Welcome
Welcome to the 47th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society! We have scheduled for you an intense
three days of linguistic excitement (7–9 April 2011), all taking place in Ida Noyes Hall at the University of
Chicago (1212 E. 59th St., Chicago, IL 60637).
Highlights include exciting talks from six invited speakers: Yosef Grodzinsky, Colin Phillips, Keith Johnson, Angelika Kratzer, Sharon Inkelas, and Norvin Richards. In addition, we have 18 sessions on diverse
topics of linguistic interest, including 6 parasessions on Experimental Methods in Linguistic Research.
Registration will begin at 8:00 on each of the three days, and we will kick off the conference with a special
Welcome at 9:10 on Thursday. We also invite interested graduate students to attend our Graduate Student
Mixer at 19:30 on Thursday. Finally, please join us for a delicious Banquet and accompanying festivities(including the ever-popular karaoke!) starting at 18:30 on Saturday.
CLS is pleased to offer books and journals at affordable discount prices at our book table. We havetitles from the MIT Press, the Cambridge University Press, and the University of Chicago Press, as well as
previous volumes of the CLS proceedings.
Special CLS 47 t-shirts are now on sale for the affordable price of $15 each. They are available in thefollowing two delightful designs, inspired by the classic educational computer games Number Munchers andOdell Lake, published by MECC in 1986, 25 years ago. Pick your favorite, or get one of each!

P-side design

S-side design2

Acknowledgments
The Chicago Linguistic Society would like to thank the following sponsors for their generous support:• The Office of the Reynolds Club and Student Activities• The Franke Institute for the Humanities
In addition, this conference would not have been possible without the contributions of our conference
volunteers, whose help in managing the conference is much appreciated, and our anonymous external andinternal abstract reviewers, whose extensive feedback has been most useful for CLS and the authors who
have submitted their work to us. We would like to thank the faculty, staff, and students of the Departmentof Linguistics for their help and guidance, and previous CLS committees for their advice and support.
We also thank our invited speakers for setting aside time for us in their busy schedules, and all of thesession presenters for the opportunity to learn about and discuss new exciting developments in linguistic
research. To all authors who submitted an abstract for consideration, whether or not your paper has been
accepted, we appreciate your thinking of us and sharing your work. Finally, we would like to thank all
conference attendees for joining us here at the 47th annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society andcontinuing a fine tradition of excellence.
Carissa Abrego-Collier
Arum Kang
Martina Martinović
Chieu Nguyen
CLS 47 Organizing Committee

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Schedule
All events take place in Ida Noyes Hall, University of Chicago (1212 E. 59th St., Chicago, IL 60637).
W sessions meet in the West Lounge, 2nd floor. E sessions meet in the East Lounge, 2nd floor.

Thursday, April 7
8:00
Registration Opens (LOBBY, 2ND FLOOR)
9:10
CLS 47 Welcome (WEST LOUNGE, 2ND FLOOR)

9:30

1W – GENERAL SESSION
Morphosyntax

1E – EXPERIMENTAL PARASESSION
Segmentation

David J. Medeiros (University of Michigan)
A morpho-syntactic account of embedded
imperatives

Jason Bishop (University of California, Los Angeles)
Kristen Toda (University of California, Los Angeles)
Syllabification, sonority, and segmentation:
Evidence from word-spotting
Sverre Stausland Johnsen (Harvard University)
Predicting rhyme with segment confusion

10:00 Jason Zentz (Yale University)
Morphological evidence for a movement
analysis of adverbial clauses
10:30
Break

10:45
Invited Speaker (WEST LOUNGE, 2ND FLOOR)
Yosef Grodzinsky (McGill University)
Quantifiers and quantities: Parametric RT and fMRI investigations into meaning and numerosity
11:45
Lunch
2W – GENERAL SESSION
Semantics

2E – GENERAL SESSION
Sociolinguistics

13:30 Ezra Keshet (University of Michigan)
Contrastive focus and paycheck pronouns
14:00 Noah

Constant(UniversityofMassachusetts

Amherst)

Appositives after all: Reevaluating Mandarin relative clauses
14:30 E. Matthew Husband (University of South
Carolina)

Rescuing manner/result
from certain death

complementary

4

Richard Cameron (University of Illinois at Chicago)
Acquiring sociolinguistic difference: Genderand age in a Chicago elementary schoolNeşe Kaya (Boğaziçi University)
Unresolved positionings: Constructing identities in second/third generation immigrantdiscourse
Sakiko Kajino (Georgetown University)
Japanese Women’s Language:
BeyondTokyo

15:00Break
15:15
Invited Speaker (WEST LOUNGE, 2ND FLOOR)
Colin Phillips (University of Maryland)
What is a mental grammar?
16:15
Break

3W – SPECIAL SESSION
Achievement Unlocked

3E – EXPERIMENTAL PARASESSION
Language Acquisition

16:30 Isabel Oltra-Massuet (Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones
Cientı́ficas)

On the status of impossible words systematically derived by the grammatical system
17:00 Miho Nagai (City University of New York Graduate
Center)Öner Özçelik (McGill University)
Nominal positions in Turkish
17:30 Natasha Abner (University of California, Los Ange-

Oana Lungu (Université de Nantes)
Temporal construals of relative clauses inchild French

Jie Ren (Brown University)
James L. Morgan (Brown University)
Do infants have more detailed lexical representation than adults?
Terue Nakato-Miyashita (University of Mas-

les)sachusetts Amherst)

On being and becoming P and plumb P

The economy of encoding and anaphoric dependency with relational nouns: Evidence
from child grammar

19:30
Graduate Student Mixer (THE PUB, BASEMENT OF IDA NOYES)

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Friday, April 8
8:00
Registration Opens (LOBBY, 2ND FLOOR)

9:00

4W – GENERAL SESSION
Pragmatics, Semantics

4E – GENERAL SESSION
Computational Linguistics

Dongsik Lim (Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales,

Nazarré Merchant (Eckerd College)
Learning ranking information from unspecified overt forms using the join
[Rescheduled for Saturday, April 9, 9:00]
Giorgio Magri (Institut Jean-Nicod / École Normale

Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientı́ficas)

9:30

Temporal and inferential interpretation of
Korean direct evidential -teAnastasia Giannakidou (University of Chicago)
Suwon Yoon (University of Chicago / Cornell University)

Referential vagueness and negative polarity: Evidence from Greek and Korean
10:00 Xuehua Xiang (University of Illinois at Chicago)
Individuation, temporal interpretation, and“bare classifier”: A discourse-informed
study of the classifier system of Shishan(Lingao/Be, Hainan Island, China)

Supérieure)

Correctness of OT online algorithms on
Prince and Tesar’s (2004) test cases
Joan Chen-Main (University of Pennsylvania)
Aravind K. Joshi (University of Pennsylvania)
A dependency structure perspective on complexity of natural language

10:30
Break
10:45
Invited Speaker (WEST LOUNGE, 2ND FLOOR)
Keith Johnson (University of California, Berkeley)
A corpus phonetic study of California English
11:45
Lunch

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5W – SPECIAL SESSION
Island Voyages

5E – EXPERIMENTAL PARASESSION
Semantics

13:30 Justin Nuger (University of Maryland)
On idiom locality and the architecture of thegrammar: Evidence from Palauan
14:00 Dong-yi Lin (University of Florida)
A syntactic account of interrogative verbs in
Kavalan
14:30 Jean Crawford (University of Connecticut)
Syntactic satiation in subject islands

William Salmon (University of British Columbia)
Determiners, parentheticals, and projectability: Experimental evidence
Yu-Chi Huang (University of Southern California)
Elsi Kaiser (University of Southern California)
Semantic flexibility in message formulation
during online production
Hadas Kotek (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Yasutada Sudo (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Edwin Howard (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Martin Hackl (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
A superlative reading for mostprop
15:00
Break
15:15
Invited Speaker (WEST LOUNGE, 2ND FLOOR)Angelika Kratzer (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Hunting down the material conditional
16:15
Break
6W – SPECIAL SESSION...

6E – EXPERIMENTAL PARASESSION
Phonology

16:30 Tommi Leung (United Arab Emirates University)
Aamna Shemeili (United Arab Emirates University)
Making the first step correct in syntax: Evidence from Emirati Arabic sluicing
17:00 Sandra Stjepanović (West Virginia University)
A case of violation repair under sluicing andconsequences for genitive of quantification
in Slavic
17:30 Ora Matushansky (Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS / Utrecht University / Centre National de laRecherche Scientifique / Université Paris 8)

Tania Ionin(University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)More than one solution

7

Rebecca Morley (Ohio State University)
From phonetics to phonology: Learning
epenthesisBożena Paja˛ k (University of California, San Diego)
Roger Levy (University of California, San Diego)
How abstract are phonological representations? Evidence from distributional perceptual learning
Marc Ettlinger (Northwestern University)
Analytic bias in phonology is domain general

Saturday, April 9
8:00
Registration Opens (LOBBY, 2ND FLOOR)

4E – RESCHEDULED GENERAL SESSION
Computational Linguistics
9:00

Nazarré Merchant (Eckerd College)
Learning ranking information from unspecified overt forms using the join

7W – EXPERIMENTAL PARASESSION
Scope

7E – EXPERIMENTAL PARASESSION
Phonetics

9:30

Chung-hye Han (Simon Fraser University)
Jeffrey Lidz (University of Maryland)
Dennis Ryan Storoshenko (Yale University)
Variation in negation and quantifier scope
judgments in Korean
10:00 Anastasia Giannakidou (University of Chicago)
Despoina Papadopoulou (Aristotle University ofThessaloniki)

Melita Stavrou (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)
Scope and epistemic judgment: An experimental investigation of Greek indefinites

Nicholas C. Henriksen (Northern Illinois University)

The acoustic correlates of question signaling in Peninsular Spanish: Three sentence
types compared
Anne Pycha (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
John Kingston (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Duration variation triggered by consonantvoicing is not gestural: Evidence from production

10:30
Break
10:45
Invited Speaker (WEST LOUNGE, 2ND FLOOR)
Sharon Inkelas (University of California, Berkeley)
Where did the Derived Environment Effect go?
11:45
Lunch

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8W – GENERAL SESSION
Syntax

8E – GENERAL SESSION
Semantics

13:30 Lobke Aelbrecht (GIST, Ghent University)
Marcel den Dikken (City University of New York
Graduate Center)

Preposition doubling in (Belgian) Dutch dialects
14:00 Ivana Mitrović (Stony Brook University)
A novel view of resumption in SerboCroatian
14:30 Yasuhiko Miura (University of Southern California)
Cleft in Japanese: A base-generation analysis and its empirical justification

Sylvia L. Reed (University of Arizona)‘Perfect’ doesn’t mean past: The classification of prospectives

Jiwon Yun (Cornell University)
Wh-indefinites and their licensing conditionsPeter Graff (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Jeremy Hartman (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Constraints on predication

15:00
Break
15:15
Invited Speaker (WEST LOUNGE, 2ND FLOOR)
Norvin Richards (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Affix Support and the EPP
16:15
Break

9W – SPECIAL SESSION
Subject Positions

9E – GENERAL SESSION
Phonology

16:30 Roberto Mayoral Hernández (University of Alabama at Birmingham)

Asier Alcázar (University of Missouri)
Analyzing weight effects on preverbal constituents: The case of Spanish subjects
17:00 Will Harwood (GIST, Ghent University)
There are several positions available: English intermediate subject positions
17:30 Jessica Coon (Harvard University)
Omer Preminger (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Gillian Gallagher (New York University)
Auditory features: The case from laryngeal
cooccurrence restrictions

