Proceedings Published by the LSA (Linguistic Society of America)
Not a member yet
4323 research outputs found
Sort by
Zero, Null Individuals, and Nominal Semantics in Cantonese
Get PDFIt has been convincingly argued that English zero provides evidence for introducing null individuals into the ontology of natural language (Bylinina & Nouwen 2018). We examine ‘zero’ in Cantonese, where it provides evidence that such null individuals are a matter of crosslinguistic variation. Cantonese zero has a more restricted distribution. It occurs widely in a number of contexts, but it is systematically ruled out with ordinary classifiers. These facts, coupled with assumptions about the nature of measurement and nominal semantics, demonstrate despite its extensive use in the language, zero is impossible in precisely the uses that require null individuals. Cantonese seems to be telling us that such null individuals are simply absent from its ontology, implying an interesting difference in natural language metaphysics between the languages—and perhaps a different perspective on what theoretical shape crosslinguistic variation can take
Toward a unified semantics for English "either"
Get PDFThis paper proposes that the additive and disjunctive uses of English either share a semantic core. Formulated in Inquisitive Semantics, this core involves a requirement that either apply to an inquisitive proposition, which accounts for either’s co-occurrence with disjunction. It also includes an additive presupposition that is more flexible than has previously been assumed in the literature, which allows the analysis to account for novel data in which additive either conveys that a proposition is unexpected or undesirable. The inability of either to appear in alternative questions is also pointed out and accounted for
Triconsonantal Clusters in Qassimi Arabic
Get PDF Old Qassimi Arabic speakers show variation in avoiding morpheme-internal CCC in trisyllabic verbs. They epenthesize a vowel in both available positions: [CVCC] or [CCVC]. This variation ceases to exist in the speech of younger QA speakers where the repairing vowel is always epenthesized after the second consonant.It is argued that the site of the epenthetic vowel breaking up illicit triconsonantal clusters is governed by an interaction between stress and epenthesis. This approach connects epenthesis to larger properties of the grammar and offers an independent justification for epenthesis. It is also shown that morpheme-internal triconsonantal clusters highlight tension between stress and epenthesis that yields variation for older speakers while younger speakers resolve that tension in an invariant fashion
The nonexistence of the plain bilabial trill phoneme
Get PDFPhonetic studies of bilabial trills in phonemic systems show that they are preceded immediately by an oral stop closure, e.g., /mbʙ, bʙ, pʙ̥/. A plain bilabial trill without a preceding oral stop closure /ʙ/ is not known to occur as an individual phoneme in any language. On the contrary, plain apical /r/ and uvular /ʀ/ trill phonemes that lack a preceding oral stop closure occur in many languages. The nonexistence of /ʙ/ is likely due to the fact that it does not meet the specific aerodynamic conditions necessary for its production (Maddieson 1989). In this paper, I examine a crosslinguistic sample of consonant inventories containing both bilabial and apical trills. I find that these inventories show an implicational tendency: For each phoneme containing a bilabial trill, there is usually a corresponding phoneme containing an apical trill that shares the same values for voicing and prenasalization. These phonemes always include an oral stop closure preceding the trill, and they pattern as obstruents. In addition, these consonant inventories usually include a plain apical trill phoneme (which patterns as a sonorant), but lack a plain bilabial trill phoneme. The most common such inventory (e.g., found extensively in Austronesian) includes three trills /mbʙ, ndr, r/, while larger inventories are found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Sudan, e.g., Mangbetu /pʙ̥, bʙ, mbʙ, tr̥, dr, ndr, r/. While a plain bilabial trill does not emerge due to aerodynamic constraints, resulting in a gap in the system, symmetry appears to favor the emergence of bilabial stop-trill phonemes in languages that have corresponding apical stop-trill phonemes
Transitivization, causative constructions, and the thematic-licensing of external arguments
Get PDFI argue that the head responsible for thematically licensing the external argument is neither Voice nor v, but instead a distinct θ-licensing head, L, which intervenes between Voice and v. Evidence comes from Kinande, where I show that the \u27lexical causative\u27 is not v, Voice, or a Cause head which introduces an event -- it is purely a θ-licensor. I then turn to Kinande\u27s productive causative constructions, and show that in causatives of transitive verbs the Cause head embeds a complement which includes agentive semantics (i.e. it embeds the head which θ-licenses the external argument of the caused event), but the complement nonetheless does not include the VoiceP phase. I ultimately argue for a bifurcation of what is traditionally understood as VoiceP into two distinct phrases: a θ-Licensing Phrase (LP), where the θ-role for the external argument is introduced, and VoiceP, which is the locus of the phase boundary, and is where the external argument merges
Sociolinguistically-aware computational models of Mandarin-English codeswitching
