Proceedings Published by the LSA (Linguistic Society of America)
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Acoustic Properties for the Kazakh Velar and Uvular Distribution
Get PDFKazakh has an asymmetrical dorsal consonant inventory. Velars and uvulars are involved in two restrictions. First, the dorsal consonants are restricted in their place of articulation depending on neighbouring vowels. Velars appear in front vowel environments and uvulars appear in back vowel environment. Second, the dorsal consonants are restricted in voicing in the stem-final position. Voiceless velars and uvulars appear word-finally, while voiced velars and uvulars appear intervocalically with a following vowel-initial suffix. The existing descriptions regarding Kazakh dorsals contain limited amounts of data, and so an elicitation-based production experiment using nonce words with a native Kazakh speaker was conducted. Different acoustic properties, including closure duration, voice onset time, frication duration, centre of gravity, vowel duration, and F2 values, were examined with the purpose of determining whether the participant varied in their production of target velars and uvulars that could distinguish between place of articulation and voicing. The acoustic properties reveal that the place of articulation restriction is not productive, while the voicing restriction is productive
Nominative subjects of infinitives in Hungarian subject-control predicates: Postsyntactic copying and the overt realization of PRO
Get PDFIn Hungarian, the focused subject of the infinitival complement of a subject-control verb appears as a pronoun or lexical DP in nominative case. I propose that this nominative form realizes PRO at PF, but does not exist at Syntax, where PRO is caseless. PRO is overtly realized by postsyntactic copying of the phi-feature of case (and other material) from the controlling nominative matrix subject
Simplified grammar in both languages? On scope assignment in Q-Neg sentences in English-dominant heritage Chinese speakers
Get PDFQuantifier-negation (Q-Neg) sentences are sentences like ‘All teachers did not use Donald’s car,’ where a negation word and universal quantifier occur in the subject position. There are both surface scope (all>not) and inverse scope (not>all) readings in English, but only the surface scope (all>not) reading is allowed in Chinese. This study conducted a picture-matching truth value judgment experiment to examine whether English-dominant heritage Chinese speakers know the difference between English and Chinese regarding the interpretation of Q-Neg sentences. The data reveals three different groups of participants: a. participants who accepted the inverse scope reading in both languages; b. participants who rejected the inverse scope reading in both languages; c. participants who accepted the inverse scope reading in English but rejected it in Chinese. Implications regarding heritage language research will be discussed
Some syntactic properties of psychological adverbs in Japanese
Get PDFThis paper presents a comprehensive theory for the licensing of Japanese Psychological Adverbs (PAs, e.g. oisiku ‘deliciously’, omosiroku ‘interestingly’) being grounded on their syntactic, interpretations, and lexical properties. PAs can appear in at least three different types of constructions. One of the constructions where Agent of the main verb and Experiencer of a PA is identical will be examined in particular. Investigating their syntactic and semantic characteristics, the paper claims that PAs are structurally licensed when they are c-command by the local Agent, following the same structural condition that Ernst (2002) argues for subject-oriented (SO) adverbs. There is a set of data that seems to contradict this condition, but I argue that the data indeed exhibits PAs’ another property: they are polarity-sensitive. In order to comprise this lexical property into the condition aforementioned, I classify PAs into three types being based on Ernst’s (2009) PPI trichotomy for speaker-oriented adverbs (SpOAs)
Exclusive Free Choice in Turkish
Get PDFIn this paper, we will be concerned with a type of interpretation associated with ya…ya… disjunction in Turkish where the Free-Choice inference is obligatorily accompanied with the Prohibition inference. We claim that such a reading arises as a consequence of the fact that each disjunct inside ya…ya… disjunction is parsed with only (overt or covert). We show that the scalar nature of only, which we model as a restriction on alternatives, is crucial in accounting for the exclusive Free-Choice readings. We finally discuss some differences between only and the Exh operato
Subtonal features in a three-tone language: Evidence from Laal
