Proceedings Published by the LSA (Linguistic Society of America)
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Linguistic variation within the Northwestern Gheg Albanian dialect
Get PDFIn previous literature and linguistics analysis, the Northwestern Gheg Albanian dialect is classified as one zone that encompasses the area of northwestern Albania and southwestern Montenegro (B. Demiraj 1997: 40, Gjinari 1989: 54-8, Mëniku 2008: vii., Shkurtaj 2016: 26). The area is assumed to form a single subdialect; however, evidence from various levels of linguistic analysis discussed in this paper challenges this assumption. The area of Malsia Madhe in northwestern Albania and southwestern Montenegro exhibits different phonological, syntactic, and lexical patterns than the area of Shkodër. The southernmost point of this Gheg subdialect is Lezhë, which also has its own set of distinct idiosyncratic differences. This analysis provides an overview of the main differences between the areas of Malsia Madhe, Shkodër, and Lezhë, all typically grouped in the northwestern Gheg subdialect. This includes an evaluation of phonological, grammatical, semantic, and lexical differences between the three main areas of northwestern Gheg. Finally, it also offers a diachronic view of how this subdialect contributes to and challenges the history of the Albanian language’s development from Proto-Albanian and Proto-Indo-European
Varieties of wh-exclamatives: A view from the negative wh-expressives in Japanese
Get PDFWh-exclamatives are usually considered degree constructions (e.g., Zanuttini & Portner 2003, Castroviejo 2008, Rett 2008). However, Japanese possesses what I call negative wh-expressives, which are unrelated to degree. I argue that unlike typical wh-exclamatives, negative wh-expressive sentences express a speaker’s negative attitude, and their compositional system is similar to that of an interrogative sentence except for the speech act operator. That is, a negative wh-expressive occurs with a speech act operator, which takes a set of propositions Q and (i) presupposes that there is a unique proposition p in Q that is salient, and (ii) conventionally implies that p is unexpected and that the speaker has a negative attitude toward it. In this paper, we also look at cases in which the wh expression is embedded in the complement of omo-tteiru ‘think’ and cases in which nani ‘what’ acts as an adjunct, and show that these cases can also be explained by the core component of the proposed mechanism. This paper shows that wh-related exclamatives have both scalar and non-scalar types, and considers a new typology of exclamatives
“He sounds like a bureaucrat”: Variation of voice quality in stylistic performances
Get PDFVoice quality is a vital but understudied sociolinguistic feature in constructing style and personae. This study examines stylistic performances of character types in Beijing Mandarin, to understand how voice quality varies and comes to conventionally associated with social meanings. Acoustic analysis of recorded performances shows that voice quality is a dynamic variable that should be examined from the lens of different linguistic and discursive levels. Combined with meta-discursive analysis, the findings show that voice quality not only helps to typify a persona, but also contributes to forge relationships in frames of social interactions
Prosodic disambiguation of wh-indeterminates in Mandarin Chinese
Get PDFThis study focuses on naturally occurring ambiguous utterances like “Zhōngguóduì shuí yě dǎ-bù-guò” in Mandarin to study if/how prosody is used for disambiguation of wh-indeterminates. The results of our production study suggest that wh-indeterminates are disambiguated prosodically. For the wh-region, interrogative readings are distinguished from indefinite readings by having a longer duration and higher maximum pitch. For the pre-wh region, longer duration was observed when the wh-word received interrogative readings and left-dislocated. For the post-wh region, significantly greater pitch excursion was observed for indefinite reading than for interrogative reading. In particular, the novel finding of post-wh pitch compression for wh-interrogatives in Mandarin is in line with what has been attested in other wh-in-situ languages, such as Japanese and Korean, which suggests shared prosodic mechanisms for disambiguating wh-indeterminates in wh-in-situ languages
A theoretical account of whale song syntax: A new perspective for understanding human language structure
Get PDFIt is a common belief among linguists that the use of language is a species-specific phenomenon belonging only to humans. However, there is no doubt that there are non-human communication systems within the animal kingdom that are amazingly complex and share certain properties with human language (Berwick et al. 2011). The current paper – adapted from a more comprehensive undergraduate thesis – calls to attention the intricacy of one such system used among humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae). Recent findings by biologists and acousticians have uncovered an unpredictable pattern of bidirectional egressive and ingressive sounds in whale songs, leading to questions about song function and the presence of hierarchical structure akin to human language (Mercado & Perazio, 2021). While no conclusions have been unanimously agreed upon, whale song ‘syntax’ has the potential to remedy deficiencies in modern linguistic theory and provide insight into human communication. Drawing from recent literature about animal communication at large, whale singing behavior, and bidirectional sound production, I propose a theoretical, two-channel mechanism for the acoustic and structural nature of whale song. Using the two-channel mechanism, I further present a catalog of possibilities surrounding the potential for whale song compositionality to establish parallels with human language and ultimately argue a structural context for issues surrounding the modeling of paralinguistic computation, parentheticals, and syntactic amalgams.
