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Forthcoming Articles
Listed here are articles that are to appear in upcoming issues.
Click on any title to jump to the abstract, if available.
Typological feature analysis models linguistic geography
Mark Donohue (Australian National University), Simon Musgrave (Monash University), Bronwen Whiting (Australian National University), and Søren Wichmann (Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Leiden University)
Exploring a ‘pragmatic ambiguity’ of negation
Alyson Pitts (University of Turku)
A test of the cognitive assumptions of magnitude estimation: Commutativity does not hold for acceptability judgments
Jon Sprouse (University of California, Irvine)
On the informativity of different measures of linguistic acceptability
Thomas Weskott (University of Potsdam) and Gisbert Fanselow (University of Potsdam)
External sandhi in a second language: the phonetics and phonology of obstruent nasalization in Korean-accented English
Elizabeth Zsiga (Georgetown University)
In the Works
Productivity is the key: morphophonology and the riddle of alternating diphthongs in Spanish
Matthew T. Carlson (University of Chicago) and Chip Gerfen (The Pennsylvania State University)
Perception of Exuberant Exponence in Batsbi: Functional or Incidental?
Alice C. Harris (University of Massachusetts Amherst and Stony Brook University) and Arthur G. Samuel (Basque Center on Cognition Brain and Language)
The Interplay of Internal and External Factors in Grammatical Change: First Person Plural Pronouns in French
Ruth King (York University), France Martineau (University of Ottawa), and Raymond Mougeon (Glendon College and York University)
Modals Without Scales
Amy Rose Deal (Harvard University)
Typological feature analysis models linguistic geography
Mark Donohue (Australian National University), Simon Musgrave (Monash University), Bronwen Whiting (Australian National University), and Søren Wichmann (Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Leiden University)
Dunn et al. (2008) describe and exemplify the use of sophisticated analyses of abstract structural features to reconstruct language histories. The techniques which they use do show some clustering in the groups of languages which they examine; Dunn et al. state that they ‘tend to favor a phylogenetic origin for the signal of relatedness’, and that the results of their test case ‘show a close degree of correspondence to the existing linguistic classification based on sound-meaning correspondences’. We argue that a more parsimonious explanation for the results obtained by Dunn et al.’s methodology is that it accurately maps linguistic geography, the network of contact and diffusion that postdates a proto-language, in most cases corresponding to geographic distance.
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Exploring a ‘pragmatic ambiguity’ of negation
Alyson Pitts (University of Turku)
This paper explores a ‘pragmatic ambiguity’ of negation in English, first discussed by Horn (1985/1989 ch.6) in his appeal to an intuitive division between ordinary, ‘descriptive’ negation and marked, ‘metalinguistic’ uses of negation in everyday language. The main agenda is to better understand what such a ‘pragmatic ambiguity’ of negation really amounts to: are there sufficient grounds to posit two types of negation, and what prevents Horn’s pragmatic ambiguity from being semantic in its nature? In the paper, I review the key features promoted by Horn as characteristic of the purported duality in negation – particularly those posited for marked, ‘metalinguistic’ uses of negation, such as resistance to prefixal incorporation, failure to trigger negative polarity items, and employing the paradigmatic ‘not X but Y’ construction. I then consider and evaluate subsequent attempts to posit a finer-grained analysis of metalinguistic negation, as endorsed by Foolen (1991) and Geurts (1998). Finally, the paper concludes by upholding the so-called pragmatic ambiguity, but advises due caution with regard to Horn’s diagnostics when appealing to this intuitive distinction of negation within use.
