Proceedings Published by the LSA (Linguistic Society of America)
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The Productive Status of Laurentian French Liaison: Variation across Words and Grammar
Get PDFThere are competing views in contemporary phonological theory about how to best represent processes that are pervasive, frequent, and phonologically motivated, yet still lexically sensitive. To what extent can – or should – a process that applies idiosyncratically to different morphemes, words, and even phrases, be represented in a way that allows it to generalize to novel forms? We examine this question by looking at prenominal liaison as it is used in contemporary Laurentian French, spoken in Canada. We present the results of an online production study that compares application of liaison in real vs. nonce nouns, and that considers the effect of nonce nouns’ phonological properties and morphosyntactic context on the process. We interpret our results as evidence that liaison behaviour is driven jointly by lexical representations and an abstract grammar, with properties of the real-word lexicon affecting liaison rates in nonce words. We further show that there is considerable variation in the population in the extent to which speakers produce liaison with real h-aspiré words, but that all speakers nonetheless share an understanding of what types of words are more vs. less likely to undergo liaison
Faithfulness and underspecification
Get PDFThis work is about two ‘generation problems’ for classic Optimality Theory, chain shifts and saltations. The issues for OT posed by traditional analyses of chain shifts and saltations have led to various embellishments of the classic theory, typically in the form of novel constraint types. Reiss (2021a,b) proposes a general solution to the problem of chain shifts and saltations that relies more directly on different assumptions about representations than about constraints. Specifically, Reiss assumes that underlying representations may be underspecified, and that a map ‘counts’ as a chain shift or as a saltation so long as the surface alternants from a uniform underlying representation match the respective observed alternants. We report here on three results from our ongoing formal assessment of Reiss’s proposed solution
A discourse-based approach to concessive although-stripping in English
Get PDFThis study investigates concessive stripping in English, a phenomenon where the so-called Stripping or Bare Argument Ellipsis (BAE) occurs in although-clauses. This elliptical construction has at least two sub-patterns: although-stripping and negative although-stripping. Merchant (2003) and Wurmbrand (2017) argue that although-stripping undergoes clausal ellipsis to contribute to the propositional meaning of a remnant, supported by syntactic connectivity effects. However, the corpus data we have identified indicate that connectivity effects can often be overridden. Based on this observation, we suggest a discourse-based approach in which the ellipsis construction is directly generated with no derivational processes and interpreted with reference to the contextual information in questio
Getting serious about serial verbs: Evidence from Croatian
Get PDFWe put forth here the novel claim that certain Croatian multi-verb constructions are to be analyzed as instances of serial verb constructions (SVCs), based on the fact that they show characteristics, such as shared arguments, restrictions on selection of verbal elements, limitations on modification, and so on, that are associated with SVCs cross-linguistically. We contrast Croatian SVCs with coordinate structures and control/non-control subordinate constructions, and offer a formalization of the differences among these structures
Mandarin overt wh-fronting as focus movement
Get PDFThis study reexamines the syntactic encoding of information structure embodied by Mandarin overt wh-fronting questions. The sentence patterns that this paper is concerned with are wh-questions containing one or more fronted wh-phrases surfacing in (i) a clause-initial position (in root or non-root contexts) or (ii) a position immediately following a topicalized subject (also in root or non-root contexts). Departing from previous literature that obscures the exhaustifying effect exerted by a clause-initial shi ‘be’, I propose a more fine-grained classification of the focus interpretations of this type of question: a bare wh-fronting question coerces a plain (non-exhaustive) contrastive focus or a mirative focus reading (when the wh-phrase is prosodically marked) of the wh-variable, and shi-marked wh-fronting questions are shown to enforce an exhaustive focus in the answer. These three types of focus-associated interpretations are treated as conventional implicatures following Bianchi et al. (2015)
The morpho-phonology of an English diminutive
