Proceedings Published by the LSA (Linguistic Society of America)
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“Does this make sense?”: The effect of matching guise in regional accent on grammatical acceptability judgments
Get PDFSyntax and sociophonetics are typically treated as wildly disjointed (possibly even incompatible) theoretical pursuits. This paper seeks to unite sociophonetic speech perception and syntax research by presenting participants with matching or mismatching social expectations during a structural grammaticality judgment task. Place is the unifying social association between guise and structure. Participants completed a between-subjects matched guise survey with place-based grammatical structures spoken in either a matching place-based, local accent or a nonlocal accent. Place-based structures are consistently rated more acceptable in the local accent than the nonlocal. These results suggest that judgment of grammaticality results from an interplay of sociocultural expectations with accent and sentence structure. Judgment of structural grammaticality is not independent of social expectation
The Recursive Set-Subset Ordering Principle orders adjectives and relative clauses in visual context
No full textWe present evidence from two picture-matching experiments that native adult speakers of American English order and interpret sequences of nouns modified by adjectives/relative clauses containing adjectives in line with the Recursive Set-Subset Ordering Principle proposed in Bleotu & Roeper (2022a, b) and Bleotu, Foucault, & Roeper (2023). This principle ensures an automatic mapping of set-subset semantics to a recursive syntax in Universal Grammar, such that set modifiers are merged closer to the noun than subset modifiers: leaves (N) that are short (SET) that are long (SUBSET) or short (SET) leaves (N) that are long (SUBSET). We here expand upon the interpretation and ordering of set-subset modification to elucidate the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic interface.
Degree estimates as a measure of inference calculation
Get PDFScalar inference (SI), e.g., utterances containing the quantifier some being enriched to mean some but not all, is a central topic in semantics-pragmatics. Of recent interest in the experimental literature is the phenomenon of scalar diversity: that different lexical scales exhibit variation is how likely they are to lead to SI. However, studies of scalar diversity have almost exclusively relied on a particular experimental task: the inference task. In this paper, we argue that the inference task suffers from a number of shortcomings: namely, that it biases by providing participants with the stronger alternative and that it obscures pragmatic inferences other than SI. Instead we offer as an alternative a degree estimate task to investigate utterances containing scalar terms. We use the degree estimate task to reassess previous inference task-based findings from the literature on how two manipulations (discourse context and only) affect the likelihood of inference calculation. Our results show that the two tasks produce results that differ from each other in subtle but important ways
Bootstrapping where? Location changes disrupt intransitive verb mapping
Get PDFChildren utilize a range of cues in verb learning. The current studies explore children’s weighting of two different cues for verb-meaning: number of syntactic arguments and event location. Naigles (1990) demonstrated that children use syntactic bootstrapping in mapping transitive and intransitive verbs—they hypothesize that intransitive verbs refer to one-participant events and transitive verbs refer to two-participant events. Previous work also indicates that children are sensitive to the location that an event took place when they are learning new verbs. The current study builds on this work, exploring the role of location changes in mapping new transitive and intransitive verbs. We find that children robustly link transitive verbs to two-person events but are weaker overall weaker linking intransitive verbs to one-person events. Children are, however, less likely to link intransitive verbs to one-person events when the event location has changed, suggesting that they are influenced by background changes when interpreting intransitive verbs
On the auditory identifiability of Asian American identity in speech: The role of listener background, sociolinguistic awareness, and language ideologies
Get PDFThe current study examined the auditory identifiability of Asian American ethnoracial identity, including the role of listener characteristics and ideologies. Results of an identification experiment showed that the overall accuracy of ethnoracial identification on (East and Southeast) Asian talkers was low, but not the lowest among talker groups and not significantly different from accuracy on Black talkers. There were also significant effects of listeners\u27 ethnoracial identity, gender, and linguistic chauvinism (i.e., disfavoring linguistic diversity in the US). In particular, being Asian or a woman was associated with a higher likelihood of accuracy, whereas greater linguistic chauvinism was, to an extent, associated with a lower likelihood of accuracy. Results of a discrimination experiment additionally showed an effect of listeners\u27 awareness of ethnoracially-based language variation: having this awareness was associated with a higher likelihood of accuracy on discrimination trials with one or more Asian talkers. Taken together, these findings converge with previous results showing an effect of the listener\u27s background on ethnoracial perception and further implicate the listener\u27s sociolinguistic awareness and ideologies
