Proceedings Published by the LSA (Linguistic Society of America)
Not a member yet
4323 research outputs found
Sort by
Morphological and phonological origins of Albanian nasals and its parallels with other laws
Get PDFThe Albanian language is traditionally divided between the Gheg dialect to the geographic north and the now Standard Tosk dialect to the geographic south. Recent literature of the historically isolated dialect of Malsia Madhe (Dedvukaj 2022) has revealed a subdialect which has not undergone the specific phonological sound changes seen in both the Standard Tosk and Modern Gheg dialects. The Tosk dialect is distinct from the dialects of Gheg and Malsia Madhe (Malsia) in that it contains homorganic nasal-stop clusters in positions where they did not occur in various Proto-Indo-European (PIE) reconstructed forms. Three historical processes and the distinct ways in which nasal-stop clusters appear in Tosk are discussed: homorganic nasal assimilation that occurred in the 16th–18th centuries, the insertion of epenthetic stops due to sonority constraints and analogical extension, and constraints on the analogy that can be attributed to the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP), which restricts Tosk Albanian to one nasal-stop cluster within a single morpheme
Mandarin verbal reduplication and the one-delimitation principle
Get PDFIt has long been observed that an eventuality may be associated with at most one delimitation. This paper argues that the incompatibility between Mandarin verbal reduplications and several post-verbal result-denoting elements is one of the cases to which the one-delimitation principle applies. The discussion of Mandarin verbal reduplication contributes to our understanding of the one-delimitation principle by showing that (i) the one-delimitation principle not only applies to resultatives but also other result-denoting elements; (ii) vP is the domain for the one-delimitation principle
Community and lifespan changes in music: Sociophonetic variation in Laurentian French
Get PDFPrevious studies on English have highlighted various instances where individual singers or small groups change which dialectal features appear in their music (e.g. Trudgill 1997; Beal 2009; Coupland 2011; Eberhardt & Freeman 2015; Lyon 2019). Whereas corpus studies on music have the option between real-time or apparent-time analyses, most previous research on music has largely been conducted via case studies on change across a singer or group’s career (see Gibson in press a). Focusing on Laurentian French (also known as Quebec French or Canadian French), multiple singers may moderate dialectal traits in music due to their albums being released internationally, where the dialect faces stigma (Szlezák 2015). We further hypothesize that pop singers are especially sensitive to international norms and stigma because they are more likely to market abroad due to pop music’s greater international appeal (Grenier 1993). We examine non-lengthened high vowel laxing in closed final syllables (e.g. /vit/ [vɪt] vite ‘fast’; Dumas 1983), a process characteristic of Laurentian French that is categorical (Côté 2012) and nonstigmatized (Lappin 1982; Paradis & Dolbec 1998; Reinke et al. 2006) within the dialect. We expand the study of dialectal traits in music beyond English by using a new corpus of 20 Québécois singers who sing in French and are of the Laurentian French dialect. Additionally, we analyze the patterning of groups of singers across their careers, rather than the patterning of a single singer, and analyze real-time change of groups as opposed to individual
Sensitivity to finiteness in attitude verb interpretation
Get PDFChildren are sensitive to syntactic structure when learning new verbs (Gleitman 1990). This has been shown in tracking transitivity (Naigles 1990), as well as in hypothesizing meanings for attitude verbs (Harrigan et al 2019). In English, desire and belief subcategories of attitude verbs have different finiteness properties; desire verbs occur with finite complements and belief verbs occur with non-finite complements. The current study explores adults’ sensitivity to varying distributions of finiteness in the complements of a novel attitude verb, aiming to better understand the mechanism for hypothesizing verb meaning based on syntactic distribution. We find that adults’ hypotheses for class of attitude verb are tied to the syntactic distribution—they strongly connect finiteness to belief verbs and non-finiteness to desire verbs
To describe or to make a description: How Uzbek verbal morphology handles borrowings
Get PDFIn the field of contact linguistics, how susceptible certain lexical categories are to borrowing is a major topic of discussion. Verbs, in particular, have been a subject of controversy for several decades. This study seeks to add to that discussion by consulting Uzbek as a test case. As a Turkic language with agglutinating morphology and a language that has been subject to influence from several prestige languages, Uzbek has a wealth of borrowed vocabulary available to be analyzed and a verbal system that allows for relatively easy dissection to see which processes borrowings may need to undergo in order to function as verbs in the target language. Using two online Uzbek-English dictionaries, verbs that included various derivational morphemes were obtained and analyzed to see if there was evidence of verbs being borrowed into the language. Upon completion of this analysis, it was determined that Uzbek does not borrow verbs. Instead, its rich derivational morphology allows for a highly productive system of transforming adjectives and nouns into verbs, meaning that there is no reason to borrow verbs themselves
