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Proceedings of the 31st Annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 30
  • Publication
    Phonetic, phonological, and social forces as filters: Another look at the Georgia Toscana
    (2008-04-23) Dalcher, Christina Villafaña
    This study brings quantitative analysis to data from Florentine Italian to describe the lenition process Gorgia Toscana, assessing the roles of physiological, perceptual, phonological, and social factors. Data from six native speakers of Florentine Italian were analyzed acoustically for consonant duration, intensity, periodicity, and burst absence. Results indicate that Gorgia Toscana produces gradient and variable output, with certain patterns occurring in the variation. The observations that emerge from the data cannot all be accounted for if Gorgia Toscana is characterized as a purely phonetic, phonological, or socially driven process of sound change. Rather, different aspects of the process can and should be attributed to different motivators: gradience and velar preference to articulator movements; resistance of non-velar lenition to perceptual constraints; targeting of a complete natural class and categorical weakening to abstract featural representations; and intersubject variation in velar lenition to external social factors. Gorgia Toscana seems best understood by referring to various forces that act to encourage or inhibit weakening. Applying Hume and Johnson's (2001) filter model to lenition data, we can generalize over the observed patterns in Gorgia Toscana in a way that is descriptively and explanatorily more adequate than previous accounts of the process.
  • Publication
    The real effect of word frequency on phonetic variation
    (2008-04-23) Dinkin, Aaron J.
    The claim that high-frequency words tend to undergo regular sound change faster than less frequent words is common in Exemplar Theory literature. This paper examines the effect of word frequency on F2 of short vowels in the region of American English subject to the Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCVS). I find that more frequent words appear to have more centralized vowels - higher F2 for back vowels, and lower F2 for front vowels - regardless of the direction the vowel is moving in the NCVS. I interpret this result as supporting, rather than the strong claim that high-frequency words undergo sound change in general faster, an observation by Phillips (1984) that high-frequency words undergo specifically lenition faster.
  • Publication
    DP hypothesis for Japanese “bare” noun phrases
    (2008-04-23) Furuya, Kaori
  • Publication
    A syntactic analysis of nominal and pronominal associative plurals
    (2008-04-23) Vassilieva, Masha
    An associative plural is a nominal expression that refers to a group by naming its most salient member (1). The construction is used to introduce a new group into discourse, a group that is understood to be inherently (or contextually) associated with its named protagonist. (1) Pa-hulle (Afrikaans, den Besten 1996:16) Dad-them ‘Dad and Mum' or 'Dad and his folks’ In this paper, I argue for an analysis of associative plurals as phrasal expressions where the protagonist and the group are two separate syntactic entities. Namely, I suggest that associatives are headed by a non-descriptive nominal with group semantics. The reference of this group is determined through its association with the protagonist. The protagonist is a referential modifier which starts out in a modifier projection and moves to the specifier of DP. I begin by showing that associative protagonists share a number of syntactic and morphological properties with other types of referential modifiers such as demonstratives, personal pronouns and certain types of possessives. I go on to demonstrate that languages employ different strategies in spelling out the functional features of the non-descriptive group nominal, and that the apparent surface diversity of associative marking can be derived from the same syntactic structure. Finally, I suggest that my analysis of associatives can be extended to personal pronouns in their associative, anaphoric, and non-canonical interpretations.
  • Publication
    A morpho-syntactic approach to pronominal binding
    (2008-04-23) Koak, Heeshin
    In this paper, I propose that the availability of a bound variable reading for pronouns is predictable from their morphological structure of the pronouns. More specifically I argue that noun-containing pronouns cannot be bound variables. My proposal is different from D&W's (2002) argument in that in their theory, every DPs cannot have a bound variable reading, while in my theory, even DPs can have a bound variable reading as long as they do not contain a noun in it. I show that my proposal has more empirical and conceptual advantages than D&W's (2002) theory through the binding properties of Korean pronouns. I also deal with the cases discussed in D&W (2002) and show that my proposal can explain those data without the additional category phi-P that D&W (2002) suggest.
