University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics

A Stratal OT Approach to a Noun-Verb Asymmetry With Respect to Opacity in Korean

Jiwon Yun — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 21:39:32 PDT

This paper revisits the well-known opacity caused by the interaction of post-obstruent tensification and coda cluster simplification in Korean and suggests a new class of data that threatens the validity of previous approaches. The new data shows that the opacity occurs only if the input belongs to a certain morphological category such as verb. Therefore, it calls for a theory in which morphology and phonology are systematically interleaved, such as Stratal OT (Kiparsky, 2000). I show that the Stratal OT approach provides a solution to the problem since it adds derivational effects as well as morphological insights to an OT grammar.

Goldilocks Meets the Subset Problem: Evaluating Error Driven Constraint Demotion (RIP/CD) for OT language acquisition

Joshua Tauberer — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 21:37:00 PDT

Linguistic Variation and Lexical Parameter: The Case of Directed Motion

Minjeong Son — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 21:33:29 PDT

On Certain Troublemakers to Partial Control as Agree

Anna Snarska — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 21:33:28 PDT

In this short paper, I present some arguments against the view of Partial Control as held within the framework of the Agree Theory of Control (Landau, 2000, 2004, 2007). It is shown that the Agree-centered scenario does not stand up under closer scrutiny. On the whole, the paper does not develop a novel theory of the relevant phenomenon. The purpose of this paper is more modest. It merely points to the existence of PC conundrums. However, by presenting these challenges, it provokes some questions concerning the overall validity of the ATC.

An Acoustic Analysis of Intrusive Vowels in Guatemalan Spanish /rC/ Clusters

Benjamin Schmeiser — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 21:31:35 PDT

Quilis's (1970, 1993) instrumental work on the acoustic analysis of intrusive vowels (henceforth, IVs) in Spanish has greatly enhanced our understanding of these short, vowel-like fragments found between a Spanish tap, /r/, and its adjacent consonant. His work on IV formant structure in /Cr/ clusters suggests that IVs exhibit the same properties of the nuclear vowel. Quite surprisingly, however, no known study exists that treats the IV formant structure in heterosyllabic /rC/ clusters. The current study fills this gap in the analysis by examining the acoustic properties of IVs in Spanish /rC/ clusters and comparing them to Quilis's (1970, 1993) findings on their /Cr/ cluster counterparts. By doing so, the study greatly contributes to linguistic research by offering empirical data from a variety of Spanish on a topic previously unattested and advances our understanding of IV formant structure. With regards to experimental design, I analyzed the acoustic properties of the IV from a corpus that includes ten subjects from Guatemala City, Guatemala; 197 /rC/ clusters were analyzed spectrographically using Praat and categorized by their flanking vowels (e.g. a_a). Subjects were recorded at a sample rate of 22,050 Hz and sample size of 16-bit. Preliminary data results suggest that the acoustic properties of IVs in /rC/ clusters are unlike those of their /Cr/ counterparts in that they are not linked to a particular nuclear vowel. The formant structure is typically that of a mid vowel, with an average F1 value of 425 and an average F2 value of 1480, regardless of the flanking vowels' quality.In theoretical, Articulatory Phonological (Browman and Goldstein, 1989 et seq.) terms, Gafos (2002) notes that both consonants in the tautosyllabic onset cluster have a timing relationship with the underlying (nuclear) vowel. However, Gafos (2002) also mentions that whereas a consonant in coda position has a timing relationship with its nuclear vowel, the following (heterosyllabic) consonant has a timing relationship the nuclear vowel of the following syllable. The current study's findings are novel in that they suggest the IV in a /rC/ cluster has no apparent timing relationship with either of the neighboring nuclear vowels, as evidenced by its neutral formant structure. Thus, the findings corroborate Gafos's (2002) notions with empirical evidence and shed new light on his view of the syllable.

Evidentiality and German Attitude Verbs

Tatjana Scheffler — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 21:27:43 PDT

German attitude verbs usually embed that-clause complements. In addition, only certain verbs can also license clauses with matrix verb-second (V2) word order as their complements. These same verbs can also appear in slifting constructions. The main question addressed in this paper is why only some attitude verbs allow these additional constructions. I argue that in slifting, the attitude verb functions as an evidential parenthetical, elaborating on (Reis, 1997) and a suggestion in (Potts, 2007), but contra (Wagner, 2004). The lexical meaning of the slifting verb (e.g., the preference information for 'hope') is contributed as a conventional implicature. For V2-embedding, I show that the attitude verb syntactically and semantically embeds its complement. Still, the evidential semantics is the same as in slifting. What differs between the two cases is the distribution of the semantic pieces onto the semantic dimensions of assertion and conventional implicature. In both constructions, only verbs that contribute an upwards epistemic component without factivity are compatible with the evidential semantics.

