The 48th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society
April 19-21, 2012

Contents
Welcome . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Schedule
Day 1 (Thursday, April 19, 2012). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7
Day 2 (Friday, April 20, 2012) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Day 3 (Saturday, April 21, 2012) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Invited talks
Adam Albright (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Modeling the origin and spread of morphologicalparadigm gaps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Sandra Chung (University of California, Santa Cruz) On Reaching Agreement Late . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Marcel den Dikken (CUNY Graduate Center) The Phase Impenetrability Condition and successive cyclicity: A reconsideration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Nausicaa Pouscoulous (University College London) Grice’s children: Investigations in the development of
pragmatic abilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .15
Kai von Fintel (joint work with Sabine Iatridou) (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) What’s in animperative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .16
Alan C. L. Yu (University of Chicago) The Linguistic Individual in the Changing World . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
PapersNatasha R. Abner and Thomas Graf (University of California, Los Angeles) The Complexity of Binding
in English and ASL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
John Alderete1 , Paul Tupper1 , Stefan Frisch2 (1 Simon Fraser University, 2 University of South Florida)
Learning phonotactics without rules: A connectionist model of OCP-Place in Arabic . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Artemis Alexiadou, Mariangeles Cano, Gianina Iordǎchioaia, Fabienne Martin, and Florian Schaefer(University of Stuttgart) Direct participation effects in derived nominals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Vandana Bajaj, Viviane Déprez, Julien Musolino (Rutgers University) The Question Under Discussion
and its Role in Scopal Ambiguity Resolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Sebastian Bank, Jochen Trommer (University of Leipzig) Paradigm Learning and Subanalysis Complexity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Matthew Barros (Rutgers University) Evidence for Syntactic Identity in P-stranding Clausal Ellipsis in
Spanish . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten (University of Massachusetts Amherst) Slightly coerced: Processing evidence
for adjectival coercion by minimizers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Sebastian Buecking (University of Tuebingen) The semantics of frequency adjectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Heather Burnett (University of California, Los Angeles) Universal Quantification and Slack Regulation in
the Adjectival Domain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Becky Butler (Cornell University) A Gestural Account of Minor Syllables: Evidence from Khmer . . . . 223

I-Hsuan Chen (University of California, Berkeley) What Determines the Licensing of Negative Polarity
Items: The Interaction between Mandarin Chinese Minimizers, Negation, and Foci . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Jinsun Choe (University of Hawaii at Manoa) Acquisition of Raising: Intervention Effects in A-movement. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Eva Csipak (University of Göttingen) The factivity of pizza subjunctives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Karen Duek (CUNY Graduate Center) Bare nouns and gender agreement in Brazilian Portuguese . . 24
Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Mandarin alternative questions question focus alternatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Jessica Gamache (Michigan State University) Children’s forms as derivational steps: External evidence
for a new synthetic compound structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .25
Anastasia Giannakidou1 , Alda Mari2 (1 University of Chicago, 2 ENS/CNRS Paris) A modal analysis of
Greek and Italian future morphemes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
Maria Giavazzi (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Assibilation in Standard Finnish: a case of stressconditioned contrast neutralization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .26
Kyle Gorman (University of Pennsylvania) Latin rhotacism for real . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Stefan Hofstetter (Universität Tübingen) Better low pay than no pay: Propositional Adjectives Obviate
Negative Island Effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Yusuke Imanishi (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Non-uniform merge of argument WH and null
resumption: A case study in Kaqchikel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Hyun Kyoung Jung (University of Arizona) Stacking Verbal Suffixes in Korean — An Argument for
Flavors of v . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Laura Kalin1 , Coppe van Urk2 (1 University of California, Los Angeles, 2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology) A novel aspect split in Senaya . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Gregory Kierstead (The Ohio State University) The interaction between propositional attitude verbs andreportative evidentiality in Tagalog . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Yun Jung Kim (University of California, Los Angeles) Do learners prefer transparent rule ordering? An
Artificial language learning study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
Lan Kim (University of Delaware) On the Khmer Passive-like Construction: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
Yulia Kondratenko, Laura Spinu (Concordia University) Being “better” with accents: evidence from bilinguals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Hadas Kotek, Yasutada Sudo, Martin Hackl (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Many Readings ofMost . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Soohyun Kwon (University of Pennsylvania) Beyond the adolescent peak of toykey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Bradley Larson (University of Maryland) Sprouting Anew: Fragment Answers, And Here’s Why . . . . . 32
Tommi Leung (United Arab Emirates University) Sluicing may repair LF-constraints . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Constantine Lignos, Kyle Gorman (University of Pennsylvania) Revisiting frequency and storage in morphological processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Kuo-Chiao Jason Lin (New York University) Post-syntactic Operations: Morphological Locality in Saaroa
Prefix Concord . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Giorgio Magri (CNRS, University of Paris 7) Constraint promotion: not only convergent but also efficient. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

4

Paul Marty (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) The Role of Release Bursts in Word-Final Stop
Perception . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Marie-Christine Meyer (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Missing Alternatives and Disjunction 35
Elliott Moreton, Katya Pertsova (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) Is phonological learning
different? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
Alexander Podobryaev (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) A third dependent case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
Mariana Resenes1 , Marcel den Dikken2 (1 University of Sao Paulo, 2 CUNY Graduate Center) Semi-clefts
as a window on the syntax of predication, modification, and complementation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Kevin Sitek1 , Keith Johnson2 (1 San Francisco VA Medical Center, 2 University of California, Berkeley)
Ipsilateral and contralateral phonetic context effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Anastasia Smirnova (Tufts University) The semantics of mood in Bulgarian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
E. Allyn Smith1 , Kathleen Currie Hall2 (1 Northwestern University, 2 CUNY) The relationship between
projection and at-issueness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Ayaka Sugawara (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Semantics of English suffix -ish . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Julia Thomas, Timothy Grinsell (University of Chicago) Finna as a Socially-Meaningful Modal (andPerformative) in African American English . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Tsz-Him Tsui (The Ohio State University) Tonal variations in Hong Kong Cantonese: Interactions of
acoustic distance and functional load . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
Alexis Wellwood1 , Justin Halberda2 , Tim Hunter3 , Darko Odic2 , Paul Pietroski1 , Jeffrey Lidz1 (1 Universityof Maryland, 2 John Hopkins University, 3 Yale University) Meaning more or most: evidence from 3and-a-half year-olds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
Suyeon Yun (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Perceptual Similarity and Epenthesis Positioning in
Loan Adaptation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Erin Zaroukian, Charley Beller (Johns Hopkins University) Licensing by modification in two classes ofverbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
Author Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

5

Welcome
Welcome to the 48th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. We are very fortunate this year
to have so many eminent presenters including our six invited speakers: Adam Albright, Sandra Chung,Marcel den Dikken, Kai von Fintel, Nausicaa Pouscoulous, and Alan Yu. In all, we have twenty-two
stimulating sessions covering a broad spectrum of current topics with special parasessions on Agreement,
Historical Phonology and Morphology, and Meaning and Cognition.
The conference is being held 19-21 April, 2012, in Ida Noyes Hall at the University of Chicago (1212 E.
59th St., Chicago, IL 60637). Registration is at 8:00 am each day, with opening remarks scheduled for 10
am Thursday. We cordially invite all graduate students to attend our Graduate Student Mixer at 7:30
pm Thursday and we sincerely hope to see everyone at the closing banquet, 6:30 pm Saturday, which willfeature 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 the MIT Press, the Cambridge University Press, and the
University of Chicago Press. 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!

6

Day 1 schedule (April 19, Thursday)
All events held in Ida Noyes Hall (1212 E. 59th Street)
Left column and invited talks – West Lounge, 2nd floor
8:00-10:00
10:00-10:15
10:15-10:45

10:45-11:15

11:15-11:30

11:30-12:00

Right column – East Lounge, 2nd floor

Registration
Opening Remarks (West Lounge, 2nd floor)
General Session: Syntax (1)General Session: Pragmatics
Mariana Resenes1 , Marcel den Dikken2
Gregory Kierstead (The Ohio State Univer(1 University of Sao Paulo, 2 CUNY Graduate Center):sity):

Semi-clefts as a window on the syntax
of predication, modification, and complementation
Natasha Abner, Thomas Graf (University

The interaction between propositional attitude verbs and reportative evidentiality in
TagalogMarie-Christine Meyer (Massachusetts Insti-

of California, Los Angeles):tute of Technology):

The Complexity of Binding in English andMissing Alternatives and Disjunction
ASL
Break
General Session: Syntax (2)General session: Computational
Phonology and Morphology (1)Yusuke Imanishi (Massachusetts Institute ofGiorgio Magri (CNRS, University of Paris 7):
Technology):

12:00-12:30

Non-uniform merge of argument WH
and null resumption: A case study in
Kaqchikel
Jinsun Choe (University of Hawaii at Manoa):

Constraint promotion: not only convergent but also efficient
Sebastian Bank, Jochen Trommer (University of Leipzig):

12:30-14:00
14:00-15:00
15:00-15:15

15:15-15:45

Acquisition of Raising: Intervention EfParadigm Learning and Subanalysis Comfects in A-movement
plexity
Lunch
Invited speaker: Kai von Fintel (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
What’s in an imperative
Break
Parasession: Historical Phonology
Special session: Tense & Moodand Morphology
Tsz-Him Tsui (The Ohio State University):
Anastasia Giannakidou, Alda Mari (University of Chicago, ENS/CNRS Paris):

15:45-16:15
16:15-16:45

Tonal variations in Hong Kong Cantonese: Interactions of acoustic distanceand functional load
Kyle Gorman (University of Pennsylvania):
Latin rhotacism for realSpecial session: Experimental Phonology (1)Suyeon Yun (Massachusetts Institute of Tech-

A modal analysis of Greek and Italian future morphemes
Eva Csipak (University of Göttingen):The factivity of pizza subjunctives
Anastasia Smirnova (Tufts University):
The Semantics of Mood in Bulgarian

nology)16:45-17:00
17:00-18:00
19:30-

Perceptual Similarity and Epenthesis Positioning in Loan Adaptation
Break
Invited speaker: Adam Albright (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Modeling the origin and spread of morphological paradigm gaps
Graduate Student Mixer: Pub in Ida Noyes Basement
7Day 2 schedule (April 20, Friday)
All events held in Ida Noyes Hall (1212 E. 59th Street)
Left column and invited talks – West Lounge, 2nd floor
8:00-9:00

9:00-9:30

9:30-10:00

Right column – East Lounge, 2nd floor

Registration
General Session: Computational
General Session: Semantics (1)Phonology and Morphology (2)Constantine Lignos, Kyle Gorman (Univer- Ayaka Sugawara (Massachusetts Institute ofsity of Pennsylvania):

Technology):

Revisiting frequency and storage in morphological processing
John Alderete1 , Paul Tupper1 , Stefan
Frisch2 (1 Simon Fraser University, 2 University of

Semantics of English suffix -ishHadas Kotek,Yasutada Sudo, Martin Hackl(Massachusetts Institute of Technology):

South Florida):

10:00-10:15

10:15-10:45

Learning phonotactics without rules: A con- Many readings of most
nectionist model OCP-Place in Arabic
BreakSpecial Session: Syntax and theGeneral session: Sociolinguistics
verbal domain
Hyun Kyoung Jung (University of Arizona):
Julia Thomas, Timothy Grinsell (Universityof Chicago):

10:45-11:15

11:15-11:30
11:30-12:30
12:30-14:00
14:00-14:30

Stacking Verbal Suffixes in Korean – An Ar- Finna as a Socially Meaningful Modal (andgument for Flavors of v
Performative) in African American English
Lan Kim (University of Delaware):Soohyun Kwon (University of Pennsylvania):
On the Khmer Passive-like Construction: A Beyond the adolescent peak of toykey
Cross-Linguistic Perspective
Break
Invited speaker: Alan C. L. Yu (University of Chicago)
The Linguistic Individual in the Changing World
Lunch
Special session: Ellipsis
Special Session: Semantics and Adjectives
Matthew Barros (Rutgers University):
Heather Burnett (University of California, Los
Angeles):

14:30-15:00

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

Evidence for Syntactic Identity in P- Universal Quantification and Slack Regulastranding Clausal Ellipsis in Spanishtion in the Adjectival Domain
Bradley Larson (University of Maryland):Sebastian Buecking (University of Tuebingen):Sprouting Anew: Fragment Answers, And The semantics of frequency adjectives
Here’s Why
BreakParasession: Agreement
Special session: Speech Perception
Kuo-Chiao Jason Lin (New York University):
Kevin Sitek1 , Keith Johnson2 (1 San Francisco VA Medical Center, 2 University of California,
Berkeley):

Post-syntactic Operations: Morphological
Locality in Saaroa Prefix Concord

8

Ipsilateral and contralateral phonetic context effects

15:45-16:15

16:15-16:45

Laura Kalin1 , Coppe van Urk2 (1 University ofMaria Giavazzi (Massachusetts Institute of Tech-

