Proceedings Published by the LSA (Linguistic Society of America)
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Unorthodox Agreement in Turkish Copular Sentences
Get PDFTurkish verbs agree with the subject in almost all cases. The same goes for the copular adjectival or nominal structures. However, if a nominal predicate is 2nd or 1st person whereas the subject is 3rd person the agreement, the agreement takes place with the predicate instead of the subject. Some features had been proposed in order to account for the different behavior of the persons, most famous of which being Harley & Ritter’s (2002) three-way feature system. I will try to develop an economical argument using solely one feature: [ref]. It correctly explains some phenomena that previous feature-dependent accounts come short explaining. I will mostly build up on work of Ince & Aygen & Aydın (2015), spotting problems in their proposal and offering solutions
Revisiting the Lookahead Effect in Mbe Reduplication
Get PDFDue to its inherent nature of gradualness, Serial Template Satisfaction (STS, McCarthy et al. 2012) does not predict the existence of derivational lookahead, which is admitted by Base-Reduplicant (BR) Correspondence Theory (McCarthy & Prince 1995). In this regard, Wei & Walker (2020) show that STS cannot tackle the lookahead pattern in Mbe reduplication, where the amount of material copied is predetermined by a subsequent phonological change. This paper, however, offers an STS solution to resolve the derivational lookahead problem in Mbe.
The morpho-phonology of accusative and genitive case in Barguzin Buryat
Get PDFIn this paper, I explore an aspect of the morpho-phonology of accusative and genitive case in the Barguzin dialect of Buryat. While most case suffixes in this language are straightforward, accusative and genitive case display considerable complexity. I argue that these cases are subject to a particular phonological alignment constraint, which motivates the inclusion of an epenthetic morpheme in some cirumstances. I go on to relate this analysis to several other details about these cases, several of which remain to be explained in future work
Occasional-type frequency adjectives and quantification over stages
Get PDFOccasional, odd and rare are different from other frequency adjectives (such as daily or frequent) in that they are able to pluralize a verbal event outside its immediate scope. While attempts have been made to capture this association to the event (Morzycki 2016; Gehrke & McNally 2011, 2015; Gehrke 2021; Schäfer 2007; Zimmermann 2003; Stump 1981; Sæbø 2016; Bücking 2012), none of them capture all the relevant empirical facts, namely that these sentences are distributive, stage-level and can optionally involve a verbal or a nonverbal event plurality. We present an analysis in which occasional-type frequency adjectives quantify over stages, following Barker’s (1999) definition of a stage as an ordered pair of an event and an individual <e,x>. This analysis better accounts for the data and leads to a larger discussion of the nature of stages
The mountains are impure: the semantics of lexical plurality
Get PDFThis paper is concerned with the semantics of so-called plurals of extension, a class of lexical plurals such as mountains, cliffs, skies, Hebrides, and Pyrenees. While similar on the surface to regular plural nouns, they behave differently in certain regards, including their compatibility with determiners, interpretation in half of the N partitives and possibility to occur as weak definites. We will argue that plurals of extension denote predicates over impure atoms, predicting that theybehave as singulars from a semantic point of view and as plurals from a morphological point of view. The analysis will be extended to temporal plurals of extension and plural mass nouns
Restrictions on copredication: a situation theoretic approach
Get PDFThis paper proposes a situation-theoretic account of polysemy: polysemous nouns denote situations that witness (i.e. contain) multiple entities of different types. For instance, lunch denotes situations that contain an eating event and some food where these stand in a patient relation. A puzzle regarding more than two ways polysemous nouns such as statement is the restrictions on copredication they exhibit, namely, where multiple, potentially incompatible predicates are applied based on a single antecedent, but not all combinations of readings are possible. Such restrictions fall naturally out of the situation-theoretic account of polysemy
Framing events in the logic of verbal modification
Get PDFI ask what a small set of modification data requires of clausal event semantics. Classic Davidsonian semantics posits that modifiers like "in the hallway" express properties of events, and expects that iterations of such modifiers will simply contribute additional conjuncts at logical form. The data I consider challenges this view, and others cast in the Davidsonian spirit, at least so long as we hope to preserve an important and plausible semantic principle, Role Exhaustion (Williams 2015). As I show, preserving the principle and accounting for the facts can be accomplished by adopting two independently-motivated sets of claims: first, that verbs introduce existential closure over their event argument, and modifiers take verb meanings as semantic arguments (Champollion 2015); second, that simple clauses have two layers of event description, "framing" and "framed" (Schein 2016). In the end, I sketch two possible extensions of the approach, towards the interpretation of temporal modification and negative perceptual reports
The Chin as a Domain Widener in American Sign Language (ASL)
Get PDFIn this paper, we investigate a grammaticalized facial expression in American Sign Language (ASL) called flat chin, which we propose functions as a general-purpose domain widener, targeting both quantificational domains as well as the scales used by gradable predicates. Our analysis allows for flat chin to target nearly any expression involving a domain, and is based on Morzycki\u27s (2012) analysis of extreme degree modifiers. Such an analysis both expands our understanding of ASL as well Language more broadly, as few general-purpose domain wideners have yet been reported and fewer still are reported to occur as a non-manual (non-hand) markers in a sign language
Social identity, precision and charity: when less precise speakers are held to stricter standard
Get PDFRecent has begun to show systematic connections between social information and pragmatic reasoning. These findings raise the question of whether social information shapes comprehenders\u27 assessments of the correctness of linguistic description in light of a single known and determined fact. We explore this question by testing the impact of speaker identity on T(ruth)-V(alue) J(udgment)s based on the interpretation of number words. We find that imprecise statements from speakers socially expected to be less precise – i.e. “Chill" ones – are rejected at a higher rate, and thus held to more stringent evaluation standards, than those from speakers socially expected to speak more precisely – i.e. “Nerdy" ones. We explain the new finding by appealing to the idea that, by virtue of generally being perceived to be more precise, Nerdy speakers are granted higher epistemic credibility than Chill ones. The emerging picture is one in which TVJ assessments are affected by social considerations in a different way from other experimental tasks, suggesting a nuanced interplay between social information and different interpretation tasks and processe
Cyclic tense: Discontinuous temporal reference in Djambarrpuyŋu
Get PDFThis paper presents a formal proposal for the semantics of Djambarrpuyŋu tense and temporal reference in Djambarrpuyŋu, a Yolŋu (Pama-Nyungan) variety spoken in northern Australia. On the basis of novel data, elicited in the field, it comprises the first formal treatment of “cyclic tense” phenomena, where formal devices encoding temporal remoteness are ostensibly “recycled” and posits a hypothesis about the diachronic development of cyclic tense systems