Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium
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Publication Intervention Effects and wh-movement(2009-03-23) Malhotra, ShitiIntervention 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.Publication Evidentiality and German Attitude Verbs(2009-03-23) Scheffler, TatjanaGerman 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.Publication A Stratal OT Approach to a Noun-Verb Asymmetry With Respect to Opacity in Korean(2009-03-23) Yun, JiwonThis 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.Publication Analyzing Ilokano Pseudoclefts(2009-03-23) Rafal, JeremySeveral 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=ø < 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).Publication Selectional Asymmetries between CP and DP Suggest that the DP Hypothesis is Wrong(2009-03-23) Bruening, BenjaminThe primary motivation for the DP Hypothesis has been a claimed parallel with the clausal domain, where functional projections (at least IP and CP) dominate the lexical projection of the verb. However, the claimed parallels are not real. Verbs that select for clausal complements only select things that are high in the clause, plausibly on C (questions vs. declaratives, finite vs. non-finite, etc.); they never select V. In contrast, verbs that select for nominal arguments only select for N, and never for the functional elements like D. In form selection, each head in the clausal domain determines the form of the head of its complement. In contrast, within nominals, it is N that determines the form of everything else. These asymmetries indicate that the head of the clause is C, but the head of the nominal is not D, it is N. A review of other arguments that have been given for the DP Hypothesis indicates that none of them are compelling.Publication Accounting for do-support Post-Syntactically: Evidence from Old Irish(2009-03-23) Newton, GlendaSince 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.Publication Towards a Finer-Grained Theory of Italian Participial Clausal Architecture(2009-03-23) Benincà , Paola; Tortora, ChristinaPublication Similarity Avoidance in the Proto-Indo-European Root(2009-03-23) Cooper, Adam I.This paper adapts the similarity avoidance analysis developed by Frisch, Pierrehumbert and Broe (2004) for Arabic to account for co-occurrence restrictions in the set of reconstructed verbal roots of Proto-Indo-European (PIE). Completion of the two components of the similarity avoidance methodology – the identification of consonantal co-occurrence restrictions through quantification of over- and under-representation in the data, and the appeal, as a means of explaining them, to values of similarity calculated according to shared natural classes, reveal a picture of co-occurrence noticeably more fine-grained than is conveyed by the individual constraint statements traditionally posited for the language. The analysis also evokes questions about the justification for one of these constraints in particular, that against co-occurrence of voiced unaspirated stops; the issue is examined here in further detail.Publication Adverbs of Quantity: Entities of Different Kinds(2009-03-23) Csirmaz, AnikoPublication A Tale of Five Fricatives: Consonantal Contrast in Heritage Speakers of Mandarin(2009-03-23) Chang, Charles B.; Haynes, Erin F.; Yao, Yao; Rhodes, RussellThis study investigated the production of five Mandarin and English sibilant fricatives by heritage speakers of Mandarin in comparison to native speakers and late learners. Almost all speakers were found to distinguish the Mandarin retroflex and alveolo-palatal, as well as the Mandarin alveolo-palatal and English palato-alveolar. However, fewer distinguished the Mandarin retroflex and English palato-alveolar or the Mandarin and English alveolars, with the majority of heritage speakers falling into this group of "distinguishers" in both cases. These results indicate that heritage speakers, in addition to most late learners, do not have much trouble with the Mandarin post-alveolar contrast, and furthermore, that while native speakers and late learners of Mandarin tend to merge similar Mandarin and English sounds, heritage speakers tend to keep them apart. Thus, of the three groups heritage speakers appear to be the best at maintaining contrast between categories both within and across languages.