Proceedings of the 37th Annual Penn Linguistics Conference
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03/28/2014
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Publication Preface(2014-03-27) Kwon, SoohyunThe University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics (PWPL) is an occasional series published by the Penn Linguistics Club. The series has included volumes of previously unpublished work, or work in progress, by linguists with an ongoing affiliation with the Department, as well as volumes of papers from NWAV and the Penn Linguistics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. This volume contains selected papers from the 37th Penn Linguistics Colloquium, held from March 22nd-24th, 2013 in Philadelphia, PA at the University of Pennsylvania. Thanks go to the editorial board, in alphabetical order: Hezekiah Akiva Bacovcin, Haitao Cai, Mao-Hsu Chen, Eric Doty, Aaron Ecay, Sabriya Fisher, Amy Goodwin Davies, Guðrún Björg Gylfadóttir, Anton Karl Ingason, Helen Jeoung, Yong-Cheol Lee, Kobey Shwayder, Einar Freyr Sigurðsson, Elizabeth Sneller, Karen Tseng, Robert Wilder and David Wilson. Since Vol. 14.2, PWPL has been an internet-only publication. Since Vol. 13.2, PWPL has been published both in print and online gratis via ScholarlyCommons@Penn. Due to the large number of hits these online papers have received, and the time and expense of managing a back catalog of PWPL volumes, the editorial committee decided in 2008 to cease print publication in favor of wider-scale free online dissemination. 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: Ahern, Chris. 2014. Mergers, Migration, and Signaling. U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 20.1: Proceedings of PLC 37, ed. S. Kwon, 1-10. http://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol20/iss1/2 The entire back catalog has been digitized and will be available on ScholarlyCommons@Penn soon. 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 619 Williams Hall University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104–6305 working-papers@ling.upenn.edu http://ling.upenn.edu/papers/pwpl.html Soohyun Kwon Issue EditorPublication Building Deverbal Ability Adjectives in Icelandic(2014-01-01) Wood, Jim; Sigurðsson, Einar F.This paper discusses two ways of forming Icelandic ability predicates: one with the present participle (Ability Participles, APs) and the other with an adjectivizing affix (Ability Adjectives, AAs). We show that they each share distinct properties with passives and with middles (and differ from both). We compare the meaning of the different ability predicates; in APs, the ability relates to properties of the understood subject or the event process, whereas in AAs, the ability relates to propertes of the object. On our analysis, the adjectivizing head of AAs attaches on top of a participial structure which both APs and AAs share.Publication Faithfulness Conflict in Korean Blends(2014-01-01) Ahn, SuzyThis study addresses the question of what basic principles and constraints govern blending while focusing on the description and analysis of phonological properties of Korean blends. Korean blending shows a systematic phonological word-formation process that usually preserves the prosodic structure of the head source word, while the initial part of the segmental sequence of the blend is from the non-head source word. This general pattern can be explained by adopting prosodic faithfulness constraints for the head and segmental faithfulness constraints for both source words. Usually, prosodic faithfulness overrides segmental faithfulness. General and exceptional patterns of Korean blends can be explained by the interaction of prosodic faithfulness and segmental faithfulness constraints within the framework of Harmonic Grammar.Publication Adjoined koP in Korean Clausal Coordination: Implications for the Across-the-Board Analysis(2014-01-01) Lee, Jenny S.This paper investigates the syntax of coordinate structures in Korean. The proposed analysis is consistent with the direction taken by most current theories of coordination, which hold to the assumption that phrase structure is fundamentally asymmetric. The resemblance of syntactic asymmetries found in so-called Across-the-Board (ATB) questions to those found in parasitic gap constructions provides an empirical justification for the adjunction analysis advanced here, where a conjunction phrase koP (constituting the first conjunct plus the conjunctive suffix -ko) is assumed to be adjoined to the final conjunct. On this analysis, conjoined wh-questions in Korean are not so "across-the-board" as traditionally assumed; rather, there is only one A-bar movement chain, namely that of a null operator into Spec,koP. The proposed analysis departs in significant ways from Munn's (1993) adjunction analysis of English ATB sentences. Most significantly, the wh-phrase in Korean is analyzed to be base-generated in the left periphery and also to bind pro in the second conjunct. These differences are described as syntactic reflexes of more general typological differences between the two languages including word order and the (un)availability of pro. A particularly important consequence of the proposal is discussed, namely the reformulation of the Coordinate Structure Constraint as a kind of parallelism requirement on conjuncts, i.e., phrases of the same category/size (here, TPs).Publication A Semantics for Object-Oriented Depictives(2014-01-01) Motut, AlexandraThis paper presents a complex-predicate analysis of depictive secondary predicates (DSPs) in English that accounts for the restricted combinations of primary- and secondary-predicates for object-oriented depictives (OODs). I argue that these restrictions are the result of a presupposition introduced by the functional head, Dep, which introduces the depictive secondary predicate. This presupposition places a restriction on the main predicate, requiring that there be a subpart of the object in the primary predicate relation for every subsituation/subevent of the situation/event denoted by the primary predicate. I further argue that there is independent evidence for the use of the subpart relation in Dep’s presupposition, since it explains a previously unnoted connection between the partitive construction and OODs: the partitive constraint on NP complements of partitive of parallels the constraint on objects that can form OODs.Publication Rising pitch, continuation, and the hierarchical structure of discourse(2014-01-01) Tyler, JosephThe meaningful contribution of terminal rising pitch has received a fair amount of