Proceedings Published by the LSA (Linguistic Society of America)
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Accentual phrases in Tagalog intonation and their loose relation to word prosody
Full text linkIn this paper, we present a preliminary analysis of Tagalog intonational phonology. We argue for three levels of prosodic phrasing above the prosodic word: an Accentual Phrase (AP), an Intermediate Phrase (iP) and an Intonational Phrase (IP). Each of these phrases are defined by edge tones, which contributes to the regular tonal melody of Tagalog utterances. We argue that Tagalog is typologically unusual in that some tones display variability in terms of their alignment: sometimes these tones target prominent syllables, while other times they appear to ignore them and target phrase edges. In particular, the left edge tone of an iP-medial AP is some- times aligned to an (unstressed) AP-initial syllable, and other times is aligned to the stressed syllable of an AP-initial word. This finding suggests that Tagalog repre- sents a new type of language, one with variable tonal alignment, which is not easily accounted for in the Autosegmental-Metrical theory of intonational phonology
Pragmatic accommodation in judging event culmination
Full text linkThis study investigates Mandarin speakers’ acceptability of telic descriptions for incomplete situations, focusing on the role of pragmatic accommodation. Previ- ous research (Xu & Schmitt to appear a, to appear b) has shown that in judging event culmination, when two out three objects were fully consumed or created and the third object was partially affected (e.g., a girl eating two cookies and taking a bite from the third one), participants were able to restrict the domain of the definite/demonstrative DP (but not the noun phrases with the numeral three) to refer only to the fully consumed or created objects and, we argued, because of that, tended to accept the description as matching the event. In the present study, we examined a different type of (non)-culmination in which all objects were partially consumed or created (e.g., a girl taking a bite from each of three cookies/partially building three houses), a context where domain restriction of this type is not possible. Sur- prisingly, participants accepted sentences with both demonstrative and numeral direct objects as “good enough” descriptions of the event. These findings further challenge the idea of a general mechanism for the acceptance of telic descriptions in (non)-culminating situations, and instead support specific effects depending on how different ingredients of aspectual composition and visual context interact
Number Agreement of Coordinated Subjects: Competing Syntactic and Semantic Rules
Full text linkWe investigate number agreement in coordinated subjects, including disjunctions and conjunctions of singular universal quantifier. Experimental data from German reveals that they often allow for singular agreement. We argue that there is a competition between semantic and syntactic agreement, and that the latter is a generalization of the former
Deriving the paradoxical effects of temporal metalepsis
Full text linkThis paper explores a phenomenon, metalepsis, that hasn’t been discussed in linguistics until only recently, but is important because it sheds new light on the semantics of fiction and paradoxical statements. We focus on a particular instance of metalepsis, namely the following sentence from Sylvie by Gérard de Nerval: ‘While the coach is making its way up to the hills, let us piece together the memories of the days when I often visited these parts.’ This sentence exemplifies a temporal paradox since the narrator asks the narratee to join him in doing something that had already happened. Previous analyses of metalepsis have focused on third-person examples, leading to incorrect predictions for such first-person examples. We propose a novel analysis that accounts for both first- and third-person uses, while also accounting for a potential difference in aesthetic import between the two cases
Mood Across Constructions: A Unified Approach
Full text linkThe present paper provides a uniform treatment of mood morphology across constructions in Spanish, including: (a) mood selection in complement clauses of attitude verbs and in matrix clauses, (b) mood alternation in relative clauses and, tentatively, (c) mood alternation in conditional clauses. We argue for the following combination of ingredients from different approaches: (i) mood tracks the modal architecture of the embedding verb, not the local context set; (ii) mood introduces a world pronoun, not world quantification; and (iii) indicative mood is presuppositionally heavier than subjunctive mood
A UG-based exploration of children’s use of the
Full text linkEnglish-learning-children have been shown to use “the” in a non-adult-like manner, to refer not only to discourse-old referents but also to discourse-new ones in many contexts. Here, we explore a novel semantic hypothesis for this acquisition observation, whereby the distribution of “the” in children’s speech is a result of their semantic representation for this item being identical to bare nominals in so-called article-less languages. This hypothesis predicts that children must overuse “the” only in those contexts where article-less languages independently license bare nouns, and not elsewhere. Across two experiments, we utilized a free production task where participants filled in missing NPs in children’s stories. The results were found to be overall consistent with our hypothesis, though there are some alternative interpretations to be further explored in future work
Prenominal relative clauses in Northern Tajik Persian: Analytic to synthetic morphology and a new contact perspective
Full text linkWe examine the evolution of synthetic relative clauses (RCs) in Northern Tajik Persian, driven by prolonged contact with Uzbek. While Standard Tajik Persian uses analytic post-nominal RCs with the complementizer ki, Northern Tajik has synthetic pre-nominal RCs with non-finite verbs,with a high degree of structural and grammatical parallelism with Uzbek RCs, suggesting they were acquired through contact. We explore the dynamics of language change and reevaluate the sociolinguistic factors contributing to the grammatical ‘Turkification’ of Northern Tajik. Initially, stable bilingualism in the vast rural contact zone favored the adoption of isomorphic structures for code-switching. Later, these varieties permeated some Tajik-speaking cities like Samarkand and Bukhara, analogous to rural-to-urban shifts which diachronically brought Bedouin-type dialects into Baghdad. In modern times, these urban centers have become significant contact zones, further transforming the language through Uzbek-medium education and media exposure
The role of intonation and context in lack of necessity meanings in negated deontic necessity modals in child Romanian
Full text linkThe current paper experimentally addresses the question of whether Romanian 5-year-olds interpret negated deontic necessity modals as interdiction initially, and to what extent intonation and situational context may act as cues for a more adult-like interpretation. We find that, in the absence of situational context, children initially interpret all negated deontic modals as interdiction. Prosodic cues are on their own not enough to lead to an adult interpretation. However, in the presence of situational context, children are able to tease lack of necessity and interdiction apart and even show sensitivity to prosodic differences among negated modals
Telescoping in incremental quantification
Full text linkBumford (2015) argues that universal quantification in dynamic semantics should be analyzed as generalized dynamic conjunction for empirical benefits. However, this analysis is incompatible with the existing telescoping analyses, which use a pluralized dynamic system (van den Berg 1996; Nouwen 2003; Brasoveanu 2007: a.o.). This study aims to resolve this conflict. It is proposed that quantification over events and their participants allows us to account for telescoping without the pluralized dynamic system
Epistemic bias anti-lincenses NPIs in polar questions
Full text linkThere is general agreement that the distribution of any is unrestricted in polar questions. I argue that this is not the case: in contexts where there is epistemic bias in favor of the prejacent of a polar question, the question exhibits the same behavior as a declarative with respect to the licensing of any. I provide an account for this observation in terms of intervention: epistemic bias forces polar questions to be parsed as having a silent modal E which intervenes between any and the question operator whether that otherwise licenses any