Congratulations, Yining!

Congratulations to Yining Nie (MA 2015), who defended her Ph.D. thesis, "Licensing arguments", at New York University this week. Her committee included Alec Marantz (chair), Stephanie Harves, Gary Thoms, Richard Kayne, and external examiner Laura Kalin (Princeton University). Congratulations, Dr. Nie!

New paper: Konnelly and Cowper (2020)

Lex Konnelly (Ph.D.) and Elizabeth Cowper (faculty) have a new paper in Glossa, 5(1): "Gender diversity and morphosyntax: An account of singular they."

As one of the primary means of constructing gendered identities, language is a matter of central concern to transgender people (Zimman 2018). In this paper, we present an analysis of non-binary singular they; that is, they as used to refer to individuals whose gender identity is not, or is not exclusively, masculine or feminine. Despite singular they’s widespread usage and long history in English, not all speakers judge this most recent innovation to be grammatical, even if they do not object to singular they in quantified, generic, or otherwise gender non-specific contexts, and even if they produce the latter sort of examples natively. We argue that resistance to this new use of they can, at least in part, be attributed to speakers’ level of participation in a grammatical change in progress. Further, we propose that this change can be categorized into three distinct stages, with they’s most recent broadening – that is, as a non-binary singular pronoun of reference – dovetailing with wider socio-cultural changes (as well as featural changes beyond the pronominal system) that underscore the difficulty in separating grammatical and social judgements. As we aim to show, linguists from all subdisciplines – both theoretical and applied – are especially well suited to leverage theoretical insights to advocate for trans-affirming language practice.

Research Groups: Week of April 27-May 1

Wednesday, April 29, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM: Syntax Group
Collective viewing and discussion, hosted by Arsalan Kahnemuyipour (faculty), of GLOW talk by András Bárány (Leiden University): "A typological gap in ditransitive alignment: No secundative case/indirective agreement."

New paper: Kochetov, Petersen, and Arsenault (2020)

Alexei Kochetov (faculty), Jan Heegård Petersen (Københavns Universitet), and Paul Arsenault (Ph.D. 2012, now at Tyndale University College) have a new paper in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 147(4): "Acoustics of Kalasha laterals."

Kalasha, a Northwestern Indo-Aryan language spoken in a remote mountainous region of Pakistan, is relatively unusual among languages of the region as it has lateral approximants contrasting in secondary articulation - velarization and palatalization (/ɫ/ versus /lʲ/). Given the paucity of previous phonetic work on the language and some discrepancies between descriptive accounts, the nature of the Kalasha lateral contrast remains poorly understood. This paper presents an analysis of fieldwork recordings with laterals produced by 14 Kalasha speakers in a variety of lexical items and phonetic contexts. Acoustic analysis of formants measured during the lateral closure revealed that the contrast was most clearly distinguished by F2 (as well as by F2-F1 difference), which was considerably higher for /lʲ/ than for /ɫ/. This confirms that the two laterals are primarily distinguished by secondary articulation and not by retroflexion, which is otherwise robustly represented in the language inventory. The laterals showed no positional differences but did show considerable fronting (higher F2) next to front vowels. Some inter-speaker variation was observed in the realization of /ɫ/, which was produced with little or no velarization by older speakers. This is indicative of a change in progress, resulting in an overall enhancement of an otherwise auditorily vulnerable contrast.

Congratulations, Majed!

Majed Al-Solami defended his doctoral dissertation, "Vowel elision, epenthesis, and metrical systems in Bedouin Arabic dialects", on Friday, April 24. The committee consisted of Keren Rice (supervisor), Elan Dresher, Yoonjung Kang, Alexei Kochetov, Abdel-Khalig Ali, and external examiner Stuart Davis (Indiana University). Congratulations, Dr. Al-Solami!

New paper: Milway (2020)

Dan Milway (Ph.D. 2019) has a new squib in the Canadian Journal of Linguistics, 65(1): "Modifying Spatial P: A remark on Svenonius (2010)."

