The 53rd Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society
May 25-27, 2017

Contents
Welcome . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Schedule
Day 1 (Thursday, May 25, 2017) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Day 2 (Friday, May 26, 2017) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Day 3 (Saturday, May 27, 2017) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Invited talks
Lucas Champollion (New York University) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Itamar Francez (University of Chicago) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Thomas Graf (Stony Brook University) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Sun-Ah Jun (UCLA) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Audrey Li (USC) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Josep Quer (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
PapersSpecial Session: computational/mathematical linguistics
Alëna Aksënova & Aniello De Santo (Stony Brook University) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Hyunah Baek (Stony Brook University) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Hossep Dolatian & Jeff Heinz (University of Delaware) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Jonathan Dunn (Illinois Institute of Technology) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Yu Tomita (Sokendai) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Special Session: cross-linguistic quantification
Patrick Elliott (UCL), Andreea Nicolae & Uli Sauerland (ZAS) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Haoze Li (NYU) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Hsiu-Chen Daphne Liao (National Chiao-Tung University) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Yimei Xiang (Harvard University) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Special Session: east asian linguistics
Toru Ishii (Meiji) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .21
Kenji Oda (Syracuse) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Lukas Rieser (Kyoto) & Rihito Shirata (JSPS / University of the Ryukyus) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Jianrong Yu (University of Arizona) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
General Session experimental linguistics
Eli Asikin-Garmager (Iowa) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Andrea Beltrama, Erlinde Meertens & Maribel Romero (Konstanz) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Morwenna Hoeks, Grzegorz Lisowski, Jonathan Pesetsky & Alexandre Cremers (ILLC, Universityof Amsterdam) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Savithry Namboodiripad, Dayoung Kim (UC San Diego) & Gyeongnam Kim (Sogang) . . . . . . . . . . . 26
Anne Pycha (UW Milwaukee), Sharon Inkelas & Sarah Bakst (UC Berkeley) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
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Special Session intonation & prosody
Hossep Dolatian (University of Delaware) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .27
David Yoshikazu Oshima (Nagoya) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Jason Ostrove (UC Santa Cruz) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Shu-hao Shih (Rutgers) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
General Session: phonetics & phonology
Gasper Begus (Harvard) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .30
Nick Danis, Eileen Blum, Luca Iacoponi, Hazel Mitchley & Adam Jardine (Rutgers) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
Eleanor Glewwe (UCLA) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Sam Tilsen (Cornell) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
General Session: semantics
Matthias Lalisse (Johns Hopkins) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Xiao Li & Hongyong Liu (Queens College) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Mary Moroney (Cornell) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Emma Nguyen (UConn) & Lisa Pearl (UC Irvine) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Special Session: sign language linguistics
Natasha Abner (Montclair), Helen Koulidobrova (Central Connecticut), Ronnie Wilbur (Purdue) &Sandra Wood (McDaniel) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Laura Horton, Lilia Rissman, Susan Goldin-Meadow & Diane Brentari (University of Chicago) . . .34
Meltem Kelepir, Asli Özkul & Elvan Tamyurek Ozparlak (Bogazici University) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Jonathan Rawski (Stony Brook) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
General Session: syntax
Steven Foley, Nick Kalivoda & Maziar Toosarvandani (UC Santa Cruz) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
Edward Rubin (University of Utah) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
Matthew Tyler (Yale) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
General Session
Matthew Barros & Hadas Kotek (Yale) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Till Poppels & Andrew Kehler (UC San Diego) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Tom Roberts (UC Santa Cruz) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
General Session
Robert Borges & Justyna Olko (University of Warsaw) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Josh Phillips (Yale) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Yenan Sun (University of Chicago) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
Author Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

4

Welcome
Welcome to the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. We are very fortunate
this year to have so many eminent presenters including our invited speakers: Lucas Champollion,
Itamar Francez, Thomas Graf, Sun-Ah Jun, Audrey Li and Josep Quer.
In all, we have eleven stimulating sessions covering a broad spectrum of current topics, withspecial parasessions on Computational/Mathematical Linguistics, Cross-linguistic Quantification,
East Asian Linguistics, Intonation and Prosody, and Sign Language Linguistics.
The conference is being held 25-27 May, 2017, in Ida Noyes Hall at the University of Chicago(1212 East 59th Street, Chicago, IL 60637). Registration is at 8:30am all three days, with opening
remarks scheduled for 9:45am Thursday. We cordially invite all graduate students to attend our
Graduate Student Mixer at 7:00pm Thursday and we sincerely hope to see everyone at the closing
banquet, 6:00pm Saturday, which will feature the ever-popular karaoke, with some interesting
performances.
This year at our book table, CLS is pleased to offer a great assortment of topical books
and journals at discounted prices; publications are from John Benjamins, the MIT Press, theCambridge University Press, the University of Chicago Press and Springer. Also available are
editions of previous CLS proceedings.
Lastly, to our invited speakers, all presenters and attendees, welcome, thank you for coming,and enjoy the conference!

5

Schedule
Day 1 Schedule (Thursday, May 25)
All events held in Ida Noyes Hall (1212 E. 59th St.).
Invited talks, Registration & East Asian Session: Theater, 3rd floor
Left column: West Lounge, 2nd floor
8:30-9:45
9:45-10:00
10:00-10:30
10:30-11:00

11:00-11:15
11:15-11:45
11:45-12:15
12:15-1:15
1:15-2:15
2:15-2:30

2:30-3:00

3:00-3:30

3:30-3:45
3:45-4:15

registration
opening remarks
Special Session: East Asian Linguistics
Kenji Oda (Syracuse):
Syntax of Proper Names in Japanese
Jianrong Yu (University of Arizona):
Deriving Mandarin Verb-doubling Resultative Compounds at the
Syntax-morphology Interface: Manner Incorporation and M-merger
breakToru Ishii (Meiji):Japanese ‘Gapless Relative Clauses’: A Movement Approach
Lukas Rieser (Kyoto)& Rihito Shirata (JSPS / University of the Ryukyus):‘Why’ without reasons: ‘wh’-exclamatives in Kikaijima Ryukyuan
lunch
Invited Speaker: Audrey Li (USC)
Argument ellipsis and structures of noun phrases
breakSpecial Session:
General Session
Intonation & Prosody
Syntax
Jason Ostrove (UC Santa Cruz): The Edward Rubin (University of Utah): AdMorphology-Prosody Interface in San Martı́n
Peras Mixtec
Hossep Dolatian (University of Delaware):Armenian prosody: A case for prosodic stems

verbial Nominals and Case

Matthew Tyler (Yale): Choctaw PCC repair: Basque-style PCC repair in a languagewith no dative

break
Shu-hao Shih (Rutgers): On the Inter- Steven Foley, Nick Kalivoda &action between Phrase-final Lengthening and Maziar Toosarvandani (UC Santa Cruz):
Prosodic Structure

4:15-4:45

Right column: East Lounge, 2nd floor

Forbidden clitic clusters in Zapotec: Implications for the Person–Case Constraint

David Yoshikazu Oshima (Nagoya):
The prosody of positively biased negative polar interrogatives in Japanese: Post-focal reduction or deaccenting?

4:45-5:00
5:00-6:00
7:00

break
Invited Speaker: Sun-Ah Jun (UCLA)
Intonational difference in syntax-marking vs. focus-marking prosodic phrasing
graduate student mixer

6

Day 2 Schedule (Friday, May 26)
All events held in Ida Noyes Hall (1212 E. 59th St.).
Invited talks & Registration: Theater, 3rd floor
Left column: West Lounge, 2nd floor
8:30-9:00

9:00-9:30

9:30-10:00

Right column: East Lounge, 2nd floor

registration
Special Session:
General Session
Computational/ Mathematical
Experimental Linguistics
Linguistics
Alëna Aksënova & Aniello De Santo Anne Pycha (UW Milwaukee), Sharon(Stony Brook): Strict Locality in Morphological Derivations

Inkelas & Sarah Bakst (UC Berkeley):Why do morpheme-internal segments resist alternations? A word-learning experiment

Yu Tomita (Sokendai): Towards a pied-Morwenna
Hoeks,
Grzegorz
Lisowski, Jonathan Pesetsky &Alexandre Cremers (ILLC, University

piping account for wh-scope within compositional event semantics in minimalismof Amsterdam): Experimental Evidence for a
Semantic Account of Free Choice Disjunction

10:00-10:15
10:15-10:45

10:45-11:15

breakHyunah Baek (Stony Brook): Compu- Eli Asikin-Garmager (Iowa): Where’s
tational representation of unbounded stress:
tiers with structural features

my verb? Insights from experimental Austronesian syntax for universal production biases

Jonathan Dunn (Illinois Institute of Tech-

Savithry Namboodiripad, Dayoung
Kim (UC San Diego) & Gyeongnam Kim

nology): Recursively Emerging Structure: A
Discovery-Device CxG

11:15-11:45

Hossep Dolatian & Jeff Heinz (University of Delaware): Reduplication and FiniteState Technology

11:45-12:45
12:45-1:45

1:45-2:00

2:00-2:30

2:30-3:00(Sogang): English-dominant Korean speakers
show reduced flexibility in constituent order

Andrea Beltrama, Erlinde Meertens& Maribel Romero (Konstanz): Polar
Questions, or not Alternative Questions andComplement Alternative Questions: A Comparative Study

lunch
Invited Speaker: Thomas Graf (Stony Brook)
It’s a (Sub-)Regular Conspiracy: Locality and Computationin Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, and Semantics
breakSpecial Session:
General Session
Sign Language Linguistics
Phonetics & Phonology
Natasha Abner (Montclair), Helen Sam Tilsen (Cornell): Social distance corKoulidobrova (Central Connecticut), Ronnie Wilbur, (Purdue) & Sandra Wood
(McDaniel): Don’t miss the BEAT!: Exceeds
Comparatives in American Sign Language

relates with similarity in linguistic behavior

Laura Horton, Lilia Rissman, Susan
Goldin-Meadow & Diane Brentari

Eleanor Glewwe (UCLA): Substantive(University of Chicago): The Emergence ofAgent-Marking Strategies in Child Homesign
Systems

3:00-3:15

Bias in Phonotactic Learning: Positional Extension of an Obstruent Voicing Contrast

break

7

3:15-3:45

3:45-4:15

4:15-4:30
4:30-5:30

Meltem Kelepir, Asli Özkul & Elvan Tamyurek Ozparlak (Bogazici University): Expressing the clusivity distinction
in non-specific indefinite pronouns in Turkish
Sign Language (TİD)
Jonathan Rawski (Stony Brook): Phonological Complexity is Subregular: Evidence
from Sign Language

Nick Danis, Eileen Blum, Luca Iacoponi, Hazel Mitchley & Adam Jardine (Rutgers): A computational method
for evaluating theories of phonological representation
Gasper Begus (Harvard): Historical Probabilities of Alternations

break
Invited Speaker: Josep Quer (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
The right place for locative agreement in sign languages

8

Day 3 Schedule (Saturday, May 27)
All events held in Ida Noyes Hall (1212 E. 59th St.).
Invited talks & Registration: Theater, 3rd floor
Banquet: Cloister Club, 1st floor
Left column: West Lounge, 2nd floor
8:30-9:00

9:00-9:30

9:30-10:00

10:00-10:15
10:15-10:45

10:45-11:15

11:15-11:30
11:30-12:30

12:30-1:30

1:30-2:00

registration
Special Session:
Cross-linguistic Quantification
Hsiu-Chen Daphne Liao (National
Chiao-Tung): The cumulative and distributive readings expressed by Chinese collectivizing adverbial yiqi
Yimei Xiang (Harvard): Wh-items quantify over polymorphic sets

& Uli Sauerland (ZAS): Sorting out who’s
who: higher-order quantification and the interpretation of number cross-linguisticallyHaoze Li (NYU): Relative measurement in
event-related domains: Evidence from Mandarin

3:15-3:45

3:45-4:00
4:00-5:00
6:00

Till Poppels & Andrew Kehler (UCSan Diego): Verb Phrase Ellipsis is discourse
reference: novel evidence from dialogue
Matthew Barros & Hadas Kotek(Yale): Ellipsis licensing in sluicing: A QuD
account

sive Predicates are Question-Embedding: Evidence from Estonian

break
Invited Speaker: Lucas Champollion (NYU)
Stratified reference: a unified perspective on distributivity
across constructions and languages
lunch
General Session:
General Session:
Semantics
Mary Moroney (Cornell): A semantic Robert Borges & Justyna Olko (Uni-Emma Nguyen (UConn) & Lisa Pearl(UC Irvine): Do You Really Mean It? Linking Lexical Semantic Profiles and the Age ofAcquisition for the English Passive

2:30-2:45
2:45-3:15

General Session:

break
Patrick Elliott (UCL), Andreea Nicolae Tom Roberts (UC Santa Cruz): Respon-model of switch reference in Koasati

2:00-2:30

Right column: East Lounge, 2nd floor

versity of Warsaw): Locus of Marking in
Nahuatl and Spanish: contact-induced morphological change
Josh Phillips (Yale): Apprehensionality
emerging: The case of Kriol bambai

breakMatthias Lalisse (Johns Hopkins): Pluri- Yenan Sun (University of Chicago): Twovaluationist semantics for absolute gradable
predicates
Xiao Li & Hongyong Liu (Queens College): Subjectivity and Gradability: on thesemantics of the possessive property concept
construction in Mandarin Chinese