California, Los Angeles, 2 Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology):

nology):A novel aspect split in Senaya

Assibilation in Standard Finnish: a case ofstress-conditioned contrast neutralization
Paul Marty (Massachusetts Institute of Technol-

Karen Duek (CUNY Graduate Center):ogy):

16:45-17:00
17:00-18:00

Bare nouns and gender agreement in Brazil- The Role of Release Bursts in Word-Final
ian Portuguese
Stop Perception
Break
Invited speaker: Sandra Chung (University of California, Santa Cruz)
On Reading Agreement Late

9Day 3 schedule (April 21, Saturday)
All events held in Ida Noyes Hall (1212 E. 59th Street)
Left column and invited talks – West Lounge, 2nd floor
8:00-9:00
9:00-9:30

9:30-10:00

Right column – East Lounge, 2nd floor

Registration
General Session: Syntax (3)Parasession: Meaning and Cognition (1)I-Hsuan Chen (University of California, Berke- Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten (University of Masley):sachusetts Amherst):

What Determines the Licensing of Negative Polarity Items: The Interaction between Mandarin Chinese Minimizers, Negation, and Foci
Alexander Podobryaev (Massachusetts Insti-

Slightly coerced: Processing evidence for adjectival coercion by minimizers

tute of Technology):

Alexis Wellwood1 , Justin Halberda2 , Tim
Hunter3 , Darko Odic2 , Paul Pietroski1 , Jeffrey Lidz1 (1 University of Maryland, 2 Johns Hopkins University, 3 Yale University):A third dependent case
10:00-10:15
10:15-10:45

Meaning more or most: evidence from 3and-a-half year-olds
BreakSpecial session: Phonological Learning
Parasession: Meaning and Cognition (2)Elliott Moreton, Katya Pertsova (University E. Allyn Smith1 , Kathleen Currie Hall2(1 Northwestern University, 2 CUNY):

of North Carolina at Chapel Hill):

Is phonological learning special?
10:45-11:15

11:15-11:30
11:30-12:30
12:30-14:00

14:00-14:30

The relationship between projection and atissueness
Yun Jung Kim (University of California, Los An- Vandana Bajaj, Viviane Deprez, Julien Mugeles):solino (Rutgers University):
Do learners prefer transparent rule order- The Question Under Discussion and its
ing? An Artificial language learning study
Role in Scopal Ambiguity Resolution
Break
Invited speaker: Nausicaa Pouscoulous (University College London)
Grice’s children: Investigations in the development of pragmatic abilities
Lunch
Semantics: General Session (2)Special session: Morphosyntax and
Nominalization
Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (Massachusetts Jessica Gamache (Michigan State University):
Institute of Technology):

Mandarin alternative questions question focus alternatives
14:30-15:00

15:00-15:15
15:15-16:15
16:15-16:30

Children’s forms as derivational steps: External evidence for a new synthetic compound structure
Erin Zaroukian, Charley Beller (Johns Hop- Artemis Alexiadou, Mariangeles Cano, Gikins University):anina Iordǎchioaia, Fabienne Martin, Florian Schaefer (University of Stuttgart):
Licensing by modification in two classes of Direct participation effects in derived nomiverbs
nals
Break
Invited Speaker: Marcel den Dikken (CUNY Graduate Center)
The Phase Impenetrability Condition and successive cyclicity: A reconsideration
Break

10

16:30-17:00

Special session: Constraints and Repairs
in Syntax and Semantics
Stefan Hofstetter (Universität Tübingen):Special session: Experimental Phonology (2)Yulia Kondratenko, Laura Spinu (Concordia
University):

17:00-17:30

Better low pay than no pay: Propositional
Adjectives Obviate Negative Island Effects
Tommi Leung (United Arab Emirates Univer-Being “better” with accents: evidence frombilinguals
Becky Butler (Cornell University):sity):

Sluicing may repair LF-constraints
18:30-A Gestural Account of Minor Syllables: Evidence from Khmer
Dinner Banquet (Theater, 3rd floor)

11

Invited Talks
Modeling the origin and spread of morphological paradigm gaps

Adam Albright (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Thursday, April 19, 17:00, West Lounge
It is well known that languages may exhibit lexically arbitrary paradigm gaps, in which speakers are unwilling or unable to produce certain inflected forms of certain lexical items. A number of recent analyses
have focused on the synchronic status of paradigm gaps, attributing them to constraint conflict (Rice2006, Wolf and McCarthy 2010), rule failure (Albright 2003, 2010), or learned ineffability (Halle 1973,
Sims 2006, Daland et al 2006, Baerman 2008). It is generally recognized that there is a diverse typology
of gap effects, but a mystery that remains is how paradigm gaps arise in the first place. Several studies
have investigated contributing factors in specific cases (e.g., Baerman 2008), but to date there have been
no fully formalized accounts of how lexically arbitrary gaps may be created. In this talk, I argue thatat least a portion of the gap typology may be attributed to a single learning model. I present simulations showing that gaps may arise through a feedback loop of progressively decreasing confidence, in theprobabilistic rule-based “minimal generalization” approach of Albright and Hayes (2003). In this model,
the rules needed to cover lexical items in sparse areas of the lexicon may find only weak support, so that
inflected forms are projected with low confidence. The model provides a unified account of two distinct
diachronic pathways to gaps: in the first, speakers are reluctant to inflect existing words in sparsely attested regions of the lexicon, while in the second, speakers refrain from extending otherwise productive
morphological patterns to new words with rare/unattested shapes. The end results of these changes are
somewhat different, due to differences in how exceptions arise: in the first case, pre-existing words may
retain their inflected forms as memorized exceptions. In this case, gaps should preferentially target low
frequency items, since speakers have more opportunity to memorize inherited inflected forms for highfrequency items. In the case of novel lexical items, gaps can only be exceptionally filled through someindependent mechanism, such as borrowing or learned coinage. In this case, the distribution of gaps may
be less principled, since it is impossible to predict which lexical items are most likely to acquire borrowed
or coined inflected forms. In both cases, however, the mechanism of gap creation is a conservative learning
procedure, in which speakers learn rules that apply with highest confidence in the specific contexts inwhich they have been frequently observed.
Adam Albright is Associate Professor of Linguistics at MIT. He received his PhD at the University ofCalifornia at Los Angeles. His research interests include phonology, morphology, and learnability, with anemphasis on using computational modeling and experimental techniques to investigate issues in phonological theory. Topics of interest range across phonotactics, paradigms, gaps, historical phonology, morphological productivity, and exceptions. The languages under study include Yiddish, Lakhota, Welsh, Korean,and Spanish. He has been Reviews editor for the journal Morphology since 2006.

12

On Reaching Agreement LateSandra Chung (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Friday, April 20, 17:00, West Lounge
The fundamental licensing relation of minimalist syntax holds between two categories in the right structural configuration when each lacks something that the other can supply. The fact that this relation
is named Agree suggests that this mutual validation is connected to the feature sharing found in morphological agreement. And in fact, a significant strand of minimalist research holds that morphologicalagreement is a transparent reflection of Agree. This research has sought to use the fine details of morphological agreement, the distribution of clitics, and subject-object interactions in various languages to shedlight on the workings of Agree. One of the results has been a steady expansion in the range of options
encompassed by Agree; e.g. split feature checking (Anagnostopoulou), cyclic Agree (Béjar and Rezac),
multiple Agree (Nevins), obligatory Agree that can fail (Preminger), and so on. This expansion of thesyntactic toolkit might seem to conflict with minimalist ideals.
Here I take the position that morphological agreement can, but need not, transparently reflect Agree(see Chung 1998, to appear; Sigurdsson 2006). With Bobaljik 2008, I also claim that the feature sharing
involved in morphological agreement occurs not in narrow syntax but rather in the morphology. Bothclaims are fleshed out with respect to person-animacy effects in the Austronesian language Chamorro.
Ordinary transitive clauses in Chamorro contain a verb that agrees in person and number with the subject.
Such clauses also exhibit subject-object interactions of the sort analyzed in terms of harmonic alignment
by Aissen 1999 and in terms of multiple Agree by Nevins 2011. As a first approximation, the direct object
cannot outrank the subject on the hierarchy: 2 > 3 animate pronoun > animate > inanimate (where> means “outranks”). I first show that these effects do not constrain the legal pairings of subject andobject across the board, but rather concern the realization of a particular set of agreement morphemes.
I then show that the “object” targeted by these effects need not be identical to the DP that is syntactically licensed by small v. These observations point to an account of the relevant contrasts that involves
operations not in narrow syntax, but instead in the morphology. Such a result supports a version of theminimalist program in which Agree retains its original minimalist design, and what is expanded to handle
this and other language-specific patterns is the morphological toolkit.
Sandra Chung is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California at Santa Cruz and was the
President of the Linguistic Society of America in 2011. She received her PhD from Harvard University.
She has worked extensively on the syntax of Austronesian Languages (especially Chamorro), investigating
ergativity, word order, wh-agreement, and movement. In 1998, she published The Design of Agreement:
Evidence from Chamorro, a cornerstone piece of work in the literature on the topic.

13

The Phase Impenetrability Condition and successive cyclicity: A reconsideration

Marcel den Dikken (CUNY Graduate Center)
Saturday, April 21, 15:15, West Lounge
When a syntactic object undergoes Spell-Out, it is ‘handed over’ to PF, and its valued uninterpretablefeatures are ‘stripped away’. In current parlance, the stages through which syntactic derivations evolveare called ‘phases’, and the derivational model that incorporates this philosophy is accordingly called‘derivation by phase’. Considering the way it has been operationalised, however, the name ‘derivation byphase’ for this theoretical model of incremental structure building and manipulation is misleading. The
syntactic objects that undergo Spell-Out are usually not the phases themselves. Though entire phases are
spelled out en bloc if they constitute the root of the tree, in all other contexts it is only the complement
domain of the phase head that is standardly assumed to be ‘handed over’ to the interpretive components.
Its name notwithstanding, the PIC does not state that phases are impenetrable; it only declares the phasehead’s complement opaque. The obvious stumbling block for the idea that the entire phase is ‘stripped’and ‘frozen’ upon completion is that it appears that parts of the phase remain accessible later in thesyntactic derivation. But I will argue that we do not actually need to exempt the head and the edge ofthe phase from Spell-Out at the phase level. A re-evaluation of the notion of ‘head movement’ renders
head exemption redundant; and a critical reappraisal of the idea that long-distance movement dependencies proceed in a successive-cyclic manner, from phase to phase, leads to the conclusion that it should
be fundamentally rethought in such a way that so-called successive-cyclic movement is modelled as fellswoop long-distance movement dependent on successive-cyclic Agree relations between potential phases
and higher probes. With these conclusions in place, I then proceed to an investigation of the broader
theoretical consequences of the idea that Agree between a potential phase and the next probe up the tree‘extends’ the lower phase up to the projection of the higher probe. This notion of ‘phase extension’ isboth principled and empirically adequate, providing a simple perspective on strong islands. But it fitsin poorly with the idea that syntactic structure is built incrementally from bottom to top. In this light,
I explore the prospects of a top-down left-to-right structure-building model for syntactic computation,
providing a new outlook on the relationship between wh-scope marking and parasitic gap constructions
along the way. Time permitting, I will review the other recent top-down approaches to syntax.
Marcel den Dikken is Professor of Linguistics at City University of New York. He received his PhD fromthe University of Leiden. His main areas of interest are syntax and its interface with semantics andmorphology. In particular, his research in agreement and predication has a significant influence on theongoing development of syntactic theory. The author of 3 books and numerous articles, he now serves as
the Editor-in-Chief of the Natural Language and Linguistic Theory journal.

