UTA SCILT 23 Student Conference in Linguistics & TESOL

November 4, 2016

1. Rosemarie Connolly, Indiana University “Optionality and Optimality of

Russian Possessive Anaphora”

2. Marco Bittencourt, Texas A&M International, “An Analysis of the

Progressive with Stative Verbs in Brazilian Portuguese”

3. Dr. Tyler Peterson, Keynote Speaker, University of Auckland, New Zealand,

“Evidentials and Extended Interrogatives”

4. Jason Schneider, Erubiel Ordaz, and Nathaniel Bables, The University of

Texas at Arlington & Mountain View, POSTER, “The Influence of Language

on Attitudes and Biases between English and Spanish”

5. Darcey Browning, The University of Texas at Arlington, POSTER, “Delay via

Hashtag Placement: A Diachronic Study of Hashtags in a Survivor Corpus”

6. Daniel Amy, The University of Texas at Arlington, POSTER, “On the

Obligatory Appositive Interpretation of Massive Pied Piping”

7. Dennys Tenelanda, Universidad Nacional de Chimborazo, and Monica

Castelo, Escuela Superior Politecnica de Chimborazo, POSTER, “Using the

Voice Recorder App on Mobile Phones to Improve Speaking Subskills in the

EFL Classroom”

8. Jeremiah James, Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics, “The Subject in

Central Sinama”

9. Rok Sim & Jong-Bok Kim, Kyunghee University, Seoul, “Cleft Syntactic

Amalgams in English: A Construction Based Perspective”

10. Lauren McIntosh, University of Western Ontario, “Analysis of Pronouns and

Pragmatics in Alzheimer’s Disease”

11. Jing Ding, The University of Texas at Arlington, “The Construction of

Chinese A-not A Questions”

Optionality and Optimality of Russian Possessives

While traditional Russian grammars (e.g., Wade 2000: 142–44) and textbooks (e.g.,

Ervin et al. 2002: 55–56) point out that optionality exists in the choice between pronominal and

reflexive possessives in first- and second-person but not third-person contexts, various linguists

(e.g., Yokoyama 1975; Yokoyama and Klenin 1976; Timberlake 1980) attempt to identify the

semantic differences in these choices. According to Yokoyama (1975) and Yokoyama and

Klenin (1976), these differences can correlate to a variation in closeness, be it temporal closeness

or emotional closeness. The examples in (1–2) show such differences: in (1) the speaker has a

strong emotional connection, thus the pronominal possessor is used, while in (2) the speaker is

attempting to detach himself from his sister and the described events, thus the reflexive possessor

is used. Examples (1–2) are cited from works by Pushkin’s Boris Godunov by Yokoyama (1975:

78).

(1) V sem’e moej ja mnil najti otradu, ja doč’ moju mnil osčastlivit’

in family my I hoped find joy I daughter my hoped make-happy

brakom…

in-marriage

‘I hoped to find joy in my family, I hoped to make my daughter happy by marrying her

off…’

(2) Kto ni umret, ja vsex ubijca tajnyj:

who NEG dies I all murderer secret

Ja uskoril Feordora končinu,

I sped-up Feodor end

Ja otravil svoju sestru carinu…

I poisoned REFLPOSS sister czarina

‘Whoever dies, I am the secret murderer of all / I hastened Feodor’s demise / I poisoned

my sister the czarina…’

Such differences are also related to what Timberlake (1980) suggests are categorized under the

meta-principle of “uniqueness”: the less the antecedent is individually referential (a hypothetical

versus a distinct individual; a member of a collective versus a discrete individual), the less likely

the anaphor is to appear as a reflexive. For example, in (3), the partner is not one unique

individual, and therefore is not directly referential, and the construction prefers the use of the

reflexive possessor. In (4), on the other hand, the speaker refers to one specific partner,

positively referential. As such, the pronominal possessor is preferred.

(3) Ved’ do ètogo ja vsegda družestvenno rabotal [?s moim]/ [so svoim]

after all to that I always friendly worked [?with my/ [with self’s

partnerom, kem by to ni bylo.

partner who COND that NEG was

‘After all, up to that time I had always worked in a friendly way with my partner,

whoever he was.’

(4) Vse èto ne moglo ne radovat’ menja, i ja s ešče bol’šim

all that NEG could NEG please me, and I with more great

rveniem prinjalsja zanimat’sja [s moim]/ [?so svoim] partnerom.

enthusiasm began rehearse [with my/ [?with self’s partner

‘All this couldn’t help but please me, and I began to rehearse with my partner with even

more enthusiasm.’

