Proceedings Published by the LSA (Linguistic Society of America)
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Numerous-like predicates in bare plural generics
Get PDFIn this paper, we discuss the unavailability of generic constructions when a bare plural is modified by ‘numerous’: for instance, ‘gathered students are loud’ has a salient generic reading roughly equivalent to ‘when they are gathered, students are loud’. ‘Numerous students are loud’, instead, only has a quantificational reading: it can only mean that the number of students being loud is high, and lacks a generic reading equivalent to ‘when students are numerous, they are loud’. We analyse this on a par with available analyses of the impossibility of restrictive modification by ‘numerous’ of referential definite plurals (Pinton 2022). In a nutshell, operators contributing maximality like the maximisation coming with the definite article make the contribution of ‘numerous’ trivial. We also consider the more complicated case of Italian, where ‘numerous’ can in fact participate in generic readings, but only in certain syntactic configurations
Causality and modality: A case study on Teochew periphrastic causatives
Get PDFMany linguistics works have adopted the CAUSE operator to analyze causal relations. However, recent studies have gradually converged on the idea that a denotation like CAUSE(e, e\u27) is not sophisticated enough to capture complex causalities encoded in linguistic structures, echoing long-time discussions on causation in the field of philosophy. This study supports this view by working on the plural instantiations of causation encoded in five periphrastic causative constructions in Teochew, an understudied Southern Min language. I demonstrated causality notions encoded in Teochew causatives differ in four dimensions: (i) direct vs. indirect (temporal, spatial, intermediary agent), (ii) deterministic vs. probabilistic (in terms of the actuality entailment of the caused event), (iii) attitude-neutral vs. attitude-bearing (benefactive/adversative) and (iv) permissive vs. non-permissive. I provide a sublexical modal analysis paired with event semantics to capture these complexities, aiming to replace the monolithic CAUSE event linker and to show most of the causal complexities result from different flavors of sublexical modality encoded in the causative verbs
How do GenZ speakers use and process emoji in chatbot conversations: An eye-tracking study
Get PDFThis study investigates use and processing of emoji in chatbot conversations. 32 GenZ participants engaged in semi-naturalistic chats in an eye-tracker for ten minutes with a ChatGPT bot that used specific emoji from two personas (GenZ and Millennial). Eye-tracking and sentiment analysis revealed that the GenZ bot was typically positively perceived, while the Millennial bot showed one of two patterns: adaptation or hyperfocus on the ‘wrong’ emoji. The study sheds light on how emoji are used compared to words and their impact on AI assistant communication styles. The findings offer insights for studying open-ended conversations and linguistic patterns using ChatGPT.
Emphasis, certainty, and interdiction: Adverbials in Gisida Anii
Get PDFThis article presents novel fieldwork data describing the adverbials shɩ, cɔɔ, and caa in Anii, an understudied Ghana-Togo-Mountain language spoken in Togo and Benin. Shɩ and cɔɔ emphasize and mark the speaker’s certainty of aspectual reference, respectively, while caa serves to mark the speaker’s acknowledgement that the action or state denoted by the predicate is contrary to the listener’s wants
Subject nominalizations in Setswana
Get PDFAgent nominalizations of an object-bearing transitive predicate require of-insertion in many languages, including English (e.g., driver *(of ) a truck). Note that the same transitive predicate is not associated with of-insertion in the clausal syntax (e.g., drive (*of ) a truck). This work provides empirical evidence from Setswana (Bantu) and suggests that of-insertion is not necessary in Setswana agent nominalizations and subject nominalizations, more broadly construed. As long as the syntactic licensing requirements are satisfied, they need not resort to of-insertion. Additionally, I add weight to the claim that an external argument can be represented inside subject nominalizations (Baker & Vinokurova 2009). Adopting the Phrasal Layering approach (Alexiadou & Schäfer 2010, among others), I argue that parallels can be drawn between the nominal domain and the clausal domain in Setswana
Two voices calling out as one: A split voice analysis of Javanese passives
Get PDFThis paper examines the voice system of the Surakarta dialect of Javanese (SkJ) and proposes that both syntactic ergativity and a bundled C/T probe are necessary in interpreting the empirical facts in the language. We present an analysis along these facts, and further propose a decomposed voice structure based on the morphosyntactic realizations of Agents in SkJ voice system, which directly feeds the split ergativity analysis that underpins the extraction restriction observed in SkJ