14

Grice’s children: Investigations in the development of pragmatic abilities



Nausicaa Pouscoulous (University College London)
Saturday, April 21, 11:30, West Lounge
Recent developmental research on social cognition indicates that pragmatics plays a grounding role inthe development of children’s communicative skills even before they utter their first words (see the workby Csibra, Gergerly and colleagues, and by Tomasello and colleagues, summed up in part in Tomasello2008). Furthermore, much evidence in language acquisition suggests that young children could not learn
to speak without impressive pragmatic abilities (e.g., Tomasello 2003; Bloom 2000; Clark 2003). In
stark contrast with this picture, linguistic pragmatic inferences (e.g., reference assignment, implicatures,
metaphors, presuppositions and irony) appear to develop later than other linguistic abilities. This talktries to reconcile the development of these two types of pragmatic abilities by presenting new data on
three linguistic pragmatic phenomena with which children fare better than was previously thought: scalar
implicature, presupposition and metaphor.
According to pragmatic theories (e.g., Grice, 1975/1989; Sperber & Wilson, 1986/1995), inferences involved in understanding various types of implicit and non-literal meanings require (a) intention reading,(b); taking into account common ground (or mutual knowledge), (c) and at least some degree of cooperation. Empirical findings suggest that prelinguistic children already master these skills. Several studies
have shown that infants see others as intentional agents (Gergely et al., 2002), that they recognise (communicative) intentions (Behne et al., 2005a; Behne et al., 2005b) and that even 2-year-olds pay attention
both to informative and communicative intention (Shwe and Markman, 1997). From 14 or 18 months ofage, toddlers take into account the common ground between them and their interlocutor in a communicative context (e.g., Moll et al., 2008; Liebal et al., 2009). Finally, toddlers have been shown to be helpful
and cooperative (e.g., Warneken & Tomasello, 2006). Words and syntax, it seems, are all there is left
to learn for children to become perfect little ‘Gricean’ comprehenders, and to understand implicatures,presuppositions and metaphors.
Yet, prior developmental research on these phenomena suggest otherwise. For instance, expressions giving
rise to scalar implicatures (e.g., some) appear to be given a literal – logical – interpretation by children
until fairly late (9 to 11-years-old); some is understood as compatible with the stronger term, all, rather
than excluding it as adults do (Noveck, 2001). Similarly, non-literal expressions tend to be interpreted
literally by younger children (see, Winner, 1988/1997, Nippold, 1988/1998 and Gibbs, 1994, for a review).
Finally, presuppositions triggered by additive particles such as too, do not seem to be taken into accountby younger comprehenders (Bergsma, 2006). I will present evidence showing these pragmatic phenomena
might be understood much earlier than prior results suggest, and that several factors – independent ofchildren’s pragmatic abilities per se – may explain children’s apparent struggle with pragmatic inferences.
Nausicaa Pouscoulous is Lecturer in Experimental Pragmatics at University College London. She received
her PhD at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Socials in Paris. Her interests include theoreticaland experimental pragmatics, semantics, the development of pragmatic and communicative competence,
language acquisition, and the philosophy of language. Her seminal work on the acquisition and developmental trajectory of scalar implicatures has provided an invaluable contribution and a new perspective tothe understanding of the semantics/pragmatics interface.

15

What’s in an imperativeKai von Fintel (joint work with Sabine Iatridou) (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Thursday, April 19, 14:00, West Lounge
Imperatives, which are prototypically used to issue commands, can also be used to give permissions:(1)

A: May I open the window? B: Sure, go ahead, open it!

Further, imperatives can serve as quasi-conditional antecedents in “left-subordinating conjunctions”:(2)

Study hard and you will pass the class.

(3)

Ignore your homework and you will fail the class.

(4)

Open the paper and you will find 5 mistakes on every page.

We show that these phenomena present severe challenges for all existing theories of imperatives. We layout desiderata for a successful analysis and speculate on ways of getting there. Along the way we present
data from English, German, and pretty much every language spoken on the Mediterranean Rim.
Kai von Fintel is Professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Associate
Dean for MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. He received his PhD at the Universityof Massachusetts at Amherst. He has worked on a variety of topics related to the study of meaning,
including presuppositions, conditionals, imperatives and modality in general. He is editor (with Michael
Beaver) of Semantics and Pragmatics, an open access journal affiliated with the Linguistic Society ofAmerica’s eLanguage initiative.

16

The Linguistic Individual in the Changing World

Alan C. L. Yu (University of Chicago)
Friday, April 20, 11:30, West Lounge
Linguists usually discuss language in terms of groups of speakers, even though it is often acknowledgedthat no two individuals speak alike. In particular, researchers often present group scores with little
attention paid to the variation within the group. The focus on language as a group-level phenomenon has
obscured important insights only apparent when systematic individual variation is taken into account.
In this talk, I argue that the study of individual variation is particularly crucial for understanding theorigins of language variation and change.
The introduction of linguistic innovations and their eventual propagation is often attributed to the contextdependent nature of speech and language. What is less clear is to what extent context-dependent variationin speech and language is uniformly maintained and observed across individuals. In this talk, I offer experimental evidence showing that individuals vary significantly and systematically in their responses tothe effects of the lexicon and coarticulation in speech perception and production. The individual difference dimensions that capture, if only partially, the individual variation include concentrations of “autistic
traits” and levels of working memory resources. Socio-cognitive traits, I argue, may offer the necessarily
link to resolve the so-called “actuation” and “threshold” problems in language change.
Alan Yu is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Chicago. He received his PhD from the
University of California at Berkeley under Sharon Inkelas. His work centers around both the theoreticalside of morphophonology and experimental phonology and socio-cognitive factors mediating sound change.
He also engages in descriptive, documentary, and theoretical work on Native American languages, especially Washo, an endangered language of California and Nevada. In 2007 he published A Natural Historyof Infixation.

17

Papers
The Complexity of Binding in English and ASLNatasha R. Abner, Thomas Graf (University of California, Los Angeles)
Thursday, April 19, 10:45, West Lounge
Motivated by computational properties of Minimalist syntax, we propose a new, descriptive universal ofbinding theory.
Limited Obviation For every language there is some integer n such that the number of (syntactically)bound pronouns that must have pairwise disjoint referents and occur within the same binding
domain does not exceed n.
In English, none of the configurations that may introduce an unbounded number of pronouns (adjuncts,
recursion inside DPs, coordination) violate the universal. For instance, homophonous pronouns can becoordinated only if they are used deictically, wherefore coordination is limited to a maximum of threebound obviative pronouns (him, her and it).
(1)a.

Every football player told some friend of his that the coach wants to see him (deictic) andhim (deictic) in his office.
b. *[Every football player]i told [some friend of his]j that the coach wants to see himi and himj
in his office.

Surprisingly, the analog of (1b) is grammatical in ASL. This suggests that binding is more complex in
ASL than in English. However, DPs in ASL can be assigned spatial positions, and pronouns are realized
by pointing at the respective antecedent’s position in space. This modality difference to English endows
ASL’s binding mechanism with a strongly deictic component, thus pushing it out of syntax proper andexempting it from Limited Obviation.

Learning phonotactics without rules: A connectionist model of OCP-Place in Arabic
John Alderete1 , Paul Tupper1 , Stefan Frisch2 (1 Simon Fraser University, 2 University of South Florida)
Friday, April 20, 9:30, West Lounge

Much work in generative linguistics is nativist in the sense that the fundamental mechanisms for computing
linguistic processes are assumed to be innate. However, results from other research paradigms have shownthat many language processes can be learned directly from the statistical structure of experience, including
nontrivial ones like dependencies between nonadjacent elements. This paper presents a model that induces
phonotactic constraints in Arabic OCP-Place using a connectionist architecture. The model was trainedby exposure to a lexicon of Arabic roots. The model was evaluated for how it rated the full set of
Arabic roots, all computationally possible roots in Arabic, as well as the novel roots used in a behavioral
experiment with Jordanian Arabic speakers (Frisch and Zawaydeh, Language, 2001). The network learned
the lexicon in the sense that it assigned higher scores to the words that it had been exposed to. Second,
the network rated OCP-Place violating roots lower than OCP-Place satisfying roots, comparable to the
behavior of human subjects. A detailed analysis of the behavior of hidden nodes in the network shows it
has developed distinct activation responses to different place classes.

18

Direct participation effects in derived nominals
Artemis Alexiadou, Mariangeles Cano, Gianina Iordǎchioaia, Fabienne Martin, and Florian Schaefer(University of Stuttgart)
Saturday, April 21, 14:30, East LoungeIn this paper, we offer a syntactic analysis of a restriction on the realization of the external argument inderived nominals. The restriction, recently (re)formulated in Sichel (2011), is the following: while verbal
forms allow both direct and indirect participants/causers as external arguments, nominals derived fromthem require direct participation (regardless of animacy restrictions). We propose that this restriction isrelated to the absence of Voice in derived nominals and the type of prepositions that introduce event participants in the nominal domain (Alexiadou, Anagnostopoulou & Schäfer 2009). Based on cross-linguistic
evidence (English, German, Greek, Romanian, Spanish and French), we show how this hypothesis captures
the realization of nominal external arguments satisfactorily.
Our analysis suggests that not all types of nominalizations share the same internal structure (ing-of
gerunds vs. derived nominals, Abney 1987, and others). Moreover, it predicts that in languages like
English there are two types of by-phrases: an argumental one in the structures with Voice (e.g. ing-of
gerunds), and a modifier one in the absence of Voice (e.g. derived nominals, contra Bruening 2011).

The Question Under Discussion and its Role in Scopal Ambiguity Resolution



Vandana Bajaj, Viviane Déprez, Julien Musolino (Rutgers University)
Saturday, April 21, 10:45, East LoungeOver the last decade, many studies on semantic acquisition have focused on the way speakers disambiguate
sentences containing quantified NPs and negation (Musolino, 1998; Lidz & Musolino, 2002, 2006; Musolino& Lidz, 2003, 2006; Gualmini, 2004; Gualmini et al. 2008; Noveck et al. 2007; inter alios). Gualmini
et al. (2008) propose a novel account of this phenomenon, the Question-Answer Requirement (QAR),
which makes central use of the discourse coherence notion of a question under discussion (QUD; Roberts,
1996). To test the QAR, Gualmini (2007) and Zondervan et al. (2008) advocated using a Truth Value
Judgment Task with overt questions that verbalize the QUD, but in doing so, they failed to test two crucial
predictions of the QAR, namely that (i) manipulating the overt question can indeed lead participants toresolve the ambiguity in different ways, and (ii) that predictable ambiguity resolution is driven by the
emergence of a clear and constant goal early in the experimental story context. Our experiment tested
these predictions and showed, regarding (i), that manipulating the explicit question alone failed to pushparticipants to systematically access either reading of the ambiguous target sentences. Regarding (ii), ourresults suggest that the point at which the relevant QUD becomes salient appears irrelevant. Overall ourstudy demonstrates the greater potency of implicit information over utterances placed explicitly in the
discourse, showing that ambiguity resolution is a complex affair, insufficiently characterized by the QAR.

19

Paradigm Learning and Subanalysis Complexity



Sebastian Bank, Jochen Trommer (University of Leipzig)
Thursday, April 19, 12:00, East Lounge
Zero marking of inflectional categories is often regarded a major source of complexity in morphologicalsystems (cf. e.g. Anderson 1992, Wunderlich and Fabri 1994, Segel 2008). In this talk, we argue that on
the contrary zero marking as for present tense in the German affix paradigm in (1-a) is a precondition formorphological learning.
(1)

a.
1
2
3

Present
sg
pl
-Ø-e
-Ø-en
-Ø-est -Ø-et
-Ø-et
-Ø-en

b.
1
2
3

Past
sg
pl
-t-e
-t-en
-t-est -t-et
-t-e
-t-en

We show that the expression of present tense by Ø plays an important role in making accessible to learners
the subanalysis of past tense forms into tense and agreement markers by presenting a learning algorithm
for affix segmentation which profits substantially from assuming zero morphology in specific parts of inflectional paradigms. Moreover, we present preliminary results of a typological pilot study supportingthe claim that human languages always exhibit zero marking at the relevant points of paradigms. We
assume that the complexity of subanalysis depends crucially on the occurrence of potential subaffixes
as independent affix, which establishes a simple hierarchy of complexity classes for the learnability ofinflectional systems (Class 1 ⊂ Class 2 ⊂ Class 3). Its impact on learning of inflection is demonstrated
by an incremental learning algorithm which simultaneously performs affix subanalysis and assigns morphosyntactic content to the resulting (sub-)affixes. By restricting search to independent affix strings, thelearner has a rather small search space, but is still capable of subanalyzing data of complexity class 2,
where for any binary subanalysis of an affix string into S1+S2 either S1 or S2 occurs independently.

Evidence for Syntactic Identity in P-stranding Clausal Ellipsis in SpanishMatthew Barros (Rutgers University)
Friday, April 20, 14:00, West Lounge
Rodrigues et al. (2009), Vicente (2008) propose that apparent cases of preposition stranding (P-stranding)under clausal ellipsis in Spanish actually stem from elided copula clauses where no preposition stranding
actually obtains (a pseudosluicing analysis). In this talk, I present evidence against pseudosluicing andinstead propose that preposition stranding under ellipsis should receive the same treatment as cases ofisland repair under ellipsis.
I show that there are cases where P-stranding is possible but an overt copula clause follow up is notpossible, and there are cases where P-stranding is impossible, but an overt copula clause is possible.
This mismatch is unexpected if P-stranding stems from copula clauses. Additionally, I show that theconstraints on P-stranding discussed in Vicente (2008) are the same as constraints on island repair notedin Merchant (2008) and discussed more recently in Griffiths and Liptak (2011); clausal ellipsis is sensitive
to both P-stranding and island violations in the same way. As a result, I extend the existing accounts forisland repair to the P-stranding patterns in Spanish.
In the talk, I also discuss the diagnostics Rodrigues et al. (2009) and Vicente (2008) bring to bear on thepseudosluicing analysis and show that the diagnostics do not distinguish between a pseudosluicing analysis
and the analysis proposed here. Finally, I present new data which raise challenges for the proposals in
Merchant (2008), Griffiths and Liptak (2011) and discuss ways in which those challenges could be met.

