Linguistics

Claims that markedness influences morphological change do not fit attested patterns of suppletive replacement in verb paradigms. Examination of all suppletion types and sources reveals that markedness considerations are weaker predictors of suppletion patterns than interparadigmatic relationships, intraparadigmatic relationships, and semantic connections.

This work focuses on kinship terms in Lio, an understudied Austronesian language spoken in Flores, Indonesia. We describe the Lio kinship terms and compare them to available data on other nearby Austronesian languages. Preliminary observations show examples of alternate generation terms which have not been discussed in previous literature. These alternate generation terms are also divided by gender, a quality that has not been discussed in the Central Flores languages literature.

It is a common belief among linguists that the use of language is a species-specific phenomenon belonging only to humans. However, there is no doubt that there are non-human communication systems within the animal kingdom that are amazingly complex and share certain properties with human language (Berwick et al. 2011). The current paper – adapted from a more comprehensive undergraduate thesis – calls to attention the intricacy of one such system used among humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae). Recent findings by biologists and acousticians have uncovered an unpredictable pattern of bidirectional egressive and ingressive sounds in whale songs, leading to questions about song function ..

This paper investigates subject-verb placement for unaccusative and unergative verbs in Spanish, focusing on syntactic, pragmatic, and sociolinguistic factors that predict placement. The study aims to answer three questions: (1) Does the unergative/unaccusative divide influence SV/VS order acceptability?, (2) What are the dialectal differences in subject placement acceptability in Spanish?, and (3) Does sentence context affect subject placement preference? The study collected data from sixty-nine Spanish speakers from the Caribbean, Chile, and Mexico, who provided 1656 acceptability ratings on sentences with different subject-verb orders. The findings indicate that both verb type and pragmat..

Markedness is a theory that was developed on the basis of segmental patterns observed in speech output and has primarily been addressed in regard to speech production in previous studies. According to the Markedness Theory, marked segments are more difficult to produce due to an additional property or “mark” which requires more articulatory effort. However, its effects on speech perception are not discussed in the previous literature. This study examines the role of markedness in perception with Bengali stops. Bengali stops involve two types of markedness or additional properties, voicing and aspiration. Voiced stops (represented as D) are marked with respect to voiceless stops (represen..

Prior research on the linguistic abilities ofSouthern English- (SE) and African-American English-speaking children (SAAE)revealed unexpectedly high rates of risk for a language disorder (Christodoulou & Tsimpli 2021;Moland & Oetting 2021).This study examines the performance of139 SE-, 46 SAAE-, and 35 Mainstream American English-speaking children (MAE), aged 2-13, and analyzes their performance,throughtwelve sections,in four key linguistic domains:syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and phonology, using astandardizedassessment test.Results revealed a parallel performance across the three groups in all linguistic domains. The highest means of accuracy were noted with phonology and the lowe..

Any event includes countless components, giving the learner many possible options in mapping verb meanings. Previous research demonstrates that children are sensitive to the distribution of motion verbs in their language, mapping ambiguous verb-event pairings to manner if their language has more manner verbs, like English, and path if their language has more path verbs, like Spanish. Previous work also demonstrates that children have some sensitivity visual components, such an event’s location, when they are learning motion verbs.Our study explores how the learner weighs components of visual scene against the distributional factors present in their language. Like previous studies, we find ..

An underlyingassumption in terms of sonority distances is that clusters with large sonority distances are more common than those with small distances, as captured in the unmarked status of large sonority distances and formalized in terms of sonority constraints on consonant clusters. A cross-linguistic survey of attested sonority distances in 357 languages reveals that large sonority distances are not most commonly attested. Rather, there is a point of sonority distance at which the largest number of languages is attested. When the sonority distance exceeds a particular value, the number of languages starts to decrease, regardless of the sonority scales tested. The finding puts the unmarked ..

