ICU LINguistics COlloquium 2021

[See below for abstracts]

April 10 (10 am - 12 pm, JST)

Yurie Hara (Hokkaido University)

"A Game-Theoretic Approach to Diachronic Trajectory from Causal to Conditional in Japanese and German"

Osamu Sawada (Kobe University)

"Sense-based minimizers in Japanese and English: Speaker’s experience, evaluation, and the relation with emotions"

April 17 (10 am - 12 pm, JST)

Satoshi Tomioka (University of Delaware)

"Right Dislocation at the Grammar-Discourse Crossroads"

Hiroaki Saito (Mie University / University of Connecticut)

"Decategorizing say"

May 8 (10 am - 12 pm, JST)

Rajesh Bhatt (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)

"Crossover asymmetries"

Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (National University of Singapore)

"Patterns of relativization in Austronesian and Tibetan"

May 22 (10 am - 12 pm, JST)

Benjamin Bruening (University of Delaware)

"Spelling out the Numeration, Part 1: Selection by Itself Accounts for Synthetic-Periphrastic Alternations"

Shin Fukuda (University of Hawai'i at Mānoa)

"Floating Numeral Quantifiers as an Unaccusative Diagnostic: Evidence from Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, and Korean"

June 5 (10 am - 12 pm, JST)

Marc Brunelle (University of Ottawa)

"Voicing and register in Raglai dialects: the underpinnings of transphonologization"

Marc Garellek (University of California, San Diego)

"Voicing of glottal consonants"

June 12 (10 am - 12 pm, JST)

Elisabeth Zsiga (Georgetown University)

"Towards an Articulatory Phonology for Tone: Evidence from Igbo Vowel Assimilation"

Christopher Green (Syracuse University)

"Theory feeds description feeds theory: a case study of Somali moraic phonology"

April 10 (10 am - 12 pm, JST)

Yurie Hara (Hokkaido University)

"A Game-Theoretic Approach to Diachronic Trajectory from Causal to Conditional in Japanese and German"

This paper analyzes the diachronic semantic shift of the Japanese V-e-ba (so-called izenkee+particle ba) construction and the German conjunction, wande/wann/wenn. In Old Japanese (OJ), V-e-ba appears to mark a temporal conjunction (1) and a causal adjunct clause (2a) as can be seen in the Modern Japanese (ModJ) node in (2b) and English because translations. ModJ V-e-ba, on the other hand, appears to mark a conditional adjunct (antecedent) (3b).

(1) sore o mir-e-ba sansun bakari naru hito, ito utsukushiu te witari. (OJ)

‘When he looked at it, there was a person, who was only three inches tall, sitting very lovely.’ (Taketori; late 9-early 10C)

(2) a. kurushiki koto nomi masar-e-ba, ... (OJ)

b. tsurai koto bakari fueteiku node, ...(ModJ)

“Because only harsh things increased, (she was very much depressed).” (Genji; early 11C)

(3) a. uramu bekaram fushi-o-mo, nikukarazu kasumenas-a-ba, ... (OJ)

b. uramu no-ga mottomona ten-mo kawairashiku bokashite i-e-ba, ... (ModJ)

“Even the things you definitely hate, if you just mention them sweetly, (men will love you more).” (Genji; early 11C)

The goal of this paper is to explain how the interpretation of V-e-ba shifted from conjunction/causality to conditionality. More specifically, this paper analyzes the core semantics of ba of V-e-ba is a dynamic update on a suppositional context, c[φ-e-ba ψ] = c[φ][ψ]. The causal meaning in OJ is obtained by an I-implicature, while the conditional meaning in ModJ is obtained by a Q-implicature. The proposed diachronic development is in accordance with Deo’s (2015) Evolutionary Game Theory model that underpins the grammaticalization paths from the semantic-pragmatic perspective. Since the proposed diachronic path is a pragmatic one, a question naturally arises as to: Can this path be universal or cross-linguistically attested? Indeed, the German conjunction wande/wann/wenn has been used as temporal, causal and conditional conjunctions (e.g., Gagel, 2017).

Osamu Sawada (Kobe University)

"Sense-based minimizers in Japanese and English: Speaker’s experience, evaluation, and the relation with emotions"

The Japanese minimizers kasukani ‘faintly’ and honokani ‘approx. faintly’ and the English minimizer faintly are similar to typical minimizers, such as the Japanese sukoshi ‘a bit’ and English a bit, in that they semantically represent a low degree. However, their meanings and distribution patterns are not the same. I argue that kasukani, honokani, and faintly are sense-based minimizers in that they not only semantically denote a small degree but also convey that the judge (typically the speaker) measures degree based on his/her own sense (the senses of sight, smell, taste, etc.) at the level of conventional implicature (CI) (e.g., Grice 1975; Potts2005; McCready 2010; Gutzmann 2011). It will be shown that this characteristic restricts sense-based minimizers to occur only in a limited environment. This paper also shows that there are variations among the sense-based minimizers with regard to (i) the kind of sense, (ii) the presence/absence of evaluativity, and (iii) the possibility of a combination with an emotive predicate, and will explain them in the non-at-issue domain. In analyzing the meaning of sense-based minimizers, the relationship between a sense-based minimizer and a predicate of personal taste (e.g., Pearson 2013; Ninan 2014; Kennedy and Willer 2019; Willer and Kennedy 2019) will also be discussed.

