Coordinators: Steven Foley and Pranav Anand

Spring 2017

May 12

Emily Clem (UC Berkeley): “Ergative case as agreement with multiple heads”

The mechanisms underlying ergative case assignment have long been debated, with two main view emerging in the literature: 1) ergative is an inherent case assigned by a transitive v to an agent, 2) ergative is a dependent case assigned to a DP that c-commands another DP within a case domain. In this talk, I present novel data from the Panoan language Amahuaca, in which ergative case is sensitive to the position of the transitive subject. The interaction of movement and morphological case assignment in Amahuaca cannot easily be captured by current inherent or dependent case theories. Ergative is not assigned in a theta-position, as predicted by an inherent case account, nor is it dependent on whether the subject and object DPs are in the same case domain, as predicted by a dependent case account. Instead, I argue for an account of ergative case as exponing Agree operations between a DP and two distinct functional heads, v and T. This approach is able to account for the Amahuaca data, while incorporating key insights from both inherent and dependent case theories of ergativity. I further demonstrate that this view that takes case to be the exponence of multiple features is able to be extended to account for elements of Amahuaca’s case-sensitive switch reference system as well as its focus-sensitive nominative marking. The Amahuaca data thus suggest that ergative case can be viewed as a feature bundle, rather than a single case feature, and that morphological ergative marking arises as the exponence of structural relationships between multiple heads and a nominal.

May 5

Ginny Dawson (UC Berkeley): “A new kind of epistemic indefinite”

In this talk I examine a series of epistemic indefinites — pronouns that convey speaker ignorance about the witness to the indefinite (Alonso-Ovalle & Menéndez-Benito 2015) — in Tiwa, a Tibeto–Burman language of India. These pronouns, formed from a wh-word base and the suffix –khi, take obligatory widest scope, freely range over a singleton domain, and can encode speaker ignorance with respect to any salient property of the witness. Further, the ignorance component is not a conversational implicature, but better analyzed as a presupposition. These features place Tiwa’s epistemic indefinites in contrast with those discussed in the literature (eg, Spanish algún (AO & MB 2010), German irgendein (Kratzer & Shimoyama 2002), and others), for which the ignorance effects appear to be an implicature that arises from their anti-singleton domain requirements, and are consequently limited in what sorts of ignorance they can convey. Instead, Tiwa’s –khi indefinites represent an entirely different sort of epistemic indefinite, that (i) are choice functional (deriving their widest scope), and (ii) carry presupposition of speaker ignorance about some salient property of the witness.

April 11

Andrés Salanova (University of Ottawa): “Frustratives and viewpoint”

(Joint work with Javier Carol)

Many languages in the world exhibit the category of the frustrative, which encodes that an expected outcome of an action did not come to be (Copley & Harley 2010, 2014, Kroeger 2016, Overall 2017). A closer inspection of the category reveals a cluster of related but distinct meanings. On the one hand there are those where the situation wasn’t initiated or completed (exs. 1a, 2a), while on the other there are those that indicate that the completed situation did not have the intended effects (exs. 1b, 2b). We call these type I and type II respectively.

(1) Chorote

(1) a. A-lej-ta ki i-‘yu‘…

(1) a. 1A-wash-FRUST D 1SG.POSS-clothes

(1) a. “I was washing my shirt…” [I didn‘t finish]

(1) a. “I was going to wash my shirt…” [I didn‘t wash it]

(1) a. “I was washing my shirt…” [I didn‘t finish]

(1) b. A-lej-a-ta ki i-‘yu‘, ¡t’ọjli’!

(1) b. 1A-wash-MOM-FRUST D 1SG.POSS-clothes 3.dirty

(1) b. “I washed my first, but it’s dirty!”

(2) Mẽbengokre

(2) a. Ba bit awỳr tẽ

(2) a. I FRUST 2:up.to go

(2) a. “I was going up to where you were” [I met you on the way, or gave up]

(2) b. Ba te awỳr tẽ

(1) b. I FRUST 2:up.to go

(2) a. “I was going up to where you were” [In vain; you were gone]

We claim that treating the two different senses as distinct categories (e.g., Overall, op. cit.) is inadequate from both an empirical and theoretical point of view. Empirically, many of the different senses overlap in the same morpheme cross-linguistically, or arise from interactions of a single morpheme with other categories (as is the case with the MOMentary morpheme in Chorote, and with prospective in Mẽbengokre). As far as theoretical adequacy goes, in this talk we propose that a single formalism can elegantly characterize the different attested meanings of the frustrative and draw parallels between them and modal-aspectual morphemes.