Word-final syllables are known to show phonological strength, presumably due to final lengthening (Steriade 1994; Barnes 2002), but also phonological weakness. We propose that final weakening effects are also due to final lengthening under the assumption that duration due a phonetic source (i.e. final lengthening) is not on linguistic par with duration from a phonological source. We show further supportfor our proposal through the results of perception studies with adults that show less sensitivity to word-final duration differences. We note that child language phonology often shows unexpected final syllable strength and include two such diary studies with English-learning children. We propo..

This study investigates concessive stripping in English, a phenomenon where the so-called Stripping or Bare Argument Ellipsis (BAE) occurs in although-clauses. This elliptical construction has at least two sub-patterns: although-stripping and negative although-stripping. Merchant (2003) and Wurmbrand (2017) argue that although-stripping undergoes clausal ellipsis to contribute to the propositional meaning of a remnant, supported by syntactic connectivity effects. However, the corpus data we have identified indicate that connectivity effects can often be overridden. Based on this observation, we suggest a discourse-based approach in which the ellipsis construction is directly generated with n..

Extensive research has focused on how VoiceP (Kratzer 1996), ApplP (Pylkkänen 2008), and i* (Wood & Marantz 2017), an overarching term for Voice and Appl, establish argument structure inside the thematic domain (below TP). A question arises as to whether argument structure can be established outside the thematic domain (above TP). This work provides empirical evidence from Korean in suggesting that an argument can be introduced by Voice/Appl (i*) in the left periphery. Specifically, it lends support to the claim that the discourse participant ‘addressee’ is represented in syntax (Haegeman & Hill 2013; Miyagawa 2017; 2022; Portner et al. 2019 among others). In this regard, this w..

This paper discusses and analyzes the variation betweenai and ɨi in A’ingae(or Cofán, an Amazonian isolate, ISO 639-3: con) by comparing the data reported in Borman’s (1976) dictionary with contemporary productions. In Borman (1976), aidoes not generally appear after labial consonants; the distribution of ɨi is not restricted. In some modern productions, postlabial ai is allowed when the diphthong crosses a morpheme boundary (a + i). I propose that Borman’s (1976) distribution of ai and ɨi is a consequence of a diachronic change of ai to ɨi after labial consonants (* ai > ɨi/B _). The contemporary distribution reflects paradigm leveling and contact-induced replacement: Borman..

This paper investigates the morpho-syntactic features of language contact in the endangered Greek dialect Romeyka with Turkish. We analyze the use of the borrowed negative existential jok to (a) determine its role in Romeyka’s negation patterns (b) examine the effects of contact in Romeyka through cross-linguistic comparisons of jok with Turkish and forms of the dialect as spoken in Greece and (c) apply the identified grammatical patterns of jok to Myers-Scotton’s linguistic explanations for the code switching phenomena in the Matrix Language Turnover Hypothesis. The analysis demonstrates the pervasive influence of Turkish on the morpho-syntax of Romeyka through the incorporation of Turk..

We put forth here the novel claim that certain Croatian multi-verb constructions are to be analyzed as instances of serial verb constructions (SVCs), based on the fact that they show characteristics, such as shared arguments, restrictions on selection of verbal elements, limitations on modification, and so on, that are associated with SVCs cross-linguistically. We contrast Croatian SVCs with coordinate structures and control/non-control subordinate constructions, and offer a formalization of the differences among these structures.

In Italian,ri-‘again’ can be separated from the constituent it is semantically attached to and challenges the structural account for the ambiguity of ‘again’-type elements. To address this issue, this paper proposes a solution through aspectualagreement and suggests a movement and reconstruction analysis for the separationeffect ofri-. It also provides supporting evidence for this analysis through CoordinateStructure Constraint and Relativized Minimality.

In American Sign Language, nominal phrases contain various pointing signs, referred to as 'indices', which establish specific referential loci in the signing space. These indices can occur pre- and/or post-nominally or can function as an independent pronoun. Traditionally, these indices have been treated as separate lexical items, but I argue that they are instead realizations of the same functional category, namely idx. Here, I extend part of an analysis of Washo nominal phrases (Hanink 2021) to nominals in ASL.

