Proceedings Published by the LSA (Linguistic Society of America)
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Effects of zero morphology on syncretism and allomorphy in Western Armenian verbs
Get PDFVerbs in Western Armenian (Indo-European) inflect for both subject agreement and tense. Subject and tense marking is often fused, which makes segmentation difficult. We show that, despite surface fusion, verbal inflection in Western Armenian is fundamentally agglutinative. By segmenting subject and tense suffixes across the verbal paradigm, we capture syncretic patterns and other interactions between inflectional slots that a fusional account does not. Our analysis requires limited but systematic use of zero morphs. Our agglutinative model of Western Armenian verbs reveals that inwardly-sensitive morphologically-conditioned allomorphy has priority over its outwardly-sensitive counterpart
Interaction of lexical strata in hybrid compound words through gradient phonotactics
Get PDFWe analyse hybrid compound words in Japanese, where a hybrid compound is one formed from stems that belong to more than one lexical stratum. In native-foreign compounds, where one stem belongs to one of the three native strata: Yamato, Sino Japanese and mimetic, as identified by Itô and Mester (1995), and the other to the foreign stratum, we observe that violations of phonological wellformedness constraints in the foreign stem are significantly less probable than in pure foreign words. These observations are explainable through gradient phonotactic probability, where the probability of a phoneme is determined by the whole sequence of phonemes that precedes it. We shall argue that this observed phonotactic behaviour of hybrid compounds is best explained by the hypothesis that both lexical strata distinctions and phonotactics are graded rather than categorical
Comparative Reconstruction Probabilistically: The Role of Inventory and Phonotactics
Get PDFI introduce a novel quantitative methodology for evaluating manual comparative reconstructions. This method is incumbent on the existence of a manual comparative reconstruction and, unlike previous quantitative methods, cannot give a result contradictory to the reconstruction. The primary goal for this framework is to reconcile traditional and quantitative methodologies and act as an objective and accessible platform for comparative reconstruction, thereby extending the scope of historical linguistics further into the past. A few theoretical corollaries of the framework are also presented. It is shown that the likelihood that a reconstruction is spurious is related to some of the phonological properties of the descendent language. This likelihood is inversely correlated with mean word-length and segmental inventory size. Additionally, most active phonological processes and cooccurrence restrictions in the language – such as phonotactic constraints, prosodic effects, segment harmony, and neutralization – all serve to increase the likelihood that a reconstruction to that language is spurious
Non-iterativity, Icy Targets, and the Need for Non-linear Representations in Feature Spreading
Get PDFVowel and vowel-consonant harmonies have been central to much linguistic theorizing over the last century. One prevailing theme in this work is the need for non-linear representations. Clements (1981) and Jurgec (2011) argue for the superiority of non-linear representations for the analysis of unbounded and bounded feature spreading, respectively. This paper modifies and extends the metrical analysis in Jurgec (2011) to provide an Optimality Theoretic account for three bounded harmonies, rounding harmony in Central Crimean Tatar, as well as ATR harmony in Bangla and Iny. In all of these patterns, a vowel undergoes harmony but does not further propagate the harmonic feature. The metrical analysis is then compared to analyses employing string-based and autosegmental representations
Intensional Gaps: Relating veridicality, factivity, doxasticity, bouleticity, and neg-raising
Get PDFWe investigate which patterns of lexically triggered doxastic, bouletic, neg(ation)-raising, and veridicality inferences are (un)attested across clause-embedding verbs in English. To carry out this investigation, we use a multiview mixed effects mixture model to discover the inference patterns captured in three lexicon-scale inference judgment datasets: two existing datasets, MegaVeridicality and MegaNegRaising, which capture veridicality and neg-raising inferences across a wide swath of the English clause-embedding lexicon, and a new dataset, MegaIntensionality, which similarly captures doxastic and bouletic inferences. We focus in particular on inference patterns that are correlated with morphosyntactic distribution, as determined by how well those patterns predict the acceptability judgments in the MegaAcceptability dataset. We find that there are 15 such patterns attested. Similarities among these patterns suggest the possibility of underlying lexical semantic components that give rise to them. We use principal component analysis to discover these components and suggest generalizations that can be derived from them
Referential effects on verb agreement: Finnish numeral-noun constructions
Get PDFThis paper explores seemingly puzzling subject-verb agreement patterns with Finnish numeral noun constructions (NNCs, e.g. three birds) in subject position, which can occur with singular or plural verbs. This alternation is not predicted by current theories. Building on properties of Finnish independent of NNCs, I argue that the Finnish data can be reconciled with prior analyses if we analyze verb number marking as dependent on referential properties of the NNC. I suggest that NNCs with singular verbs do not involve agreement, but rather a default verb form that surfaces in contexts involving existential construal, while NNCs with plural verbs are a true case of (semantic) agreement. According to my analysis, the lack of subject-verb agreement with existentially-interpreted NNCs is related to the fact that, more generally, existentially-construed subjects do not trigger verb agreement in Finnish (which presumably stems from their underlying syntactic position, given the discourse-configurational nature of Finnish). By arguing that subject-verb agreement in Finnish NNCs is variable and depends on existential vs. definite construals, while agreement patterns in the nominal domain are more rigid, these data pose a challenge to attempts to unify agreement mechanisms in the verbal and nominal domains
Tuvan -daa in quantificational noun phrases: Existential or universal?