April 17 (10 am - 12 pm, JST)

Satoshi Tomioka (University of Delaware)

"Right Dislocation at the Grammar-Discourse Crossroads"

The Right Dislocation (RD) structure, like the Japanese example in (1), is found in numerous languages, including Japanese and Turkish, but it has not caught as much attention as Left-ward Dislocation structures (e.g., Topicalization, Focus Movement, Scrambling, etc.).

(1) Ai-mashita-ka? Yamada-san-ni.

Meet-polite.past-Q Yamada-honorific-Dat

`Did you meet (her), Ms. Yamada?'

The most of the existing syntactic analyses focus on formal properties, such as scope reconstruction, island effects and binding connectivity effects. While we by no means intend to belittle the significance of those issues, our presentation focuses on some aspects of RD that have been often overlooked. (i) It is strictly a main clause phenomenon that resists embedding. (ii) It is totally optional -- This does not mean that there is no pragmatic condition imposed on RD. However, whenever a RD sentence is felicitous, the 'canonical' counterpart is also felicitous. In this sense, it is optional. (iii) It is found almost exclusively in speech (not in written texts).

Based on the data mainly drawn from Japanese and Turkish, we propose a syntactic analysis modeled after H. Ko's (2014, 2015) analysis of remnant movement. We differ from Ko's account in that the remnant-moved constituent is a DiscP (a Discourse Phase), the concept independently proposed by Beninca (2001). It is the highest syntactic structure, and it can contain information about the speaker's attitude towards the speech act. We further argue that RD is triggered by the communication-based principle that encourages the speaker to communicate the essential information as early as possible. Since the predicate is the most essential part of a sentence, this principle leads to the `predicate-to-the-left' structure in a head final language.

This is a collaborative project with Dursun Altinok, a Ph.D. student at the University of Delaware.

Hiroaki Saito (Mie University / University of Connecticut)

"Decategorizing say"

This talk aims to offer a formal analysis of grammaticalization, focusing on a change from speech verbs to complementizers and other functional elements. Assuming that speech verbs consist of category-neutral roots and the verbalizer (the category-determining head), I suggest that grammaticalization of speech verbs involves loss of the verbalizer. The proposed analysis makes a different prediction regarding possible stages of the grammaticalization in question from other generative analyses, which I argue is desirable. In particular, investigating evidential markers that have developed from speech verbs and operators that induce indexical shift, I argue that these elements are in a stage of grammaticalization predicted to exist under the proposed analysis.

May 8 (10 am - 12 pm, JST)

Rajesh Bhatt (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)

"Crossover asymmetries"

We investigate and analyze a crossover asymmetry in Hindi/Urdu scrambling: such scrambling is not subject to (secondary) weak crossover but at the same time shows clear (secondary) strong crossover effects. This asymmetry provides empirical evidence that the two types of crossover must be analytically decoupled from each other, and it sheds new light on the factors that condition each type. We find that weak crossover is conditioned by the landing site of movement, while strong crossover is determined by properties of the launching site. More specifically, we propose that weak crossover follows from a syntactic restriction on the placement of an operator that is required for pronominal binding from the landing site. Strong crossover, on the other hand, is determined by the amount of structure present in the launching site, which can itself be derived from Late Merge and nominal licensing along the lines developed by Takahashi & Hulsey 2009. In addition to contributing to our understanding of crossover phenomena, our argument also has implications for the A/A'-nature of scrambling (e.g., Webelhuth 1989, Mahajan 1990, Dayal 1994) and movement-type asymmetries more generally.

Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (National University of Singapore)

"Patterns of relativization in Austronesian and Tibetan"

In both Tibetan and so-called Philippine-type Austronesian languages, the form of the verb varies with the choice of relative clause pivot, with different forms chosen for the relativization of agents, themes, locatives/goals, and instruments. These alternations have however been described in very different ways in their respective literatures. In the Bodic literature, these verb forms have been described as different types of nominalizations (DeLancey 1999, Noonan 2008, a.o.). In the Austronesian literature, these alternations reflect different grammatical “voices,” with relativization obeying a “subject-only” restriction (Keenan & Comrie 1977, a.o.). In this talk, I compare these systems, concentrating on the behavior of relativization of an embedded clause argument, i.e. long-distance relativization. Original data on long-distance relativization in Tibetan, which has not been previously described, shows clear parallels to the well-studied behavior of long-distance relativization in Austronesian languages. I describe an analytical approach for capturing the shared behavior of these systems, as well as their differences.

