Research Groups: Week of February 11-15

Tuesday, February 12, 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM, Innis College 313
Morphology Reading Group
Paper discussion led by Sahar Taghipour (Ph.D.): Stump, Gregory (to appear). Some sources of apparent gaps in derivational paradigms. Morphology.

Friday, February 15, 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM, SS560A
Language Variation and Change Research Group
Marisa Brook (faculty) and Mirva Johnson (University of Wisconsin, Madison) reporting on their fieldwork trip investigating Finnish and English and language contact in Sointula, British Columbia.

Friday, February 15, 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM, SS560A
Phonology Research Group
TBA

Friday, February 15, 1:00 PM-2:30 PM, SS560A
Semantics Research Group
Heather Stephens (Ph.D.): "English polarity particles."
In this talk, I will present work in progress looking at the English polarity particles yep and nope. We will see that these particles are more restricted than their counterparts, yes and no. The differences are tied to the polarity of the proposition being responded to, the polarity of the response itself, and the discourse function of the response. In particular, yep is only felicitous in response to a positive initiative and cannot be used to disagree with a preceding utterance. Nope cannot be used to disagree with a preceding negative utterance. Further, yep and nope are shown to be infelicitous in response to out-of-the-blue utterances. I will present the discourse model of Farkas and Bruce (2009) as well as a featural analysis of polarity particles (Farkas and Roelofsen, 2015), and discuss amendments that may be required in order to account for this new data.