Get PDFI describe and analyze the morpho-phonology of the English diminutive suffix /-i/, as in doggy, birdie, horsie, and so on. My first goal is to argue that unlike most other diminutives in English this suffix is productive, though subject to a phonological constraint. Specifically, I show that this suffix must be adjacent to a stressed syllable—a requirement that motivates exceptional truncations. I propose that thesefacts provide a clear instance of a morpheme-specific phonological constraint. My second goal is to examine how this diminutive interacts with nouns that normally have irregular plural forms. I show that this diminutive can block irregular plural morphology, but optionally allows the persistence of plural ablaut. I explain these facts using an analysis in which morphological rules require adjacency between the triggering node and the affected one, along with a proposal that the English diminutive /-i/ is an adjunct/modifier which can be attached late in the derivation
Passive vP is not phasal in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian
Get PDFLegate (2003) argues, contra Chomsky 2001, that passive vP is a phase in English. In this paper, I present novel Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) data from (i) theme vowel quality, (ii) apparent non-local allomorphy and allosemy, and (iii) agreement to support the claim that passive vP is not phasal in this language. Comparing these findings with Legate’s, I show that those of her diagnostics that can be applied to BCS put BCS passive participles on a par with active verbs, patterning with the English data. This result, I argue, supports the view that Legate’s diagnostics may not be phasehood detectors at all and has consequences for our general understanding of phasehood
Modeling harmony biases in learning exceptions to vowel harmony
Get PDFArtificial language learning experiments typically show non-categorical results after training on categorical data. This is generally due to incomplete learning, but these results can also reveal biases. One example is that participants trained on a vowel harmony language with alternating and non-alternating affixes prefer the non-alternating affix in harmonic contexts (Finley 2021). In this paper, I show that (i) the preference for harmonic items in non-alternating affixes replicates for remote (online) data collection, and (ii) that this effect can be modeled with MaxEnt Harmonic Grammar. In Harmonic Grammar, the harmony score of each candidate determines its grammaticality, and the probability of surfacing. Because non-alternating affixes that satisfy vowel harmony have higher harmony scores than non-alternating affixes that violate harmony, harmonic candidates will be more likely to surface than disharmonic candidates, even when both types of items surface at levels greater than expected by chance. The theoretical and methodological implications for these results are discusse
Role of markedness in the perception of Bengali stops
No full textMarkedness is a theory that was developed on the basis of segmental patterns observed in speech output and has primarily been addressed in regard to speech production in previous studies. According to the Markedness Theory, marked segments are more difficult to produce due to an additional property or “mark” which requires more articulatory effort. However, its effects on speech perception are not discussed in the previous literature. This study examines the role of markedness in perception with Bengali stops. Bengali stops involve two types of markedness or additional properties, voicing and aspiration. Voiced stops (represented as D) are marked with respect to voiceless stops (represented as T), and aspirated stops (TH) are marked with respect to unaspirated stops (T). Voiced aspirated stops bear both additional properties (represented as DH). While the absence of a marked property may make segments easier to produce than those with the property, the question addressed here is whether the same holds true for perception. This study investigates the possibility that the opposite is what is observed. That is, the presence of additional properties may make segments more audible and identifiable. Additionally, this study also investigates whether the combination of multiple marks in the Bengali DH stops lead to a cumulative effect on perception with the best perceptual results for the DH stops. The results from this study show that this is, in fact, the case
A Paradigm Gap in Turkish
Get PDFIn this paper, we argue that Turkish has a gap in the third person plural cell of the person-number agreement paradigm of desiderative constructions formed with the -AsI suffix. We provide evidence for this claim from a corpus search and an acceptability judgment experiment. The corpus search shows that the third person plural suffix is virtually unattested with -AsI desideratives and the results of the experiment show that the third person plural suffix significantly reduces the acceptability of -AsI desideratives. In order to account for the observation that third person plural desideratives are unacceptable for most speakers, we argue that both negative evidence and competition accounts contribute to the existence and persistence of the gap. We discuss that competition accounts are supported by the presence of two competing forms whereas negative evidence accounts are supported by the anomalous relative frequency distribution in the paradigm of desideratives