May 22 (10 am - 12 pm, JST)

Benjamin Bruening (University of Delaware)

"Spelling out the Numeration, Part 1: Selection by Itself Accounts for Synthetic-Periphrastic Alternations"

The concept of the numeration (Chomsky 1995) has been important in recent syntactic theory, but how it works has never been fully explored. I suggest that spelling out how items are selected from the lexicon and put into the numeration, and how they are taken out of the numeration and merged in the syntax, can explain numerous phenomena in syntax. This project starts by investigating how items are selected from the lexicon and put into the numeration. It shows that spelling this out in a way that is independently required for things like nominal concord explains synthetic-periphrastic alternations like English do-support and the ``overflow'' pattern of auxiliaries in Kinande (Bjorkman 2011). These fall into a common pattern where a language requires one-to-one matching between inflectional heads and other elements. The proposed account enables us to do without syncategorematic insertion mechanisms; all we need is selection-constrained selection of items for the numeration.

Shin Fukuda (University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa)

"Floating Numeral Quantifiers as an Unaccusative Diagnostic: Evidence from Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, and Korean"

The Unaccusative Hypothesis (UH) argues that intransitive verbs across languages are split into two subclasses: Uunaccusatives, whose subjects are internal arguments, and unergatives, whose subjects are external arguments. The UH has inspired a rich and diverse literature, including many recent experimental studies. Yet, no conclusive evidence for or against the UH has been put forward, largely because phenomena that motivate the dichotomy – unaccusative diagnostics – are often amenable to both syntactic and non-syntactic analyses. In order to present unequivocal evidence for the UH, diagnostics that make crucial reference to the UH must be carefully identified and studied. This study argues that floating numeral quantifier (FNQ) licensing is such diagnostic, as it makes crucial reference to the putative syntactic difference between unaccusative and unergative subjects, and provides experimental evidence for FNQ- licensing as unaccusative diagnostic in Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Three sentence acceptability judgment experiments were conducted to examine acceptability of FNQ-licensing by subjects, with fifteen intransitive verbs from five lexical semantic classes in each of the three languages. The results show that in all three languages (i) the intransitive verbs are split into roughly two subclasses, supporting the UH, and (ii) stative verbs appear least affected by FNQ, indicating their status as core unaccusatives. The results also show that overall the Japanese intransitive verbs were least affected by FNQ. Implications of the findings for the UH and FNQ will be explored.

June 5 (10 am - 12 pm, JST)

Marc Brunelle (Univeristy of Ottawa)

"Voicing and register in Raglai dialects: the underpinnings of transphonologization"

In various languages of Southeast Asia, the voicing contrast in onset stops was lost and replaced with register, a bundle of acoustic properties including phonation, vowel quality and pitch that is mostly realized on vowels (Henderson, 1952; Haudricourt, 1965; Huffman, 1976; Ferlus, 1979; S. J. Lee, Kawahara, Guillemot et al., 2019). While it is relatively uncontroversial that these acoustic properties are secondary correlates of obstruent voicing that get transphonologized as voicing is neutralized, two questions remain unanswered: 1) Can the lax or breathy phonation typically associated with the low register be attributed to an intrinsic property of voiced obstruents? 2) How does the transphonologization of voicing unfold at an early stage?

In order to address these questions, we investigated laryngeal contrasts in two mutually intelligible Raglai dialects of south-central Vietnam: Northern Raglai preserves a voicing contrast in onset stops, whereas Southern Raglai has a full-fledged register system (E. W. Lee, 1966; Awơi-hathe, Aviong, A-Tý et al., 1977; Tạ, 2009). As these dialects are closely related, our initial goal was to compare their acoustic properties to try to uncover the precursors of Southern Raglai register in the presumably more conservative Northern Raglai voicing contrast.

Our results confirm that Northern Raglai preserves a voicing contrast in onset stops and that Southern Raglai has a register contrast that is largely based on F1 and phonation. However, there is little straightforward evidence for the presence of phonetic precursors of register in our pooled Northern Raglai results. We argue that possible precursors are only attested in a class of partially devoiced onset stops primarily found in women’s speech. Implications of this finding for registrogenesis and theories of transphonologization are explored.

