Proceedings Published by the LSA (Linguistic Society of America)
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Linguists and teachers collaborating in an ELA classroom: Teaching around the test
Get PDFIn this paper, a scholar of English Education (Michelle) and a linguist (Chris) discuss their four-week research study in a ninth-grade classroom. Highlighting the collaborations with the classroom teachers, this paper discusses the importance of integrating linguistic concepts with current curricular demands. A focus on the final activity, in which students were asked to explore how linguistic concepts relate to areas of the everyday world like social media and the law, demonstrates that students were able to engage with the linguistic concepts in critical and important ways. The paper finishes with a discussion of how linguists can consider future collaborations with stakeholders in K12 spaces, and the importance of integrating these concepts into the existing curriculum.
United Cyclic Agree
Get PDFThe operation Agree has been defined in many different ways for different purposes. This presents a problem for minimalist syntax, since no one form of Agree can explain all of the relevant generalizations. It becomes especially problematic when multiple versions of Agree must exist simultaneously on the same probe in order to explain different phenomena. This article examines two such phenomena in Basque finite verb agreement: ergative displacement and the Strong Person-Case Constraint, and the theories that account for them: Cyclic Agree (Béjar and Rezac 2009) and Feature Gluttony (Coon and Keine 2021). A combined approach called United Cyclic Agree is proposed, which captures the advantages of both theories without generating any new erroneous predictions. In this theory, all of the segments in a probe continue probing in successive cycles until they all have matching goals or there is nowhere left to probe
The division of main and subordinate discourse information in real-time comprehension
Get PDFThe study examines the role of discourse structure representation in real-time comprehension, with a focus on how main discourse and subordinate discourse information guides language processing. Using a web-based visual world eyetracking paradigm, we investigated pronoun resolution in two types of relative clauses: appositive relative clauses (ARCs) and restrictive relative clauses (RRCs). While ARCs were generally considered as secondary and side-commentary information, aligning with subordinate discourse, RRCs were usually construed as part of the main discourse. Making use of this distinction between ARCs and RRCs, the current study examined pronoun resolution with two possible antecedents. In one condition (RRC), the two antecedents were part of the same discourse whereas in the other (ARC), they were in distinct discourse units. We found stronger competition between the two possible antecedents in the former condition than the latter. Our findings can potentially be explained by an encoding interference, where linguistic entities encoded with similar discourse status information can lead to an interference effect
Automatic intonational contour clustering in Patwin
Get PDFThis study uses automated methods from Contour Clustering (Kaland 2021) to identify seven common intonational patterns in Patwin, an understudied Wintuan language of Northern California that survives via archival recordings. Only two phonetic or phonological analyses currently exist for Patwin (Lawyer 2015, 2021). This study finds that all seven contours suggested by Contour Clustering are attested in word-list elicitation, demonstrating a remarkable diversity of intonational types. In so doing, this study challenges claims made in Shafer (1961) that Patwin has lexical tone. Though the results are generally successful, Contour Clustering is not robust to the effects of poor recording quality on pitch tracking and subsequent cluster assignment. In general, this study indicates that using automated methods in tandem with a more phonologically grounded method of analysis such as PaToBI (Silverman et al. 1992; Björklund 2024) is fruitful for facilitating working with large amounts of archival data. This study adds to our limited understanding of Wintuan intonation, suggesting new intonation types for future investigation
Investigating the role of case markers in honorific agreement processing in Korean
Get PDFThis study explores the influence of case markers on the attraction effect in subject-verb honorific agreement in Korean. Using a self-paced reading experiment on PCIbex Farm, we manipulated case markers (possessive vs. nominative) and the presence of the honorific marker -si on verbs to assess their impact on the attraction effect, where syntactically illicit NPs are erroneously retrieved due to partial feature matching. While Avetisyan et al. (2020) reported that in Armenian, case information is used as a retrieval cue during subject-verb number agreement, our preliminary findings reveal no significant attraction effect related to case marker similarity, indicating that the case features (nominative case) do not crucially trigger the attraction effect in honorific agreement. The discrepancy with previous studies highlights the role of noun animacy and the specific construction of Korean sentence structure. Our results contribute to understanding the nuanced factors influencing honorific agreement processing in Korean and suggest that case marking, while integral to sentence structure, does not significantly affect the attraction effect in honorific agreement processing
