The poster session will be held 5-6:30 Saturday July 15th in the Amherst Room on the 10th floor of the Campus Center, accompanied by drinks and snacks. We have a great lineup of presentations from alumni!
Why Linguistics Should Care About Writing
Amalia E. Gnanadesikan, University of Maryland (retired)
Since the time of the Structuralists, writing has been dismissed as non-language and as irrelevant to the field of linguistics. Yet writing is the medium through which historical language data is preserved, psycholinguistic stimuli are (often) presented, and literate people receive most of their linguistic input. Writing also plays a major role in the forces of sociolinguistics, defining language boundaries and spheres of power as well as creating distinct registers and even diglossia. Thus understanding writing is essential to understanding language data, use, and context.
The structure of writing systems is also of relevance for linguists. All writing systems operate via an analysis of language: it is only in writing that linguistic utterances are broken into discrete units. The history of writing is thus a history of linguistic analysis. The particular writing system that we learn in childhood conditions us to a particular analysis and may well bias our perspective on contending linguistic theories.
Writing systems also show evidence of grammar, with analogs of phonological and morphemic structure and linguistic processes such as reduplication and affixation. A growing body of work suggests that the amodal human capacity for language previously noted in speech and sign transfers to the written modality as well. Just as speech and sign are shaped by the properties of their modalities, so the expression of grammar in writing is also shaped by its modality.
A phonetic study of Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) accent
Nancy Hall, California State University Long Beach
Ho-Chunk has been the subject of many theoretical analyses, due to its unusual third-mora accent pattern and complex interaction between accent and vowel epenthesis. However, analyses have been based exclusively on impressionistic descriptions, which are not fully consistent. Also, analyses have focused almost exclusively on the question of which syllable receives pitch accent, while the tonal representational of the pitch accent, and its interaction with phrasal tones and boundary tones, has been under-explored. We present the first acoustic analysis of tonal patterns in archival fieldwork recordings, made in 1974-5 by Kenneth Miner. We will argue that:
1) The pitch accent consists of High*+Low targets, but realization of the fall depends on availability of segmental material as well as interaction with boundary tones.
2) There is likely interspeaker variation in the temporal anchoring of the High* pitch target within the syllable.
3) When pitch accent occurs on the third syllable, there is a phrasal tone on the second syllable.
4) There is no ‘secondary accent’ on epenthetic vowels, contra Miner 1979. .
Investigating pathways of semantic change in modality
Aynat Rubinstein, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Recent years have seen increasing discussion of semantic change from a formal semantic perspective, where semantic rather than pragmatic content is taken to be the basis for change. Research in this new subfield of diachronic linguistics focuses on the compositional re-distribution of entailed meanings, to the exclusion of pragmatic inferences, in situations of language change (Eckardt 2009; Condoravdi and Deo 2014; Beck and Gergel 2015). I have been investigating the applicability of this approach to change in the domain of modality, specifically in Hebrew from its revival (its transformation back into a language with native speakers around the turn of the 20th century) to the present day. In this poster I will present the special historical corpus put together for this purpose and pathways of change that the Hebrew developments shed new light on. I will argue that the empirical findings support the semantic approach to change in modality over an alternative that is based on pragmatic inferencing.
When does speaker normalization affect phonetic convergence?
Ivy Hauser, University of Texas at Arlington
Phonetic convergence (also called imitation or accommodation) occurs when talkers alter their production towards speech they hear, even in lab settings without explicit instruction to imitate. Existing work provides conflicting results on how speaker normalization affects convergence: do people converge towards a normalized pattern or the raw acoustics of the model talker’s voice? This poster reviews current evidence and presents a new test case of spontaneous imitation of English sibilants /s ?/ by native and non-native speakers. Participants first produced sibilant-initial words, were exposed to model speech with manipulated sibilants, then produced the words again post-exposure. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: increased or decreased spectral mean (SM, also called center of gravity) for two different model talkers. Results from all conditions indicate that participants converged towards the raw SM of the model, regardless of whether SM was enhanced or reduced for the model talker. This suggests raw non-normalized acoustics can be the target of phonetic imitation for at least some phonetic dimensions. Interactions with phonological contrast, implications for the perception-production link, and methodological considerations for convergence studies will be discussed.