New paper: Franck, Mirdamadi, and Kahnemuyipour (2020)

Julie Franck (University of Geneva), Farhid Mirdamadi (University of Geneva), and Arsalan Kahnemuyipour (faculty) have a paper out in Glossa, 5(1): "Object attraction and the role of structural hierarchy: Evidence from Persian."

Research on subject-verb agreement production in SVO languages has shown that objects moved pre-verbally sometimes trigger attraction, i.e., erroneous agreement of the verb with the object rather than the subject. Moreover, objects c-commanding one of the agreement positions in the hierarchical structure were found to generate stronger attraction than those linearly preceding them. Evidence for the role of c-command comes from the observation that the accusative clitic in French triggers stronger attraction than the preverbal dative pronoun and the PP modifier (Franck et al. 2006; 2010). In this study, we report the results of an experiment in Persian (an SOV language) in which subject–verb agreement was elicited by presenting sentences in Rapid Serial Visual Presentation procedure (RSVP) followed by verb selection (Staub 2009; 2010). We compared attraction errors induced by pre-verbal accusatives versus datives in the canonical SOV word order as well as the OSV word order. Corroborating Franck et al. (2006; 2010), we found stronger attraction when the pre-verbal object occupies a c-commanding position in the hierarchical structure than when it simply precedes one of the agreement positions in the linear string. We also found stronger attraction in the OSV word order as compared to the canonical SOV word order. This finding is attributed to the real-time processes of erroneous structure building and/or erroneous controller selection during subject-verb agreement computation.

GLOW 43

Generative Linguistics in the Old World (GLOW) 43 is taking place online from April 8th through 20th; Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin is hosting the conference virtually this year. Note that there is no charge to watch any of the talks.

• Sahar Taghipour (Ph.D.) and Arsalan Kahnemuyipour (faculty) are giving a presentation: "A syntactic repair to a clitic cluster restriction: The case of Laki split agreement."
• Monica Irimia (Ph.D. 2011, now at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia) is also a presenter: "ABA, DOM, and other accusatives."

New paper: Han, Kim, Moulton, and Lidz (2020)

Keir Moulton (faculty) and colleagues Chung-hye Han (Simon Fraser University), Kyeong-min Kim (Simon Fraser University), and Jeffrey Lidz (University of Maryland) are coauthors of a new paper in Linguistic Inquiry, 51(2): "Null objects in Korean: Experimental evidence for the argument ellipsis analysis."

Null object (NO) constructions in Korean and Japanese have received different accounts: as (a) argument ellipsis (Oku 1998, S. Kim 1999, Saito 2007, Sakamoto 2015), (b) VP-ellipsis after verb raising (Otani and Whitman 1991, Funakoshi 2016), or (c) instances of base-generated pro (Park 1997, Hoji 1998, 2003). We report results from two experiments supporting the argument ellipsis analysis for Korean. Experiment 1 builds on K.-M. Kim and Han’s (2016) finding of interspeaker variation in whether the pronoun ku can be bound by a quantifier. Results showed that a speaker’s acceptance of quantifier-bound ku positively correlates with acceptance of sloppy readings in NO sentences. We argue that an ellipsis account, in which the NO site contains internal structure hosting the pronoun, accounts for this correlation. Experiment 2, testing the recovery of adverbials in NO sentences, showed that only the object (not the adverb) can be recovered in the NO site, excluding the possibility of VP-ellipsis. Taken together, our findings suggest that NOs result from argument ellipsis in Korean.

New book: Massam (2020)

Congratulations to Diane Massam (faculty) on the publication of Niuean: Predicates and Arguments in an Isolating Language, newly available from Oxford University Press! This landmark book, which forms part of the 'Oxford Studies of Endangered Languages' series, represents the culmination of Diane and her consultants' and colleagues' 25 years of work on Niuean.

Research Groups: Friday, April 3

Note that this week's meeting of the Fieldwork Group is cancelled.

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM, online: Psycholinguistics Group
Presentation by Breanna Pratley (MA).

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM, online: Phonetics/Phonology Group
1. Lisa Sullivan (Ph.D.): "Gender-based sound symbolism in Korean given names."
2. Lisa Schlegl (Ph.D.): "Phonetic correlates of performative voicing."