Kinds of Quantificational Domains: Mandarin
mei with or without dou

break
Invited Speaker: Itamar Francez (University of Chicago)
Love and Happiness [Joint Work with Andrew Koontz-Garboden]banquet9Invited Speakers
Lucas Champollion is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at New York University. His researchdeals with linguistic aspect, overt and concealed distributivity, counterfactual expressions, and thesemantics of expressions referring to events, among other topics. His work has been publishedin Semantics and Pragmatics, Theoretical Linguistics, Journal of Semantics, and Linguistics andPhilosophy.
Itamar Francez is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at The University of Chicago. His research focuses on natural language meaning, specifically using logical tools to model the intuitions of
speakers and explain the relation between meaning and form. Recent interests include the interaction
between conventional linguistic meaning and pragmatic reasoning. His work has been published in
Semantics and Pragmatics, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Natural Language Semantics,
and Linguistics and Philosophy
Thomas Graf is Assistant Professor of Linguistics and Affiliate Professor in the Institute forAdvanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University. He has worked on a wide range of
topics in phonology, morphology, and syntax, connected by the idea of determining the complexityof patterns in natural language. His main research area is computational syntax - in particular,
computational models of syntactic constraints - approached from the perspective of the formalism of
Minimalist Grammars. His work has appeared in Gloss and Formal Grammar among others.
Sun-Ah Jun is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Her research focuses on various aspects of intonation and prosody, including intonational phonology,
prosodic typology, and the way intonation and prosody interact with other subareas of linguistics. Herjournal articles have appeared in the Journal of Phonetics, Studies in Second Language Acquisition,
Language and Speech, Language and Cognitive Processes, and the Journal of East Asian Linguistics,
among numerous others.
Audrey Li is Professor of Linguistics and East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests lie in syntactic theory, the syntax-semantics
interface, and the syntax-phonology interface, with particular reference to Chinese languages. Someof her recent research topics include Case, ellipsis, and the Chinese particle de. Her works haveappeared in Language, Lingua, Linguistic Inquiry, and Journal of East Asian Linguistics, and she
has co-authored various monographs published by the Cambridge University Press, Kluwer/Springer,
and the MIT Press.
Josep Quer is Research Professor of Linguistics at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. His
research interests are concentrated around negation, agreement and quantification in both signed
and spoken languages, with focus on morphosyntax, semantics and prosody. He is a leading figure
in sign language linguistics and was the chair of the European Union COST Action ‘SignGram’,a multi-national collaboration to study and compare the linguistic structures of European sign
languages, and to protect the linguistic heritage of the Deaf. His works have appears in Lingua, The
Linguistic Inquiry and Theoretical Linguistics.

10Invited Talks
Stratified reference: a unified perspective on distributivity across constructions
and languages
Lucas Champollion (New York University)
Saturday, 11:30-12:30, TheaterThis talk summarizes my recent book (Parts of a Whole, 2017, vol. 66 of the series Oxford Studies
in Theoretical Linguistics, see http://nyu.edu/projects/champollion/book/), with special attention tocross-linguistic quantification, the topic of one of the special sessions at CLS 53. My work brings
together several strands of research on semantic and pragmatic phenomena in order to propose acomprehensive theory of distributivity, atelicity, plurality, and the count/mass distinction. I start byanswering the question What is distributivity? in several related ways: distributivity is a property ofpredicates, of quantifiers, of constructions, or a relation between constituents, and of constructions.
I build on these notions to argue that the term distributivity applies to a variety of constructions,such as adverbial each, for -adverbials, and pseudopartitives. Building on a common thread that runs
through these constructions, I propose a constraint that explains why they reject collective and telicpredicates, singular count nouns, and nonmonotonic measure functions. To capture this constraint,
I develop stratified reference, a parametrized notion whose core idea is that if a predicate applies tosomething, it must also apply to its parts along some dimension and down to a certain level of granularity. Stratified reference generalizes and relates two core concepts in algebraic semantics: higher-orderproperties such as Krifka’s divisive reference and Dowty’s subinterval property, and distributive operators such as Link’s D and Schwarzschild’s Part. On this basis, I develop a formal account of
distance-distributive constructions across languages, such as English adnominal each, German jeweils, or distributive numerals. The common core of these constructions as well as their crosslinguistic
variation can be captured by varying the dimension and granularity parameters of stratified reference.

11Love and Happiness
Itamar Francez (University of Chicago)
Saturday, 4:00-5:00, Theater[Joint work with Andrew Koontz-Garboden]
We dont know what love is, but in this talk we make a proposal for how to derive happiness. Specifically, building on the theory of property concept nouns as denoting qualities (a particular kind ofmass) advanced in our recent book (Francez and Koontz-Garboden 2017), we propose a compositional
account of English deadjectival nominalization like happiness, strength, and depth, on which the derivational suffixes are systematically ambiguous, and the interpretational possibilities for the derived nounare predictable from the meaning of the deriving affix and that of the element (root or adjective) it
combines with, as anticipated on a view of grammar that recognizes the lexicon as an important locus
of generalizations. We demonstrate that the resulting analysis makes several surprising and correct
predictions, including some cross-linguistic ones, and speculate about how our happiness might relate
to love.

12

It’s a (Sub-)Regular Conspiracy: Locality and Computation in Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, and Semantics
Thomas Graf (Stony Brook University)
Friday, 12:45-1:45, Theater
It is commonly believed that phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics are distinct modules oflanguage, governed by very different principles with little common ground. Nonetheless several approaches (e.g. Government Phonology, Distributed Morphology) subscribe to the idea that at least
some of these language modules exhibit profound parallels. Interestingly, recent findings in computational linguistics corroborate this hypothesis: it seems that linguistic dependencies belong to asmall, heavily constrained region of the so-called subregular hierarchy. If correct, this has far-reachingtypological implications, sheds new light on learnability issues, and raises deep questions about thecognitive architecture of language.
The subregular hierarchy provides a system for classifying structural dependencies according totheir computational complexity and expressive power. It turns out that linguistic dependencies largely
cluster at the lower end of the hierarchy, thanks to the limiting effects of the locality conditions thatthey are subject to. This computational result furnishes answers to a variety of seemingly unrelated
questions, such as:• Why is there no first-last harmony in phonology?
• Why are some prefixes and suffixes freely iterable, but no circumfixes?
• Why does no language have a monomorphemic version of the quantifier an even number of ?
• Why is syntactic movement upward rather than downward?
This is but the tip of a much larger iceberg. The predictions span phonology, morphology, syntax,
and semantics, and they even intersect with psycho- and neurolinguistics. Computational linguists
cannot do all of this by themselves. Without the expertise of theoretical linguists, it is impossible tofully explore the cognitive, typological, and theoretical ramifications of this “subregular conspiracy”.
If we want to know how deep the rabbit hole goes, we have to go down there together.

13

Intonational difference in syntax-marking vs. focus-marking prosodic phrasing
Sun-Ah Jun (UCLA)
Thursday, 5:00-6:00, Theater
Prosodic phrasing refers to a grouping of words in an utterance, defined in terms of distribution of allophones and realizations of suprasegmentals. The phrasing delivers information on syntactic structureor the prominence relations among the words. Therefore, it has been known that prosodic phrasing,though not isomorphic to syntactic structure, is closely tied to syntactic structure, by marking theedges of a syntactic constituent (Selkirk 1986, 2000, 2011; Nespor & Vogel 1986/2007; Truckenbrodt
1999; Samek-Lodovici 2005). It is also well-known that contrastive or corrective focus affects prosodic
phrasing in various languages, overriding the default prosodic phrasing of an utterance produced inbroad focus condition. In these languages, a new prosodic boundary is often inserted right before
a focused word (e.g., Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Northern Bizkaian Basque). Researchers haveassumed that a prosodic phrase would be realized the same if the type of prosodic unit is the same,
regardless of whether the prosodic phrase is triggered by syntax or focus. However, it is possible thata prosodic unit has different phonetic and phonological properties depending on its function. In thistalk, I will show such data from two prosodic units in Korean. First, the Intermediate Phrase (ip) inSeoul Korean is defined by pitch reset, but the right edge of ip is marked by phrase-final lengthening
and a boundary tone only when it marks syntactic grouping but not when it marks focus. Second, theAccentual Phrase (AP) in Yanbian Korean, a lexical pitch accent dialect spoken in northeastern China,
near North Korea, is headed by the rightmost word when it marks syntactic grouping but headed by
the leftmost word when it marks focus. This data also suggests that the preverbal argument receives
focus in Korean. The results will be further discussed by referring to the typological difference inprominence marking across languages.

14

Argument ellipsis and structures of noun phrases
Audrey Li (USC)
Thursday, 1:15-2:15, Theater
Argument ellipsis (AE), defined as null arguments allowing sloppy readings and quantificational antecedents, is only possible in certain languages or positions. Two main factors have been proposed
to determine the availability of AE—absence of articles and lack of agreement. However, among languages without articles and agreement, some allow AE only in object positions; some others, in subject
and object positions (e.g, Cheng 2013, Li 2007, 2014, Tomioka 2014, Simpson et al. 2013). This workshows that such a difference argues for the need to distinguish two types of languages without articles—one projecting noun phrases to DPs containing a null D, and the other, without a D (cf. Boskovic
2008, 2012, Cheng 2013, Tomioka 2003, a.o). The latter type of languages, exemplified by Japanese,allows AE in both subject and object positions; the former, illustrated by Chinese and Bangla (Simpson et al. 2013, Simpson and Syed 2016), only in object positions. Such differences are captured byadapting Barbosa (2016)/Roberts’ (in preparation) proposal for radical pro-drop languages by representing their empty pronouns in two ways (a) one with an empty D, and (b) the other without a D—
(DP ∅[-ϕ] )...[nEAP x nEA [nCatP ONE nCat ]]. An empty D in object positions can be incorporated to V;
but due to a weak T, an empty D in the subject position is not incorporated. However, such a DP isa minimal pronoun and can turn the immediately dominating clause into a predicate (Kratzer 2009,
Zhang’s 2016 derived predicate predication), which captures the generalization that a subject nullargument is coindexed with the closest c-commanding antecedent and has a de se reading (generalized
control, Huang 1982, Tomioka 2014). Differences in constituency and order requirements within nounphrases in the two types of languages support the distinction.

15

The right place for locative agreement in sign languages
Josep Quer (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
Friday, 4:30-5:30, Theater
The nature of verb agreement in sign languages is still controversial among researchers (see Costello
2016 for a very recent take on this issue), but Padden’s (1983/1988) classical tripartite division of sign
language verbs according to their agreeing properties (plain, person agreement and spatial agreement)
has been decisive for the characterization of the phenomenon. However, the study of sign language
agreement has mainly focused on verbs that agree with person arguments. With few exceptions (e.g.,
Janis 1992, 1995), spatial (lexical) verbs and spatial/locative agreement have received relatively little
attention, since spatial agreement seems to come for granted in the signed modality. Nevertheless,no explanation has been offered for the striking fact that spatial verbs overtly agree with their locative arguments, and not with the (personal) subject when they cooccur, as in MONTHN̂EXT IX1LONDONa NEW-YORKb aFLYb ‘Next month I’ll fly from London to New York.’ Janis (1995: 219)
simply states the generalization in her system for ASL agreement: “A nominal with locative case cancontrol agreement regardless of its G[rammatical] R[elation], S[emantic] R[ole], or animacy features.”In this talk I will offer a possible line of analysis of spatial/locative agreement in sign languages bydrawing a link to the cases of locative agreement that we find in some spoken languages, like those of
the Bantu family. In Chichewa, for example, locative NPs cannot only function as locative adjuncts,
but they can also occur as grammatical subjects, as in (1) (Bresnan & Kanerva 1989: 2), triggeringclass agreement on the verb (class 17 agreement in this case).
(1)

ku-mu-dzi ku-liu
chi-tsı̂me
17-3-village 17:SU-be 7-well‘In the village is a well.’

I explore the validity of the parallelism with such cases of locative agreement, as well as its limitations,in order to understand the common core between the two language modalities. I further examine thedifferent kinds of spatial agreement that we find in sign language verbs in order to redraw the empirical
map and help sharpen the analytical questions.

