Proceedings Published by the LSA (Linguistic Society of America)
Not a member yet
4323 research outputs found
Sort by
Language variation in teacher speech in a dual immersion preschool
Get PDFThis study investigates the language input provided for English-Mandarin emergent bilingual children in a California English-Mandarin dual immersion preschool. As illustrated in previous studies, teacher speech in foreign language classrooms often serves as the native standard of the target language, thus necessarily limiting students’ exposure to stylistic variation. The current research focused on the language input for emergent bilingual preschoolers who were Chinese heritage language learners and the use of sociolinguistic variables, including Mandarin lexical tones and word-initial sibilants, by their teachers. Results show that although the teachers perceived their classroom roles differently, they tried to provide clear and rich Mandarin input with tonal and sibilant variables that were used in consistent patterns. Except for the constraints of the linguistic environment, standard variables were preferred in classroom discourse. This implies that the particular needs of the English-dominant children to acquire Mandarin have been acknowledged and addressed by teachers. This type of modification in language input may affect children’s development of phonetic categories and their sociolinguistic competence
The Mandarin classifier is changing: How and why
Get PDFThis study aims to investigate the current state of Mandarin nominal classifier, uncover the change in classifiers across time, and explore the social meaning of classifier variation. A production experiment found a decline in diversity in specific classifiers over time. Perception results from the younger group demonstrate that classifier variation indexes a series of related personality characteristics. The age difference in participants’ production and perception indicates that the classifier variation is a change led by young people and suggests such change might have been motivated by the variable’s social meanings
Linguistic evidence for the Indo-European and Albanian origin of Aphrodite
Get PDFI consider the question of the source of the divine name Aphrodite, arguing that the etymology of the name indicates an Albanian and Illyrian origin. I first survey different etymological hypotheses and give reasons for rejecting them and then turn to motivating the Albanian sound changes necessary for taking the name to derive from Albanian sources. The historical and linguistic evidence will show that the Albanian phrase afro dita ‘come forth the day/dawn’ can be posited back to a Proto-Albanian *apro dītā a reflex of Proto-Indo-European *h2epero déh2itis. Modern Albanian afro dita refers to Aphrodite’s celestial origin. Aphrodite was first and foremost known as the planet Venus, which can only be seen during the dawn. Only Modern Albanian afro dita ‘come forth the day/dawn’ indicates this exact time when the planet Venus is visible in the sky. The celestial concept of Aphrodite was adapted by a Pre-Proto-Albanian group (Illyrians) from the Phoenicians, who first brought knowledge of the goddess to Europe
Nonboolean Conditionals
Get PDFOn standard analyses, indicative conditionals behave in a Boolean fashion when interacting with and and or. We test this prediction by investigating probability judgments about sentences of the form "If A, then B {and, or} if C, then D". Our findings are incompatible with a Boolean picture. This is challenging for standard analyses of ICs, as well as for several nonclassical analyses. Some trivalent theories, conversely, may account for the data
Reading times show effects of contextual complexity and uncertainty in comprehension of German universal quantifiers
Get PDFWe report three experiments, in which we combined self-paced reading with picture-sentence verification to test how reading times are affected by meaning-related processes. In particular, we investigated German sentences containing the universal quantifier alle (“all”) and examined how restrictive processes incrementally interact with other aspects of quantifier meaning, comparably to previous studies using other methods. Our results show that reading times were sensitive towards a match between context and sentence meaning and also towards an interaction between picture complexity and task demands. The results also point to the need for integrated processing models that combine refined notions of the relation between memory and expectations, on the one hand, with assumptions about adaptive processes and about representations involved in compositional interpretation, on the other
The interaction between past and conditional morphemes in Turkish
Get PDFThis paper focuses on the two conditional antecedent morphemes in Turkish, -(y)sA and -sA, and how the past morpheme interacts with them to generate different interpretations. Inspired by von Fintel and Iatridou (2023), I refer to -(y)sA as the O-marking, which is restricted to the epistemically possible worlds, and -sA as the X-marking, which refers to a wider domain than this context set. I argue that the past in O-marking denotes the actual past time. However, when the past morpheme appears with X-marking, it further widens the domain to include even less possible or impossible worlds. In line with Kaufmann (2022), I also argue for different levels of remoteness in X-marked conditionals and suggest that the past widens the domain further than the first level of X-marking by shifting back in time as she suggests
Is instrumental causee available in Azerbaijani?
No full textThis paper focuses on the availability of instrumental PPs in the ditransitive and causative of ditransitive verbs. While base ditransitive verbs only allow PPs to be marked with inanimate NPs, causative of ditransitive base verbs also accept animate NPs. The aim of this paper is to investigate whether these animate NPs marked with instrumental PPs can be the causee of the causative of ditransitive sentences, and to give an argument structure analysis within the Lexical Mapping Theory
Turkic impersonal passives
Get PDFAbstract. The current paper compares Sakha and Turkish through the lens of Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993) and outlines the structural differences and similarities between their canonical and impersonal passive constructions. Turkish argument structure has attracted lots of attention in the literature due to the unexpected patterns it exhibits in the domain of passive and impersonal constructions, such as double passives and passives of unaccusatives, which pose a problem for the Unaccsuative Hypothesis (Perlmutter 1978). To account for these structures, different previous approaches have argued that Turkish passive morphemes can in fact function as the overt realization of an argument in synthetic impersonal constructions (Dikmen et al. 2022, Legate et al. 2020). Building on this, I propose a new approach whereby these impersonal arguments are introduced by the general argument-introducing head i* (Wood & Marantz 2017), which allows for a more flexible account of passives and impersonals in Turkic and possibly beyond
Effects of instruction on semantic and pragmatic judgment tasks
Get PDFSentence judgment tasks are used often in linguistics studies. However, there is no consensus on how significant the effect of instruction is in such tasks: some argue that instruction is trivial, while others argue that they affect the way participants respond. In this study, we investigate different keywords used in sentence judgment tasks and determine which keyword best teases apart speakers\u27 response to semantically and pragmatically licit and illicit sentences. We test this in English and Mandarin, exploring the possibility of cross-linguistic variation on how speakers respond to different keywords. Our results show that the common keywords used in semantic and pragmatic judgment tasks such as \u27natural\u27 do distinguish semantic and pragmatic violations for English speakers, but that the common Mandarin translations of these words fail to distinguish between the two types of violations. Our results highlight the need for language- and study-specific norming procedures in sentence judgment tasks
Default biases in the interpretation of English negation, conjunction, and disjunction
Get PDFPrevious research has hypothesized default interpretive biases for three types of ambiguities with English logical words and, or, and not. First, disjunction (A or B) is hypothesized to be biased towards an exclusive interpretation in upward-entailing environments and an inclusive interpretation in downward-entailing environments (Levinson 2000, Chierchia 2004, Breheny et al. 2005). A negated disjunction (not A or B) is claimed to be biased towards a “neither-nor” interpretation (i.e. wide scope negation: ¬[A ∨ B]) and a negated conjunction is said to be biased towards an “either-not” interpretation (i.e. wide-scope negation: ¬[A ∧ B]) (Szabolcsi 2002, Szabolcsi & Haddican 2004). We tested these hypotheses within the same experimental paradigm with 149 English-speaking participants and found disjunction to be biased towards an inclusive interpretation across three different entailment environments: episodic declaratives, questions, and conditional antecedents. Our results also confirmed that English negated disjunction is biased towards a “neither-nor” (wide scope negation) interpretation but the results did not show an “either-not” bias (wide scope negation) for negated conjunction