Proceedings of the 40th Annual Penn Linguistics Conference
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Publication Preface(2017-01-01) Djärv, Kajsa; Goodwin Davies, AmyThe 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 The series has included volumes of previously unpublished work, or work in progress, by linguists with an ongoing affiliation with the Department, as well as volumes of papers from NWAV and the Penn Linguistics Colloquium/Conference. This volume contains selected papers from the 40th Penn Linguistics Conference, held from March 18-20, 2016 in Philadelphia, PA, at the University of Pennsylvania. Thanks go to Luke Adamson, Faruk Akkuş, Hezekiah Akiva Bacovcin, Ryan Budnick, Spencer Caplan, Andrea Ceolin, Nattanun Chanchaochai, Mao-Hsu Chen, Sunghye Cho, Ava Creemers, Aletheia Cui, Sabriya Fisher, Duna Gylfadottir, Ava Irani, Helen Jeoung, Jordan Kodner, Wei Lai, Ruaridh Purse, Nari Rhee, Caitlin Richter, Milena Šereikaitė, Einar Freyr Sigurðsson, Betsy Sneller, Lacey Arnold Wade, and Robert J. Wilder 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: Akkuş, Faruk and Balkız Öztürk. 2017. On Cognate Objects in Sason Arabic. In University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 23.1, ed. Djärv, Kajsa and Amy Goodwin Davies, 1-10. Available at: http://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol23/iss1/2 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. Kajsa Djärv and Amy Goodwin Davies, Issue EditorsPublication The Semantic Ontology of Agent and Theme: A Case Study with Event Partitioning Quantifiers in Japanese(2017-01-01) Nakamura, TakanobuThe primary aim of this paper is a description of a previously unanalyzed kind of numeral quantifiers in Japanese. While the purpose is modest, I believe that it might shed light on the Neo-Davidsonian semantic architecture (see Parsons 1990, Schein 1993 and Kratzer 1996 among others). Specifically, I will introduce Event Partitioning Quantifiers (EPQs), which have not been analyzed in literature and show that with an EPQ, agents of events and themes of events are quantified independently of both an event expressed by a lexical verb and host nominals in the subject or in the object. Based on this observation, I discuss the semantic independence of thematic roles Agent and Theme from their corresponding verb.Publication “I didn’t drink and drove a car” Neg Expresses Eccentric Triplets(2017-01-01) Yoda, Yusuke; Kobayashi, RyoichiroThis paper aims to propose an account of the scope between negation and VP-coordination in Japanese. We investigate a scope puzzle between negation and VP-coordination, which has been unexplained. We claim that VP-coordination and negation have three readings: (i) Suspended Affixation Reading (neg > VP1 > VP2); (ii) non-Suspended Affixation Reading (VP1 > neg > VP2); and (iii) the third reading (VP2 > neg > VP1), which has been unnoticed. This reading is yielded via the phase-based interpretation system, as well as De Morgan’s Law, which only applies to negation.Publication Speech Act Phrase, Conjectural Questions, and Hearer(2017-01-01) Oguro, TakeshiSpeech Act Phrase is proposed by Speas and Tenny (2003) as a projection hosting discourse roles such as Speaker and Hearer. Miyagawa (2012) argues for its existence by looking at Japanese WH-questions. His proposal is that the politeness marker motivates the presence of Hearer, which is necessary in information-seeking questions. In this paper, I deal with conjectural questions, which do not require the presence of Hearer, and argue for the relevance of Speaker to them. In particular, I examine the behavior of yara-conjectural questions and daroo ka-conjectural questions. I suggest that they contain a modal projection, whose Spec hosts a Point-of-View operator, whose value is determined by the closest c-commanding sentient element. In conjectural questions, Speaker is the only relevant c-commander, since they are typically uttered in soliloquy. I also consider polite versions of such questions, which involve Hearer. Despite the presence of Hearer, which is due to the presence of a politeness marker, the conjectural question interpretation is allowed in these questions. This is, I argue, because in these questions, unlike in information-seeking questions, Hearer is positioned lower than CP, which makes Speaker the only sentient c-commander of the Point-of-View operator. This analysis can be applied to cover the pattern of Jussive clauses as well.Publication The Particle Mo in Japanese and its Roles in Numeral Indeterminate Phrases(2017-01-01) Mohri, FumioThe main purpose of this paper is to provide an appropriate explanation for the so-called numeral indeterminate (NI) constructions, in which mo is accompanied by an indeterminate pronoun+ Cl(assifier). The quirky character of this construction is that apparently mo is applied to the denotation of a numeral indeterminate nan-nin as a syntactic binder and at the same it invokes a scalar reading. The assumption that mo should be a syntactic binder can be corroborated from the fact that the NI construction is degraded without the particle mo. Also mo as a scalar particle attributes an implicit large reading. This large reading can also be observed in cases where the indeterminate is replaced by a specific numeral, e,g, yo-nin-mo ‘four-Cl-mo’. To the best of my knowledge, Kobuchi-Philip (2010) and Oda (2012) are the only works that deal with this construction. Especially Oda extensively discusses every possible means to explain this construction and works out a solution by assuming that the suffix mo functions multiply as an existential quantifier and a scalar particle. Through this paper, I will support her claim for its double functions, but I will clarify that the functions are both derived from a core semantic property of mo, namely, maximality. In other words, these functions work individually, but the component of maximality is placed in the center of the semantics of both usages.Publication The Social Perception of a Sound Change(2017-01-01) Lawrence, DanielA core finding of sociolinguistic research is that phonological changes may become subject to social evaluation as they propagate through a speech community. Much work has analyzed the social evaluation of innovations by categorizing them in terms of their salience, or the degree of stigma/prestige attached to them. However, recent studies