Type I frustratives resemble imperfectives in that in the latter the culmination is outside topic time, and no claim is made as to whether it is reached or not (cf. 3). Like in imperfectives, the frustrative can be used both when the situation has in fact begun, or when it is imminent, in a way that is determined to a great extent by the predicate’s Aktionsart. The salient difference between imperfectives and frustrative is simply that in the frustrative the claim that the culmination is not reached is explicitly made (i.e., 3b is excluded).

(3) I was reading your draft when I was called to work…

(3) a. …so I never finished reading it.

(3) b. …so I finished reading it the following day.

The fact that in type II frustratives (1b, 2b) the eventuality culminates apparently puts us in a hard place. We claim that the solution to this is implicit already in our discussion of type I frustratives, with the sole addition of distinguishing between different types of culmination.

An event can be conceived as a series of stages, represented in (4). Before their completion, it is not assured that any of these stages will come to pass, but, simplifying somewhat, the later stages are already implicit from the planning stage (if one understands consequences as intended or expected consequences). The relation among these various stages is modal, and based on the notion of inertia (cf. Arregui et al. 2014). In simplified form, the inertia situations of an actual situation are those where things continue as expected and the next stage of the event is reached. This notion has applications in the imperfective and in frustratives in the way shown in (5, 6).

(4) Planning → Development → Culmination → Consquences

(5) ⟦IMPF⟧ = λP.λs.∀sʹ : M_α(s)(sʹ) = 1.∃e.P(e)(sʹ) = 1

(6) ⟦FRUST⟧ = λP.λs.∃e.∀sʹ : M_α(s)(sʹ) = 1.P(e)(sʹ) = 1 ∧ P(e)(s) = 0

(6) Where M_α is modal base relating two situations inertially.

Given these semantics for the frustrative, we hypothesize that when languages have independent means of indicating the boundedness of the event, e.g., Chorote’s momentary morpheme, the two types of frustratives will be encoded by a single morpheme: i.e., Type II = culmination + non-continuation, hence absence of consequences, while Type I = non-culmination + non-continuation, hence interruption before culmination. Mẽbengokre exemplifies at the same time a case where frustrative morphemes pack information about culmination, and one where the aspectual morphology available is the opposite of culmination (e.g., prospective).

April 7

Nico Baier (UC Berkeley): “Unifying Anti-Agreement and Wh-Agreement”

Many languages exhibit anti-agreement (AA), an effect in which φ-agreement with an argument is disrupted when that argument is A̅-extracted (e.g. Ouhalla 1993). In this paper, I argue against the view that AA results from constraints against the extraction of certain arguments (Boeckx 2003; Schneider-Zioga 2007; Diercks 2010; Erlewine 2016). Instead, AA is a form of wh-agreement — dedicated agreement morphology that indexes extracted arguments (Chung and Georgopoulos 1988). The effect is the result of a φ-probe copying both φ- and wh-features from a goal. AA arises when partial or total impoverishment applies to the [φ + wh] feature bundle in the morphological component, blocking insertion of an otherwise appropriate, more highly specified agreement exponent.

Winter 2017

January 13

Sandy Chung & Matt Wagers (UC Santa Cruz): “Competition among pronouns in the grammar of Chamorro reflexives”

Safir (2014) proposes that all bound variable pronouns in natural language which are c-commanded by their antecedents realize a single dependent form, which he calls D-bound. In his system, D-bound — the “one true syntactically sensitive anaphor” — is the dependent element in bound anaphora, whether the antecedent is local or long-distance. Principle A effects arise when a language’s morphological spell-out of D-bound is sensitive to whether it is in the same phase as its antecedent. Principle B effects arise because ordinary, ‘natural-born’ pronouns with the same (bound) construal always lose in the competition with D-bound.

Safir’s system predicts the existence of languages in which locally-bound (‘reflexive’) instances of D-bound have the same morphological spell-out as natural-born pronouns, although — as he observes — such languages are rare. He claims that the prevalence of morphological reflexives (e.g. English themselves) “is a form of morphological conservation reacting to functional pressure for local anaphora resolution where possible” (2014: 119).

