Proceedings Published by the LSA (Linguistic Society of America)
Not a member yet
4323 research outputs found
Sort by
Deriving the evidence asymmetry in positive polar questions
Full text linkThis paper explores a famous puzzle about English positive polar questions introduced by Buring and Gunlogson 2000: while in many contexts they seem to indicate nothing whatsoever about what the speaker takes for granted or thinks likely, in contexts that provide evidence against the content proposition of the question, they are infelicitous. This pattern, which I term the "evidence asymmetry", has been particularly troubling for standard accounts of polar questions that treat the positive and negative answers on par with each other. However, given that polar questions are felicitous in neutral contexts, it doesn\u27t have an easy solution: polar questions in general don\u27t seem to place constraints on evidence or context. I propose that polar questions have a fairly weak presupposition requiring just the content alternative to be possible (but say nothing about its negation), and (building on Trinh 2014) that this together with Maximize Presupposition-based reasoning about competitor questions (specifically"or not" alternative questions) can derive the evidence asymmetry. This account does not require the covert evidential marker of Trinh 2014, and essentially proposes that the evidence asymmetry follows from norms for English polar questions
Generality, genericity and subjective predicates: What propositional attitude verbs, alien viruses, and COVID can tell us
Full text linkIn uttering a subjective opinion like Donuts are tasty, is a speaker expressing her own opinion or also making a generalization about people-in-general? While researchers largely agree that generic readings of subjective predicates exist, there is no consensus on how central genericity is for theories of subjective meaning. We report a psycholinguistic study that tests what influences the level of prevalence that comprehenders attribute to opinions, expressed with subjective predicates, about unfamiliar information. Specifically, if you overhear an alien expressing an opinion about an unfamiliar virus (e.g. The zorgavirus is dangerous), how many other aliens do you think share this alien\u27s opinion? We find that the perceived generalizability of subjective predicates is modulated by the presence/absence of embedding under propositional attitude verbs (whether the speaker is explicitly mentioned with I think/consider) and by participants\u27 extra-linguistic attitudes, namely their anxiety levels about COVID. This work uncovers a new link between subjective predicates and humans’ egocentric cognitive biases
Verum, focus, and certainty
Full text linkVerum Focus is known as a prosodic pattern that places stress on verbs or auxiliaries and conveys certainty in a statement’s truth value. Previous literature is conflicted as to whether the effect of certainty arrives from a covert ‘truth’ operator, and to what extent focus alternatives are involved in the process. I show that focus alternatives and covert operators are independent mechanisms in Verum Focus utterances, which jointly trigger an inference of speaker’s certainty through a scalar implicature
Comparative analysis of advocacy strategies in justifications for gender-neutral English
Full text linkThis comparative analysis of arguments for singular they and neopronoun adoption focuses on two justifications: historical presence of gender-neutral language in English and individuals’ freedom to choose affirming terms for themselves. We found significant relationships between support for singular they and historical references, as well as neopronoun support and agency references, indicating a meaningful distinction in the ways language users justify different preferences. The frequency of specific arguments illuminates how people conceptualize language, which arguments are perceived as effective, and who must be convinced, and these findings can inform our understanding of folk perspectives on where and how prestige is granted to linguistic features
Ambiguity of the Japanese negative comparative expression kurabe mono-ni nara-nai ‘cannot be compared’
Full text linkThe Japanese comparative expression kurabe mono-ni nara-nai ‘cannot be compared’ has some characteristics that ordinary comparatives lack. First, its meaning is ambiguous in terms of whether the subject x is much higher than the object y or whether x is much lower than y in terms of scale. Second, it always appears with negation. I will argue that these two kinds of interpretation can be derived from the interaction with negation and the notion of category, and that the polarity sensitivity of the expression is due to its interaction with the maxim of quantity (Grice 1975). I will also compare the Japanese data to some related expressions in Chinese, English, and Japanese and discuss their similarities and differences. This paper shows that there is a new type of comparative, context-dependent comparison in natural language whose relative relationship is not linguistically encoded explicitly
You switch I switch, Jack: On the role of interaction in Cabo Verdean language mixing