Testing the influence of QUDs on the occurrence of Conditional Perfection
Get PDFIn natural language conversations, speakers often communicate ‘if and only if’ when they say ‘if’. The reasons why in some circumstances, yet not all, conditionals receive a biconditional interpretation remain under investigation. Von Fintel (2001) proposed an account where the interpretation of a conditional (“if p, then q”) is predicted to depend on the focus of the conversation which may either lie on the conditions that make the consequent, q, true or on the consequences following when the antecedent, p, is true. To test this account, we present two novel behavioral experiments with non-text based stimuli that take advantage of participants’ intuitive understanding of physics. We find some supporting evidence for the tested account that is not conclusive but suggests that other aspects, like the nature of potential alternative causes for the consequent to become true (e.g., with or w/o the influence of an external variable), also play a role for the interpretation of the conditional
An Economy-based Amendment to Learning Hidden Structure with Robust Interpretive Parsing
Get PDFRobust Interpretive Parsing is a method of learning hidden structure with error-driven learning algorithms (Tesar and Smolensky 1998, 2000). When an algorithm makes an error while learning a word, it calculates what it considers to be the structural representation of the word (the “target parse”) and changes its grammar accordingly. Among potential directions of grammar change, it chooses the direction that best satisfies the current constraint ranking. However, this choice is problematic because the current constraint ranking is guaranteed to be erroneous: had it not been erroneous, an error would not have occurred in the first place. While this problem has been recognized conceptually by Jarosz (2013), there have not been demonstrations of the problem arising in actual learning simulations. I present evidence from new learning simulations that the choice of target parse based on constraint ranking can indeed lead to learning failure. I then suggest an alternative method of choosing the target parse. This method opts for the target which involves the least amount of rerankings to accommodate for. In other words, it rewards economical change. While this alternative method does not lead to drastic improvement of performance, it does result in more efficient convergence
Is Sour Grapes Learnable? A Computational and Experimental Approach
Get PDFIn this paper, I present results from simulations using three different maximum entropy phonotactic models (Hayes & Wilson, 2008; Moreton et al., 2017): one that can only represent Sour Grapes, one that can only represent standard, attested harmony, and one that has the expressive power to capture both patterns. I then present results from an experiment designed to test the predictions of these models and find that humans behave most like the model that can capture both generalizations—challenging the idea that Sour Grapes is categorically unlearnable
Learning Stress with Feet and Grids
Get PDFThis paper investigates quantity-insensitive stress learning using the MaxEnt learner of Pater and Prickett (2022) and compares the performance of the learner equipped with three different constraint sets: a foot-based constraint set and two grid-based constraint sets, one drawn directly from Gordon (2002), and one that changes the formulation of the main stress constraint to match the foot-based learner. The learner equipped with the foot-based constraint set succeeds at learning all the languages from the Gordon (2002) typology that it can represent; the structural ambiguity of the foot-based representations is not a problem in this regard. The foot-based learner also learns the languages as quickly in terms of number of epochs as the faster of the grid-based learners, which is the one with the revised main stress constraint. We conclude that the foot-based learner and the grid-based learner fare similarly well in this initial comparison on a typologically grounded set of learning problems
Temporal Coordination and Markedness in Moenat Ladin Consonant Clusters
Get PDFIn this paper we examine the phonotactics of consonant clusters in Moenat Ladin in terms of their markedness and temporal coordination. Moenat Ladin word-initial clusters include sibilant-stop (SC), stop-/r/ (Cr), stop-/l/ (Cl), and sibilant-stop-/r/ (SCr). However, despite SC and Cl sequences being well-formed in Moenat, sibilant-stop-/l/ (SCl) clusters are almost entirely unattested. We hypothesize that the rarity of SCl clusters owes to a cumulative markedness effect that arises from the combination of marked structures involved in SC and Cl sequences. Our investigation centers chiefly on the status of word-initial SC sequences in Moenat Ladin, for which we hypothesize that the sibilant is organized external to the syllable onset. This hypothesis is supported by an acoustic study of temporal coordination of Moenat, employing the methodology of Ruthan et al. (2019) and Durvasula et al. (2021). We propose a formal account in Harmonic Grammar (Legendre et al. 1990) such that SCl clusters exceed a markedness threshold in contrast to permissible clusters. In this account we employ a model of phonotactics in which a phonotactically non-permissible cluster is modeled as selection of the null parse (e.g. Albright 2008, 2012, Breiss & Albright 2022)