Proceedings Published by the LSA (Linguistic Society of America)
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Juggling arguments: VSVO and other word orders in Hul’q’umi’num’ Salish SVCs
Get PDFThis paper investigates the word order of serial-verb constructions in Hul’q’umi’num’ Salish. Hul’q’umi’num’ SVCs are monoclausal constructions consisting of two or more verbs that can function as independent lexical verbs, have matching aspect, share one or more arguments, and are not connected by any linking element. Two-verb SVCs may consist of transitive and intransitive verbs. The first question concerns subject and object NP placement. For constructions with two overt NPs, an alternating VSVO pattern is both preferred in elicitation, and the only order occurring in the corpus. Only shared arguments may intervene between the verb components. Hul’q’umi’num’ SVCs exhibit flexible word order in elicitation, but certain grammatical word orders generate ambiguity. Various pragmatic strategies work together to prevent or rescue ambiguous constructions. SVCs are an understudied feature of Central Salish languages; thus investigation of this topic broadens the scope of the current literature
Swimming in the desert? The role of environment in motion verb acquisition
Get PDFAny event includes countless components, giving the learner many possible options in mapping verb meanings. Previous research demonstrates that children are sensitive to the distribution of motion verbs in their language, mapping ambiguous verb-event pairings to manner if their language has more manner verbs, like English, and path if their language has more path verbs, like Spanish. Previous work also demonstrates that children have some sensitivity visual components, such an event’s location, when they are learning motion verbs. Our study explores how the learner weighs components of visual scene against the distributional factors present in their language. Like previous studies, we find that English-learning children are better at encoding manner than path information. Additionally, we build on previous work on motion verb acquisition, showing that children are differentially influenced by different kinds of background environments
What Mr. Simmons said: Stylization, pitch, and the voicing of others on the Gullah Geechee cultural heritage tour
Get PDFThis article discusses the use of stylized voicing, specifically falsetto phonation, in Gullah Geechee during a cultural heritage tour in Charleston, South Carolina. Gullah Geechee, a minority creole language spoken by descendants of formerly enslaved persons in the American Southeastern coastal Lowcountry, is analyzed in the study using participant observation and sociophonetic data collection. The research finds that the stylized pitch-shifting is a productive component of the guide’s ethnolinguistic repertoire, used for multiple indexical functions, including constructing authenticity and performing stylized double-voicing. The data shows the complex social meaning of this feature related to speech genres, performance, perceptions of authenticity and authority, and the ethnolinguistic repertoire of a minority language commodified for outsider consumption. The study also links Gullah Geechee prosodic indexicality with its related variety, African American English
Negotiating communicative imaginaries: Definitional debates and language ideologies in a critical race theory hearing
Get PDFBetween January and March 2022, the South Carolina Education and Public Works Committee held a series of hearings to consider five bills that were introduced in the State House, all of which were seeking to restrict how race could be taught and discussed in schools. As similar “anti-CRT” bills were introduced in a majority of U.S. states, many ensuing political debates focused on disagreements over the meaning and usage of the term “critical race theory.” Proponents and opponents of the bills oriented to starkly different understandings of the definition of CRT, and they relied on different language ideologies to defend those understandings. In examining the relationship between language ideologies and political strategies in over 21 hours of public debates about anti-CRT bills, this project analyzes instances when interlocutors used the same term to invoke different meanings; both Republicans and Democrats treated CRT as a semiotic abbreviation (Slotta 2019), yet the speech chains invoked by this abbreviation were vastly different. For Republicans, CRT invoked an educational praxis aimed at accusing White students of racism; for Democrats, CRT referred to an advanced legal theory that had never been present in K-12 schools. This paper focuses on language ideologies used in instances of explicit definition, ultimately finding that these ideologies depended both on the political stance of the speaker (for or against the bills) and their political role (legislator or public testifier)
Semantics of Non-Doxastic Attitude Ascriptions from Experimental Perspective
Get PDFThe paper presents novel experimental data regarding reports of non-doxastic attitudes (expressed by verbs such as “wants”, “fear”, “is glad”, and etc.) As observed by some theorists, non-doxastic attitude ascriptions differ from the ascriptions of doxastic attitudes (e.g., “believes”) in that they do not support simple entailments or presuppositions of their complement clause. In particular, an ascription may intuitively change its truth-value if we alter the informational structure of the embedded clause without modifying its truth conditions. We present two experiments whose results support this observation. Experiment 1 shows that the truth-value and acceptability judgements of non-doxastic attitude ascriptions in a context generally depend on the informational structure of the embedded clause. Experiment 2 reveals that the truth-value judgements vary if we manipulate not only the “presupposition-assertion” structure of embedded clause, but also the components related to non-presuppositional entailments of the clause. This conclusion suggests that the contents on which attitude verbs operate should be represented as structured entities
On the Distribution of Neutral Tone in Southern Min: LCC and Beyond
Get PDFThe aim of this paper is to address an often-overlooked topic in Southern Min tonology: neutral tone. We show that the tone sandhi domain in Southern Min is not always isomorphic with an XP in syntax or a phonological phrase. In fact, this domain may be smaller than what has been predicted, as evidenced in the phrase-final functional morphemes as well as in the rhythmic effect. We propose that the tone sandhi domain in Southern Min is defined by a constituent Tone Sandhi Domain (TSD, τ) between the p-phrase and the p-word. A TSD is required to bear a final prominence, and only a p-word, mapped from a contentive or focused element in syntax, can be a “prominence-bearing unit.