Since these treatments of several decades ago, little research has been done on this topic

(although Timberlake 2004 does revisit the subject). In this presentation, I will revisit the factors

at work in selecting the most appropriate form, using an Optimality Theoretic approach. This

framework is ideal for handling the apparent “optionality” between pronouns and reflexives. In

my analysis, a ranked hierarchy of constraints will be proposed to account for the different

options, and it will be shown that the optimal choices are in fact not optional at all.

References

Barbosa, Pilar et al., eds. (1998) Is the best good enough? Optimality and competition in syntax.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Ervin, Gerald L., Larry McLellan, Sophia Lubensky, and Donald K. Jarvis. (2002) Nachalo:

Book Two. 2nd ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill.

Kagen, René. (1999) Optimality Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Legendre, Géraldine, Michael T. Putnam, Henriëtte de Swart, and Erin Zaroukian. (2016)

Optimality-Theoretic Syntax, Semantics, and Pragmatics: From Uni- to Bidirectional

Optimization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Timberlake, Alan. (1980) “Reference Conditions on Russian Reflexivization.” Language 56(4):

777–96.

Timberlake, Alan. (2004) A Reference Grammar of Russian. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

Wade, Terence. (2000) A Comprehensive Russian Grammar. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Yokoyama, [Tsuneko] Olga. (1975) “Personal or Reflexive? A Functional Approach.” Harvard

Studies in Syntax and Semantics 1: 75–112.

Yokoyama, Olga and Emily Klenin. (1976) “The Semantics of ‘Optional’ Rules: Russian

Personal and Reflexive Possessors.” Ladislav Matejka, ed. Sound, Sign, and Meaning:

Quinquagenary of the Prague Linguistic Circle. Ann Arbor: Dept. of Slavic Languages,

University of Michigan, 249–70.

An analysis of the progressive with stative verbs in Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract.

In this research, we investigate the occurrence of stative predicates and the progressive in Brazilian

Portuguese, as in João está sabendo geografia, John is knowing geography, and Maria está

vivendo com Pedro, Mary is living with Peter. According to Cunha (1998, 2004), in a proposal

developed for European Portuguese, statives are distinguished by the presence/absence of the

semantic feature [+phase], being the progressive used only with phase statives. Analyzing data

from Brazilian Portuguese relative to different semantic subclasses of statives (existential,

epistemic, copulative, locative, perceptive, and psychological), we developed a hypothesis

according to which the progressive with phase statives mark a frontier or transition of phases of a

given state, distinguishing the previous phase of a state and a phase in progress. To capture the

semantic notion of phaseability proposed by Cunha (1998, 2004) in formal terms, we appeal to

Parsons (1990) proposal, to English, which deals with the notion of subatomic events. We depart

from the author’s evidence that the progressive has the effect of cutting an interval of time in an

event which is identified as a state of things, to claim that, when a verb is originally an stative, the

effect is to identify an interval of time in which a transition between two phases of a state occurs

denoted by the verb.

Keywords: Stative predicates. Progressive. Phaseability. Subatomic events.

References

BASSO, Renato Miguel; ILARI, Rodolfo. Estativos e suas características. Revista Brasileira de Linguística

Aplicada, v. 4, n. 1, 2004, p. 16-26.

BASTOS, Ana Claudia P. Progressive Constructions in Brazilian Portuguese and English. Revista Letras,

n. 63, maio/ago. 2004, p. 41-59.

BERTUCCI, R.; LUNGUINHO, M. V. When the Progressive and Aspectual Classes Meet: the case of

Brazilian Portuguese. In: MOLSING, Karina Veronica; IBAÑOS, Ana Maria Tramunt. (Orgs.). Time and

TAME in Language. 1. ed. v. 1. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013. p. 124-156.

CHOMSKY, Noam. Language and Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

________________. Syntactic Structures. The Hague/Paris: Mouton, 1957.

________________. The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.

CUNHA, Luis Filipe Alvão Serra Leite da. As construções com progressivo no português: uma abordagem

semântica. Dissertação de Mestrado em Linguística Portuguesa Descritiva. Universidade do Porto: Porto,

1998.

________________. Semântica das predicações estativas para uma caracterização aspectual dos estados.

Tese de Doutorado em Linguística. Universidade do Porto: Porto, 2004.

DERMIDACHE, H.; URIBE-ETXEBARRIA, M. The syntax of temporal relations: a uniform approach to

Tense and Aspect. In: CURTIS, E.; LYLE, J.; WEBSTER, G. (eds.). Proceedings of the WCCFL 16.

Stanford: CSLI Publications, 1997. p. 145-159.

GONÇALVES, Cláudio Corrêa e Castro. Estar-ndo as a Generic. Revista Letras, n. 63, maio/ago. 2004. p.

139-153.

LUNGUINHO, M. V. Verbos auxiliares e a sintaxe dos domínios não-finitos. Tese de Doutorado.

Universidade de São Paulo: São Paulo, 2011.