16Papers
Strict Locality in Morphological Derivations
Alëna Aksënova & Aniello De Santo (Stony Brook)
Friday, 9:00-9:30, West Lounge
The traditional and widely accepted view on phonology and morphology is that they both fit in theclass of regular languages (Kaplan and Kay 1994, Beesley and Kartunnen 2003). But it has been
recently suggested that most of the phonological patterns occurring in natural language do not need
the full power of regular languages, but can in fact be captured by classes in the subregular hierarchy(Heinz and Idsardi 2013). Similarly, Chandlee (2014) has claimed that morphological mappings canbe analyzed as subregular functions, and Aksënova et al. (2016) have argued that morphotactics does
not require more power than phonology.
However, a problem for the subregular approach arises when facing several patterns such as oneof the nominalizations in Russian: the nominalization suffix -nie attaches only to atelic stems, but
the affixes responsible for the telicity change can also be prefixes. As the result, the appearance ofa perfective prefix can make the attachment of the nominalization suffix impossible. This case isproblematic for the subregular approach: considering the finite amount of (im)perfective affixes in
Russian, the pattern can be still captured with a regular language only by memorizing very long
strings. Otherwise, it might be even not regular.
In this paper, we argue for a derivational analysis of morphological dependencies, and show how
this problematic case can indeed be reduced to a subregular process, if considered over the sequenceof morphological operations: only the last operation is crucial for the Russian nominalization suffix.
If the last operation was the attachment of the atelic affix, the suffix -nie is permitted, otherwise its
appearance is impossible. Such results show that if viewed under a derivational perspective, even thepatterns that pose a problem for the regularity of morphology can be analyzed in a subregular fashion.

Computational representation of unbounded stress: tiers with structural features
Hyunah Baek (Stony Brook)
Friday, 10:15-10:45, West Lounge
In computational linguistics, it is now widely agreed that phonology is regular. More recently, Heinz(2016) and related works have argued that most phonological patterns are even less complex, or subregular, and fit into the classes of Strictly Local (SL), Strictly Piecewise (SP), or Tier-based Strictly Local(TSL). By maintaining that phonology belongs to the subregular region, the Subregular Hypothesis
provides explanations on the typology and learnability of phonological patterns. However, there still
remain patterns that ostensibly display higher complexity. One example is culminative unboundedstress, such as the rightmost heavy, otherwise leftmost or the rightmost heavy, otherwise non-final
leftmost patterns (Hayes 1995). I re-analyze these patterns and argue that once grammar has accessto structural information of syllables, they are TSL after all. TSL with Structural Features (TSL-SF)
posits that prosodic elements are composed of features containing their structural information and thatthese features rather than whole syllables trigger tier projection. In a TSL-SF grammar, T specifies
feature matrices such that a symbol (consisting of structural features) is projected onto the tier iff it iscompatible with one of the matrices. S specifies forbidden substrings that must not be present in the
projected string. TSF-SF expands the expressivity of TSL and accommodates culminative unboundedstress patterns. The hypothesis that phonological dependencies are TSL-like thus can be maintained.
17Moreover, TSL-SF grammar limits the availability of structural features to suprasegmental phonology. This analysis provides a computational account for complexity differences between segmental
and suprasegmental phonology (Jardine 2014).

Reduplication and Finite-State Technology
Hossep Dolatian & Jeffrey Heinz (University of Delaware)
Friday, 11:15-11:45, West Lounge
Morphology and phonology have been studied within computational linguistics with finite-state technology, regular languages, and regular transductions (Kaplan and Kay, 1994; Chandlee, 2014). Although reduplication has a rich history in morpho-phonology, it has remained challenging for computational and mathematical linguistics. This is because finite-state technology as currently utilized cannot
adequately describe many cases of reduplication, especially unbounded total reduplication (Roark andSproat, 2007; Chandlee, 2014). Attempts to do so have come at the cost of imposing a finite andpotentially large bound on the size of the reduplicant (Hulden, 2009).
This paper shows how a specific understudied type of finite-state technology actually can accountfor virtually all forms of bounded and unbounded reduplication without imposing an artificial limit on
the size of reduplication. These are 2-way Deterministic Finite-State Transducers (2DFSTs) (Savitch,
1982; Engelfriet and Hoogeboom, 2001). They are distinguished from the more well-known (1-way)finite-state transducers by allowing the machine to move back and forth on the input tape but not
the output tape. By having this additional power, this paper shows that 2DFSTs can capture almost
all unbounded and bounded reduplicative processes in the various forms they take crosslinguistically(Moravcsik, 1978; Rubino, 2005; Inkelas and Downing, 2015a,b), including but not limited to nonlocality (Riggle, 2004), TETU effects, opacity (underapplication/overapplication) (McCarthy and Prince,
1995), and internal reduplication (Broselow and McCarthy, 1983).

Recursively Emerging Structure: A Discovery-Device CxG
Jonathan Dunn (Illinois Institute of Technology)
Friday, 10:45-11:15, West Lounge
Construction Grammar (CxG) views language as a network of constraint-based slot-filler constructions
at different levels of representation and abstraction that emerge from observed usage. Constructions
are self-similar in that the same processes and forms repeat themselves at multiple levels of representation. Thus, rather than posit a morphology and a constituent grammar and a dependency grammarthat each exhibit individual behaviors, CxG posits a single grammatical unit that generalizes acrossthese levels. Unfortunately, the CxG paradigm lacks an emergence mechanism: although constraint
mechanisms have been proposed, these only apply to existing structures. This is a critical problem
because any exception or unexplained phenomenon can become an item-specific construction. Without an emergence mechanism capable of predicting such item-specific representations, constructions
are ultimately ad hoc. This paper describes a discovery-device grammar that recursively learns CxGs
from large unannotated corpora, providing an emergence mechanism capable of making falsifiable predictions. The algorithm iterates across increasing levels of abstraction: purely lexical constructions,purely syntactic constructions, and full-scope constructions containing lexical, syntactic, and semantic
slot constraints. Each stage inherits representations learned in previous iterations: phrase structurerules form constituents which, in later passes, inherit the syntactic and semantic properties of theirhead and are allowed to fill individual slots in other constructions. This recursive learning reflects theclaim that grammatical structures are self-similar, sharing a single emergence mechanism.
18

Towards a pied-piping accout for wh-scope within compositional event semantics
in minimalism
Yu Tomita (Sokendai)
Friday, 9:30-10:00, West Lounge
In this talk, I consider long-distance wh-movement and the semantics of wh-scope in a variant of
the Minimalist Grammar (MG) formalism with compositional neo-Davidsonian semantics, proposing
a covert pied-piping analysis. In Tomita’s (2016) framework, Merge can assign thematic roles toarguments, whereas Move determines semantic scope. In that proposal, however, a wh-phrase thatmoves from an embedded clause cannot take scope over the entire sentence. Under the hypothesis thata subconstituent can move over the clausal boundary phonologically but not semantically, I proposethat wh-phrases remain at SpecCP in the embedded clause and this embedded clause covertly moves
to the matrix clause.
(1)

Who did everyone find that Brutus stabbed?
a. SO: [ CP who2 did everyone find [ CP who1 that [ TP Brutus stabbed who0 ] ] ]b. PF: /who2 did everyone find who1 that Brutus stabbed who0 /c. LF: [ [ CP who1 [ TP Brutus stabbed who0 ] ] [ CP who2 did everyone find that Brutus
stabbed ] ]In ((1-a)), who 2 in an matrix CP is a semantically vacuous copy and thus appears in ((1-b)), but
not in ((1-c)). Before Spell-Out, who 1 remains in the embedded clause. Then, this embedded clausecovertly moves to the matrix one at LF. This covert pied-piping movement analysis also accounts
for the proper interpretation of wh-phrases in compositional event semantics for MG. Champollion’s(2015) semantic framework for MG allows wh-phrases to take scope over the entire sentence via covert
pied-piping movement, since separated θ-role components can move together with embedded clauses.

Sorting out who’s who: higher-order quantification and the interpretation of number cross-linguistically
Patrick D. Elliott (UCL), Andreea C. Nicolae & Uli Sauerland (ZAS)
Saturday, 10:15-10:45, West Lounge
Dayal (1996) and others analyze English who as number neutral. We argue on the basis of crosslinguistic data that Dayal’s analysis cannot be maintained, and that who must be analyzed as ranging
over generalized quantifiers (see also Spector 2007, 2008).
In the first part of the talk, we give an overview of the necessary theoretical background. To
begin with, we present Dayal’s analysis in terms of the Maximal Informativity Principle (MIP) of
the Uniqueness Presupposition (UP) carried by singular which-questions. We go on to lay out ourassumptions concerning the semantics of number. Following Sauerland (2003) and Sauerland et al.
(2005), and others, we adopt the weak theory of plurality, i.e., we assume that singular number ispresuppostional whereas plural number is semantically vacuous. We show that this is compatible with
Dayal’s explanation for the Uniqueness Presupposition, and furthermore that it accounts for the antisingleton inference of plural which-questions via Heim’s (1991) Maximize Presupposition! principle.
In the next part of the talk, we provide cross-linguistic evidence from Spanish and Hungarian
showing that, contra predictions made by Dayal, singular who-questions lack a UP whereas plural
who-questions nonetheless still carry an anti-singleton inference.
In the final section we present an explicit compositional analysis of simplex wh-questions which
accounts for their interaction with number. The crucial innovation is to analyse simplex wh-expressions19

as type-flexible existential quantifiers. When who quantifies over individuals (type het, ti), we derive
the UP via the interaction between singular number and the MIP. When who quantifiers over quantifier
denotations, i.e., sets of sets of individuals (type hhhet, ti, ti, ti), singular number is still interpreted,but it effectively applies pointwise to each set in the quantifier denotation. The MIP thus gives rise
to a weaker presupposition globally.

Relative measurement in event-related domains: Evidence from Mandarin
Haoze Li (NYU)
Saturday, 10:45-11:15, West LoungeThis paper is concerned with relative measurement, which is expressed by percentage nouns and fractions. I show that relative measurement, just like absolute measurement, also exhibits measurementin event-related domains independent of focus, in addition to measurement in the individual domain.
I provide two alternative ways to compositionally derive the event-related interpretation of relative
measurement. My analysis can capture many intriguing properties of event-related relative measurement, including counting recycled individuals, requiring an event-related domain with a non-trivial
part-whole structure, and sensitivity to weak island effects.

The cumulative and distributive readings expressed by Chinese collectivizing adverbial yiqi
Hsiu-Chen Daphne Liao (National Chiao-Tung)
Saturday, 9:00-9:30, West Lounge
Chinese collectivizing adverbial yiqi ‘together’ has two main uses: to convey a team relationship orpure spatio-temporal proximity. Crucially while the latter receives either a distributive or a cumulativeinterpretation, the former has a cumulative interpretation only.
To explain the phenomenon, the paper first points out that agents volition is the critical factor forthe shift of the two main uses, a fact making an ambiguity analysis (cf. Lasersohn (1998) for English
adverbial together ) doubtful for yiqi. Instead, a more reasonable account is to treat Chinese yiqi as
an overt counterpart of the group forming operator ↑ proposed in Landman (1989, 2000), and makeit adjoin to v 0 in [−volition] cases and to Cause0 in [+volition] cases. In cases with v 0 adjunction, yiqi
turns its associated plural agent into a group, which is atomic and so requires one single event. This
causes spatio-temporal proximity. Next, if a QNP appears in the object position, it may receive astandard treatment for QNPs to derive a cumulative reading, or it may be taken as a property entity
by the use of Chierchia’s (1994, 1985) typeshift ∩ (as done in de Vries (2015)), leading to a distributive
interpretation via ‘pseudo equivalent’ inference assumed in Winter and Scha (2015).
The above analysis crucially relies on a group agent to get the distributive reading. However nogroup agent exists in [+volition] cases. In those cases, yiqi ’s associate is in [Spec, CauseP], working
as internal causers of their own actions. Yiqi then comes in to form a group causer, deriving a teamreading. Importantly, what is present in [Spec, v P] for agents is a covert, lower copy of the subject NP.
In such a low position, the plural agent is not turned into a group; thus, no distributive interpretation
is available for the team use of yiqi.

Wh-items quantify over polymorphic sets
Yimei Xiang (Harvard)
Saturday, 9:30-10:00, West Lounge

20This talk argues for two generalizations on the semantics of wh-items: (i) the restrictor of a pluralor number-neutral wh-item consists of not only individuals but also generalized conjunctions anddisjunctions; (ii) the restrictor of a singular or numeral-modified wh-item contains only individuals.
Disjunctions
An elided disjunction ((1)b) can completely answer a 2-question ((1)a) by taking
scope below the 2-modal. Spector (2007, 2008) thus proposes that the restrictor of what includes¯ m (= λPhe,ti [P (s) ∨ P (m)]), which takes reconstruction and derives
generalized disjunctions like s ∨the strongest true answer 2[read0 (j, s)∨read0 (j, m)]. Further, Fox (2013) observes that this disjunction
cannot completely answer the corresponding singular 2-question ((2)a): ((2)b) takes only an ignorance
reading. Fox concludes that the restrictor of which book excludes disjunctions.
(1)

a.
b.

“What does John have to read?”“Syntax or Morphology. (The choice is up to him.)”

(2)

a.
b.

