153 Natasha Abner (University of Michigan)
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Natasha Abner (University of Michigan) LSA40 Carlo Geraci (Ecole Normale Supérieure) Justine Mertz (University of Paris 7, Denis Diderot) Jessica Lettieri (Università degli studi di Torino) Shi Yu (Ecole Normale Supérieure) A handy approach to sign language relatedness We use coded phonetic features and quantitative methods to probe potential historical relationships among 24 sign languages. Lisa Abney (Northwestern State University of Louisiana) ANS16 Naming practices in alcohol and drug recovery centers, adult daycares, and nursing homes/retirement facilities: A continuation of research The construction of drug and alcohol treatment centers, adult daycare centers, and retirement facilities has increased dramatically in the United States in the last thirty years. In this research, eleven categories of names for drug/alcohol treatment facilities have been identified while eight categories have been identified for adult daycare centers. Ten categories have become apparent for nursing homes and assisted living facilities. These naming choices function as euphemisms in many cases, and in others, names reference morphemes which are perceived to reference a higher social class than competitor names. Rafael Abramovitz (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) P8 Itai Bassi (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Relativized Anaphor Agreement Effect The Anaphor Agreement Effect (AAE) is a generalization that anaphors do not trigger phi-agreement covarying with their binders (Rizzi 1990 et. seq.) Based on evidence from Koryak (Chukotko-Kamchan) anaphors, we argue that the AAE should be weakened and be stated as a generalization about person agreement only. We propose a theory of the weakened AAE, which combines a modification of Preminger (2019)'s AnaphP-encapsulation proposal as well as converging evidence from work on the internal syntax of pronouns (Harbour 2016, van Urk 2018). Mitchell Abrams (Advanced Resource Technologies, Inc.) SCiL Poster I Claire Bonial (U.S. Army Research Labs) Lucia Donatelli (Saarland University) Graph-to-graph meaning representation transformations for human-robot dialogue In support of two-way human-robot communication, we leverage Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) to capture the core semantic content of natural language search and navigation instructions. In order to effectively map AMR to a constrained robot action specification, we develop a set of in-domain, task-specific AMR graphs augmented with speech act and tense and aspect information not found in the original AMR. This paper presents our efforts and results in transforming AMR graphs into our in- domain graphs by employing both rule-based and classifier-based methods, thereby bridging the gap from entirely unconstrained natural language input to a fixed set of robot actions. 153 Eric Acton (Eastern Michigan University) P1 Anna Mae Bower (Eastern Michigan University) Rachael Crain (Eastern Michigan University) Veronica Grondona (Eastern Michigan University) Janet Leppala (Eastern Michigan University) Shelby Taylor (Eastern Michigan University) Socially motivated movement toward a supra-regional vowel system in Metro Detroit: Evidence from style-shifting among Jewish women Recent research has uncovered sound changes sweeping the Inland North, whereby some aspects of the Northern Cities Shift (NCS) are reversing while others progress. Our analysis of style-shifting in NCS vowels among ten Jewish women from Metro Detroit shows that in moving from conversational to read (word-list) speech, younger women shifted their vowels significantly more than older women, and always toward supra-regional norms of the ‘third dialect’. These results enrich the picture of what appears to be a sort of regional leveling of the vowel system and, crucially, support the notion that these changes are socially motivated. Ana Lívia Agostinho (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina) SPCL3B Gabriel Antunes de Araujo (Universidade de Macau/Universidade de São Paulo) Eduardo Ferreira dos Santos (Universidade da Integração Internacional da Lusofonia Afro-Brasileira) Interrogative particle and phrasal pitch-accent in polar questions in Fa d’Ambô This paper presents two strategies for polar questions in Fa d’Ambô, a Portuguese-based Creole language spoken on the Island of Ano Bom, Equatorial Guinea. We discuss (i) the use of the final interrogative particle ‘a’ in polar questions, and (ii) the association of phrasal pitch-accent to the last mora of the final prosodic word of the sentence with a possible change in word accent and raising of intonation. Finally, we offer evidence for its presence in the Proto-Creole of the Gulf of Guinea, as a sign of the influence from Niger-Congo substrate