Kyle Gorman (University of Pennsylvania)
What phonotactics might not be
Kazutaka Kurisu (Kobe College)
Global optimality in Japanese mimetic voicing

Towards a unification of person splits

18:30
CLS 47 Banquet (THEATER, 3RD FLOOR)

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Invited Speakers
Quantifiers and quantities: Parametric RT and fMRI investigations into meaning andnumerosity
YOSEF GRODZINSKY (McGill University)
Thursday, April 7, 10:45, West Lounge
The semantic story: Quantifiers take sets as their semantic value. Proportional quantifiers—words denoting
proportion like most or less-than-half —are special, in that they make use of the cardinalities of these sets.
Thus, in a universe consisting of a finite number of discrete objects, e.g., circles, a statement like morethan-half of the circles are blue is true iff the cardinality of the set satisfying the Generalized Quantifier
more-than-half of the circles exceeds that of its complement set.
The cognitive story: When we think about the verification of sentences with proportional quantifiers against
a scenario, it is easy to see that it is a task that often requires quantity estimation, followed by a comparison
between cardinalities of sets. To verify a sentence like the one above, we must count the members of the setof blue circles, or at the very least estimate its cardinality. We must then compare this cardinality to thecardinality of the complement set.
In this context, then, verification requires numerical estimation, followed by numerical comparison. These,
however, are 2 well-studied building blocks of numerical ability in humans and monkeys. The verificationof statements with proportional quantifiers against suitable scenarios is therefore a task that may provide
important clues about possible connections between numerosity and language.
A view from the brain: I report the results of a complex parametric Reaction Time (RT) and functional
MR imaging (fMRI) experiment (carried out in collaboration with Stefan Heim, Katrin Amunts, Dan Drai
& Simon Eickhoff), that explored these issues through a novel Parametric Proportion Paradigm (PPP ).
Participants (native speakers of German), lying inside the magnet, were asked to verify auditory sentencesin German that contained proportional quantifiers against scenarios they viewed. The PPP coupled eachsentence with different visual images that contained 50 circles, some blue, some yellow, where blue/yellow
proportion was systematically varied. Thus the sentence more-than-half of the circles are blue was presented
several times, each with a different image with 50 circles, of which between 5 to 45 were blue, and the rest
yellow. RTs were recorded, as was the concomitant with Blood Oxygen Level Dependent (BOLD) response.
Quantifiers were either negative or positive, and had either a fixed Standard of Comparison (e.g., most,less-than-half ), or a contextually determined one (e.g., many, few ).
The PPP enabled 2 parametric analyses on the large data set obtained: correlating the intensity of the BOLD
signal in different brain loci with proportion identified bilateral parieto-frontal brain circuits that participate
in numerical estimation; correlating the same signal with a measure of comparison difficulty (RT), identified
comparison regions which are adjacently anterior to the estimation areas in the parietal lobes and extend to
the temporal lobes.
Our novel method distinguished between these 2 circuits for the first time in humans. We also localizedcertain aspects of quantifier calculation. We therefore not only probed the human numerical system, butalso uncovered some fine semantic distinctions, as well as anatomical connections between quantification andnumerosity.
In the talk, I will discuss the method, the findings, and certain resulting linguistic puzzles.

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Where did the Derived Environment Effect go?
SHARON INKELAS (University of California, Berkeley)
Saturday, April 9, 10:45, West Lounge
It has been widely observed that phonological alternations which are triggered in derived environments
may fail to apply when the same phonological environment occurs in nonderived environments. This isespecially true of phonological patterns which potentially neutralize phonological contrasts. However, thedefinition of what constitutes a morphologically derived environment is tricky. In the best known type of
example, the trigger and target of a phonological alternation fall on opposite sides of a morpheme boundary.
Phonologically derived environments are those which exist only by virtue of the application of anotherphonological alternation. Alternations which are conditioned in either of these two ways are often referred toas ‘derived environment effects’; the non application of such alternations morpheme internally is known as‘non derived environment blocking’. This talk will survey the range of morphologically derived environment
effects (MDEs), along with the variety of theoretical approaches taken to them over the past decades. The
diversity of approaches is striking, as is the limited scope of each approach. This talk will raise the questionof whether derived environment effects really constitute an internally uniform and distinct natural class ofphenomena, or whether the so-called derived environment condition is simply a scattering of points in thelarger pattern of morphologically conditioned phonology.

A corpus phonetic study of California English
KEITH JOHNSON (University of California, Berkeley)
Friday, April 8, 10:45, West Lounge
In May, 2011, the in-coming class at UC Berkeley (∼3000 students) will be invited to contribute several
audio samples in a class project. This is an unprecedented opportunity to take a phonetic snap-shot of
California English. This talk outlines the set of technologies that we plan to use to collect audio over theweb, acoustically analyze it in real-time and present phonetic similarity, dialect map, and acoustic vowel
space results to participants in dynamically-generated interactive data displays.

Hunting down the material conditional
ANGELIKA KRATZER (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Friday, April 8, 15:15, West Lounge
Again and again, in the history of semantics, the brightest minds have fiercely defended material implication
as the correct analysis for indicative conditionals. And, again and again, in the history of semantics, thebrightest minds have fiercely opposed material implication as the correct analysis for indicative conditionals.
I will show that any adequate theory of conditionals needs to provide the material implication interpretation
as a possible interpretation for indicative conditionals, and I will make a suggestion about how the grammarsof natural languages provide this interpretation.

What is a mental grammar?
COLIN PHILLIPS (University of Maryland)
Thursday, April 7, 15:15, West LoungeStandard generative grammars describe language in terms that appear distant from considerations of everyday, real-time language processes. To some this is a critical flaw, while to others this is a clear virtue.
Generative grammars are typically framed as theories of speakers’ task-independent knowledge of their language, and these are understood to be distinct from theories of how specific communicative tasks might
put that knowledge to use. Set against this background are a number of recent proposals that various linguistic phenomena can be better understood in terms of grammars that incrementally assemble structuresin (roughly) the same left-to-right order found in language use. One can evaluate these proposals based
simply on standard considerations of ‘descriptive adequacy’. But it is also natural to ask how left-to-right11

derivations impact the psychological commitments of grammatical theories. Are they procedural descriptionsof how speakers put together sentences in real time (either in comprehension or in production)? Do theyamount to a retreat from linguists’ traditional agnosticism about ‘performance mechanisms’ ? These arequestions about what a grammatical theory is a theory of, and they are the proverbial elephant in the roomin discussions of derivational order in syntax, although the issues have not been explored in much detail. In
this talk I will summarize the current state of some of the evidence for and against grammars as models of
real-time processes, drawing on a variety of findings by our group and others.

Affix Support and the EPPNORVIN RICHARDS (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Saturday, April 9, 15:15, West Lounge
Some languages are generally described as having classic EPP effects, while others lack them:(1)

There arrived a man(2)É
arrivato un uomo
aux arrived a man[Italian]

In this talk I will propose a universal condition on affixes, which derives the distribution of EPP effects.
The condition makes crucial reference to the word-internal metrical structure responsible for the placementof word stress; part of the goal of the talk will be to explore the consequences of this proposal for thearchitecture of the grammar.

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Papers
On being and becoming P and plumb P
NATASHA ABNER (University of California, Los Angeles)
Thursday, April 7, 17:30, West Lounge
The adverbial modifier plumb, as used in dialects across the Southern and Southwestern parts of the UnitedStates, makes an interpretive contribution either to the degree interpretation of a predicate or the expressed
expectations of the speaker. As a degree modifier, plumb is compatible with degree predicates of distinct
syntactic categories, providing further evidence for the notion of ontological symmetry between events andindividuals (Bach 1986; Krifka 1990, 1992; among others). While the possible interpretations of plumbappear to vary, it is argued here that plumb makes a uniform semantic contribution: plumb presupposes thatits degree argument exceeds the standard associated with the base predicate and asserts, moreover, that
this degree exceeds the standard associated with plumb. This distinguishes it both from other overt degree
modifiers (e.g., very, completely) and silent degree morphemes like pos (Cresswell 1976, Kennedy 1999) orEval (Rett 2008). The analysis extends straightforwardly to the behavior of plumb in degree achievements
and confirms previous claims regarding the role of scalar structure in degree achievement predicates andeconomy of scalar interpretations (Hay et al. 1999; Kearns 2007; Kennedy 2007; Kennedy and Levin 2008).

Preposition doubling in (Belgian) Dutch dialects
LOBKE AELBRECHT (GIST, Ghent University)
MARCEL DEN DIKKEN (City University of New York Graduate Center)
Saturday, April 9, 13:30, West LoungeThis paper explores previously unnoticed P doubling in certain Flemish dialects, which display circumpositions with an identical preposition and postposition:(1)

dat hij op dem berg
is op geklommen.
that he on the mountain is on climbed‘that he has climbed up on the mountain.’[Asse Dutch]

P doubling occurs only with spatial directional PPs, not with selected (2a) or locative (2b) ones.
(2)a. Will zou
nooit in die
sprookjes (*in) geloven.
Will would never in those fairytales inbelieve‘Will would never believe in those fairytales.’b. Hij springt in het water in.
he jumps in the water in
Directional: ‘He jumps into the water.’#Locative: ‘He jumps up and down in the water.’

Secondly, in doubling PPs the preposition and the object can undergo movement to the exclusion of the
postposition, shown for topicalization in (3).
(3)

Op dienen
berg<*op> klimt hij niet <op>.
on that.masc mountain on
climbs he not on‘He’s not climbing up on that mountain.’

Thirdly, dialects that allow for P doubling also display the sequence “P pronoun P V”, with the pronoun insitu (4a), next to Standard Dutch “R-pronoun P V” in (4b):
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(4)

a. op iets
op klimmen
on something on climb‘to climb onto something’b. ergens
op klimmen
somewhere on climb‘to climb onto something’We capture these properties by adapting Den Dikken’s (2006) structure for (Standard Dutch) circumpositions:(5)[PP PDir =op [CP C*[Place] [DegP Deg[Place] [PlaceP Place [PP PLoc =op DP=den berg ]]]]]

Syllabification, sonority, and segmentation: Evidence from word-spotting
JASON BISHOP (University of California, Los Angeles)
KRISTEN TODA (University of California, Los Angeles)
Thursday, April 7, 9:30, East Lounge
A key claim in the literature is that a speech segmentation strategy guided by syllable structure is unlikely ina stress-timed language like English, since syllable boundaries are often unclear and stress patterns provide
better cues to likely word boundaries. In the present study, we used the word-spotting paradigm to explore
English listeners’ sensitivity to an aspect of syllable structure not yet tested in on-line segmentation experiments: sonority. Based on off-line, explicit syllabification studies, we hypothesized that English listeners
segmentations might exhibit the following structural preference: given a sequence /. . . VCV. . . /, listeners
are more likely to choose the parse V.CV if C is an obstruent, and more likely to choose a VC.V parse if it isa sonorant. 29 listeners were presented with 50 bisyllabic vowel-initial target words (e.g., absent) embedded
in nonsense strings. Target words were immediately preceded by a syllable ending in an obstruent or asonorant. For example, listeners had to spot targets such as absent in the string veebabsent, and also in thestring veemabsent. Results of mixed-effects regression modeling indicated that listeners spotted target words
more quickly and more accurately when they followed sonorants, reflecting a bias towards VC.V parsings ofintervocalic sonorants (i.e., veem.absent) but V.CV parsings of obstruents (vee.babsent). Evidence was also
obtained suggesting sonority had a gradient effect on parses. These results demonstrate an effect on spoken
word segmentation that is difficult to account for without making reference to syllable-based influences, afact which models of word segmentation and recognition must account for.