MUFWENE, Salikoko S. Stativity and the progressive. Indiana Linguistics Club, Bloomington, nov. 1984,

p. 2-51.

NAVES, R. R; LUNGUINHO, M. V. 2013. Aspecto e alternância causativa. In: NAVES, R. R. et al (orgs.)

Temas em Teoria da Gramática – Textos Selecionados, Brasília: Thesaurus.

PARSONS, Terence. Events in the semantics of English: a study in subatomic semantics. Boston: MIT

Press, 1990.

RADFORD, Andrew. Syntactic Theory and the Structure of English: a minimalist approach. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1997.

VENDLER, Zeno. Verbs and Times. In: Linguistics in Philosophy, vol. 4, 1967, p. 21-32.

WACHOWICZ, T. C. As Leituras Aspectuais da Forma do Progressivo do Português Brasileiro. Tese de

Doutorado. Universidade de São Paulo: São Paulo, 2003.

Evidentials and Extended Interrogatives

The aim of this project is to extend the current empirical base and typological

scope of questions, through investigating how different semantic and pragmatic

elements affect the kinds of meanings questions express, and how they are

interpreted. Broadly speaking, questions are often characterized as having a

specific kind of syntactic and semantic structure. Pragmatically, they are typically

used to request information. However, questions can also have pragmatic effects

unrelated to information requests.

Two of the more familiar kinds are wh-exclamatives and rhetorical questions.

Exclamatives such as ‘What a great movie that was!’ have the semantics of a

question, but pragmatically function as statements of surprise or unexpectedness

– they are not a request for information (cf. Portner & Zanuttini 2004). Rhetorical

questions also pragmatically implicate other kinds of meaning, usually to affirm

something both the speaker and addressee already know (cf. Caponigro &

Sprouse 2007). However, the meaning of a question can be altered by the

insertion of other elements into the interrogative clause. For example, the

insertion of the evidential modal =ima in Gitksan (Tsimshianic, an endangered

indigenous isolate language in Canada) into a question creates an utterance

translated by speakers using ‘I wonder...’.

One of the central empirical goals of this project is to examine how the semantic

and pragmatic features of evidentials condition or determine those of conjectural,

rhetorical and wh-exclamative questions – or what I call extended interrogatives

(EI). This also entails a study of how these phenomena shed light on what we

know about extended interrogatives in more familiar languages as, for example,

wonder-like verbs or rhetorical questions in English, or the use of the reflexive in

French.

The Influence of Language on Attitudes and Biases between English and Spanish

The current study is to determine whether language affects attitudes and biases. The

motivation behind this study stems whether bilingual speakers have different attitudes and biases

depending on the influence of a language. This study will attempt to satisfy whether bilinguals

speakers respond differently to cues and stimuli in English and Spanish. The study will

administer two identical implicit attitude tests (IAT), and both tests will be administered in

English and Spanish. Hypothetically, if the results differ between an IAT in Spanish from an IAT

in English, the results might corroborate that language influences attitudes and biases.

Ogunnaike, Dunham, and Banaji (2010) explain that the IAT measures “implicit attitudes

based on the simple notion that it is easier to jointly categorize related concepts than less related

or unrelated concepts” (p. 1000). Blair (2002) claims that situations as stimuli cue buried,

unconscious motivation toward attitudes and biases (p. 255-7). Ogunnaike, Dunham, and Banaji

(2010) finds that in two experiments bilinguals exhibit different biases and attitudes taking an

implicit attitude test (IAT) in each language even though the content between the two tests are

the same, just differing in language. Greenwald and Banaji (1995) introduce the IAT to tap into

unconscious biases and attitudes through implicit rather than explicit testing

Bilingual speakers of Spanish and English will be given an IAT in English and Spanish,

so these IATs will be two distinct tests but precisely the same in content, just differing in

language. There will be two control groups. There will be an English control group of English

speaking monolinguals and a Spanish control group of Spanish speaking monolinguals so that

this study captures an average measure for attitudes and biases among speakers of one language

and can anticipate L1 transfer among bilinguals.

Understanding the affiliation between language and the motivation for attitudes and

biases can reveal the extent of language’s influence. This study will provide the academic

community whether language affects attitudes and biases. Testing participants with an IAT will

provide results for differing attitudes and biases. By administering an English and Spanish IAT,

the tests will show whether bilinguals have different attitudes and biases when using a particular

language.

References

Anthanasopoulos, P., Emanuel, B., Montero-Melis, G., Damjanovic, L., Schartner, A., Kibbe, A.,

Riches, N., Thierry, G. (2015). Two Languages, Two Minds: Flexible Cognitive

Processing Driven by Language of Operation. Psychological Science, 26(4), pp. 518-526.

