Journal Issue: Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Penn Linguistics Conference
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02/27/2019
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Publication The influence of pitch contour on Mandarin speakers' perception of English stress(2019-02-27) Liu, YaobinPrevious studies on L2 stress perception have mainly focused on words in isolation or in single intonational contexts. This paper reports on a study exploring the influence of different intonation contours, falling (declarative) and rising (yes/no question), on nonnative speakers' stress identification. The study compared the perception of stress position in English words by native speakers of Mandarin, a tone language, and English, a stress language. The results showed that Mandarin speakers exhibited misperception of stress position when high tones did not coincide with the stressed syllable. As a control condition, native English speakers also displayed misperception of stress, but to a lesser extent in the condition of initial stress. Tonal transfer and asymmetrical cue usage are believed to be responsible for the perceptual differences.Publication The Role of Prepositions in Case Mismatches in Free Relatives(2019-02-27) Bergsma, FennaIn this paper, I discuss six patterns of case mismatches in free relatives that arise in German. Four of the six have been accounted for in Bergsma (submitted), using grafting (Van Riemsdijk 2006) and the case hierarchy in nanosyntax (Caha 2009). I show that the (un)grammaticality of free relatives with case mismatches involving prepositions follows directly from this analysis. That is, if the embedded clause requires a less complex case than the main clause, additional merged features are spelled out by a separate lexical entry, and an override the spellout of the relative pronoun is avoided.Publication Variable Word-Final Schwa in French: An OT Analysis(2019-02-27) Purse, RuaridhIn a great number of languages, the presence or absence of word-medial vowels - especially schwa - is a type of variation that has drawn the interest of a number of scholars. By comparison, the variable production of schwa at the end of otherwise consonant-final words in French has gone relatively unexplored. The present study describes an analysis of word-final French schwa using Stochastic Optimality Theory to account for rates of word-final schwa in different contexts. The phenomenon is a striking example of the Richness of the Base in action in that, while schwa rates vary by context, there appears to be a potential for schwa production in all consonant-final words. This is true both for words that end in an othographic 'e' (e.g. page 'page') and words that don't (e.g. lac 'lake'), although word-final schwa appears more than twice as frequently when there is such an orthographic 'e', suggesting that it reflects a non-ubiquitous underlying vowel. Ultimately the essential variable character of word-final schwa is explained by a tension between two competing pressures that are observed elsewhere in French phonology: to align stress with the rightmost syllable in any given word, and to repair word-final codas with an unstressable vowel. We supplement this basic locus of variation with other constraints to account for rates of schwa across orthographic and phonological environments. Additionally, we demonstrate that constraint values producing schwas with a similar distribution to that in the observed data are learnable with a scaled-up version of the observed data as input.Publication A Passive Analysis of Morphological Causatives in Korean(2019-02-27) Jo, JinwooMorphological causatives in Korean show some intimate correlations with morphological passives across different domains of the grammar. Morphologically, both the causative and the passive can be marked with the allomorphs *-i*, *-hi*, *-li*, *-ki*; syntactically, in both constructions, the agent of the stem verb can be assigned dative case *-eykey*; and semantically, some apparent causative constructions (often called the retained object construction) may be interpreted passively. In this paper, I suggest that the causative-passive correlations arise because the causative may contain the passive as part of its structure. Specifically, I argue that (i) the passive in Korean involves passive Voice; and that (ii) the head responsible for causativization, Caus(e), c-selects VoiceP in Korean including passive VoiceP. The possibility of Caus taking passive VoiceP as its complement is claimed to bring about the correlations in question.Publication Korean Vowel Mergers: Contrastive Hierarchies and Distinctive Features(2019-02-27) Kwon, JoyThe present paper provides a contemporary viewpoint of phonological representations. Specifically, I present contrastive hierarchies of distinctive features adopting the Modified Contrastive Specification (MCS, Dresher, Piggott and Rice 1994, Dresher 2008, 2009) and the dimension hypothesis (Avery and Idsardi 2001, Purnell, Raimy and Salmons 2018). Under these frameworks, I reanalyze and revise Ko's (2009) proposals on the contrastive hierarchies of Korean vowels. The two-step merger of a low back vowel from Late Middle Korean to Early Modern Korean exemplifies how the modified hierarchies can provide a more efficient and systematic account. As for synchronic examples, I illustrate a merger of a low high front and a mid high front vowel and a feature unpacking phenomenon of high front rounded vowels under the proposed hierarchies. Furthermore, Oxford's (2015) model for sound change is applied to evaluate the revised representations. The diachronic and synchronic sound change data are well verified by his model. I argue that the representations proposed in this study hold their advantages as they offer more economical and consistent explanations for sound changes.Publication Cyclicity and prosody in Armenian stress-assignment(2019-02-27) Dolatian, HossepThe morphology-phonology interface is rife with examples of interactions between the two modules. Various theoretical models have been proposed to either a) cover the entire interface, or b) cover a subset of this interface. Lexical Phonology and Prosodic Phonology are two popular models of how this interface operates. However it is an open question if both models are needed and if one can do the job of the other. In this paper, data from Armenian morpho-phonology shows the need for both models to be combined and used as one single model for the interface. Crucially, data on Armenian stress assignment and destressed vowel reduction necesitates using both Lexical