Proceedings of the 44th Annual Penn Linguistics Conference

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07/09/2021
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  • Publication
    On the Interaction of Reflexives and Periphrastic Causatives in Icelandic
    (2021-07-09) Wood, Jim; Sigurðsson, Einar Freyr
    Cross-linguistically, reflexive verbs frequently show puzzling behavior when they are embedded under causatives. We focus on two ways that this pattern manifests itself in Icelandic Indirect Causatives, formed with the light verb láta ‘let/make/have’: (i) verbs that normally cannot be embedded are allowed with reflexives, and (ii) a pleonastic use of the causative verb becomes available in imperatives with oblique subjects. We propose that these facts follow from the syntax of long-distance reflexives (which involves a “point-of-view” operator OPPOV), and a Voice-stacking analysis of indirect causatives, where two Voice heads are added on top of a single vP. The claim is that there is a limited set of ways to interpret the Voice-stacking structure, and reflexives provide one particular way to do this that is not otherwise available. Assuming that either Voice head can introduce a thematic interpretation or be expletive, we propose that in principle, there are four ways to interpret the Voice-stacking structure. Our analysis supports the view that the syntax and semantics of causatives is derived from the interaction of more basic primitives and mechanisms, and is not encoded with a dedicated functional head in the grammar.
  • Publication
    Post-Lexical Tone 3 Sandhi Domain-Building in Huai’an Mandarin: Multiple Domain Types and Free Application
    (2021-07-09) Du, Naiyan; Lin, Yen-Hwei
    Based on the production and acceptability data of tone sandhi patterns of the Huai’an dialect of Jianghuai Mandarin (Huai’an, hereafter) at the syntactic level, this paper argues that (i) both disyllabic and trisyllabic tone sandhi domains are basic domains in Huai’an, which differs from the traditional analysis where only disyllabic domain exists in the Mandarin language family and trisyllabic domain is derived, and (ii) as a consequence, both types of domains can be built freely at the post-lexical level as long as all the syllables are exhaustively incorporated. By positing both disyllabic and trisyllabic domains, the current proposal gives a succinct analysis of Tone 3 Sandhi in Huai’an, and removes the parameter of directionality. Furthermore, a lapse-based analysis (Elenbaas & Kager, 1999) involving a binary tone sandhi domain with an unparsed syllable is unlikely because it cannot produce the surface representation “(2 2 3)” (parenthesis indicates tone sandhi domain boundary and number indicates tone) where all three syllables must be included into one tone sandhi domain to generate the correct surface form in Huai’an. This study suggests more generally that ternary prosodic units, including ternary stress feet (Prince, 1980), can be independent domains in phonology.
  • Publication
    Learnability of a Phonetically Null Segment
    (2021-07-09) Nyman, Alexandra
    This paper investigates why two classes of French words, both of which contain words that in isolation are phonetically realized as vowel-initial, vary with respect to elision when pronounced right-adjacent to a definite article: one class does not trigger the deletion of the expendable vowel, while the other class does. It is argued that these two classes differ in that one contains underlyingly vowel-initial words, while the other class consists of words whose underlying representations contain an underspecified consonant segment (termed a ghost consonant; Kiparsky, 2003). The paper also addresses how a learner could posit a ghost consonant in the underlying representation of this second class of words given that the ghost consonant is phonetically null. Through Inconsistency Detection (Tesar, 2004) and Presence Feature setting (Nyman & Tesar, 2019) the learner is able to posit a phonetically null segment, resulting in the resolution of a ranking paradox that would otherwise obtain.
  • Publication
    Locative Causatives in European Portuguese as Voice Alternations
    (2021-07-09) Soares, Catarina; Wood, Jim
    In this paper, we discuss the syntax of a causative construction in European Portuguese, which is similar to the ordinary causative (OC) but which also differs from it in important ways. We refer to this construction as the Locative Causative (LC) construction, which alternates between transitive (TLC) and intransitive (ILC) variants. We show that LCs entail a change of location of the theme and exhibit an existence presupposition on the theme. We suggest that this is because the entire VoiceP is embedded in a LocP structure, and that this structure also leads to the existence presupposition. We propose that both TLCs and ILCs may embed a passive VoiceP despite having infinitival morphology, and that the distinction between light verbs ‘go’ in ILCs and ‘put’ in TLCs stems from the presence or absence of an external-argument-introducing Voice head in the matrix clause.
