Proceedings Published by the LSA (Linguistic Society of America)
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Regularities and Oddities in Greek Binomials
Get PDFOur study looks into End-weight (EW) manifestations in Standard Modern Greek (Greek). EW refers to the tendency of certain constituents which pattern as heavy to occur closer to the right edge of the prosodic phrase, in order to align with its most prominent locus, nuclear stress (Ryan 2019). This phenomenon ties in with other known manifestations of the stress-weight interface in quantity-sensitive (QS) languages. We constructed two forced choice tasks – one with real words, the other with nonce words – aiming to explore the possible influence of vowel quality, word-final coda presence, and word length (in syllables) on the internal coordination of binomials. Our findings show that Greek manifests regular EW effects and words with back vowels, word-final codas, and more syllables pattern as heavy and are preferred closer to the right edge. The oddity mainly lies in the fact that in Greek, a quantity-insensitive language (QI), no constituents are expected to pattern as heavy. We further find that lapse effects might be more relevant in the language than previously believed. We theorize that our more experimentally-oriented approach to the language potentially reveals a gradient-weight system
Learning Phonotactics in a Differentiable Framework of Subregular Languages
Get PDFPhonotactic constraints have been argued to beregular, meaning that they can be represented usingfinite-state automata (Heinz, 2018); furthermore, they have been argued to occupy a even more restrictedregion of the regular language class known as the subregular hierarchy (Rogers & Pullum, 2011). Ourcontribution is to present a simple model of phonotactic learning from positive evidence. Our approach isbased on probabilistic finite-state automata (Vidal et al., 2005a,b). We study the model’s ability to induce localand nonlocal phonotactics from wordlist data, both with and without formal constraints on the automaton.In particular, we evaluate the ability of our learner to induce nonlocal phonotactic constraints from data ofNavajo and Quechua. Our work provides a framework in which different formal models of phonotactics canbe compared, and sheds light on the structural nature of phonological acquisition (Dai, 2021; Shibata & Heinz,2019; Heinz & Rogers, 2010, 2013)
Are neutral roots in Uyghur really neutral? Evaluating a covert phonemic contrast
Get PDFThis paper looks at the case of so-called neutral roots in Uyghur (Turkic: China), whose idiosyncratic behavior with respect to the backness harmony system has been analyzed as stemming from a covert vowel contrast. Based on considerations of the structural properties of the language and the results of an experimental study, we suggest that an analysis based on lexical exceptionality is more parsimonious than the traditional analysis, unifying the treatment of neutral roots with other cases of exceptionality in the harmony system and accounting for a relationship between the patterning of roots and their frequency. We close by discussing implications for covert contrast analyses in general
Phonology course design for the contemporary student
Get PDFThis paper shares novel pedagogical approaches to the traditional models that typify instruction in university-level phonology courses. Acknowledging the challenges faced by young adult students and the variance in their experience, I survey the range of resources across Linguistics programs. These circumstances suggest both a need and an opportunity to explore what instructors of phonology may do differently, and thus I also present some specific examples of how a phonology curriculum may be adapted to suit contemporary needs of students. This includes a comparison of an idealized traditional phonology curriculum with a more typical contemporary instantiation; paths to consider for means of improving the engagement and performance of students in phonology courses, and a closer look at some of these content-oriented strategies of engagement
Modal vs. deictic evidentials in ʔayʔaǰuθəm (Comox-Sliammon)
No full textIn this paper, we present novel data from ʔayʔaǰuθəm (a.k.a. Comox-Sliammon; an understudied Salish language) that challenge both the claim that all evidentials are epistemic modals (Matthewson 2012) and the claim that evidentials and modals are distinct, non-overlapping categories (e.g. Aikhenvald 2004, Speas 2010}. We take the defining difference between modal and nonmodal evidentials to be that modal evidentials contribute an at-issue claim involving quantification over possible worlds/situations, whereas nonmodal evidentials do not; both types of evidentials contribute information about the speaker\u27s source of evidence for the proposition. We argue that ʔayʔaǰuθəm has two types of evidentials: one set are epistemic modals, while the other set are nonmodal deictic particles. Though we argue against the claims that evidentials are uniformly modal or nonmodal, we propose that both types of evidentials encode relations between situations (following Speas 2010)
A compositional intersective account of Heterofunctional Coordination
Get PDFThe analysis presented in this paper extends the uniform intersective (“boolean”) treatment of conjunctive coordinators to Heterofunctional Coordination (HC), i.e., coordination of different grammatical functions. A compositional account of HC based on mainstream derivational syntax is proposed, one that makes Champollion’s (2015) “quantificational event semantics” compatible with derivational syntax. The analysis is based on the assumption, common in Minimalism, that traces of moved quantifiers denote domain restrictions rather than just variables
Division vs. distributivity: Is per just like each?