Get PDFThis paper characterizes the main functions of the Tuvan particle -daa and proposes a semantic analysis, focusing on its role in Quantificational NPs (QNPs), specifically its role in forming Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) and universal quantifiers. It is argued that Tuvan -daa QNPs are underlyingly existentials, with these two main readings being derived from recursive exhaustification of the host\u27s alternatives
Indeterminates in comparatives as free choice items
Get PDFJapanese indeterminate pronouns have different interpretations depending on a particle that they appear with. Indeterminates may appear “bare” in the yori comparative, which leads to questions of whether they are existential quantifiers, negative polarity items (NPIs), universal quantifiers, or free choice items (FCIs), and of how they are licensed. We examine each possibility and argue that they are FCIs. We then provide novel evidence that the yori comparative has some properties of unconditional clauses, which corroborates our previous claim that indeterminate- based FCIs in Japanese are unconditional clauses
Suspended Affixation needs no morphological word: The suffix -(y)Ip
Get PDFI re-evaluate the morphological word constraint for suspended affixation(SA) in Turkish (Kabak 2007). I argue that SA, as an operation, is not bound by the morphological word constraint. What is constrained is the exponent insertion and SA takes place before it. SA is a morphological ellipsis taking place in conjunctions. After suspension, conjunction peripheral affixes are interpreted for all the conjuncts. The morphological word constraint in Turkish is related to SA in verbals, and it defines the limit of suspendability for an affix. This limit is defined by Kabak to be the morphological word. What is left of the conjunct after suspension should be a morphological word, otherwise the derivation is ungrammatical. To show that this is not the case, I propose a different analysis for the suffix -(y)Ip and provide empirical points for its relation to SA
Voice in Istanbul Greek: A Language Contact Explanation
Get PDFThe aim of this research is analyzing Voice-related constructions in Istanbul Greek, namely anticausative and passive predicates, and addressing the synchronic differences between the Istanbul dialect and Standard Greek in terms of these constructions from a language-contact perspective. As a morphosyntactic analysis of Istanbul Greek, this research is the first of its kind, and is based on data collected from native speakers, namely the Istanbul Greeks. Voice-related constructions in Greek involve regular use of non-active morphology. Hence, the empirical domain of this research covers the use of non-active morphology in Istanbul Greek. My hypothesis is that the markedness of Istanbul Greek anticausatives is correlated with the markedness of their Turkish counterparts, contrary to Standard Greek. By markedness, I refer to the existence of an overt exponent for the binary morphological distinction between active and non-active forms. I claim that language contact between Istanbul Greek and Turkish is a possible reason for the dialectal differences between Istanbul Greek and Standard Greek in terms of the marking of Voice-related constructions.In terms of setting the theoretical background for Voice-related constructions in Standard Greek, I utilized Alexiadou et al.’s (2015) work about Standard Greek marked/unmarked anticausatives. I also collected data on Standard Greek from ten speakers, which diverged from Alexiadou et al.’s (2015) explanation of Voice-related constructions in the standard dialect. For setting the linguistic background on Istanbul Greek, I utilized the study of Pandelidis (2019). To offer a morphosyntactic explanation for the dialectal differences observed in the Istanbul Greek data, I utilized language contact concepts such as interference (Thomason 2003), convergence (Clyne 2003), valency-copying (Grossman and Witzlack-Makarevich 2019), morphophonological explanations such as the presence vs. absence of an augment, and Haspelmath’s (1993) spontaneity scale, among others