Proceedings of the Fourty-Fourth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society
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PROCEEDINGS OF THE FOURTY-FOURTH ANNUAL MEETING OF THE BERKELEY LINGUISTICS SOCIETY February 9-11, 2018 Editors Karee Garvin Noah Hermalin Myriam Lapierre Yevgeniy Melguy Tessa Scott Eric Wilbanks Berkeley Linguistics Society Berkeley, CA, USA Berkeley Linguistics Society University of California, Berkeley Department of Linguistics 1203 Dwinelle Hall Berkeley, CA 94720-2650 USA All papers copyright ⃝c 2018 by the Berkeley Linguistics Society, Inc. All rights reserved. ISSN: 2377-1666 LCCN: 76-640143 Contents Acknowledgements .........................................................................iii Foreword .................................................................................... v I can believe it: Quantitative evidence for closed-class category knowledge in an English-speaking 20- to 24-month-old child Alandi Bates, Lisa Pearl, & Susan R. Braunwald . 1 Quantitative Comparison for Generative Theories: Embedding Competence Linguistic Theories in Cognitive Architectures and Bayesian Models Adrian Brasoveanu & Jakub Dotlačil . 17 On the Paradox of Changting Hakka Tone Sandhi Luhua Chao ..................................................................................33 The pragmaticalization and synchronic variations of Japanese adverb jitsuwa and English adverb actually Kiyono Fujinaga . 47 Subanon mo- cancels out volitionality: Evidence from paradigms and argument structure Bryn Hauk ...................................................................................61 Two types of preverbal object movement and duration/frequency phrases in Mandarin Chinese Hsi-Lun Huang . 83 Effects of sensory modality on the interpretation of subjective adjectives: Comparing sight, smell and taste Elsi Kaiser . 99 Gradable Ideophones, Scales, and Maximality in Grammar Koji Kawahara ..............................................................................115 Suppletive allomorphy conditioned by humbleness in Korean Soo-Hwan Lee & Minjung Kim . 131 A feature-based analysis of the Chol (Mayan) person paradigm Carol-Rose Little. .147 The attributivizing marker in Andi (Nakh-Daghestanian): clitic, affix, or both? Timur Maisak . 163 Response Bias and Sensitivity in Distributional Learning: Two Stages in Early Phonetic Category Acquisition Emily Moeng . .179 i Interpretation of internally-headed relative clauses in Shan Mary Moroney . 197 An anaphora-based review of the grammar/pragmatics division of labor Koichi Nishida . 213 Underspecification and scope: The case of gapping Sang-Hee Park . 229 Phonological environment and the social evaluation of American English sibilants Jacob Phillips . 243 Syllabic Size Restrictions on Verb Reduplication in Brazilian Portuguese Jamilläh Rodriguez . 257 Viewpoint aspect and object case in Kwakwala and Finnish Katie Sardinha . 271 Japanese -TE as a marker of aestheticization in the language of menus Kiyoko Toratani . 287 Parametric dependencies result in correct predictions about word accent typology Alexandre Vaxman . 301 ii Acknowledgements The Executive Committee of the 44th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society would like to thank the students, faculty, and staff who gave their time to review abstracts, chair sessions, and assist with a vast number of administrative and logistical tasks–this conference would not have been possible without you. We also extend our gratitude to conference participants, whose contributions have once again made this conference an engaging and stimulating experience. Special thanks go to Paula Floro and Belén Flores, whose knowledge, expertise, and guidance proved indispensable in making BLS44 a success. Finally, we thank the UC Berkeley Lin- guistics Department for its financial assistance. iii iv Foreword This collection contains 20 of the talks given at the 44th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, held in Berkeley, California, February 9-11, 2018. The conference focused on the special topic of innovative methods, and featured presentations on a broad range of theoretical, experimen- tal, and descriptive work, especially with regards to innovative methodologies. BLS44 was organized by the second-year graduate students of the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley: Karee Garvin, Noah Hermalin, Myriam Lapierre, Yevgeniy Melguy, Tessa Scott, and Eric Wilbanks. The papers in this volume were edited for style by the members of the Executive Committee, and compiled into the final volume by Noah Hermalin and Yevgeniy Melguy. The BLS 44 Executive Committee January 2019 v vi I can believe it: Quantitative evidence for closed-class category knowledge in an English-speaking 20- to 24-month-old child ALANDI BATES,LISA PEARL,&SUSAN