Journal Issue: Proceedings of the 44th Annual Penn Linguistics Conference
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07/09/2021
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Publication The Sociolinguistic Variable: Where is it?(2021-07-09) Fleming, Andrew PBy examining speakers of Salvadoran heritage in Boston through a model of structural continuity, this paper seeks to understand the how speakers’ use of the salient phonological variable of coda /s/ reduction and the supposed non-salient syntactic variable of subject placement change as Spanish speakers spend longer in the United States. Whereas past studies have suggested that Spanish speaker’s use of coda /s/ reduction changes according to complex negotiations of sociolinguistic identity, their use of syntactic variables changes due to the effects of the new linguistic environment of the U.S. Rather than addressing these hypotheses directly, the analysis of this study’s nine speakers calls attention to the need to better understand the conceptual binaries of salient vs. non-salient and phonological vs. syntactic in the study of sociolinguistic variables. While sociolinguistics often uses terms like coda /s/ reduction and subject placement to refer to “sociolinguistic variables,” this study finds evidence that this terminology obscures the nature of salient and non-salient variation among speakers. The data suggests that when Spanish speakers of Salvadoran heritage seek to obscure the regional origins of their speech to avoid raciolinguistic discrimination, they do so by increasing the production of frication of coda /s/ before non-consonants and/or word-finally, and by post-posing more subjects with experiencer-presentative verbs. These results indicate that both these sites of variation in Spanish may hold social meaning in constrained social and linguistic contexts, a finding which demands a new understanding salient and non-salient sociolinguistic variation.Publication The Codex Aubin: Nahuatl Glyphic Writing in Post-Conquest Mexico(2021-07-09) Krishnan, Arjun SaiIn this paper, we study the Nahua glyphic script as used in the Codex Aubin, a post-Conquest codex produced in 1576 that narrates the traditional Aztec founding myth and chronicles indigenous life in the early colonial period. The text consists of a preconquest-style annal written in the form of a European book; traditional depictions of events and transcriptions in the traditional glyph script are paired with Nahuatl glosses in Roman script, allowing for analysis of glyphs alongside their intended readings. In particular, we look for evidence of phoneticity in glyphs; a number of Spanish language names are transcribed in glyphs in the Codex, providing yet-undescribed examples of phonetic glyph compounds. Further, we also explore the generation of new logograms and phonetic compounds to capture Spanish-language lexemes in the post-Conquest period. We demonstrate the fundamentally polyvalent usage of the script with novel data, interpreting the simultaneous usage of multiple modes of meaning-conveyance and proposing novel readings of some glyphs. Finally, we also investigate the assembly and visual organization of complex glyphs in the codex. In particular, we detail a new modality of glyph usage, which we dub ‘emphatic cross-reference’ — it involves the assignment of extra-graphemic meaning to individual glyphs by means of their visual organization in compounds. To our knowledge, this particular usage of the Aztec script is undescribed to date, and we preliminarily detail our analysis of a few examples found in the Codex Aubin.Publication Balancing the (Horn) Scale: Explaining the Production-Comprehension Asymmetry for Scalar Implicatures(2021-07-09) Mognon, Irene; Sprenger, Simone; Kuijper, Sanne; Hendriks, PetraPreschoolers struggle with Scalar Implicature (SI) generation, showing difficulties in interpreting the scalar element “some” with its upper-bounded meaning “some but not all”. Strikingly, despite the fact that the comprehension of “some” is not adult-like until at least 5 years of age, recent corpus data suggest that children, in production, can use “some” as “not all” already in their third year of life. In this paper, we propose the Asymmetry Account, an account of SI generation formulated in the framework of Bidirectional Optimality Theory (Bi-OT). By taking Bi-OT as a model of language use, we show that the comprehension of “some” requires hearers’ to consider the speaker’s perspective, but not vice versa: to produce “some” with its upper-bounded meaning no mentalizing about other perspectives is needed. In light of this, we predict that the comprehension of weak scalar elements such as “some” is cognitively more demanding than their production and argue that children’s difficulty with the “some”-implicature is to be related to children’s developing of cognitive abilities, in particular, Theory of Mind.Publication Does Learner’s Preference Match the Typological Pattern of Animacy Hierarchy in Morphological Marking?