20

Slightly coerced: Processing evidence for adjectival coercion by minimizers

Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Saturday, April 21, 9:00, East LoungeThis paper considers the processing of open scale dimensional adjectives (DAs) modified by minimizers(slightly). An online study examines the composition of adjectival scales and degree modifiers, comparing
the rates of composition of compatible scales and modifiers with cases where modifiers induce scale
coercion.
Kennedy (2007; L&P ) predicts (1a) to be infelicitous in contrast with (1b): adjectives in (1b) haveminimum scale endpoints (d min ), which minimizers reference in their denotations (‘exceed d min to a small
degree’). However, an offline rating task shows that sentences containing (1a) collocations were judged as
felicitous as those in (1b):
(1)

a.
b.

slightly large / deep
slightly bent / ugly

DAs
Minimum endpoint / Negative evaluative adjectives

I argue that the felicity of (1a) results from coercion of d min on otherwise open DA scales by minimizers.
A self-paced reading study supports this view. Longer reading times (RT) can indicate coercion (Traxler
et al. 2002, J. Mem. Lang.). Sentences like (2) were compared:(2)

Ms. Smith thought that 1 | the red sofa was 2 | {(a) slightly ugly / (b) too ugly / (c) slightly large/ (d) too large} 3 | to be used 4 |...

RT for slightly-adj conditions (a,c) were compared to RT of too-adj conditions (b,d). Too-adj does not
require coercion and served as the control for (a,c). The difference between (c)-(d) was greater than (a)(b): 76.4ms vs. 31.5ms with a significant interaction (pMCMC = 0.034). The increase in RT for modified
DAs relative to the control condition is consistent with the coercion hypothesis.

The semantics of frequency adjectives

Sebastian Buecking (University of Tuebingen)Friday, April 20, 14:30, East Lounge
Frequency adjectives (= FAs) as occasional allow for three readings in English and German:(1)

An occasional beer tastes good / Ein gelegentliches Bier schmeckt gut‘generic’ reading ≈ If one drinks a beer occasionally, it tastes good.

(2)

An occasional sailor strolled by / Ein gelegentlicher Matrose schlenderte vorbeia. ‘adverbial’ reading ≈ Occasionally, a sailor strolled by.
b. ‘internal’ reading ≈ Someone who sails occasionally strolled by.

Split approaches analyze ‘adverbial’ FAs as determiners (cf. Stump (1981), Larson (1998)); Gehrke &McNally (2011), however, treat FAs as uniform adjectival modifiers that quantify over event kinds. My
talk’s concern is twofold: following the insights of the parsimonious analysis in Gehrke & McNally (2011),
I will point to shortcomings of its implementation. I will then present an alternative semantics that builds
upon coercion as formalized in Asher (2011) and amend it by landing site underspecification in the senseof Egg (2005).
Accordingly, FAs both presuppose the application to events and quantify over corresponding event kinds.
Since neither beer nor sailor denote events, the modification resorts to different adaptive strategies: the‘generic’ and the ‘adverbial’ readings rest upon the interpolation of an underspecified event via coercion.
On the ‘generic’ reading, the NP-context – for (1), which event relates to beverages? – allows the
specification to drinking events. On the ‘adverbial’ reading, the eventive type is identified with the DPexternal verbal type, i. e. the strolling in (2a). The ‘internal’ reading goes without coercion. Here, landingsite underspecification ensures FAs’ compositional access to events that are semantically integral to themodified nouns, i. e. the sailing in (2b).
21

Universal Quantification and Slack Regulation in the Adjectival Domain

Heather Burnett (University of California, Los Angeles)
Friday, April 20, 14:00, East LoungeThis paper presents a novel empirical contribution to the open debate concerning the syntactic and semantic analysis of the lexical item all and its cognates in the Indo-European languages, with a particularfocus on the Romance family (ex. French tou(te)s, Italian tutto, Romanian tot- etc.). Although it is
one of the most discussed elements of the Indo-European determiner system, the proper treatment of
all/tou(te)s/tutto in the nominal domain remains controversial. The majority view in the literature isthat all and its cognates are universal quantifiers. Recent advocates of this style of semantic analysis are
Winter (2001), Zweig (2008), and Champollion (2011). However, an alternative view, advocated principally by Lasersohn (1999) and Brisson (2003), proposes that the contribution of all to the meaning of
the sentence is pragmatic, not quantificational. For example, Lasersohn proposes that all in English is aslack regulator, an item that eliminates ‘pragmatic slack’ or vagueness associated with its complement.
This paper provides new evidence in favor of the ‘slack regulator’ style of analysis, against the quantificational analysis. We present new data concerning the distribution and interpretation of French “tout”
and its cognates with adjectives and argue that a universal quantifier approach cannot account for theinterpretative pattern observed. However, we show that the observed distribution and interpretations of
tout with both adjectives and DPs is straightforwardly expected under an analysis of this lexical item asa slack regulator that eliminates the borderline cases of its complement.

A Gestural Account of Minor Syllables: Evidence from Khmer

Becky Butler (Cornell University)
Saturday, April 21, 17:00, East Lounge
Predictable vocalic elements – or intrusive schwas – can be either epenthetic (phonological) or excrescent(phonetic). In this paper, I provide an empirical account of intrusive schwa in Khmer sesquisyllables. A
sesquisyllable is traditionally defined as a word type comprising one right-aligned footed (major) syllable
preceded by one unfooted (minor) syllable (Matisoff 1973). A minor syllable is characterized by its reduced
markedness, including a reduced syllable shape and segmental inventory and a lack of prosodic material.
The acoustic study focuses on a set of Khmer words with initial consonant sequences, which may berealized as either monosyllables with complex onsets (e.g. ["mteh], ‘pepper’) or as sesquisyllables with an
intrusive schwa (e.g. [m@"teh], ‘pepper’). Results suggest that Khmer intrusive schwa is a transition state
between gestures, whose voicing derives from the continuation of vocal fold vibration accompanying C1.
A comparison of this account with Ridouane and Fougeron’s (2011) study of intrusive schwa in Tashlhiyt
Berber demonstrates that gestural timing models must allow for intra- and cross-linguistic variation. In
addition, I suggest that variability in gestural coordination underlies the role of intrusive schwa in socalled sesquisyllabic languages, and that this variability can result in the misperception and mistiming ofgestural coordination, which, in other historically sesquisyllabic languages, like Kammu and Vietnamese,
have led to a change in the phonological status of minor syllables.

22

What Determines the Licensing of Negative Polarity Items: The Interaction between Mandarin
Chinese Minimizers, Negation, and Foci

I-Hsuan Chen (University of California, Berkeley)
Saturday, April 21, 9:00, West LoungeThis paper tackles the questions of what licenses negative polarity items (NPIs). Mandarin Chinese(MC) minimizer NPIs deserve our attention because they pose a challenge to the claim that negation isa sufficient licensor for NPIs. Negation has been regarded as the most canonical licensor for NPIs (Klima
1964, Ladusaw 1996). This study of MC minimizer NPIs will show that negation alone is a necessary
condition but not always sufficient. MC minimizer NPIs have three characteristics. First, they have ascalar implication. Second, they are strict NPIs narrowly licensed by negation. Third, the NPIs areindefinite. The properties of strict NPIs and indefinites are strongly tied to their syntactic distribution. I
account for the complicated distribution of MC minimizer NPIs by examining it through three independently motivated analyses: negation licensing strict NPIs under c-command (Progovac 1994, Giannakidou
2011), the VP-internal subject hypothesis (Huang 1993), and the Extended Mapping Hypothesis (Diesing
1992, Tsai 2001). For strict NPIs, like MC minimizer NPIs, syntactic licensing by negation is a necessary
requirement, but it is not sufficient. This has to do with the syntactic position of NPIs and the indefiniteness of NPIs. Therefore, focus with a quantificational function is required to license the indefinites
when necessary. To account for the full distribution of NPIs, different factors, such as the strictness, thescalar inferences, and the indefiniteness of NPIs, should be taken into consideration.

Acquisition of Raising: Intervention Effects in A-movement

Jinsun Choe (University of Hawaii at Manoa)
Thursday, April 19, 12:00, West Lounge
Children have been reported to have difficulty with raising structures like John seems to Mary [t] to be
happy (e.g., Hirsch & Wexler, 2007, amongst others). This difficulty has been interpreted as evidence
for maturational theories of language acquisition (Borer & Wexler, 1987), which posit that A-movement
structures such as raising and passives are ungrammatical for young children. However, the explanation
pursued here is that the source of the difficulty with raising is one in the same as a well-known difficultyfound in other structures: Similarity-based Intervention. Children (and adults) have been shown to havedifficulty with structures that involve filler-gap dependencies which have an intervening NP between thefiller and the gap, as in object relatives like the boy who the girl kissed [t] (e.g., Friedmann et al., 2009).
To tease apart the movement hypothesis and the intervention hypothesis, a Truth-Value Judgment Task
(Crain & Thornton, 1998) was conducted with English-speaking children (age 3;3 to 5;8, mean=4;8, n=43)
to test the comprehension of raising structures, in which the experiencer does (e.g., Donald seems to Mickey[t] to be short) and does not (e.g., To Mickey, Donald seems [t] to be short) intervene between the raised
NP and the gap. The results revealed that children’s comprehension of raising sentences was significantly
better with a fronted experiencer than with an intervening experiencer. These findings suggest that thepresence of an intervening experiencer phrase in raising structure is the source of children’s difficulty withraising sentences, rather than the movement per se.

23

The factivity of pizza subjunctives



Eva Csipak (University of Göttingen)
Thursday, April 19, 15:45, East LoungeThis talk discusses a hitherto unobserved phenomenon: free factive subjunctives in German, exemplified
in (1).
(1)

Ich hatte (noch) Pizza im Kuhlschrank.
‘I ( Part) have.Subj pizza in the fridge.’

In its most salient reading, (1) is interpreted factively, e.g. in a scenario where the speaker wishes tooffer existing pizza to an interlocutor. This means the subjunctive seen in (1) differs sharply from thesubjunctives seen in Romance languages where they obligatorily receive a counterfactual interpretation.
Following Kasper’s (1992) analysis of free counterfactual subjunctives as the consequents of a counterfactual conditional, I treat (1) as the consequent of a relevance conditional.
(2)

Wenn du Hunger hast, ich hatte (noch) Pizza im Kuhlschrank.
‘If you are hungry, I have.Subj ( Part) pizza in the fridge.’

The antecedent is derived by spelling out a presupposition of (1): that there is a salient individual witha salient goal for whom knowing (1) is relevant. Note that in the indicative case this is done via Gricean
implicature. I also discuss a further difference between (2) and its indicative counterpart (3):(3)

Wenn du Hunger hast, ich habe (noch) Pizza im Kuhlschrank.
‘If you are hungry, I have.Ind ( Part) pizza in the fridge.’

Unlike (3), the speaker of (2) is not committed to having the only or even the best relevant information
regarding the hearer’s goals.

Bare nouns and gender agreement in Brazilian PortugueseKaren Duek (CUNY Graduate Center)
Friday, April 20, 16:15, West LoungeThis paper presents new data on a gender agreement mismatch phenomenon in Brazilian Portuguesethat is observed with bare singular subjects of predicative adjectives. In particular, there is a systematic
distinction between bare singulars with arbitrary gender such as maçã ‘apple’ (1) or sex-based gendersuch as atriz ‘actress’ (2), and between the bare plural and bare singular of arbitrary gender NPs (3).
I propose that the accessibility of Index features (Wechsler and Zlatic 2002) of bare singulars is dependent on the nature of their gender feature. Following Kramer (2010), arbitrary gender is a feature of theroot and natural gender a feature on little n. Semantically, natural gender is treated as an instantiation
function, giving access to instances of the kind denoted by the noun. This is a requirement on the availability of Index features values, due to their relationship to the referentiality of NPs. Gender agreement
is shown to correlate with interpretative possibilities in the direction predicted given its contribution to
the individuation status of NPs. Cross-linguistically, this approach is also compatible with the gendermismatches observed in Scandinavian pancake sentences.
The analysis addresses the need for a more fine-grained theory of Index agreement that incorporates thesemantic import of φ-features individually.
(1)

a.
b.

Maçã
Apple*Maçã
Apple

é
is
é
is

gostoso.
tasty.m
gostosa.
tasty.f

(2)

a.
b.

Atriz
Actress*AtrizActress

24

é
is
é
is

vaidosa.
vain.fvaidoso.
vain.m(3)a.
b.