Blair, I. V. (2002). The Malleability of Automatic Stereotypes and Prejudice. Personality and

Social Psychology Review, 6(3), pp. 242-261.

Greenwald, Anthony and Banaji, Mahzarin R. (1995). Implicit Social Cognition: Attitudes, Self-

Esteem, and Stereotypes. Psychological Review, 102(1), pp. 4-27.

Ogunnaike, Oludamini, Dunham, Yarrow, and Banaji, Mahzarin R. (2010). The language of

implicit preferences. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46, pp. 999-1003.

Delay via hashtag placement: A diachronic study of hashtags in a survivor corpus

Overview: Many popular activist campaigns use branded hashtags as a means of collectively discussingthe same subject. Since the 2014 #whyIstayed/#whyIleft campaign focuses on the awareness of domesticabuse, the hashtags were used to collectively talk about violence, disclosing survivor stories on Twitter.Using the Twitter search function, coupled with Google Chrome extension Web Scraper, I gathered asampling of disclosure tweets (at most 20 tweets per day) that specifically reveal survivor stories using#whyIstayed and #whyIleft. The tweets from this campaign span over 73 days, where the density oftweets correspond with current events.I show how early hashtag placement acts as a delay device in tweets conveying survivor stories;furthermore, I show that while the pattern of hashtag placement changes over 73 days of the 2014Domestic Abuse Awareness campaign, this diachronic change is indicative of the emergence of the delayfunction in survivor tweets.While speakers naturally hesitate when talking (Erard 2008), more hesitation is used when discussingsensitive information; delaying devices, including discourse markers, frequently appear in emotionalnarratives (Romano 2014). Since tweets are often colloquial, delay devices should appear in theseemotional narrative tweets; however, the character limitations on Twitter complicate how hesitations anddiscourse markers are realized.

Corpus Collection: Analyzing 443 tweets from the 2014 #whyIstayed/#whyIleft campaign, Idiachronically examine hashtag position and content in relation to the delay function of discourse markers. .

Hashtag placement: Hashtags are categorized as being in one of the three following placement areas:inital (as shown with #WhyILeft in (1)), medial (as shown in (2) with #adopted), and final (#depressed,#crying, and #WhyIStayed in (3)).

(1) (1) #WhyILeft I knew, that no matter how perfect I was. It would never be enough to stop him. Ihad to take care of me

(2) #WhyILeft Because being treated inferior because you were #adopted is NOT okay. #respect

(3) Sometimes I dont understand why...why they treat me like this..I did sthwrong? #depressed #crying #WhyIStayed

This study looks at the initial placement, where the the hashtag is connecting to the larger conversation,but the placement of the hashtag is a delay before disclosing details of violence, akin to other discoursemarkers that precede content and act as delays like well (Jucker 1993) and so (Buysse 2012).

Delay function: The placement of the hashtags #whyIstayed and #whyIleft have changed over thecourse of the broader discussion on domestic abuse. Since the first instance of #whyIstayed used with aself-disclosure features a final placement hashtag, one might expect this to affect how others use thishashtag to join the larger discussion. However, the prevalence of initial hashtags in the campaign as awhole is indicative of pragmatically motivated placement.

Conclusion: While not all early hashtags are delays before a personal disclosure, speakers employ suchdelay discourse markers as tools in this survivor corpus to distance themselves when discussing personal,traumatizing information.

ReferencesBuysse, Lieven. 2012. So as a multifunctional discourse marker in native and learner speech. Journal of

Pragmatics 44(13): 1764-1782.Erard, Michael. 2008. Um. . .: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean. New York,

NY: Anchor Books.Jucker, Andreas. H. (1993). The discourse marker well: A relevance-theoretical account. Journal of

Pragmatics 19(5): 435-452.Romano, Manuela. 2014. Evaluation in emotion narratives. In Thompson, Geoff, & Laura Alba-Juez, eds.

Evaluation in context. Vol. 242, 367-385. John Benjamins Publishing Company.Schiffrin, Deborah. 1987. Discourse markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

On the Obligatory Appositive Interpretationof Massive Pied-Piping

In relative clause formations, additional material can be ‘pied-piped’ to the left edge of the relative clause bya wh-element (Ross, 1967). The structure in (2) depicts what Safir (1986) and Heck (2008) subcategorize as‘heavy’ or ‘massive pied-piping’. This is compared to the wh-element only movement in (1). Safir, Heck, andothers note that when massive pied-piping occurs, the relative clause must be interpreted as an appositive.This contrasts with the availability of a restrictive reading of the relative clause in other pied-piping contextssuch as ‘recursive pied-piping’ by a specifier, as shown in (3). The acceptance of massive pied-piping forcingan appositive reading has not been universally accepted (Stockwell et al., 1973; Huddleston & Pullum, 2002).

