelled in a theory that only deals with the formation of individual words (or, in the case of idioms, phrases). They could attempt to explain this phonologically, that the non-manual negative marker spreads due to phonological reasons associated with the marker. However, since this is restricted to the verbal domain, this cannot be explained solely phonologically. So, it seems as if Strong Lexicalism would have a difficult time explaining this phenomenon. However, it would have a much easier time explaining the co-occurrence of the manual and non-manual markers as well as the negative incorporation. For the co-occurrence of manual and non-manual markers, the word-formation rules may add both the manual negative marker and the non-manual marker. There may also be another rule that adds a non-manual negative marker but not a manual negative marker. However, there would be no rule adding a manual negative marker without a non-manual negative marker. For negative incorporation, similar to nominalizing reduplication, there may be a word-formation rule or a set of rules that apply only to the verbs which are negated through negative incorporation. These rules would specify that a certain movement which is a part of the verb is reduced, thereby negating it (they would also add a non-manual negative marker).

In Paradigm Function Morphology, the spread of the non-manual marker also poses a problem as the realization of each cell is a single word. Aside from that, though, explaining ASL negation using Paradigm Function Morphology is fairly straightforward. For some words, the realization of the cell <VERB, {negation}> would be NOT+VERB, while for verbs like WANT it would be a function of the verb such that the motion of the verb is reversed.

Bembridge gives an overview of a DM attempt to explain ASL negation using the framework of Distributed Morphology. She lays out the Vocabulary Items associated with ASL negation:

In ASL, there can be both NOT and NEVER, which Bembridge explains by claiming that NEVER is “base-generated in Neg^o and subsequently undergoes Neg-to-T movement to account for the distribution of NEVER” as in Figure 5 (Bembridge 2016: 15-16). Since Neg and T have been adjoined through head movement, they are said to have undergone Fusion, yielding a single node for Vocabulary Insertion (Bembridge 2016: 16).

Since in ASL there can be a non-manual negator without NOT, but not vice versa, Bembridge claims that the features that dominate the NEG head are inherently negative, while NOT is not inherently negative (Bembridge 2016: 16). Bembridge likens ASL negation to French negation using Rowlett’s analysis of French. In Rowlett’s analysis of French, Rowlett argues that the negative pas is an adverb as it serves to modify something, and is inherently negative, so it licenses ne by “transmitting its [+NEG] feature to Neg^o, the locus of ne” (Bembridge 2016: 17). Similarly, Bembridge argues that the adverb licenses NOT, and is not necessary by convention, accounting for why only non-manual negation is necessary, since it is the only inherently negative element. The context for the insertion of NOT is created by the ADV head undergoing head adjunction to NEG, as in Figure 6.

The third and fourth vocabulary items are representative of the allomorphy found depending on what the verb is. For verbs like WANT, where negation is marked by negative incorporation, the Vocabulary Item –DON’T is inserted, which represents that process. To me, it is still unclear how DM deals with the presence of a non-manual and manual, as in the case of [NEG, ADV] presumably only NOT would be inserted, and not the non-manual marker. While Bembridge shows the environments in which manual negative markers like NOT are inserted, she does not show examples of trees where both a non-manual and a manual negative marker are inserted, only likening it to how French negation works. One explanation is that there is another negative morpheme that operates on the clausal level (thus explaining the spread of the non-manual marker over the verbal domain), and that is where the VI for the non-manual marker is inserted. A restriction may then be imposed that in the case that it cooccurs with a manual negative marker, the non-manual marker is limited to that particular morpheme and will not spread across the clause.

6 References

Abner, N. (2017). What You See Is What You Get.Get: Surface Transparency and Ambiguity of Nominalizing Reduplication in American Sign Language. Syntax, 20, 317-352. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/synt.12147

Aronoff, M., Meir, I., & Sandler, W. (2005). THE PARADOX OF SIGN LANGUAGE MORPHOLOGY. Language, 81(2), 301–344. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2005.0043

Aronoff, M., Meir, I., Padden, C., & Sandler, W. (2005). Morphological universals and the sign language type. In Yearbook of Morphology: Yearbook of Morphology 2004 (pp. 19-39). Springer, Dordrecht. https://quote.ucsd.edu/padden/files/2013/01/YoM.pdf

Bellugi, U., & Newkirk, D. (1981). Formal Devices for Creating New Signs in American Sign Language. Sign Language Studies, 30(Spring), 1-35. https://doi.org/10.1353/sls.1981.0001

Bembridge, G. (2016). Negation in American Sign Language: The view from the Interface. Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics, 36(1). Retrieved from https://twpl.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/twpl/article/view/26703

Harley, H. (2009). Compounding in Distributed Morphology. The Oxford Handbook of Compounding, 129-144.