scholarly attention, discussed for its ability to create questioning force on declarative syntax (Gunlogson, 2008), as part of listing intonation (Ladd, 2008), as well as indicating discourse relationships (Jasinskaja, 2010; Nilsenová, 2006; Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg, 1990). A common interpretation of the meaning of rising pitch is that it conveys incompleteness, more-to-come, continuation or is ‘forward-looking’ (Bolinger, 1989; Hirschberg, 2008; Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg, 1990). Recent experimental results contribute to this discussion, showing a rise can bias towards the coordinating interpretation of a coordination/subordination discourse ambiguity (Tyler, 2012). Because both interpretations of the ambiguity involve continuation, the rise is signaling not just that you continue but how you continue. In this paper, I will briefly present these results and then integrate them into a unified account of the contribution of rising pitch, which I see as a signal of incompleteness with respect to the current hierarchical level of the discourse.Publication Getting your Gutturals out of the Mind: An Assessment of the Role of Phonology in the Patterns of Historical Gutturals in Modern Hebrew(2014-01-01) Montoya, Ignacio L.In traditional accounts of Hebrew morphology, the primary basis of word formation is an underlying consonantal root and vocalic/prosodic template. However, many words in Modern Hebrew containing reflexes of historical gutturals deviate from the canonical form with regard to syllable structure, the number of surface root consonants, and the number and quality of vowels in the template. These deviations can be characterized as deletion, vowel epenthesis, and vowel lowering, suggesting that the exceptional words can be explained via phonological approaches. Indeed, phonological explanations have been by proposed by previous generative and Optimality Theory (OT) accounts (Bar-Lev 1977, Bolozky 1978, Faust 2005), though these studies have been limited with regard to their explanatory scope. The present paper begins both by expanding on these treatments using a wider array of ordered rules and ranked constraints than was previously proposed and by exploring their limitations. To address their shortcomings, this paper then adopts an Evolutionary Phonology (EP) framework. Under an EP analysis, we can assess the extent to which the tools of phonology are appropriate for explaining patterns involving the modern reflexes of the gutturals by exploring multiple sources of explanation for these patterns: phonetic and historical factors, external factors such as language contact and prescriptive norms, and analogical change (Blevins 2004). The source of vowel lowering and epenthesis is posited to be the effects of the relatively high F1 associated with gutturals, which became phonological processes in Biblical Hebrew (McCarthy 1994). Incorporated into Hebrew orthography, these effects remained evident in Modern Hebrew, despite the fact that the guttural triggers themselves were not recovered in the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language in the late 1800s (Sáenz-Badillos 1993) and therefore did not form part of the synchronic phonology. After considering non-phonological sources of explanation for vowel lowering and epenthesis, deletion alone is left as a strictly phonological process. This paper proposes that the synchronic effects associated with vowel lowering and epenthesis should be explored using the tools of morphology rather than those of phonology.Publication (Anti-)locality and A-scrambling in Japanese(2014-01-01) Goto, SayakaIn this paper, I investigate binding effects triggered by long-distance scrambling in Japanese. The first purpose of the study is to describe an environment where long-distance scrambling can feed A-binding and make a generalization about it. The generalization made in this paper is that Long-distance scrambling can feed A-binding only if i) the embedded subject is null, and ii) a bindee is contained in the matrix object (or in the matrix subject if there is no matrix indirect object). The second purpose is to give an analysis to derive the generalization without recourse to A/A'-distinction. As discussed in the paper, there are some problems in an approach to capture binding phenomena resorting to A/A'-distinction. Therefore, I propose an analysis to derive the generalization without using the notion of A/A'-distinction.Publication Interaction of Phonology and Morphology in Maltese and Makassarese Clitics(2014-01-01) Shwayder, KobeyThis paper presents two case studies in which surface phonological form is determined by an interaction of phonological and morphological information and processes. In both Makassarese (South Sulawesi, Austronesian) and Maltese (Semitic) the attachment of certain clitics to a host results in an asymmetry in phonological behavior. The phonological form of these host-clitic structures is sensitive to both the morphology of the clitic (that is, not all clitics show this behavior) and to the phonological shape of the host. To analyze this data, I propose a framework, following Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993, et. seq.), in which the triggers for the application of phonological processes are specific morphosyntactic structures and processes. One such morphosyntactic process, Local Dislocation, is known to be conditioned by phonological information about the objects to which it applies. The interleaving of Vocabulary Insertion, which results in available phonological material, Linearization and Local Dislocation result in a framework which has a complicated but restricted interaction of phonological and morphological information. With this framework, the data in the case studies can be explained with one simple morphological process and a few simple phonological rules.Publication Mergers, Migration, and Signaling(2014-03-28) Ahern, Christopher AThe interaction between learning at the individual level and the trajectory of a population over time is fundamental to our understanding of linguistic change. Here we use game theory as a mathematical framework for formulating and testing hypotheses about this interaction. We formalize two hypotheses regarding the spread of vowel mergers and use them to derive the proportion of merged in-migrants that would precipitate a merger in a previously non-merged speech community. We test these predictions against the documented spread of the low-back merger. In light of these results, we consider the impact of social network structures on both models.