Analyzing Ilokano Pseudoclefts

Jeremy Rafal — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 21:27:42 PDT

Several researchers have proposed that cleft constructions in many Austronesian languages are in fact concealed pseudoclefts (Chung, 1998 for Chamorro; Paul, 2001, 2008 for Malagasy; Georgopolous, 1991 for Palauan, among others). What this paper examines is the syntactic structure of pseudoclefts in Ilokano, a VSO Austronesian language spoken in the Northern Philippines. I argue that the language employs two types of pseudoclefts, both of which are biclausal. The first type (ti-type or null copula-type pseudocleft) utilizes a null copula between a focused constituent XP and a headless relative introduced by the determiner ti. Thus, we get a construction of the type XP < copula=� < ti + wh-clause. Despite the lack of an overt wh-phrase, material after the determiner ti contains an operator-variable chain signaled by the 'trigger' morphology, creating a headless relative much like in English and other languages. Many Austronesian languages including Ilokano exhibit the famous 'trigger-only' restriction to A-bar movement (Keenan and Comrie, 1977; Aldridge, 2004), and thus the trigger morphology found on the verb in a headless relative marks the 'role' of the variable. The second type (ket-type pseudocleft) employs the topic particle ket with the word order ti + wh-clause < ket < XP. This time, the headless relative sits in a topicalization position and the constituent after the topic particle ket introduces the focused constituent XP. I argue that the ket-type of pseudocleft is in fact a TOPIC < COMMENT construction where the focus is a full IP subject to optional ellipsis, similar to a type of specificational pseudocleft found in English (cf. den Dikken et al., 2000).

Accounting for do-support Post-Syntactically: Evidence from Old Irish

Glenda Newton — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 21:25:03 PDT

Since Chomsky (1957) much has been written on the topic of do-support and its connection to affix hopping in English. However, as yet no definitive analysis has been proposed. This paper considers a parallel to English do-support, namely the use of the dummy particle no in Old Irish (OIr). A post-syntactic account of this phenomenon in OIr is developed within the framework of Distributed Morphology/DM (Halle and Marantz, 1993) and the possibility of applying such an account to English do-support is considered.

When 'What' Means 'Why': On Accusative wh-adjuncts in Japanese

Chizuru Nakao — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 21:03:27 PDT

This paper considers properties of the Japanese Accusative wh-adjunct 'nani-o (what-Acc)' (Kurafuji, 1996, 1997; Ochi, 1999) in sentences such as "Kare-wa nani-o sawai-dei-ru no? (lit. What is he making a noise?)". Although the Accusative wh-adjunct 'nani-o' is usually translated in the same way as 'naze (why)', there are a number of differences between them: (i) 'Nani-o' has an animacy restriction on the subject, (ii) it has some special speaker's inference, and (iii) it is incompatible with sluicing (Ochi, 1999). We will explain the properties (i) and (ii) by claiming that Accusative wh-adjuncts are base-generated in a functional projection FP, which is related to speaker's illocutionary force. We attribute the property (iii) to Fox and Lasnik's (2003) parallelism condition on sluicing; because Accusative wh-adjuncts are base-generated in a different position from other reason adjuncts, they do not satisfy parallelism with the corresponding adjunct in the antecedent clause. By clarifying the syntactic positions of the two types of reason adjuncts, we attempt to contribute to the typological study of adjuncts.

Intervention Effects and wh-movement

Shiti Malhotra — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 21:00:35 PDT

Intervention effects visible in many natural languages have been a lively issue in the syntactic and semantic literature in the last decade, starting with the seminal work by Beck (1996) and followed by a number of equally influential analyses. This paper highlights the limitations of some of these studies and proposes a reanalysis of intervention effects in terms of head movement. This paper also suggests an alternative Wh-movement approach for some Wh in-situ languages that show intervention effects, and claims that the nature of Wh-movement in natural languages has a direct consequence on the nature of Wh-quantifier interactions. I discuss data from various languages, particularly Hindi, English and Chinese to show how the nature of Wh-movement in these languages determines the presence of intervention effects as well as island effects. In this exploration, the paper also investigates the nature of constraints that regulate movement in these languages.