Kauffman, C. A. (2015). Reduplication reflects uniqueness and innovation in language, thought and culture. York College of Pennsylvania.

Marantz, A. (2020, August 11). Contextual allosemy and idioms. NYU Morphlab. https://wp.nyu.edu/morphlab/2020/08/11/contextual-allosemy-and-idioms/

Siddiqi, D. (2014). The morphology-syntax interface. In The Routledge Handbook of Syntax (pp. 345-364).

The post The Morphology-Syntax Interface in American Sign Language appeared first on Elena Gill.

Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology Final Project 2021

1 Introduction

This paper focuses on the Hungarian language, specifically analyzing phonemic trends of the language and alternations regarding the /h/ phoneme using recordings from a native speaker. We analyzed voice recordings sent by our speaker using the PRAAT software, focusing on comparing the center of gravity and voicing of the fricative in different environments. We determined that our speaker realizes /h/ as [ɦ] between front vowels, [ç] between a front vowel and a syllable boundary, [x] after a back vowel, and [h] everywhere else.

2 Background

2.1 Language Background

Hungarian is spoken primarily in Hungary, where it is the national language, but is also spoken in Slovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia. It is also commonly spoken in immigrant communities around the world (“Hungarian,” n.d.). There are approximately 9,780,000 speakers in Hungary, and 12,538,370 speakers globally (“Hungarian,” n.d.). There are eight main dialects of Hungarian: Western, Transdanubian, Alföld, Duna-Tisza, North-Western, North-Eastern, Trans-Királyhágó, and Székely (Siptár, 2000, 20-1). Western comprises primarily the inhabitants of Vas and Zala counties. Transdanubian encompasses most
of Transdanubia except for those that speak Western. Alföld covers the middle part of the Great Hungarian Plain. Duna-Tisza comprises most of the territories between the rivers Danuba and Tisza. North-Western encompasses Palóc and related varieties. North-Eastern covers the upper Tisza region and adjacent counties. Trans-Királyhágó covers Transylvania in present-day Romania, and Székely covers parts of Romania (Siptár, 2000, 20-1). A map of Hungary for reference can be seen in Figure 1 (“Administrative Map of Hungary,” 1998). While there is variation between dialects, it is minimal, and they only differ slightly from Standard Hungarian.

Hungarian is a Uralic language, and a member of the Finno-Ugric family (Harms, 2016). From the North-Central Urals where Proto-Uralic developed, Finno-Ugric spread south and west, to an area close to the confluence of Karma and Volga Rivers (Harms, 2016). From there, Hungarian separated from other Ugric languages, spreading south into the steppe region below the Urals (Harms, 2016). Hungarian has been written in a modified Latin alphabet since the 13th century, and its orthography was stabilized around the 16th century with the introduction of printing (“Hungarian Language,” 2013).

2.2 Consultant Background

Our speaker is a 20-year-old female student who was born in Texas but grew up in upstate New York. Her mom speaks North-Western Hungarian, and her dad speaks the Transdanubian dialect. Her dialect is most likely a mix of the two, although she said that they sound very similar to begin with. She was educated largely in English, although she did not speak English at all before the age of four. She also speaks French. She uses a relatively informal variety of the language when speaking at home/with family, and does not tend to speak Hungarian outside of that context. This paper will be presenting information on Standard Hungarian, but Standard Hungarian and our speaker’s dialect are very similar to one another.

3 Phonemic Overview

3.1 Vowels

Hungarian has seven basic vowel qualities that occur in distinctively long and short quantities (Szende, 1994, p. 92). These seven vowels are /ɔ/, /o/, /u/, /i/, /ø/, /y/, and /ɛ/. Each of these seven vowels has a long version. In the case of /ɔ/, whose paired long vowel is /a:/, and /ɛ/, whose paired long vowel is /e:/, the long vowels are different underlying vowels than the short vowels (Szende, 1994, p. 92). In the other cases, each vowel’s paired long version is the long version of the vowel (i.e. /ø:/ for /ø/) (Szende, 1994, p. 92). The vowel chart for the Hungarian vowels can be seen in Figure 2.