Real-time processing of indexical and generic expressions: Insights from, and implications for, COVID-related public health messages
Get PDFWe used COVID-related health messages to investigate the incremental processing of expressions such as you, we and people in generic contexts, to further our understanding of how these kinds of expressions are processed in real-time and to explore whether the ease of comprehending public health messages related to the COVID pandemic is influenced by type of referring expression. Results from a self-paced reading study point to an increased processing load in messages with the non-indexical form people (relative to we and you), which we suggest is separable from effects of word length and frequency. We interpret this as preliminary support for the Indexicality Hypothesis, which posits that expressions which can in principle receive indexical interpretations are easier to process than non-indexicals, and also emphasize the need for further work on these kinds of questions
Phrasal Prominence Location is Influenced by IP Boundary Location in the Absence of Stress Clash
Get PDFSeveral factors can influence early prominence in double-stressed words (e.g., Maltese), namely the presence of foot-level stress clash with a following word, and their adjacency to domain-initial boundaries. We test whether initial accent can occur in such words even when the words are spoken in isolation. Fourteen targets and 26 tri-syllabic filler-items were produced in isolation and in a frame sentence, e.g., [Say Maltese again], by 12 English speakers. In isolation, ‘Early’ prominence on, e.g., Mal- is more likely because the target is utterance- and phrase-initial. In the Embedded condition, phrasal prominence should be less likely on the initial syllable because there is a weaker boundary preceding the target. Three linguists coded prominence location. Early prominence rates, and Early scores (sum of ‘Early’ judgements/token) were calculated. While 96% of the Embedded tokens were perceived with ‘Late’ prominence, this pattern appeared in only 48% of the Isolated targets. The Early scores were also significantly higher in the Isolated condition. Overall, results suggest that doubly-stressed words show stress shifting to demarcate the left IP-edge. Because this study uses contexts free of stress clash with a following word, its results provide evidence that other factors, namely domain-onset-marking, can influence prominence location
Adjustable word edges and weight-sensitive stress
Get PDFIn standard Optimality Theoretic analyses of weight-sensitive stress, no consideration is given to thepossibility that languages may reposition the edges of the prosodic word in order to avoid violations ofconstraints related to syllable weight. I propose that this underexplored prediction is borne out in Karuk (isolate, California) and Majhi Punjabi (Indo-Aryan)
Non-uniformity in phonologizing phase heads: Evidence from Kazakh
Get PDFTypical of a Turkic language, vowel harmony regularly occurs in Kazakh. In this paper, I address the exceptional behavior of the comitative marker in Kazakh regarding palatal harmony, and show that it follows from the K head being phonologized separately from its complement. This is crucial following work on Cophonologies by Phase (CBP), in which phase heads are claimed to be phonologized with their complements (see Sande & Jenks 2018, Sande 2019, Sande et al. 2020, Felice 2022). I argue that CBP can account for the exceptional behavior of the comitative marker by modifying the existing proposal. Specifically, it can model the exceptionality of the comitative marker if it is assumed that some heads (specifically the K head in the case of Kazakh), are phonologized separately from their complements (cf. Newell 2008)
Optionality in semantic-pragmatic interface of bilingualism? Bare numeral constructions in Tibetan and Chinese bilinguals’ grammar
Get PDFBare numeral constructions (BNCs) can be anaphoric in Chinese but not Tibetan. Since the interpretation of BNCs requires a specific context, we consider it to involve a semantic-pragmatic interface, which has been argued to be vulnerable to crosslinguistic transfer for bilinguals (e.g., Sorace 2005, 2011). This study conducted a controlled sentence-picture matching truth value judgment task to examine whether Tibetan-Chinese bilinguals show crosslinguistic influence when interpreting BNCs in both languages. The data suggests that crosslinguistic effects did occur among some bilinguals. However, there were more bilinguals who successfully differentiated the two languages regarding the interpretation of BNCs. Our findings imply that early bilinguals may not necessarily show optionality in interface phenomena