  • Publication
    The Computational Similarity of Binding and Long-Distance Consonant Dissimilation
    (2021-07-09) Ikawa, Shiori; Jardine, Adam
    This work shows that the binding patterns are computationally similar to long-distance consonant dissimilation. From a computational point of view, phonological patterns have long been hypothesized to be regular. More recent work has suggested this holds for syntax as well, given the correct representation. By examining binding conditions from morpho-syntactic transformational point of view, we show that binding conditions can be logically characterized in a parallel way to long-distance consonant dissimilation. The similarity shows that binding patterns as transformations fall into a subsequential class, a subregular class of transformations which is considered to capture a great deal of segmental phonological process. This result adds further support to the subregular hypothesis for syntax.
  • Publication
    Colonial-Era Language Shifts and the Sources of Substrate Body Partonomy in the Spanish of Northwestern Colombia
    (2021-07-09) Raynor, Eliot
    Monolingual varieties of Spanish in the Colombian provinces of Chocó, Antioquia, and Córdoba demonstrate a pattern of non-canonical limb partonomy in which the lexemes mano and pie can refer not only to ‘hand’ and ‘foot’ but also to ‘arm’ and ‘leg’, respectively. On the surface, this would appear to be a simple case of part-for-whole metonymy; indeed, the semantic extension ‘finger’ > ‘hand’ is well attested cross-linguistically. However, there are vanishingly few cases of ‘hand’ > ‘hand + arm’ or ‘foot’ > ‘foot + leg’ in work on language-internal semantic change. On the other hand this is a rather common outcome in cases of intense historical language contact (e.g., Creole genesis) in which speakers of superstrate languages with distinct lexical items for ‘hand’ vs. ‘arm’ and ‘foot’ vs. ‘leg’ (e.g., English, French, and Portuguese) came into contact with speakers of substrate languages with no such distinction (e.g., Kikongo, Akan, Ijo, etc.). The present analysis demonstrates that this type of substrate semantic influence can also occur in language shift scenarios where radical restructuring (i.e. ‘creolization’) did not occur. Based on linguistic and sociohistorical evidence pointing to the early presence and outsized influence of speakers of Emberá, Kikongo, and Upper Guinea Portuguese-based Creoles, this paper argues that substrate transfer through language shift is the most plausible explanation for the origin of the non-canonical sense of mano for ‘arm’ and pie for ‘leg’ in three varieties of Spanish in northwestern Colombia.
  • Publication
    Balancing the (Horn) Scale: Explaining the Production-Comprehension Asymmetry for Scalar Implicatures
    (2021-07-09) Mognon, Irene; Sprenger, Simone; Kuijper, Sanne; Hendriks, Petra
    Preschoolers struggle with Scalar Implicature (SI) generation, showing difficulties in interpreting the scalar element “some” with its upper-bounded meaning “some but not all”. Strikingly, despite the fact that the comprehension of “some” is not adult-like until at least 5 years of age, recent corpus data suggest that children, in production, can use “some” as “not all” already in their third year of life. In this paper, we propose the Asymmetry Account, an account of SI generation formulated in the framework of Bidirectional Optimality Theory (Bi-OT). By taking Bi-OT as a model of language use, we show that the comprehension of “some” requires hearers’ to consider the speaker’s perspective, but not vice versa: to produce “some” with its upper-bounded meaning no mentalizing about other perspectives is needed. In light of this, we predict that the comprehension of weak scalar elements such as “some” is cognitively more demanding than their production and argue that children’s difficulty with the “some”-implicature is to be related to children’s developing of cognitive abilities, in particular, Theory of Mind.
  • Publication
    Does Learner’s Preference Match the Typological Pattern of Animacy Hierarchy in Morphological Marking?