Complements and modifiers: Implications for typologies of pronouns
Get PDFThis paper argues for a distinction between two categorially distinct types of personal pronouns in natural language. It demonstrates that overt nominal content surfaces as (i) a complement or (ii) a modifier of a personal pronoun. The distinction in the way nominal content merges is reflected in two types of pronouns. Pronouns taking nominal complements are full-fledged determiners, while pronouns surfacing with nominal modifiers are pronouns proper, i.e., pronominal forms that do not exhibit the determiner syntax. Four novel diagnostics underlying the complement/modifier distinction are introduced: (i) binding, (ii) genericity requirement, (iii) availability of pro-drop, and (iv) size of the pronoun. The paper contributes to a longstanding debate on the representation of nominal content in pronouns and a close connection between pronominal forms and determiners
A phonotactic-tonotactic grammar for Tokyo Japanese that clusters by lexical strata offers a good trade-off between model size and likelihood
Get PDFThe Japanese lexicon is typically classified into at least three etymological strata: native, Sino-Japanese and foreign words. In Tokyo Japanese, nouns from different strata are known to have different phonotactic as well as tonotactic properties. Should one analyze Tokyo Japanese nouns using a non-clustering grammar that generates all nouns using the same phonological grammar, or should one analyze them using a clustering grammar that generates nouns from different strata using different grammars? In this study, I address this question from a probabilistic and a model selection perspective: the better probabilistic grammar is one that better balances fit to data and the number of parameters in the grammar. Using the UCLA Phonotactic Learner, I train two kinds of MaxEnt grammars that correspond to non-clustering and clustering grammars. I compare the two kinds of grammar using the Bayesian Information Crierion (BIC), and show that the non-clustering grammars make a better trade-off between fit to data and model size than non-clustering grammars. Consequently, different etymological strata of the Tokyo Japanese nominal lexicon are better analyzed as being generated from different MaxEnt grammars than from the same MaxEnt grammar
Secondary predication in Irish and the syntax-prosody interface
Get PDFCross-linguistically, secondary predicates may be distinguished from event-modifiers (e.g. adverbs or converbs) and individual-modifiers (e.g. attributive adjectives, participles, or prepositional phrases) via the presence or absence of prosodic processes and phonetic cues. This paper examines the prosodic behavior of secondary predicates in Modern Irish, which can form bare adjectival depictive and resultative secondary predicates. We show that Mod. Irish bare AP secondary predicates are distinguished from surface distributionally equivalent attributive modifiers through the morphophonological system of initial mutation and cues such as phrase-final lengthening and pauses. These facts support an analysis of secondary predicates as extraposition structures that project to a φ-max/ι-boundary, mapping to complex syntactico-semantic representations. Evidence from Italian consonant gemination (raddoppiamento sintattico) and Georgian boundary tones are likewise discussed under the proposed analysis
Narrating a path: Digital humanities tools in the linguistics classroom
Get PDFThis paper embraces the premise in Mehl (2021: 331) that “linguists should care about the digital humanities … because collaborations between … linguistics and DH will be fruitful for all of us.” I discuss my incorporation of a selection of DH tools and practices into my teaching of three undergraduate linguistics courses, where in lieu of the traditional “research paper”, students learn about free web-based tools to create interactive exhibits and digitally edited volumes. These tools make multimodal writing and data presentation easy, and they are ideal for interactive presentation of ideas. They also allow students to weave concepts in linguistics with ways in which linguistics, usually more embedded in the social sciences, finds footing in the humanities, including language and identity, language endangerment and revitalization, or specific languages that they speak or are spoken in their worlds. These initiatives address justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) initiatives promoting cross-linguistic and cross-cultural understanding. They also allow students to actively interrogate the ways in which the discipline may perpetuate or challenge existing power structures and their biases
Video chat exams in an online general education linguistics course
Get PDFVideo chat exams are a potential solution in online, general education introductory linguistics courses that seek to promote academic integrity, differentiate instruction, center student language and rhetorical practices, and offer multiple assessment modalities. Instructors who try video chat exams will want to clearly communicate expectations, offer practice exams, take steps to mitigate bias, and be sure this strategy aligns with their student learning outcomes as well as logistical concerns, like class size