Proceedings Published by the LSA (Linguistic Society of America)
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On the ‘subject’ honorific -si- in Korean
Get PDFKorean is one of several languages that has a system of honorification, whereby a speaker can express (their desired interpretation of) their relative social standing with respect to others via morphosyntactic marking. Alongside the question of what honorification means (what it contributes to the communicative content of an utterance), there is another, less well-studied question: how is the target of honorification identified? Often this is taken to be a syntactic question, where honorification is treated as a kind of agreement. We present several arguments as to why this is not the correct approach. Instead, we advocate for a semantic/pragmatic solution. We take as our case study one marker of honorification in Korean, the morpheme -si-, which is often called a ‘subject honorific’ because it supposedly targets/honors the subject of the verb it appears on. It is well known, however, that this is an inadequate characterisation, and here we present further evidence that this cannot be the correct description of its role. Instead, we argue that the target of -si- is the human referent which is ‘closest’ to the subject in terms of the pragmatic relation of PROXIMITY, thus accounting for both the canonical uses and other potentially puzzling uses
Word-final strength and weakness
Get PDFWord-final syllables are known to show phonological strength, presumably due to final lengthening (Steriade 1994; Barnes 2002), but also phonological weakness. We propose that final weakening effects are also due to final lengthening under the assumption that duration due a phonetic source (i.e. final lengthening) is not on linguistic par with duration from a phonological source. We show further support for our proposal through the results of perception studies with adults that show less sensitivity to word-final duration differences. We note that child language phonology often shows unexpected final syllable strength and include two such diary studies with English-learning children. We propose that this difference between child and adult phonology is due to children not yet having learned to differentiate the import of duration based on its source
Yes-no questions in Balkar
Get PDFThis paper investigates yes-no questions in Balkar. We show the distribution and attachment options for the Balkar question particle mI in single-clause matrix questions and in questions with embedded complements. We also show that the Balkar mI-particle can scope out of island structures. We consider movement and non-movement accounts for Balkar yes-no questions. We conclude that the mI particle in Balkar is an adjunct focus particle attaching to the source of alternatives
Plural Possession in Turkish and Sakha
Get PDFThis paper examines the morphological interaction of possessor agreement and the number of the possessor and possessed noun in Turkish and Sakha, two distantly related Turkic languages. Of particular focus are third-person posses- sors, where both languages can use the regular nominal plural suffix -LAr to index 3PL possessors, and (similar to many Turkic languages) do not allow two instances of -LAr in sequence, resulting in a three-way ambiguity, e.g. Sakha at-tar-ï [horse-PL-3.POSS] a. ‘his/her horses,’ b. ‘their horse,’ c. ‘their horses.’ In Turkish, this ambiguity obtains only with pro-dropped possessors, as an overt plural possessor does not index plurality on singular nouns, whereas in Sakha 3PL agreement is obligatory. It is argued that in Sakha, 3PL possession is true agreement, whereas in Turkish the pattern that obtains under pro-drop is a result of the possessor’s PL feature lowering onto the possessed noun. Further, we examine the nature of the *-lar-lar haplology (i.e. the fact that a 3PL-possessing-PL cannot be marked with -lar twice: e.g. Sakha *at-tar-dar-a [horse-PL-PL-3P] ‘their horses,’ contending that it is a particular property of the exponent -lar which occurs during Vocabulary-Insertion
The rise and particularly fall of presuppositions: Evidence from duality in universals
Get PDFAt the center of this paper is the question whether presuppositions are more likely to be gained or lost in the process of language change. We offer a new experimental method that aims at ascertaining the re-learning speed of potentially presuppositional items based on nonce words and which integrates certain factors of change such as social prestige in an artificial but clearly contextualized set-up. The meaning targeted is of a quantifier meaning ‘both’ with speakers of German and the initial results point to higher ease of losing rather than incorporating the presupposition, but with an interesting resilience after a critical questioning of presuppositional status
Visual boundaries in sign motion: processing with and without lip-reading cues
