YPL2 - Issue 12

Issue 12 (December 2012)

Editors: Theodora Lee, Thomas Devlin and Natalie Fecher

Verbal Descriptions of Voice Quality Differences Among Untrained Listeners

1–28

Dominic Watt and Juliet Burns

Abstract

Phonetically untrained British English-speaking listeners were asked to provide and rank up to four unprompted and unguided verbal descriptions of the voice qualities heard in controlled audio samples in English and German spoken by one talker per language. These were then pooled and ranked by frequency, and popularly-chosen descriptive labels were extracted from the list. After having listened to the same audio samples as were heard by the first participant group, a second group of listeners was asked to select and rank up to five labels from the popular choices list. The terms chosen by lay listeners, and the intersection of these descriptions with the technical terminology used by phoneticians and forensic speech scientists, are considered from the perspective of the elicitation and reliability of earwitness testimony in the forensic domain.

Verb Order, Object Position and Information Status in Old English

29–52

Ann Taylor and Susan Pintzuk

Abstract

This paper demonstrates that the distribution of objects differs in VAux and AuxV clauses in Old English in three ways: post-verbal objects are less frequent in VAux clauses than in AuxV clauses; discourse/performance factors have a greater effect in VAux clauses than in AuxV clauses; and non-referential objects do not appear post-verbally in VAux clauses but do in AuxV clauses. These results cannot be reconciled with a single grammar in which object position is predominantly dependent on discourse/performance factors, as has previously been proposed. Rather, they show that this is the case only for VAux clauses. In AuxV clauses, object position is partly dependent on discourse factors and partly fixed syntactically. The primary implication of our results for syntactic analyses of OE is that there need to be two ways to derive post-verbal objects, one which involves discourse/performance factors and one which does not, and that these two derivations are associated with verb order.

The Interpretation of Questions by Serbia-speaking Broca's Aphasics

53–67

Helen Goodluck, Danijela Stojanović, Darinka Anđelković, Maja Savić and Mile Vuković

Abstract

This study looks at the way in which 20 Serbian Broca's aphasics interpret wh-questions. In one experiment, we tested wh (koji) subject and object questions with both simple and discourse-linked (complex) phrases, and in a second experiment we tested the distinction between koga and za koga object questions, which have categorically distinct interpretations in the grammar of unimpaired persons. In our first experiment, we find six different patterns of response, not all of which have been observed in previous work on Broca's subjects. In our second experiment we find the distinction between koga and za koga questions is preserved. We discuss the data in the context of proposals made to account for the performance of English and German speaking Broca's aphasia, finding these proposals to not be fully adequate to account for the data from Serbian.

Thoughts on Multiple Wh-fronting in Czech

68–79

Rebecca Woods

Abstract

This paper tackles the familiar issue of multiple wh-fronting in Slavic languages, particularly focusing on the case of Czech, in which Superiority effects are found in both matrix and embedded clauses. Leading on from Focus movement accounts (Bošković, 1998, 2002) and A'-movement accounts (Sturgeon 2006, 2008), I propose a reinterpretation of Rudin's seminal (1988) account. Using extant and novel data, I postulate Superiority-free, Focus-motivated A-movement of multiple wh-phrases to the edge of vP, followed by wh-movement of the highest wh-element through Spec IP to SpecCP to check EPP and wh-features. The wh-features of second and successive wh-elements are checked at LF.

Inflectional Morphology and the Loss of V to T Raising in English

80–101

Rebecca Tollan

Abstract

Whilst it is commonly recognised that languages with rich inflectional morphology also exhibit verb raising, the reason why such a correlation exists remains largely unexplained. In my paper I consider proposals by Rohrbacher (1994) and Alexiadou and Fanselow (2002) in an attempt to account for how lexical verb raising came to be lost from Early Modern English following erosion of inflectional morphology several centuries earlier. I conclude that, as far as English is concerned, the connection between inflectional morphology and verb raising is one which is governed by the nature of language use, first language acquisition and general syntactic change. The loss of inflectional morphology set in motion a series of changes, with loss of verb raising as the end result. The analysis presented here appeals to biological (UG) endowment of Roberts' (1985) syntactic principle of V-Visibility; as such I also present an evolutionary explanation for this supposed UG status.

Island Constraints and Extraction of Lexical Case-marked DPs in Finnish and Turkish

102–122

Rebecca Tollan

Abstract

This paper investigates the acceptability of types of wh-question formation which involve extraction out of strong syntactic islands in languages with rich lexical case marking systems. By considering these types of extraction, I aim to test Cinque's (1990) diagnostic regarding the distinction between different island- hood strengths, namely that so-called 'strong' islands, whilst sometimes allowing DP extraction, do not allow extraction of a PP due to unavailability of PP resumption at the extraction site. I will claim, based upon evidence from extraction of DPs in Finnish and Turkish, that this hypothesis is certainly on the right track, but suggest an potential alternative explanation for the PP-DP extraction asymmetry observed in other languages.