All fourteen of these vowels are contrastive in Hungarian. For example, á ([a:] phonetically) refers to ‘the letter A’ as opposed to a ([ɔ] phonetically), which refers to the definite
article ‘a.’ Another example of this phonemic contrast across vowel pairs is púp ‘lump’ [pu:p] and pap ‘minister’ [pɔp] (“Hungarian-English dictionary,” n.d.). The Hungarian vowel system also uses vowel harmony. In its vowel harmony system, vowels are classed into three groups: back vowels (ɔ, a:, o, o:, u, u:), front rounded vowels (ø, ø:, y, y:), and front unrounded vowels (ɛ, e:, i, i:). Front unrounded vowels function as “neutral” vowels, while back and front rounded vowels are “harmonic” (Siptár, 2000, p. 64). This means that back vowels and front rounded vowels do not occur together in the same word, although front unrounded vowels can occur with any other vowel (“Hungarian Language,” 2013). Hungarian vowel harmony functions as “stem-controlled” vowel harmony, where the backness of the stem controls the backness of vowels in affixes, specifically suffixes, as the harmony is directional (left-to-right) (Siptár, 2000, p. 64). This can be seen in how suffixes are normally alternating, where their vowel has a front and a back alternant which is selected by which agrees with the stem vowel(s) (Siptár, 2000, p. 64). Non-alternating suffixes either only have front unrounded (neutral) vowels, or have a back-harmonic vowel that does not harmonize (Siptár, 2000, p. 65). While in Standard Hungarian (and the Hungarian spoken by our speaker), speakers do not use [e] and there is no phonemic contrast between [e] and [ɛ], about fifty percent of the Hungarian speaking population uses a vowel system that distinguishes between [e] and [ɛ] (Szende, 1994, p.
93). In these dialects of Hungarian, the word written mentek ‘go.PL2.Pres’—in Standard Hungarian [mɛntɛk]—represents four different words: [mentek] ‘go.PL2.Pres’, [mentɛk] ‘go.PL3.Past’, [mɛntek] ‘save.SG1.Pres’, or [mɛntɛk] ‘to be exempt from.PL3.Pres’ (Szende, 1994, p. 93).

3.2 Consonants

The Hungarian Alphabet has 26 consonants in its alphabet, however you’ll notice that there are only 21 sounds documented in the phonetic alphabet. This is partially due to the presence of double and triple glyphs in the Hungarian alphabet that we touched upon earlier. The IPA representations for these glyphs are as follows – /ts/, /tʃ/, /dz/, /dʒ/, which are a combination of two phonetic elements. It’s debated as to whether these sounds are stop-fricative sequences or affricates. Sometimes the double or triple glyph is represented orthographically, such as with the letters Dz, Cs, and Dzs, and other times the multiplicity of phonetic elements is not represented orthographically, such as with C. It is also the case that some letters that are represented in the written alphabet with two letters, such as Sz, are phonetically one sound. There are 13 voiced sounds and 8 voiceless consonants. Interestingly, for the consonants that contain multiple sounds, it appears that in the Hungarian alphabet both sounds must either be voiced or voiceless, and there cannot be a combination of a voiced and voiceless sound for a consonant. The most common articulatory placements are alveolar and palatal and the most common manners of articulation were plosive and fricative. Additionally, the reason that the letters J and Ly are the same phonetic sound is that Ly
was originally pronounced as a palatal lateral sound ( ʎ), but in the standard Hungarian dialect as well as the eastern dialects of Hungary experienced a merger such that both orthographic consonants are now pronounced as a palatal approximate (Benko 1972). I expect that most younger generations of speakers would have this merger however given that our subjects parents are both from the more western part of the country it’s possible that our speaker could have a more lateral pronunciation for the Ly consonant.

3.2.1 Stops

Hungarian has three voiceless stops and three voiced stops. The voiceless stops include the /p/ bilabial stop, the /t/ alveolar stop, and the /k/ velar stop, while the voiced stops include the /b/ bilabial stop, the /d/ alveolar stop, and the /g/ velar stop. The voiceless stops /p/, /t/, and /k/ are also considered unaspirated, as these stops have a very short VOT compared to other languages with typical aspirated stops (Gósy, 1999). The average VOT value for typical aspirated stops in English tends to fall above 30 milliseconds (Anderson, 2018), and in Table 3, we see how the VOT values for /p/, /t/, and /k/ in Hungarian tend to fall close to or even below 30 milliseconds. /c/ and /ɟ/ in Hungarian are considered both palatal stops and affricates, as their closure duration is in between the two categories (Hungarian alphabet, 2021).