(1) Reports [ [ which ]i the government prescribes the height of the lettering on the covers of ti ] areinvariably boring.

(2) Reports [ [ the covers of which ]i the government prescribes the height of the lettering on ti ] areinvariably boring.

(3) The student [ [whose paper ]i I read ti ] knew nothing about syntax.

This study investigates the assumption of an appositive reading of massive pied-piping with diagnosticsderived from Demirdache (1991), including the availability of parasitic gap licensing, weakest crossovereffects, and variable binding. While massive pied-piping constructions appear to pattern after appositiverelative clauses with respect to weakest crossover and variable binding, parasitic gaps appear to be licensablein massively pied-piped structures where they are not licensed in appositives. This information suggests that,while massive pie-piping allows for and possibly prefers an appositive interpretation, it does not necessitatean appositive interpretation.

ReferencesDemirdache, Hamida Khadiga. 1991. Resumptive chains in restrictive relatives, appositives and dislocation

structures. United States – Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Doctoral Dissertation.

Heck, Fabian. 2008. On Pied-Piping: Wh-Movement and Beyond. Mouton de Gruyter.

Huddleston, Rodney D. & Geoffrey K. Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge grammar of the English language.Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Ross, John R. 1967. Constraints on variables in syntax. United States – Massachusetts: MassachusettsInstitute of Technology Doctoral Dissertation.

Safir, Ken. 1986. Relative Clauses in a Theory of Binding and Levels. Linguistic Inquiry 17(4). 663–689.

Stockwell, Robert P., Paul Schacter & Barbara Hall Partee. 1973. The major syntactic structures of English.New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

1

Title: Using the voice recorder app on mobile phones to improve speaking subskills in

the EFL classroom.

Abstract:

The paper entitled “Using the voice recorder app on mobile phones to improve

speaking subskills in the EFL classroom” aimed to contribute to develop appropriately

two of the speaking sub skills such as: pronunciation and intonation. The population

was 41 students of the first level of the Medicine School of the Escuela Superior

Politécnica de Chimborazo during the academic term April-August 2016. The study

was quasi-experimental and the proposal was carried out as a complement for the

class activities considering the syllabus of the English subject. The strategy was

applied for 20 English lessons working inside and outside classroom. A pre-test,

intermediate test and post-test were applied in order to obtain results of the application

of the strategy. The results showed that students felt more confident working by

themselves and at their own pace by the means of listening audios in English and

recording them as many times as necessary with their own voices imitating

pronunciation and intonation of the original audio. It was evidenced that students had a

meaning progress of 31,46% comparing the three test mentioned above. In short, it

may be said that the proposed strategy is useful and easy to be used by any teacher.

Key words: <mobile phones>, < speaking sub skills>, <strategy>, <confident>,

<meaningful progress>.

Bibliography

McCarthy, M. y F. O´Dell (1999): English Vocabulary in Use. Editorial de Cambridge, Cambrigde.

McCArthy, M. y J. McCarten (2005): Touchstone Teacher´s Edition. Editorial deCambridge, Hong Kong.

Menken, K. (2001): An Overview of the Preparation and Certification of Teachers Working with Limited English Proficient (LEP) Students. Editorial George Washington University, Washington.

Posso Yepéz, M.A. (2009): Metodología para el trabajo de grado. Editorial NINA comunicaciones, Quito.

Richards, J. y T. Rodgers (2012): Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. Editorial Cambridge University Press, New York.

Richards, J. y T. Rodgers (2006): Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. Editorial Cambridge University Press, New York.

Seligson, P. y E. Hodgson (2013): English ID 1 teacher´s guide. Editorial Santillana Educación, México D.F.

Romero, G. (2009): “La Utilización de estrategias didácticas en clase”, en innovación y experiencias educativas, pp. 1-8.

García, J. (2014): “Entrenamiento en estrategias de aprendizaje de Inglés como lengua extranjera en un contexto de aprendizaje combinado”, en Revista Lingüística Neibrija, pp. 1-12.

Anastasia, D. (2013): “College students' cell phone use, beliefs, and effects on their learning”, en College Student Journal, pp. 585-592.

The Subject in Central Sinama

The notion of subject is a vexed one for a number of Austronesian languages in the Philippines and Borneo. The most well-known dispute pertains to Tagalog [tgl], with Schachter (1976) famously positing that Tagalog subjecthood properties are divided between actors and topics, leaving no single syntactic category that can be identified as the subject. Other researchers, though, have argued for identifying the subject in Philippine-type languages with the nominative noun phrase, the NP which is selected by the verb morphology (Kroeger 1991 for Tagalog; Schwartz 1976 for Ilokano).