    (2021-07-09) Chen, Yiran; Schuler, Kathryn
    Plural marking systems in natural languages follow an Animacy Hierarchy such that although it is common for animate nouns to receive plural markers while inanimate nouns are left unmarked, the reverse pattern is never attested. A hypothesis that has received wide empirical support is that underlying biases of learners during language learning shape language typology: linguistic patterns easily learned by language learners are promoted, while those that are unlearnable are eliminated. This study asked whether learners have underlying biases which would contribute to the settlement of the typologically universal Animacy Hierarchy. With an artificial language learning paradigm, this study showed that learners biases do not align with the universally-attested Animacy Hierarchy: learning a language that violates the Animacy Hierarchy is in fact easier for adult learners and they view shifting a language with a probabilistic plural-marking system towards a pattern that violates the hierarchy as a viable option as well. However, adult learners are more successful in probability-matching on animate trials than inanimate trials, which suggests high salience of animate tokens during the rule learning process. Our preliminary data on children suggest that such an animacy-conditioned grammatical system is hard for children aged 5-8 to fully acquire in a single-session learning task and that for those children who have acquired the pattern, no convincing evidence suggests a learning bias favoring the language that follows the typological pattern either. Taken together, it is observed in the current study that patterns that violate Animacy Hierarchy is not only not disfavored by learners, but sometimes preferred. More investigation is underway to whether native language influence or animacy manipulation gave rise to the opposite pattern. Our results suggest that, in the case of Animacy Hierarchy, other factors during the process of language transmission and language use, such as cognitive and pragmatic salience animate objects, may have played stronger roles in shaping linguistic typology, potentially overriding the learning bias observed in the opposite direction.
  • Publication
    The Codex Aubin: Nahuatl Glyphic Writing in Post-Conquest Mexico
    (2021-07-09) Krishnan, Arjun Sai
    In this paper, we study the Nahua glyphic script as used in the Codex Aubin, a post-Conquest codex produced in 1576 that narrates the traditional Aztec founding myth and chronicles indigenous life in the early colonial period. The text consists of a preconquest-style annal written in the form of a European book; traditional depictions of events and transcriptions in the traditional glyph script are paired with Nahuatl glosses in Roman script, allowing for analysis of glyphs alongside their intended readings. In particular, we look for evidence of phoneticity in glyphs; a number of Spanish language names are transcribed in glyphs in the Codex, providing yet-undescribed examples of phonetic glyph compounds. Further, we also explore the generation of new logograms and phonetic compounds to capture Spanish-language lexemes in the post-Conquest period. We demonstrate the fundamentally polyvalent usage of the script with novel data, interpreting the simultaneous usage of multiple modes of meaning-conveyance and proposing novel readings of some glyphs. Finally, we also investigate the assembly and visual organization of complex glyphs in the codex. In particular, we detail a new modality of glyph usage, which we dub ‘emphatic cross-reference’ — it involves the assignment of extra-graphemic meaning to individual glyphs by means of their visual organization in compounds. To our knowledge, this particular usage of the Aztec script is undescribed to date, and we preliminarily detail our analysis of a few examples found in the Codex Aubin.
  • Publication
    Scope Assignments and Scalar Implicatures in Child English: The Role of Working Memory
    (2021-07-09) Wang, Shuyan
    Acquisition delays have been found for scope assignments and scalar implicatures (cf. Musolino 1998; Lidz 2016; Chierchia et al. 2001; Noveck 2001; Katsos & Bishop 2011). Both acquisition delays have separately been attributed to childrenís immature processing capacities, like their limited working memory. Yet, no study has ever directly looked at the role of processing limits in the acquisition of scope assignments or in the acquisition of scalar implicatures. Moreover, no one has looked at the two fields in combination. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate English-speaking childrenís mastery of scope assignments as well as their command of scalar implicatures. Most importantly, I also tested each childís digit span which is generally used to measure working memory. The results showed that although inverse-scope readings are allowed in English, adults hesitated to accept them but children were more permissive. Moreover, a significant correlation was found between participantsí acceptance of inverse-scope readings and their digit span. Regarding scalar implicatures, children did not compute the scalar implicatures while adults did, and a significant correlation was observed between a childís computation of scalar implicatures and their digit span. These findings provide new support for the processing approaches to the observed delays in scope assignments and scalar implicatures.