3.2.2 Fricatives

The sound /f/ appears initially and medially following a back vowel. The sound ʃ also appears initially, medially, and finally, and is typically adjacent to a vowel. The sound /v/ almost always appears initially with a consonant following (at least based on this word set). The only allophone that exists among the fricatives is /h/ presenting as [ɦ] between two vowels, [ç] syllable-finally after front vowels, and [x] in the final position after a back vowel (Szende 1994). /f/ and /z/ appear to be in contrasting distribution as well.

3.2.3 Affricates

Affricatives

There is debate among linguistics as to whether the sounds that I have labeled as affricatives in the IPA chart are actually affricatives or are forms of stop-fricative sequences. For our purposes, and for thoroughness in this project, I will discuss them as if they are affricatives.

/dʒ/  appears both medially and initially. We see this with Cs as well, thus we can say that they are in contrastive distribution with each other. They are certainly within distinct phonemes as well. We see /dz/ as opposed to /dʒ/ which would appear phonetically similar based on the orthography are also relatively similar phonetically with both the /z/ and /ʒ/ sounds being voiced fricatives with a slight difference in placement of articulation. Additionally, we see c appearing initially, medially and finally typically adjacent to a lower open vowel. /tʃ/ demonstrates a similar pattern.

3.2.4 Nasals

Hungarian has three nasals, which include the voiced bilabial nasal [m], the voiced alveolar nasal [n], and the voiced palatal nasal [ɲ] (Hungarian Phonology, 2021). While there is no allophony for Hungarian nasals, there are several trends of nasal place assimilation in the language.

Hungarian nasals will always assimilate to the place of articulation of the following consonant within a word and sometimes occur across a word boundary. For example, nasals will assimilate to the voiced velar nasal [ŋ] before the velar consonants [k] and [g]: angol “English” → [ɒŋgol]. Nasals will also assimilate to the palatal nasal [ɲ] before the palatal consonants [c], [ɲ], and [ɟ]: magannyomozó “private detective” → [mɒga:ɲ:omozo:]. Nasals will additionally assimilate to the voiced labiodental nasal [ɱ] before the labiodental affricates [f] and [v]: különféle “various” → [kyløɱfe:lɛ]. Finally, nasals will assimilate to the voiced bilabial nasal [m] before the bilabial consonants [p], [b], and [m]: sínpad “stage” → [si:mpɒd] (Hungarian Phonology, 2021).

3.2.5 Approximants

Hungarian has two approximants, each with a long and short variety: /l/ and /l:/, and /j/ and /j:/. These four are all contrastive. For example, hal [hɔl] ‘fish’ and hall [hɔl:] ‘hallway’ (“Hungarian-English dictionary,” 2021). Or, for a contrast between /j/ and /l/, look at jó [jo:] ‘good’ and ló [lo:] ‘horse’ (“Hungarian-English dictionary,” n.d.). It is difficult to find minimal pairs for /j/ and /j:/, but theoretically the word ingujj [inguj:] ‘shirt-sleeve’ would contrast with an imagined word inguj [inguj] (“Hungarian-English dictionary,” n.d.).

While there is no allophony for /l/, /l:/, and /j:/, there is allophony for /j/. The phoneme /j/ becomes [ç] if it is between a voiceless obstruent and a word boundary, and becomes [ʝ] between voiced obstruents (Siptár, 2000, 205). For example, /j/ becomes [ç] in words like lopj [lopç] ‘steal’ and becomes [ʝ] in phrases like dobj be [dobʝ be] ‘throw (one/someone) in’ (Siptár, 2000, 205).

3.2.6 Trills

Hungarian has a singular trill consonant which is the sound /r/. Interestingly, longer rhotic sounds will occur as trills (such as a double r spelling), however, shorter rhotics will have less of a trill and present more as a tap (Tar 2017). Meaning that there are certainly allophones that exist for /r/ within the Hungarian language which are similar to /ɾ/.

4 Analysis

4.1 Introduction

When doing our phonetic analysis, we decided to examine the /h/ alternation that occurs intervocalically, in syllable final positions after front vowels, and word-finally. Following the Tamás Szende’s 1994 illustration of IPA we hypothesized that our speaker would realize /h/ as [ɦ] intervocallically, as [ç] in the syllabic-final position after a front vowel, and as [x] in the word-final position after a back vowel (Szende 1994). Based on our hypothesis we gathered a word list which we thought would allow our speaker to demonstrate these alternations and engaged in phonetic and phonological analysis via PRAAT software. Our results ended up differing from the hypothesis we had previously laid out and there is a question as to whether this represents solely the idiolect of the speaker or perhaps a greater phonetic and phonological realization in the Hungarian language.