languages, especially those from the Sudanic belt. Emily Ahn (University of Washington) SCiL4 Cecilia Jimenez (University of Pittsburgh) Yulia Tsvetkov (Carnegie Mellon University) Alan W Black (Carnegie Mellon University) What code-switching strategies are effective in dialog systems? We study preferred code-switching styles by incorporating linguistically-motivated strategies of code-switching into a rule-based goal-oriented dialog system. We collect and release CommonAmigos, a corpus of 587 human-computer text conversations in mixed Spanish and English between our dialog system and human users. From this new corpus, we analyze the amount of elicited code- switching, types of user code-switching strategies, and impact of user demographics. Based on these exploratory findings, we give recommendations for effective code-switching dialog systems, highlighting user's language proficiency and gender as critical considerations. Faruk Akkus (University of Pennsylvania) P4 A'-movement feeds licensing: A view from causatives A number of languages have constructions in which an argument cannot remain in its base-generated position, and need to move to be 'rescued', e.g. wager-class verbs in English, Romance infi nitives, or Austronesian applicatives. Previous proposals include: (i) those that revolve around locality restrictions, be it either CP as a barrier/phase, or extra silent projections, (ii) a PF-based constraint, or (iii) an Exfoliation approach, in which projections are deleted from a full clause. This study demonstrates that 'make' causatives (MC) in Sason Arabic support a locality-based analysis, which provides striking evidence for A'-movement feeds licensing relations. 154 Amani Alageel (University of Arizona/Qassim University) NARNiHS2 This coool Insta-celeb’: Stylistic variation and fame on social media Social media has presented challenges while paving new paths to the study of language variation and change. One phenomenon that has grown widely on social media is what is known as social media celebrities, or influencers. Those are ordinary people who have become famous by means of the Internet (Marwick, 2013). Aiming to explore stylistic variation in relation to fame on Instagram, this study examines the style variation of a young Arab Instagram celebrity in real-time. It follows the celebrity’s style shifting across time: before her fame, throughout her fame, and after her fame declined. Ahmad Alqassas (Georgetown University) P1 Revisiting negative concord as syntactic agreement: Evidence from true negative indefinites Arabic Negative Indefinites (NIs) display complex negative concord (NC) and double negation (DN) readings even in preverbal position. Some NIs display split scope readings, whereby the interpretation of negation and the indefinite is split by a modal, while other NIs do not display split scope. I argue for a revised version of NC as syntactic agreement positing a covert negative operator as last resort for NIs with split scope effects, and for the availability of negated existential quantification in natural language. Sam Alxatib (City University of New York) LSA25 Innocent inclusion and "only" Bar-Lev & Fox (2017), B&F, redefine the exclusive particle only, so that it negates Innocently-Excludable alternatives, and presupposes Innocently-Includable ones. B&F justify their revision of "only" on the basis of Alxatib's (2014) finding that "only" presupposes Free Choice (FC) in cases like (1). (1) Charlie was only allowed to eat [apples or pears]F We show challenges to B&F’s view of "only", and argue against extending Innocent-Inclusion to its meaning. We propose that embedding Exh under "only", along the lines of Alxatib, explains the data naturally. We conclude more generally that FC is not always the result of global exhaustification, contra B&F. Daniel Amy (University of Texas at Arlington) LSA19 Re-constraining massive pied-piping: An argument for non-interrogative CPs This paper investigates the (marginal) acceptability of massive pied-piping in complements of factive predicates, e.g., %John knows the painting of which president Mary bought. Such constructions violate Heck’s (2008) generalization on massive pied-piping. This paper proposes a revised restriction wherein massive pied-piping is restricted to non-interrogative clauses. This revised generalization is accounted for by combining den Dikken’s (2003) two-stage agreement process for wh-movement and Cable’s (2010) QP-analysis of wh-movement. Under this analysis, pied-piping is the result Focus-movement, and the grammaticality of massive pied-piping is dictated by the presence or absence of a wh-probe on Force. Hannah Youngeun An (University of Rochester) SCiL Poster II Aaron Steven White (University of Rochester) The lexical and grammatical sources of neg-raising inferences We investigate neg(ation)-raising