The functions of full nominal reduplication in Jakarta Indonesian: A corpus-based examination
Get PDFExisting literature on full nominal reduplication in Indonesian describes the process as marking plurality or variation of type/kind (Sneddon et al. 2010). There are conflicting claims in the literature as to whether fully reduplicated nouns can cooccur with numerals and/or classifiers (Chung 2000; Dalrymple & Mofu 2012). This paper presents a corpus study of full nominal reduplication (FNR) in Jakarta Indonesian (JI), a recent variant of Malay which emerged as a blend of Jakarta Malay (JM) and Standard Indonesian (SI). In particular, I examine the cooccurrence and linear ordering of other nominal elements with fully reduplicated nouns (FRNs), including quantifiers, numerals, classifiers, demonstratives, possessive pronouns, and the definite article -nya. The corpus study found no instances of FRNs cooccurring with numerals, but one potential instance of an FRN cooccurring with a classifier. FRNs can cooccur with all other nominal elements. The linear ordering of these elements in JI more closely resembles the ordering in JM than in SI in that the FRNs may either precede or follow demonstratives. The corpus study also explores the interpretation of FNR as it pertains to plurality and variation of kind. It presents evidence that an additional function of FNR in JI is contrastive focus
Reviving Waccamaw Siouan: Reconciling ethics, Indigenous epistemologies, and colonial data archives
Get PDFIn this paper we discuss our strategies for reviving Waccamaw Siouan, a dormant Eastern Siouan language. We first outline and categorize the challenges of reconciling ethical methodologies with colonial data sets and systems, dividing these issues into six general categories. Next, we suggest specific, action-based tenets, in five categories, for dormant language revival; we argue for creative methodological adaptations to centralize Indigenous epistemologies and ethics while dealing with multiple, incomplete sources of archival data and various logistical hurdles. Ultimately, we contribute to ongoing discussions of language revival methodologies in the Americas, and particularly in first point-of-colonial-contact sites.
Transparency-conditioned valency alternations in Heritage Laz
Get PDFThe often-noted endangered status of Laz (South Caucasian) spoken in Türkiye (Haznedar et al. 2018) has not been systematically and empirically studied with reference to actual linguistic data produced by younger generation heritage speakers. To fill in this gap and identify the vulnerable aspects of Laz grammar when acquired as a heritage language (Montrul 2016; Polinsky 2018) I carried out one free production task and two grammatically oriented tasks (production via translation; and comprehension via grammaticality judgment task). Focusing on the patterns of valency changing operations in Heritage Laz, this study shows that the significant erosion of the syncretic i- marker in Laz provides evidence for its semantically vacuous nature (Eren 2021) rather than a voice marker (Lacroix 2012) or a verbal pronominal (Öztürk & Taylan 2014, 2017; Öztürk 2021). The erosion of this marker is expected given the Interface Hypothesis (Tsimpli & Sorace 2006) along with the Principle of Transparency (Aalberse et al. 2019), both of which were previously shown to regulate heritage grammars.
Morphological Decomposition in Heritage Turkish in the U.S.
Get PDFHeritage Speakers (HSs) of Turkish in the U.S. are unbalanced bilinguals, with Turkish as their morphologically rich, non-dominant language and English as their analytical, dominant language. The present study investigated whether HSs of Turkish process morphologically complex derived words in Turkish and English through decomposition or as whole words. This study also compared HSs’ processing patterns with those of homeland Turkish and homeland English speakers to determine whether HSs’ processing of morphology in the dominant and non- dominant languages relies on the same fundamental mechanisms as does baseline speakers’ morphological processing (Uygun & Clahsen, 2021). Two morphological priming experiments were conducted: the Turkish experiment compared HSs to baseline Turkish speakers; the English experiment compared the same HSs tested in their dominant language to baseline English speakers. The findings suggest that HSs exhibited efficient morphological decomposition in both their weaker heritage language and their dominant language, in that they exhibited morphological priming patterns similar to both baseline groups. In line with previous work on Heritage Turkish (Uygun & Clahsen, 2021; Jacob et al., 2019), these findings suggest that, despite limited exposure to the heritage language, HSs still develop homeland speaker-like morphological decomposition mechanisms for derived words in their heritage language