MaçãsApples*Maçãs
Apples

são
are
são
are

gostosas.
tasty.f
gostosos.
tasty.m

Mandarin alternative questions question focus alternatives

Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Saturday, April 21, 14:00, West Lounge
Mandarin Chinese alternative questions use the disjunction háishi, distinct from its logical disjunction
huo(zhe/shi). I argue that the interpretation of háishi alternative questions involves the computation of
Roothian focus alternatives, à la Beck and Kim (2006), a.o.
Previous approaches to háishi disjunction in Mandarin (C.T. Huang, 1991; R.H. Huang, 2009, 2010) statethat disjunction is always clausal, with deletion of “redundant” material creating the illusion of local
disjunction. I present evidence from intervention effects, cooccurrence with the focus marker shı̀, and whisland sensitivity, which can be explained by the focus alternatives proposal but not through conjunction
reduction.
While háishi is often described as an alternative-question-introducing disjunction, in some environments(e.g. conditionals, under modals, or with free-choice interpretation under dōu) háishi is simply interchangeable with the logical disjunction and does not trigger question force. I adopt Alonso-Ovalle’s(2006) analysis for the interpretation of disjunction in such environments which use focus alternatives
projected by then disjunction. I then propose that háishi has only a focus semantic value while thelogical disjunction has both ordinary and focus semantic values, explaining their different distributions.
This offers an approach to analyzing distinct logical and alternative question disjunctions, which is also
attested in Sinhala, Finnish, and Basque.

Children’s forms as derivational steps: External evidence for a new synthetic compound structure

Jessica Gamache (Michigan State University)
Saturday, April 21, 14:00, East Lounge
Deciding between competing linguistic analyses when both analyses have the same empirical coverage canbe difficult. Many structures have been proposed for synthetic compounds that essentially fall into two
categories: (i) [truck [drive-er]]-type structures or (ii) [[truck drive] –er]-type structures. In this paper
I present results from two experimental studies tracking the development of synthetic compounds in
English and argue that children’s novel synthetic compounds (or “errors”) are acquisition steps reflecting
the derivational history of the adult structures (Strong Continuity Hypothesis). The acquisition steps
for synthetic compounds, namely (1) verb-object (drive-truck ), (2) verb-er -object (driver-truck ), and (3)object-verb-er (truck-driver ), support structures like that in (i) and are problematic for structures likethat in (ii) (e.g., Harley, 2009; Borer, to appear), due to the false prediction of an object-verb (truck-drive)
acquisition stage, which is unattested in the two studies presented in this paper, as well as in past studies(Clark et al., 1986; Nagpal & Nicoladis, 2009). In this paper I propose a new DM structure for synthetic
compounds where the verb-object word-order is retained until –er enters the structure, attracting theinternal argument to its specifier and forcing leftward movement (in the spirit of Roeper 1999). Under
this structure, the learning problem becomes tractable and the development of the novel forms children
produce mimics the derivational steps towards the adult forms.

25

A modal analysis of Greek and Italian future morphemes
Anastasia Giannakidou1 , Alda Mari2 (1 University of Chicago, 2 ENS/CNRS Paris)
Thursday, April 19, 15:15, East LoungeThis paper argues that the future suffix in Italian and the future particle tha in Greek must be treated as
evidentials. Both the Italian suffix and Greek tha have a modal and a temporal interpretation. Our main
goal is to show how these interpretations are derived from an evidential mechanism. We assume that,together with the evidential component, the future contributes non-past. On the empirical side, we show
that, like epistemic modal statements, future statements are grounded in the availability, in the context
of utterance, of indirect evidence. On the theoretical side, we treat the Italian suffix and tha as epistemic
modal operators, taking wide scope over tense. We work in a branching time framework and assume anonveridical analysis of epistemic modality (Giannakidou 1998, 1999): knowledge of the speaker is bothcompatible with p and not p being true. This can be achieved at the utterance time, if knowledge isindirect. The event description is forward shifted in two cases: 1. When an overt adverb is present; 2.
When the epistemic reading is blocked by the availability of direct evidence that either p or not p are truein the context of utterance. In this case, as both p and non-p are true in future branches from the actual
world at the utterance time, a circumstantial modal basis is chosen, yielding the temporal interpretationof the future.

Assibilation in Standard Finnish: a case of stress-conditioned contrast neutralization

Maria Giavazzi (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Friday, April 20, 15:45, East Lounge
The aim of this paper is to provide a new analysis of assibilation in Standard Finnish verbs and to present
a case study of the interaction between stress and segmental processes.
Assibilation applies to stem-final /t/ before /-i/ across a morpheme boundary. It is blocked in immediately
post-tonic position, optional following a post-tonic segment, and obligatory if the /ti/ sequence is further
away from stress.
Anttila (2007) proposes that assibilation applies to extrametrical /t/, as a result of Positional Faithfulness(Beckmann 1998) to segmental features occurring within the stressed foot.
I argue that assigning stressed feet a positional privilege has major consequences for the predicted factorial
typology of Pos-Faith effects, since it faces the challenge of restricting the set of features which can betargeted by stress-conditioned processes.
I propose that the effect of stress on Finnish assibilation is consistent with a more restrictive, phonetically
based analysis: assibilation is triggered by the perceptual similarity between the frication noise of [t]before [i] and the frication of [s], and this process is blocked in the vicinity of stress, due to C lengthening
in this position.
Acoustic data shows that coronal stops in the obligatory assibilation contexts are acoustically most dissimilar from strident fricatives, while they have the largest burst/total duration ratio in the assibilation
context. Results from a perceptual experiment also support the neutralization analysis: /ti/ sequences
whose acoustic properties mirror post-tonic /ti/ are discriminated more easily from /si/ sequences, than/ti/ sequences whose acoustic properties are those of far-from-stress /ti/.

26

Latin rhotacism for realKyle Gorman (University of Pennsylvania)
Thursday, April 19, 15:45, West Lounge
Latin s ∼ r alternations are the parade examples of intraparadigmatic influences on phonological change.
It is widely assumed that Classical Latin contains a phonologically general process of Rhotacism (s → r/ V V). Under this analysis, honōs/honōris ‘honor (nom.sg./gen.sg.)’ derive from the root /hono:s/,with Rhotacism of the stem-final /s/ in the gen.sg. Using a corpus of all extant pre-Christian texts,
I argue that such a rule would incur extensive and diverse exceptions in Classical Latin and should be
rejected. More roots contain intervocalic s (and therefore are putative exceptions to Rhotacism) than
the s ∼ r alternation that is the only synchronic evidence for Rhotacism. Further, intervocalic s istolerated in numerous derived environments. I propose an alternative account in which many instancesof this alternation are generated by an independently motivated coronal cluster simplification process.
If the root of ‘honor’ is /hono:r-/, than the -s suffix of the nominative singular will delete the stemfinal consonant (and produce the desired s ∼ r pattern) just as it deletes other coronal consonants in thiscontext (e.g., cōs/cōtis ‘flint’, laus/laudis ‘praise’, pollis/pollinis ‘flour’). This has desirable consequences
for understanding the leveling of the s ∼ r in later Latin (e.g., honor /honōris in Apuleius). I propose theleveling is the result of a gradual extension of the competing null nom.sg. (e.g., cōnsul/cōnsulis ‘consul’),which eliminates the context for coronal cluster simplification and allows stem-final coronals to surface.

Better low pay than no pay: Propositional Adjectives Obviate Negative Island Effects

Stefan Hofstetter (Universität Tübingen)
Saturday, April 21, 16:30, West Lounge
Normally, putting an n-word into the than-complement of a comparative leads to a (semantic) Negative
Island Effect (NIE) that renders an otherwise fully grammatical comparative unacceptable (*Mary istaller than no boy is.). This phenomenon occurs however in a much less systematic fashion than theexisting literature on comparatives has it, as can be seen from the impeccable status of the following
dialogue uttered in the context of a public reading that nobody but Peter attended: A: Only Peter turned
up. B: That’s still better than no-one at all. A corpus study in the languages English, French, German
and Spanish has shown the lack of NIEs to be productive in all four languages alike and we propose toaccount for these data on the basis of two other observations: NIEs generally disappear whenever the nword happens to be in a position embedded more deeply within the than-complement and with sentences
lacking a NIE, it is always possible to extend this complement into a fully-fledged CP (That’s still better
than if no-one at all had turned up. for the above example). We therefore suggest that in cases where no
NIE arises, we aren’t dealing with an ‘ordinary’ adjective denoting a relation between an individual and a
degree (of type <e,<d,t>>)), but with a ‘propositional’ one, expressing a relation between a proposition
and a degree (type <<s,t>,<d,t>>). With the latter type of adjective (but not the former), an n-wordwill automatically be embedded within an entire proposition, which successfully prevents a NIE.

27

Non-uniform merge of argument WH and null resumption: A case study in KaqchikelYusuke Imanishi (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Thursday, April 19, 11:30, West Lounge
I claim that a possessor wh in Kaqchikel undergoes non-uniform Merge by showing new empirical facts
that (at least) one dialect of Kaqchikel has two strategies to make a possessor interrogative: one type of
the possessor wh is External-Merged into Spec-CP, while the other type undergoes movement to Spec-CP
via Internal-Merge. It is argued that the non-uniform Merge in Kaqchikel is made possible by the existenceof null resumption in the language. I present a paradox in which resumption in Kaqchikel displays no
movement properties in a simple clause, whereas it does in a long-distance dependency. I suggest thatthe domain of locality relevant to the resumptive dependencies in Kaqchikel is more constrained than the
one in other widely discussed resumptive languages like Irish and Hebrew. Specifically, I propose thata resumptive pronoun in Kaqchikel must be licensed within a clause, not a phase, which is commonly
assumed to play a dominant role in explaining various syntactic phenomena. The Clause-Mate Conditionon the Resumptive Chain (CCRC) will be proposed to address the paradox. I also provide an account of
the CCRC in the following way: the CCRC results from the (indirect) dependency between a resumptive
operator and a clitic. The CCRC can be then reduced to a general property of clitics. I also consider
the Clitic Left Dislocation in Italian and Greek in the context of the CCCRC, and conclude that theselanguages pattern with Kaqchikel regarding the availability of the CCRC.

Stacking Verbal Suffixes in Korean — An Argument for Flavors of v

Hyun Kyoung Jung (University of Arizona)
Friday, April 20, 10:15, West LoungeThis paper provides new evidence for different flavors of v (Harley 1995; Folli & Harley 2005; 2007) byinvestigating the properties of the verbalizers occurring with Sino-Korean (SK) roots and native Korean(NK) roots. Specifically, the paper examines the Case licensing facts in nominalizatons and argues thatthe verbalizer -ha ‘do’ either functions as v BE or v DO depending on the type of the root it attaches
to. Therefore, (i) although -ha attached to SK agentive roots and that attached to SK psych roots are
identical in the form and verbalizing function, the two differ in terms of the Case licensing ability andhosting an external argument. In addition, (ii) I show that the agentive interpretation associated with
SK psych roots with two instances of -ha arises due to the outer v DO layer. In line with Jung (2011), a
further observation is made that NK roots are associated with null verbalizers, which also are identified
as either v BE or v DO . The predictions made by the current proposal on the distinct statuses of v BE andv DO are confirmed by the interaction of the verbalizers with the imperative, exhortative, and promissive
endings. Finally, a welcome result of the typology of v is discussed with respect to a restructuring (Rizzi
1978; Wurmbrand 2001) construction in Korean. This study comes to a conclusion that a verbalizing
head does not necessarily serve three functions simultaneously. The verbalizing function of v needs to be
separated from its ability to assign structural Case and introduce the external theta-role.

28

A novel aspect split in Senaya
Laura Kalin1 , Coppe van Urk2 (1 University of California, Los Angeles, 2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Friday, April 20, 15:45, West LoungeThis paper adds to the typology of aspect-based case/agreement splits by presenting the unusual systemof the Neo-Aramaic dialect Senaya. In Senaya, a nom/acc system in the imperfective, (1a), alternateswith what resembles an antipassive in the perfective, (1b):
(1)

a.

b.

Aanii xazy-ii-lan.
they see.impf-3pl.S-1pl.L‘They see us.’
Axnii xa yaala xzee-lan.
weone child see.perf-1pl.L‘We saw a child.’

The object marker of the imperfective in (1a) (-lan, 1pl), marks the subject of the perfective in (1b),while the object in the perfective cannot be marked and is therefore indefinite.
We show that this system can be derived from the assumption that imperfective aspect introduces additional structure, developed in recent work on split ergativity (Coon 2010, i.a.). Specifically, we argue
that the perfective in Senaya represents the most basic agreement configuration – there is a single φ-probe
on T, which establishes an Agree relation with the subject. Imperfective aspect introduces an additional
φ-probe, on Asp itself, between T and v. This φ-probe is closer to the transitive subject (spec-vP) andtherefore it is Asp that establishes an Agree relation with the subject; this enables the φ-probe on T toestablish an Agree relation with a definite object. The syntactic structures we propose for the perfective
and imperfective map directly onto the universal structure of tense and aspect proposed by Demirdacheand Uribe-Etxebarria (2000) and provide evidence for the hypothesis that split ergativity arises becauseof additional structure introduced in nonperfective aspects (Coon 2010; Coon and Preminger 2011; Laka2006).

