Proceedings Published by the LSA (Linguistic Society of America)
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Bilingual knowledge of wh-in situ and island violations
Get PDFResearch on bilingual sentence processing has argued that structures which fully overlap in surface word order across two languages do not distinctly belong to either one of a bilingual’s languages but are instead shared across both. However, it is unclear to what extent the derivational properties of these structures play a role in this sharedness. In this paper we investigate bilinguals’ sensitivity to two structures that ultimately result in overlapping word orders across their two languages but are argued to be licensed under different pragmatic contexts. We focus on wh-in situ structures in Egyptian Arabic, a language where wh-in situ serves as a canonical wh-question formation structure in out-of-the-blue questions and English, where (single) wh-in situ structures have been argued to be pragmatically licensed in contexts where common ground requirements are fulfilled. Using data from Egyptian Arabic and English wh-structures, we show that even in situations where the wh-in situ structures are presented without pragmatic licensing, bilinguals accept them as out-of-the-blue interrogatives. Taken together, these results suggest that wh-in situ is a common structure across Egyptian Arabic and English for this population of bilinguals, despite its restricted pragmatic conditions in English
Presentist, trajectorial and heliocentric approaches to teaching the history of linguistics
Get PDFThis paper considers options for positioning the present in relation to the past in teaching the history of linguistics. It proposes three approaches as having been demonstrably practiced (presentist, trajectorial and heliocentric), plus a fourth (antiquarian) that is less likely to be publicized. They are exemplified and explored through a look at how the history of linguistics has been taught within the history of linguistics, in particular by William Dwight Whitney (a presentist), Ferdinand de Saussure (a trajectorialist) and Noam Chomsky (a heliocentrist). Key questions that arise include: What strategies and tactics can be inferred from their treatment of their predecessors? And to what extent can the teacher determine the course orientation, given that students, coming to it with their various backgrounds, experiences and expectations of the science, will receive it in different ways?
Note: A video of the session in which this was presented and the associated slide deck are available in the foreword to this issue.
Rampant analogy: The untold scope of analogical change from Latin to Romance
Get PDFAnalogical change has played a greater role in historical Romance verb morphology than is commonly recognized. Latin possum ‘be able’ (< pot- + sum ‘be’) has only one Spanish reflex derived via regular sound change, puedes ‘you can’. All other forms result from grammaticalization or analogy. This extent of analogical creation undermines claims that homophony avoidance drives analogy. The lower level of analogy elsewhere in Romance challenges the notion of necessity for the Spanish changes. Despite this verb’s high frequency, speakers replaced nearly every form on the basis of a single reflex without eliminating irregularity
Simplifying the evidential condition on asking polar questions
Get PDFIn classic accounts of polar question semantics, positive polar questions like "Did Mo sing?", low negation questions like "Did Mo not sing?", and high negation questions like "Didn\u27t Mo sing?" all denote the same set of answers: {that Mo sang, that Mo didn’t sing}. At the same time, it is well known that these three question types have different distributions. In particular, they have different requirements with respect to contextual evidence for the answers, the Evidential Condition on polar questions. Despite widespread discussion of this fact, no universally accepted explanation has emerged. In this paper, I make the novel argument that high negation questions do not have an Evidential Condition, and so only the conditions for positive and low negation questions need to be explained. I then argue that an explanation can be given based on general principles of markedness and information structure, even while maintaining a classic {p, not-p} semantics for both positive and low negation questions. I discuss ramifications for polar question semantics
The order of OVX and the argument-adjunct distinction
Get PDFAs for the order of verb (V), object (O), and oblique (X), Dryer (with Gensler) (2013) finds the asymmetry between VO and OV languages in terms of the position of X: VO languages are almost exclusively VOX, and OV languages are of all three types (XOV, OXV, and OVX). Hawkins (2008) argues that “[t]he OVX languages should be more head-initial and have head ordering correlations more like those of VO” (e.g., preposition: OVX 33%, VO 86%). However, we claim that high percentages of OVX languages have head-final orders unlike VO languages in complement-head orders (e.g., postposition: OVX 67%, VO 14%). We also claim that OVX languages have more head-initial orders than XOV and OXV languages in head-adjunct orders (e.g., Noun-Adjective: OVX 100%, XOV 56%, OXV 67%). We propose the universal tendency to complement-head-adjunct order
Information-theoretic applications to Hupa verbal morphology
