Proceedings Published by the LSA (Linguistic Society of America)
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Arguing against Northern Cities Shift reversal: Counter-shifting in Michigan
Get PDFI have analysed the vowels /i, ɪ, ɛ, æ, ʌ, u, ʊ, ɔ, ɑ/ across multiple regions in the state of Michigan. By organizing them by demographics of age, region, population-density, and sex, I identified that the Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCS) is reversing as indicated in other areas of the Inland North, but its distribution among the demographic categories and the mechanism of reversal are inconsistent across Michigan and the rest of the Inland North. On account of this, I propose that we are not observing a “reversal” of the NCS, but a series of “counter-shifts.
“One does not simply categorize a meme”: A dual classification system for visual-textual internet memes
Get PDFInternet memes are a popular and long-standing genre of discourse on social media platforms, used to express everything from emotional states to political opinions. Dancygier and Vandelanotte (2017) define internet memes as intertextual, multimodal discourses that combine text with images. In order to capture and compare these rapidly-changing discourses, we propose a descriptive dual classification system for memes with two components: meme composition and multimodal quality. Meme composition categorizes memes by their structure—beyond the individual images they employ—and thus explains how memes recontextualize images and text to create new meanings. Multimodal quality serves to describe the way(s) that the text interacts with the image in the meme: as a caption, label, and/or utterance. Combining one meme composition with one or more multimodal qualities classifies an individual meme structurally and provides a basis for explaining its intertextuality, modality, and meaning-making. We apply the dual classification system to English language data collected in its naturally-occurring context on the social media platform Instagram from 2019 to 2021. Analysis of these data shows that the dual classification system is a flexible and robust approach which provides a vocabulary for discussing the creative agency exerted by meme creators in a wide range of communities. We argue that the dual classification system affords researchers the ability to study memes linguistically across a variety of platforms and over time
Location, location, location: Anaphor selection in English locative prepositional phrases
Get PDFThis paper presents experimental work on the relative naturalness of subject-oriented reflexives (herself) and pronouns (her) in English locative prepositional phrases (e.g., Michele set a glass next to her/herself). Syntactic approaches to anaphor licensing have tended to focus on the lack of complementarity in such constructions; however, it has long been observed that preferences between forms may depend on verb meaning (change in location vs. perception vs. possession) and spatial relation (+contact vs. -contact), with very strong preferences reported in some cases. This study aims to clarify the extent to which these two factors shape anaphor choice. Results confirm that both play a significant role: reflexives are most natural in the expression of change in location and direct contact, while pronouns pattern oppositely. Importantly, preferences between forms are less stark than those found in constructions where syntactic constraints are assumed to render one form ungrammatical. I suggest that these findings favor a treatment of English anaphora that takes event structure into account
Binary-constrained code-switching among non-binary French-English bilinguals
Get PDFThis paper presents data on non-binary French-English bilinguals’ metalinguistic analyses of their code-switching behavior in discussing their gender identities. Six non-binary French-English bilinguals were recruited for sociolinguistic interviews via Montréal-based LGBT+ organizations and asked about their experiences using non-binary French and English, especially how they describe themselves in each language. Participants’ preferences for using English to describe issues of gender identity reveals a particular type of topic-based code-switching is utilized in this community—a novel phenomenon that I have deemed Binary-Constrained Code-Switching, where participants switch out of an L1 (French) into an L2 (English) because they perceive their L1 as lacking the appropriate lexicon or grammatical features, specifically non-binary pronouns and gender agreement markers, to index their gender identities. In parallel to their dispreference for using French to describe their gender identities, participants’ preference for using English correlated with their perceptions of English as a more gender-neutral language than French, as well as a language with more linguistic resources—chiefly, vocabulary— to describe LGBT+ identities (c.f. queer). The data presented here not only supplement the primarily binary gender models found in extant studies of socially-motivated code-switching, but also provide greater evidence for the perceptual link between grammatical gender and social gender
Associative Plurality and the DP/NP typology
Get PDFThis paper investigates the phenomenon of additive plural morphology being used to denote the associative plural in a variety of languages. A novel empirical generalization is proposed: Languages with identical additive and associative plural morphology lack free standing definite articles. This follows a line of generalizations made by Boskovic (2008, 2012), who argues that languages without free standing definite articles do not project the DP layer, though the proposed generalization groups affixal article languages with languages without articles (see also Talic (2017)). I propose a new analysis of associative plurals that yields the empirical generalization for free. I argue that Num, the position of additive plural morphology, moves to Associative, which heads a projection on top of the nominal domain. This movement operation is blocked by the presence of D/DP in free standing definite article languages
