Faculty member Emily Clem published a paper entitled “Object-sensitive switch-reference and insatiable probes” in NELS 49: Proceedings of the Forty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society, Vol. 1.
Category Archives: Publications
Nina Feygl Semushina and Rachel Mayberry have a new paper on numeral incorporation in Russian Sign Language
Graduate student Nina Feygl Semushina and faculty member Rachel Mayberry published a paper Numeral Incorporation in Russian Sign Language: Phonological Constraints on Simultaneous Morphology in Sign Language Studies, vol. 20 no. 1.
Abstract. Numeral incorporation is the simultaneous combination of a numeral and a base sign into one sign. Incorporating forms typically use the numerical handshape combined simultaneously with the movement, location, and orientation of the base lexical sign: for example, “3 months” will be expressed through an incorporating form 3_MONTH. Analyses of Russian Sign Language (RSL) data collected through fieldwork in Russia, show that there is no general linguistic rule for numeral incorporation in RSL (unlike in ASL which has a one-handed numeral system). Instead, because of phonological constraints that govern the distribution of two-handed signs, incorporation of two-handed numerals in RSL depends upon the place of articulation and the hand orientation of the particular lexical sign.
Gustavo Guajardo and Grant Goodall publish article in Glossa
Alumnus Gustavo Guajardo (Ph.D., 2017) and faculty member Grant Goodall just published “On the status of Concordantia Temporum in Spanish: An experimental approach” in the open-access journal Glossa. This article is based on a large-scale acceptability experiment done in three countries as part of Gustavo’s dissertation work. Gustavo is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Linguistics at the Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
Emily Clem co-edited new open-access volume
Emily Clem co-edited with Peter Jenks and Hannah Sande a book that has just been published with the open-access publisher Language Science Press. The volume is entitled Theory and description in African linguistics: Selected papers from the 47th Annual Conference on African Linguistics.
New paper by Marc Garellek in Laboratory Phonology
Marc Garellek (Linguistics, UC San Diego) and Adam Chong (Linguistics, Queen Mary University of London) have recently published a new paper entitled “Online perception of glottalized coda stops in American English” in the journal Laboratory Phonology.
The paper can be read here: https://www.journal-labphon.org/article/10.5334/labphon.70/
Adam McCollum has a new paper in Phonology
Adam McCollum‘s paper “Vowel dispersion and Kazakh labial harmony” has been accepted to Phonology. It should come out this year in Phonology 35.
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New paper by Ivano Caponigro and Anamaria Fălăuș
Ivano Caponigro (Linguistics, UC San Diego) and Anamaria Fălăuș (Linguistics, CNRS, Nantes) just published a paper on “Free choice free relative clauses in Italian and Romanian” on Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. The printed version can be seen here, while the authors’ version can be freely downloaded here.
Investigating Thematic Roles through Implicit Learning: Evidence from Light Verb Constructions
Wittenberg, Eva, Khan, Manizeh, & Snedeker, Jesse (2017): Investigating Thematic Roles through Implicit Learning: Evidence from Light Verb Constructions. Frontiers in Psychology, 8:1089.
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01089/full
Abstract:
The syntactic structure of a sentence is usually a strong predictor of its meaning: Each argument noun phrase (i.e., Subject and Object) should map onto exactly one thematic role (i.e., Agent and Patient, respectively). Some constructions, however, are exceptions to this pattern. This paper investigates how the syntactic structure of an utterance contributes to its construal, using ditransitive English light verb constructions, such as “Nils gave a hug to his brother”, as an example of such mismatches: Hugging is a two-role event, but the ditransitive syntactic structure suggests a three-role event. Data from an eye-tracking experiment and behavioral categorization data reveal that listeners learn to categorize sentences according to the number of thematic roles they convey, independent of their syntax. Light verb constructions, however, seem to form a category of their own, in which the syntactic structure leads listeners down an initial incorrect assignment of thematic roles, from which they only partly recover. These results suggest an automatic influence of syntactic argument structure on semantic interpretation and event construal, even in highly frequent constructions.
Eva Wittenberg has two new papers out
TROTZKE, A. and WITTENBERG, E. (2017) ‘Expressive particle verbs and conditions on particle fronting’, Journal of Linguistics, 53(2), pp. 407–435. doi: 10.1017/S0022226716000153.
Jackendoff, Ray & Eva Wittenberg (2017). Linear grammar as a possible steppingstone in the evolution of language. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 24.1, pp 219–224. OpenAccess
Separating viewpoint from mode of representation in iconic co-speech gestures: insights from Danish narratives
Graduate student Anne Therese Frederiksen recently published a paper on gesture form and function in Language and Cognition titled ‘Separating viewpoint from mode of representation in iconic co-speech gestures: insights from Danish narratives‘.
Abstract: During narrative retelling, speakers shift between different viewpoints to reflect how they conceptualize the events that unfolded. These viewpoints can be indicated through gestural
means as well as through verbal ones. Studies of co-speech gestures have inferred viewpoint from gesture form, i.e. how entities are mapped onto the (primarily manual) articulators, but the merits of this approach have not been discussed. The present study argues that viewpoint is more than gestural form. Despite connections between the two, many other factors may influence a gesture’s form. Assessing viewpoint from gesture form alone limits the applicability of gestural viewpoint as a window onto speakers’ event conceptualization and introduces unnecessary differences in the categorization of viewpoint across gestures types. The present study examines iconic co-speech gestures in Danish narratives, and makes explicit the means used to infer gestural viewpoint. The approach advocated here ensures that the notion of viewpoint can be applied in a principled way to all or most iconic gestures.