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A test of the cognitive assumptions of magnitude estimation: Commutativity does not hold for acceptability judgments
Jon Sprouse (University of California, Irvine)
The introduction of the psychophysical technique of Magnitude Estimation to the study of acceptability judgments (Bard et al. 1996) has led to a surge of interest in formal acceptability judgment experiments over the past 15 years. One of the primary reasons for the popularity of is that it was developed as a tool to measure actual units of perception, offering the possibility of data that is inherently more informative than previous scaling tasks. However, there are several untested cognitive assumptions that must hold in order for ME to be the perceptual measurement test that it is purported to be. Building on the recent formalization of these assumptions in the psychophysics literature (Narens 1996, Luce 2002), this article presents two experiments designed to test whether these assumptions hold for acceptability judgment experiments. The results suggest that the cognitive assumptions of magnitude estimation do not hold for participants in acceptability judgment experiments, eliminating any reason to believe that ME could deliver inherently more meaningful data than other acceptability judgment tasks.
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On the informativity of different measures of linguistic acceptability
Thomas Weskott (University of Potsdam) and Gisbert Fanselow (University of Potsdam)
This article deals with the claim that the MAGNITUDE ESTIMATION (ME) method of gathering acceptability judgments produces data that are more informative for linguists than binary or n-point scale judgments. We performed three acceptability-rating experiments that directly compared ME data to binary and seven-point scale data. The results clearly falsify the hypothesis that data gathered by the ME method carry a larger amount of information about the acceptability of a given linguistic phenomenon. The three measures are largely equivalent with respect to informativity. Moreover, ME judgments are shown to be more liable to producing spurious variance under certain circumstances.
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External sandhi in a second language: the phonetics and phonology of obstruent nasalization in Korean-accented English
Elizabeth Zsiga (Georgetown University)
This article presents the results of an acoustic study of nasal assimilation and gestural overlap at word boundaries in Korean and Korean-accented English. Twelve speakers of Seoul Korean recorded phrases containing obstruent#nasal and obstruent#obstruent sequences in both Korean and English. Nasalization of the word-final obstruent, predicted by the rules of Korean phonology, occurred in 93% of obstruent#nasal sequences in Korean and in 32% of such sequences in Korean-accented English, a rate of application higher than that reported in most other studies of external sandhi alternations in nonnative speech. Acoustic analysis found categorical nasalization in the L1 Korean productions, but both categorical and gradient nasalization, along with a high degree of inter- and intraspeaker variation, in the L2 English productions. For a subset of speakers, there was a significant correlation between quantitative measures of nasalization in English and measures of consonant overlap in the English obstruent#obstruent sequences. An analysis in terms of articulatory gestures and the coupled-oscillator model of speech planning is supported. The analysis is based on the ARTICULATORY PHONOLOGY model (Browman & Goldstein 1990a,b, 1992, 2000, Goldstein et al. 2006), though with modifications. Implications for phonetic and phonological representations, and for speech planning in both L1 and L2, are explored.
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In the Works
Productivity is the key: morphophonology and the riddle of alternating diphthongs in Spanish
Matthew T. Carlson (University of Chicago) and Chip Gerfen (The Pennsylvania State University)
One of the most enduring problems in Spanish phonology has been the appearance of unstressed diphthongs in words with derivational suffixes. Despite robust conditioning of the diphthong alternation by stress, which predicts monophthongs in such words, derivational suffixes exhibit gradient tolerance for diphthongs. Moreover, speakers’ intuitions appear to be keenly sensitive to this variability among suffixes. In this article we present corpus data identifying productivity as a crucial property of suffixes predicting the occurrence of diphthongs in extant Spanish derivations. This finding allows us to link the distribution of diphthongs to a more general, crosslinguistic tendency for words with productive morphology to be phonologically marked. We then present experimental results from lexical decision showing that this relationship between phonology and morphology not only drives Spanish speakers’ intuitions but also their real-time processing of novel derivations. In addition to offering a solution to a long-standing problem in Spanish phonology, these findings have profound implications for our understanding of the phonology-morphology interface. Our corpus and experimental results conceptually motivate an argument that the contrasting demands of compositional and holistic processing of polymorphemic words play a crucial role in the increased incidence of marked phonology in particular morphological contexts.
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Perception of Exuberant Exponence in Batsbi: Functional or Incidental?
