Proceedings Published by the LSA (Linguistic Society of America)
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Gender-inclusive language as a Rational Speech Act in Spanish
Get PDFAmidst social changes in gendered language use, there is pushback from institutions such as the Spanish Royal Academy, which claims that the use of the generic masculine (e.g., bomberos ‘firemen’) in describing a mixed-gender group is equally inclusive of both men and women (Bosque 2012). By contrast, speakers of Spanish have increasingly adopted gender-inclusive alternatives to the generic masculine (e.g., bomberos o bomberas; Bengoechea 2015). Across two behavioral tasks, we investigated whether gender-inclusive forms actually lead to more inclusive interpretations. We found that the use of the inclusive form (by contrast to the generic masculine) indeed yields more inclusive interpretations, increasing the inferred femaleness of stereotypically male professions, but also decreasing the inferred femaleness of stereotypically female professions. In an attempt to explain the reasoning that delivers inclusive interpretations, we developed a computational cognitive model of the reasoning process. Our model treats the phenomenon as an instance of a markedness implicature: speakers use the longer, inclusive form to guide listeners away from their prior expectations. This work highlights the need for further research into the use of gender-inclusive language cross-linguistically, as well as for pushback against prescriptive institutions perpetuating stereotypes
*ABA pronominal stem allomorphy without containment
Get PDF*ABA environments are pockets of morphology that prohibit noncontiguous suppletion, and which show promise to generativists as a diagnostic for the presence of syntactic hierarchical structure. In particular, it identifies Lower Arrernte (Pama-Nyungan) nonsingular pronouns as an AAB-permissive *ABA environment. Morphological contiguity in Lower Arrernte results from the manner in which kintactic features expressing kinship generation and shared patrimoiety must always be bundled together at the same node as co-triggers of suppletion within a realizational morphology. Crucially, this study contradicts earlier accounts of the relevant paradigms in terms of how the categories are ordered by markedness: it argues that the agnatic-harmonic pronouns (i.e., pronouns that refer to groups in which all members belong to the same patrimoiety and even-numbered generations) are the most representationally complex. It emerges that morphological contiguity in Lower Arrernte nonsingulars patterns against the containment relationship observed in comparative suppletion and with the bundling relationship observed in English ablaut
Recursive and non-recursive tone sandhi domains in Laoling trisyllabic sequences
Get PDFIn previous studies, variations of tone sandhi domains of tri-tonal sequences are either recursive or non-recursive domains, differing only in prosodic branching. In Laoling, however, both recursive, e.g., (σ(σσ)), ((σσ)σ), and non-recursive variant domains, e.g., (σ)(σσ), (σσ)(σ), are observed. In traditional Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993), such variations cannot be predicted. In this study, we combine Coetzee’s (2006) Rank-Ordering model of Eval with McCarthy’s (2010) Harmonic Serialism and demonstrate how both recursive and non-recursive domains and their varying frequencies can be predicted
Passives, impersonals and Voice in Sakha
Get PDFPrevious studies on Sakha have diverged on whether to analyze its passives and impersonals as syntactically distinct constructions or not. In this paper, we report a novel variety of Sakha which behaves differently from those recorded in the literature with regard to its passives and impersonals. We argue that in this Sakha variety, the impersonal should be analyzed as an active construction with a null impersonal pronoun, rather than a passive construction. We also discuss the implications of the findings for theories of passives and the typology of Voice
From approximation to probability: bi’ + numeral constructions in Turkish
Get PDFThis paper provides a semantic analysis of bi’ + numeral constructions in Turkish (e.g., Markete varmak için bi’ 20 metre daha yürüyeceksin). Although there are similarities between bi\u27+ numeral constructions in Turkish and some+ numeral constructions in English, there are unexplained situations about the bi\u27 structure in Turkish. We claim that the presence of the indefinite determiner bi’ ‘some’ in such constructions is licensed by the presence of the probability operator PROB at the sentence level
Comprehending Turkish sentences using word order, thematic roles, and case