“Which book does John have to read?”√“Syntax or Morphology. {#The choice is up to him./ I don’t know which exactly.}”

Conjunctions
The predicate formed a team licenses only a collective reading, as ((3)) shows;thus ((4)a) suffers presupposition failure. Nevertheless, ((4)b) felicitously infers that John justifiably
believes that ab formed a team and cd formed a team (cf. ((4)c)). I argue that the restrictor of which¯ c⊕d (= λPhe,ti [P (a⊕b)∧P (c⊕d)]),boys (but not that of which two boys) include conjunctions like a⊕b ∧which supplies a conjunctive for the strongest true answer f.a.t.0 (a ⊕ b) ∧ f.a.t.0 (c ⊕ d).
(w: The considered boys formed two teams in total: ab formed one, and cd formed one.)(3)# The boys formed a team. (collective)√
The boys formed teams. (covered)
(4)

#
√
#

John knows [that the boys formed a team]John knows [which boys formed a team].
John knows [which two boys formed a team]Formally, I propose that the lexicon of the wh-determiner contains a †-operator. This operator closes
a set A under conjunction and disjunction iff A itself is closed under sum, as defined in ((6)):(5)(6)

Jwhich AK = λB.∃x ∈ [†A ∩ B](
W
V
min{α : A ⊆ α ∧ ∀β 6= ∅[β ⊆ α → ¯ β ∈ α ∧ ¯ β ∈ α]}†A =A

if *A = Aotherwise

Japanese ‘Gapless Relative Clauses’: A Movement Approach
Toru Ishii (Meiji)
Thursday, 11:15-11:45, Theater
It has been claimed (Kuno 1973; Saito 1985) that Japanese “gapless relative clauses” exemplified by(1) are derived not by movement but by base-generation, since it looks like the relative head does notbind any position, and there is no possible derivational source:(1)a.

[[relative clause Tai-ga
oisii]
sakana]-wa eigo-dewa “side dish” dewa-naku
red.snapper-Nom delicious fish-Top
English-in “side dish” not“fish” to iu“fish” as call21

b.

Lit. ‘Fish, as for which red snapper is delicious, is not called “side dish” but “fish” inEnglish.’[[relative clause Sakura-gaii]hana]-wa eigo-dewa “nose” dewa-naku
cherry.blossom-Nom good flower-Top English-in “nose” not“flower” to iu“flower” as call
Lit. ‘Flower, as for which cherry blossom is good, is not called “nose” but “flower” inEnglish.

Contrary to this widely accepted view, this paper argues that “gapless relative clauses” are derived
through movement enforced by labeling as shown in (2):
(2)

a.
b.

[[[nP1 Sakana] [nP2 tai]]oisii]
fish
red.snapper delicious[[nP2 [nP1 Sakana] [nP2 tai]]-ga oisii] [nP1 sakana]I argue that the underlying form of (1a) is (2a), where sanaka ‘fish’ and tai ‘red snapper’ are directly
merged as predicate and subject on the assumption that Merge applies freely. In (2a), the two nPs
sanaka ‘fish’ and tai ‘red snapper’ are merged in a single subject argument position without inducing
any agreement. Since this results in a symmetric structure of {XP,YP} type, labeling requires sanaka‘fish’ to move out of the subject argument position to make the structure asymmetric; sanaka ‘fish’ isobligatorily raised to the relative head position. This explains the apparent lack of a derivational sourceof “gapless relative clause”. I argue that our movement analysis is supported by island, reconstruction,and parasitic gap facts. Our analysis also gives support for the Free Merge with labeling algorithm
approach.

Syntax of Proper Names in Japanese
Kenji Oda (Syracuse)Thursday, 10:00-10:30, TheaterThis talk argues for a rather intuitive (but theoretically not well-articulated) claim that proper nouns
do not form a unitary class, while providing further evidence from Japanese that supports the analysis of proper nouns that they are underlyingly predicative and their referential status is achieved
compositionally/post-lexically. The Japanese noun phrase with a proper name in (1) is ambiguous,
giving rise to two readings.
(1)

tanaka-no ojisan
Possessive Reading: ‘Tanaka’s uncle’
Tanaka-gen uncle/middle.aged.man Quotative Reading: ‘Tanaka, who is a middle-aged man’However, the ambiguity is not found in every [ProperN-Gen N] combination: (2) shows that
only a small subclass of kinship terms with a related meaning may invoke the ambiguity, while anyother nouns consistently lack the Quotative Reading (QR). (3) shows that QR is unavailable when
the proper noun comes with the honorific suffix -san. Finally, (4) illustrates that while family names
induce the ambiguity, native Japanese first names fail to bring about the QR.
(2)tanaka-no sensei/ishaTanaka-gen teacher/doctor

XR: ‘Tanaka’s teacher/doctor’*QR: ‘Tanaka, who is a teacher/doctor’(3)tanaka-san-no
ojisanTanaka-hon-gen ojisan

XR: ‘Mr. Tanaka’s uncle’*QR: ‘Mr. Tanaka, who is a middle-aged man’
22

(4)

taroo-no ojisan
Taroo-gen middle.aged.man

XR: ‘Taroo’s uncle’*QR: ‘Taroo, who is a middle-aged man’I take Ghomeshi and Massam’s (2009) feature-based analysis of proper nouns as a point of departure:
The feature [name] is a feature on N0 in English distinguishing proper nouns from common nouns, while
the feature [proper] is on D0 in English, and it select an NP that carries [name]. To account for (1-4),
I argue that given names in Japanese are lexically associated with both [name] and [proper], whilefamily names carry only [name], assuming that in Japanese, [proper] can be located in a functional
layer between D and N. Further consequences of this proposal follow.

‘Why’ without reasons: ‘wh’-exclamatives in Kikaijima Ryukyuan
Lukas Rieser (Kyoto) & Rihito Shirata (JSPS / University of the Ryukyus)
Thursday, 11:45-12:15, TheaterThis paper discusses why-exclamatives in Kikiajima Ryukyuan (KR), an endangered North Ryukyuan(Japonic) language, as spoken in Kamikatetsu village on Kikai Island. We show that KR whyexclamatives are of a type not yet described in the literature and discuss implications for extant
analyses.
(1) and (2) show exclamative clefts with degree and non-degree interpretations, (3) a non-degree
exclamative declarative, (4) a corresponding why-interrogative.
(1)(Ahen) hiinuhaa
nuka!
so
cold.nmlz.top why“How cold it is!”(lit. “Such coldness, why!”)(3)

Nuwa ahen hiinuha hoo!
why so cold
sfp
“Boy it’s cold!”(lit. “Why it’s so cold hoo!”)(2)

Ahen hiinuha-hoo nuka!
socold-comp.top why“Boy is it cold!”(lit. “That it’s so cold, why!”)(4)

Nuwa ahen hiinuha ru?
why so cold
qfoc
“Why is it so cold?!”(lit. “Why is it so cold?”)

We analyze (1) through (3) as exclamative speech acts conveying a speaker attitude that the topicalized constituent or that following why is respectively high on a noteworthiness scale. Exclamatives
with gradable predicates like hinuha ‘coldness’ in (1) give rise to obligatory degree readings, which
only arise with degree-denoting adverbs like ahen ‘so’ in exclamative clefts like (2). In contrast to
information-seeking why-interrogatives like (4), exclamative clefts also have a rhetorical question reading on which a noteworthiness implicature can target the entire clause including why. We proposethat this implicature targets the clause without why when the set of (true) why-alternatives is empty,
yielding the exclamative reading of (2). Finally, exclamative declaratives like (3), similar in conveyed
meaning to exclamative clefts, are taken as evidence that KR exclamatives are speech acts distinct
from rhetorical questions.
Our data thus shows why-exclamatives of a previously unattested type — only such where thenoteworthiness attitude targets the referent of why have been described in the literature. Our analysis
furthermore sheds light on the connection between rhetorical questions and exclamatives, showingthat they are connected by the noteworthiness implicature remaining when the set of why-alternatives
is empty, but that exclamatives are speech acts distinct from (rhetorical) interrogatives.
23

Deriving Mandarin Verb-doubling Resultative Compounds at the Syntaxmorphology Interface: Manner Incorporation and M-merger
Jianrong Yu (The University of Arizona)
Thursday, 10:30-11:00, TheaterVerb-doubling phenomena are theoretically interesting, particularly to the copy theory of movement(Nunes 2004), since it seems to require multiple spell-out of copies instead of spelling out only the headof the chain as standardly assumed. In this talk, I discuss the case of Mandarin Chinese resultative
compounds, which exhibits optional verb-doubling (Cheng 2007: p.167).
(1)

ta qi-lei-le(nei-pi) ma
he ride-tired-perf that-cl horse‘He rode that horse/horses and that horse/the horses became tired.’‘He rode that horse/horses and he became tired.’(2)

ta qi (nei-pi) ma qi-lei-lehe ride that-cl horse ride-tired-perf‘He rode that horse/horses and he became tired.’

I assume the structure of the resultative to consist of a predicative small clause that is the complementof a causative vcaus (Harley 2005). Following Mateu (2012), vcaus in Mandarin is supplied with lexical
content via a process dubbed Manner Incorporation by Harley (2005), where a root is adjoined to thespecifier of and incorporated into vcaus . I propose that in the verb-doubling construction, a root that√takes a complement QI + (nei-pi) ma is manner-incorporated to vcaus via m-merger (Harley 2014;
Matushansky 2006; Harizanov 2014). M-merger of a branching projection results in only the label of√the projection, in this case the root QI, being adjoined to vcaus (Harizanov 2014). In addition, before
m-merger applies at spell-out, a sentence internal Topic head (as proposed by Paul 2002) probes for the
RootP in the specifier of vcaus and triggers internal merge to its specifier. At spell-out, linearization
no longer treats the m-merged RootP as a non-distinct copy from the topicalized RootP, leading bothcopies to be spelled out. I show in the talk some empirical advantages of such a treatment, namely thatthe verb doublet can indeed be interpreted as a presupposed topic, and that the placement of manneradverbials and negation must follow and not precede the verb doublet, suggesting that it is not within
the v P domain. In doing so, I also argue against approaches that treat Mandarin verb-doubling as acase of Sideward Merge, which faces both conceptual and empirical issues.

Where’s my verb? Insights from experimental Austronesian syntax for universal
production biases
Eli Asikin-Garmager (Iowa)
Friday, 10:15-10:45, East Lounge
Speakers’ production patterns are clearly shaped by the structural properties of their specific language(s), but what about instances when multiple word orders and grammatical voice choices areavailable? This paper reports results from a Sasak language (Eastern Indonesia) production experiment showing that speakers’ grammatical voice and word order choices are shaped by both the animacy
and relative length of arguments in the clause. Specifically, Sasak speakers exhibit an animate before
inanimate, as well as a long before short, bias. The latter of these findings directly challenges assumptions that a universal feature of the language production system is to produce shorter elements before
relatively longer ones. As such, the resulting puzzle is that data from some languages (e.g., English,
German) reveal a short before long bias, while data from other languages (e.g., Sasak, Japanese)24

demonstrate a long before short bias. I argue that these different biases are not language-specific,
and propose the Primacy of Semantic Richness before Event Structure Hypothesis, which states that‘the semantic richness of a nominal element takes precedence over its increased demand on working
memory at any temporal/linear position prior to the lexical verb.’ With this hypothesis, I proposethat length biases are more complex than originally posited, but can be understood as a function ofwhere the shifted domain is relative to the lexical verb because of the demands that the verb places on
form-oriented production processes. Foremost, the hypothesis accounts for a range of cross-linguistic
data, and does so without stipulating language-specific parameters. Moreover, it makes several clear
empirical predictions, one of which is supported with initial evidence from verb-initial languages.

Polar Questions, or not Alternative Questions and Complement Alternative Questions: A Comparative Study.
Andrea Beltrama, Erlinde Meertens & Maribel Romero (Konstanz)
Saturday, 11:15-11:45, East Lounge
Questions with seemingly identical semantic content have different pragmatic properties. In particular,
Bolinger (1978) observed that “or not” Alternative Questions (henceforth, NAQs), contrary to theirpolar counterparts (PQ), are infelicitous in non-canonical uses – e.g., to make invites, draw inferences,or pose rhetorical questions (in (1-3)); and are instead especially appropriate to force the addressee torespond to an information-seeking question that previously went unanswered (in (4), see also Biezma2009).
(1)
Invite: Do you want a drink (# or not)? (3)Rhet: Are you crazy (# or not)?
(2)

Inference: You are wet. Is it raining(4)
Info-seeking, asking 2nd time: XDid
outside (# or not)?
you do your homework or not?
Such contrasts raises an issue: is the restricted illocutionary range of NAQs driven by he specific semantic-pragmatic properties that differentiate alternative from polar questions, or by generalpragmatic principles? We address this issue by comparing the distribution of PQs and NAQS with
Complement Alternative Questions (CAQ), a type of AQ that spells out the disjuncts differently.
(5)

PQ: Is it a boy?

(6)

NAQ: Is it a boy or not? (7)CAQ: Is it a boy or a
girl?

Relying on two rating studies, we show that NAQs display a highly specialized illocutionary profile.
On the other hand, CAQs feature a significantly larger range: while they are as bad as NAQs to draw
inferences and as good to re-ask a question, CAQs, can also be successfully used to make invites andask rhetorical questions, as well as to pose discourse-initial inquiries. These findings support the ideathat the illocutionary restrictions on NAQs are crucially underlied by the way in which the second
disjunct is spelled out. Building on Horn’s (1984) division of pragmatic labor and Biezma and Rawlin’s(2014) notion of bundling, we suggest that NAQs’ markedness restricts them to contexts where the
combination of insistence and and emphasis on p is maximally functional in contexts where the speakeraims to re-ask a question to wrestle an answer from the listener; CAQs’ unmarked status, by contrast,
grants them the flexibility to operate in a broader range of situations.

