Proceedings Published by the LSA (Linguistic Society of America)
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Encoding transfer of possession events
Get PDFThe present study focuses on the linguistic and non-linguistic encoding of giving and taking events. For both English and Mandarin Chinese speakers, we find that the linguistic encoding of these transfer events respects the Thematic Hierarchy and the Source-Goal asymmetry (Exp.1 and 2): Agents are mentioned more often than Patient; Goals are encoded more often than Sources. However, in non-linguistic representation, the bias against Sources is not observed (Exp.3 and 4): Giver, Givee, Taker and Takee are equally prominent in memory. Taken together, our results support linguistic theories extending Source/Goal paths to Transfer of Possession events and call for a finer-grained account of homology between linguistic and non-linguistic encoding of events
Power and positionality: A case study of linguistics’ relationship to Indigenous peoples
Get PDFThe western scientific tradition has an exploitative, damaging history with Indigenous peoples and while not partaking in kidnapping and grave robbing, linguistics has been employed in justifying acts of genocide. Modern-day linguistics, notably within theoretical and documentary subdisciplines, takes an ahistorical and scientistic approach to its own relationship to Indigenous peoples and languages. The discipline does not acknowledge or engage with the problematic aspects of its history and current practices outside of discussions within sociolinguistics. This paper presents a case study of the relationship between linguistics and the Ojibwe people to demonstrate that it is essential for all linguists to address both their own positionality and the historical legacy of linguistics in their linguistic research. I offer several suggestions for how individuals and institutions may begin to address these issues in their research practices and in the norms of the discipline
Nanosyntactic Analysis of Turkish Case System
Get PDFThis paper takes two challenging characteristics of the Turkish case system and shows that a nanosyntactic analysis can cover both. The first puzzle is that some cases, namely ACC and GEN, in Turkish show alternations between specific and non-specific forms, while other cases like DAT and INS do not. The second puzzle concerns containment relations in morphology. Caha (2009) proposes that cases stand in a containment relation. In some languages like Estonian, Tocharian, and Vlax Romani, the ACC form serves as the foundation of the oblique cases. The puzzle is that in Turkish, the morphological containment holds only for ACC and GEN, but not for ACC and the other obliques. The comparison leads us to expect that the INS in Turkish could be *adam-ı-la, with the ACC marker to the left of -la. Interestingly, this expectation fails precisely in those cases which do not distinguish specific and non-specific forms. We propose a solution to both of these puzzles within the Nanosyntactic framework. The main idea is that Turkish nouns and cases can be composed of smaller, sub-morphemic features. These features allow specificity information to be encapsulated within the noun itself, rather than the case as previously suggested by Öztürk (2005)
Syntactic and Prosodic Processing of Quantifier Ambiguity in Turkish
Get PDFThere is a robust debate on different linguistic levels of quantifier ambiguity resolution. Many accounts of the quantifier ambiguity are extensively examined in Turkish by semantic-prosodic and syntactic-semantic levels in previous studies. In this study, we aimed to investigate the prosodic and syntactic processes of the universal quantifier (her (‘every’) and existential quantifier bir (‘a/an’)) by using an on-line picture matching experiment with 75 young adults and native speakers of Turkish. Our stimuli consisted of 120 sentences (30×4) for each of the conditions with order (her–bir (‘every–a/an’) vs. bir–her ‘a/an–every’) × focus (subject position vs. object position), respectively. In each trial, participants were asked to listen to the auditory stimuli and to judge sentences they heard. Our findings showed that the focused existential quantifier bir (‘a/an’) assigned wider scope than the universal quantifier her (‘every’) for the judgment task rates. This finding suggested that participants preferred the collective reading both for the focused universal quantifier her (‘every’) and focused existential quantifier bir (‘a/an’). For reaction times (RTs), participants favored distributive reading since the reaction times were faster in distributive reading than collective reading. This study supported the previous claims that syntactic processing has an initial role in disambiguation between collective and distributive readings
Efficient marking of argument focus: A trade-off between focus particles and word order in Sinhala
Get PDFColloquial Sinhala has focus concord constructions in which finite verbs with the suffix -e mark argument focus. In such constructions, the focal constituent is optionally marked via a focus particle, via movement to a postverbal (rather than preverbal) position, or via a combination of a focus particle and postverbal position. In this paper, I quantitatively analyze the preferred position of focal constituents marked by the three focus particles =yi, tamaa and tamai, as well as those not marked by any particle. Using data from a news website, I show that marking via a particle and the movement to the postverbal position are not randomly used. Rather, focal constituents marked by a focus particle are less likely to occur preverbally, while those not marked by a particle are more likely to occur postverbally. Moreover, among constituents marked by a focus particle, those marked by the particle =yi are more likely to occur postverbally. Based on these findings, I argue that the positional tendencies of focal constituents can be regarded as efficient marking patterns. When a constituent is marked by a focus particle, it is less likely to occur preverbally because the focal constituent is already explicit and the marking by the position would be redundant. The preference of =yi for the postverbal position does not seem to follow this general tendency until one takes into account that it requires less effort to produce =yi due to its phonological status. With this in mind, the distribution of constituents marked by =yi can also be regarded as an efficient pattern. The discussion in this paper contributes to both the typology of efficiency and the typology of optional focus marking
