Journal Issue: Proceedings of the 45th Annual Penn Linguistics Conference
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Publication Non-binary Language Forms in Spanish: Consciously Using it Facilitates Processing during Comprehension?(2022-11-18) Stetie, Noelia A.; Zunino, Gabriela M.Several grammatical studies have focused on the study of morphological innovations used as non-binary forms in Spanish (-x; -e). However, there are no experimental studies that analyze their psycholinguistic processing or the multiple and complex relationships between production and comprehension in non- binary language. To analyze this phenomenon, we performed a sentence reading and comprehension task. We recorded reading times, response times, and accuracy. We considered morphology, stereotypicality and frequency of use of non-binary forms in the participants as predictors. The results show specialization of the non-binary forms as generic morphological variants, as opposed to the generic masculine. The non- binary forms consistently elicited a reference to mixed groups and response times showed that these morphological variants do not carry a higher processing cost than the generic masculine. Moreover, it is possible to see that the conscious use of non-binary forms influences the comprehension processes of the different variants of gender morphology: as the voluntary use of non-binary forms increases, the generic masculine seems to concentrate its reference to groups of men exclusively. Thus, in addition to showing general evidence regarding the processing costs and comprehension of gender morphology in Spanish, our data allow us to observe a potential reciprocal link between production and comprehension processes that deserves further study.Publication Toward the Copular Status of Chinese Clefts -- Evidence from Diachronic Syntax(2022-11-18) Jin, Dawei; Chen, JunThis paper develops a substantive link between three independent and chronologically separate diachronic patterns in Classical Chinese. In each development, a newly copularized (reanalyzed from lexical sources) morpheme occurs in both a copular clause and a cleft. We argue that this connection can be captured by a theory according to which clefts are a type of the copular construction. Both canonical copular clauses and clefts are thus headed by the same copula verb, hence the tendency for both copular structures to emerge and decline in a coordinated way.Publication Preface(2022-11-18) Benz, Johanna; Chen, YiranThe 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 Conference. This volume contains selected papers accepted into the 45th Penn Linguistics Conference. Given the COVID-19 pandemic, PLC 45 took place virtually and all authors of oral presentations were invited to contribute a ten page paper to this volume. We thank our authors for their contribution and their patience and understanding in this editing process. We also thank Pik Yu May Chan, June Choe, Gwen Hildebrandt, Aini Li, Daoxin Li, Karen Li, Lefteris Paparounas, and Christine Soh 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: Lee, Soo-Hwan, and Yining Nie. 2022. In University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 28.1, ed. Johanna Benz and Yiran Chen, 86-95. Available at: http://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol28/iss1/11. 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. Johanna Benz and Yiran Chen, Issue EditorsPublication Directionality Effects and Exceptions in Learning Phonological Alternations(2022-11-18) Wang, Anqi; Finley, SaraThe present study explores learning vowel harmony with exceptions using the artificial language learning paradigm. Participants were exposed to a back/round vowel harmony pattern in which one affix (either prefix or suffix, depending on the condition) alternated between /me/ and /mo/ depending on the phonetic feature of the stem vowels. In Experiment 1, participants were able to learn the behaviors of both alternating and non-alternating affixes, but were more likely to generalize to novel affixes for non-alternating items than alternating items. In Experiment 2, participants were exposed to training data that contained non-alternating affixes in prefix position while alternating affixes were all suffixes, or vice versa. Participants were able to extend the non-alternating affixes to the novel direction, suggesting that participants inferred a non-directional harmony pattern. Overall, the patterns of alternating affixes are harder to learn than patterns of exceptions that do not alternate, which aligns with previous findings supporting a non-alternation bias. Our study raises the question of how biases towards exceptionality and directionality interact in phonological learning.Publication Korean Case Stacking and the Nominal Template(2022-11-18) Lee, Soo-Hwan; Nie, YiningKorean exhibits a phenomenon known as case stacking, where a single nominal can bear two markers traditionally associated with case. We show that while the inner markers in stacked nominals reflect genuine case, the outer markers are instead associated with discourse marking. Stacked “nominative” and “accusative” are in fact focus markers, whose distributions are distinct from those of genuine case marking (Schütze 2001). We propose that the inner markers are associated with the argument introducing heads Voice and Appl, and the outer markers are associated with focus and topic. By assigning inner markers low and outer markers high, our analysis derives the templatic ordering of morphemes in Korean nominals (Cho & Sells 1995) and explains the difference in distribution of honorific nominative (HON.NOM) and plain nominative (NOM). Our