(2021-07-09) Chen, Yiran; Schuler, KathrynPlural marking systems in natural languages follow an Animacy Hierarchy such that although it is common for animate nouns to receive plural markers while inanimate nouns are left unmarked, the reverse pattern is never attested. A hypothesis that has received wide empirical support is that underlying biases of learners during language learning shape language typology: linguistic patterns easily learned by language learners are promoted, while those that are unlearnable are eliminated. This study asked whether learners have underlying biases which would contribute to the settlement of the typologically universal Animacy Hierarchy. With an artificial language learning paradigm, this study showed that learners biases do not align with the universally-attested Animacy Hierarchy: learning a language that violates the Animacy Hierarchy is in fact easier for adult learners and they view shifting a language with a probabilistic plural-marking system towards a pattern that violates the hierarchy as a viable option as well. However, adult learners are more successful in probability-matching on animate trials than inanimate trials, which suggests high salience of animate tokens during the rule learning process. Our preliminary data on children suggest that such an animacy-conditioned grammatical system is hard for children aged 5-8 to fully acquire in a single-session learning task and that for those children who have acquired the pattern, no convincing evidence suggests a learning bias favoring the language that follows the typological pattern either. Taken together, it is observed in the current study that patterns that violate Animacy Hierarchy is not only not disfavored by learners, but sometimes preferred. More investigation is underway to whether native language influence or animacy manipulation gave rise to the opposite pattern. Our results suggest that, in the case of Animacy Hierarchy, other factors during the process of language transmission and language use, such as cognitive and pragmatic salience animate objects, may have played stronger roles in shaping linguistic typology, potentially overriding the learning bias observed in the opposite direction.Publication Distribution over Situations(2021-07-09) Nakamura, TakanobuIt has been reported that Japanese distributive numeral "zutsu" induces two types of distributive readings, namely an individual distributive reading and an occasion distributive reading. However, there is another reading, which evaluates distributivity in a different situation from a situation in which the rest of the clause is evaluated. I call it a group distributive reading. In this paper, I aim for a unified account of these readings. I propose that "Num-CL-zutsu" partitions a situation along with a presupposed function so that each sub-situation contains a unique/maximal individual which satisfies the measure phrase "Num-CL." The distribution of the three readings follows from an independently motivated constraint on situation pronoun binding. The semantic difference among the three readings comes from different ways to identify the presupposed function from situations to individuals.Publication Variation in Subject-Verb Agreement in the History of Scots(2021-07-09) Gotthard, LisaWe present a pilot study investigating a possible interaction between the Northern Subject Rule (NSR) and negative declarative do-support in Scots during the 16th to 18th century; Scots, a West-Germanic variety traditionally spoken in lowland Scotland, fell under increasing influence from English during this time period, the same period in which we also see Scots do-support emerging. The NSR is a subject-verb (s-v) agreement system in the present tense, which requires structural adjacency and specific subject types (1sg or any plural pronoun, 'NSR subjects') in order for s-v agreement to take place, as analysed by de Haas (2011). With evidence from a present-day Scots variety, Buckie Scots, of negative declarative do-support appearing variably with NSR subjects (Smith 2000), we ask whether there is a subject type constraint on the rise of do-support in the history of Scots: We predict that there would be lower frequencies of do-support with NSR subjects (i.e. the Buckie pattern), and investigate our prediction using automatically parsed data from the