Research Groups: Week of January 28-February 1

Tuesday, January 29, 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM, Innis College 313
Morphology Reading Group
Ross Godfrey (Ph.D.) leading a discussion of: Creemers, Ava, Jan Don, and Paula Fenger (2018). Some affixes are roots, others are heads. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 36, 45-84.

Friday, February 1, 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM
Language Variation and Change Research Group
Miriam Neuhausen (visiting scholar) on her research on German/English contact in the Kitchener-Waterloo area.

Friday, February 1, 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM
Phonology Research Group
Photini Coutsougera (University of Cyprus): "High front vowel deletion, palatalization, and fortition in Arcadian Greek."
The focus of this paper is the high front vowel /i/ and its status in Arcadian Peloponnesian (ArcGR), an entirely unstudied variety of Greek spoken in the mountainous region of Arcadia in central Peloponnese. ArcGR shares the same five-vowel system (probably with some acoustic differences?) as SMG. The two differ in that ArcGR has light diphthongs (postvocalic /i/ semivocalises and forms a light diphthong with the vowel preceding it), which are very rare in SMG. Additionally, the status of the high front vowel in ArcGR is different from that in SMG. /i/ is not as stable as the other four vowels when unstressed and is therefore more vulnerable to its phonological environment. More specifically:

In ViC, Vi# contexts it semivocalises and forms a light diphthong with the preceding vowel. In CiV contexts it either triggers full palatalization in the preceding C or undergoes fortition. In Ci# contexts it triggers either full palatalization in the preceding C or is deleted, triggering secondary palatalization in the preceding C (or strengthened palatalization according to Baltazani et al. 2016). In CiC contexts it either triggers full palatalization in the preceding C or is deleted.

Baltazani et al. (2016) propose that high vowel loss in Ci# context (where C is a labial or a non-sibilant coronal) in two northern varieties of Greek triggers strengthened palatalization and not secondary palatalization in the preceding C. This extension to the current palatalization typology (see Kotchetov 2016), is claimed to be justified on both phonetic and phonological grounds. Despite the geographical distance, the ArcGR examples that feature high vowel loss are strikingly similar to those of the aforementioned northern varieties of Greek. According to the existing literature high vowel loss is thought to be featuring exclusively in northern varieties of Greek. In fact, it constitutes a basic classification criterion used by virtually all Greek dialectologists who have attempted to classify the Greek dialects. The results of this paper may therefore have implications on the classification of Greek dialects and their representation on the dialectal map of Greek as drawn by Trudgill (2003).

Friday, February 1, 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM
Semantics Research Group
Keir Moulton (faculty) on joint work with Paula Menéndez Benito (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen): "Reasoning and evidence: Sources and direction."
Natural languages have constructions that indicate that a claim is based on reasoning from evidence. Some of these constructions encode a particular directionality of evidence (e.g., Davis and Hara 2014, Winans 2016). The phenomenon can be illustrated with the examples in (1) and (2) (after Davis and Hara 2014). While epistemic 'must' expresses conclusions that follow from a piece of evidence (1) as well as conclusions about what might have caused the evidence (2), 'seem'-reports are only possible if the embedded claim is assumed to be cause of the available evidence (a "Reasoning Back" (RB) effect, as in (2)). Other constructions that have been shown to convey a RB effect are (i) a sub-class of evidential inferential elements (see Krawczyk 2012 and references therein), and (ii) the presentational 'this' construction (Winans 2016).

	(1) Reasoning Forward from Evidence. We see, from the 20th floor, rain pouring down but we cannot see the street. a. The sidewalks must be soaked. b. #The sidewalks seem to be soaked / It seems that the sidewalks are soaked.
	(2) Reasoning Back from Evidence. We see, on a security camera that shows only the sidewalks, that they are soaking wet. a. It must be pouring rain. b. It seems that it’s pouring rain.

In this talk, which reports on work in progress, we tentatively suggest that there are two possible sources for the RB back effect: (i) evidential and epistemic items might contribute RB lexically (as Davis and Hara 2014 argued for the Japanese evidential particle "youda"); (ii) in other constructions the RB effect might come about via a default predication relation that holds between propositions and topic situations (building on Winan's (2016) proposal for presentational 'this' constructions). In support of this second possibility, we present initial data that suggest that bare assertions and some canonical doxastic alternatives ('think' and 'believe') can encode a RB effect.