What (some) parentheses do: restrictive parenthesized parentheticals in English and Korean.
Carolyn Anderson, Wellesley College.
The term parenthetical encompasses a range of constructions, including appositives, speaker-oriented adverbials, and speech report tags. Despite lending their name to the category, parenthesized parentheticals have been little discussed. This poster explores a parenthesized construction with two interesting properties: (1) it is less independent than previously studied parentheticals and (2) it gives rise to an implication absent from its non-parenthesized paraphrase: Sally drinks (herbal) tea implies Sally does not drink black tea. This construction, which I call the Restrictive Parenthesized Parenthetical construction, differs from appositives and orthographic representations of focus. I propose an analysis that treats it as a focus-sensitive operator: its extra implication results from invoking and negating a set of alternatives. I also present a preliminary comparison between this construction in English and in Korean, where the parenthesized modifier can appear on either side of the noun.
Building the (nominal) specificational sentence (NSpS)
Taisuke Nishigauchi, Kobe Shoin Women’s University
This paper proposes that the NSpS like ‘His sickness was the reason for his absence.’ derives from a NP whose head denotes a relation – ‘reason’ is a relation between two events: his sickness, or the ‘content’ of the reason in Higgins’ (1973) terms, and his absence, the consequent event, or ‘what the reason is about’. The NP, a NSpS in a nutshell, is of the form [XP1 [XP2 N]], where XP2 is focalized to derive a NSpS of the form XP2/x is [XP1 [ x N]], where the post-copular constituent is the Superscriptional containing a variable, where the value of the Superscriptional, containing the variable, is exhaustively specified by the focalized XP2, whose primary role is as ‘identifier’. This analysis is shown to shed light on connectivity (binding and scope) and other issues discussed in the literature. The analysis argues that the specificational reading of ‘The girl who helps us on Fridays is Mary Gray.’ (Higgins 1973: 265-7) derives from the NP in which ‘the girl who . . ‘ is XP1, ‘Mary Gray’ is XP2, and the head N is a silent element, which could as well be pronounced as ‘identity’ or ‘name’. When the head of the NP is ‘amount’, we obtain some version of the amount relative, and when XP is WH Operator we get the concealed question, which shows the WH-island effects.
Scalar Implicature as Contrastive Explanation
Arnold Chien, UMass Philosophy Ph.D. 1987
I argue for a subsumption of any version of Grice’s first quantity maxim posited to underlie scalar implicature, by developing the idea of implicature recovery as a kind of explanatory inference, as in science. I take the applicable model to be contrastive explanation, while following van Fraassen’s analysis of explanation as an answer to a why-question. A scalar implicature is embedded in such an answer, one that meets two probabilistic constraints: the probability of the answer, and “favoring.” Besides having wide application at large, outside of linguistic interpretation, these constraints account not only for implicatures based on strength order, logical and otherwise, but also for unordered cases. I thus suggest that Grice’s maxim and its accompaniments are dispensable in the sense of being a special-case expression of more general constraints.
Cross-linguistic issues in honorific systems
Christopher Davis, University of the Ryukyus
I summarize ongoing work on the cross-linguistic properties of grammaticalized honorific systems, showing the kinds of issues these systems pose for linguistic theory. I present a cross-linguistic survey of such systems, focusing on data from Yaeyaman, Japanese, Korean, Hindi-Urdu, Balinese, and Javanese. I consider some issues, both empirical and theoretical, that arise in the analysis of such systems, and focus on one such issue: how do the “honorific agreement” systems found in languages like Japanese, Korean, and Yaeyaman handle plural and coordinated noun phrases whose referents make conflicting demands on the honorific system (i.e. a plural NP whose referent includes some entities that should trigger honorification and some that should not). I summarize fieldwork in Yaeyaman and experimental work in Korean addressing this issue. I also compare these results with what has been reported for such configurations in Balinese, and consider their typological implications.