Proceedings Published by the LSA (Linguistic Society of America)
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Decision trees, entropy, and the contrastive feature hierarchy
Get PDFDresher (2009) argues that language-particular hierarchies of features are the best way to identify contrastive features in a phonological inventory. While not universal, this ordering of features is also not fully unconstrained. But what limits the space of possible feature orders remains an open question. This paper demonstrates how the concept of entropy establishes a partial ordering of features that both allows for but also constrains language-particular variation. Specifically, a decision tree machine learning algorithm is employed to dynamically impose structure on the hypothesis space of possible feature orders
Measure phrase modification in name adjective constructions in Mandarin
Get PDFMuch research has shown that measure phrases elicit an asymmetry in acceptability between positive vs. negative members of gradable adjective antonym pairs (3m tall vs. *3m short) (Kennedy 1999; Schwarzschild 2005, and others). As in other languages, the measure phrase in Mandarin yi mi ‘1 meter’ is accepted as direct modifier of gao ‘tall’ and rejected by the negative antonym ai ‘short’. However, when the adjective combines with name ‘so’, this measure phrase is accepted by both positive and negative adjectives. In addition, name adjective expressions are ambiguous between two readings. Namely, the surprise reading and the equative reading. This paper accounts for the new data with two proposals: (1) name is a presupposition filter; (2) There is a silent morpheme Vec in name adjective expressions, which is in complementary distribution with overt measure phrases
Comparing K-means and OPTICS clustering algorithms for identifying vowel categories
Get PDFThe K-means algorithm is the most commonly used clustering method for phonetic vowel description but has some properties that may be sub-optimal for representing phonetic data. This study compares K-means with an alternative algorithm, OPTICS, in two speech styles (lab vs. conversational) in English to test whether OPTICS is a viable alternative to K-means for characterizing vowel spaces. We find that with noisier data, OPTICS identifies clusters that more accurately represent the underlying data. Our results highlight the importance of choosing an algorithm whose assumptions are in line with the phonetic data being considered
Variation in acceptability of neologistic English pronouns
Get PDFThis acceptability-judgment survey of English neopronouns, including xe, fae, ey, and ze, shows that while neopronouns are not fully ungrammatical for most English speakers, they are rated as less grammatical than canonical third-person singular pronouns like she, he, and they. We found that several social variables correlated with ratings of neopronouns in sentences, including age, gender, and sexual orientation. The neopronouns that bear orthographic resemblance to canonical pronouns were rated highest, and metalinguistic comments from participants identified that analogy was an important factor in whether they found neopronouns grammatical
Examining voice choice in Tagalog: A corpus of web-based Tagalog
Get PDFThis study is a corpus-based analysis of web-based Tagalog (Austronesian) investigating how different prominence features influence voice in basic, declarative, transitive clauses. A large sample of these structures were extracted from a web-based corpus of Tagalog. The arguments were annotated for animacy, definiteness, and other factors proposed to influence voice choice. Preliminary results suggest that despite the morphosyntactic symmetry in voice alternations in the language, the Undergoer voice appears to be the preferred structure regardless of these factors in Tagalog. Moreover, there may be highly constrained contexts in which the Actor Voice is used when describing two-participant, transitive events. This work has implications for how we understand the notion of prominence more generally and how languages might have specific requirements for the mappings between different prominence hierarchies
The semantics of N-by-N adverbials
Get PDFThis paper will argue for a new analysis of N-by-N adverbials that they require a plural event and quantize the rate (when the N is a unit noun) or the participants (when N is a number or a sortal noun) of each subevent based on contextually interpreted free variables. It differs from previous analyses in that it does not link N-by-N adverbials to scalar change (Henderson 2013) or to the mereological make-up of some participants (Beck and Stechow 2007). And as a result, this paper is able to provide a unified analysis of N-by-N adverbials containing different types of nouns and capture their interaction with numbers and subevents
¿Va primero el verbo? OR ¿El sujeto va primero?: Subject-verb order in Latin American Spanish
Get PDFThis paper investigates subject-verb placement for unaccusative and unergative verbs in Spanish, focusing on syntactic, pragmatic, and sociolinguistic factors that predict placement. The study aims to answer three questions: (1) Does the unergative/unaccusative divide influence SV/VS order acceptability?, (2) What are the dialectal differences in subject placement acceptability in Spanish?, and (3) Does sentence context affect subject placement preference? The study collected data from sixty-nine Spanish speakers from the Caribbean, Chile, and Mexico, who provided 1656 acceptability ratings on sentences with different subject-verb orders. The findings indicate that both verb type and pragmatic conditions predict word preferability, with VS order preferred when the verb is unaccusative, and SV order preferred overall. The study adds to the literature by establishing the connection between argument structure and information structure and supporting the Unaccusative Hypothesis
KATIYEN as a common ground modifier in Turkish
Get PDFKATIYEN is classified as a negative polarity item that necessarily takes scopeunder clause-mate negation (Kelepir 2001) and subcategorized as a (super)strong-NPIthat is licensed in antimorphic contexts (Görgülü 2017, following Zwarts 1995). I arguethat KATIYEN has a dual use as a negative sensitive item and a degree modifier on thecommon ground. The novel data I present indicate that KATIYEN can be used instructurally (and semantically) nonnegative sentences to express an attitude holder’sultimate degree of certainty. I aim to capture its dual status by suggesting that KATIYENis a universal modal adverb that behaves similarly to the Greek emphatic NPIs bytaking scope over negation (Giannakidou 2000), in addition has a common groundmanaging function of marking the interlocutor’s strong stance towards the positive ornegative proposition
The enduring effects of default focus in let alone ellipsis: Evidence from pupillometry.
Get PDFThe study of clausal ellipsis in sentence processing has revealed that comprehenders are sensitive to multiple, sometimes conflicting, pressures when recovering elided content. This paper presents a pupillometry experiment investigating how the human language processing system responds to sentences in which the location of a pitch accent clashes with global preferences for local correlates. The results are discussed in light of existing literature, including the Enduring Focus Principle, in which locations for default pitch accent continue to influence focus-sensitive processes regardless of overt markers of focus
The Transmission of Vowel Harmony and Vowel Disharmony: An Iterated Learning Study
Get PDFSubstantive bias affects phonological acquisition in a way that learners may more readily learn phonetically motivated patterns. Some previous experimental work has proved the effect of substantive bias in a synchronic context, whereas how the bias influences diachronic changes has hardly been studied. This paper investigates the role of substantive bias in phonological transmission. We employed the iterated learning paradigm to compare the transmissions of two artificial languages exhibiting vowel harmony (phonetically natural) or vowel disharmony (phonetically unnatural). In general, participants performed equally well in the two conditions, and the proportions of the two patterns showed a similar decreasing tendency over generations, suggesting no bias effect in the process of language transmission