analysis that only external argument introducing heads (Voice and Appl) can assign honorific-sensitive case markers captures an independent fact about Korean: the case paradigm contains HON.NOM and HON.DAT but no *HON.ACC.Publication Differential Subject Marking in Kazakh(2022-11-18) Ótott-Kovács, EszterThis paper investigates the distinction between nominative and genitive subject complement clauses in Kazakh (Turkic) to determine whether these clauses have the same syntactic structure or whether they are derived independently using different strategies. Based on novel data, the paper shows that Kazakh morphologically distinguishes anaphoric and unique definiteness (in the sense of Schwarz 2009), and that genitive marking on the subject of complement clauses is determined by anaphoricity of the subject. Therefore, nominative and genitive subjects are in complementary distribution: anaphoric subject DPs are in the genitive, while pseudo-incorporated and unique definite subjects are nominative-marked. This distinction can be accounted for by analyzing the anaphoric subject undergoing a semantically motivated movement to the edge of the complement clause, where it is assigned lexically-governed genitive. The analysis contributes to the cross-linguistic study of morphological case assignment by showing that genitive can be a lexical case, and also by demonstrating that definiteness marking can drive differential case marking.Publication Against the Argument/Adjunct Distinction(2022-11-18) McInnerney, AndrewThis paper suggests that much of the empirical basis for the argument/adjunct distinction (A/AD) is weaker than traditionally believed. First, I argue that successful argumenthood diagnostics should both (i) identify a distinction among dependents which resembles the conventional A/AD, and (ii) draw a distinction which is not already predicted independently of the A/AD. Focusing on PPs within the VP in English, I argue that purported diagnostics for argumenthood, including omission, 'do so'-substitution, and iteration, do not meet these criteria, therefore do not provide empirical support for the A/AD. After briefly discussing the prospects for several further diagnostics, I conclude that it is plausible that the A/AD might be eliminable. Though this would raise technical questions in various areas, it would be desirable from a Minimalist perspective.Publication Unifying Concessives and Unconditionals in Japanese(2022-11-18) Yagi, YusukeFocus cuts across concessive conditionals and unconditionals among human languages. In English, this can be observed in the overt use of "even" in a concessive "even if", and "ever" in "whoever". The purpose of this study is to provide a new semantic perspective for this correlation by examining concessives and unconditionals in Japanese. In which concessives and unconditionals are both marked by the same morpheme, "-temo". It would be desirable to derive the all the relevant properties they have from a unified semantic definition of "-temo". I will make a proposal to achieve this goal, providing further evidence for the correlation of the two constructions. The resultant analysis will similar to the one for English by Rawlins (2013, (Un)conditionals, Natural Language Semantics), but some differences between English and Japanese will be dicussed.Publication Dialect-specific Acoustic Correlates of Stress in Spanish: The Role of Vowel Compression and Syllable Structure(2022-11-18) Marchini, Gilly; Ramsammy, MichaelThe present paper is part of a wider project examining vowel compression and its impact on the phonetic signalling of stress across dialects of Spanish. Here within, we compare vowel compression effects in spontaneous Southern Chilean Spanish to previous findings from continuously read Altiplateau Mexican Spanish. Results show that, in Southern Chilean Spanish, vowels are shortened in CVC and CCV syllables irrespective of stress; although unstressed vowels are shorter than stressed, onset and coda-driven compression effects are visible on all vowels. Qualitative results show that stress-driven differences in vowel height are visible on /o/ and /a/ in open but not closed syllables: stressed vowels are lower in the vowel space. Conversely, results from Altiplateau Mexican Spanish showed that whilst unstressed vowels in CVC syllables were shortened and centralised, stressed vowels were not. Results therefore support theories that dialect-specific compression effects exist due to dialect-specific phonetic-phonological interactions (Authors under review): in this case, their interaction with stress. We further consider the implications of these variety-specific patterns in the context of debates concerning the dialect-specific nature of stress, arguing that compression effects may have implications on the wider vowel systems and the phonetic way in which stress is signalled across dialects.Publication Matrix Operators in Georgian Indexical Shift(2022-11-18) Thivierge, SigwanThis paper examines indexical shift in Georgian (South Caucasian), which has been noted but understudied in the literature. I argue that its matrix-level shift provides evidence in favour of the shifty operator theory (Anand and Nevins, 2004; Shklovsky and Sudo, 2014; Deal, 2020, i.a.). In these approaches, an embedded indexical is interpreted against a non-utterance context whose parameters are determined by an operator. Crucially, this operator is distinct from the verb that introduces it, which logically allows for the operator to merge freely in the structure. This prediction is evidenced by shifted indexicals in Georgian matrix clauses.
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