Acquiring sociolinguistic difference: Gender and age in a Chicago elementary school
RICHARD CAMERON (University of Illinois at Chicago)
Thursday, April 7, 13:30, East Lounge
A characteristic of children’s social orders is relative gender segregation. Girls play more with girls and boys
with boys. This practice emerges around the age of two, peaks in middle childhood, and decreases duringadolescence. Thus, as children move through elementary school, many increasingly segregate themselves
along lines of gender. If children separate into same-gender peer groups, their interactions across the genderline will not be as frequent as interactions with members of the same sex. If less frequent, in keeping with
Bloomfield’s assertion (1933:46) that “density of communication” results in the “most important differencesof speech” within a community, one may predict that statistical differences would emerge progressively among
girls and boys. Specifically, if the degree of separation between girls and boys sequentially increases during
pre-adolescence, the frequencies of variants of sociolinguistic variables expressed by girls and by boys would
also sequentially diverge. We investigate this prediction with two sociolinguistic variables, (dh) and (ing),
in the English spoken by children from one inner-city public school in Chicago. The prediction is supported.
The results parallel findings in Cameron (2010) in a school in Oak Park, Illinois, Wolf & Jiménez (1979)
in Buenos Aires, and Kerswill & Williams (2000) in Milton Keynes, England. By combining findings fromsocial psychology with a principle of dialect formation, we can predict and provide a coherent account of
how age and gender interact in the acquisition of statistical gender differences, a widely documented findingin variationist sociolinguistics.
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A dependency structure perspective on complexity of natural language
JOAN CHEN-MAIN (University of Pennsylvania)
ARAVIND K. JOSHI (University of Pennsylvania)
Friday, April 8, 10:00, East Lounge
Within generative approaches to grammar, characterizing the complexity of natural language has traditionally been couched in terms of formal language theory (e.g. Shieber, 1985, Culy, 1985, Joshi, 1985). A novel
perspective of generative grammars, however, provides a different metric of complexity.
Recently, Kuhlmann (2007) and collaborators have connected the generative grammar approach with the dependency grammar approach, where linguistic analysis is based on word-to-word relationships. In particular,
two properties that are naturally defined over dependency structures, gap degree (a measure of discontinuity)
and well- vs. ill-nestedness (whether interleaving substructures are permitted) carve out classes of structuresthat are systematically related to the derivations of generative grammars. The question of complexity ofnatural language can now be recast in dependency structure terms: Does natural language include structuresthat are unavoidably ill-nested and/or unavoidably gap degree > 1?
We use German and Czech examples to answer both questions in the affirmative. We examine a German
construction with a dafür -split, a German construction that involves both extraposition and a split quantifier,and a Czech comparative and claim that any reasonable dependency structure assigned to these will resultin ill-nested structures. Similarly, we claim that a German construction with a what-for -split and a Czech
construction with a passive and topicalization will require gap degree 2 structures. We conclude that illnestedness and a gap degree > 1 are indeed unavoidable linguistic realities and that a grammar formalism on
the right track for characterizing natural language should be able to support such dependency structures.

Appositives after all: Reevaluating Mandarin relative clauses
NOAH CONSTANT (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Thursday, April 7, 14:00, West Lounge
Non-restrictive or “appositive” relative clauses convey supplementing information about the phrase they
attach to, along a separate dimension of meaning (Potts 2005). While English appositives are identifiable bycomma intonation (e.g. Mary, who is a doctor ), diagnosing appositivity in other languages can be non-trivial.
In this talk, I argue for the existence of prenominal appositive relative clauses in Mandarin. This finding isremarkable given claims by Del Gobbo (2003, 2005) that Mandarin lacks appositives, and subsequent claims
by Potts (2005) and De Vries (2006) that prenominal appositives are ruled out cross-linguistically.
Elicited data show Mandarin clauses passing three appositivity tests, contra Del Gobbo’s findings—thepresupposition test, the root adverb test, and the singleton anchor test. However other traditional diagnostics
give the opposite result, including Jackendoff’s (1977) generalizations that appositives may anchor to nonnominals, and occur further from the noun than restrictives. While the successful tests derive from a coresemantic notion of appositives as supplements, I show that Jackendoff’s tests diagnose not appositivity, but
syntactic integration, following Cinque (2008).
More recently, Del Gobbo (2009) classifies a subset of Mandarin clauses modifying names as “appositive”,
but maintains they are unlike the appositives of other languages: contributing at-issue meaning, and open
to binding from above. However two additional semantic tests confirm that Mandarin appositives are true
appositives, conveying conventional implicature meaning (see Potts 2005). The illusion that these clauses
can contain bound pronouns is familiar from English cases of telescoping, and disappears with the use of adownward-entailing quantifier.

15

Towards a unification of person splits
JESSICA COON (Harvard University)
OMER PREMINGER (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Saturday, April 9, 17:30, West Lounge
Different phenomena are known to exhibit sensitivity to the person/animacy (P/A) features of clausal
arguments. One example is P/A-based split-ergativity. While individual languages exhibiting such patterns
differ in where along Silverstein’s (1976) hierarchy the split occurs, there is a universal trend for DPs lower
on the hierarchy to trigger the ergative pattern, and ones that are higher to trigger the nominative pattern.
Another example of grammatical sensitivity to P/A features is auxiliary selection in Romance. In certain
Romance dialects, auxiliary alternations are constrained by P/A features of the subject (D’Alessandro &Roberts 2010, Manzini & Savoia 2007). D&R show that in Abruzzese Italian, 1st/2nd-person subjects triggerbe, while 3rd-person subjects trigger have.
Building on Coon’s (2010) account of aspect-based split ergativity, we argue that person splits arise whenstructural factors conspire to place the subject and object in separate case/agreement domains. In this
scenario, ergative is not assigned because the subject is the only DP in its domain. For person-based
split-ergativity, we assume that higher-ranked arguments on the person hierarchy must be licensed by anappropriate projection (Béjar & Rezac’s 2003 PLC ; see also Anagnostopoulou 2003); and that the phasehoodof this projection causes the aforementioned bifurcation of the clause into two case/agreement domains. With
respect to auxiliary selection, this same phase boundary blocks incorporation into be (Freeze 1992, Kayne
1993), preventing have from arising in the presence of 1st/2nd person.

Syntactic satiation in subject islands
JEAN CRAWFORD (University of Connecticut)
Friday, April 8, 14:30, West Lounge
The nature of the syntactic satiation effect, or increase in acceptability of certain ungrammatical types overtime, is a topic of debate. Snyder (2000) claims that satiation is a property inherent to some violations andnot others. Sprouse (2009) suggests that satiation effects are a result of an equalization response strategy
and does not find significant satiation for any violation tested. Yet, Francom (2009) finds significant satiationof whether islands even with a balanced design. In this paper, I provide further evidence that satiation canoccur with a balanced design.
For accounts that tie satiation to specific violation types, what is predicted for subject islands (SI’s)? The
satiation results for SI’s have been more variable than other violations. One reason may be that previous
studies did not control for type of SI. 22 Native English speakers participated in a Likert acceptability
task. Test items included whether and adjunct islands, and three types of SIs: transitive, unaccusative andunergative. All SI items were NPs extracted from PPs. Items were presented in a 7 block design, with 5 test
items and 5 grammatical filler items per block.
Subjects’ responses to test items were standardized based on their mean response to filler items. Satiation
was determined by comparing the z-score responses in Block 7 with responses in Block 1. We found significant
satiation of whether islands (t(21) = 2.23, p < .05), and no satiation of adjunct islands (t(21) = 1.45, p = .16).
None of the SI types showed satiation effects (all p > .2).

Analytic bias in phonology is domain general
MARC ETTLINGER (Northwestern University)
Friday, April 8, 17:30, East Lounge
The present study argues that cognitive or analytic biases in phonology reflect domain general principles, arenot specific to language, and therefore are not properties of Universal Grammar as it is traditionally defined.
In particular, we show that the biases for vowel harmony over vowel-consonant dependencies (Moreton,
2008) and for perceptual similarity as a factor in generalization of palatalization (Wilson, 2006) are present
16for non-speech acoustic stimulus. We replicate both of these previous studies with linguistic stimulus andshow a vowel harmony and voicing-agreement bias, as compared to a vowel-consonant dependency (Moreton,
2008) and a bias to generalize velar palatalization from mid vowels to high vowels and not vice versa. We
then repeat the same procedure using non-linguistic stimulus. The results show that the same biases forlinguistic stimulus are present in the non-linguistic stimulus, which suggests that the biases are not specificto phonology, or language, but represent domain-general analytic biases. We argue that this supports
the view that diachrony is the main source of substantive patterns in language (Blevins, 2004) and that
previously identified analytic biases are the correlate of domain-general properties of cognition. We conclude
by speculating that the domain-general biases of phonology reflect principles of Auditory Scene Analysis(Bregman, 1990), the process by which the auditory system groups sounds into perceptually meaningful
elements. These principles include similarity and proximity, which can account for harmony and similarity
driving assimilation, respectively.

Auditory features: The case from laryngeal cooccurrence restrictions
GILLIAN GALLAGHER (New York University)
Saturday, April 9, 16:30, East Lounge
The uniform patterning of ejectives and aspirates in the long-distance restrictions of Quechua provides
support for representing these segments in terms of their shared auditory property of long voice onset time(long VOT). Cooccurrence restrictions in the language prohibit roots with pairs of ejectives, pairs of aspirates
or ejective-aspirate pairs, requiring that the phonology refer to some feature that group ejectives and aspirates
as a class. The feature [long VOT] allows for an account of the absence of ejective-aspirate pairs, as wellas the uniform patterning of ejectives and aspirates more generally. An acoustic study of Quechua supports
the proposal that the unifying and defining property of ejectives and aspirates is a comparably long VOT.
It is further shown that the range of cooccurrence restrictions cross-linguistically always restrict a class ofsegments that share a single articulatory or auditory/acoustic dimension, and thus enriching representations
to include both kinds of information is further motivated. The idea that phonological patterns reflect auditory
properties builds on the work of Flemming (1995) and Steriade (1997). Steriade shows that articulatorily
similar sounds may pattern independently due to distinct auditory properties. The work here extends therole of auditory features by proposing a new feature, [long VOT], and showing that auditory features may
unify articulatory disparate sounds like ejectives and aspirates.

Scope and epistemic judgment: An experimental investigation of Greek indefinites
ANASTASIA GIANNAKIDOU (University of Chicago)
DESPOINA PAPADOPOULOU (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)
MELITA STAVROU (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)
Saturday, April 9, 10:00, West Lounge
In this paper, we assess experimentally the scopal behavior of two indefinite series in Greek: the a-indefinite(enas “a/one”) and the SOME-indefinite (kapjos “some”). Although most of the current literature on thescope of indefinites takes indefinites to behave undifferentially with respect to scope we find an asymmetryin scoping between peripheral scope positions (wide and narrow) and intermediate scope. In the peripheral
scope position, the a-indefinite tends to be interpreted with wide scope, whereas the SOME indefinite
strongly prefers narrow scope (pace Ionin 2010 where a-indefinites are found to be disallowed with long
distance readings). Both enas and kapjos scope easily in the intermediate position; and judgements forintermediate scope for both indefinites are generally easier than judgements for the peripheral scopes. Our
overall findings suggest that the processing of an indefinite in the intermediate position may be qualitatively
different from the processing of scope in the periphery. Given that the SOME-indefinite is a referentiallyvague (Giannakidou and Quer 2010) indefinite that carries a felicity condition of variation, what we findsuggests that scopal behavior is not blind to epistemic judgement.