Informational content vs. discourse orientation: experimental and computational perspectives
Get PDFThe aim of this study is to investigate how human speakers and computational language models process (i) the informational content and (ii) the discourse orientation of natural language sentences. These two dimensions of meaning have received little attention outside theoretical literature, especially in the computational linguistics domain. To help fill this void, we present the results of four experiments that exploit the specific semantics of two French adverbs, namely presque (≃ ’almost’) and à peine (≃ ’barely’), which put these two dimensions of meaning at odds. Each experiment focuses on one kind of population (humans or language models), and one kind of meaning (informational content or discourse orientation). Our results show that humans are indeed sensitive to informational content and discourse direction, as assumed in the theoretical literature. Language models exhibit a less transparent behavior. Their performances in dealing with the semantics of presque appear in line with predictions based on the way these models are trained, but this does not extend to à peine
Comparing Global and Local Accommodation: Rating and Response Time Data
Get PDFThis paper addresses the question to what extent global and local accommodation should be viewed as sharing the same underlying mechanism or whether they are distinct processes that only happen to share the same label. We present offline rating data and response times from a mouse-tracking experiment that directly compared global and local accommodation for five different triggers. The results show that globally accommodating a presupposition led to a larger decrease in acceptance than locally accommodating, and that response times for local accommodation were overall faster. While we take the results to be inconclusive with regard to the question about the underlying mechanism, we conjecture that the contexts tested here were more favorable for local accommodation, and that hence investigating how different contexts affect the relative ease of accommodation type is a promising avenue for future research
The genitive case with postpositions in Turkish
Get PDFThere is a diverse set of postpositions in Turkish that take genitive marked complements. The genitive case found on these postpositional complements is idiosyncratic, suggesting that it is a lexical case rather than a structural one (Ozt ¨ urk ¨ & Taylan 2016; Satik 2021; Kornfilt 1985; Baker 2015). The lexical genitive case exhibits distinctive behavioral patterns that we do not observe in the structural genitive case. That is, it is only overt on bare pronominals; otherwise, it is zero marked. The overt form of the lexical genitive case is syncretic with the structural genitive case. Through an analysis of these behaviors, we explore the relationship between the lexical and the structural genitive case
Binomial expressions as a window on the phonological system of Turkish
Get PDFThe principles governing word order in binomial expressions have been investigated in a few languages, revealing the relevance of several interacting semantic and phonological constraints, some of them universal or near-universal while others appear to be more language-specific. This paper presents the results of a preliminary quantitative analysis of some constraints influencing word order in Turkish irreversible binomials. We found that semantic constraints referring to the semantic prominence and iconic order of the items of the binomial, a constraint placing loanwords in final position, suprasegmental phonological constraints referring to syllable count, presence of onsets and presence of codas, segmental phonological constraints referring to the sonority of consonants, vowel roundness and presence of an initial labial consonant, all influence word order in Turkish irreversible binomials. Furthermore, the evidence from the segmental constraints may also shed light on some aspects of the Turkish phonological system, i.e. the markedness of rounded vowels and labial consonants, the properties of the sonority scale in Turkish and the featural specification of Turkish /j/
Island sensitivity and case matching in Uyghur pseudo-prolepsis
Get PDFMovement and binding constitute two classes of dependencies between nominals. Movement dependencies tend to have stricter locality requirements and involve connectivity effects between positions, while binding can often occur over longer distances and does not involve featural connectivity between the two positions. While the objects in movement are restricted to be identical — only surfacing differently in the case of deletion or use of pronominals — the objects of a binding dependency can have independent lexical content (Nunes 1995; Aoun et al. 2001). This paper concerns a kind of dependency between two DPs in Uyghur, originally classified as proleptic (Major 2021a; Rabinovitch 2022), in which the two positions associated with the dependency possess the locality restrictions and case connectivity effects of movement, while also having the independence of form associated with a binding dependency. This paper argues that this construction, dubbed here as ‘pseudo-prolepsis’, is a form of subextraction, in which a complex DP contains two coreferent DPs, one of which undergoes movement into a higher position. Locality and connectivity properties of the dependency derive from this movement, while the presence of a coreferent DP in the base position gives the illusion that the movement involves a chain of two lexically independent elements. The existence of ‘pseudo-prolepsis’ demonstrates that the independence of form between two elements in a dependency is not sufficient to rule out a movement dependency or diagnose binding