Marc Garellek (University of California, San Diego)

"Voicing of glottal consonants"

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) draws a fundamental distinction between consonants that are voiceless and those that are voiced. For glottal consonants, however, this distinction is problematic. The "voiceless" glottal stop [ʔ] and fricative [h] are usually realized as creaky and breathy voice, respectively, when they occur between vowels and in weak prosodic positions (Pierrehumbert & Talkin 1992, Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996). Although voicing of transcribed [ʔ] and [h] is pervasive, the IPA still distinguishes these sounds from their voiced counterparts, e.g. voiceless [h] vs. voiced [ɦ]. Do voiceless and voiced glottal sounds really differ in terms of their voicing, and if so, how? I will present a phonetic analysis of glottal consonants and non-modal vowels occurring in "Illustrations of the IPA" published in the Journal of the International Phonetic Association (work done in collaboration with Yuan Chai, Yaqian Huang, and Maxine Van Doren). Our analysis confirms that voicing variation is widespread for both transcribed voiceless and voiced glottal sounds. Voiceless [h] is only slightly less voiced than voiced [ɦ], and only in utterance-initial position; elsewhere, both [h] and [ɦ] are as strongly voiced as breathy vowels. Creaky vowels are more strongly voiced than glottal stops, unless the creaky vowels are described as being “rearticulated” or “checked.” Based on these results, I argue that voicing during glottal consonants is largely predictable from respiratory and prosodic factors. In many languages then, glottal consonants can be considered phonetically unspecified for voicing.

June 12 (10 am - 12 pm, JST)

Elisabeth Zsiga (Georgetown University)

"Towards an Articulatory Phonology for Tone: Evidence from Igbo Vowel Assimilation"

While cross-linguistic patterns in the timing of tones and tone-bearing units (TBU’s) have been extensively investigated from an acoustic perspective, with theories of possible associations of H or L pitch targets to segments, moras, or syllables, little work has been done from the perspective of Articulatory Phonology (AP; Browman and Goldstein 1986, 2000 et seq.). In AP, segments, moras, and syllables are not considered to be primitives, but epiphenomena arising from stable patterns of coordination among gestures. How then, should the co-ordination of tone gestures be described? The few studies that have examined lexical tone from this perspective, on Mandarin (Gao 2008), Tibetan (Hu 2016, Geissler 2021), and Thai and Serbian (Karlin 2018), suggest that tone gestures are incorporated into the gestural constellation in the same way as consonants, and are coordinated as part of the onset “c-center.” The present study expands the AP typology of tonal timing to an African language, Igbo. In a V1#V2 sequence in Igbo, the first vowel is reduced and partially assimilated, but overall sequence length is not affected by the amount of reduction: the second vowel lengthens in compensation. What happens to the tone when vowel duration changes? Results show that the timing of tonal target and vowel target are strongly correlated over changes in duration, suggesting that c-center timing for tones is not universal, and that the typology must be expanded to allow direct T-to-V coordination. While a sample size of five languages is still far too small a typology, a possible hypothesis that emerges for future investigation involves a correspondence between the different patterns of gestural constellation and the timing patterns theorized in acoustic studies. As c-center timing in the onset is argued to be indicative of syllabic organization (Goldstein et al. 2007), it might be the case that c-center timing of tones corresponds to the syllable as TBU, while direct timing of tones to vowels corresponds to the mora as TBU. In general, if AP is to be a successful theory of phonology and phonetics, the representation of tones as gestures must be incorporated into the theory, and the possibilities of tonal timing must be more thoroughly investigated.

Christopher Green (Syracuse University)

"Theory feeds description feeds theory: a case study of Somali moraic phonology"

Hyman (2003a,b) used African linguistics as a backdrop to illustrate ways in which linguistic theory guides linguistic discovery, with the outcomes of this discovery (i.e., language description) subsequently offering insightful and interesting fodder that shape and drive further theorization. In this talk, I demonstrate the utility of this methodological cycle – a driving force behind modern field linguistics – with a case study of Somali moraic phonology. Though better described than most indigenous African languages, longstanding assumptions about Somali phonology have resulted in several yet unsolved puzzles. One of these concerns whether and how consonantal moras function in the language. Standard moraic theories assume a simple “yes or no” when it comes to consonantal moraicity, but cross-linguistic evidence of moraic mismatches continues to emerge whereby moras of different types (vocalic vs. consonantal) are referenced for different processes (Gordon 2004; Hyman 1992; Steriade 1990, among others). This theoretical reconfiguration sheds new light on Somali phenomena where, heretofore, the role that consonantal moras play has not been considered. I show that while consonantal moras play no apparent role in tone assignment, they offer an principled explanation for other characteristics related to minimality requirements, syllable shape distribution, and patterns of reduplication. Notably, I show that the language displays an unusual distribution of geminates, a matter which contributes to ongoing theoretical debate concerning the suitability of a composite,v or multi-tiered model of geminate representation (cf. Baker 2008; Davis 2011).