The interaction between propositional attitude verbs and reportative evidentiality in Tagalog



Gregory Kierstead (The Ohio State University)
Thursday, April 19, 10:15, East Lounge
When triggers associated with a projective implication are embedded under a propositional attitude verb
such as believe, the implication can be interpreted as a belief of the matrix subject, as with the factive
implication of know. For example, in “John believes that Sue knows that vegetables are nutritious,” John
holds the belief that vegetables are nutritious. Here we say the implication has a local effect, which I willcall a local reading. With an appositive, however, the content of the appositive is not interpreted as abelief of the matrix subject, and so has no local effect. For example, in “John believes that Sue, a chef,
is from Texas,” John does not necessarily believe that Sue is a chef. I will call this a non-local reading.
I present data collected from original fieldwork on the Tagalog reportative evidential daw embedded
under the predicate akala ‘falsely believe’. I give evidence for both of the readings exemplified above,
showing that daw requires a different analysis than triggers that allow only one reading. In allowing both
readings, daw is unlike other evidentials attested in the literature, which either allow only a non-local
reading (Garrett, 2001), or allow only a local reading (Sauerland and Schenner, 2007). In addition, I willshow that there is a third reading where daw takes scope over akala. The new data presented here thus
raises important questions about the semantics of evidentials, the study of non-presuppositional projective
meanings, and the study of taxonomy of meaning.

29

Do learners prefer transparent rule ordering? An Artificial language learning studyYun Jung Kim (University of California, Los Angeles)
Saturday, April 21, 10:45, West Lounge
When a language has two phonological rules that interact, the classic typology posits four types ofinteraction: feeding and bleeding (transparent), and counterfeeding and counterbleeding (opaque). It has
been argued that learners prefer transparency (Kiparsky, 1976; Weinberger, 1994), but this claim has
not been thoroughly tested. In classic OT (Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004), opaque interactions require
additional mechanisms (e.g., McCarthy 2007), and thus might again be expected to be dispreferred.
The current paper tests this claim using an artificial language learning experiment, particularly whether
learners choose feeding over counterfeeding when presented with ambiguous data.
An artificial language was created with two rules: vowel deletion (V → Ø / V) and palatalization ({t,d}→ tS/dZ / i). In training, participants encountered no cases where the rules interact.
Out of 12 participants, 10 produced counterfeeding, one produced feeding, and another produced both.
These results suggest that contrary to expectation, people do not prefer transparent feeding over opaquecounterfeeding when they have a choice. These results are analyzed by using *Map theory (Zuraw, 2007).
Opaque rule ordering (the grammar of 10 participants), transparent rule ordering (the grammar of 1
participant) and free variation (the grammar of 1 participant) can be deduced from changing the order of
two constraints: *Map(te,a,o,u ∼ tS) and *ti. The current study is the first to test whether there is a clear
preference for transparent phonological processes. We found that, in this case, there is no such preference,and gave a constraint set that could capture both outcomes.

On the Khmer Passive-like Construction: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective

Lan Kim (University of Delaware)
Friday, April 20, 10:45, West LoungeThis paper investigates previously unobserved data on Khmer passive-like constructions involving theverb trau ‘hit, strike’. As described in Haiman (2011), trau appears to act both as a main verb (whenit takes an NP) and as a passive-like marker (when it takes an agent NP immediately followed by alexical verb). In this presentation, we show that separate uses of trau are historically related and share ameaning of ‘affect’, but that synchronically the predicates diverge by selecting different complements, NP
versus CP. Specifically, we argue that main verb trau as an adversative marker is an unaccusative verb
with two internal arguments (affectee and affecter), whereas passive-like trau is on a par with an English
tough-predicate. Under this proposal, a unified analysis of trau is not possible: main verb trau has beengrammaticalized as passive marker, it is bleached of its meaning, and so this difference between two usesof trau is to be expected.
In our talk, we also offer a comparative perspective on Khmer passive-like constructions with a consideration of passive-like constructions in Mandarin Chinese and Vietnamese, which reveals an interesting
parallelism among three languages in displaying A’-dependency properties. Finally, this study lends empirical support to the so-called Southeast Asian areal phenomenon in which a lexical verb denoting anadversative meaning has been generalized as a passive-like marker via grammaticalization (e.g., Cole etal 2010 on Malay, Prasithrathsint 2006 on Thai, Simpson & Ho 2008 on Vietnamese).

30

Being “better” with accents: evidence from bilinguals

Yulia Kondratenko, Laura Spinu (Concordia University)
Saturday, April 21, 16:30, East Lounge
We trained 30 speakers (monolingual English and French-English bilinguals) to produce different accentsof English. A preliminary analysis addressed subjects’ ability to neutralize the tense-lax vowel contrast in
reproducing a Russian English accent. Vowel F1/F2 measurements were obtained in three conditions: pre:prior to accent exposure, training: the subjects listened to and immediately repeated accented sentences,and post: the subjects tried to reproduce the accent spontaneously with sentences not previously heard.
While both groups achieved nativelike production (pronouncing heat and hit as [hit]) when asked to repeat
sentences, the bilinguals, as a group, were more successful when asked to spontaneously produce novel
sentences in this accent. Bilinguals’ F2 values differed significantly between heat and hit prior to accent
training, but not in the post condition. F1 values differed significantly for monolinguals and bilinguals inboth pre and post.
Our findings support the phonological translation hypothesis (Flege 1981) which predicts L2 forms should
be intermediate between L1 and L2, due to a restructuring of the phonetic space so that it encompasses
two languages. An alternative account may be in terms of echoic memory (Calabrese 2011), a mechanism
by which sensory representations of speech uttered by others are stored and checked against different
mental representations, until the stored acoustic patterns are either ascribed to existing phonologicalrepresentations or converted into new phonological representations. Bilinguals’ echoic memory strategies
may differ from those of monolinguals due to simultaneous acquisition of two languages, such that novel
intermediate phonological representations are arrived at more rapidly.

Many Readings of Most

Hadas Kotek, Yasutada Sudo, Martin Hackl (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Friday, April 20, 9:30, East Lounge
The literature recognizes at least three distinct readings of many: cardinal, proportional, and reverse
proportional (RP) (Westerståhl 1984, Partee 1988, Büring 1996, Herburger 1997, Cohen 2001).
(1)

Many Scandinavians are Nobel prize winners
a. |Scandinavian Nobel prize winners| is largeC
b. |Scandinavian Nobel prize winners|/|Scandinavians| is largeC
c. |Scandinavian Nobel prize winners|/|Nobel prize winners| is largeC(Cardinal)(Proportional)(RP)

In this talk, we observe that the same multiple ambiguity of many exists with most as well.
In addition to the ‘more than half’ and superlative readings of most that are discussed in previous studies(Szabolcsi 1986, Heim 1999), we identify two new readings: a RP reading, and what we call the “fragile”
superlative reading. The latter reading is truth-conditionally similar to the familiar superlative reading,but is sensitive to the number of comparisons between the target and competitor sets, and the distance
between them. For instance, (2), which uses the superlative reading of bare most (Kotek et al. 2011),
becomes false after 5-6 comparisons are made.
(2)

a.
b.

Most of the students are from California
9 from CA, 4 from MA, 4 from IL, 4 from TX, . . .

Based on the observation that different readings of many and most have the same distributions, we argue
that our findings lend support to Hackl’s (2009) decompositional analysis of most as being composed ofmany and the superlative morpheme -est.

31

Beyond the adolescent peak of toykey

Soohyun Kwon (University of Pennsylvania)
Friday, April 20, 10:45, East LoungeThis study presents a synchronic quantitative study of the use of intensifiers in Seoul Korean and possible
interpretations to the apparent time trajectory of two most frequently occurring intensifiers. Drawing
from 40 sociolinguistic interviews with native Seoul Koreans from four age groups, a total 1912 of tokens
were coded for two linguistic constraints (functional and semantic type of adjectival heads occurring withintensifiers) as well as two social factors (age and gender) and submitted to mixed-effect modeling throughRbrul.
A close examination of two most robustly occurring intensifiers in the data, nemu and toykey, reveals
that age is the most significant factor for both nemu (p=0.0025) and toykey (p=0.0000075). Under theapparent time interpretation, nemu, the most dominant intensifier, is gradually waning, whereas toykey,
the runner-up, is rapidly rising. The results corroborate Labov (2001) and Tagliamonte and D’Arcy’s(2009) findings of an adolescent peak in that the frequency of toykey is highest among adolescents:
teenagers use this innovative form more frequently than their immediate younger and elders do.
A possibility of age-grading is also considered. This interpretation stems partly from the fact that theuse of toykey has been associated with “being tough” or “being cool”. Toykey has been regarded as
informal, vernacular or even slangy rather than as formal or standard language (Ahn, 2003). Therefore,
this innovative variant can be used most vigorously in one’s teenager years and abandoned across one’s
lifespan.

Sprouting Anew: Fragment Answers, And Here’s WhyBradley Larson (University of Maryland)
Friday, April 20, 14:30, West LoungeThis talk presents an alternative account of sprouting (Chung, Ladusaw, and McCloske 1995; 2010) anda novel paradigm that further refines conditions on clausal antecedents for sluicing generally. Contra
standard assumptions, Sprouting occurs not just when there is no syntactic antecedent for the sluiced
element, but also when there is a syntactic antecedent, albeit phonologically elided. This spurs a new
account of sprouting that is very similar to previous) analyses of sluicing in general in which the wh-wordin question moves to the left-periphery of a clause before ellipsis (Ross 1967, Merchant 2001). The relevant
distinction here is that sprouting sub-cases of sluicing are fed by extraposition.
There have been numerous recent accounts of other construction that involve ellipsis-evasion that also rely
on extraposition. Jayeselaan (1990) argues for an account of pseudogapping in which the construction
is fed by extraposition, Hasegawa (2007) does so for swiping, and Lasnik (in press) for multiple sluicing.
The analysis that is posited here for sprouting is in the tradition of these accounts. The sprouted wh-word
extraposes before moving to Spec,CP like wh-words in Ross-style analyses of traditional sluicing. This
allows us to capture the constrained nature of the construction in a similar manner to previous analyses.

32

Sluicing may repair LF-constraints

Tommi Leung (United Arab Emirates University)
Saturday, April 21, 17:00, West Lounge
Emirati Arabic shows that movement and reconstruction are subject to distinct conditions (c.f. Aounand Li 2003, Guilliot and Malkawi 2009). Arabic wh-movement observes all (i.e. strong and weak) island
constraints:(1)a. *Sui t-Qarf [Er-rayaal Elli P@Stra ti ]? (what you-know [the-man that bought])
b. *Sui t-ba t-Qarf [PEDa John P@Stra ti ]? (what you-want you-know [whether John bought])

Wh-reconstruction neutralizes some strong-weak island distinction. It is legitimate across weak islands,
or strong islands if the antecedent NP is outside the island. The only case in which wh-reconstruction isbanned is that the antecedent NP is inside a strong island. What complicates the picture is sluicing:(2)

John Srab Saj, b@s maa Qarf Suu. (John drank something, but not know what)

Reconstruction is preserved in sluicing regardless of the type of island constraints at the underlying whquestion, or the position of the antecedent NP, which differs from reconstruction in regular contexts.
Semantically, Arabic sluicing allows single-pair and pair-list readings of the wh-sluice regardless of island
constraints (contra. reconstruction in normal contexts), again showing that sluicing can neutralize reconstruction constraints. I claim that (i) movement and reconstruction constraints are defined at PF and LF
respectively, (ii) PF- and LF-conditions interact with each other in the sense that some PF constraints oroperations have a semantic consequence at LF, (iii) sluicing as PF-deletion (Ross 1969, Merchant 2001)
can repair the reconstruction constraints which are defined at LF.

Revisiting frequency and storage in morphological processingConstantine Lignos, Kyle Gorman (University of Pennsylvania)
Friday, April 20, 9:00, West Lounge
The exploration of the tradeoff between compositional units that are stored as a whole or computed uponeach use spans both theories of representation and processing. Ideally, the units of lexical processing andthe units of lexical representation used in morphological theory should coincide, thus the question of what
units—be they whole words, pieces such as roots and suffixes, or some combination of those elements—are
implicated in processing studies should also have an impact on a theory of morphology. A long-standing
question is how the frequency of those units can affect the speed with which they are accessed and used.
We examine the subtleties of word frequency effects, the notion that more frequently used units shouldbe accessed faster. Our work is the first study to use both the largest available database of English
lexical decision times and accurate frequency estimates to examine frequency effects across a broad setof regularly inflected items. Using mixed effects linear models of lexical decision times, we find no basis
for previous claims that frequency effects can be used as evidence for some regular forms being stored(pace Alegre and Gordon, 1999). We also find that once effects of the pieces (e.g., roots and suffixes) areaccounted for there is no residual effect of whole word frequency on lexical decision times. These findings
support previously proposed decompositional models and illustrate the impact of frequency norm selection
on the conclusions of lexical decision studies.