Get PDFSign languages demonstrate a higher degree of iconicity than spoken languages. Studies on a number of unrelated sign languages show that the event structure of verb signs is reflected in the phonological form of the signs (Wilbur (2008), Malaia & Wilbur (2012), Krebs et al. (2021)). Previous research showed that hearing non-signers (with no prior exposure to sign language) can use the iconicity inherent in the visual dynamics of a verb sign to correctly identify its event structure (telic vs. atelic). In two EEG experiments, hearing non-signers were presented with telic and atelic verb signs unfamiliar to them, which they had to classify in a two-choice lexical decision task in their native language. The first experiment assessed the timeline of neural processing mechanisms in non-signers processing telic/atelic signs without access to lip-reading cues in their native language, to understand the pathways for incorporation of physical perceptual motion features into linguistic processing. The second experiment further probed the impact of visual information provided by lip-reading (speech decoding based on visual information from the face of the speaker, most importantly, the lips) on the processing of telic/atelic signs in non-signers
When Transformer models are more compositional than humans: The case of the depth charge illusion
Get PDFState-of-the-art Transformer-based language models like GPT-3 are very good at generating syntactically well-formed and semantically plausible text. However, it is unclear to what extent these models encode the compositional rules of human language and to what extent their impressive performance is due to the use of relatively shallow heuristics, which have also been argued to be a factor in human language processing. One example is the so-called depth charge illusion, which occurs when a semantically complex, incongruous sentence like No head injury is too trivial to be ignored is assigned a plausible but not compositionally licensed meaning (Don\u27t ignore head injuries, even if they appear to be trivial). I present an experiment that investigated how depth charge sentences are processed by Transformer models, which are free of many human performance bottlenecks. The results are mixed: Transformers do show evidence of non-compositionality in depth charge contexts, but also appear to be more compositional than humans in some respects
On a concessive reading of the rise-fall-rise contour: contextual and semantic factors
Get PDFThis paper presents three auditory rating experiments on the rise-fall-rise contour (RFR). Experiment 1 provides experimental evidence that the RFR makes disagreeing with a prior statement more natural than neutral intonation would. Additionally, the data show that the RFR exhibits a valence asymmetry, noted by Göbel (2019): the amelioration of a disagreement is greater when the RFR is used in a positive reply to a negative statement than in a negative reply to a positive statement. Experiments 2 and 3 investigate factors contributing to this asymmetry, showing that it disappears in replies to questions and is weakened when the reply contains an additive particle. Based on these results, we argue that the RFR has a scalar meaning, following Göbel (2019), with the relevant scale being contextually determined and resulting in an ambiguity resembling the Focus-particle at least
The pervasiveness of language contact: Evidence from negative existentials in Romeyka/Turkish code-switching
Get PDFThis paper investigates the morpho-syntactic features of language contact in the endangered Greek dialect Romeyka with Turkish. We analyze the use of the borrowed negative existential jok to (a) determine its role in Romeyka’s negation patterns (b) examine the effects of contact in Romeyka through cross-linguistic comparisons of jok with Turkish and forms of the dialect as spoken in Greece and (c) apply the identified grammatical patterns of jok to Myers-Scotton’s linguistic explanations for the code switching phenomena in the Matrix Language Turnover Hypothesis. The analysis demonstrates the pervasive influence of Turkish on the morpho-syntax of Romeyka through the incorporation of Turkish grammatical structures. We observe changes in the fundamental predicate grammar that are aligned with Turkish and that are inconsistent with Pontic’s existential constructions where the verb indicating existence is used. The patterns of contact confirm the Matrix Language hypothesis and provide evidence that indicate that Romeyka may be undergoing language turnover. Our findings are relevant to further understanding code switching among speakers of minority languages and assessing the vitality of Romeyka in Turkey
Which stress is on response particles? An empirical study
Get PDFPolar response particles (PRPs) have been the subject of a variety of studies in semantics and pragmatics, especially in languages like English and Farsi, where the same particles, āre ‘Yes’ and na ‘No’, can be used with two readings, namely the polarity and the (dis)agreement readings. While PRPs in response to the negative questions result in ambiguity, many scholars mention the important role of the prosodic saliency in the positive answers to the negative questions. This paper is an empirical effort to capture the focal stress on PRPs in Farsi. Two experiments were conducted with respect to the polarity and the bias of the question. The first experiment confirms the earlier studies for the presence of focal stress on the opposi- tion answers to the negative questions, as well as the lack of such stress in response to the positive questions. The second experiment reveals the presence of focal stress in response to both positive and negative questions, when the questions necessarily express bias. I will propose that two types of focal stress, namely Contrastive Focus and Verum Accent, perform two different functions. In the first experiment, the con- trastive focus helps to disambiguate PRPs when required, while the Verum accent in the second study is to indicate the conflict between the addressee’s response and the speaker’s (bias) expectation