Journal Issue: Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Penn Linguistics Conference
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10/01/2020
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Publication Children (and Some Adults) Overgeneralize Negative Concord: the Case of Fragment Answers to Negative Questions in Italian(2020-10-01) Moscati, VincenzoRecent studies on language acquisition have shown that children may initially adopt a Negative Concord grammar also when this option is disfavoured or forbidden in the target language. If children overextend Negative Concord, they might do it not only in Double Negation languages, but also in Romance. This hypothesis will be tested by looking at Italian children’s comprehension of negative fragments used as answers of negative questions: in this context, Double Negation readings typically arise in adult speakers of Italian. The experimental results show that Italian 5-year-olds prefer Negative Concord interpretations to a larger extend than the adult control group, supporting the idea that Negative Concord might initially be overgeneralized by young children.Publication Wh-agreement Across Three Domains in Indonesian(2020-10-01) Jeoung, HelenCross-linguistically, morphological wh-agreement has been observed either on C/T or on verbs (Zaenen 1983; Reintges et al. 2006), coinciding with classic domains for successive-cyclic A' movement. This suggests that other phasal XPs may be also marked with morphological wh-agreement. The central claim of this paper is that in Indonesian, wh-agreement occurs in three domains: complementizers, verbs and nominals. Evidence for wh-agreement on C and wh-agreement on verbs comes from previously observed patterns in the literature, which I re-cast as wh-agreement. Next, by examining cases in which possessors undergo A' movement out of DP, I show that obligatory changes in morphology are an instantiation of wh-agreement within DP. This analysis contributes new patterns to the range of attested wh-agreement, and brings Indonesian morphosyntactic patterns under the umbrella of a wider cross-linguistic phenomenon.Publication Mobile Affixes Across Western Armenian: Conflicts Across Modules(2020-10-01) Bezrukov, Nikita; Dolatian, HossepIn this paper, we discuss the cross-linguistically rare case of mobile affixation in three Western Armenian varieties, in which the Indicative marker alternates between a prefixal and a suffixal realization depending on the context. In Hamshen Armenian, conditioning is fully phonological: the Indicative is a prefix if the verb is vowel-initial and a suffix elsewhere. However, in Gyumri and Akhalkalaki Armenian, the placement of the Indicative marker is subject to a curious interleaving between phonological and syntactic conditions. First, if a consonant-initial verb is alone in some relevant syntactic domain, the affix takes a suffixal position, but if there is extra syntactic elements present, it surfaces as a prefix (syntactic condition). This domain is similar to syntactic phases but not always isomorphic to them. In Akhalkalaki, the Indicative is even capable of leaving the verb base and cliticizing onto the constituent bearing the sentential stress. We discuss the data and provide a preliminary analysis.Publication Documenting Eynu: A Case Study of Language Contact(2020-10-01) Liang, SiyuEynu is an alleged threatened contact language of Uyghur [Turkic; China] and Iranian languages, spoken in scattered enclaves in southwestern Xinjiang, China. We conducted fieldwork on the language in 2018 and provided a most up-to-date documentation of the language. Based on the data collected, we claim that Eynu is best classified as a Turkic language, since the majority of its grammar patterns with Uyghur. However, certain phonological and morphological features attest to language contact, notably with Persian languages. In addition, diachronic analysis with the help of previous data attest to an ongoing process of lexical replacement and language attrition.Publication (Im)possible Constituent Orders: Nominals, Numerals, Classifiers and Ordinal Markers(2020-10-01) Tatsumi, YutaBy investigating ordinals in a wide range of languages, this paper addresses a puzzle regarding (im)possible constituent orders of nominals, numerals and ordinal markers, which is similar to Greenberg’s (1972) observation about constituent orders of nominals, quantifiers and classifiers. I propose that my observation and Greenberg’s (1972) observation can be captured by assuming that ordinal markers occur in the same positions as numeral classifiers.Publication Finite-State Locality in Semitic Root-and-Pattern Morphology(2020-10-01) Dolatian, Hossep; Rawski, JonathanThis paper discusses the generative capacity required for Semitic root-and-pattern morphology. Finite-state methods effectively compute concatenative morpho-phonology, and can be restricted to Strictly Local functions. We extend these methods to consider non-concatenative morphology. We show that over such multi-input functions, Strict Locality is necessary and sufficient. We discuss some consequences of this generalization for linguistic theories of the morphological template.Publication An Experimental Investigation of the Role of Uniqueness and Familiarity in Interpreting Definite