This paper analyzes the identity of the subject in Central Sinama [sml], a Sama-Bajaw language spoken in the southern Philippines and northern Borneo. At least three syntactic constructions clearly identify the Sinama nominative NP as the subject: functional control, relativization, and subject inversion. This analysis is in line with studies of other Sama-Bajaw languages. In Sama Bangingi’ [sse] the large majority of subject properties are associated with the nominative NP, despite some splitting of subject properties similar to that identified in Tagalog (Gault 1999). Likewise, the nominative NP is identified as subject for West Coast Bajau [bdr] of Borneo (Miller 2007) and Indonesian Bajau [bdl] (Donohue 1998). In Sama Pangutaran [slm], the nominative NP has been described as “the syntactic pivot for all of the major syntactic constructions” (Walton 1983).

The basic Sinama voice system consists of a three-way alternation among Actor Voice, or AV (ex. 1), in which the verb morphology selects the actor of the clause as the nominative NP; Undergoer Voice, or UV (ex. 2), in which the undergoer is selected; and passive (ex. 3), in which the undergoer is selected and the actor is demoted or omitted.

(1) Hal kita aN-baklay bang tꞌbba. merely 1DU.INCL AV-travel.by.foot when low.tide ‘When the tide is low we just travel along the shore.’

(2) Bay Ø-bꞌlla=na daing itu. PST UV-cook=3SG fish this S/he cooked this fish.

(3) Bang kami <ni>holdap heꞌ mundu when 1SG.EXCL <PASS>hold.up AM bandit

s<in>urang-an kami timbak. <PASS>point.weapon-TR 1SG.EXCL gun ‘When we are held up by bandits we have weapons pointed at us.’

Control: In Sinama, only the nominative NP of a subordinate clause can be controlled, whether the actor (ex. 4) or the undergoer (ex. 5). This pattern provides strong evidence for the nominative NP’s status as the subject of a Sinama clause, because in most languages only the subject of the subordinate clause can be the controllee.

(4) Bay kami Ø-bowa=nu aN-adjal daing hēꞌ. PST 1PL.EXCL UV-influence=2SG AV-prepare.food fish DET ‘You had us prepare that fish.’

(5) Makannak itu mbal ta-koleꞌ <ni>lāng. children DET NEG PASS.APT-able <PASS>forbid ‘These children are impossible to make stop.’

Relativization: Sinama utilizes two strategies to form relative clauses: a gap strategy, and resumptive pronouns. The gap strategy is used to relativize the nominative NP in the relative clause (AV in ex. 6, UV in ex. 7). Resumptive pronouns are used to relativize possessors of nominative NPs.

In many Western Austronesian languages, relativization using the gap strategy is restricted to subjects. As the gap strategy only applies to the nominative NP in Sinama, this is evidence that the nominative NP should be understood as the subject in a Sinama clause.

(6) ni aꞌa bay aN-bꞌlli daing ma tabuꞌ to person PST AV-buy fish at market ‘to the person who bought fish at the market’

(7) ondeꞌ bay Ø-pandi=na ma undam child PST UV-bathe=3SG at basin ‘the child she bathed in the basin’ Subject inversion: Certain sentence-initial words, including negators and tense &

aspect markers, cause the nominative NP to move from its normal postverbal position into a preverbal location (ex. 1, repeated here as ex. 8). Only the nominative NP is eligible for this process of inversion. This is another way in which the nominative NP is treated uniquely by the syntax, providing evidence for its subject status.

(8) Hal kita aN-baklay bang tꞌbba. merely 1DU.INCL AV-travel.by.foot when low.tide ‘When the tide is low we just travel along the shore.’

Cleft-Syntactic Amalgams in English: A Construction-Based Perspective

The so-called cleft-syntactic amalgamation construction (Cleft-Syn-Amal) involves two independentclauses (main clause (MC) and interrupting amalgam clause (IC)), while sharing a constituent named the‘content kernel’.

(1) [MC He gives a speech in�� ��

[IC I think it wasOO OOFlorida.]]

The ‘content kernel’ Florida in (1) functions as both the object of the preposition in as well as the predicateof the verb was.

The construction can occur in various syntactic positions, as illustrated by the COCA (Corpus of Con-temporary American) examples:

(2) a. Verb object: This president has answered [I think it’s like 4,200 questions]. (COCA: 1992SPOK)

b. Prepositional object: On [I believe it was Thursday morning], less than ninety-six hoursafter the event I actually saw a building going back up. (COCA: 2011 SPOK)

c. Predicational: And the ingredients are, [I thought it was Cachaca], but no it’s Cachaca.(COCA: 2015 SPOK)

d. Adjunct: It almost sank [I believe it was Monday or Tuesday of this week]. (COCA: 1990SPOK)

For example, the ‘content kernel’ 4,200 questions in (2a) functions as both the object of the verb answered aswell as predicate of the verb is. Meanwhile, the content kernel in the other examples function as the objectof a preposition, a predicative complement, and an adjunct. The construction displays many idiosyncracieschallenging any form-function matching account. In terms of meaning, (2a) means that the president hasanswered ‘x’, and the value of ‘x’ is, at least to the speaker’s knowledge, 4,200 questions, and also accompaniesa ‘hedge’ reading (Lakoff 1974, Kluck 2009).