Experimental Evidence for a Semantic Account of Free Choice Disjunction
Morwenna Hoeks, Grzegorz Lisowski, Jonathan Pesetsky & Alexandre Cremers (ILLC, University of
Amsterdam)
Friday, 9:30-10:00, East Lounge25

In this paper, we present experimental evidence which sheds new light on the problem of free choice(FC) disjunction which has kept semanticists and pragmaticists off the streets since von Wright (1968)
and Kamp (1973). Free choice disjunction is the phenomenon in which modalized disjunctions have areading which makes both disjuncts true, as shown in (1).
(1)

Mary may have an apple or a pear.
Mary may have an apple.
Mary may have a pear.

Approaches to this puzzle come in two varieties. First, semantic approaches analyze FC effects usingnovel denotations for modals, disjunction, or both (Zimmermann 2000). Second, pragmatic approaches
explain them as implicatures following Kratzer (2002).
A satisfactory account of FC has been elusive since it is hard to explain why the availability of FC
readings seems to depend on an interaction between the knowledgeability of the speaker and the scopeof disjunction relative to the modal.
In our study, we ran two acceptability judgment tasks testing predictions of recent theories fromeach family: Fox’s (2007) scalar implicature account and Aloni’s (2016) state-based account.
Our results showed that (i) FC readings are available for wide scope so long as the speaker is
opinionated, even when either blocks reinterpretation as narrow scope, and (ii) FC is always available
in narrow scope. These findings match the predictions made by Aloni (2016) and contradict judgments
reported in Fox (2007) which are generally accepted in the literature. These findings thus suggest that
Aloni’s semantic account of FC is in a better position than Fox’s or any pragmatic account when it
comes to interactions between scope and speaker knowledge.

English-dominant Korean speakers show reduced flexibility in constituent order
Savithry Namboodiripad, Dayoung Kim (UC San Diego) & Gyeongnam Kim (Sogang)
Saturday, 10:45-11:15, East Lounge
Constituent order systems have been shown to reduce in flexibility due to language contact (Heine
2008). However, a causal link between contact and reduced flexibility has not yet been establishedexperimentally, and the effect of contact on syntax is underexplored. Using an acceptability judgment
experiment, we compare native Korean-speakers with English-dominant Korean-speakers (heritage
speakers), finding that contact is associated with reduced flexibility (defined as lowered acceptability
for non-canonical orders relative to canonical order) in constituent order.
Korean canonical order is SOV; post-verbal arguments are possible in some contexts, with no restriction on the number of post-verbal elements (Ahn 1988, Yun 2014). Grammatical non-canonicalorders lead to lowered acceptability (e.g., Weskott & Fanselow 2011), so SOV should be most acceptable, followed by OSV, verb-medial orders, and, finally, verb-initial orders. Thus, we consider two
hypotheses about how experience with a canonical SVO language, English, should affect acceptability of Korean constituent order. H1: If English order affects Korean, Korean SVO should be more
acceptable for English-dominant participants than for Korean-dominant speakers. H2: Because heritage speakers show lowered acceptability for difficult constructions (e.g., Polinsky et al. 2009), allnon-canonical orders should be less acceptable for English-dominant participants: lower flexibility.
30 Korean-dominant and 22 English-dominant participants rated sentences with animate subjects,
inanimate objects, and transitive verbs, plus fillers (presented auditorily). Results show a 4-way distinction in acceptability for both groups: SOV>OSV>{SVO, OVS}>{VSO, VOS}. Non-canonicalorders are significantly less acceptable for English-dominant participants than Korean-dominant participants, including SVO (contra H1). Splitting the English-dominant participants based on Korean
proficiency, passive bilinguals consistently rate non-canonical orders lower than active bilinguals. Our
26results align with H2: English-dominant participants differ from Korean-dominant participants indegree not kind, showing lower acceptability for non-canonical orders. This indicates that increased
contact with English corresponds to decreased flexibility in Korean.

Why do morpheme-internal segments resist alternations? A word-learning experimentAnne Pycha (UW Milwaukee), Sharon Inkelas & Sarah Bakst (UC Berkeley)
Friday, 9:00-9:30, East Lounge
Many phonological alternations are triggered at morpheme boundaries but blocked word-internally, inotherwise identical phonological environments. We attribute this derived environment effect to representational strength (e.g., Smolensky et al. 2014): morpheme-internal segments in stable phonetic
environments have more strongly activated representations than segments whose phonetic environments vary. A grammar in which faithfulness is scaled to representational strength correctly correlates
weakness with propensity to alternate (Inkelas 2015).
We test this representational theory experimentally via phoneme identification (Pitt, 2009; Samuel,1981) and restoration (Ganong, 1980; Pitt, 2009) tasks in a word learning paradigm (Leach and Samuel2007) exposing subjects to suffixed stems containing novel consonants [c, x, á, ã]. For the ‘Stable’
subject group, novel sounds occurred stem-internally (e.g., mocoz-a, mocoz-u); for the ‘Variable’
group, novel sounds occurred stem-finally (e.g., mozoc-a, mozoc-u, etc.). Learning was comparable
across the groups (89.84% vs. 88.03% correct).
Our hypothesis was that ‘Stable’ subjects would have more strongly activated lexical representations
for roots containing novel sounds than those in the Variable group. For the phoneme restoration task,
subjects listened to bare stems that they had previously learned (e.g., mocoz, for the Stable group,
or mozoc, for the Variable group), but with the initial consonant either mixed or replaced with white
noise. Results support our prediction: the Stable group was less sensitive to the presence of noise,suggesting that they used strongly activated lexical representations to effectively restore the replaced
consonant.
In the phoneme identification task, subjects listened to a previously learned stem whose initial /m/
was replaced by sounds on a synthesized [m]-[n] continuum, and identified the consonant as /m/ or/n/. Again, results support our prediction: the Stable group was more likely than the Variable groupto perceive [m] even when the signal was closer to [n], suggesting that activation of representations
was comparatively strong.
Conclusion: when listeners learn new words, they create more highly activated lexical entries if anovel consonant is located within (rather than at) morpheme boundaries, and thus itself more highly
activated, consistent with this positions overall resistance to phonologization of alternations.

Armenian prosody: A case for prosodic stems
Hossep Dolatian (University of Delaware)Thursday, 3:00-3:30, West Lounge
Armenian is a primarily-suffixing agglutinative Indo-European isolate with two main dialect families,
each with its own standard dialect: Standard Western Armenian (SWA) and Standard Eastern Armenian (SEA), as well as multiple colloquial dialects (Vaux, 1998; Dum-Tragut, 2009). Armenian
has complex yet understudied word-level prosodic phenomena. This paper aims to fill that gap. Two
prosodic phenomena are analyzed in SWA and SEA: primary stress assignment and destressedhigh vowel reduction. It is demonstrated that the phonological and morphological contexts for27

these processes are straightforwardly accounted for within the framework of prosodic phonology (Nespor and Vogel, 1986; Selkirk, 1996). However, it is shown that an adequate account of the datarequires the inclusion of a Prosodic Stem (PStem) constituent (Downing, 1999, 2006).
It is demonstrated that the PWord, which isomorphically coincides with the Morphological Word
(MWord), delimits the domain for primary stress assignment (Vogel, 2008) such that stress falls on therightmost full vowel in the PWord. Within this domain, stress must nevertheless be assigned cyclicallyas each affix is added in order to account for destressed high vowel reduction. The domain for thisprocess, however, is smaller than the PWord. It is proposed that this domain is the Pstem, a sublexical
prosodic constituent (Inkelas, 1989) derived from a morphological constituent, the Derivational Stem
(DStem). Other potential domains (Pwords, Recursive PWords) are shown to be inadequate. Finally,
it is shown that dialect differences in the size of morpho-phonological domain for vowel reduction acrossbetween SWA and SEA can be captured using the PStem and Generalized Alignment (McCarthy andPrince, 1993). Armenian thus joins a number of other languages where PStems have been posited(Downing, 1999, 2006; Downing and Kadenge, 2015).

The prosody of positively biased negative polar interrogatives in Japanese: Postfocal reduction or deaccenting?
David Yoshikazu Oshima (Nagoya)
Thursday, 4:15-4:45, West Lounge
Japanese has two major varieties of negative polar interrogatives, which Ito & Oshima (2016) the Ptype and the NN-type. The P-type roughly corresponds to English “outside-negation” interrogatives(e.g., Isn’t Jane coming, too?), and convey an epistemic bias towards the positive answer. The NN-type
corresponds to “inside-negation” interrogatives (e.g., Isn’t Jane coming, either?); it typically convey anepistemic bias towards the negative answer, but also allows a neutral interpretation in certain contexts.
It has been pointed out in the literature that the two varieties are prosodically differentiated. In the
P-type, the prosodic features of the predicate containing the negation are subdued. The NN-type does
not exhibit this property. There are two phonological processes that might account for the prosodic
features of the P-type interrogative: (i) post-focal reduction, and (ii) deaccenting (accent deletion).
Based on the results of a production experiment, this work demonstrates that the P-type interrogative
can be derived by either of the two processes, which take place under overlapping but distinct sets ofphonological, syntactic, and pragmatic configurations. Post-focal reduction is a general phenomenon
not specifically concerned with epistemic meaning. It affects the negative predicate in the P-typebecause the negation involved is, unlike in the case of the NN-type, semantically void and is not partof the information-structural focus. Deaccenting, on the other hand, is a prosodic convention that
directly encodes a positive epistemic bias; it can be applied only when the negative predicate occurs
at the very end of the clause, and is originally accented on its penultimate mora.

The Morphology-Prosody Interface in San Martı́n Peras Mixtec
Jason Ostrove (UC Santa Cruz)
Thursday, 3:30-3:00, West Lounge
San Martı́n Peras Mixtec, an Oto-Manguean language of Oaxaca, is in the process of innovating aclitic doubling pattern. This pattern copies the φ-features of the subject with a preverbal clitic.
(1)Rà lo’o rà.
he small he‘He is small.’(2)

Rà lo’o Julio.
he small J.
‘Julio is small.’

(3)

28

Ñá lo’o ñá.
she small she‘She is small.’(4)Ñá lo’o Rosa.
she small R.
‘Rosa is small.’In this talk, I present the syntactic origins of this pattern, which seems to have developed throughclitic left dislocation (Givón 1976). I also show that it increasingly behaves like agreement, as opposedto true clitic doubling (Kramer 2014), suggesting that it is in the process of grammaticization.
In addition to syntactic conditions, this pattern displays other sensitivities. For example, an adjunctin a nominal predicate blocks a doubled clitic.
(5)Rà [ doktor ] Juan.
he doctor J.
‘Juan is a doctor.’* [ Doktor ] Juan.

(6)

 [ Doktor ndı́bı́
] Julio.
doctor handsome J.
‘Julio is a handsome doctor.’*Rà [ doktor ndı́bı́ ] JulioAn adjunct in the predicate is not predicted under theories of clitic doubling to control the availableof a doubled clitic. Furthermore, things become more troublesome as this pattern moves towards
grammaticization as agreement, as adjuncts are transparent to Agree relations (Chomsky 2001). I
propose that neither theories need to be altered to account for this pattern. Rather, I argue thatthe distribution of the doubled clitic in (5-6) is prosodically optimizing. Specifically, a clitic serves tocreate a binary prosodic phrase at the left edge of the clause (Elordieta 1997, 2007, Bennett 2012).
I adopt an Optimality Theoretic framework (Prince & Smolensky 1993) using two constraints. The
first is Branch-Initial (ϕ) (Bennett 2012), which requires that the initial phonological phrase ϕ bebinary. The second is a standard constraint in prosodic phonology that penalizes prosodic clitics, suchas Exhaustivity (Selkirk 1995). By ranking Branch-Initial (ϕ) over Exhausitivy, we render
clitic marked prosodically unless they make the left-most ϕ binary. This captures the distribution in(5-6) without the need for incorporating the presence of adjuncts into our theories of φ-agreement or
clitic doubling.

On the Interaction between Phrase-final Lengthening and Prosodic Structure
Shu-hao Shih (Rutgers)
Thursday, 3:45-4:15, West LoungeThis paper proposes a novel theory about the interaction of phrase-final lengthening and prosodic
structure, and presents new experimental evidence for it. Studies on many languages have shownthat phrase-final lengthening distinguishes multiple prosodic levels (e.g. Wightman et al. 1992). I
propose that phrase-final lengthening crucially obeys two requirements: cumulativity and entailment.
Lengthening is cumulative such that segments in the final position of a higher prosodic domain are
significantly longer than those in final position of a smaller domain. Furthermore, the occurrence oflengthening before a lower-level domain boundary entails the occurrence of lengthening at all higher
levels. In this paper, I argue that evidence for a typological prediction of this theory is found in Taiwan
Mandarin: final lengthening only occurs in intonational phrase-final position, and not in lower levels.
The evidence comes from an experiment that used sentences with the word order [Subject Adverb
Verb Object]. All the words were disyllabic except for the object. The object was a trisyllabic word
which had the following morphosyntactic structure: [[σσ]σ]. Four prosodic levels were tested in thisstudy: the foot, prosodic word, phonological phrase, and intonational phrase (IP). All the target
syllables had the syllable shape CV. Corner vowels [a, i, u] were selected as target vowels; onset
consonants of the target syllables were primarily drawn from [p, t, k], with [ts, tù, tC] to fill out lexical
gaps. All the target syllables had a high level tone.
Results show that vowels before the boundary of IP are significantly longer than vowels before
the boundary of other prosodic positions (p<0.01). However, vowels in other prosodic phrase-final
positions do not show durational distinctions. All vowels exhibit the same pattern. The magnitude of
IP-final lengthening varies among different participants, but was present for all participants. Hence,29

the results are consistent with the cumulativity and entailment requirements. Finally, this paper
demonstrates that final vowel lengthening applies and adds a certain amount of duration even thoughvowels differ from each other in terms of intrinsic duration.