33

Post-syntactic Operations: Morphological Locality in Saaroa Prefix Concord



Kuo-Chiao Jason Lin (New York University)
Friday, April 20, 15:15, West LoungeThis paper argues that a post-syntactic approach is superior to a pure syntactic one invoking Multiple
Agree in explaining the morphological locality exhibited by the prefix concord (1) in Saaroa, an endangered
Formosan language.
(1)

paahlu-muamuare=aku
paahlu-papuahle paahlu-sahli
AV.PC-slowly=1SG.NOM AV.PC-twice
AV.PC-song‘I slowly sang the song twice.’

The prefixes have been taken to be verb classifiers and the adverbial verbs in Saaroa are viewed asfunctional verbs carrying uninterpretable/unvalued verb-type [CLASS] feature to be valued by the interpretable/valued verb-type [CLASS] feature on the lower lexical verb (Li 2009). The example in (1)then involves Multiple Agree (Li 2009). This paper, on the other hand, shows that an AGREE-based approach as proposed has several empirical/theoretical problemssuch morphological locality is predicted by
the C1 -LIN theory (Embick 2010), according to which for morpheme Z to induce contextual allomorphy(either via by Vocabulary Insertion (VI) or Readjustment rules) of morpheme Y, Z and Y must be in thesame cyclic domain. In other words, a noncyclic Y that is part of the edge+ of cyclic y cannot have its
contextual allomorphy determined by Z that is in the complement of inner cyclic x in ...Z] x]...y] Y] under
any circumstances.

Constraint promotion: not only convergent but also efficientGiorgio Magri (CNRS, University of Paris 7)
Thursday, April 19, 11:30, East Lounge
Children learn their target language early, fast and efficiently. They must thus rely on a remarkably
efficient learning strategy. What could it look like? According to the error-driven learning model, thelearner maintains a current hypothesis of the target adult phonotactics that is slightly updated wheneverit makes a mistake on the incoming stream of data from the target adult language, until it makes nomore mistakes. This learning model is very popular in the current Optimality Theoretic (OT) acquisition
literature because of its cognitive plausibility (Gnanadesikan 2004, Boersma & Levelt 2000, Bernhardt& Stemberger 1998, etcetera; but Tessier 2009 for critical discussion). In fact, it models the observed
acquisition gradualness, as it describes a stepwise progression towards the target adult grammar. And
it does not impose unrealistic memory requirements, as it only looks at a piece of data at the time
without keeping track of previously seen data. Yet, cognitive plausibility needs to be supplemented withcomputational soundness. The most basic computational desideratum for error-driven learning is that themodel eventually stops making mistakes and thus settle on a final ranking (convergence). Furthermore,
the number of mistakes before convergence should grow slowly with the number of constraints, so that themodel is feasible also for large constraint sets (efficiency). Building on earlier results by Tesar & Smolensky(1998), Boersma (2009), and Pater (2010), this talk develops a complete characterization (both sufficientand necessary) of convergent and efficient implementations of the OT error-driven learning scheme.

34

The Role of Release Bursts in Word-Final Stop PerceptionPaul Marty (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Friday, April 20, 16:15, East Lounge
Release bursts are known to provide important cues for the identification of place of articulation in stops(Malécot 1958, Winitz et al. 1972, Kewley-Port et al. 1983, a.o.), and the absence of stop release in coda
context has been proposed to drive neutralization of place contrasts in those environments (Ohala 1989,
Ohala 1993, Chu 2009). Specifically, in languages where coda stops are always unreleased (e.g. Cantonese,
Taiwanese, Highland Yao), it has been observed (Ohala, 1980, Kawasaki 1982, Flemming 1995) that place
contrasts neutralize when VC transitions are acoustically similar (e.g., up^/uk^). In this talk, I present(a) preliminary results from a typological study showing the particular place feature speakers default toin the light of neutralization, and (b) a study of place perception with speakers of French (obligatory stop
release), where release bursts have been removed from the acoustic signal. Results show that, in cases
where transitions are confusable, French listeners default neither to the most cross-linguistic unmarked
value, nor to the most frequent value in context, where frequency is estimated on the lexicon of French.
Rather, they overwhelmingly default to the place feature for which the release burst is most acousticallysimilar to no burst at all (i.e., [labial]). Within a perceptual grammar, I present an account in terms ofcue weighting modulated by the listener’s expectations about the presence of different cues to account forneutralization default in speakers of French and cross-linguistically.

Missing Alternatives and Disjunction

Marie-Christine Meyer (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Thursday, April 19, 10:45, East LoungeThis talk explores a previously unnoticed class of disjunctions which receive a conjunctive interpretation:(1)

Thumbs are fingers or else we’d all have eight fingers instead of ten⇒ Thumbs are fingers⇒ If they weren’t, we’d all have eight fingers instead of ten(2)

Pronouns must be generated with an index or else they will be uninterpretable(Heim & Kratzer 1998)⇒ Pronouns must be generated with an index⇒ If they aren’t, they will be uninterpretable(after Horn 2000)

We propose an analysis which derives the conjunctive interpretation as an implicature, thus preserving
the null hypothesis that or denotes Boolean ∨ (contra Klinedinst & Rothschild 2012). We argue for awell-formedness constraint on scalar alternatives which excludes the corresponding conjunction from thealternative set of or else disjunctions. The conditional interpretation of the second disjunct is derived byanalyzing else as a substractive anaphoric pro-form, thus assimilating it to its use in QPs like somethingelse (Culicover & Jackendoff 1995).

35

Is phonological learning different?

Elliott Moreton, Katya Pertsova (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Saturday, April 21, 10:15, West Lounge
Are phonological patterns learned differently from non-phonological ones? If not, how is phonology
different? This talk reports a phonological-learning experiment in which pattern structure affected pattern
learnability in a way different from that classically found with non-linguistic patterns.
A difficulty hierarchy has been established for six types (I—VI) of non-linguistic patterns defined on threebinary features (Shepard et al. 1961), with learnability decreasing in the order I > II > III = IV = V> VI. Phonological analogues of Types I, II, and VI have been studied previously and found to replicate
the non-linguistic I > II > VI order.
We tested all six types using an unsupervised “artificial language” learning paradigm with N=116 native
English speakers. Participants were familiarized by listening to and repeating CVCV stimuli which
instantiated a pattern belonging to a Shepard type. They were then tested on their ability to distinguishnovel pattern-conforming stimuli from non-conforming foils. Our findings match the usual order of I > II
> VI. However, instead of the II > III = IV = V order found with non-linguistic patterns, we found IV> II, IV > V, and III > V.
What makes phonology different? Detailed analysis suggests that (A) learners are sensitive to the characteristic internal structure of phonological stimuli (prosodic and feature-tier organization, mostly lacking
outside phonology), and (B) they are especially sensitive to correct sub-generalizations. These findings arewell modelled by a Maximum Entropy phonotactic learner, compared to the exemplar model ALCOVE.

A third dependent caseAlexander Podobryaev (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Saturday, April 21, 9:30, West Lounge
I propose an extension of the theory of dependent case, i.e. case assigned to a nominal that stands in ac-command relation to another nominal in a local domain (cf. Marantz 1991 and others). I propose a
distinction among three kinds of dependent cases with mutually exclusive licensing conditions: ergative:a case that is assigned to a nominal that (a) c-commands a distinct non-quirky nominal (i.e. a nominalthat is not assigned quirky case) and (b) is not c-commanded by a distinct non-quirky nominal within
the relevant minimal domain; accusative: a case that is assigned to a nominal that (a) is c-commanded
by a distinct non-quirky nominal and (b) does not c-command a distinct non-quirky nominal within therelevant minimal domain; and what I will call intermediate case: a case that is assigned to a nominalthat (a) c-commands a non-quirky nominal and (b) is c-commanded by a distinct non-quirky nominal in
the minimal domain. Importantly, more than one dependent case can be assigned in the domain.
The anti-c-command requirement in the definitions of ergative and accusative cases and the introductionof intermediate case ensures that if the relevant minimal domain contains three nominals, the one that isc-commanded by the highest but c-commands the lowest nominal receives — not accusative or ergative
dependent case — but a special, intermediate case. The system provides a unified analysis of case marking
in causatives and ditransitives and explains some properties of differential case marking.

36

Semi-clefts as a window on the syntax of predication, modification, and complementation
Mariana Resenes1 , Marcel den Dikken2 (1 University of Sao Paulo, 2 CUNY Graduate Center)
Thursday, April 19, 10:15, West Lounge

Our aim in this work is to analyze the semi-clefts constructions, as (1), observed in both European andBrazilian Portuguese and in Caribbean Spanish. They are linearly similar to pseudoclefts, except for theabsence of the wh-element, as well as to simple sentences, except for the presence of the copula:(1)

O João comprou foi um carro.
the João bought was a car

We will show that, although a reduced pseudocleft analysis is an option available for some semi-clefts (see(2d)), there is strong evidence forcing a monoclausal analysis for the bulk of them, like the agreement
facts with a subject focus in (2a):(2)

a.

Telefonei fuieu.
called.1SG was.1SG I
b. *Telefonou fuieu.
called.3SG was.1SG I
c. *Telefonei foi
eu.
called.1SG was.3SG I
d. Telefonou foi
eu.
called.3SG was.3SG I

In (2a), both the copula and the lexical verb show phi-feature agreement with the focused subject; this is
only possible in a monoclausal structure. The monoclausal analysis we propose is based on Den Dikken’s(2006) analysis of the syntax of predication, in which the copula is either the spell-out of a RELATOR orof a LINKER, the latter emerging due to Predicate Inversion. The derivations proposed for the semi-cleftsin (1) and (2a) are in (3), respectively:
(3)

a.
b.

[ vP o João [ v’ v [ FP [ VP comprou]i [ F+RELATOR=foi [ RP um carro [ R’ tREL ti ]]]]]][ TP [ VP telefonei ] [ T+v = fui [ vP eu [ tv tVP ]]]]

Ipsilateral and contralateral phonetic context effects
Kevin Sitek1 , Keith Johnson2 (1 San Francisco VA Medical Center, 2 University of California, Berkeley)
Friday, April 20, 15:15, East Lounge

Duplex perception experiments explore how a speech unit is processed simultaneously as a speech and nonspeech sound (Mann & Liberman, 1983; Liberman et al., 1967). Per Holt and Lotto (2002), two adjacentspeech sounds do not need to be heard in the same ear for phonetic context effects to be active. Similar
to Lotto, Sullivan, and Holt (2002), our experiments combine these paradigms by presenting two syllables
dichotically with formants of the target syllable contralaterally to the rest of the target. As reportedby Mann (1980), when hearing an ambiguous stimulus between /d/ and /g/, subjects are more likely tohear /g/ after /al/ and /d/ after /ar/. This compensation for coarticulation is significant regardless ofwhether the context is presented to the same ear as the base target or the isolated third formant transition,
demonstrating that the auditory system must combine streams before completing all phonetic analysis.
Additionally, there is a greater effect when the formant transitions are presented to the ipsilateral ear
as the context segment than when they are presented contralaterally. The difference in compensation
effects between Experiments 1 and 2 (where the formant transition is presented contralaterally to thecontext) shows that some acoustic processing occurs before the left and right auditory streams converge.
Separating the formant chirp (responsible for cuing /d/ vs. /g/) from the context may be more crucial
to analysis than separating the base target from the context. Phonetic context effects, while working
adequately across streams, may be more influential within one stream.

37

The semantics of mood in BulgarianAnastasia Smirnova (Tufts University)
Thursday, April 19, 16:15, East LoungeThis paper presents a formal semantic analysis of mood in Bulgarian. I propose that the choice of the
subjunctive and the indicative mood in complements of propositional attitude verbs is determined by
the interaction of two key factors: (i) the meaning of the matrix clause predicate (as in Giannakidou
1998, 2009), and (ii) the semantics of the indicative and the subjunctive mood (cf. Matthewson 2010
on St’át’imcets). The analysis is motivated by the fact that Bulgarian shows a robust pattern of the
double mood selection, when the same verb is compatible with both the subjunctive and the indicativecomplement. The existing analyses usually attribute the choice of mood to the semantics of the matrix
verbs alone (cf. Farkas 1992, Giannakidou 1998, 2009, Villalta 2008). Thus, according to Giannakidou’s
analysis of mood in Greek, the indicative mood is licensed by veridical predicates, i.e. predicates that
presupposeassert the truth of the complement, such as know, while the subjunctive mood is licensed
by non-veridical predicates, such as want, i.e. predicates that do not presupposeassert the truth of thecomplement. This analysis is categorical in that the matrix verb is either veridical or non-veridical, andit successfully accounts for the cases when the indicative or the subjunctive mood is the only choice.
However, the pattern of mood distribution in Bulgarian motivates a non-categorical approach to moodin this language that would allow the same predicate to select either the subjunctive or the indicativecomplement, depending on the context.