Most of the existing analyses adopt Lakoff’s (1974) deletion-based account (Kluck 2009). For example,(1) is derived from the combination of two clauses, ellipsis of the empty element, and then elide the clause:

(3) [He gives a speech in [Florida]] [I think it was Florida that He gives a speech in.] (NP-ellipsis andclausal-ellipsis)

Such a deletion-based analysis leaves many peculiar properties of the construction unaccounted for (Tsub-omoto and Whitman 2000, Grosu 2006). For example, the Lakoff-style analysis requires the mandatoryapplication of the ellipsis as seen from He gives a speech in I think it was Florida (*that he gives a speechin.), and needs to limit the type of possible subject as well as introducing verb.

In addressing the unusual mapping between form and function in the construction, this paper tries tofigure out the authentic uses of the construction, by performing an extensive investigation of the corpusCOCA. Some of the corpus findings we can observe include that the dominant subject of the IC is thepronoun I. The verb type introducing the IC is also limited to non-factive verbs like think, believe, guess toallow a hedge reading. Based on the empirical corpus study, we try to sketch a base-generation approach,couched upon the framework of Construction Grammar (CxG) where constructions, pairings of form withmeaning, are the basic units of language and linked as form or inheritance hierarchies (network) (see Goldberg2006 and references therein). Our supposition is that English employs a special clausal-level constructionwhere the content kernel is in-situ (e.g., Thursday morning in (2b), Cachaca in (2c), and Monday or Tuesdayof this week in (2d)) and introduced by a non-factive embedding verb.

The present analysis factors out generalizations of Cleft-Syn-Amal constructions. This factorizationallows us to capture generalizations as well as idiosyncracies about English Cleft-Syn-Amal constructionin a systematic way.

Selected References

Goldberg, Adele. 2006. Constructions at work: Constructionist approaches in context. New York: OxfordUniversity Press.

Grosu, Alexander. 2006. An amalgam and its puzzles. In Hans-Martin Gartner, Sigrid Beck, RegineEckhardt, Renate Musan, and Barbara Stiebels (eds.), Between 40 and 60 puzzles for Krifka.

Guimaraes, Maximiliano. 2002. Syntactic amalgams as dynamic constituency in top-down derivations. InMarjo van Koppen, Joanna Sio, and Mark de Vos (eds.), Proceedings of ConSOLE X .

Guimaraes, Maximiliano. 2004. Derivation and representation of syntactic amalgams. Doctoral Disserta-tion, University of Maryland.

Han, Chung-Hye and Nancy Hedberg. 2008. Syntax and Semantics of it-clefts: A Tree Adjoining GrammarAnalysis. Journal of Semantics 25: 345-380.

Hedberg, Nancy. 2000. The Referential Status of Clefts. Language 76(4): 891-920.

Kim, Jong-Bok. 2007. Syntax and Semantics of English It-Cleft Constructions: A Constraint-Based Analy-sis. Studies in Modern Grammar 48: 217-235.

Kim, Jong-Bok. 2012. On the Syntax of the It-Cleft Construction: A Construction-based Perspective.Linguistic Research 29(1): 45-68.

Kluck, Marlies. 2009. Intertwined clauses, interacting propositions: A note on the interpretive aspects ofsentence amalgamation. Conference of the Student Organisation of Linguistics in Europe (ConSOLE)XVI : 77-101.

Kluck, Marlies. 2011b. Sentence amalgamation. Ph.D dissertation, University of Groningen. LOT Disser-tation Series 285. (Landelijke Onderzoekschool Taalwetenschap, the Netherlands National GraduateSchool of Linguistics.)

Kluck, Marlies. 2014. A sluicing account of amalgams. Manuscript , University of Groningen.

Lakoff, George. 1974. Syntactic amalgams. Berkeley Studies in Syntax and Semantics 1(9): 1-24.

Papafragou, Anna. 2006. Epistemic modality and truth conditions. Lingua 116(10): 1688-1702.

Rooryck, Johan. 2001. Evidentiality, part I. Glot International 5(4): 125-133.