Full text linkThis paper investigates the role turn-taking has in structuring language mixing practices in bilingual conversation. Previous research has observed that bilinguals prefer maintaining each other’s language usage e.g. Auer (1984: 28-29) ‘preference for same language talk.’ The present paper tests this hypothesis by exploring the language mixing patterns in the bilingual Cabo Verdean Creole (Kriolu)-English community in Boston. Two research questions drive the investigation: 1) How are bilinguals influencing each other’s language practices in an interactional context? 2) Are there observable contextual factors conditioning these interactional language practices? Four bilingual Kriolu-English conversations totaling 1.5 hours were analyzed focusing on the languages used at points of alternation between speaker turns. A quantitative analysis calculated the rate at which speakers maintained each other’s languages. Subsequently, a qualitative analysis explored possible contextual factors conditioning language change or maintenance. Results of the quantitative analysis show speakers have a broad preference for maintaining each other’s languages and the qualitative analysis supports that changing languages can be interactionally motivated
Compensatory strategies in child first language attrition within an Atlantic Creole
Full text linkThis study investigates compensatory strategies in lexical attrition that are applicable to Creole contact. There is evidence of lexical borrowing from a second language (L2), which is paired with discourse strategies such as exemplification and paraphrasing. Word coinage, metonymy, conversion and semantic contiguity are also all strategies implemented in an aim to compensate for lexical retrieval difficulties brought on by language attrition. It is found that an L2 User whose first language (L1) has become susceptible to language change may not solely employ a single strategy in an act of discourse, but may rather incorporate varying strategies, some of which serve the purpose of complementing other types of strategies in enabling successful communication. In the implementation of these strategies, though there may be influence from an L2, this L2 may not be dominant in the L2 users’ repertoire and L2 features borrowed into the L1 may be imperfectly acquired.
The influence of Guarani on gender agreement in Paraguayan and Correntino Spanish: A contrastive analysis
Full text linkIn this paper we analyze the influence of Guarani, a genderless language, on patterns of gender agreement in two distinct Spanish varieties, Paraguayan Spanish and Correntino Spanish. Using two unique conversational corpora, we show that, of the two varieties, Paraguayan Spanish more closely resembles Standard Spanish in patterns of gender agreement, but the cases of nonagreement that do occur are found in a wide variety of linguistic contexts, resembling the kinds of transfer effects common in L2 varieties of Spanish in speakers whose L1 is genderless. Correntino Spanish exhibits patterns of nonagreement that are not only more common but are limited in linguistic scope, i.e., only occurring in noun phrases involving feminine nouns with non-article modifiers. We attribute the differences between these two varieties to the differing presence of Guarani in the two regions where they are currently spoken. Paraguayan Spanish, in closer contact with Guarani, is subject to synchronic L2 transfer effects, while Correntino Spanish, a largely monolingual variety in the modern day, is characterized by diachronic L2 transfer effects that have fossilized and come to be found in the speech of monolinguals
Goals for teaching the history of linguistics
Full text linkA history of linguistics course is as an opportunity to revisit some important linguistic concepts students have learned. Students are usually exposed to the larger goals of linguistic theory, but it is not the primary focus in syntax and phonology courses, for example. By examining the historical development of these concepts, e.g., phonemes, transformations, universal grammar, linguistic relativity etc., a history of linguistics course can be used to explore the nature of linguistics and the connections between linguistics and other disciplines.
Note: A video of the session in which this was presented and the associated slide deck are available in the foreword to this issue.
Exploring variation in English and Italian relative clause attachment: The role of coordination
Full text linkThis study investigates the effect of coordination on the resolution of relative clause attachment ambiguity in English and Italian. We also examined the interplay of RC length and DP positions on attachment preferences in coordinate structures, conducting a partial replication of previous results on English (Hemforth et al. 2015). In two offline force-choice tasks, English speakers favored local attachment, while Italian speakers showed a strong preference for non-local attachment across all conditions. This pattern aligns with established variation across the two languages, but interestingly deviates from earlier reports showing the effects of RC-Head type, RC length, and DP position on attachment decisions. Our findings thus suggest that further attention needs to be paid to the complex interaction of different, potentially understudied, structural factors when investigating disambiguation mechanisms across languages