When ‘reflexive’ D-bound is morphologically indistinguishable from natural-born pronouns, how do comprehenders navigate the task of construal? Chamorro, an Austronesian language of the Mariana Islands, provides a window onto this question. In Chamorro, (1) ‘reflexive’ D-bound generally has the same morphological spell-out as natural-born pronouns. However, (2) if ‘reflexive’ D-bound is a direct object, reflexivity can optionally be signaled with the postverbal adverb maisa ‘self’. Further, (3) ‘reflexive’ D-bound, when an object, must be spelled out as an overt proform — it cannot be null. Finally, (4) clauses with a ‘reflexive’ D-bound object evade Chamorro’s Person–Animacy Hierarchy (PAH), which bans transitive clauses in which the direct object is a (natural-born) pronoun but the subject is a nonpronoun.

If D-bound universally outcompetes natural-born pronouns with the same (bound) construal, and Chamorro maisa signals locally bound anaphora resolution, then we make several predictions about how comprehenders will construe the overt object proform gui’, which could realize D-bound or a natural-born 3SG pronoun. We discuss a touch-tracking picture-matching experiment we conducted in the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands in 2016 to test these predictions.

(Joint work with Manuel F. Borja, Inetnon Åmot yan Kutturan Natibu, CNMI)

Fall 2016

November 28

Heather Burnett (UCSC): “Signaling Games, Sociolinguistic Variation and the Construction of Style”

In this presentation, I introduce social meaning games (SMGs), which are developed for the analysis of the strategic aspect of sociolinguistic variation (in the sense of Labov 1963, Labov 1966, et seq.). While remarks have been made (eg. Goffman 1970, Dror et al. 2013, Clark 2014) about the potential usefulness of game theory in the analysis of the meaning of variable linguistic phenomena (for example, variable use of the English ING suffix (1)), a general framework uniting variationist sociolinguistics with game theoretic pragmatics has yet to be developed.

(1) I’m working on it ⁓ I’m workin’ on it

I propose that such a unification is possible through the integration of the Third Wave approach to the meaning of sociolinguistic variation (see Eckert 2000, 2008, 2012) with signalling games (Lewis 1969) and a Bayesian approach to speaker–listener reasoning (see Oaksford & Chater 2007 for a review). The combination of signaling games and Bayesian reasoning has previously been argued to be particularly useful in the analysis of a large class of pragmatic phenomena, including scalar implicatures, manner implicatures and context-sensitive reference (see Franke & Jäger 2016 for an overview).

I define the games and then show the predictions of this framework for both linguistic production and interpretation, as exemplified by the modeling of six empirical studies:

Production

1. Labov (1966)’s study of the social stratification of (ING, i.e., –in’ vs. –ing) in New York City.

2. Labov (2012)’s study of President Obama and Sara Palin’s use of INGin formal vs. informal settings.

3. Gratton (2015)’s study of the use of ING by non-binary individuals (those whose gender identity does not respect the male–female binary) in their home vs. a public coffee shop.

Interpretation

4. Campbell-Kibler (2007)’s experimental study of the interpretation of ING in the United States.

5. Podesva et al. (2015)’s experimental study of the interpretation of /t/ release in the speech of 6 American politicians.

6. Levon (2014)’s experimental study of the relationship between gender stereotypes and the interpretation of high/low pitch by men in the UK.

Based on these examples, I argue that SMGs have potential to provide a new, precise understanding of how we use our linguistic resources to communicate information and carve out our place in the social world.

October 28

Sandy Chung (UCSC): “Chamorro causatives at the syntax–prosody interface”

Traditional grammarians observed that inflection generally appears “outside” derivation, a generalization that can be reconstructed in various ways in minimalist syntax (e.g. Rizzi 2016) or Distributed Morphology. Chamorro offers an apparent counterexample to the traditional generalization. Causative verbs in Chamorro are formed by attaching the prefix na’– to a verb or adjective (Gibson 1980, Baker 1985). Curiously, na’– can attach to a verb or adjective that is already inflected for number. If na’– is derivational but number agreement is inflectional, this order of affixes is problematic. One way around the apparent counterexample is to claim, with Anderson (1992) and Durie (1986), that Chamorro number agreement is derivational as opposed to inflectional.

I discuss a different way around the problem that preserves the intuition that Chamorro number agreement is inflectional. My proposal is to analyze the causative ‘prefix’ as a prosodically deficient verb. Chamorro has a very small number of verbs (i.e. malak ‘go to’, fa’ ‘pretend’) which are prosodically deficient. These verbs, even when inflected, cannot serve as phonological words on their own; instead, they must remedy their prosodic deficiency by combining with the phonological word to their immediate right.