Descriptions(2020-10-01) Srinivas, Sadhwi; Rawlins, KyleIn this study, we follow a long line of researchers in asking about the precise role of uniqueness and familiarity in the semantics of the English definite article the. We attempt to answer this question experimentally, by observing how definite descriptions behave in contexts where a speaker potentially uses an incorrect description, as in Donnellan’s classic martini scenario, where a speaker incorrectly believes there is a unique referent for their chosen description. In particular, we investigate how hearers interpret definite descriptions in contexts that are systematically manipulated to vary in whether they do or don't contain a unique referent satisfying the description, and whether the referent has or has not been made familiar via previous linguistic mention. Our experimental results reveal that both uniqueness (construed as uniqueness with respect to the common ground between the interlocutors) and familiarity (construed as strong familiarity or anaphoricity) can act as helpful cues to the hearer during the interpretation of a definite description. However, their effects are graded, with the presence of uniqueness leading to greater referential success than the presence of familiarity. We discuss the implications of these results on several existing standard theories of definiteness, and implement a version of the Rational Speech Acts model to help explain the ways in which the observed behavioral data cannot be fully explained on these theories.Publication Direct Causation: A New Approach to an Old Question(2020-10-01) Baglini, Rebekah; Siegal, Elitzur A. Bar-AsherCausative constructions come in lexical and periphrastic variants, exemplified in English by Sam killed Lee and Sam caused Lee to die. While use of the former, the lexical causative, entails the truth of the latter, an entailment in the other direction does not hold. The source of this asymmetry is commonly ascribed to the lexical causative having an additional prerequisite of “direct causation", such that the causative relation holds between a contiguous cause and effect (Fodor 1970, Katz 1970). However, this explanation encounters both empirical and theoretical problems (Nelleman & van der Koot 2012). To explain the source of the directness inferences (as well as other longstanding puzzles), we propose a formal analysis based on the framework of Structural Equation Models (SEMs) (Pearl 2000) which provides the necessary background for licensing causal inferences. Specifically, we provide a formalization of a 'sufficient set of conditions' within a model and demonstrate its role in the selectional parameters of causative descriptions. We argue that “causal sufficiency” is not a property of singular conditions, but rather sets of conditions, which are individually necessary but only sufficient when taken together (a view originally motivated in the philosophical literature by Mackie 1965). We further introduce the notion of a “completion event” of a sufficient set, which is critical to explain the particular inferential profile of lexical causatives.Publication The Complexity of Optimizing Over Strictly Local Constraints(2020-10-01) Koser, Nate; Jardine, AdamWe show that in Optimality Theory (OT; Prince and Smolensky 1993), optimization over strictly local (SL; McNaughton and Papert 1971) constraints can generate fully regular patterns. We show that a set of stress constraints defined as SL but evaluated in parallel OT predicts an unattested ``sour grapes''-type stress assignment pattern, in which iterative foot assignment occurs if and only if it generates a full parse. We show that this pattern is fully regular, thus demonstrating that SL constraints are not closed under optimization. Furthermore, while sour grapes has received attention in harmony (Padgett 1995, Wilson 2003, Wilson 2006, McCarthy 2010) and tone phenomena (Jardine 2016), the possibility of sour grapes-like stress has not previously been discussed.Publication Diagnosing Movement via the Absence of C-command Relations(2020-10-01) Laszakovits, Sabine; Graf, ThomasIn this paper, we propose a new diagnostic for movement. It has been argued in the computational linguistics literature that some constraints can be formalized by path constraints on the sequence of their c-commanders (Graf and Shafiei 2019), and that some constraints can be formalized by the tree configuration they appear in (Graf and Heinz 2015). It holds that path constraints are a special case of tree constraints. We make the observation that path constraints cannot account for phenomena that have been argued to involve movement of the element requiring licensing, namely for ATB-extraction and parasitic gaps. However, the reverse does not hold: adjuncts islands and freezing effects, which also involve movement, can be formalized by path constraints. We thus propose the following one-way generalization: Whenever a phenomenon cannot be captured by path constraints, and can be captured by tree constraints, this phenomenon involves movement. We contend that this is not surprising given the fact that constraints on the well-formedness of the Move operation cannot be captured by path constraints, and rather must be captured by tree constraints (Graf 2018).
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