Get PDFCurrent research on computational modeling of codeswitching has focused on the use of syntactic constraints as model predictors (Li & Fung 2014; Li & Vu 2019). However, proposed syntactic constraints (Poplack 1978; Poplack 1980; Myers-Scotton 1993; Belazi et al. 1994) are largely based around Spanish-English codeswitching, and are violated repeatedly (and potentially systematically) by codeswitching involving other languages. Thus, a computational model trained on these syntactic constraints, when applied to codeswitching involving languages that are not Spanish-English, may not capture the naturalistic patterns of those languages in codeswitching contexts. This paper demonstrates the value of sociolinguistic factors as predictors in training a Classification and Regression Tree (CART) model on novel Mandarin-English codeswitch data, which come from 12 bilingual speakers of two different generations from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Participants also answered metalinguistic questions about their own language practices and attitudes and completed a written Language History Questionnaire (LHQ) (Li et al. 2020), which asked for self-evaluations of language habits (proficiency, immersion, and dominance in the two languages). LHQ responses were then quantified into numerical scores serving as sociolinguistic predictors in the CART model. The model, which highlighted that age, L2 Dominance, and L1 Immersion were among the top predictors, achieved an accuracy of 0.804 with the area under its ROC curve being 0.692. This is comparable to, if not more powerful than, previous computational studies (e.g. Li & Fung 2014) that trained models using only proposed syntactic constraints as predictors. This paper shows the importance of sociolinguistic factors in computational research previously focused on syntactic constraints; the intersection of these methodologies could improve a cross-linguistic and computational understanding of codeswitching patterns
Can noun modifiers be stranded or extracted in Mandarin?
Get PDFThis paper addresses the question of whether noun modifiers can be stranded or extracted in Mandarin. I argue that there is no positive evidence that noun modifiers can be stranded in Mandarin, and that noun modifiers cannot be extracted in Mandarin. Specifically, I show that the so-called "split NP" constructions, which are often taken to involve stranding of a noun modifier, should be subsumed under a phenomenon I refer to as "split partitivity". I further show that "split partitivity" does not involve left-branch extraction of a noun modifier, but involves extraction from Spec, DP, the "escape hatch" for extraction
Glottal stop variation in Standard Arabic: OT-based optionality analysis
Get PDFThis paper analyzes optional glottal stop deletion in Standard Arabic (SA). This deletion is typically accompanied by lengthening or gliding of an adjacent, usually preceding, vowel. It can also be accompanied by gemination either intervocalically or in a word-final position. Word-final glottal stops can also delete when preceded by long vowels and this deletion is accompanied by shortening of such long vowels when gemination is blocked. Deletion is blocked when neither lengthening/gliding nor gemination is possible. This paper assesses the ability of various OT-based theories of optionality to account for glottal stop deletion, arguing that the rank-ordering model of EVAL (ROE) by Coetzee (2006) provides a better account than alternatives such as the Partially Ordered grammars (PO) by Anttila (1997, 2007) and Serial Variation (SV) by Kimper (2011)
Sound change, paradigmatic relations, and analogy produce suppletion in Catalan verbs
Get PDFThe development of stem-final /g/ in several parts of Catalan verb paradigms via sound change and analogy has created suppletion in a large number of verbs. In this paper I present evidence against viewing these developments as teleological or driven by factors of markedness or naturalness. I also argue that appeal to morphomes must be tempered by the recognition of the highly variable nature of the patterns displayed by the verbs in question and contextualized in mechanisms that do not merely model change but explain how speakers create change
Literary forms and semantic representations of focus
Get PDFFabb (2004) made a distinction between linguistic forms and literary forms. Linguistic forms hold of a text by virtue of being generated by a linguistic representation of the text, while literary forms hold of a text by virtue of being the content of thought about the text. The present article discusses whether the observed emphatic construction in Old Japanese texts is a linguistic form or implied literary form. The emphatic construction is [p-koso q-e], concordance of the emphatic particle koso with the sentence ending form -e (conjunctive subordinator), which is found primarily in literary contexts. Ohno (1993) argued that koso -e shifted its uses over the period of Old to Early Middle Japanese. The process of shift involves three stages: i) the contrastive uses, ii) the concessive uses, and iii) the simple emphatic uses. In Ohno’s analysis, the shift from (i) to (ii) is non-distinctive, but (ii) is aesthetically more complex. I argue that the shift of koso -e from (i) to (ii) is a semantic change from literal form to linguistic form, and that linguistic form may appear less distinct due to the literary form associated with the emphatic construction