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Referential vagueness and negative polarity: Evidence from Greek and Korean
ANASTASIA GIANNAKIDOU (University of Chicago)
SUWON YOON (University of Chicago / Cornell University)
Friday, April 8, 9:30, West Lounge
Our goal in this paper is to distinguish referentially vague (Giannakidou and Quer 2010) from free choiceindefinites (FCIs). The two have often been confused (as e.g. in the analysis of German irgendein of Kratzer
and Shimoyama 2002). We show first that referentially vague indefinites can be negative polarity items(NPIs) and identify two such series: the tipota series (Greek), and nwuku-ilato (Korean). We then show thatthese NPIs occur in the broad range of nonveridical contexts including questions, imperatives, modal verbs,
directive and future oriented propositional attitudes (Giannakidou 1998, 1999). We establish the following
properties of referentially vague NPIs: (a) unlike scalar NPIs, and FCIs (which have distinct lexicalizations
in both languages), referentially vague NPIs produce weak, attenuating, statements wherever they occur,
including negation; (b) unlike FCIs, referentially vague NPIs do not exhaustify the domain; they are merely
indicators of the speaker’s uncertainty, and simply require some variation in the domain; (c) although, atleast in Korean, they are EVEN-marked (ilato), referentially vague NPIs are not scalar and do not make us
look at bottoms or tops of scales, thus suggesting that focus marking is not always an indicator of active
focus. These findings jointly implicate that (i) it is necessary to acknowledge that NPIs are not always
scalar or emphatic (pace Chierchia 2006); and (ii) referential vagueness, an instance of referential deficiency(Giannakidou 1998), is an ingredient crucial in producing NPIs.

What phonotactics might not be
KYLE GORMAN (University of Pennsylvania)
Saturday, April 9, 17:00, East Lounge
A number of recent studies (e.g., Anttila 2008, Coetzee & Pater 2008) have argued that gradient phonotactic
patterns play an active role in shaping the contents of the synchronic lexicon. This study presents evidencein support of the competing null hypothesis (Halle 1962), that patterns of phonotactic gaps are simply
the result of two independently-motivated facts: phonological processes which eliminate out certain output
sequences on one hand, and chance and historical contingency on the other.
Previous accounts of English syllable contact clusters (e.g., Pierrehumbert 1994, Hammond 1999, Duanmu
2009) have noted that only a small portion of the possible syllable contact clusters are attested in the
English lexicon, and these authors account for these patterns with phonotactic “preferences” that go beyond
attested phonological alternations in English. However, these studies have not distinguished between gaps
due to neutralization and those attributed to putative phonotactic preferences. A corpus study is used toevaluate the relative contribution of these two potential causes of gaps. Unseen species estimation techniques,
and stochastic simulation, show that the unaccounted-for gaps are accounted for as nothing more than the
result of sampling from sparse data. In contrast, several models of phonotactic well-formedness (Coleman &Pierrehumbert 1997, Hayes & Wilson 2008, McGowan in press) are found to have little utility in predicting
which syllable contact clusters are, and are not, attested. Contrary to prior claims, there is no evidence forphonotactic preferences operating in this corner of the English lexicon.

Constraints on predication
PETER GRAFF (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
JEREMY HARTMAN (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Saturday, April 9, 14:30, East Lounge
We propose a novel constraint on the denotations of lexical predicates in natural language. Informally, theconstraint states that the only individuals that must be considered to evaluate the truth of a saturated
predicate are the individuals identified by that predicate’s arguments. After identifying a connection to
Keenan and Stavi’s (1986) Conservativity, we introduce and formalize our broader constraint, which we term

18

Myopia. We show that this constraint successfully rules out several classes of conceivable but unattested
denotations for predicates of other types. (E.g., just as there are no natural language determiners like allnon such that JAll-non students are tall K = “All individuals that are not students are tall”, there are notransitive verbs such as like-non such that JJohn likes-non studentsK = “John likes (all) individuals thatare not students”). Finally, we show that Myopia applied to determiners produces a weaker constraint thanConservativity, but we argue that this is a welcome result, in light of a recent artificial learning study (Graffet al., submitted) which finds that learning of novel determiners is subject to significant independent effects
of both constraints.

Variation in negation and quantifier scope judgments in Korean
CHUNG-HYE HAN (Simon Fraser University)
JEFFREY LIDZ (University of Maryland)
DENNIS RYAN STOROSHENKO (Yale University)
Saturday, April 9, 9:30, West Lounge
Korean has two forms of negation: long negation and short negation. Linguists have used judgments on
scope interaction between object quantified phrase (QP) and negation to determine the syntactic height ofnegation and the verb in Korean. However, the scope judgments reported in the literature often conflictwith one another (Cho 1975, Song 1982, Suh 1989, Hagstrom 1998, 2002, Baek 1998, Kim 2000, Kim 2002),
raising doubts as to the utility of such data for conclusions about clause structure. Han, Lidz and Musolino(2007), however, showed experimentally that the variation in judgment exists between speakers and notwithin a speaker. They thus concluded that there are two groups of speakers of Korean, and attribute thissplit to the co-existence of two grammars concerning the height of the verb in the population: the neg>Q
reading is available only to speakers with a verb-raising grammar. This two-grammar hypothesis makes
two additional predictions. First, an individual speaker should exhibit the same scope judgments for bothtypes of negation. This prediction follows because for both constructions the height of the verb determines
the scope of negation in the same way. Second, if an individual speaker maintains only one grammar, thenhe should exhibit the same scope judgment over time. We show that both predictions are borne out in awithin-subjects experiment using the Truth Value Judgment Task.

There are several positions available: English intermediate subject positions
WILL HARWOOD (GIST, Ghent University)
Saturday, April 9, 17:00, West Lounge
Floating Quantifiers (FQs) may precede and follow almost all auxiliaries (cf. (1)a). They may be strandedin these positions by the subjects to which they were adjoined (Sportiche, 1988). FQs thus mark subject
traces. It is predicted therefore that FQs should be able to follow all auxiliaries, as well as the main verb
itself (when associated with derived subjects). This prediction is not borne out (cf. (1)b,c):(1)

a. We could <all> have <all> been <all> running a marathon by now.
b. We could be <all> being <*all> watched <*all>.
c. They were <all> being <*all> idiots.

Existential constructions supposedly mark the base position of the subject: the subject (associate) is mergedinternal to vP, and cannot raise to the canonical subject position due to merger of expletive there (cf. (2)a).
It is predicted therefore that associates should be able to follow all auxiliaries, as well as the main verb itself(when it is a derived associate). This prediction is not borne out (cf. (2)b,c):(2)

a. There were many people running.
b. There were <many people> being <*many people> watched <*many people>.
c. There were <many people> being <*many people> idiots.
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The similar distribution pattern for derived associates and FQs requires a unified explanation.
The analysis will claim that English v◦ is not an intermediate phase head, though Aspprog ◦ is; and thatraising to the edge of the phase is the last operation to occur within a phasal domain. These two main
claims should capture the relevant orderings.

The acoustic correlates of question signaling in Peninsular Spanish: Three sentence
types compared
NICHOLAS C. HENRIKSEN (Northern Illinois University)
Saturday, April 9, 9:30, East Lounge
van Heuven & Haan (2000; 2002) express the relative prosodic marking of question intent with respect to thecontinuum of lexico-syntactic devices available for use in question marking. The prediction is that prosodic
marking should be weaker in wh-questions (WHQ) than in declarative questions (DQ) since the former use a
wh-word and syntactic inversion to signal question intent, whereas the latter do not. In the current analysis
we test this prediction by examining five question contours (in addition to one statement contour) producedby 16 speakers of Peninsular Spanish: DQ early rise; DQ late rise; WHQ final rise; WHQ early fall; andWHQ late fall. The acoustic measurements were: baseline slope; speech rate (syllables/sec); stressed syllable
duration; and utterance duration. Results showed that, in terms of the baseline slope, all question contours
except the DQ late rise significantly differed from the statement contour. As for speech rate and syllable
duration, the DQ early rise and the WHQ early fall were not significantly different from one another, as they
were the fastest of the six contours on speech rate and the shortest on stressed syllable duration. Similarly,
the DQ late rise, WHQ final rise, and WHQ late fall were not found to significantly differ from one another on
the same measurements (i.e., they were the slowest and longest). Clearly, speech rate and syllable durationdifferences were not related to sentence type, and this would run counter to the predictions made in van
Heuven & Haan (2000; 2002).

Semantic flexibility in message formulation during online production
YU-CHI HUANG (University of Southern California)
ELSI KAISER (University of Southern California)
Friday, April 8, 14:00, East Lounge
During sentence production, speakers initially formulate preverbal messages which later undergo grammaticalencoding (Bock & Levelt, 1994). Our study investigated the effects of semantic flexibility—having a choiceof two propositions—on message formulation. Existing work (V. Ferreira 1996) investigated effects of syntactic flexibility—having a choice of two structures—on grammatical encoding. He concluded that syntactic
flexibility facilitates grammatical encoding, because syntactic flexibility makes maximally incremental production possible. However, little is known about whether having options on the level of message formulation
facilitates/hinders production, assuming message formulation may not be temporally organized. We conducted two sentence production tasks using Mandarin BA/BEI-constructions, testing agent-theme(AgThe)and theme-experiencer(TheExp) verbs respectively to see whether effects of semantic flexibility depend on
verb-type. Participants saw a verb, two nouns, and BA/BEI/no preposition. We manipulated (i) Noun Animacy (Animate-Animate: Same-Animacy=SA)//Inanim-Animate: Different-Animacy=DA), and (ii) Preposition constraint (BA/BEI/nothing). Crucially, semantic flexibility exists in SA conditions (i.e., freedom inthematic role assignment because speakers could say the director criticized the actress or the actress criticized the director ); syntactic flexibility is conditioned by preposition-presence. Production latencies revealed
that with AgThe-verbs, [+SemFlex] hinders production because two animates compete for the AGENT role.
However, with TheExp-verbs, since an animate noun can plausibly be THEME or EXP, [+SemFlex] facilitates production, paralleling the incrementality-based facilitative effect of syntactic flexibility (V. Ferreira1996). As a whole, our findings suggest semantic flexibility based on animacy can hinder or facilitate production, depending on verb-type/thematic-structure. Whether message formulation is competitive or incremental
is highly sensitive to linguistic information.
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Rescuing manner/result complementary from certain death
E. MATTHEW HUSBAND (University of South Carolina)
Thursday, April 7, 14:30, West Lounge
An important question concerning lexical semantics is what constraints, if any, the grammar imposes on thepossible meanings of words. One constraint argued for is Rappaport-Hovav & Levin’s (2010) manner/result
complementary hypothesis: “A verbal root can only encode either a manner meaning or a result meaning,
but not both”. This constraint has recently come under empirical scrutiny in Koontz-Garboden & Beavers(2010). They argue that manner of death verbs, like behead, electrocute, hang, strangle, etc., encode both amanner and a result meaning, a possibility at odds with manner/result complementary. A point of debate,
however, concerns whether these verbs do indeed express both a manner and result meaning, and what thetypes of meaning expressed by the manner and result components of these verbs are. After observing that only
a subset of these verbs truly express both manner and result meanings, I argue that manner of death verbs
assert their manner, but presuppose their result. In light of this behavior, I claim that manner of death verbs
clarify the manner/result complementary hypothesis, revealing that manner/result complementary acts as aconstraint on the asserted meaning of verbal roots and demonstrating that the distinction between asserted
and presupposed meaning is key to understanding the constraints on word meanings more generally.