Get PDFA core aspect of sentence comprehension is assigning thematic roles such as agents and patients to nouns. Turkish, a flexible word order language with accusative case-marking, allows us to compare the relative effect of word order, case-marking, and thematic reversibility in sentence comprehension. We conducted two spoken language comprehension experiments to investigate the relationships among these factors. Native Turkish-speaking adults were faster and more accurate in comprehending sentences with default word order than those with scrambled word order; case-marked sentences than non-casemarked sentences; and sentences with thematically irreversible nouns than those with reversible nouns. The effect of word order depended on the reversibility of the nouns, and case-marking had little-to-no effect on comprehension when the nouns were thematically irreversible. Our results suggest that while Turkish speakers use multiple cues to map thematic roles onto nouns, there are diminishing returns of facilitation with each additional source of information. These results give support to race-based models of sentence comprehension
Corpus evidence for the role of world knowledge in ambiguity reduction: Using high positive expectations to inform quantifier scope
Get PDFEvery-negation utterances (e.g., Every vote doesn’t count) are ambiguous between a surface scope interpretation (e.g., No vote counts) and an inverse scope interpretation (e.g., Not all votes count). Investigations into the interpretation of these utterances have found variation: child and adult interpretations diverge (e.g., Musolino 1999) and adult interpretations of specific constructions show considerable disagreement (Carden 1973, Heringer 1970, Attali et al. 2021). Can we concretely identify factors to explain some of this variation and predict tendencies in individual interpretations? Here we show that a type of expectation about the world (which we call a high positive expectation), which can surface in the linguistic contexts of every-negation utterances, predicts experimental preferences for the inverse scope interpretation of different every-negation utterances. These findings suggest that (1) world knowledge, as set up in a linguistic context, helps to effectively reduce the ambiguity of potentiallyambiguous utterances for listeners, and (2) given that high positive expectations are a kind of affirmative context, negation use is felicitous in affirmative contexts (e.g., Wason 1961)
Transparency in the processing of temporal ambiguity: The case of embedded tense
Get PDFWe report the results of one acceptability rating study and two self-paced reading studies on the form-meaning mismatch in the interpretation of past-under-past in complement clauses in English. Across the three experiments, we find an off-line and on-line preference for the backward-shifted interpretation, in line with predictions of the structural approach to the ambiguity when assuming a processing preference for morphological transparent interpretation
On “historical unity” of Russian and Ukrainian: A linguistic perspective on language conflict and change
Get PDFThis paper focuses on Putin’s (2021) misguided claim regarding “historical [linguistic] unity” of Russian and Ukrainian. Their being two distinct languages is not in question, as opposed (for example) to Serbian and Croatian. However, it is important to substantiate the objective reality of those differences, taking a strong stand against unjustified claims about linguistic [unity] where there are no grounds for them. Implementing a Python-coded algorithm, like those described in Nerbonne & Kretzschmar 2013, we calculate Levenshtein distance between frequency-based word lists, in a manner sensitive to both organic and contact-induced change, to fully reveal Ukrainian’s complex relationship with both Russian and Polish
Toward processing of prosody in spontaneous Japanese
Get PDFThis paper considers how prosody in spontaneous Japanese is processed. We have conducted Rapid Prosody Transcription (RPT) perception experiments on the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese (CSJ) and investigated how boundaries and prominences are perceived. We recruited three groups of participants from different Japanese dialects and found that (i) F0 is not a strong prominence cue in Japanese, contra Japanese literature on focus prominence (Pierrehumbert & Beckman (P&B) 1988; Kori 1989; Ishihara 2016) and (ii) Japanese allows multi-headed and headless intonation phrases, and P&B’s reset theory, i.e. focal prominence resets boundary phrases, faces empirical difficulties. We also found that (iii) both content words and function morphemes get highlighted in Japanese, and (iv) perception strategies vary cross-dialectally and listeners from different dialects perceive boundaries and prominences differently