The relationship between projection and at-issuenessE. Allyn Smith1 , Kathleen Currie Hall2 (1 Northwestern University, 2 CUNY)
Saturday, April 21, 10:15, East Lounge

We consider a meaning projective when it is entailed by both a simple sentence’s meaning and the meaningof the same sentence with the addition of an entailment-cancelling operator like negation. We report theresults of two online judgment tasks that use surprisal as a lay measure of entailment. The first of theseverified a number of assumptions in the literature such as the fact that assertions do not project, but
presuppositions and conventional implicatures (CIs) do (Chierchia & McConnell-Ginet 1990), and thefact that different presupposition/CI triggers project to varying amounts (Abbott 2006 and Abusch 2010,
inter alia). Simons et al. 2010 propose that a meaning has the ability to project iff it is not-at-issue, whichmeans that it is not relevant to the Question Under Discussion (QUD) at that point in the discourse.
To test whether projection variability was conditioned by at-issueness, the second experiment used thesame stimuli as the first but presented each with an explicit QUD for which the assertion was at-issue but
the presupposition/CI was not-at-issue (as determined by a norming study). The heterogeneity among
triggers remained in the results of the second experiment, showing that at-issueness alone cannot condition
projective behavior for a variety of triggers.

38Semantics of English suffix -ishAyaka Sugawara (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Friday, April 20, 9:00, East Lounge
In this talk, I investigate the semantics of the English suffix -ish as seen in tall-ish, now-ish, or toy-ish.
Little theoretical work has been done on the nature of the suffix, whose use is highly productive (seeMorris (2009) for descriptive work). Intuitively, -ish that appends to an adjectival base modifies thedegree of the base. Contrary to this naive view, I argue that -ish is a degree head of type hhd, he, tii,
he, tii (cf. “pos” of Kennedy (2007)).
I point out that adding -ish is not productive with lower-bound adjectives, while it is productive with
open scale and upper-bound adjectives. Another characteristic of adj-ish is that it is not gradable.
The proposed semantics for -ish below, where “s(P)” stands for the standard of Phd, eti , and “dc ” forcontextually provided expected deviance from the standard, correctly predict those characteristics.
J-ishK = λPhd, eti . λxe . max {d | P(d)(x) = 1} < s(P) & ( s(P) − max {d | P(d)(x) = 1} < dc )I also argue that the possibility for a lower-bound adjective to append -ish is contextually dependent, giventhat speakers generally find that there is a difference in acceptability between *bent-ish and *?open-ish.
The idea is that context provides a non-zero degree of “properly adj’ and hence there is a gap between
the degree and the lower bound. This can be compared to Kennedy & McNally’s (2005) discussion of“imprecise” uses of absolute adjectives.

Finna as a Socially-Meaningful Modal (and Performative) in African American English

Julia Thomas, Timothy Grinsell (University of Chicago)
Friday, April 20, 10:15, East LoungeThis paper provides both a descriptive and a formal account of the preverbal marker finna in African
American English (AAE). The analysis fills 2 gaps in the literature: the general paucity of research on
formal semantics in AAE and the under-developed integration of formal semantic meaning with social
meaning for dialectal variants. Using lyrics from hip hop and rap songs, this work examines 90 tokensof the pre-verbal marker finna (also seen as fitna and finta). The data suggest that finna behaves
like a temporally-proximate future modal in AAE, that is distributionally and formally distinct fromthe future marker gonna, and may also pattern differently than bouta (‘about to’). Finna may takeon a performative meaning in AAE that can be analyzed according to Schwager (2011)’s treatment ofimperatives. Finna takes on various speech act functions depending on context, but the most common
use of finna is threatening or warning. Finally, finna has acquired a salient social meaning in AAE,
especially outside of the South. The data support an enhanced distribution for finna in contexts where
the creation of a strong ethnic or cultural style is desirable, such as in hip hop lyrics. In such contexts,
speakers may be more likely to flout grammatical constraints or increase usage for the sake of amplifiedsocial meaning offering insight for the actuation problem of semantic change. Formal semantic accountsof finna are crucially augmented by considerations of its social meaning.

39

Tonal variations in Hong Kong Cantonese: Interactions of acoustic distance and functional load



Tsz-Him Tsui (The Ohio State University)
Thursday, April 19, 15:15, West Lounge
Among the six tones in Hong Kong Cantonese (HKC), the low-rising Tone 5 (T5) varies in both production
and perception. In production, T5 is often interchangeable with the high-rising Tone 2 (T2) (Bauer,
Cheung & Cheung 2003, Mok & Wong 2010a) and the mid-level Tone 3 (T3) (Vance 1976, Wong 2008).
Also, some HKC speakers also have difficulties in perceiving the contrast between the low-rising T5 andhigh-rising T2 (Mok & Wong 2010b).
This study investigates how acoustic distance and functional load (Hockett 1967, Surendran & Niyogi
2003) contributes to tone variations in HKC. The interchangeable pairs T2 T5 and T3-T5 may be leastdistant acoustically, or carry the least functional loads in distinguishing potential homophones. Acoustic
distance is defined as the root-mean-square distance between the f 0 tracks, while functional load is theentropy lost in word prediction in an HKC corpus (Luke 1997) after simulated mergers of each tone pair.
The current results show that, although neither acoustic distance nor functional load could solely explain
the tone variations in HKC, the combination of these two factors account for such variations. In otherwords, the variable tone pairs are both acoustically similar and carrying low functional loads. Sincesuch tones pairs are phonetically similar, while variations in these pairs would bring little confusion to
the communication system, they are more variably produced and perceived. The results suggest thatfunctional load, besides phonetic factors, indeed contributes to language variation and change (Hume etal. 2011, Wedel & Kaplan 2011; contra King 1967).

Meaning more or most: evidence from 3-and-a-half year-olds
Alexis Wellwood1 , Justin Halberda2 , Tim Hunter3 , Darko Odic2 , Paul Pietroski1 , Jeffrey Lidz1 (1 Universityof Maryland, 2 John Hopkins University, 3 Yale University)
Saturday, April 21, 9:30, East Lounge

Under time pressure, adults use the Approximate Number System to verify most (Lidz et al 2011), andresearch with children has shown that understanding this quantifier doesn’t require mature counting
ability (Halberda et al 2008). Given the truth-conditional equivalence of most and more in cases with
only two sets, we find here a unique opportunity to test whether differences in the specification of their
meanings can trigger different verification strategies. The meaning of most, as in (1), requires computing
the cardinality of a set and some subset of it. In contrast, more, as in (2), references the cardinality of
two distinct sets. We hypothesized that most would bias towards a visual set-subset selection procedure,
whereas more would bias towards visual set-set selection.
(1)(2)

Jmost of the animals are tigersK = |A ∩ T| > |A|−|A ∩ T|

Jthere are more tigers than elephantsK = |T| > |E|

In our experiment, we asked children to determine which of two sets is greater, on two display types varying
in two dimensions: spatial arrangement (spatially separated or intermixed) and ratio of the cardinalitiesof two sets of animals (5:4, 6:5, 7:6). We predicted higher accuracy for more on spatially separated
displays, and better accuracy for most on intermixed. Children who displayed full-counting ability yet
ratio-dependent accuracy were included (10 more and 11 most; range 3;5-4;1, mean 3;8). Results were aspredicted: accuracy for most is better on spatially intermixed displays, and better for more on spatiallyseparated displays.

40Perceptual Similarity and Epenthesis Positioning in Loan Adaptation

Suyeon Yun (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Thursday, April 19, 16:15, West LoungeThis study presents a comprehensive typology of epenthesis positioning in loan adaptation and provides
novel generalizations: (i) if a cluster contains a stop, a vowel is epenthesized after the stop, (ii) if a cluster
contains a sonorant, a vowel is epenthesized before the sonorant. My hypothesis is that the typology
results from perceptual similarity between a consonant and its epenthesized form. Specifically, a stop is
perceptually more similar to a stop-vowel sequence than to a vowel-stop, and a sonorant is perceptuallymore similar to a vowel-sonorant sequence than to a sonorant-vowel. The results of a perception experiment support the hypothesis, and the typology will be analyzed based on the P-map hypothesis (Steriade
2001/2009).

Licensing by modification in two classes of verbs

Erin Zaroukian, Charley Beller (Johns Hopkins University)
Saturday, April 21, 14:30, West Lounge
Here we address the puzzle of why evaluative verbs like like and habituals like eat both give an infelicitous
specific reading of a singular indefinite in sentences like (1) but not (2).
(1)

Greta #eats/#likes/wants a cookie.

(2)

Greta eats/likes/wants a cookie after dinner.

Drawing from Rimell (2004) and Ferreira (2005), we propose that this non-specific reading is licensed
by the introduction of a modifier that allows for low binding of the singular indefinite. The applicationof this analysis to like highlights ways in which eat and like differ. In particular, like behaves like an
Intensional Transitive Verb (ITV), e.g. want, in its ability to license non-specific readings through a covert
HAVE -clause complement.
(3)

Greta wanted/liked/ate a cookie after dinner (when she was a child).
a. There was a time after dinner at which Greta wanted/?liked/ate a cookie
b. Greta’s want/like/#eat was to have a cookie after dinner

However, evaluatives remain intermediate between ITVs and habituals by allowing, not requiring, HAVE clause complements (cf. Greta likes David ) and by their ‘intermediate’ modal status (compare (4) and
(5)).
(4)

Greta wants/#likes/#rides a (real live) unicorn.

(5)a. David wants water but doesn’t want H2 0 (which he believes is poisonous).
b. David likes water but doesn’t like H2 0...
c. #David drinks water but doesn’t drink H2 0...

This leads us to draw a distinction in verb classes which bridges habituals and ITVs.
(6)

a.

b.

HAVE -clause-taking verbs(i) ITVs, e.g. want, need(ii) Evaluatives, e.g. like
Non-HAVE -clause-taking verbs(i) Habituals, e.g. eat

41

Acknowledgments
The Chicago Linguistic Society would sincerely like to thank the following sponsors for their generous
financial support of this years 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 the session
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 researchentails. 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 over 250 submissions, it was necessary to leaveout from the program many outstanding pieces of research. If the Chicago Linguistic Society conference
maintains high standards, it is due in large measure to the notable authors who submit their work forconsideration. Special thanks must also be given to the faculty and students in the Department ofLinguistics who offered their valuable advice and support from the very first to the very last stages ofconference preparation. In addition, we want to express our deep gratitude to all of 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 tothank all conference attendees for joining us here at the 48th annual meeting of the Chicago LinguisticSociety, continuing the tradition of excellence.
Andrea Beltrama
Tasos Chatzikonstantinou
Jackson Lee
Mike Pham
Diane Rak
CLS 48 Organizing Committee

42Author Index
Abner, Natasha R., 18
Albright, Adam, 12
Alderete, John, 18
Alexiadou, Artemis, 19Bajaj, Vandana, 19
Bank, Sebastian, 20
Barros, Matthew, 20
Beller, Charley, 41
Bogal-Allbritten, Elizabeth, 21
Buecking, Sebastian, 21
Burnett, Heather, 22
Butler, Becky, 22
Cano, Mariangeles, 19
Chen, I-Hsuan, 23
Choe, Jinsun, 23
Chung, Sandra, 13
Csipak, Eva, 24
Déprez, Viviane, 19
den Dikken, Marcel, 14, 37
Duek, Karen, 24

Kondratenko, Yulia, 31
Kotek, Hadas, 31
Kwon, Soohyun, 32
Larson, Bradley, 32
Leung, Tommi, 33
Lidz, Jeffrey, 40
Lignos, Constantine, 33
Lin, Kuo-Chiao Jason, 34
Magri, Giorgio, 34
Mari, Alda, 26
Martin, Fabienne, 19Marty, Paul, 35
Meyer, Marie-Christine, 35
Moreton, Elliott, 36
Musolino, Julien, 19
Odic, Darko, 40
Pertsova, Katya, 36
Pietroski, Paul, 40
Podobryaev, Alexander, 36
Pouscoulous, Nausicaa, 15

Erlewine, Michael Yoshitaka, 25
Resenes, Mariana, 37
Frisch, Stefan, 18
Gamache, Jessica, 25
Giannakidou, Anastasia, 26
Giavazzi, Maria, 26
Gorman, Kyle, 27, 33
Graf, Thomas, 18
Grinsell, Timothy, 39

Schaefer, Florian, 19
Sitek, Kevin, 37
Smirnova, Anastasia, 38
Smith, E. Allyn, 38
Spinu, Laura, 31
Sudo, Yasutada, 31
Sugawara, Ayaka, 39

Hackl, Martin, 31
Halberda, Justin, 40
Hall, Kathleen Currie, 38
Hofstetter, Stefan, 27
Hunter, Tim, 40

Thomas, Julia, 39
Trommer, Jochen, 20
Tsui, Tsz-Him, 40
Tupper, Paul, 18

Imanishi, Yusuke, 28
Iordǎchioaia, Gianina, 19
Johnson, Keith, 37
Jung, Hyun Kyoung, 28
Kalin, Laura, 29
Kierstead, Gregory, 29
Kim, Lan, 30
Kim, Yun Jung, 30

van Urk, Coppe, 29
von Fintel, Kai, 16
Wellwood, Alexis, 40
Yu, Alan C. L., 17
Yun, Suyeon, 41
Zaroukian, Erin, 41

43

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