  • Publication
    Barely there: Hard-to-detect auxiliaries shed light on children’s acquisition of French
    (2008-04-23) Dye, Christina D.
    The status of children’s acquisition of grammatical categories and in particular of auxiliaries continues to be debated. On the one hand, a number of corpus studies suggest that auxiliaries and similar categories are absent early on (e.g., Wijnen 1996/1997, Schlyter 2003). On the other hand, experimental studies indicate that syntactic competence for functional categories is available to toddlers and even infants (e.g., Gerken & McIntosh 1993, Santelmann & Jusczyk 1998). This study investigates the acquisition of auxiliaries in child French and evaluates these two perspectives using a new corpus of over 5000 child utterances containing cross-sectional speech samples from 18 children, ages 1;11 – 2;11. Subjects were presented with a standardized set of props and questions designed to trigger utterances with verbs and auxiliaries. Data collection and analysis involved an innovative digital recording set-up, digital transcription technology and editing software, and more detailed data analysis, including spectrograms. The results reveal that auxiliaries and modals are evidenced in all children from the earliest ages. Children produce a variety of auxiliary/modal forms: full auxiliaries, phonetically and phonologically reduced auxiliaries, “filler” vowels standing for auxiliaries, as well as subject agreement markers that precede nonfinite verbs and that implicate the presence of a finite auxiliary/modal. These findings strengthen previous experimental results regarding children’s knowledge of functional categories by providing corroboration from a corpus study.
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    Reconstruction of Proto-Trique phonemes
    (2008-04-23) Matsukawa, Kosuke
    Trique languages are spoken in Oaxaca, Mexico and belong to the Mixtecan family of the Otomanguean stock. Trique languages are composed of three languages: San Andrés Chicahuaxtla Trique, San Juan Copala Trique and San Martín Itunyoso Trique. Based on the data on these three Trique languages, Proto-Trique has been reconstructed by Matsukawa (2005, 2006a, 2006b, 2007a, 2007b). This article is the refined version of my previous reconstruction of Proto-Trique. In Proto-Trique, seven stop sounds (/*t/, /*d/, /*k/, /*g/, /*kw/, /*gw/, /*ʔ/), three fricative sounds (/*ß/, /*s/, /*ʃ/), three affricate sounds (/*ts/, /*tʃ/, /*tʂ/), five resonant sounds (*m/, /*n/, /*l/, /*r/, /*y/), seven oral vowels (/*i/, /*e/, /*ɨ/, /*ə/, /*a/, /*o/, /*u/) and four nasal vowels (/*ĩ/, /*ɨ̃/, /*ã/, /*ũ/) can be reconstructed as phonemes. Both oral and nasal vowels have four types: short vowels (V), long vowels (VV), glottalized vowels (Vʔ) and aspirated vowels (Vh). Some of these reconstructed phonemes show very limited distributional constraints. All of the nasal vowels, long vowels, glottalized vowels and aspirated vowels occur only in a final syllable. In non-final syllables, only short oral vowels can occur. Although Proto-Trique has both voiced and voiceless stop sounds, voiced stop sounds can be reconstructed only in a final syllable. In non-final syllables, only voiceless stop sounds can occur. In this article, I will show how these Proto-Trique phonemes were reconstructed and how these reconstructed Proto-Trique phonemes have undergone series of historical sound changes in the three modern Trique languages.
  • Publication
    An argument/adjunct asymmetry in wh-questions
    (2008-04-23) Yoon, Suwon
    Contra previous uniform approaches for wh-phrases, the current paper argues that there is a clear asymmetry between in-situ argument and adjunct wh-phrases with respect to Intervention Effects (IEs) in Korean and Japanese. Based on the categorical (nominal vs. adverbial) dichotomy evidenced by structural case attachment tests and formation of complex wh-expressions, different base locations for wh-arguments (inside vP) and wh-adjuncts (outside vP) are suggested in these languages. Finally, I propose that IE asymmetries be attributed to the inherently different properties of argument and adjunct wh-phrases under scrambling operation.

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