Simons, Mandy. 2007. Observations on embedding verbs, evidentiality, and presupposition. Lingua 117(6):1034-1056.

van Riemsdijk, Henk. 2006c. Towards a unified theory of wh- and non-wh-amalgams. In Yubun Suzuki,Mizuho Keizo, and Ken-Ichi Takami (eds.), In search of the essence of language science: Festschrift forProfessor Heizo Nakajima on the occasion of his 60th birthday, 43-59. Tokyo: Hitsuji Shobo.

de Smet, Hendrik, and Freek Van de Velde. 2013. Serving two masters: Form-function friction in syntacticamalgams. Studies in Language 37(3): 534-565.

Tsubomoto, Atsuro and John Whitman. 2000. A type of head-in-situ construction in English. LinguisticInquiry 31, 176-182.

2

Analysis of Pronouns and Pragmatics in Alzheimer's Disease

The overall aim of this study is to synthesize the current discrepancies found by linking pragmaticswith Alzheimer's Disease. In particular to explore the pronoun and reflexive loss associated withAlzheimer's Disease.

There is a growing number of persons who will be diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease in Canada. Itis estimated that there will be 1.4 million persons diagnosed cases of Alzheimer's Disease by 2031(Alzheimer Society Canada, 2012). At the current rate, Canada is in dire need to better understanddiagnosis, prevention, and rehabilitation of Alzheimer's Disease in order to keep up with the risingdemand. Bridging the gap between linguistics and Alzheimer's Disease will provide a better frameworkfor understanding language loss with patients with Alzheimer's Disease. In discourse, it is observed thatpatients with Alzheimer's Disease either misuse pronouns or are missing referents to the pronouns. Thissame misuse does not occur with reflexives to the same extent. Working within Binding Theory, itseems that principle B is impaired while principle A is not. However, currently the literature proposesthat syntax is preserved up until the later stages of the disease. It is puzzling that syntax is preserved yetone syntactic property (principle B) is not. This misuse or missing referents in Alzheimer's Diseasecould be linked to a loss of the pragmatic principle, proposed by Reinhart (1983, 1986).

The purpose of this study is to determine whether the pragmatic principle is related to pronoun andreflexive loss in patients with Alzheimer's Disease. Specifically questions are whether it is the syntacticprinciple B that is impaired or if it is the pragmatic principle instead. How do these results impactcurrent literature about syntax preservation in Alzheimer's Disease? How is the pragmatic impairedduring discourse? This study will allow for greater understanding and minimization of thediscrepancies found between the current framework used to study Alzheimer's Disease, and the actualresults obtained in practice.

The study was a judgement comprehension task that consisted of a statement coinciding to a picture.Judgement was if the statement matched the picture. Results from this study showed that the differencein performance between the two groups was found to be significant. Patients with Alzheimer's Diseaseincorrectly allowed mismatching statements at a significantly higher rate than was found in the controlgroup, where such errors were not observed. Future steps from this preliminary study would be toextend this to include working memory and fMRIs.

The implications of the study could potentially have long standing effects. The theoretical frameworkof neurolinguistics and dementia is being tested and it could start the process to revising how we viewpragmatics in discourse with patients with Alzheimer's Disease. This hypothesis could also be extendedto other neurological degenerative diseases as well as the general aging population.

Keywords: Pragmatics, Semantics, Language Impairment, Alzheimer's Disease, Psycholinguistics

References

Alzheimer Society Canada, 2012. Retrieved from http://www.alzheimer.ca/en

Reinhart, T. 1983. Coreference and bound anaphora: A restatement of the anaphora questions.Linguistics and Philosophy, 6(1): 47-88.

Reinhart, T. 1986. Center and periphery in the grammar of anaphora. In Studies in the Acquisition ofAnaphora. 123-150. Springer Netherlands.

The Construction of Chinese A-Not-A Questions

There are two critical issues about Chinese A-Not-A questions, one is which item should the

A-not-A operator attach to; the other is how the A-not-A operator changes the sentence

structure. Most previous studies focus on the second issue, investigating different types of

A-not-A questions, including C-T James Huang (1991), Wen-Hsin Karen Tseng (2009), etc. This

study, however, tackles the first issue, raises a hypothesis of the underlying sentence structure of

Chinese A-not-A questions and examines the generation of various types of Chinese A-not-A

questions. Furthermore, it also presents a comparison between Chinese A-not-A operator and

the negation operator.

Because the A-not-A operator can attach to various kinds of tokens, for example, auxiliaries,

verbs, as well as be verb shi, most linguists analyze Chinese A-not-A questions as different types

of sentence structures based on which kind of token the sentence contains. However, their

studies fail to explain which item the A-not-A operator will attach to when there are more than

one kind of verbs in a sentence. This research argues that there is only one sentence structure for

Chinese A-not-A questions and the surface of the sentence changes based on which token the

A-not-A operator attaches to, rather than which type of token the sentence contains. The main

conclusion is that there is a hierarchy of the tokens to which the A-not-A operator attaches,

which is shi> Auxiliaries> Verbs.