Historical Probabilities of Alternations
Gasper Begus (Harvard)
Friday, 4:15-4:45, East Lounge
One of the most contested debates in phonology concerns identifying factors that affect typology. Twolines of thought emerge in this discussion: Analytical Bias (AB) and Channel Bias approach (CB).
One of the aims of this paper is to propose a quantifiable model of typology within CB with theultimate goal to further disambiguate AB and CB influences on typology. We introduce the conceptof Historical Probabilities of Alternations (Pχ ) and claim that for every alternation we cancalculate Pχ based on the number of sound changes required for the alternation to arise diachronicallyand their corresponding probabilities.
We further propose a new method of estimating historical probabilities from typological surveys
labeled “bootstrapping sound changes” (BSC). Historical probabilities are bootstrapped (Efron 1979)
from a sample of successes (languages in the sample with a sound change S1 ) and failures (languages
in the sample without a sound change S1 ). If an alternation Ax requires more than one sound change
to arise (unmotivated minimally two, unnatural minimally three), Pχ is bootstrapped from a productof probabilities based on number of successes and failures (divided by n! to account for ordering ofsound changes).
The BSC method has several advantages: (i) the ability to compare historical probabilitiesof alternations and to perform inferential statistics on the comparison, (ii) the ability to predict(un)attestedness of alternations in a given sample, (iii) the ability to identify historically equiprobableprocesses that can be tested experimentally, and (iv) the ability to differentiate historical probabilities
of unattested alternations. Finally, historical probabilities can be used as means for encoding Channel
Bias in typological models.

A computational method for evaluating theories of phonological representation
Nick Danis, Eileen Blum, Luca Iacoponi, Hazel Mitchley & Adam Jardine
Friday, 3:15-3:45, East Lounge
We present a computationally-grounded framework in which linguistically motivated representational
devices like features and tiers decrease the complexity of the grammar in a well-defined sense. Througha number of examples we show that, given the right representational assumptions, the notion of phonological naturalness can be connected to an independently motivated notion of cognitive complexity.
This notion, based on k-values in the Strictly k-Local formal language classes (McNaughton and Papert, 1971), not only allows us to formalize the notion of a ‘simple’ constraint, but also gives us new
insights into the nature of phonological representation. We can ask of a representational theory: Do
natural, commonly attested patterns have a smaller k-value than their unnatural counterparts? Weshow that representations which include ordered features as explicit elements create such a distinction.
In other words, in such a representation natural constraints are less computationally complex thanunnatural constraints. This is a step towards unifying formal complexity and phonological substance.
30

Substantive Bias in Phonotactic Learning: Positional Extension of an Obstruent
Voicing Contrast
Eleanor Glewwe (UCLA)
Friday, 2:30-3:00, East Lounge
If a language contrasts voicing in obstruents word-finally, it contrasts voicing in obstruents wordinitially, but not necessarily vice versa (Steriade 1997). The present study examines substantive bias
in phonotactic learning by testing whether subjects reproduce this phonetically motivated phonotactic
implicational in an artificial grammar learning paradigm. I exposed subjects to an obstruent voicing
contrast in either word-initial or word-final position and tested whether they extended the contrast to
the other position. There were four training languages defined on two dimensions: Trained Contrast
Position (where the language exhibited an obstruent voicing contrast) and Trained Neutralization
Value (whether obstruents in the other position “neutralized” to voiced (D) or voiceless (T)). Subjects
also heard sonorant consonants in all positions. In the test phase, subjects heard both conforming
items (consistent with the pattern heard in training) and nonconforming items (featuring the voicing
and position combination not heard in training). If learners are biased toward natural phonotactic
systems, subjects exposed to the obstruent voicing contrast word-initially should less readily accept
nonconforming items than subjects exposed to the contrast word-finally.
The acceptance rates of nonconforming items in the word-initial contrast conditions were not significantly lower than the acceptance rates in the word-final contrast conditions. Thus the results do notsupport a substantive bias. However, subjects in the Initial Contrast with Word-Final Neutralization
to D condition accepted T# items significantly less than subjects in the Initial Contrast with WordFinal Neutralization to T condition accepted D# items. A possible explanation lies with the presenceof the sonorant-final items. In the former condition, subjects could have posited *[voice]# to exclude
T# items while in the latter condition, subjects would have had to posit the more complex *[-son,+voice]# to exclude D# items but not sonorant-final items. The simpler constraint may have beeneasier to learn, resulting in the difference between the two conditions with respect to subjects’ accuracy at rejecting nonconforming items. This suggests a possible role of complexity bias in phonotactic
learning.

Social distance correlates with similarity in linguistic behavior
Sam Tilsen (Cornell)
Friday, 2:00-2:30, West Lounge
Studying social-linguistic patterns over an extended timeframe is challenging for a number of reasons:social networks are typically not isolated, spontaneous speech is highly variable, and obtaining sufficient temporal resolution of linguistic behavior can be resource-intensive. To address these challenges,
a ten-week longitudinal study was conducted in an ad-hoc network of eight speakers. Participants
played a total of 535 dyadic map task games over the course of the study and produced teammate
preference rankings after each game. In addition, the task vocabulary was constrained: players wereallowed to say only location names, location properties, and a small set of function words and directionals. In each round, players were randomly paired into two-person teams, with pairings biased byteammate preference rankings made in the previous round.
The main hypothesis was that temporal variation in speech behavior would correlate with variation
in social distance, which was indexed by teammate preference rankings. Analyses of player-player distances in phonetic variables (vowel quality, sibilant spectra) and in syntactic patterns (Markov models
of word class transition probability) were conducted using a Monte Carlo procedure. The mutual
information between time series of social distance and linguistic variable distances was compared to31mutual information obtained from random permutations of these variables. The analyses showed an
excess of mutual information between social distance and linguistic behavioral distance. Hence theresults show that variation in social distance on the scale of ten weeks is correlated with similarity inlinguistic behavior. These results demonstrate that social forces are relevant to the temporal dynamics
of speech behavior on timescales of weeks and months, suggesting that change on longer timescales
may also be governed to a large extent by fluctuations in social networks.

Plurivaluationist semantics for absolute gradable predicates
Matthias Lalisse (Johns Hopkins)
Saturday, 2:45-3:15, West Lounge
In the literature on gradable predicates, “supervaluationist” accounts of degree phenomena—in which
gradable adjectives are analyzed as vague predicates—have been argued to flounder on the data ofabsolute gradable adjectives like empty/full and open/closed (Burnett 2014, Kennedy 2007). Absolute
gradable adjectives show some properties that distinguish them from relative gradable adjectives liketall, clever, sweet. For instance, they are generally not vague or context-sensitive (a door is closed if
it is maximally closed, cf. tall ), and they can occur with endpoint-oriented modifiers like completely(completely closed vs. #completely tall ).
In this presentation, I develop a “plurivaluationist” framework for natural language semantics, amathematical setting in which both ambiguity and gradability manifest as consequences of a language having multiple possible interpretations (Burnett 2014, Klein 1980, van Rooij 2011). A primarydifficulty for theories of this type has been to explain the scale properties of absolute gradable adjectives—i.e. the existence of maximal/minimal elements. In particular, if gradable adjectives denotevague, context-sensitive predicates as the supervaluationists claim, how can one derive—apart fromstipulative syntactic restrictons—the truth conditions and presuppositions of modifiers like completelythat presuppose endpoints on a scale?
To answer this challenge, I present an intensional semantics for gradable predicates in which scale
properties are stated as conditions on the set of admissible interpretations for a language—namely,that absolute gradable adjectives have maximal or minimal interpretations. I show that these conditions are coherent when gradable predicates have intensional denotations—i.e. where predicates are
in De→(s→t) —and in general incoherent when the semantics is not intensional, which leads to correct
predictions for sentences like #The glass is full but it could be fuller (van Rooij 2011). The framework I present explains the absolute-relative distinction and also provide a highly general degree-freetheoretical toolkit for the analysis of gradability and ambiguity.

Subjectivity and Gradability: on the semantics of the possessive property concept
construction in Mandarin Chinese
Xiao Li (Queens College) & Hongyong Liu (University of Macau)
Saturday, 3:15-3:45, West Lounge
In Mandarin Chinese, gradable predicates can be classified into two groups based on their morphosyntactic features: one consists of adjectival (e.g., gao ‘tall’) and verbal lexemes (e.g., xihuan ‘to like’),and the other consists of verbal phrases formed by the verb you to possess, to exist and a NP (e.g.,
you zhihui ‘have wisdom’). Following Francez and Koontz-Garboden (2015), we refer to the latteras Property Concept (PC) possessive predicates. What is interesting about them is that not all NPs
can combine with you to form a gradable predicate–count nouns such as pingguo ‘apple’ cannot; mass
nouns like shui ‘water’ cannot either (i.e., you pingguo ‘have apple’ or you pingguo ‘have water’ only
have an existential reading; they cannot be modified by degree morphology such as hen ‘very’). We
32

provide empirical evidence to show that a PC possessive predicate ‘you NP’ is gradable only when it
expresses a subjective assessment of an object: it must be a predicate of personal taste (e.g., fun) oran evaluative predicate (e.g., wise). Based on this observation, we put forward a proposal built upon
the intuition that one can truthfully say that a cup has water if there is a minimal portion of water inthe cup, but one cannot say that Zhangsan has wisdom if Zhangsan only possesses a minimal portionof wisdom. The gradability of ‘you NP’ is essentially determined by whether the standard involved isan objective degree (i.e. zero) or a subjective degree decided by the speaker/judge (dj ).

A semantic model of switch reference in Koasati
Mary Moroney (Cornell)
Friday, 1:30-2:00, West LoungeThis paper offers a semantic model of switch reference in Koasati, a Muskogean language spoken in
Louisiana and Texas. Switch reference (SR), a morphological phenomenon found in several languages
in the world, is traditionally characterized as a way of indicating whether the subjects of two conjoined clauses are the same or different (Jacobsen 1993); however, later work has shown that the real
picture is more complicated (see, for example, McKenzie 2015). Previous semantic accounts of SR
include work by Stirling (1993), who treats switch reference as tracking the identity/disjointness between eventualities, and McKenzie (2007, et seq.), who takes SR to be indicating identity/disjointness
between Austinian situations. My analysis of switch reference differs from these in that I am pursuinga reference tracking analysis. The data from Koasati suggests that SR markers manipulate the possible antecedents that can be referenced by anaphors. There is a sytematicity to which antecedents
are most accessible in Koasati that an event or situation based analysis of switch reference does notpredict. In order to capture this pattern of available reference, I modify Dekker’s (1994) Predicate
Logic with Anaphora (PLA), which encodes an order of individuals introduced in a discourse. PLA isa system for modeling English pronouns that uses standard Predicate Logic syntax with a semantics
that maintains ordered lists of individuals introduced by the existential quantifier. This system canbe altered to capture the basic patterns of Koasati switch reference. Aside from simply being able
to account for Koasati switch reference, it is possible to compare English and Koasati systems ofanaphora if both can be modeled in PLA.

Do You Really Mean It? Linking Lexical Semantic Profiles and the Age of Acquisition for the English Passive
Emma Nguyen (UConn) & Lisa Pearl (UC Irvine)
Friday, 2:00-2:30, West Lounge
English children are observed to be delayed in their understanding of the passive. While some approaches suggest this is due to either a general grammatical deficiency or verb frequency in children’s
input, several studies have noted that performance depends on the verb’s lexical semantics. We conducted both a meta-analysis of experimental studies assessing the age of acquisition for the passive
use of English verbs and a corpus analysis of English children’s input. We find a striking correlation
between the lexical semantic profile of verbs and the demonstrated age of acquisition for their passive
usage by English children, with no relationship to individual verb frequency.