How morphological is Hungarian vowel harmony?
Get PDFThere is a significant degree of phonological indeterminacy in front/back harmony in Hungarian (HVH), which manifests itself in lexical variation and/or vacillation. Harmonic behaviour in the zone of variation strongly supports the hypothesis that harmonic classes which individual roots belong to are organized as a paradigmatic system, very similar to inflectional classes. Such lexically determined declension classes are required independently of vowel harmony to account for various other lexically conditioned alternations in Hungarian, e.g., the alternations involving linking vowels in suffixes and yod in 3rd person possessives. A further evidence for the morphologisation of HVH is a paradigm uniformity effect, Harmonic Uniformity, which reduces harmonic uncertainty by making a stem’s harmonic behaviour predictable from that of its root. Thus, HVH is determined by morphology (paradigmatic classes and paradigm uniformity) in addition to (and sometimes overriding) phonology
The Segment Status of the Mandarin Glide: A Language Game Experiment
Get PDFThe acquisition of a phonological grammar requires the segmentation of an utterance into individual consonants and vowels as a first step, yet it is often taken as a given. I show that segmentation is not a trivial problem by drawing evidence from Mandarin Chinese, where the shortage of morphophonological processes leads to ambiguity in the segmentation of prenuclear glides. I present two language game experiments, in which Mandarin speakers are asked to disassemble syllables in their language, thus revealing their segmental structure. The task, based on fanqie secret languages, involves taking a disyllabic word and swapping its two onsets, in order to form a codeword. What the speaker does with the glide informs us on how they have segmented the sound. A key finding of the experiments is that /j/ is more likely to be treated as an independent segment after non-palatal onsets, compared to palatal ones. Speaker variation, both interspeaker and intraspeaker, is observed. Nevertheless, Mandarin speakers converge on three distinct types
Paraguayan Guaraní reduplication: a novel prosodic analysis
Get PDFIn contexts of reduplication in Paraguayan Guaraní [gug, Tupí-Guaraní, Paraguay], two syllables are copied.The position of the reduplicant is variable, but morphophonologically conditioned. With data from apparentbase-reduplicant mismatches, I evaluate three possible analyses of reduplication. Contrary to previousaccounts of reduplication in Tupí-Guaraní (Everett & Seki, 1985; Rose, 2005; Hamidzadeh, 2013), I arguethat the reduplicant in Paraguayan Guaraní is best analyzed as an infix: specifically, a suffix to the stressedvowel. Reduplication in Paraguayan Guaraní is sensitive to stress assignment, which is determined by theprosodic structure, and the reduplicant is a disyllabic suffix to a stressed vowel. The vowel to which thereduplicant attaches may lie within any prosodic word: therefore, both attested and unattested types ofvariability in reduplicant position fall out from this account. I additionally propose that synchronic variationis evidence of an ongoing reanalysis of the position of the reduplicant in Paraguayan Guaraní from a suffix tothe stressed vowel towards a suffix to the prosodic word, in line with free suffix order in the language
Probing a Neural Network Model of Sound Change for Perceptual Integration
Get PDFThe cross-linguistic tendency for contrast shifts to occur between some cues more than others has been investigated typologically and experimentally (Yang 2019), but with less attention in computational modeling. This paper adapts a human experimental paradigm (Kingston et al. 2008) to the speech perception component of a neural network model of sound change (Beguš 2020) to better understand how it processes acoustic cues in the context of Yang’s proposal that auditory dimensions affect which cues are more likely to undergo contrast shift. Piloting this neural network probing technique, I find evidence that the model integrates different pairs of English stop voicing cues than humans do, suggesting that further amendments to the model are necessary to implement Yang (2019)’s account. In general, these results highlight potential acoustic processing differences between humans and the model under investigation, a Convolutional Neural Network, which is commonly used in spoken language applications