Get PDFIn this paper, I provide arguments in favor of subtonal features, with data from Laal, an endangered, three-tone isolate language of southern Chad. I show that a system using the two features [upper] and [raised] (Yip 1980, Pulleyblank 1986) offers a straightforward account of properties of the Mid tone that are otherwise impossible to account for using the three tonal primitives H, M, L. I show that Laal provides evidence for parallels between tonal and segmental behavior which justify a featural analysis of tone. In particular, Laal displays a tonal assimilation process involving natural classes of subtonal features, which works just like vowel harmony, and could be described as a form of tone harmony. This goes against arguments frequently put forward against subtonal features (e.g. Hyman 2010, Patin et al. 2010). Additionally, the Laal case shows that the featural specification of the M tone in three-height tone systems is not necessarily ambiguous, making subtonal features potentially well-suited for the analysis of tone systems of all shapes
An Identity Preference in Ngbaka Vowels
Get PDFIn a large Ngbaka dictionary (Henrix et al. 2015), segmental identity between vowels is systematically overrepresented: cases of identity like [kɔkɔ] \u27to cover oneself\u27 and [ɓɛnɛ] \u27to consult an oracle\u27 occur significantly more often than predicted by the frequencies of the individual vowels alone. I show that the best-fit statistical model of the lexical data includes a predictor for identity: non-identical vowels are dispreferred. The implication of this finding is that the phonological grammar must be able to reference identity directly (following MacEachern 1999, Coetzee & Pater 2008, Gallagher & Coon 2009, Gallagher 2013, 2014, a.o.)
Modally conditioned mood-switch: The Case of ADVISE-Predicates in Greek
Get PDFThis paper discusses a case of mood-switch with predicates expressing advice, exhortation, request (hence, ADVISE-Ps). While all studies categorize these predicates as combining with subjunctive, I show that they can combine with indicative if they embed a prioritizing modal operator. This type of switch provides further evidence for the mood-as-modal approach, under which indicative expresses simple necessity whereas subjunctive encodes human necessity as recently argued by Portner & Rubinstein (2020). Building on a meaningful approach to mood, I argue that this special type of modally conditioned mood-switch is associated with the bieventive character of ADVISE-Ps, which can be decomposed into a cause speech event and a prioritizing (PRT-)state (Martin & Schäfer 2013; Grano 2018). In this way, they can combine either with subjunctive licensed by the embedding PRT-state or with indicative and a prioritizing modal operator licensed by the communication cause event and the PRT-state accordingly
Introducing expressives through equations. Implications for the theory of nominal predication in Romance
Get PDFThis paper offers a new theory of binominal constructions in Spanish(e.g., el idiota de Andrés ‘That idiot Andrés’, una mierda de departamento ‘a shitof an apartment’). I use what I call Potts’ Criterion as a way to detect whether or nota given term has predicative force at the truth-conditional level. The observation isthat epithets do not have such a predicative import in binominal constructions of therelevant type, a clear indication that these binominals do not involve predicationalunderlying structures of the type proposed in Den Dikken (2006) and most, if notall, mainstream approaches to binominals in Romance. I then propose that thesyntactic and semantic connection between epithets/expressives and their relatedDPs/NPs is a particular type of equation between those DPs/NPs and an underlyingindexical term, denoting in individuals or in properties depending on the relevantconstruction
Singularity and plurality of discourse reference to worlds
Get PDFThe referential analysis of conditionals has recently been put forth as an alternative of the Kratzer-style restrictor analysis (Schein 2001, Schlenker 2004, among others). Under this analysis, conditional antecedents are definite descriptions of worlds/situations. This paper explores a widely accepted assumption of the referential analysis, namely that conditional antecedents refer to plural objects. I show that the singularity/plurality of conditional antecedents can correlate with whether the conditional expresses modal or adverbial quantification. I use this correlation to motivate an analysis where conditional antecedents are number-neutral by default, but can be forced to denote singular referents. This idea is formally implemented within the dynamic framework by Brasoveanu (2010)