Phonology's concepts of cyclicity and strata and Prosodic Phonology's concepts of prosodic stems and prosodic non-isomorphism.Publication Changing Variation: Diffuse Directionality in Icelandic Subject Case Substitution(2019-02-27) Guðmundsdóttir, Dagbjört; Nowenstein, Iris Edda; Sigurjónsdóttir, SigrÃðurWe present results from a large-scale online survey (N = 4545) and an in-depth follow-up study (N = 48) showing unexpected variation patterns in the case marking of theme subjects in Icelandic. In previous accounts (Jónsson 2003), quirky oblique theme subjects, in opposition to experiencers, were thought to obligatorily pattern with the structural nominative case instead of a possibly inherent dative case (Nominative Substitution rather than Dative Substitution). Contrary to this, we show that the productivity of dative case marking with themes is non-negligible and possibly increasing, pointing towards a much more diffuse directionality of the change. We argue that this is not unexpected if we assume a theory where semantic roles are probabilistically mapped onto case and productivity is driven by type frequency, as it is under the Tolerance Principle (Yang 2016). We put this to the test by combining a verb knowledge task with a case selection task to compute productivity patterns, and individual type frequency counts, predicting the presence of dative productivity correctly in 39 out of 48 participants by using the Tolerance Principle. Although our results disconfirm a categorical impossibility of theme subjects receiving dative rather than nominative, the previously attested patterns still hold. Experiencers appear significantly more frequently with non-nominative substitution than themes do, originally accusative subjects have the highest rate of substitution and verbs which are generally more known/frequent are less likely to show subject case substitution. These patterns are reflected in attested examples of non-nominative subjects with novel verbs.Publication Identifying Phonologically Overt Counterparts to Silent Elements: The Case of French Exceptives(2019-02-27) Authier, J.-Marc; Reed, Lisa A.A relatively recent development in the generative framework is the hypothesis that there exist in syntax silent elements (SEs) that have a semantic content that is recovered by accessing their phonologically overt counterparts (cf. Kayne 2005, 2012 and Her and Tsai 2015, among others). In this paper, we provide a careful assessment of the two SEs that have been argued by O’Neill (2011) and Homer (2015) to be present in the French (ne)…que exceptive construction; namely silent rien ‘nothing’ and silent autre ‘other’. In doing so, we take to heart one of the main points made by Her and Tsai (2015) in relation to their criticism of Kayne (2012); namely, that for a proposed SE to be learnable, there cannot be any deviation in meaning from its overt counterpart. That is, the recoverability constraint assumed in the generative framework to be at work in, say, PF-deletion ellipsis, applies to all phonologically silent categories, including SEs. Additionally, as Her and Tsai argue, if semantic deviance between SEs and their phonologically overt counterparts were allowed, SEs would become ‘empirically intractable’. We argue that while positing a silent n-word in (ne)…que is faithful to the recoverability constraint on silent categories, the alleged second SE, namely, silent autre ‘other’, is not semantically equivalent to its phonologically overt counterpart in several respects. As we demonstrate, however, if one assumes instead that its overt counterpart is plus ‘more’, the recoverability requirement is restored.Publication Turkic Nasal Harmony as Surface Correspondence(2019-02-27) Lamont, Andrew; Washington, Jonathan NorthTurkic languages are well known for syllable contact phenomena – sonority-driven processes where suffix-initial sonorants surface as obstruents in certain environments. These alternations interact with nasal harmony, a less studied phenomenon where underlying stops and nasals surface as nasals between two nasals. Nasal harmony is attested in about ten Turkic languages (Shor, various Khakas varieties, northern and southern Altay varieties, Kazakh, Qaraqalpaq, Noghay, possibly Karachay-Balkar, and Kazan and Siberian Tatar varieties), and it varies in its scope and how it interacts with syllable contact phenomena. In this paper, we provide a detailed description of nasal harmony in Kazakh, which has one of the richest nasal harmony systems, and explore an analysis within Surface Correspondence Theory.Publication Preface(2019-02-27) Creemers, Ava; Richter, CaitlinThe University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics (PWPL) is an occasional series published by the Penn Graduate Linguistics Society. The series has included volumes of previously unpublished work, or work in progress, by linguists with an ongoing affiliation with the Department, as well as volumes of papers from NWAV and the Penn Linguistics Colloquium/Conference. This volume contains selected papers from the 42nd Penn Linguistics Conference, held from March 23-25, 2018 in Philadelphia, PA, at the University of Pennsylvania. Thanks go to Luke Adamson, Nikita Bezrukov, Ryan Budnick, Spencer Caplan, Andrea Ceolin, Nattanun Chanchaochai, Aletheia Cui, Kajsa Djärv, Ava Irani, Alexandros Kalomoiros, Wei Lai, Lefteris Paparounas, Ruaridh Purse, Nari Rhee, Ollie Sayeed, Milena Å ereikaitÄ—, Yosiane White, and Hong Zhang for their help in editing. Since Vol. 14.2, PWPL has been an internet-only publication. As of September 2014, the entire back catalog has been digitized and made available on ScholarlyCommons@Penn. Please continue citing PWPL papers or issues as you would a print journal article, though you may also provide the URL of the manuscript. An example is below: Bade, Nadine and Florian Schwarz. 2019. An experimental Investigation of Antipresuppositions. In University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 25.1, ed. Ava Creemers and Caitlin Richter, 31-40. Available at: http://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol25/iss1/5 Publication in the University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics (PWPL) does not preclude submission of papers elsewhere; copyright is retained by the author(s) of individual papers. The PWPL editors can be contacted at: U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics, Department of Linguistics, 3401-C Walnut Street, Suite 300, C Wing, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6228 and working-papers@ling.upenn.edu. Ava Creemers and Caitlin Richter, Issue Editors