Journal Issue: Proceedings of the 45th Annual Penn Linguistics Conference
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Publication The Lack of Full Pro Drop as a Consequence of Featural Overspecification(2022-11-18) Koeneman, Olaf; Zeijlstra, HeddeDespite the enormous attention that pro drop has received in the linguistic literature, there is no generally accepted answer to the question why relatively rich Germanic languages do not have argumental null subjects, neither is there a fundamental answer to the question why English would not allow them in at least 3SG contexts, where the agreement marker uniquely identifies the features of the unexpressed subject, just like in Italian. We argue that a closer inspection of the Germanic languages reveals that tense and agreement are expressed mono-morphemically, whereas Romance pro drop languages have distinct morphemes for tense and agreement. This allows us to postulate that the lack of pro drop in Germanic languages is a consequence of overspecification: the presence of the tense features makes licensing of a null subject impossible. Germanic variants that have partial pro drop, such as Frisian and Bavarian German, can be naturally accommodated in our approach by reference to complementizer agreement.Publication Cot in the Act: Speaker Ethnicity Conditions Lexical Identification in the Context of the Low-Back Merger in New York City English(2022-11-18) Ortiz, Omar; Haddican, BillThis paper reports on an experiment designed to measure how listeners's perceptions of speaker age and ethnicity condition identification of lexical items with THOUGHT/LOT vowels in New York City English (NYCE). Several independent studies have recently reported evidence of THOUGHT-lowering and/or LOT/THOUGHT merging in NYCE led by younger non-White speakers. Spoken corpus data by Wong (2012), Becker (2010) and Haddican et al. (2021) suggest rapid THOUGHT lowering, particularly in Asian and Latinx communities. Similarly, younger Asian and Latinx NYCE speakers favor merged LOT/THOUGHT responses in controlled homophony judgment tasks (Johnson 2010, Haddican et al. 2016). Moreover, matched-guise results by Becker (2014) suggest that raised THOUGHT is associated mainly with older White speakers. Unaddressed in this literature is whether listeners use perceived social information about the speaker--i.e. perceptions of age and ethnicity--in their phonemic categorization of low back vowels in comprehension of NYCE (Rubin 1992, Hay, Warren and Drager 2006, Koops 2011). Here, we report results from a forced-choice lexical identification experiment intended to investigate this. Consistent with previous production and matched guise results, judges tended to misidentify LOT auditory stimulus items as THOUGHT more often when the item was accompanied by a photo of an Asian speaker than a White speaker. The analysis revealed no effect for the age comparison. The results suggest that NYCE-native listeners actively use social information about speaker ethnicity in the categorization of LOT/THOUGHT items in comprehension.Publication A Quantitative Study of Voiced Velar Nasalization in Japanese(2022-11-18) Breiss, Canaan; Katsuda, Hironori; Kawahara, ShigetoThis paper presents a corpus-based analysis of voiced velar nasalization (VVN) in the standard (Yamanote) dialect of Japanese, in which a voiced velar plosive /g/ becomes nasalized in prosodic-word-medial position. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first quantitative study of the phenomenon, and confirms the impressionistic observation reported in the previous literature; at the same time, our study finds that these generalizations are stochastic. Looking more closely at the determinants of this variation reveals intriguing ways in which phonological grammar and lexicon interact, as well as the role of frequency in shaping phonological variation. Outside of frequency, we also examine factors such as prosodic length, and the effects of the segmental context on VVN.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.Publication Universal Concord as Syntactic Agreement(2022-11-18) Yip, Ka-FaiThis paper argues that universal concord is attested in Cantonese and offers a syntactic agreement account. The Cantonese verbal suffix -can is shown to be a concord element that requires the presence of a universal quantifier but it lacks inherent quantificational force. Drawing crucial evidence from minimality and locality, I propose that -can carries an uninterpretable universal feature that agrees with a genuine universal quantifier. Consequently, the empirical landscape of concord is extended to universal quantifiers. Moreover, this study also offers additional support for a syntactic approach to concord by exploring minimality effects, which have not received enough attention in the studies on concord.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 A Mixed Tense System: Two Roads to the Simultaneous Reading in Modern Greek(2022-11-18) Tsilia, AnastasiaEmbedded tense in Modern Greek (MG) displays an unexpected “optionality”: both present and past tenses can be used under a past tense attitude verb to convey a simultaneous reading. Building on Schlenker (1999) and Sharvit (2003, 2018), we claim that MG has a mixed tense system, being able to delete the embedded past like English and shift the embedded present like Russian and Hebrew. Thus, the correlation between having either a deleted past or a shiftable present but not both is accidental. This is theoretically important because it confirms that the two parameters are independent. We also complete the characterization of MG present tense in the cross-linguistic typology of embedded tense, claiming that it behaves like Russian and unlike Japanese, since our data suggest that it does not shift in non-attitudinal environments. Thus, we conclude that two parameters are active in attitudinal environments in MG: (i) a deleted past, and (ii) a shiftable present. Are these two the only routes to the simultaneous reading? There could in principle be a third one, namely interpreting the embedded past de re, i.e., with respect to the time of the utterance. However, we argue that this would over-generate simultaneous readings for languages without a deletion rule, such as Hebrew and Russian. We propose an analysis of the data based on Prefer De Se, predicting that there are indeed two roads to the simultaneous reading in MG.Publication Discontinuous Predicates as Partial Deletion in Cantonese(2022-11-18) Chan, Sheila S.-L.; Lee, Tommy T.-M.; Yip, Ka-FaiProviding novel evidence from discontinuous predicates in Cantonese, this paper argues that partial deletion applies to the word level. A number of disyllabic verbs in Cantonese may appear as discontinuous strings where the two syllables are separated by suffixes and/or phrasal elements. We propose that their derivation involves a conspiracy of multiple operations in Narrow Syntax and in the Phonological Form (PF): (i) verb movement in Narrow Syntax creates copies; (ii) affixes induce a PF syllable deletion rule on the higher copy; (iii) partial Copy Deletion applies to the lower copy. Consequently, partial deletion not only applies to phrasal constituents (Fanselow and Cavar 2002), but also to words/heads. We also maintain a relatively conservative understanding of Copy Deletion by scattering the deletion to a PF deletion rule and Copy Deletion, where the partial effect is due to disruption of the latter by the former.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.
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