Japanese Women’s Language: Beyond TokyoSAKIKO KAJINO (Georgetown University)
Thursday, April 7, 14:30, East Lounge
The ideology of Japanese Women’s Language (JWL) emerged at the end of the 19th century when the Tokyo
variety was adapted as the national standard (Inoue 2006; Nakamura 2008). To date, despite much scholarship on JWL, most research has discussed only the variety of the Tokyo metropolitan area and overlooked
other regional dialects. This paper, part of a larger study on regional variation in JWL, investigates the
Kyoto and Osaka varieties in addition to that of Tokyo. I show that the conventional ideology of JWL, withorigins in Tokyo, fails to explain patterns in other regions.
This study investigates the use of phrase-ending forms in archival data from the National Institute forJapanese Language and Linguistics, collected between 1977 and 1983. Speakers range in age from 49 to 79
years old. All phrase endings (N = 4,508) were coded for their realization and collapsed into four categories(masculine, feminine, null, and other). A series of mixed effects logistic regressions on factors influencing theuse of each category were conducted with Rbrul (Johnson 2008).
Results show that while patterns for Tokyo speakers are consistent with the conventional gendered language
ideology, patterns from Osaka challenge the traditional ideology, with women favoring forms traditionallylabeled masculine. The reverse pattern in the Osaka data reveals a limitation of conceptualizing linguistic
practice in a single dimension (i.e. gender). Furthermore, the contrast between the Osaka and Kyoto, which
are geographically adjacent, suggests that locally-based ideologies should be taken into consideration in thesociolinguistic study of Japanese Women’s Language.

Unresolved positionings: Constructing identities in second/third generation immigrantdiscourse
NEŞE KAYA (Boğaziçi University)
Thursday, April 7, 14:00, East Lounge
After the Lausanne Treaty in 1923, a compulsory population exchange took place between Greece andTurkey. This study aims to analyze identity construction of second and third generation immigrants from
Crete to Cunda through discourse analysis looking at linguistic strategies used by them and also to reveal
the situational, social and contextual processes that influenced and framed their identity formation. The
study focuses on the ethnic identity claims and the cultural/social attributes used to construct these ethnic
identities. The representation of the migration experience and how participants position themselves in21

relation to migration experience is also the focus of the study.
The data for this study come from 13-hour recordings of semi-structured interviews with 11 second or third
generation immigrants settled in Cunda for a larger project called “Preservation of linguistic heritage: Asia
Minor (Anadolu) Greek and its interaction with Turkish”.
The study shows that participants position themselves as both Cretan and Turkish portraying continuously
set up oppositions and ambivalence between these identities. The ambivalence the participants present is
not limited to the construction of ethnic identities but also observed in the representation of the migration
experience as both “gönüllü” (voluntary) and “zorunlu” (forced) and participants’ (de)personalization of the
migration experience.

Contrastive focus and paycheck pronouns
EZRA KESHET (University of Michigan)
Thursday, April 7, 13:30, West Lounge
Paycheck pronouns are often analyzed as complexes f (i) where f is a contextually salient relation and i is abound variable (see Karttunen 1969, Heim 1990, Jacobson 1977, 2000). In (1), it means f (i) where f is therelation between an employee and her paycheck, and i is a variable bound by everyone else. This analysis
overgenerates in WCO environments, though. If it in (2a) really contained a bound variable, (2a) shouldsound as odd as (2b), which contains an overt bound variable. Another problem with this analysis is that it
misses the generalization (motivated by data such as (3)) that all paycheck pronouns appear in contrastive
contexts.
This paper instead analyzes paycheck pronouns as resulting from strong parallelism constraints on contrastive
contexts, the same constraints that require he in (4) to refer to John. Rooth’s (1992) focus operator canenforce this same parallelism between the VPs in (1), forcing it to refer to the subject’s paycheck.
(1)

Johni [VP deposited hisi paycheck in the bank].
[Everyone else]j [VP deposited it in the credit union].

(2)

The man whose surgery cured him is happier than the manj whomj . . .
a. . . . it paralyzed tj for life.
b. ?? . . . hisj surgery paralyzed tj for life.

(3)?The man who had his surgery on Tuesday, was happier than the man who had it on his foot.
(cf. . . . who had it on Thursday).

(4)

The car John bought was nicer than the car he sold.

A superlative reading for mostprop
HADAS KOTEK (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
YASUTADA SUDO (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
EDWIN HOWARD (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
MARTIN HACKL (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Friday, April 8, 14:30, East Lounge
The Study. We provide new experimental evidence for analyzing most prop as a superlative construction,(2). The evidence comes in the form of a latent superlative reading that speakers access when verifying
sentences such as (1) relative to dot arrays that vary in the number of colors that they contain. This reading
is unexpected by the competing proposal in (3).
(1)

Most of the dots are blue
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(2)

JmostK(A)(B) = 1 iff ∃X[*A(X) & *B(X) & ∀Y ∈ C[Y 6= X → |X| > |Y |]]C = *A (by default)(3)

JmostK(A)(B) = 1 iff |A ∩ B| > |A| − |A ∩ B|

(4)

Jmore than halfK(A)(B) = 1 iff |A ∩ B| > 1/2|A|(Hackl 2009)(Lidz et al, in press)(2), derived compositionally from a superlative analysis for most, predicts that the verification of (1) is moresensitive to the number of colors in the array than a baseline provided by more than half, (4). Contrastively,(3) predicts that they are equally insensitive.
Results and Discussion. We observe a Truth × #Colors interaction in accuracy rates for most (p < 0.05)
but not for more than half. We argue that the interaction is due to participants responding True when|A ∩ B| is greater than the cardinality of each salient subset of A − B even when |A ∩ B| < |A − B|, i.e. whenparticipants interpret (1) as superlative with the comparison class C partitioned according to color. Support
comes from a post-hoc analysis of reaction times, which reveals a split between participants who interpret(1) superlatively and participants who interpret it proportionally.

Global optimality in Japanese mimetic voicing
KAZUTAKA KURISU (Kobe College)
Saturday, April 9, 17:30, East Lounge
Exploring morphophonological mimetic voicing in Japanese, I argue that global optimality assumed in classic
OT is superior to serial local optimization maintained in Harmonic Serialism and OT-CC. Gradualness andharmonic ascent are two hallmarks of these two derivational theories. Gradualness dictates that Gen may
apply at most one phonological change at once. Moreover, harmonic ascent requires every derivational stepto improve harmony with respect to a given constraint ranking.
Japanese mimetic voicing is morphophonological in the sense that it is associated with negative connotations
such as dullness and coarseness. This voicing phenomenon usually targets the initial consonant of a mimetic
root (e.g., /kata-kata/ > [gata-gata] ‘rattling’). In addition to a root-initial consonant, a root-medial consonant undergoes voicing when it is /p/ (e.g., /tapu-tapu/ > [dabu-dabu] ‘baggy’). This voicing of medial/p/ is best viewed as emergence of the unmarked.
In classic OT, gradualness is not required, so fell swoop voicing of two root consonants may take place inexamples like [dabu-dabu]. It turns out that such examples are not handled with Harmonic Serialism and
OT-CC even though several analytical possibilities exist. The problem with these two derivational theories
is that any gradual attempt to generate correct outputs is barred by harmonic ascent. Harmonic ascent is a
key property of Harmonic Serialism and OT-CC, so the problem stems from their fundamental architectures.
I conclude that Japanese mimetic voicing offers evidence for global optimality maintained in classic OT.

Making the first step correct in syntax: Evidence from Emirati Arabic sluicing
TOMMI LEUNG (United Arab Emirates University)
AAMNA SHEMEILI (United Arab Emirates University)
Friday, April 8, 16:30, West Lounge
Emirati Arabic has two types of wh-questions, i.e. wh-fronting derived by movement, and wh-cleft that is not
movement-induced. It also possesses sluicing which is similar to many languages, e.g. John yashrab shaj, basmaa ‘arf shuu ‘John 3sg.drink something, but not 1sg.know what’. Emirati Arabic Sluicing (EAS) can beanalyzed by TP-deletion at PF as proposed by Merchant (2001). This is supported by the fact that in EAS,
island constraints as interface conditions are not observed. EAS presents the following puzzle, i.e. is theunderlying source of sluicing wh-fronting or wh-cleft? Merchant called the latter strategy ‘pseudosluicing’.
Applying Merchant’s diagnostic to distinguish between sluicing and pseudosluicing, EAS allows both as theunderlying sources. The choice is not random, but depends on (i) the PF of the antecedent clause (e.g. Merger
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vs. Sprouting), and (ii) the semantic interpretation of EAS. The dual-source approach to EAS suggests thatsyntax does not freely generate offending structures (i.e. wh-fronting) for PF-repair (cf. Boeckx 2003, Sato2009). Syntax makes sure that numerations are ‘carefully’ selected to avoid potential crash. The structuraldescription in which sluicing functions as PF-repair is ad-hoc and should not be entertained seriously, i.e.
(i) if the antecedent clause contains an island constraint and wh-dependency across the island, and (ii)
Sprouting. That the licensing condition of EAS relies upon the PF of the antecedent clause also casts
doubt on Merchant’s Preposition Stranding Generalization, which says that morphosyntactic constraints(e.g. preposition stranding) continue to play a role in sluicing.

Temporal and inferential interpretation of Korean direct evidential -teDONGSIK LIM (Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientı́ficas)
Friday, April 8, 9:00, West Lounge
Korean verbal ending -te- introduces the evidential implication that the speaker has direct (visual) evidence
about his/her assertion. However, when used without any overt tense, the sentence with -te- is interpreted
as past, and when used with a past or future marker -te- introduces the (apparent) inferential evidentiality(based on direct evidence). To solve this, I propose a lexical entry for -te-, which introduces the presupposition
that there is a salient time t before the utterance time, and that the speaker at t has direct evidence compatible
with p. I further assume that when there is no overt tense, a covert anaphoric tense is used.
This proposal explains the puzzle as follows. When -te- is used without any tense marker, the covert
anaphoric tense is ‘anchored’ to t in the presupposition of -te-. Therefore the sentence is interpreted as
past. With the past tense, since -te- indicates that direct evidence is only compatible with the assertion,-te- triggers the implicature that the speaker does not have stronger (direct perceptive) evidence. Thus, thespeaker would not use -te- when (s)he has direct evidence w.r.t. the assertion, but use it only when his/herevidence is compatible with the assertion. Hence, the inferential evidentiality. Finally, with the future tense,
since the speaker cannot perceive the eventuality which will occur in the future, the inferential evidentiality(based on direct evidence) is triggered. After solving the puzzle, I will also discuss some implications of the
proposed entry for -te-.

A syntactic account of interrogative verbs in Kavalan
DONG-YI LIN (University of Florida)
Friday, April 8, 14:00, West Lounge
The present study proposes a syntactic account for the derivation of interrogative verbs (IVs) in Kavalan,an Austronesian language in Taiwan. We assume that the voice markers in Kavalan are different types ofverb-defining head v. The correlation between the transitivity of IVs and voice markers can find a natural
explanation on this assumption. The syntactic similarities between a transitive ‘do.what’-question and a‘do.how’-question can also be explained if the patient voice marker in this language is analyzed as v CAUSE
that necessarily implies an endpoint.
This analysis can also account for the syntactic and semantic properties of tanian ‘where’. The use of tanian‘where’ as a verb is restricted to questions about the location of the theme argument in a ditransitive event.
Questions concerning the location where an event takes place cannot utilize tanian as a verb. The derivationof tanian as a verb involves a v P-shell structure with an implicational causal relation between the higher v P
headed by v CAUSE and the lower v P headed by v BECOME . The interpretation of this v P-shell structure is
only compatible with questions about the location of a theme argument.
Taking into account syntactic principles/constraints like Head Movement Constraint and Empty Category
Principle, the proposed analysis can further predict what interrogative words can and cannot be used asverbs in Kavalan. The predictions are borne out, as illustrated by the syntactic and semantic properties oftani ‘how many’, mayni ‘which’, and zanitiana ‘whose’.