Helsinki Corpus of Scottish Correspondence (1540-1750; Meurman-Solin and VARIENG 2017). We do not find the expected correlation of do-support and NSR subjects in our data, and we discuss the status of the negator and the adjacency constraint on the NSR as factors affecting these results, which we will consider further in future study.Publication Colonial-Era Language Shifts and the Sources of Substrate Body Partonomy in the Spanish of Northwestern Colombia(2021-07-09) Raynor, EliotMonolingual varieties of Spanish in the Colombian provinces of Chocó, Antioquia, and Córdoba demonstrate a pattern of non-canonical limb partonomy in which the lexemes mano and pie can refer not only to ‘hand’ and ‘foot’ but also to ‘arm’ and ‘leg’, respectively. On the surface, this would appear to be a simple case of part-for-whole metonymy; indeed, the semantic extension ‘finger’ > ‘hand’ is well attested cross-linguistically. However, there are vanishingly few cases of ‘hand’ > ‘hand + arm’ or ‘foot’ > ‘foot + leg’ in work on language-internal semantic change. On the other hand this is a rather common outcome in cases of intense historical language contact (e.g., Creole genesis) in which speakers of superstrate languages with distinct lexical items for ‘hand’ vs. ‘arm’ and ‘foot’ vs. ‘leg’ (e.g., English, French, and Portuguese) came into contact with speakers of substrate languages with no such distinction (e.g., Kikongo, Akan, Ijo, etc.). The present analysis demonstrates that this type of substrate semantic influence can also occur in language shift scenarios where radical restructuring (i.e. ‘creolization’) did not occur. Based on linguistic and sociohistorical evidence pointing to the early presence and outsized influence of speakers of Emberá, Kikongo, and Upper Guinea Portuguese-based Creoles, this paper argues that substrate transfer through language shift is the most plausible explanation for the origin of the non-canonical sense of mano for ‘arm’ and pie for ‘leg’ in three varieties of Spanish in northwestern Colombia.Publication Classifying Apurímac Quechua Ejectives(2021-07-09) Marcinko, MackenzieI analyze ejective stops in Apurímac Quechua (a variety of Quechua spoken in Southern Peru) in light of the classification system proposed in Lindau (1984) and Kingston (1985), in which ejectives are considered strong or weak based on their acoustic properties. I discuss quantitative characteristics of Apurímac Quechua ejectives as determined in an acoustic study and evaluate the suitability of Lindau (1984) and Kingston (1985)’s typology for categorizing ejectives in light of the Apurímac Quechua data, considered holistically along with data on ejectives from other languages.Publication On the Diachronic Nature of Marathi Light Verbs(2021-07-09) Kulkarni, AadityaThe diachronic nature of Indo-aryan light verbs has been a matter of debate. Scholars like Hook (1991, 1993) and Slade (2013) consider light verbs to have emerged as a resultant of diachronic change; whereas Butt and Lahiri (2002, 2013) opine that light verbs are historically stable and resistant to change. In the light of these views, the present paper traces the Marathi light verbs across time to i. show that their pattern is indicative of gradual emergence rather than historical stability, and ii. affirm Butt and Lahiriís (2013) observation that once established, they show little change in terms of their semantics and morphophonology.Publication NO NEED TO YELL: A Prosodic Analysis of Writing in All Caps(2021-07-09) Heath, MariaWriting in all caps, while not unique to the internet, has become a common feature used in social media. English-speaking internet natives seem to have shared intuitions about what meaning it contributes to a text, even though it is not a feature taught in standard English orthographic education. This study employs production studies to determine how readers produce tweets written in all caps out loud, in order to provide evidence that there is a prosodic component to the interpretation of all caps. Though common discourse about all caps holds that it indicates yelling and anger, the data from this study shows that it's not just average loudness but also average pitch and syllable duration that tend to be increased in the production of all caps text versus text with standard capitalization. This combinaiton of prosodic features which can be associated with all caps also supports the conclusion that it can be used in contexts exemplifying a wide range of emotions, not just anger. This study lays groundwork for a better understanding of the interaction between orthography and prosody on social media and how production studies can be used to test such interactions.