Style shifts in Japanese video game commentary monologues
Get PDFHonorific markers play an integral role in many languages, but their purpose and meaning are still widely debated. Ide (1989) claims a one-to-one relationship between social rank difference and linguistic form, but Cook (1997, 2011) proposes that honorifics are used to display a ‘disciplined self,’ which further indexes a variety of social meanings. This study examined style shifts between the honorific and plain form in Japanese video game commentary monologues. We found that instances of honorific form can be grouped into four categories regarding their contextual functions: to make an announcement, to indicate seriousness, conventionalized formulae, and to quote others. This conclusion supports Cook’s proposal
A sociophonetic approach to the acquisition of Spanish rhotics in a bilingual community
Get PDFThis study explores Spanish-English bilingual children’s acquisition of Spanish rhotics. The children’s productions are compared to a group of Spanish-English bilingual adults who represent the Spanish spoken in the same community: Albuquerque, New Mexico. In their narrations of a wordless picture-book, both children and adults produce more non-canonical than canonical variants. Binary logistic regressions run on 817 rhotics produced by 21 children, ages 3-9-years-old, and 6 adults demonstrate that non-canonical variants, instead of canonical variants are more likely to occur as Spanish use increases and in word medial position. The results point towards the propagation of a working change in Spanish rhotics that sees both articulatory and sociolinguistic motivations. Implications for research on phonetic-phonological development are also discusse
Double plurals in Breton: Evidence for a split analysis of plurality
Get PDFTraditional analyses of plurality situate number features within Num(ber)P between NP and DP projections. However, such an analysis does not easily account for all of the properties of plural forms cross-linguistically, particularly those that surface with multiple plural morphemes affixed simultaneously to a single stem. Kramer (2016b) proposes that number features can be exponed on the n category head in addition to on the Num head, generating plural nouns with either one or two plural suffixes. Yet, questions remain about the ability of this analysis to generate multiple plurals in other languages, such as Breton. In this paper, I test the predictions made by Kramer on Breton, which has a complex set of possible plural nominal forms. I present a morphosyntactic description of Breton noun phrases from the framework of Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993), and I propose several adjustments to the theory of split n/Num plurality as presented by Kramer (2016a). This analysis is an alternative to previous descriptions of Breton number that situate double plurals within theories of lexicality (e.g., Acquaviva 2008) or that assume a strict dichotomy between inflectional and derivational morphology (e.g., Stump 1989, 1990)
A compositional account of counterfactual conditional clauses in Old Japanese
Get PDFThe paper is concerned with tenselessness of the past tense morpheme in counterfactuals. The question is twofold. One is why is it the past tense that marks counterfactuality (Iatridou 2000, Ogihara 2000), which indicates anteriority. Another question is why the past tense is tenseless (or “fake tense”) in the counterfactuals. The previous theories (past tense as modal and past tense as exclusive operator) have not offered answers to these questions. In this paper, I argue that the conditional clauses originate in temporal adverbial clauses, and therefore it is only natural for the conditionals to be represented by temporal abstracts (Stump 1985). Second, I argue that the temporal abstracts are intensionalized in conditionals and causatives. This assumption not only provides a compositional analysis for the conditional, causal, and temporal adverbial clauses but also explains the reason why a proposition in the past tense can denote anteriority in the extensional context but counterfactuality (a temporal interval in the possible world) in the intensional context. I support my proposal by presenting data of counterfactuals from Old Japanese. The previous studies show the past tense morpheme is essential to counterfactual interpretation cross-linguistically (Karawani 2014) but I show that it is not a necessity, as counterfactual interpretation originates in the temporal abstract represented by the temporal adverbial clauses. I present four types of temporal clauses from which the counterfactual can be formed: at the time when, whenever (always when), in the circumstance/event that, and and then. All these temporal clauses can be intensionalized to be conditional or causal clauses under a modal operator
Specificity Effects and Object Movement In Turkish and Uyghur
Get PDFThis paper examines a typologically novel differential object marking pattern in Uyghur where marked objects loose their obligatory specific interpretation under fronting to sentence initial position. This pattern contrasts with the more typical differential object marking pattern found in, for example, Turkish where marked objects always have a specific interpretation regardless of surface position. The Uyghur data, I argue, suggest that specific interpretation of object DPs does not always correlate with structural height relative to the VP (Diesing 1992). Instead, I propose a new model where a specific interpretation of an object is forced if it passed through a particular position in the structure