24Temporal construals of relative clauses in child French
OANA LUNGU (Université de Nantes)
Thursday, April 7, 16:30, East Lounge
I report experimental results with 4;4–7-year-old French children testing the construal of the present and theimparfait in Relative Clauses (RCs) embedded under a matrix past. The main findings show that Frenchchildren (i) reject adult indexical construals of the imparfait when the RC involves “be + P(repositional)
P(hrase)s”, but not when it involves “activity verbs” (ii) allow non-adult simultaneous construals of thepresent with “activity verbs”. I argue that the unexpected rejection of the indexical imparfait arises because
children analyze RCs as reduced clauses (similar to Japanese present tensed RCs, cf. Kusumoto 1999).
The “reduced clause” strategy, available with “be + PPs” but not with “activity verbs”, gives rise toa simultaneous construal, false in the “indexical imparfait” scenario. The unexpected acceptance of thepresent tensed RCs with “activity verbs” arises because children construe present as a zero tense (in thesense of Kratzer 1998).
Interestingly, it has been reported in the literature (Hollebrandse 2000) that Japanese children also allow
non-adult simultaneous construals of the past in RCs, in addition to adult simultaneous construals of thepresent. The French and Japanese data seem to indicate that children speaking parametrically different
languages pass through a stage where they have the same options for the simultaneous construals. I would
like to suggest that this is due to the fact that their grammar contains zero tenses, in addition to indexical
tenses. More work should be done in the future to investigate this conjecture.

Correctness of OT online algorithms on Prince and Tesar’s (2004) test cases
GIORGIO MAGRI (Institut Jean-Nicod / École Normale Supérieure)
Friday, April 8, 9:30, East Lounge
A promotion/demotion OT online model (OTOM) for the acquisition of phonotactics works as follows: atevery time, it entertains a current hypothesis of the target ranking; it receives a piece of data from thetarget adult language; and it slightly updates its current ranking, by promoting (demoting) winner- (loser-)preferring constraints. Typical examples are Tesar and Smolensky’s (1998) CD, Boersma’s (1997) GLA, andMagri’s (2010) variant thereof. There has been considerable analytical work addressing the issue of OTOMs’convergence, namely whether the models only perform a finite number of updates and thus eventually settle
on a final grammar; see Tesar and Smolensky (1998), Pater (2008), and Magri (2010). There has been instead
little analytical work addressing OTOMs’ correctness, namely whether the final grammar entertained by themodels is restrictive enough to capture the target phonotactics. As faithfulness constraints work towards
the preservation of contrast and against restrictiveness, Prince and Tesar (2004) conjecture that the final
ranking is correct provided that it ranks the faithfulness constraints as low as possible, compatibly with thedata. Prince and Tesar furthermore single out three simple case studies where a faithfulness constraint can(and thus should) be ranked low. In this talk, I will show analytically that promotion/demotion OTOMs
work fine on these three case studies. This result rests on a simple but general technique to study the current
ranking (vector) entertained by an OTOM at a generic time. Further prospects for the theory of correctness
of OTOMs of the acquisition of phonotactics are discussed.

More than one solution
ORA MATUSHANSKY (Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS / Utrecht University / Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique /Université Paris 8)

TANIA IONIN (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Friday, April 8, 17:30, West Lounge
It is well-known since at least Bresnan 1973 that the English more can correspond either to the synthetic
comparative of much, or to the freestanding form of the comparative affix -er, with mo-support working
analogously to do-support. Likewise, than may combine with a full or partially elided finite CP, or with a25

smaller constituent (Hankamer 1973, Napoli 1983, Lechner 2001, Pancheva 2006). The so-called ‘modified
numeral’ more than five children (Barwise and Cooper 1981, Krifka 1999, Hackl 2000, Geurts and Nouwen2007) can be translated into Russian in four different ways, which suggests that it can encode any of thefour resulting structures. First, more can be translated as either bol’še (which we analyze as the suppletive
comparative of mnogo ‘much/many’) or bolee (a case of mo-support). Second, than can correspond either
to čem (clausal comparative) or to Genitive case (phrasal comparative) (cf. Pancheva 2006).
We argue that the bol’še clausal comparative is ambiguous between structures with many vs. much, ananalysis that is motivated by ambiguity of numeral-containing comparatives, as well as by the ability ofbol’še (like mnogo) to function as a direct object or adverbial modifier in the absence of a head noun. We
assume a structure with much for bolee comparatives, and analyze the subject of the comparative clauseas a property, not an entity (cf. Landman 2003, Ionin and Matushansky 2006). Our analysis captures thesimilarities between comparatives used with numerals and in other environments, and provides empiricalevidence for the different derivations of more.

Analyzing weight effects on preverbal constituents: The case of Spanish subjects
ROBERTO MAYORAL HERNÁNDEZ (University of Alabama at Birmingham)
ASIER ALCÁZAR (University of Missouri)
Saturday, April 9, 16:30, West Lounge
Abundant research reports that weight is a processing constraint that affects the ordering of postverbal
constituents (Hawkins 1994, 2004, Wasow 1997, 2002, Wasow and Arnold 2003, Rosenbach 2005). Our study
is a novel contribution to the weight literature because it analyzes whether preverbal constituents may beaffected as well, specifically subjects. We focus on the position of Spanish subjects with unaccusative verbs(Perlmutter 1978), because they may precede or follow the verb. To this end, we extracted sentences fromthe online corpus CREA and utilized statistical methods to determine significance. We took into accountthe presence of co-occurring constituents in preverbal and postverbal positions, as they change the overallsentence weight. The results indicate that weight influences both preverbal and postverbal positions inseveral ways. First, heavier subjects tend to be postverbal. Second, the presence of preverbal constituentsfavors postverbal subjects. Conversely, the presence of postverbal constituents favors preverbal subjects.
The subject tends to appear in complementary distribution with other co-occurring constituents. The more
flexible syntax of Spanish enables weight interactions between preverbal and postverbal constituents, which
had never been reported. This indicates that the human processor favors a balanced distribution of weightacross the preverbal and postverbal domains.

A morpho-syntactic account of embedded imperatives
DAVID J. MEDEIROS (University of Michigan)
Thursday, April 7, 9:30, West Lounge
In this paper, I link syntactic embedding of imperatives to rich imperative morphology, examining a numberof languages but most specifically Ancient Greek. It has long been recognized that Ancient Greek allows
syntactic embedding of imperatives while English does not (Goodwin (1875), Gildersleeve (1900), Rivero
and Terzi (1995)). I explain the contrast between languages (such as Ancient Greek) that allow syntactic
embedding of imperatives and those which do not (such as English) within the independently motivatedtheory of Feature Transfer (Chomsky 2008). Extending Feature Transfer to this domain helps explain
the difference with respect to syntactic embedding, adding minimal complexity to the learning task. The
analysis also adopts and deduces aspects of Zanuttini’s (2008) proposal regarding English imperatives, andadditionally examines data from languages such as Kobon and Bhojpuri.

26

Learning ranking information from unspecified overt forms using the join
NAZARRÉ MERCHANT (Eckerd College)
Friday, April 8, 9:00, East Lounge
In this talk I propose a learning algorithm in which a learner determines necessary ranking information fromunspecified or partially specified words. It does so by using the join operator (Merchant 2008), an operator
on pairs of ERCs that yields an ERC that entails all ERCs that are jointly entailed by the original two.
The algorithm works by first producing sets of ERCs from consistent lexica for an overt form (similar to
Merchant and Tesar 2006). These sets are then processed using the join operator in such a way to guarantee
the production of all shared ranking information from the original sets.
This algorithm highlights the fact that an overt form that is highly ambiguous regarding its underlying
representation can still yield useful ranking information. For example, in a system with three constraints,
a learner may hypothesize two lexica leading to two rankings, say C1  C2  C3 and C1  C3  C2.
Regardless of which one is correct, in the target language C1 must dominate both C2 and C3.
This algorithm when applied to contrast pairs (Tesar 2004) and augmented with a lexical specification
algorithm can be shown to succeed on linguistic systems on which an algorithm that requires full specificationof underlying forms to determine ranking information fails (e.g. Merchant and Tesar 2006) providing further
evidence that the learner can and must be able to gather information about the target grammar from forms
that are not fully specified.

A novel view of resumption in Serbo-Croatian
IVANA MITROVIĆ (Stony Brook University)
Saturday, April 9, 14:00, West Lounge
Resumptive pronouns (RP) in Serbo-Croatian (SC) can occur only in relative clauses introduced by a complementizer and their distribution can be divided into three contexts: disallowed, obligatory and optional.
I argue that RP distribution is based on case and in some instances case and theta-role of RP and relative
head. The following generalizations hold: (i) nominative RPs are disallowed, (ii) inherent case marked RPs
are obligatory and (iii) accusative or dative experiencer RPs are optional and require a case and theta-role
matching relative head. The analysis is set in the Pesetsky and Torrego (2006) feature system. The nominative RPs disallowance follows from the obligatory presence of complementizers introducing relative clauses;
nominative RPs are disallowed by Economy on a T-to-C account of overt complementizers. Inherent caseis uniformly treated as PP. Evidence comes from binding data, showing that inherent case marked elements
cannot bind; hence adpositional structure. Inherently case marked RPs are obligatory because (i) PPs are
instances of interpretable features and/or (ii) preposition stranding is disallowed. Dative experiencer RPs
differ crucially from indirect object RPs: (i) dative experiencers can bind and (ii) they can never co-occur
with accusatives. They are in a structural case position, assigned case by V. This structural case is the only
one that the matching requirement can target: if there is a theta- and case-matching relative head, T featureinterpretability is not specified in V; hence an optionality of RP.

Cleft in Japanese: A base-generation analysis and its empirical justification
YASUHIKO MIURA (University of Southern California)
Saturday, April 9, 14:30, West Lounge
The focus phrase in the Japanese cleft may appear with or without a case-marker. This paper deals with
the Japanese cleft with a case-marker on the focus phrase (C(ase-)M(arked)-Cleft). CM-Cleft, unlike nonCM-Cleft, exhibits subjacency effects, as discussed in Hoji 1987. We can thus hope to obtain insight into theproperties of the Computational System, assumed to be at the core of the language faculty, by investigating
the CM-Cleft, provided that subjacency effects are syntactic in nature and are a reflection of properties of
the Computational System.
The analyses of the CM-Cleft in the literature are divided into two types depending on whether the focus
27phrase has been moved to its surface position (“movement analysis”) or base-generated (“base-generation
analysis”). I argue against the movement analysis on the basis of the NPI licensing, Condition D effects andresumption facts in the CM-Cleft. I then propose a base-generation analysis in line with Hoji 1987, further
articulating the structure of the CM-Cleft on the basis of the new data. More specifically, I propose thatthe focus phrase in the CM-Cleft forms a small clause with the presuppositional CP, and is situated in an
A0 -position, so that it is interpreted for BVA (bound variable anaphora) and DR (distributive reading) bymeans of the mechanism of chain binding of Barss 1986, available for A0 -chains. It will be shown that the
proposal is supported by the results of on-line experiments on the predicted schematic asymmetries deduced
from the hypotheses under the proposal.