have attempted to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the types of social-indexical meaning which can attach to linguistic variation. In particular, it is argued that speaker-listeners' social perceptions of variation tend to be structured around locally-relevant stereotypical figures such as the `valley girl' or `burnout' (Eckert, 2008; Moore & Podesva, 2009; D'onofrio, 2015). It has been claimed that innovations which come about due to global processes of change (such as chain-shifting principles) may become associated with these local stereotypes, resulting in divergent behavior on the part of some groups of speakers (Haddican et al. 2013). This raises the question of how the social meanings proposed for a given innovation can be identified, and how the role of social indexicality in constraining the propagation of that innovation can be diagnosed. With a view to addressing this problem, this paper presents an account of the fronting and diphthongization of the tense back vowels /u/ and /o/ in York, Northern England. After presenting evidence of change in these vowels, the paper evaluates a recent account of the role of social indexicality in shaping the outcome of this change. It does this using data from a novel experimental paradigm, which allows the testing of quantitative predictions regarding the degree to which different dimensions of social-indexical meaning are associated with different acoustic dimensions of the vowels under study. The findings contradict previous accounts of the role of social indexicality in constraining /u/ and /o/ fronting in York, highlighting the risk of inferring social-indexical meanings primarily from production patterns. For example, despite its rapid and uniform incrementation and apparent lack of class-stratification in production, /u/ fronting emerges as a robust cue to socioeconomic status in perception. While the absence of fronted /o/ monophthongs in the speech of younger speakers has previously been interpreted as evidence of their association with a stigmatized working-class stereotype, there is no support for this in the perception data. Intriguingly, there is evidence of structured variability in listeners' social-perceptual responses --- the social groups who lead the changes in production appear to respond more consistently in the social perception tasks, suggesting that some speaker-listeners may be more sensitive to the social-indexical information conveyed by variation in these vowels than others.Publication Flexible Expectations of Speaker Informativeness Shape Pragmatic Inference(2017-01-01) Fairchild, Sarah; Papafragou, AnnaHuman communication relies on shared expectations between speakers and hearers. For example, upon hearing a sentence like “Some of my dogs bark,” the listener typically assumes that the speaker did not intend the literal semantic meaning (“At least one (and possibly all) of my dogs bark”). Instead, s/he is likely to derive a scalar implicature (SI), inferring that the speaker intended to convey “Not all of my dogs bark.” Properties of the speaker are known to affect whether listeners compute SIs, with comprehenders being less likely to make a pragmatic inference when the speaker is not knowledgeable of the situation at hand. What is unclear is whether listeners also use previously-held expectations about speaker groups (e.g., children, non-native speakers) to override Gricean principles, in such a way that is stable across situational contexts and does not require an adaptation period. Across two experiments, we investigated how listeners interpret under-informative utterances produced by native and non-native speakers. We found that a subset of individuals is more tolerant to pragmatic infelicities produced by non-native speakers (Exp. 2), but that this tolerance is subject to individual differences in language processing ability and does not emerge in a speeded task where the utterances are supported by visual context (Exp. 1).Publication Morpho-pragmatic Faithfulness Interacts with Phonological Markedness in Appalachian A-prefixing(2017-01-01) McQuaid, Goldie AnnThis paper examines so-called a-prefixing in the speech of dialect speakers living in Appalachia. Building on existing empirical work, and leveraging results from a GoldVarb analysis, I posit the a-prefix realizes a morpho-pragmatic feature which expresses a range of related meanings, including surprise, unexpectedness, and newsworthiness. This range of meanings is encompassed in the linguistic category mirativity. The prefix is therefore suggested to spell out the feature [MIRATIVE]. Variable insertion of the a-prefix is blocked when the base does not meet certain phonological requirements. In particular, prefixing is blocked with forms beginning with a lax vowel (*‘a-ask-ing’), and with forms possessing non-initial stress (*‘a-discover-ing’ ). A formal, Optimality-Theoretic (OT) analysis of the interaction of morpheme insertion and phonological markedness is provided.Publication Case in Polish Predication and Control(2017-01-01) Lindert, PatrickIn this paper, a unification of case markings in Polish predication and control is proposed. It is argued that adjectives with instrumental case marking in control environments are actually modifiers of DPs, and not bare APs, therefore following the predictable case assignment mechanism of Polish predication. This paper discusses cases of subject control and non-obligatory control.Publication Phonetic Enhancement and Three Patterns of English a-Tensing(2017-01-01) Nie, YiningEnglish a-tensing has received numerous treatments in the phonological and sociolinguistic literature, but the question of why it occurs (i) at all and (ii) in seemingly unnatural disjunctive phonological environments has not been settled. This paper presents a novel phonetic enhancement account of a-tensing in Philadelphia, New York City and Belfast English. I propose that a-tensing is best understood as an allophonic process which facilitates the perceptual identity and articulatory ease of nasality, voicing and/or segment duration in the following consonant. This approach unifies the apparently unnatural phonological environments in which the two a variants surface and predicts the attested dialectal patterns. A synchronic account of a-tensing also provides an explanation for the suprasegmental and morphological factors that condition the process.