This study proposes a hypothesis that honorific titles such as English Mrand Japanese sanoccupy the D head position and discusses its consequences to the syntax and semantics of nominals. Seven pieces of supporting evidence are presented using data from various languages. If the proposed hypothesis is correct, (i) nominals in languages without articles are not NP but DP, (ii) proper names cannot be D but N, and (iii) a semantic parameter concerning the basic denotation of common nouns such as Chierchia's (1998) Nominal Mapping Parameter is unnecessary.

Dresher (2009) argues that language-particular hierarchies of features arethe best way to identify contrastive features in a phonological inventory. While notuniversal, this ordering of features is also not fully unconstrained. But what limitsthe space of possible feature orders remains an open question. This paper demonstrates how the concept of entropy establishes a partial ordering of features that bothallows for but also constrains language-particular variation. Specifically, a decisiontree machine learning algorithm is employed to dynamically impose structure on thehypothesis space of possible feature orders.

This paper studies Korean L2 English learners’ responses to negative polar questions (NPQs – i.e., negative yes-no questions), focusing on the differences between EFL learners (those learning English as a foreign language in Korea) and ESL learners (those learning English as US residents). The paper first considers differences in the syntax and semantics of Korean and English NPQs, differences that may lead to misinterpretations when questions are translated from one language to the other. The paper then describes a series of experiments comparing Korean EFL and ESL learners’ responses to English polar questions, focusing on measuring participants’ response times (RTs) and unexpected..

This paper focuses on Putin’s (2021) misguided claim regarding “historical [linguistic] unity” of Russian and Ukrainian. Their being two distinct languages is not in question, as opposed (for example) to Serbian and Croatian. However, it is important to substantiate the objective reality of those differences, taking a strong stand against unjustified claims about linguistic [unity] where there are no grounds for them. Implementing a Python-coded algorithm, like those described in Nerbonne & Kretzschmar 2013, we calculate Levenshtein distance between frequency-based word lists, in a manner sensitive to both organic and contact-induced change, to fully reveal Ukrainian’s complex re..

Bare numeral constructions (BNCs) can be anaphoric in Chinese but not Tibetan. Since the interpretation of BNCs requires a specific context, we consider it to involve a semantic-pragmatic interface, which has been argued to be vulnerable to crosslinguistic transfer for bilinguals (e.g., Sorace 2005, 2011). This study conducted a controlled sentence-picture matching truth value judgment task to examine whether Tibetan-Chinese bilinguals show crosslinguistic influence when interpreting BNCs in both languages. The data suggests that crosslinguistic effects did occur among some bilinguals. However, there were more bilinguals who successfully differentiated the two languages regarding the interpr..

This paper considers how prosody in spontaneous Japanese is processed. We have conducted Rapid Prosody Transcription (RPT) perception experiments on the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese (CSJ) and investigated how boundaries and prominences are perceived. We recruited three groups of participants from different Japanese dialects and found that (i) F0 is not a strong prominence cue in Japanese, contra Japanese literature on focus prominence (Pierrehumbert & Beckman (P&B) 1988; Kori 1989; Ishihara 2016) and (ii) Japanese allows multi-headed and headless intonation phrases, and P&B’s reset theory, i.e. focal prominence resets boundary phrases, faces empirical difficulties. We also fo..

Much research has shown that measure phrases elicit an asymmetry in acceptability between positive vs. negative members of gradable adjective antonym pairs (3m tallvs.*3m short) (Kennedy 1999; Schwarzschild 2005, and others). As in other languages, the measure phrase in Mandarinyi mi‘1 meter’ is accepted as direct modifier ofgao‘tall’ and rejected by the negative antonymai‘short’. However, when the adjective combines withname‘so’, this measure phrase is accepted by both positive and negative adjectives. In addition,nameadjective expressions are ambiguous between two readings. Namely, the surprise reading and the equative reading. This paper accounts for the new data with two ..