Don’t miss the BEAT!: Exceeds Comparatives in American Sign Language
Natasha Abner (Montclair), Helen Koulidobrova (Central Connecticut), Ronnie Wilbur (Purdue) &Sandra Wood (McDaniel)
33

Friday, 2:00-2:30, West Lounge
Constructions expressing gradable information, especially in the domain of comparative constructions,have received significant attention in both typological studies and formal analyses. However, few studies of comparatives in sign language exist (though see Aristodemo & Geraci 2015 and Gajewski 2015
for recent work). This research incorporates sign language data into the typological and formal landscape of comparatives by providing evidence from Deaf signers that American Sign Language (ASL)
uses the spatial agreement verb beat to create a verbal exceed -style comparative, thus extending thegeographic distribution of exceeds comparatives beyond South Asian and Sub-Saharan language families. We analyze the morpho-syntactic and semantic properties of this comparative construction andprovide evidence that beat (1) can be semantically extended to express general evaluative comparison(2), suggesting function as a grammatical comparative marker.
(1)

fs trump beat fs clinton

Trump beat Clinton.

(2)

i sister ixi rich (i) beat1

My sister is way more rich than I am.

Moreover, comparatives formed with beat are compatible with adverbial modifiers, including measurephrase differentials (3).
(3)

ixi finish smoke+++ beat twice than you

He smokes twice as much as you.

beat comparatives also provide a rich domain for the exploration of clausal subordination in ASL,
as they appear to allow clausal material in the standard (4). Thus, beat comparatives may provide additional typological evidence for Baglini’s (2012) proposal (contra Stassen 1985) that exceeds
comparatives allow clausal standards.
(4)

a.
b.

win five game beat win four gameix2 write, ixi write, (i) beat2

Winning five games beats winning four games.
He’s better than you at writing.

The Emergence of Agent-Marking Strategies in Child Homesign Systems
Laura Horton, Lilia Rissman, Susan Goldin-Meadow & Diane Brentari (University of Chicago)
Friday, 2:30-3:00, West Lounge
Crosslinguistically, many sign languages encode argument structure alternations with a discrete agentive morpheme in classifier predicates. Benedicto and Brentari (2004) established that, in classifier
predicates in American Sign Language (ASL), handshapes that iconically represent the shape of theobject, Object-CLs, and handshapes that iconically represent how a hand would manipulate the object, Handling-CLs, are sensitive to agency: Handling-CLs encode transitive agentive events. We ask
whether this device appears in emergent sign language systems and whether it is used productively to
encode more nuanced construals of transitive agentive events. We compare two groups of child “homesigners” in Guatemala, where a homesigner is deaf children who is not learning an established sign
language but are inventing their own sign systems to communicate. The first group–family homesigners–has a communicative model from a deaf adult relative, who also has not learned a sign language
but has significant experience using their homesign system. The second group–peer homesigners–
attend school with other deaf students and thus interact with peers who also use homesign systems.
We elicited descriptions of short video clips from two family homesigners (Mage = 7;0) and two peer
homesigners (Mage = 12;6). We find that homesigners use handshape to mark a distinction between
events with and without agents. Nonetheless, homesigners who communicate with each other, buthave not received a structured system as input market this distinction less consistently and do notinnovate devices for more nuanced construals of agency.
34

Expressing the clusivity distinction in non-specific indefinite pronouns in Turkish
Sign Language (TİD)
Meltem Kelepir, Asli Özkul & Elvan Tamyurek Ozparlak (Bogazici University)
Friday, 3:15-3:45, West Lounge
Some spoken languages and many sign languages make clusivity distinctions in personal pronouns
such as exclusive vs. inclusive first person plural (‘we’) or dual (‘two of us’). In sign languages,
while inclusive pronouns are signed at the centre of the signer’s chest, exclusive pronouns are signedon the lateral plane (Cormier, 2012). Exclusive pronouns in sign languages may exclude not only
the addressee but also some other referents salient in the discourse. In this paper, we show that
TİD makes a clusivity distinction in non-specific indefinite pronouns as well, in ways similar to theclusivity distinction in personal pronouns. These data have been elicited during a study on impersonal
constructions where the referents of the agents are unknown. TİD signers have been observed to use
strategies to explicitly express that the set of potential agents do not include the addressee (andother people salient in the discourse), i.e. they are not “from among us”, “the exclusive someone
reading”, in contrast to explicitly expressing that the potential agents do include the addressee (andother people salient in the discourse), i.e. are “from among us”, “the inclusive someone reading”.
TİD employs both lexical and modality-specific means to express clusivity distinctions: (i) there areforms which include the sign other and are inherently exclusive, (ii) inclusive indefinite pronoun
one ‘someone’ is signed in a central locus while the exclusive indefinite pronoun oneu ‘someone’ issigned in a high locus, (iii) the locus of agent marking on an agreement verb is high or a plain verb
is signed in the upper part of the lateral plane for the “exclusive someone” reading. Our study showsthat clusivity, usually associated with personal pronouns in languages, must be extended to indefinite
pronouns, at least in TİD.

Phonological Complexity is Subregular: Evidence from Sign Language
Jonathan Rawski (Stony Brook)
Friday, 3:45-4:15, West Lounge
Do the computational properties of phonology hold independently of modality? Many phonologists
claim that the characteristics of the phonological system are inextricably dependent on the physicalarticulators which externalize it. Others use sign language phonology as evidence for an algebraic
phonology of computational rules that hold regardless of the system of articulation used, i.e. independent of modality. I use formal language theory to draw parallels between the computational
complexity of three signed processes and that of their spoken equivalents, and thus point to a unified
independent phonology.
I review three sign processes metathesis, final syllable reduplication, compound reduction using theframework of Heinz (2016). He proposes that the complexity of spoken phonology is heavily restricted,
falling in the sub-classes of the Chomskyan Regular class of string patterns, where grammars aredefined by finite states and transitions between them. If phonology is truly independent of modality,
then any phonological process will fit into this subregular characterization regardless of modality, or
the algebraic view of phonology may be incorrect. I show that in sign languages, metathesis and final
syllable reduplication are Strictly Local processes, just like the parallel spoken language processes(Chandlee 2014), while compound reduction uses multiple Tier-Based Strictly Local grammars. This
supports the view that the Subregular classification of phonology holds regardless of modality.
35

Forbidden clitic clusters in Zapotec: Implications for the Person–Case Constraint
Steven Foley, Nick Kalivoda & Maziar Toosarvandani (UC Santa Cruz)
Thursday, 3:45-4:15, East Lounge
The following line of reasoning is often advanced in the literature on the Person–Case Constraint(PCC): If an impossible combination of clitic arguments is subject to a syntactic repair, such as
periphrasis, there must be something syntactic wrong with it; by contrast, if an impossible clitic
cluster is subject to a morphological repair, such as deletion, there must be something morphologicalwrong with it (Anagnostopoulou 2003, Nevins 2007, 2011, Rezac 2011, a.o.). Combinations of thirdperson clitics in several Northern Zapotec varieties (Oto–Manguean: Oaxaca) challenge this wellaccepted view. In these languages, we argue that clitic clusters with totally identical ϕ-features are
forbidden because of a morphological constraint on haplology even though violations are repaired
through syntactic means.
In these Zapotec languages, pronominal clitics exhibit a four-way gender distinction—elder humanvs. non-elder human vs. animal vs. inanimate—which restricts possible clitic clusters. In addition
to a Gender–Case Constraint, a version of the PCC that prohibits certain clusters based on a genderhierarchy, these languages generally also forbid clitic clusters with completely identical gender (andperson) features. With one exception: across these varieties, the elder human clitic can take different
forms depending on context. While conditioning environments vary from language to language, thefollowing generalization holds absolutely: Two elder human clitics cannot appear in a cluster justin case they are identical in form (i.e., if the cluster is haplological). Nonetheless, violations of this
X–X Constraint are repaired syntactically: the second argument is realized periphrastically as anindependent pronoun.
For forbidden clitic clusters, then, the character of their repair does not necessarily indicate thesource of their ill-formedness. This suggests, moreover, that the GCC—and, by analogy, the PCC—
should be maintained as a distinct grammatical principle that treats featurally-identical clitic clusters
as syntactically well-formed (Anagnostopoulou 2005, Nevins 2007, 2011, contra Walkow 2012).

Adverbial Nominals and Case
Edward Rubin (University of Utah)
Thursday, 2:30-3:00, East LoungeThis paper applies minimalist reasoning to Case Theory, concluding that it applies more generally
than normally held. Specifically, it argues against its application only to Argument Nominals (ArgNs),
which would necessitate an assumed restriction beyond the minimally (and empirically) necessary one
that Case Theory exists (Lasnik 2008). The main argument focuses on a contrast between between
two grammar types: One has Adverbial Nominals (AdvNs) with fixed morphological case, and theother has AdvNs which display structural case that can vary in standard ways. The proposal adopts
standard mechanisms of minimalist theories (Chomsky 2005, 2008), including Agree and the [Case]feature, applying them to ArgNs and AdvNs equivalently, though features other than [Case] mightvary across example-types, as generally permitted by modern feature-checking.
For varying-form, structural case languages (Korean, Finnish), I propose the simplest analysis,that the standard configuration for Licensing applies. Because the (structural) case of AdvNs in theselanguages vary in form exactly as do ArgNs, I propose that the same head (v or T) contains thelicensing probe for each, thus capturing their identity of shift in form without additional assumptions
beyond those needed for the standard treatment of ArgNs. In contrast, for languages with fixed caseforms (e.g. German, Russian, Latin), I propose that the grammar associates the probing feature withsome particular fixed head. For both, I propose that the probing feature is not uφ, as it is for the36

ArgN’s Case, because of intervention and other factors. Instead, I propose that it is the unvalued
correlate of another feature that is inherent to AdvNs in the same way that φ is to ArgNs: Mod(ifier)from Rubin 2003. Finally, I discuss the heads involved in the fixed-case languages, and show that this
proposal reduces ”semantic” case to structural case, with licensing by a relevant head.

Choctaw PCC repair: Basque-style PCC repair in a language with no dative
Matthew Tyler (Yale)
Thursday, 3:00-3:30, East Lounge
A striking property of Choctaw and certain Basque varieties is that the two unrelated languages makeuse of a similar repair strategy to obviate violations of the Person-Case Constraint (PCC) in transitive
unaccusatives. The strategy is Absolutive Promotion (AP), in which an argument that typically bears
absolutive Case is realized instead with ergative Case. Strangely, however, in Basque the promoted
argument is the theme (Rezac 2008, Arregi & Nevins 2012), while in Choctaw it is the experiencer.
I argue that the relevant distinction is Case-assignment. On the assumption that AP always targets
the highest internal argument without Case, the difference in AP between the two languages comes
down to whether the Appl(icative) head assigns dative Case to the experiencer in Spec-ApplP: if Appl0
does assign Case to the experiencer (as in Basque), it cannot be targeted for AP, and the next-highestCaseless argument – the theme – is targeted instead. If Appl0 does not assign dative Case (as in
Choctaw), the experiencer is now the highest Caseless argument, and it gets promoted in AP. I showthat Choctaw’s apparent ‘dative’ clitics are illusory, being composed of an absolutive clitic followed
by applicative morpheme.
In addition to sharing a PCC repair mechanism, the PCC restrictions in both languages can be
accounted for similarly: Arregi & Nevins’s analysis, that PCC restrictions arise from a syntactic restriction against multiple clitic pronouns adjoining to a single host, extends perspicuously to Choctaw.
In Choctaw, almost all absolutive clitic clusters are banned – this is because they attempt to attach
to the same host. The only exceptions are when the inner clitic is 1SG – this is because, I argue, there
is a dedicated head for 1SG absolutive clitics. The existence of the dedicated 1SG clitic host accounts
for a variety of other anomalous behaviors of 1SG arguments in Choctaw.

Ellipsis licensing in sluicing: A QuD accountMatthew Barros & Hadas Kotek (Yale)
Saturday, 9:30-10:00, East LoungeThis talk defends a semantic identity account of ellipsis licensing. The argument will come fromexamples of multiple sluicing as discussed e.g. in Romero 1998; Lasnik 2014. We concentrate inparticular on antecedents that contain two quantified statements and uncover a surprising asymmetry,
where surface-scope antecedents can license a multiple sluice, but inverse-scope antecedents cannot.
The fact that the multiple question pre-sluice is acceptable with an inverse scope antecedent showsthat this is a sluicing-specific pattern. We argue that this finding is explained by semantic accounts ofellipsis licensing, where ellipsis is licensed when the sluice corresponds to an (implicit) Question under
Discussion (cf. AnderBois, 2014; Barros, 2014; Weir, 2014). We show that QuDs cannot be computed
based on the truth-conditional content of the antecedents alone; instead, they must be computed only
after (scalar) implicatures have been calculated and added to the common ground, along with thecontext of utterance. We further discuss the commitments required of a syntactic LF-identity accountof ellipsis licensing in order to account for multiple sluicing with quantified antecedents, and argue
that accounts along these lines would run into serious trouble, making them practically untenable.
37

Verb Phrase Ellipsis is discourse reference: novel evidence from dialogue
Till Poppels & Andrew Kehler (UC San Diego)
Saturday, 9:00-9:30, East Lounge
It is widely acknowledged that the licensing and interpretation of Verb Phrase Ellipsis (VPE) is
context-dependent, but the nature of that dependency remains controversial. Here, we present experimental evidence in support of a theory of VPE as discourse reference, based on short dialogues as in
(1).
(1)

Spectator: Can I please see that card trick one more time?
Magician: I’m sorry, I can’t. [show it to you again]

The spectator’s utterance does two things: it poses a question to the magician, which (a) provides a
VP that could serve as the antecedent for subsequent ellipsis, and (b) communicates an indirect speech
act by implicitly submitting a request—in this case, that a card trick be performed. The magician’s
response employs VPE, but the meaning of the ellipsis clause (“show”) does not correspond to thatof the antecedent (“see”). In a dual-task experiment, participants rated the acceptability of dialogues
like (1) on a 5-point Likert scale and then paraphrased the ellipsis site in a free production task.
The results were consistent with a discourse-reference view, but incompatible with identity theories
of ellipsis: participants’ interpretation of the ellipsis clause exhibited a strong tendency to deviate
from the meaning of the linguistic antecedent (as exemplified by the see—show mismatch in (1)). In
terms of acceptability, we found these deviations to be associated with slightly lower acceptability
compared to non-elliptical controls, but they were judged much more acceptable than lower-boundelliptical filler items. We argue that these results represent an important addition to the empiricalbase in the VPE literature, and discuss their ramifications for a variety of analyses of VPE currently
on offer.