A multilingual corpus approach to postpredicativity in spoken Turkish, Kurmanji Kurdish and German
No full textThis paper investigates phenomena of postpredicativity in a Turkish- Kurmanji Kurdish-German trilingual corpus of spoken language. Starting from the assumption that postpredicativity when viewed in this trilingual perspective is an epiphenomenal effect of argument type in Kurmanji, finite verb movement in German and discourse activation status (next to illocutionarily motivated verb fronting) in Turkish, it sets out to explore overlaps and double motivations. Based on a collection of 1,211 findings, differentiations within the categories as well as overlaps at several levels are identified. Central results are discourse-level motivations in Kurmanji, their dependence on syntactic size, and overlaps between illocutional verb fronting and discourse activation status in Turkish
Temporal Information and Event Bounding Across Languages: Evidence from Visual World EyeTracking from
Get PDFWe explore the typological question of what the interpretation of grammatical perfectivity is, and how it connects to the related aktionsartal notion of boundedness/telicity on the one hand, and the tense category Past on the other. We report on a comparative experimental paradigm of past tense accomplishment sentences in Russian, Spanish and English respectively, in which we use an online visual world paradigm -- comparing looks to an ongoing representation (OE) with a result state representation (CE) -- to track the triggering of entailments of culmination during auditory processing. In all three languages, the results revealed at-ceiling preference for OE in the imperfective condition both in the offline task and the online gaze patterns. In the perfective condition, we found robust differences. In Russian, the choice of the result state (CE) picture in the offline task was at ceiling (95 %); for Spanish it was high, but not quite at ceiling (83 %); in English there was no statistical preference for the CE picture in the Simple Past condition (54 %, not significantly different from chance, p=0.39). Analysis of the participants\u27 online gaze patterns yielded parallel results. Our results for English suggest that even on telic predicates, the simple past form does not obligatorily enforce a completed-event interpretation, contrary to previous assumptions in the literature (Smith 1995)
Interaction of dou and scope effects in Mandarin relative clause
Get PDFHow to analyze the multi-functional focus-sensitive operatordouinMandarin has been a long-standing debate (Lin 1998; Giannakidou & Cheng 2006;Xiang 2008; Liao 2011; Liu 2017, 2018; Xiang 2020, a.o.). In this paper, I providenovel arguments for the analysis ofdouin analogy toonlyproposed in Xiang (2020),by examining the interaction ofdouwith scope effects in relative clauses embeddedin different matrix clauses. I propose that the scope effects in RCs embedded innon-specificational sentences are derived from long QR of the embedded QP, whilethose in specificational sentences result from a natural-function analysis of the RC,which does not involve movement of the focus associated withdou. Crucially, thefocus-semantics ofdoublocks the former while is compatible with the latter. Thepuzzles and the proposed solution also adds new perspective into the more generalquestion of focus-association with moved elements
Incremental pragmatic interpretation of gradable adjectives: The role of standards of comparison
Get PDFWhile for relative gradable adjectives the value on the underlying measurement scale that serves as a standard of comparison is contextually determined, for absolute gradable adjectives this is typically taken to be a fixed, context-invariant value (Rotstein & Winter 2004; Kennedy & McNally 2005). The present study investigates how lexical-semantic factors, such as the type of standard of comparison invoked by gradable adjectives, affect the incremental computation of scalar implicatures triggered by such adjectives. Our study shows that the incremental computation of scalar implicatures is facilitated by the immediate visual context but only for relative adjectives. Minimum standard absolute adjectives, which impose a lower bound on their corresponding measurement scales, robustly trigger upper-bounded interpretations independently of the availability of contrastive visual information. Our findings indicate that different kinds of scalar meaning are computed incrementally and potentially in parallel. Overall, these findings shed new light on theories of scalar implicatures and highlight the need for a model of adjective meaning that incorporates semantic and pragmatic factors (see also Gotzner 2021; and for related ideas in the domain of quantifiers see Franke & Bergen 2020 and Cremers, Wilcox & Spector 2022, and Magri (2017) for Hirschberg scales)
Phonetically Identical Forms can Have Different Phonological Behaviors
Get PDFThere is a lot of research since at least mid-1980s documenting the effect of incomplete neutralization of phonological contrasts. Some researchers have taken this as evidence against traditional formal phonology where categorical phonological representation is assumed. By such way of using phonetic measurement to directly infer phonological representation, two assumptions have been made. First, phonetically different forms should be different in phonology; Second, phonetically identical forms should be identical in phonology. The first assumption has been largely undermined in the case of prosodic words lengthening in Japanese. It has been showed that although lengthened prosodic word has identical phonological behavior with their underlying counterpart in Japanese, their durations are significantly different. As an attempt to oppose the second assumption, the current study investigates Tone 4 Sandhi of Huai’an Mandarin. I show that although Lexically Derived Tone 3 is phonetically indistinguishable from Post-Lexically Derived Tone 3 with regard to F0, their phonological behaviors are different with regard to the ability to trigger another tone sandhi process. F0 is measured since it contains all critical phonetic cues that can distinguish Mandarin tones