Proceedings Published by the LSA (Linguistic Society of America)
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The time course of the rate of speaker transitions in conversation
Get PDFUsing over 500 hours of recorded conversations from the CallHome and CallFriend corpora (MacWhinney & Wagner 2010), this study analyzes conversations to measure gaps and overlaps in speaker transitions. It builds on previous work in (1) measuring speaker transitions by using custom software that measures single speaker segments based solely on acoustic evidence, without the need for a transcription or manual configuration, and (2) by breaking down the conversations and evaluating the transition rates minute by minute. Across the seven different languages studied, a pattern emerges in the rate of speaker transitions over the course of time. The number of transitions is highest in the first minute and gradually decreases before coming to a more consistent rate. This pattern exists in each of the languages studied, despite language-specific differences in turn-taking behavior. The cross-linguistic consistency of the decrease in the transition rate over the first several minutes of a conversation suggests that accommodation may be occurring as speakers negotiate the cadence of their interchanges with each other
Involvee causatives in Turkish
Get PDFIn this study, we investigate a morphologically but not semantically causative construction in Turkish, which we label ‘involvee causative’ (InvC). In contrast to regular causative, the external argument in InvCs is not interpreted as an agent or causer but as merely being involved in or experiencing the event. Additionally, InvCs also differ from regular causatives in not licensing agent-oriented adverbs, instrument phrases and passivization. In previous research, failure of these diagnostics to apply has been taken as evidence for an unaccusative structure. However, we argue against such an analysis for InvCs and show that the latter contain a thematic Voice head. The above diagnostics, we conclude, are sensitive not only to the syntactic status of the external argument but also to its semantic properties, and are licensed only if the argument receives an agentive interpretation
Analytic autoethnography: Centering students’ linguistic and cultural experiences in assessment
Get PDFutoethnography is often used as a field research method and by educators to foster intersectionality in, and critical reflection upon, their own pedagogy. However, autoethnography is not commonly used as an assessment tool. There appears to be no literature on its use in a linguistics course, and this paper aims to address that gap. Analytic autoethnography is a productive assessment method for a linguistics course. The goal of analytic autoethnography is to connect one’s lived experience to theoretical concepts and research. I argue that using analytic autoethnography as an assessment method can help students critically reflect on their own lived linguistic and cultural experiences and to connect these to course content. Importantly, I argue that the assessment is more meaningful and more inclusive than standard exams. Additionally, analytic autoethnography is well suited to antiracist teaching as it requires students to examine the ways linguistic privilege and discrimination have affected their own lives and their communities of practice, thereby creating a linguistics classroom that is inclusive of all students’ linguistic and cultural identities. As analytic autoethnography is written using the authors’ native dialect(s) and language(s), it mitigates the privileging of Standard English in the classroom and puts into practice linguistic justice
Everyone except possibly Ann
Get PDFThis paper deals with the interaction of modals and exceptives as in Every student passed, except possibly Ann. Arguments are put forward motivating a parse for at least some such sentences combining features of the two standard analyses for exceptive constructions, namely the phrasal and clausal analyses. A novel approach based on the well-known idea of exception as set subtraction coupled with exhaustification contributed by an operator EXH is proposed. Crucially, on this approach the prejacent S of EXH is conjoined with [ modal EXH S ]. That is, the modal is only present in the second conjunct where it takes scope over the clause EXH S, which is partially elided. This leads us to consider further data suggesting that the EXH used in such constructions does not assert the prejacent but rather only excludes alternatives. That is, it is the first conjunct alone that contributes assertion of the prejacent
Not very easy: Towards the unification of scalar implicature and understatement
Get PDFModified and unmodified gradable adjectives give rise to two distinct and opposing varieties of pragmatic enrichment: scalar implicature and understatement. While earlier work in pragmatics took these to be complementary inferences derived from opposing conversational principles, more recent work in the formal tradition has placed the focus firmly on scalar implicature and related phenomena, with no attempt to also account for understatement. In this paper I argue that there are good reasons to pursue a unified treatment of the two, and outline one possible way of doing so, framed within the commitment approach to assertion, where I take the commitments that come with asserting a proposition to encompass not only liability for its truth but also acceptance of the social consequences of expressing it. I further discuss how this approach can shed light on recent experimental findings regarding the role of lexical semantics in the pragmatic inferences available to gradable adjectives, as well as a puzzle that these findings pose
Preliminaries for a substitution theory of de re
Get PDF We examine whether several challenges for transparent evaluation theories of de re can be accounted for by a single mechanism of propositional substitution. We provide necessary conditions for replacing the prejacent of an attitude with another salient proposition, and review some merits and weaknesses of this approach
Notes on two markers of contrast in Terek Kumyk
Get PDFThis paper investigates the meaning and the position of two discourse particles in Terek Kumyk (<West Kipchak<Kipchak<Turkic): =msA and =ˇc. The first one is found commonly within Turkic languages as a contrastive topic marker (see Iatridou (2013)), while the latter one can be called an universal marker of contrast which can mark either contrastive focus or contrasive topic. We will distinguish these two particles from homonymic markers, observe some contexts where we can meet them
The syntax of Mandarin Num-Cl P Num-Cl constructions
Get PDFNum(eral) P Num(eral) constructions in Indo-European languages have attracted much attention in the generative literature: they are argued to semantically function as a distributive phrase that targets plural participants and syntactically involve a reduplicative head Q bearing a quantity feature. This paper examines their understudied Mandarin counterpart, the adverbial Num-Cl P Num-Cl structure. Having discovered a fine-grained four-way ambiguity of this Mandarin construction, I argue that it is base-generated in the V-complement position, where de behaves like a functional head (“concordializer”) and forces it to move to its surface pre-VP position to receive Case through Agreement (cf. Larson 2018)
Diagnosing dominance: Problematic sandhi types in the Chinese Wu dialect of Jinshan
Get PDFThe concept of phonological dominance plays an important role in typologizing tone sandhi behavior in Sinitic languages. We confront the diagnostic criteria for dominance with data from Jinshan, a northern Wu dialect with complex disyllabic lexical tone sandhi. Auditory and acoustic data for the seven Jinshan tones in monosyllabic words are presented and compared with their realization in several different types of disyllabic word tone. It is argued that the current criteria for deciding the dominance of tone sandhi require refinement, which, when applied, reveal examples of both left and right dominance within the same lexical tone sandhi system
The structure of Mandarin embedded and matrix sluicing
Get PDFIn Mandarin sluicing, the copula shi may precede the wh-phrase and it’s sometimes optional. Most existing analyses agree that Mandarin embedded sluicing with shi is an instance of pseudo-sluicing with an underlying copular structure. However, different analyses disagree on exactly when shi can be absent in Mandarin sluicing and by extension, the underlying structure of sluicing without shi. Many existing analyses assume that shi can be absent in embedded sluicing when the wh-phrase is complex. This study presents experimental findings showing that shi can only be absent in matrix sluicing and is obligatory in embedded sluicing, regardless of the wh-phrase. I then provide novel arguments in favor of the view that sluicing with shi is underlying copular, while sluicing without shi is not