Responsive Predicates are Question-Embedding: Evidence from Estonian
Tom Roberts (UC Santa Cruz)
Saturday, 10:15-10:45, East Lounge
Responsive Predicates (ResPs)–those clausal-embedding predicates which permit both declarative orinterrogative complements, like know and say–pose a puzzle for compositional semantics. Declarative
clauses are typically taken to denote propositions, whereas interrogatives denote questions, which isproblematic if each ResP maintains a single entry in the lexicon. Prior accounts diverge on how tobest rectify this inconsistency, from reducing interrogatives to propositions (Karttunen 1977, Ginsburg
1995, Spector & Egré 2015, a.o.), to reducing declaratives to questions (Uegaki 2016) or dispensing
altogether with the assumption that the denotations of declaratives and interrogatives are of different
types, as in Inquisitive Semantics (e.g. Theiler et al 2016).
In this talk, I bring novel data from Estonian to bear on this theoretical debate. In Estonian, a classof ResPs whose denotations concern contemplation, such as mõtlema ’think, consider’, convey what
seem to be radically different meanings depending on the type of complement it takes. When pairedwith a declarative complement, mõtlema canonically indicates representational belief like English
think (1), but with an interrogative complement, it indicates ignorance toward the true answer to theembedded question, like English wonder (2).
(1)
Ma mõtlen, et sajab vihma.
(2)
Ma mõtlen, kas sajab vihma.
I mõtlema that falls rain
I mõtlema Q falls rain
‘I think that it’s raining.’‘I wonder whether it’s raining.’
38

I demonstrate that a proposition-embedding denotation for mõtlema is not compatible with its fullrange of meanings, but a question-embedding denotation, combined with standard Gricean reasoning,
can naturally derive the superficially distinct interpretations of mõtlema across contexts. Building
upon the analysis by Uegaki (2016), I argue that a proposition-embedding semantics for ResPs is
not sufficient to capture the Estonian facts, whereas a question-embedding semantics is, and that thisapproach is also compatible with the uniform treatment of declaratives and interrogatives of Inquisitive
Semantics.

Locus of Marking in Nahuatl and Spanish: contact-induced morphological change
Robert Borges & Justyna Olko (University of Warsaw)
Saturday, 1:30-2:00, East Lounge
Locus of marking was first described in Nichols’ (1986) seminal paper that described morphologicalhead marking and dependent marking as a typological prime. She suggested that languages tend to
primarily employ one strategy or the other (or none, zero marking; or both, double marking) acrosstheir grammars. This paper examines the locus of marking strategies in two languages that have beenin contact for approximately half a millennium – Nahuatl and Spanish. Contact-induced languagechange has been regarded as the primary factor driving language change in Nahuatl varieties. Colonial
Nahuatl makes primary use of head marking strategies, while Spanish tends to use of dependentmarking strategies if at all. In a forthcoming work, Olko suggests that the bulk of changes in Nahuatl
have to do with a reduction or loss of head-marking strategies in modern Nahuatl varieties.
In this paper, we propose to examine locus of marking in several areas of grammar, following
Nichols (1986) original description – possessive phrases, adpositional phrases, main clauses, and relative clauses. We will take a historical variationist approach, applying quantitative methodology toevenly distributed historical data from the sixteenth century to the present, which will elucidate trends
in variation over time. This study is grounded in our extensive corpus of written colonial Nahuatl
texts, coupled with present-day ethno-historical and linguistic data from both strongly urbanized (central Puebla, Tlaxcala, Estado de Mexico) and more peripheral rural communities where traditionalmodes of subsistence are preserved (Huastecan region in northern Veracruz, Sierra Negra in Tlaxcala,southern Puebla).

Apprehensionality emerging: The case of Kriol bambai
Josh Phillips (Yale)
Saturday, 2:00-2:30, East Lounge‘Apprehensional’ markers are a nuanced, cross-linguistically attested grammatical category, reported
to encode epistemic possibility in addition to information about speakers’ attitudes with respect to the(un)desirability of some eventuality. Taking the meaning of the Australian Kriol particle bambai as anempirical testing ground, this talk provides a first semantic treatment of apprehensionality, informed
by a diachronic observation (due to Angelo & Schultze-Berndt 2016) that apprehensional readings
may emerge from erstwhile temporal frame adverbials that encode a relation of subsequentiality
between a discourse context and the eventuality described by the prejacent predicate.
Kriol bambai derives from dialectal English by-and-by, an adverbial with reflexes found across many
Pacific contact varieties which is taken to encode the instantiation of its prejacent in the future of acontextually retrievable reference time. This use has been retained in Kriol, given in ((1-a)) below.
In certain modalised contexts however, the apprehensional reading is made salient; shown in ((1-a)).

39

(1)

a.

main dedi imin go la det shop ailibala bambai imin kambek
bla gugum
my father 3s-pst go loc the shop morning bambai 3s-pst come.back purp cook
dina bla melabat
lunch purp 1p.excl‘My father went to the shop this morning, then he came back to make lunch for us’b.

Context: It’s noon and I have six hours of work after this phonecall. I tell my colleague:
ai-rra dringgi kofi bambai mi gurrumuk la desk iya gin
1s-irr drink coffee bambai 1s fall.asleep loc desk here emph
‘I’d better have a coffee otherwise I might pass out right here on the desk’

I propose a unified analysis of the subsequential and apprehensional readings of bambai by appealing
to a Kratzerian analysis (2012 a.o.) of modal polysemy and the contextual retrieval of conversational
backgrounds as well as drawing analogies with antecedent-as-domain restrictor analyses of conditional
constructions.
This analysis provides a first formal semantic treatment of apprehensionals as a grammatical category and demonstrates the utility of a formal treatment of semantic change in the modal and expressive
domains.

Two Kinds of Quantificational Domains: Mandarin mei with or without dou
Yenan Sun (University of Chicago)
Saturday, 2:45-3:15, East LoungeThis paper revisits Huang’s (1995, 1996) observation that a seemingly counterpart of English Dquantifier and A-quantifier in Mandarin: mei and dou, behaves very differently from every and all.
Mandarin mei can optionally co-occurs with an adverb dou when there is an indefinite phrase like yishou ge ‘a/one song’ in the predicate, as in (1)1 ; while mei obligatorily co-occurs with dou when there
is no indefinite phrase in the predicate, as in (2).
(1)

mei yi ge nanhai (dou) chang-le
yi shou ge.
MEI one CL boy
DOU sing-PERF one CL song
‘Every boy (*all) sang a song.’(2)

mei yi ge nanhai *(dou) dao-le/chang-lezhe shou ge.
MEI one CL boy
DOU arrive-PERF/sing-PERF this CL song
‘Every boy (*all) arrived/sang this song.’

Different from Huang’s original analysis that mei is a generalized universal quantifier plus a skolem
function, I propose that the mei sentences with or without dou should be distinguished in terms of how
their quantificational domains are built: as simplified and summarized in (3), structure A’s domain
is characterized by what I call one-time partition which means if there are 4 boys in the context,
they are divided by num1 (num=numeral, assume it is 2 here) into 2 groups, each group relates to an
occurrence of the event “build num2 -CL castle”; structure B’s domain is characterized by exhaustive
cover building, which means if there are 4 boys in the context, all the possible pairs are built to bequantified over and each pair as a cover relates to an occurrence of the event.
(3)
1

structure A: MEI num1 -boy built num2 -castle
structure B: MEI num1 -boy DOU built num2 -castle
The notations in this paper: CL=classifier, PERF=perfective, num=numeral.

40(one-time partition)(exhaustive cover-building)There are 3 novel predictions following from this proposal: (i) a truth conditional difference between
structure A and B when num1 >2; (ii) structure A is more sensitive to indivisible domain than B;(iii) structure B is less compatible with average semantics than A. These predictions can be confirmed
by most native speakers’ judgments and I will argue the messy part of the data (from a pilot study)
can be explained by pragmatic factors. Finally I will provide a compositional analysis for structure
A and B and further discuss the consequences and implications of encoding one-time partition, which
captures the non-overlapping quantity of the domain, into formal semantics.

41

Acknowledgments
The Chicago Linguistic Society would sincerely like to thank the following sponsors for their generous
financial support of this year’s meeting:• The Office of the Reynolds Club and Student Activities• The Franke Institute for the Humanities
We are especially grateful to our keynote speakers for presenting their research and to all of thesession presenters for sharing their work with us. We appreciate the considerable effort involved in
preparing for, traveling to, and presenting at our conference, not to mention the demanding work that
their research entails. We are also very grateful to all who submitted an abstract for consideration but
did not have an opportunity to present. With a three-day schedule and around 220 submissions, it wasnecessary to leave out from the program many outstanding pieces of research. If the Chicago LinguisticSociety conference maintains high standards, it is due in large measure to the notable authors who
submit their work for consideration. Special thanks must also go to the faculty and students in the
Department of Linguistics who offered their valuable advice and support from the very first to thevery last stages of conference preparation. In addition, we want to express our deep gratitude to allof our anonymous abstract reviewers — external and internal — who provided helpful feedback to
submitting authors. Thanks, too, to all the student volunteers who helped us with the conference
logistics. Finally, we would like to thank all conference attendees for joining us here at the 53rd annual
meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, continuing the tradition of excellence.

CLS 53 Organizing Committee:
Daniel Edmiston
Marina Ermolaeva
Emre HakgüderJackie Lai
Kathryn Montemurro
Brandon Rhodes
Amara Sankhagowit
Michael Tabatowski

42Author Index
Özkul, Asli, 35
Abner, Natasha, 33
Aksënova, Alëna Aks, 17
Asikin-Garmager, Eli, 24
Baek, Hyunah, 17
Bakst, Sarah, 27
Barros, Matthew, 37
Begus, Gasper, 30
Beltrama, Andrea, 25
Blum, Eileen, 30
Borges, Robert, 39
Brentari, Diane, 34Champollion, Lucas, 11Cremers, Alexandre, 25
Danis, Nick, 30
De Santo,Aniello, 17
Dolatian, Hossep, 18, 27
Dunn, Jonathan, 18
Elliott, Patrick D., 19

Iacoponi, Luca, 30
Inkelas, Sharon, 27
Ishii, Toru, 21Ostrove, Jason, 28
Ozparlak, Elvan Tamyurek,
35

Jardine, Adam, 30
Jun, Sun-Ah, 14

Pearl, Lisa, 33
Pesetsky, Jonathan, 25
Phillips, Josh, 39
Poppel, Till, 38
Pycha, Anne, 27

Kalivoda, Nick, 36
Kehler, Andrew, 38
Kelepir, Meltem, 35
Kim, Dayoung, 26
Kim, Gyeongnam, 26
Kotek, Hadas, 37
Koulidobrova, Helen, 33
Lalisse, Matthias, 32
Li, Audrey, 15
Li, Haoze, 20
Li, Xiao, 32
Liao, Hsiu-Chen Daphne, 20
Lisowski, Grzegorz, 25
Liu, Hongyong, 32

Foley, Steven, 36
Francez, Itamar, 12Meertens, Erlinde, 25
Mitchley, Hazel, 30
Moroney, Mary, 33

Glewwe, Eleanor, 31Goldin-Meadow, Susan, 34
Graf, Thomas, 13

Namboodiripad, Savithry, 26
Nguyen, Emma, 33
Nicolae, Andreea C., 19

Heinz, Jeffrey, 18
Hoeks, Morwenna, 25
Horton, Laura, 34

Oda, Kenji, 22Olko, Justyna, 39
Oshima, David Yoshikazu, 28

43

Quer, Josep, 16
Rawski, Jonathan, 35
Rieser, Lukas, 23
Rissman, Lilia, 34
Roberts, Tom, 38
Romero, Maribel, 25
Rubin, Edward, 36
Sauerland, Uli, 19
Shih, Shu-hao, 29
Shirata, Rihito, 23
Sun, Yenan, 40
Tilsen, Sam, 31
Tomita, Yu, 19
Toosarvandani, Maziar, 36
Tyler, Matthew, 37
Wilbur, Ronnie, 33
Wood, Sandra, 33
Xiang, Yimei, 20
Yu, Jianrong, 24

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