R. BRAUNWALD University of California, Irvine∗ 1 Introduction Adults are believed to have abstract syntactic categories that they use to generate their ob- servable utterances (e.g., closed-class categories like NEGation and open-class categories like VERB to generate don’t go). However, there’s been significant debate about when chil- dren develop syntactic categories and how to accurately assess what category knowledge they have when. We review prior approaches to assessing children’s developing knowl- edge of syntactic categories, and then present our quantitative approach, which synthesizes insights from this prior work. This allows us to (i) define possible child representations for multi-word combinations, and (ii) calculate the observed vs. expected linguistic produc- tion properties for each possible representation. We use this approach to investigate the existence of both closed-class and open-class syntactic categories in a 20- to 24-month- old child’s verb phrases. We evaluate whether the child’s observed production matches the expected production when the child uses a specific category representation, and find that the child’s productions are compatible only with representations that have adult-like closed-class categories (NEG,AUXiliary), but not adult-like open-class categories (NOUN, VERB). We conclude with implications for the development of syntactic categories. 2 Syntactic category knowledge in children There hasn’t been a clear consensus for when children develop syntactic categories, whether open-class or closed-class. Some studies suggest that knowledge of certain categories – either rudimentary or adult-like – may be in place as early as age 2 Pinker (1984), Valian ∗We have benefited from comments and suggestions from the Computation of Language Laboratory at UC Irvine, and the audiences at UROP 2017 at UC Irvine, CAMP 2017 at UCLA, and the Berkeley Linguistics Society 2018 meeting. All errors are of course our own and not at all their fault. 1 Alandi Bates, Lisa Pearl, & Susan Braunwald (1986), Capdevila i Batet & Llinas` i Grau (1995), Booth & Waxman (2003), Rowland & Theakston (2009), Theakston & Rowland (2009), Yang (2010, 2011), Shin (2012), Mey- lan et al. (2017), while others argue that such knowledge only emerges much later (Pine & Lieven 1997, Tomasello 2004, Kemp et al. 2005, Tomasello & Brandt 2009, Theak- ston et al. 2015). Taken together, there seems to be some agreement that children may have rudimentary knowledge of open-class categories (NOUN,ADJective) fairly early, but don’t refine these into adult-like open-class categories until later. However, for closed-class cat- egories (DETerminer, NEG,AUX), there isn’t yet consensus on when either rudimentary or adult-like versions of these categories develop. This may be due in part to the dif- ferent quantitative analysis approaches that prior research has adopted. More generally, many prior studies demonstrate that there’s utility in quantitatively analyzing children’s productions to determine the nature of their underlying representations. However, there are several ways to go about this analysis. Notably, many prior approaches harnessed the intuition that syntactic categories allow children to transfer knowledge about how a word from one category (a NEG like don’t) combines with words from another category (VERBs like go and believe) in order for the child to generate novel productions. For example, if the two-word combination don’t go hasn’t been heard before, then it must have been generated based on units that are more ab- stract than individual lexical items. This combinatory productivity – that is, the generation of combinations that haven’t been heard before – is a sign of abstract syntactic category knowledge. Yet, what about combinations that have in fact been heard before? How do we know if children are generating them in a productive way that relies on syntactic categories (the way adults would) or instead in some other way that relies on the individual lexical items? This is where prior approaches diverge from each other. Below, we describe our approach, which is inspired primarily by Yang (2010), Yang (2011), and Pine et al. (2013). 3 Possible child category representations for multi-word combinations We consider three types of syntactic category representation that very young children could use to form multi-word combinations (like don’t go). The representation types differ with respect to whether the child produces multi-word combinations according to (i) the dis- 2 Alandi Bates, Lisa Pearl, & Susan Braunwald tribution of multi-word combinations in her input (NOT productive), (ii) both her input distributions and an internal category representation (SEMI-productive), or (iii) internal category representations alone (fully PRODuctive). A child using a NOT productive representation can only generate