Get PDFHupa (Na:tinixwe Mixine:whe’) is a Pacific Coast Dene language spoken in Hoopa Valley in Northern California. Like its Dene sisters, Hupa exhibits complex verbal morphology which has attracted decades of theoretical research. One approach that has yet to have been applied to these languages is information theory. Previous information-theoretic research into verbal morphology has uncovered a cross-linguistic trend of grouping predictive information closer together and finding morphemes that are more mutually-informative to the root closer to the root, which in turn reduces overall surprisal and is easier on memory constraints. However, these studies analyzed prominently suffixing languages of Afro-Eurasia. This project is the first application of these information-theoretic concepts to a Dene language to investigate if these approaches also apply to explain morpheme order in a low-resource, Indigenous American language with intricate, prominently-prefixing morphology. The results indicate similar findings to previous research. Hupa demonstrates a word-level linear morpheme order that, on average, orders most mutually-informative morphemes closest to the verb root compared to a randomized baseline. This morpheme order also resulted in an average surprisal that was more comparable to optimized morpheme orders than a randomized baseline. Morpheme-type mutual information, however, demonstrates the discrepancies between word- and templatic-level information content in Hupa, which exemplifies the word-level efficiency that Hupa shares with other languages despite the typological uniqueness of its morphological grammar
Comprehension of complex syntactic structures in Southern varieties of American English and mainstream American English
Get PDFResearch on the acquisition of complex syntactic structures in Southern English (SE) and Southern African-American English (SAAE) is near-absent, though an extensive body of literature is available on phenomena such as those of auxiliary and copula BE, and 3SG -(e)s. de Villiers et al. (2011) supported that characteristics found in AAE help avoid commonly observed developmental errors in the comprehension of wh-questions. Prior work on mainstream American English (MAE) has shown that where and what are acquired before who, how, why, which, and when. Research on passive voice revealed that children comprehend action verb passives earlier than non-action verb passives. We investigate the comprehension of wh-questions and passive voice in 222 SAAE-, SE- and MAE-speaking children, aged 2-13 and examine whether there were certain structural environments where we examined the comprehension of wh-questions or passive voice that were more challenging for the three groups. The results show that SE and SAAE have comparable development with wh-questions and passive voice, with minor exceptions. They confirm findings from previous studies on both the order of acquisition of wh-questions and the earlier acquisition of action passives, as well as the SAAE-speaking participants’ highly accurate performance with wh-questions, especially structures which include indirect/medial questions
A phonological analysis of the onset velar nasal merger in Hong Kong Cantonese
Get PDFThis paper provides a phonological analysis of the onset /ŋ/ ↔ /∅/ merger in Hong Kong Cantonese (HKC). What is particularly challenging for a formal analysis here is that the insertion and deletion of [ŋ] can occur in the same environment, since a sound normally does not allow two contrasting operations in the same environment (McCarthy 2003). The current study employs an analysis using a probabilistic constraint-based grammar (Goldwater et al. 2003), by proposing that [ŋ] is a placeless consonant at the onset position. Thus, [ŋ] is inserted placelessly and gets its place from the following vowel. Insertion of other sounds can thus be excluded by penalizing place insertion
Goals in teaching the history of linguistics
Get PDFWhile once a required part of programs in Linguistics, courses in the history of the field have largely fallen into desuetude. When such courses are offered, they tend to attempt to cover thousands of years of history or a vast range of diverse related fields in a single term. There is perhaps a place for such courses, but I argue here that a rather more limited and focused offering has a particularly important role to play in the education of future linguistic theorists.
Note: A video of the session in which this was presented and the associated slide deck are available in the foreword to this issue.
The does not encode an anaphoric index: Evidence from kind uses
Get PDFTwo types of semantic theories concerning referring uses of the English definite article the have historically held sway: (i) uniqueness theories, where the is taken to uniquely describe a referent within some contextually restricted domain, and (ii) familiarity theories, where the picks out a previously mentioned referent. Here, we focus on an observation made in Reed (2024) on the anaphoric potential of the definite article in kind-denoting contexts: namely, that it is limited when compared to occurrences of the in anaphoric individual-denoting contexts as well as to occurrences of other referring expressions (e.g., that) in anaphoric kind-denoting contexts. Based on these data, we argue for an analysis of the definite article that makes crucial use of domain restriction rather than anaphoric indices.