Cross-linguistically, some languages make a morphosyntactic distinction between alienable and inalienable adnominal possession, where alienable possession is more morphologically marked, and inalienable possession shows a tighter structural bond between the possessor and possessee. In this paper, I show that Ɔkere violates these cross-linguistic generalizations differently. I also show that two types ofmóoccur in the language, one is a possessive marker, and the other is an independent pronoun. Again, I show that the nature of the possessive marker and the independent pronoun leads to a pro-drop in inalienable possession. The data and analysis in this paper favor proposing an overt possess..

The K-means algorithm is the most commonly used clustering method for phonetic vowel description but has some properties that may be sub-optimal for representing phonetic data. This study compares K-means with an alternative algorithm, OPTICS, in two speech styles (lab vs. conversational) in English to test whether OPTICS is a viable alternative to K-means for characterizing vowel spaces. We find that with noisier data, OPTICS identifies clusters that more accurately represent the underlying data. Our results highlight the importance of choosing an algorithm whose assumptions are in line with the phonetic data being considered.

This study investigates the language input provided for English-Mandarin emergent bilingual children in a California English-Mandarin dual immersion preschool. As illustrated in previous studies, teacher speech in foreign language classrooms often serves as the native standard of the target language, thus necessarily limiting students’ exposure to stylistic variation. The current research focused on the language input for emergent bilingual preschoolers who were Chinese heritage language learners and the use of sociolinguistic variables, including Mandarin lexical tones and word-initial sibilants, by their teachers. Results show that although the teachers perceived their classroom roles di..

Polar response particles (PRPs) have been the subject of a variety of studies in semantics and pragmatics, especially in languages like English and Farsi, where the same particles, āre ‘Yes’ and na ‘No’, can be used with two readings, namely the polarity and the (dis)agreement readings. While PRPs in response to the negative questions result in ambiguity, many scholars mention the important role of the prosodic saliency in the positive answers to the negative questions. This paperis an empirical effort to capture the focal stress on PRPs in Farsi. Two experiments were conducted with respect to the polarity and the bias of the question. The first experiment confirms the earlier studi..

Bhatt (2002) argues for a head-raising analysis (HRA) of relative clauses based on the interpretation of certain adjectival modifiers on the head. This paper evaluates Bhatt’s argument in the configurations of stacked relative clauses (SRCs) in Mandarin and argues that the internal interpretation of adjectival modifiers on the head is not a sufficient argument for HRA. We show that adjectival modifiers on the external head of SRCs can receive an internal interpretation when reconstruction is not possible. We propose that the internal reading can instead be derived by non-local matching between the adjectival modifier and its internal representation.

The Albanian language is traditionally divided between the Gheg dialect to the geographic north and the now Standard Tosk dialect to the geographic south. Recent literature of the historically isolated dialect of Malsia Madhe (Dedvukaj 2022) has revealed a subdialect which has not undergone the specific phonological sound changes seen in both the Standard Tosk and Modern Gheg dialects. The Tosk dialect is distinct from the dialects of Gheg and Malsia Madhe (Malsia) in that it contains homorganic nasal-stop clusters in positions where they did not occur in various Proto-Indo-European (PIE) reconstructed forms. Three historical processes and the distinct ways in which nasal-stop clusters appea..

The order of verbs (V) and their object (O) has been of great interest among researchers. However, few studies have examined the order of obliques (X) with respect to V and O. Dryer (with Gensler) (2013) find the asymmetry between VO and OV languages in terms of the position of X: unlike VO languages, all three types of OV languages (XOV, OXV, and OVX) are widely attested. Hawkins (2008) tries to explain this asymmetry by the interaction of three patterns, (i) Verb & Object Adjacency, (ii) Object & X on Same Side of Verb, and (iii) Object before X. Although his analysis is successful in explaining the word order data in the world’s languages, there are still some problems. In this ..