Get PDFThis paper argues that there are lexical items that conventionally express the idea of dividing one quantity by another, and per is one of them. In particular, the proposal is that there are three ratio-related senses of per: (i) a quotient function; (ii) a quotient operator; and (iii) quotient of measure functions. The ratio-based approach, which is built up here in order to handle a wider range of data than previous ratio-based approaches could, is contrasted with an opposing view, one on which per is a distributivity marker like each. Four types of evidence are used: (i) cases involving measurement of an object or an event whose measure is smaller than the unit given by per’s complement; (ii) uses in the differential argument of a comparative; (iii) uses modifying a measure function noun; and and (iv) uses modifying a gradable predicate. All of these are problematic for a distributivity- marker analysis, and support the idea that per expresses the concept of ratio. Along the way, we gain diagnostics for whether a given item conventionally expresses the concept of a ratio in a given language
Genuinely tenseless: encoding time in Cantonese
Get PDFLanguages without overt marking of tense have been commonly analyzed as having covert tense, either in the form of a phonologically null tense morpheme or a post-LF semantic rule. We argue that the notion of (neo-Reichenbachian) tense is not only unnecessary for the analysis of Cantonese, but also falls short of accounting for temporal reference in this language. Following Pancheva & Zubizarreta (2020, 2021) on Paraguayan Guarani, we propose an analysis of Cantonese that manipulates the temporal parameter of the evaluation context in lieu of tense. A more general contribution of this line of work is the proposal that tense is not a semantic universal
‘Do’-support in the northern Italian Camuno
Get PDFThe Camuno dialect uses an auxiliary fa ‘do’ in an interrogative construction that strongly resembles English do-support. Stages of its grammaticalization remain within the different valley dialects. When optional, fa-support (FS) coexists with verb-subject clitic inversion (SCI), e.g. fa-la mangià (does she eat) / màngia-la (eats-she) ‘l peh da hena? (the fish for supper?). There are semantic restrictions on the type of supported verb: manner > result > state. Questions are pragmatically marked with speaker answer expectations, and are opinion-seeking. A wh-item (normally ‘insitu’) has specific reference. Impersonal questions are agrammatical with optional FS but not obligatory FS. A biclausal model with a lexically rich fa ‘do’ is suggested for optional FS
Quantifying semantic and pragmatic effects on scalar diversity
Get PDFScalar inference (SI), the process by which we systematically infer meanings stronger than what was explicitly said, has long been a central topic of investigation in semantics-pragmatics. A recent experimental finding that has generated interest is scalar diversity: that the robustness of SI calculation varies across lexical scales. For instance, the some but not all SI is much more likely to arise than good but not excellent. In this paper, we take a first step toward more rigorously quantifying the observed variation across scales using relative entropy. We then turn to the question of how factors independent of scalar diversity can make SI calculation both more likely and more uniform. We find that a supportive discourse context and overt exhaustification with the focus particle only both increase inference rates and reduce variation across scales, with the effect of only being stronger. However, there still remains a lot of scalar diversity; only when we combine context with semantic exhaustification do we find uniformity across lexical scales