Alice C. Harris (University of Massachusetts Amherst and Stony Brook University) and Arthur G. Samuel (Basque Center on Cognition Brain and Language)
Batsbi has multiple exponence (redundant marking) in gender-number agreement, and in a series of experiments we explore the question of whether marking of this kind is functional. In a series of three experiments, we compare verbs that have no agreement marker with ones that have a single marker, and we compare verbs with one agreement marker with ones that have two. We find that word recognition is slower with agreement than without it; words with two agreement markers are recognized more slowly and with more errors relative to verbs with a single marker. For grammaticality judgments, subjects were generally slower to respond when the verb carried more markers. For verbs with no marker versus verbs with one marker, this extra cognitive effort yielded improved accuracy; however, this advantage did not extend to multiple exponence, as the extra processing time did not produce much improvement in accuracy. In cued recall, the presence of one marker conferred a clear advantage in accuracy, but the presence of two agreement markers actually resulted in decreased accuracy. Overall, multiple exponence was found not to confer a functional advantage in these experiments.
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The Interplay of Internal and External Factors in Grammatical Change: First Person Plural Pronouns in French
Ruth King (York University), France Martineau (University of Ottawa), and Raymond Mougeon (Glendon College and York University)
In contemporary spoken European French, on meaning ‘we’ is the predominant 1st person plural variant, having largely supplanted its competitor, nous. There is, however, considerable debate as to whether the domination of on is the result of fairly rapid change in the late 19th/early 20th centuries or whether there is actually a robust tradition of on usage going back several centuries. In this article, we trace the trajectory of 1st person plural pronominal variation over four centuries of usage and investigate the role of both linguistic and extralinguistic conditioning factors, an analysis based on data from plays and parodic dialogues, metalinguistic commentary (by grammarians, lexicographers, and philologists) and naturalistic data (sociolinguistic interviews). The study involves quantitative and qualitative analysis not only of on and nous usage, the variants typically considered in the literature, but also focuses on use of je in combination with the 1st person plural ending - ons, a lower-class variant not sufficiently taken into account in earlier studies. We show that a shift towards dominant on does takes place in the latter half of the 19th century in lower class speech but is not adopted by the upper classes until the 20th century. Further, the lower class does not move directly from je to on but rather passes through an intermediary stage wherein nous is the dominant variant, a transition interpreted as part of a general shift towards greater analycity in the pronominal system. We show that for much of the period under study, on is primarily associated with unrestricted reference, only taking over in restricted reference contexts as the change accelerates. We then compare variation and change in European French to what has obtained in both conservative and innovative New World varieties, varieties with closely-related grammars but which differ with regard to their history and to the sociolinguistic settings in which they are spoken. This comparison allows further testing and confirmation of the analyses put forward for European French.
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Modals Without Scales
Amy Rose Deal (Harvard University)
Some natural languages do not lexically distinguish between modals of possibility and modals of necessity. From the perspective of languages like English, modals in such languages appear to do double duty: they are used both where possibility modals are expected and where necessity modals are expected. The Nez Perce modal suffix o’qa offers an example of this behavior. I offer a simple account of the flexibility of the o’qa modal centered on the absence of scalar implicatures. O’qa is a possibility modal that does not belong to a Horn scale; its use is never associated with a scalar implicature. Accordingly, in an upward entailing environment, φ-o’qa is appropriate whenever there are accessible φ-worlds, even if indeed all accessible worlds are φ- worlds. In a downward entailing environment, flexibility of the o’qa modal is seen no more. Here, neither o’qa nor English possibility modals are associated with scalar implicatures, and the use of o’qa exactly parallels the use of English modals of possibility. Given that o’qa is a possibility modal that does not contrast with a modal of necessity, just how do you talk about necessities in Nez Perce? Speakers translating into Nez Perce rely on a variety of techniques to paraphrase expressions of simple necessity away. Their strategies highlight an area where Nez Perce and English plausibly differ in the range of propositions they convey. The data cast doubt on any strong form of effability as a language universal.
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