4.2 Methods

We created our elicitation list by identifying several environments that we wanted to study for the phoneme /h/: word-initial, word-final after a back vowel, intervocalic between non-front vowels, intervocalic between a front vowel and a non-front vowel, and intervocalic between front vowels. Some of these categories overlap, but we made sure our word list had at least two words per category to make sure it was not an isolated incident. The exception to this is that we had one word to represent the environment “syllable-final following a front vowel.” We only had one due to the late addition of this category and the speaker’s lack of time available to record in a quiet space. The word list was given to the speaker in several chunks, which she then recorded either in her dorm room or her room at home on her phone, using the voice memo app. The voice memo app provides a sample rate of 44.1KHz. While we could not find the exact bit depth of recordings taken using the voice memo app, it is likely that it uses either a 16 or 24-bit setting (“Knowing Your Digital Audio Recorder,” 2014).

4.3 Phonetic Analysis

We measured the duration of each fricative, the standard deviation of each fricative to use as an indicator of dispersion, and the center of gravity of each fricative through analyzing the spectral slice of the fricative in PRAAT. We also made note of whether there was a voicing bar present. For each possible environment, we calculated the average standard deviation/dispersion and the average center of gravity. Additionally, we calculated what percent of the sounds in that environment were voiced.

These results were a bit surprising. Looking at Table 9, the values for and word-final /h/ after a back vowel and /h/ between two non-front vowels, /h/ is mostly unvoiced, and its center of gravity is fairly low compared to that of /h/ between front vowels, after a front vowel, and word-initially. This indicates that our speaker may have the [x] alternation not only word-finally but also between two non-front vowels. The word-final alternation seems natural, as [x] is a little bit easier to hear, and so speakers would put in that extra effort to make sure the listener understood there was an /h/ at the end of the word. This could also be how the intervocalic alternation emerged, although it seems less natural than a voicing assimilation rule to make the /h/ easier to pronounce.

The centers of gravity for /h/ in all the other environments are closer to one another than they are to those in the “Word-Final After a Back Vowel,” “Syllable-Final After a Front Vowel,” or “Intervocalic—Non-Front Vowels” categories, indicating this is probably the same sound. The only difference is that /h/ is always voiced between front vowels. This indicates that our speaker has the [ɦ] alternation only between front vowels, as opposed to all vowels as we expected. In the category “Intervocalic—One Front one Non-Front,” the /h/ is voiced 50% of the time, so it could go either way. Going forward in our analysis we will treat it as though the /h/ is realized as unvoiced since some of the syllable boundaries are a bit unclear, which would make a rule for an [ɦ] alternation that occurs after front vowels difficult to distinguish from the [ç] alternation that also happens after front vowels but only syllable-finally.

The centers of gravity for /h/ in all the other environments are closer to one another than they are to those in the “Word-Final After a Back Vowel” or “Intervocalic—Non-Front Vowels” categories, indicating this is probably the same sound. The only difference is that /h/ is always voiced between front vowels. This indicates that our speaker has the [ɦ] alternation only between front vowels, as opposed to all vowels as we expected. Our word list only had one word where the /h/ was in between a front vowel and a consonant, and that one was not only unvoiced, but had an extremely high center of gravity (3788.7 Hz). This indicates that the /h/ in this instance is realized as [ç] as expected syllable-finally after a front vowel.

Overall, our speaker seemed to have different forms of the [ɦ] and [x] alternations than we expected, although they were easy to make patterns for, indicating that while her alternations are different than expected, they still seem natural and predictable.

4.4 Phonological Analysis

As discussed above, we went with three rules: a voicing rule in between front vowels, a palatization rule after a front vowel before a syllable boundary, and a velarization rule after a back vowel. These rules are written out in Table 10. We briefly discussed the first rule occurring after any front vowel, but it was both unclear if /h/ between a front vowel and a non-front vowel was voiced, and due to syllable boundaries being slightly unclear, it was unclear how we would distinguish between that rule and rule 2.

While rule 3 does not have to come before or after either rule 1 or 2, rule two must come after rule 1, as if a word has a syllable boundary between the /h/ and a front vowel after it, the /h/ should still be realized as [ɦ]. These rules seem relatively complex, since one only occurs between front vowels, as opposed to all vowels, which we have seen examples of more often. This alternation is also complex since there are three rules and four different realizations of the /h/ phoneme. However, it does make sense that these rules would depend on the backness of the vowel(s) surrounding it, since Hungarian has vowel backness harmony, so it would make sense that other alternations depend on the backness of vowels, as opposed to, for example, the height of the vowels.

5 Appendices

6 References

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