Journal Issue: Proceedings of the 34th Annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium
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03/13/2011
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Publication On Strategies of Question-Formation and the Grammatical Status of the Q-particle huwwa in Egyptian Arabic Wh-Questions(2011-01-01) Soltan, UsamaThis paper addresses two salient properties of wh-interrogatives in EA: First, the utilization of the in-situ and ex-situ strategies to form wh-questions, and second, the optional occurrence of the (Q)uestion-particle huwwa in the initial position of such structures. In the first half of the paper, I argue that scope in wh-questions in EA is licensed via unselective binding by an interrogative operator, which may either bind a wh-phrase in the lexical domain, thereby giving rise to an in-situ wh-question, or a wh-phrase in SpecFocP, thereby giving rise to an ex-situ wh-question. In the second half of the paper, I turn to the discussion of the grammatical status of the Q-particle huwwa, arguing, on the basis of theoretical and empirical evidence, against both Wahba’s (1984) claim that huwwa is obligatorily needed to define the scope of in-situ wh-phrases, as well as Eid’s (1992) analysis of huwwa as derived from an underlying pronominal copula. Instead, I argue that huwwa is a clause-typing Q-morpheme that occupies a head position in an articulated left-periphery of the clause, has f-features, and induces (a degree of) presupposition. Diagnostics such as felicity of negative answers and suspension of the associated proposition underlying a question suggest that different degrees of presupposition underlie different types of wh-questions in EA, hence lending support to a fine-grained approach to the interpretation of questions, as has been argued recently in Romero and Han 2004, Tomioka 2009, and Eilam and Lai 2009.Publication Right Node Raising Requires both Ellipsis and Multidomination(2011-01-01) Barros, Matthew; Vicente, LuisExisting analyses of Right Node Raising (RNR) implicitly assume that all instances thereof can be subsumed under a single mechanism, whether it be movement, ellipsis, or multidomination. We challenge this assumption by showing that English RNR can be divided into (at least) two distinct subtypes, one which shows properties of ellipsis and one which shows properties of multidomination. Moreover, we also show that these two subtypes are in complementary distribution, and that neither one can be reduced to the other. The overall result is that RNR is not a single process, but rather a cover term for a family of processes with superficially identical outputs.Publication Learning classes of sounds in infancy(2011-01-01) Cristià, Alejandrina; Seidl, Amanda; Gerken, LouAnnAdults' phonotactic learning is affected by perceptual biases. One such bias concerns learning of constraints affecting groups of sounds: all else being equal, learning constraints affecting a natural class (a set of sounds sharing some phonetic characteristic) is easier than learning a constraint affecting an arbitrary set of sounds. This perceptual bias could be a given, for example, the result of innately guided learning; alternatively, it could be due to human learners‚Äô experience with sounds. Using artificial grammars, we investigated whether such a bias arises in development, or whether it is present as soon as infants can learn phonotactics. Seven-month-old English-learning infants fail to generalize a phonotactic pattern involving fricatives and nasals, which does not form a coherent phonetic group, but succeed with the natural class of oral and nasal stops. In this paper, we report an experiment that explored whether those results also follow in a cohort of 4-month-olds. Unlike the older infants, 4-month-olds were able to generalize both groups, suggesting that the perceptual bias that makes phonotactic constraints on natural classes easier to learn is likely the effect of experience.Publication The Syntactic Structure of Palauan Resultatives(2011-01-01) Nuger, JustinEmbick (2004) has recently challenged the widely held view that English resultative participles (or adjectival passives) are formed in the lexicon while (verbal) passives are built syntactically (a proposal originally formalized in Wasow 1977; see also Bresnan 1982, Levin and Rappaport 1986, and many others). Instead, Embick argues for a syntactic analysis to explain why only certain arguments of a verb may serve as externalized arguments of a corresponding resultative, which must be stipulated on lexical analyses. I enrich the debate by examining the structure of resultatives in Palauan, an Austronesian language with about 15,000 speakers in Micronesia. I provide empirical evidence for a particular syntactic and semantic analysis of Palauan resultatives that is compatible with Kratzer's (2000, 2005) semantic analysis of German resultatives and Embick's (2004) syntactic analysis of English resultatives.Publication Social Meaning in Prosodic Variability(2011-01-01) Callier, PatrickAn analysis of six characters from a Chinese television drama reveals socially meaningful patterns of variation in rhythm and final lengthening. Two measures of rhythm, the syllabic PVI and Varco∆S, reveal the three female characters to be more “stress-timed” than the three male characters; smoothing splines analysis, meanwhile, shows that the women do more lengthening of utterance-final syllables than the men. Interspeaker differences in rhythm among the men suggest that the social meaning of rhythmic variability may be linked to a cultural binary between “martial” and “refined” masculinities. This study opens up new avenues in the sociolinguistic study of rhythm and prosody, which has not seen widely reported gender differences in rhythm; as well it is the first study of final