From phonetics to phonology: Learning epenthesis
REBECCA MORLEY (Ohio State University)
Friday, April 8, 16:30, East LoungeThis work is an experimental investigation of a diachronic source for a default epenthesis system. A theoretical account of synchronic phonological patterns as the product of natural sound changes (e.g. Blevins
2004) is adopted. Under this view, an epenthetic consonant could emerge from listener misperception of thenatural transition between two adjacent vowels: ratu+@k, pronounced as ratuw @k, re-analyzed as ratuw@k.
The major question of this work is under what conditions such a change could come about.
In three artificial grammar learning experiments adult participants are trained on various morphophonemic
alternations. In experiment 1, consonant-final stems are held-out, training consisting only of vowel-final
stems and inflected forms (ratu; ratuw@k), and listeners interpret phonetically natural glides as the product of coarticulation. In the second set of experiments, consonant-final forms were included in training(darum; darumw@k), forcing a phonemic percept of the glide—in all contexts. In the final set of experiments
consonant-final stems were again held-out, but phonetically unnatural tokens were included, surfacing variably with natural tokens. This led to frequency matching in novel contexts, but boosting (of the naturalvariant) in familiar ones.
These results indicate that both phonetic expectation and morphological economy can produce categoricallearning behavior. Phonological predictability, on the other hand, does not generalize in the same way.
And a naturalness bias may be more likely to affect familiar (variably realized) words, than unfamiliar ones.
There are important implications here for developing a full learning-based model of the emergence of abstract
synchronic patterns from diachronic phonetic tendencies.

Nominal positions in Turkish
MIHO NAGAI (City University of New York Graduate Center)
ÖNER ÖZÇELİK (McGill University)
Thursday, April 7, 17:00, West Lounge
Focusing on Turkish, the goal of this paper is to show that internal arguments of verbs do not uniformly
occur in the complement position of the verb (contra e.g. Perlmutter 1978).
Previous literature showed that, in Turkish, an indefinite bare NP never moves from certain syntactic domains
such as VP/v P (Kornfilt 1984). Phrasal stress facts also support this: For instance, the indefinite subjectof unaccusatives stays within the same phonological phrase (PPh) as the verb, just like the indefinite (bare)object of transitives (Özçelik & Nagai 2010). This means that the bare internal argument of a verb appears
within VP although this does not ensure that bare NPs must occur in the complement position of the verb.
We hold that internal arguments of a certain class of verbs occur in the specifier position (cf. Larson 1988;
Hale & Keyser 2000), irrespective of the unaccusativity (or transitivity) of verbs. Based on the aspectual
properties of VPs (e.g. Vendler 1967) and low adverb placement, we propose that bare internal arguments
of Turkish achievements occur in SpecVP while those of accomplishments occur in the complement positionof V. Further, it is shown that the prosodic phrasing reflects the syntactic structure.
28

In conclusion, it seems that there are (at least) two syntactic positions, in Turkish, for bare internal arguments, and that achievements and non-achievements (accomplishments) are syntactically different withregard to VP-structures.

The economy of encoding and anaphoric dependency with relational nouns: Evidence
from child grammar
TERUE NAKATO-MIYASHITA (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Thursday, April 7, 17:30, East LoungeThis paper shows the results of an experiment investigating Japanese-learning children’s interpretation of
constructions with body-part noun/non-body-part noun objects. The results will be shown to support twotheoretical proposals about adult syntax/semantics: (I) the economy-based theory of binding (Reuland (2001,2010)) and (II) the syntactic/semantic distinction between relational and non-relational nouns (Vergnaud
and Zubizarreta (1992), Partee and Borschev (1998) among others). Body-part nominal objects in Japaneseshow an ambiguity between alienable and inalienable readings, and with the inalienable reading they showproperties similar to anaphoric binding. In the economy-based theory of binding, different ways of encoding
the identity of referents are hierarchically ordered in accordance with the number of cross-modular steps
required, as in (1).
(1)

Economy of encoding
narrow syntax < logical syntax (C-I interface) < discourse(Reuland (2010: 272))

Adopting this theory and the assumption that relational nouns have hidden variables in them, we predictthat the inalienable reading is more economical than the alienable one. The inalienable reading is derived
through Agree/logical binding in narrow syntax/logical syntax, while the alienable reading is derived throughdiscourse binding (Nakato (2010), Nakato-Miyashita (2011)). This analysis predicts that Japanese-learning
children should show a strong preference for the inalienable reading in their acquisition of body-part nominal
objects. The experimental results confirm this prediction and show (A) that the hierarchy of the economy
of encoding is operative from the early stages of language acquisition and (B) that children show knowledgeof the syntactic/semantic distinction between relational and non-relational nouns.

On idiom locality and the architecture of the grammar: Evidence from Palauan
JUSTIN NUGER (University of Maryland)
Friday, April 8, 13:30, West Lounge
DPs in English VP-idioms (kick the bucket; pull strings) differ in their ability to be passivized, relativized,
modified, pronominalized, etc., and such discrepancies have proven difficult to analyze. Many proposals
insist that idioms satisfy locality requirements that constrain the relations between their parts, and different
idioms satisfy locality at different stages of a derivation. I enrich the debate, examining a class of idioms in
Palauan, an understudied Austronesian language with about 15,000 speakers. If Palauan has EPP-driven
subject movement, then the locality requirement for this class of idioms must be satisfied at PF.
Each idiom contains a predicate that selects a particular argument DP containing the inalienably possessednoun reng “heart” as its head N0 , along with a possessor DP. With this reng-DP, the predicate assumes anidiomatic interpretation (impossible with a non-reng-DP). The important data involves bi-clausal subjectraising constructions: raising a full reng-DP subject from an embedded clause blocks the idiomatic interpretation. There is no problem raising non-reng-DP subjects (with the nonidiomatic reading).
The idiomatic interpretation cannot be assigned when the structure is base-generated, and it cannot bereconstructed from a lower copy of the subject at LF (there would always be a copy of the reng-DP in a
local configuration with the predicate). For the idiomatic reading to be possible with a reng-idiom embedded
under a raising predicate, the reng-DP must remain low and undergo possessor-raising to subject, satisfying
EPP-requirements of the raising predicate. Palauan idioms thus provide evidence that the PF-branch is a29domain restricting idiom locality.

On the status of impossible words systematically derived by the grammatical system
ISABEL OLTRA-MASSUET (Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientı́ficas)
Thursday, April 7, 16:30, West Lounge
Despite the traditional view that -ble adjectives are productively derived from any transitive verb, which
accounts for the contrast basura incinerable ‘incinerable waste’ and *basura ardible ‘burnable garbage’(unaccusative-only burn) in Spanish, there is a pleonastic construction of the form V {todo/algo de/nadade} lo Vble where essentially any verb can appear, including unergative verbs (e.g. Tosió todo lo tosible‘cough-3sgPast all lo cough-ble’) or unaccusative verbs, be they degree achievements with variable telicity(e.g. Ardió todo lo ardible ‘burn-3sgPast all lo burn-ble’) or prototypically telic verbs (Ocurrió todo loocurrible ‘occur-3sgPast all lo occur-ble’).
These data point out a new paradox concerning the status of impossible words, which can nevertheless be
regularly and systematically derived in a very particular context. A basic question concerns the architectureof grammar, i.e. how these aberrant words can be systematically generated in an appropriately constrained
fashion.
The main claim I put forward is that syntax and semantics conspire with morphology to the effect ofbuilding such a priori aberrant forms. I show that their grammaticality must be a function of their externalor exoskeletal properties in interaction with general features of quantification (Sánchez López 1999), thegrammar of cognate elements (Pereltsvaig 1999), the grammar of degrees (Kennedy 1999, 2004), and thegeneral grammar of achievements, unergatives and unaccusatives (Dowty 1979, de Miguel 1999), together
with some general facts of the grammar of Spanish—concretely, its having a special overt morpheme lo, avariable that can range over different domains (Bosque & Moreno 1990).

How abstract are phonological representations? Evidence from distributional perceptual learning
BOŻENA PAJA˛ K (University of California, San Diego)
ROGER LEVY (University of California, San Diego)
Friday, April 8, 17:00, East Lounge
Cross-linguistic research suggests that phonetic categories are represented phonologically in terms of articulatory or acoustic-phonetic properties shared among members of natural classes. However, it is still unclear
how abstractly these properties are represented psychologically. For example, contrastive length can characterize almost any pair of segments, but the articulatory/acoustic correlates of length differ across segments.
Is then contrastive length represented as an abstract property shared by all short segments on the one handand all long segments on the other? Or is the representation of length specific to individual segments orsegment classes that are articulatorily/acoustically similar? We address this question by testing adults’
perception and learning of novel sound contrasts: if phonetic properties are abstracted across individual
segments, then we expect that learning a novel distinction in one phonetic dimension for a given class ofsegments should be generalized to another class of segments, even if the raw articulatory/acoustic correlatesof that distinction are rather different across segment classes. We tested this prediction by training monolingual English speakers in a distributional learning paradigm (Maye & Gerken, 2000) on a novel contrast,
segmental length, and testing them on discrimination of length for both trained and untrained items. Results
show both learning and generalization from one class of segments (sonorant consonants) to another class(obstruents), broadening the empirical range of phonological contrasts for which distributional learning has
been shown to be effective and providing evidence that mental phonological representations are abstract andcross-cut a variety of segments, regardless of their articulatory/acoustic similarity.

30

Duration variation triggered by consonant voicing is not gestural: Evidence fromproduction
ANNE PYCHA (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
JOHN KINGSTON (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Saturday, April 9, 10:00, East Lounge
Speech sounds vary according to their context. In many cases, articulatory gestures predict this variation,
but in a few puzzling cases they do not. A classic example is the variation in vowel duration conditioned
by voicing of the following consonant. For example, [i] exhibits longer durations in bead than in beat,but attempts to explicitly link the gesture of vocal fold vibration with duration, e.g. by measuring muscular
activity (Raphael 1975), have produced no consensus. The theoretical status of voicing variation thus remains
unclear. In this production study, we take a more generalized approach: all contextual variation, if it does
indeed have an articulatory basis, should exhibit the same basic pattern of gestural overlap or displacementin the same environments. As we show, however, beat-bead variation defies this pattern. We therefore argue
that duration variation triggered by voicing requires a separate, non-articulatory explanation.

‘Perfect’ doesn’t mean past: The classification of prospectives
SYLVIA L. REED (University of Arizona)
Saturday, April 9, 13:30, East Lounge
In this paper I provide a novel analysis of the particle gu in Scottish Gaelic (hereafter Gaelic). I argue that
sentences with gu are a type of forward-looking perfect. I argue that gu contributes two pieces of meaning:(1) that reference time (RT) fully precedes event time (ET), and (2) that the interval between RT and ET
is small.
Sentences with gu convey something like English ‘about to’:(1)

Bha/tha/bithidh mi gu litira sgriobhadh.
be.past/pres/fut I
gu letter write.inf‘I was/am/will be about to write a letter.’

However, the distributional characteristics of gu and English ‘about to’ differ. I depart from Ramchand(1993)’s analysis of gu as an anchor of tinitial of event time to tense, and argue that gu is an instantiation of
the Aspect head in Gaelic that establishes an ET in a subsequence relation with RT. Furthermore, I argue
from the distribution of time adverbials that gu requires that the ET be relatively close to the RT. I use εto denote an ‘arbitrarily small quantity’:(2)

JguK = λP (vt) .λt(i) [t ≺ τ (e) & P (e) & ∃ε(N) [0 < |t − τ (e)| < ε]](t ≺ τ (e) iff there is no t0 ⊂ τ (e), s.t. t0  t)

I argue, then, that gu is essentially a forward-looking (‘prospective’) perfect—that it expresses the same typeof time relation as retrospective perfects, but in the other direction and with a restriction on the RT-ET
interval. Given this, I argue that gu is the mirror image (in time) of one of the language’s other aspectual
particles, as dèidh.