This proposal automatically accounts for many distinctive aspects of the morphosyntactic profile of causatives. (Perhaps the most recalcitrant pattern involves morphological case, but even that can be dealt with.) And since the causative na’– is no longer a derivational prefix, but rather the prosodically deficient content of a syntactic verb, the potential threat to the “outside–inside” order of inflection and derivation dissolves. More generally, the analysis reveals one way in which close attention to the syntax–prosody interface can have unexpected morphosyntactic consequences.

October 14

Lavi Wolf (Ben Gurion University): “On Rhetorical and Metalinguistic Questions in English and Hebrew”

This paper offers an analysis of a particular type of rhetorical questions (RQs), the so-called Doubly Marked Interrogative (DMI). This is a type of why-marked RQ with a particularly puzzling form and function described by Khalaily & Doron (2016), who report examples such as (1) in colloquial Modern Hebrew and other Semitic languages.

(1)

A: Clean your room!

B: Lama mi ata?

why who you

‘Who are you [to tell me what to do]?’

A DMI consists of a why-question which embeds an additional question Q: [Why Q], yet it is interpreted as a single question, Q. We show that the DMI is not a multiple quesiton and can be distinguished from the corresponding sequence of two questions (Why? Who are you?) phonologically, syntactically, semantically, and pragmatically.

Following Caponigro & Sprouse (2007) (and pace Han 2002), we assume that RQs have the same semantics as Ordinary Questions (OQs). We adopt, for the sake of concreteness, Karttunen (1977)’s semantic analysis of questions. Thus the denotation of the question mi ata ‘Who are you?’ in (1) is:

(2) ⟦Who are you?⟧ = λp.∃x [p = x is the addressee] & p(w₀)

The why-question in the DMI is a metalinguistic question, which, similarly to metalinguistic negation (Horn 1985), targets speech acts rather than propositions. While the standard use of why inquires about reasons/justifications for ⟦S⟧, where S is a sentence (3), the metalinguistic use inquires about reasons/justifications for a previous utterance of S by the addressee (4).

(3) ⟦Why S⟧ = λp.∃x [p = x is reason/justification for ⟦S⟧ ] & p(w₀)

(4) ⟦Why SA_AS⟧ = λp.∃x [p = x is reason/justification for ⟦SA_AS⟧ ] & p(w₀)

Condition: SA_AS describes a previous speech act SA performed by addressee A uttering S.

In the DMI, the metalinguistic why-question is sluiced: [ [ Why SA_AS ] Q ]. It does not contribute to the semantic value of the DMI, which is equivalent to its embedded question Q, but rather contributes a condition to the felicity of the DMI: the condition that a positive answer for the why-question presupposes a positive answer for Q.

RQs are distinguished from OQs in their use. Unlike an OQ, which seeks an answer from the addressee, a RQ does not expect such an answer. It has been shown that this effect can be brought upon by an emphatic component inherent to some RQs (Krifka 1995) that have a ‘challenging’ effect. The challenging effect accounts for the negative bias of RQs noted by Sadock (1971, 1974) and Han (2002), i.e. a bias toward a negative answer. This bias is achieved by choosing, from among the relevant alternative questions, the weakest (and least informative) question and marking it as the strongest. The speaker thus lowers the threshold for a positive answer and at the same time conveys that she is certain that the answer would be negative.

DMIs combine the negative bias of ‘challenging’ RQs with the metalinguistic aspect of the embedding question, thus giving rise to the speech act rejection effect for SA_AS.

(Joint work with Edit Doron.)

October 3

Klaus von Heusinger (University of Cologne): “Towards a dual-process model of the comprehension of definite and indefinite noun phrases”

In this paper, we argue that the comprehension of definite and indefinite noun phrases is best described within a dual-process model of referent activation. In a first process, a comprehender accesses the concept associated with the noun phrase’s descriptive material while, in a second process, the function of the noun phrase’s article guides the comprehender to select the denoted referent(s). Importantly, definite articles signal that there is a unique element that falls under the previously activated concept. In contrast, indefinite articles signal that there are (potentially) multiple referents for the previously activated concept. The dual-process model proposed here was tested in a visual-world eye-tracking experiment, where the different functions associated with definite and indefinite noun phrases are reflected at the level of a referent’s accessibility to a comprehender.

(Joint work with Andreas Brocher.)