lengthening as a sociolinguistic variable in its own right.Publication Structure-Sensitivity in Actuality: Notes from a Class of Preference Expressions(2011-01-01) Gergel, RemusThe paper deals with the development of certain preference expressions (in particular 'rather') against the background of language change. Following results from narrow syntax, a diachronic reanalysis at the level of Logical Form is proposed. Synchronically, certain actuality entailments (Bhatt 1999/2006) are observed and a structural analysis capitalizing on Hacquard (2009) is proposed.Publication Case Mis-matching as Kase Stranding(2011-01-01) Daskalaki, EvangeliaDepending on whether and how argumental Free Relatives (FRs) resolve instances of case conflict between the requirements of the External (i.e., the matrix) and the Internal (i.e., the relative) Predicate, they can be classified into three main categories: (i) Strictly Matching FRs (e.g., Polish), where the FR pronoun has to comply in morphological case with both predicates (Citko 2000), (ii) I(nternal)-Matching FRs (e.g. German), where the FR pronoun has to comply in morphological case with the Internal Predicate, but not necessarily with the External one (Grosu 1994), and (iii) E(xternal)-Matching FR (e.g., Greek), where the FR pronoun has to comply in morphological case with the External Predicate, but not necessarily with the Internal one ((Stavrou & Philippaki 1987; Horrocks & Stavrou 1987; Chila-Markopoulou 1991; Philippaki & Spyropoulos 1997; Alexiadou & Varlokosta 2007; Vogel 2001; Agouraki 2005; Daskalaki 2008; Spyropoulos 2007). In this paper, I use the Greek pattern as my starting point, and I develop a formal account of the observed cross-linguistic variation, which builds on the KP hypothesis (Lamontagne & Travis 1987).Publication The Syntax of ne…que Exceptives in French(2011-01-01) O’Neill, TeresaThis paper examines the syntax of the French ne...que exceptive construction. For exceptive sentences like je ne lis que le journal ‘I don’t read anything but the newspaper’, no satisfactory minimalist account has been given for the nature of the negation, the syntactic status of que, and the source of the exception semantics. Although ne is typically analyzed as the negative head, and que as a complementizer, in this construction, the distribution of these morphemes is anything but typical. While ne normally depends on a second negative element in the sentence, in ne…que none is required. A complementizer like que is expected to select a full clause, but in ne…que, a finite clause is the only type of phrase disallowed after que. In the spirit of lexical economy, this paper provides an analysis for ne…que that grants no special status to either ne or que, instead assimilating the construction to the syntax of a reduced clausal comparative. If the exception phrase following que is in fact the remnant of an elliptical relative clause adjoined to an optionally covert NPI, the syntactic properties of ne…que cease to be problematic.Publication Inherent Case and Locality Requirement: Evidence from Ditransitives and their Nominalizations(2011-01-01) Dvorak, VeraInherent Case is understood as Case, the assignment of which has to be accompanied by theta-assignment (Chomsky 1995). While Nominative on the subject and Accusative on the direct object are typical representatives of structural Case, Genitive or Dative are usually taken as representatives of inherent Case. In this paper I first review the properties of ditransitive verbs in Czech explored in Dvořák (in press) who argues that there are two types of inherent Datives in Czech: a high Dative assigned by an applicative head and associated with a recipient/benefactive theta-role, and a low Dative associated with a path theta-role. I provide the evidence for the independent existence of both of these Datives outside of ditransitives: in unaccusative structures and in structures with only a dative object. After that I draw my attention to the properties of the postnominal Genitive in Czech, especially the Genitive that is assigned to the direct object of nominalized ditransitive verbs. Even though these constructions reveal that Genitive is similar to Dative in terms of the local relationship between the Case-assigning head and the Case-assigned DP, I show that we do not need to refer to Genitive’s “inherentness” in order to derive the fact that the Genitive DP always immediately follows the assigning noun. I employ the data from nominalized ditransitives, in which the theta-marking and Case-marking of the object DP is dissociated, complemented by data on nominalizations with small clause subjects in Genitive, to argue for the “structuralness” of the postnominal Genitive in Czech.Publication Experimental Evidence for the Syntax of Phrasal Comparatives in Polish(2011-01-01) Pancheva, Roumyana; Tomaszewicz, BarbaraPancheva (2009) argues that phrasal comparatives in Polish exhibit a subject-island effect. She proposes an account of the island effect as a combination of several factors: than has a small clause complement in phrasal comparatives; wh-movement turns the than-clause into a degree predicate; wh-movement of the vP subject is prohibited by an anti-locality constraint; sub-extraction of the vP subject is then the only option, but it causes an island violation. Informally elicited judgments support this proposal but there is a fair amount of variability among and even within speakers. Given this variability in speakers’ responses, we need to elicit judgments in controlled conditions allowing subsequent quantitative analysis. We conducted two acceptability-rating studies on Polish comparatives following standard experimental procedures and testing a large number of speakers. The results support the small clause analysis of phrasal comparatives.
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