Do infants have more detailed lexical representation than adults?
JIE REN (Brown University)
JAMES L. MORGAN (Brown University)
Thursday, April 7, 17:00, East Lounge
Previous research has sometimes suggested that early lexical representations are less detailed than mature
representations (Stager & Werker, 1997). However, infants display graded sensitivity to onset mispronunciations varying in severity (White & Morgan, 2008). Here we present three studies using intermodal preferential
looking that show that infants’ lexical representations are at least as specific as those of adults.
31

Experiment 1 tested whether White & Morgan (2008)’s results apply to coda mispronunciations. Infants
heard tokens of familiar words with correct pronunciations, or one-feature, two-feature or three-featurecoda mispronunciations. A significant linear trend of decreased looking to familiar objects with increasing
severity of coda mispronunciation replicated White & Morgan’s findings for onsets. Nineteen-month-olds
have detailed representations of both onsets and codas of familiar words.
Experiments 2 and 3 tested whether 19-month-olds specify non-coronal consonants but underspecify coronalconsonants, as adults have been claimed to do (Lahiri & Reetz, 2010). For both onsets and codas, wefound significant effects of pronunciation (correct/mispronounced), but no significant effects of specification.
Contrary to predictions from underspecification accounts, we did not find pronunciation-by-specificationinteractions for either onsets or codas. Infants symmetrically specify both coronal and noncoronal phonemesin the lexicon. Perhaps 19-month-olds have not yet learned which segments can be safely underspecified. Or
perhaps adults’ immediate representations are symmetrically specified, just as infants’ are. To adjudicate
between these explanations, we are currently testing adults in an on-line task similar to that used here for
infants.

Determiners, parentheticals, and projectability: Experimental evidence
WILLIAM SALMON (University of British Columbia)
Friday, April 8, 13:30, East Lounge
Projective meaning has received a substantial increase of attention in the semantics and pragmatics literaturerecently (Roberts et al. 2009). A significant amount of this attention has focused on the projective propertiesof parentheticals, which are often seen to project to, or be oriented to, the speaker of the indirect speech
report in question. This pilot study is concerned with the projective behavior of parentheticals in indirectspeech reports like (1), and the extent to which the presence of definite and indefinite determiners affects
whether the parentheticals are seen to project.
(1)

John said that Kelly, the/ a guy from down the street, is coming over later.

The study presents audiovisual treatments of speakers relaying indirect speech reports like (1) to a third
party, who is also present in the video. Test subjects were then given modified truth value judgment tasks
in response to the videos. The preliminary results suggest that whether such parentheticals are definite
or indefinite makes little difference in how the test subjects rated them: by and large, both were rated as
non-projective. This is somewhat surprising, as definites in general have long been known to project in thepresupposition literature.
The results ultimately support arguments by Harris & Potts (2009) and Salmon (2009) that projection isstrongly influenced by pragmatic factors rather than a purely semantic account. And, the approach takenwith the video and truth value judgments presents a novel way of collecting data in an area where intuitions
are notoriously shaky and difficult to interpret.

Predicting rhyme with segment confusion
SVERRE STAUSLAND JOHNSEN (Harvard University)
Thursday, April 7, 10:00, East Lounge
Intuitively, a-b is a better rhyme than a-c when a and b are more ‘similar’ to each other than a and c are.
But how do we measure this similarity? I show in this talk that the perceptual similarity between segments
as calculated from confusion matrices is a much better predictor of people’s judgments of rhymes than are
similarity measures based on articulatory or acoustic feature systems.

32

A case of violation repair under sluicing and consequences for genitive of quantification in Slavic
SANDRA STJEPANOVIĆ (West Virginia University)
Friday, April 8, 17:00, West LoungeThis paper presents evidence that a violation of Inverse Case Filter for inherent case (IICF) can be repairedby sluicing, and discusses the implications of this finding for the analysis of Genitive of Quantification (GQ)in Slavic.
The evidence is based on Serbo-Croatian (SC) data in (1)-(2).
(1)*Kolikomuškaraca će on prići?
will he approach
how-many menGEN‘How many men will he approach?’(2)

ali ne znam
kolikomuškaraca.
Znamdaće on prićijednoj ženi,
know1sg that will he approach oneDAT womanDAT but not know1sg how-many menGEN‘I know that he will approach one woman, but I don’t know how many men.’

These data show that QP’s such as koliko muškaraca, where Q assigns GQ to its complement, are infelicitous
as complements of inherent case-marking verbs unless they are remnants of sluicing. Bošković (2008), whobuilds on Franks (1994), who builds on Babby (1987), attributes the ungrammaticality of (1) to a violation
caused by the impossibility of the verb to discharge its inherent case onto its QP complement. This ultimately
results in a violation of Theta-Criterion at LF, under Chomsky’s (1986) conception of inherent case that ties
inherent case to theta-role assignment. While I follow Bošković’s (2008) insight that the ungrammaticality ofcases like (1) is due to a violation of the IICF, I argue based on (2), that IICF is a morphological requirement,
which allows it to be repaired by sluicing. I also show that the analysis can be extended to GQ in Russian.

Individuation, temporal interpretation, and “bare classifier”: A discourse-informed
study of the classifier system of Shishan (Lingao/Be, Hainan Island, China)
XUEHUA XIANG (University of Illinois at Chicago)
Friday, April 8, 10:00, West Lounge
Combining native speaker intuition and naturally occurring conversation data, the current discussion isa discourse-informed study of the classifier system of Shishan, a dialect of Lingao (aka. Be) of the TaiKadai language family, spoken on northern Hainan Island, China. The study’s aim is two-fold: 1) survey a
previously unknown classifier system of the Lingao language thus augment the limited literature on Lingao/Be(cf. Hashimoto, 1982, 1985; Li, 1956, 1977); 2) empirically base an argument for a discourse-informed
perspective on classifiers.
Shishan nominals, similar to nominals in other Southeast Asian languages, may appear as bare nouns orwith a classifier (in post-position). Nevertheless, absent from previous literature of classifier languages isa phenomenon termed, “Bare Classifier,” in which the classifier alone constitutes a nominal expression.
Semantically similar to a singular third-person reference (he/she), the bare classifier, however, is distinct
from pronouns in its occurrence condition. The bare classifier reference is both deictic and definite, a usagethat is a typological and empirical testation/evidence of the inherent deictic nature of classifiers (cf. Cheng
and Sybesma, 1999).
The paper further illustrates various optional uses of Shishan classifiers whose temporality/specificity readings plausibly arise from the “singularization” and “individualization” meanings of the classifiers in general(see Cheng and Sybesma, 1999; Croft, 1994: 162; Longaobardi, 1994; Paris, 1981: 69), that is, the optional classifiers effectuate a temporal/temporary reading of the verbal predicate, attributing the describedsituation/event to a particularized subject.

33

Wh-indefinites and their licensing conditions
JIWON YUN (Cornell University)
Saturday, April 9, 14:00, East Lounge
It has been noted that cross-linguistically, indefinite expressions that have morphologically the same form
with wh-interrogatives (BWIs: bare wh-indefinites) appear in quite restricted environments. Thus researchers
have concluded that bare wh-words need to be bound by certain licensors to receive an existential reading(Cheng 1991, Li 1992, Postma 1994, Ha 2004, Yanovich 2005, Aldridge 2007, among others). However,
Korean does not fit into this generalization in that none of the general restrictions holds for BWIs. This paperargues that the seemingly exceptional distribution of Korean BWIs is due to their referential homonyms,
which can occur where a typical non-restricted existential expression cannot appear. This approach is inline with the view that attributes the exceptional wide scope reading of certain genuine indefinites to theirlexical ambiguity (Fodor & Sag 1982, Kratzer 1998). The lexical ambiguity analysis also correctly predicts
that the non-canonical occurrence of BWIs can only have a widest scope reading.

Morphological evidence for a movement analysis of adverbial clauses
JASON ZENTZ (Yale University)
Thursday, April 7, 10:00, West Lounge
Beginning with Geis (1970), several authors have provided syntactic, semantic, and etymological arguments
for a derivation of adverbial (subordinate) clauses that involves movement of an (often null) operator (seeHaegeman 2010a for a review). This paper provides morphological evidence for this view while arguing forseparate extraction sites for the moved elements in temporal and conditional clauses.
The Bantu language AkOOse (Hedinger 2008) exhibits wh-agreement (see Reintges, LeSourd, & Chung 2006
for a typology); that is, it marks its verbs with respect to whether an element has been extracted to the left
periphery. This extraction marking occurs not only in canonical wh-movement contexts (Chomsky 1977),
such as constituent questions, relative clauses, cleft questions, and topicalization, but also in temporal andconditional adverbial clauses.
Crucially, AkOOse wh-agreement encodes whether the extracted element originated above or below v. The
distribution of wh-agreement morphology shows that the operator in central conditional clauses is extracted
from a position above v (supporting Haegeman’s (2010b) claim), the moved element in central temporalclauses originates below v (allowing us to choose between two possibilities proposed in Haegeman 2007), andthere is no extraction in peripheral adverbial clauses (as argued in Haegeman 2007).
Wh-agreement provides compelling evidence for a movement analysis for both temporal and conditional
central adverbial clauses. Due to its sensitivity to height of extraction, AkOOse lends insight into the questionof where the moved elements originate, unlike languages like Irish (McCloskey 2001) where wh-agreement
only registers the presence of movement.

34

Author Index
Abner, Natasha
Aelbrecht, Lobke
Alcázar, Asier
Bishop, Jason
Cameron, Richard
Chen-Main, Joan
Constant, Noah
Coon, Jessica
Crawford, Jean
Dikken, Marcel den
Ettlinger, Marc
Gallagher, Gillian
Giannakidou, Anastasia
Gorman, Kyle
Graff, Peter
Grodzinsky, Yosef
Hackl, Martin
Han, Chung-hye
Hartman, Jeremy
Harwood, Will
Henriksen, Nicholas C.
Howard, Edwin
Huang, Yu-Chi
Husband, E. Matthew
Inkelas, Sharon
Ionin, Tania
Johnson, Keith
Joshi, Aravind K.
Kaiser, Elsi
Kajino, Sakiko
Kaya, Neşe
Keshet, Ezra
Kingston, John
Kotek, Hadas
Kratzer, Angelika
Kurisu, Kazutaka
Leung, Tommi
Levy, Roger

Lidz, Jeffrey
Lim, Dongsik
Lin, Dong-yi
Lungu, Oana
Magri, Giorgio
Matushansky, Ora
Mayoral Hernández, Roberto
Medeiros, David J.
Merchant, Nazarré
Mitrović, Ivana
Miura, YasuhikoMorgan, James L.
Morley, Rebecca
Nagai, Miho
Nakato-Miyashita, Terue
Nuger, Justin
Oltra-Massuet, IsabelÖzçelik, Öner
Paja˛ k, Bożena
Papadopoulou, Despoina
Phillips, Colin
Preminger, Omer
Pycha, Anne
Reed, Sylvia L.
Ren, Jie
Richards, Norvin
Salmon, William
Shemeili, Aamna
Stausland Johnsen, Sverre
Stavrou, Melita
Stjepanović, Sandra
Storoshenko, Dennis Ryan
Sudo, Yasutada
Toda, Kristen
Xiang, Xuehua
Yoon, Suwon
Yun, Jiwon
Zentz, Jason

13
13
26
14
14
15
15
16
16
13
16
17
17, 18
18
18
10
22
19
18
19
20
22
20
21
11
25
11
15
20
21
21
22
31
22
11
23
23
30

35

19
24
24
25
25
25
26
26
27
27
27
31
28
28
29
29
30
28
30
17
11
16
31
31
31
12
32
23
32
17
33
19
22
14
33
18
34
34

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1010 E. 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637 USA
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/cls