Research Groups: Friday, April 9

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Language Variation and Change Group
Michael Iannozzi (BA 2014, now at the University of Western Ontario) presenting on his work about heritage Italian and contact with English in southern Ontario.

11:30 AM - 1:00 PM: Phonetics/Phonology Research Group
Angelika Kiss (Ph.D.) and Andrei Munteanu (Ph.D.): "Intonation contours in Russian declarative questions."

Intonation is often used to encode speaker commitment to a proposition. While intonation-contours for genuine questions and assertions have been explored previously, phonetic correlates of declarative questions are understudied, particularly for languages other than English. We present preliminary results from an online production experiment, which elicited 4 utterance types – assertions, genuine questions, confirmative declarative questions, and echo declarative questions – from speakers of Russian. A Principal Component Analysis of the F0 contours reveals that the first two principal components are enough to distinguish assertion from other types of sentences, and questions from CDQs and EDQs, but not CDQs from EDQs. The main factor distinguishing CDQs from EDQs appears to be utterance duration. More impressionistically, true questions are signaled through a peak on the verb, while CDQs and EDQs with a peak on the object. Assertions tend to have a peak on the subject, or not at all.

1:00 PM - 2:00 PM: Syntax Group
Samuel Jambrović (Ph.D., Department of Spanish and Portuguese): "Family names and the morphosyntax of specific reference."

Many languages differ from English in requiring a determiner when referring to kinds.

(1) *(Az) elefántok nagyok. (Hungarian)

(2) *(Los) elefantes son grandes. (Spanish)

'Elephants are big.'

In (1) and (2), only context differentiates between specific reference (the elephants are big) and generic reference (elephants are big). With family names, however, these languages contrast specific and generic reference morphosyntactically. To refer to a specific family, Hungarian uses an associative plural marker (3), while Spanish uses a plural determiner (4).

(3) Nagyék a szomszédaim. (Hungarian)
(4) Los García son mis vecinos. (Spanish)
'The Nagys/Garcías are my neighbours.'

The constructions in (3) and (4) are both exceptional. In Hungarian, names do not directly combine with canonical plural morphology, as indicated by the regularization of family names derived from irregular common nouns (ló 'horse' → lovak 'horses', but Ló 'surname' → Lók 'the Lós'). In Spanish, the plural determiner cannot otherwise combine with morphologically singular elements (*los elefante 'the.pl elephant.sg').

These data suggest two generalizations: 1) names are not compatible with NumP, the locus of individuation; 2) there is special plural morphology that only occurs with names. I propose a distinct nominalizer for names to capture these facts and account for the interpretation that names receive at the syntax-semantics interface.