here - Linguistic Society of America

the reading of scripture by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). We analyze the speech of selectedactive LDS speakers while reading a secular passage and a scripture passage for the prosodic features of pitch, amplitude, andduration. We consider the ways in which LDS members adopt scripture-speech and potentially index their religious identity viathis speech genre.Walter F. Edwards (Wayne State University, Detroit) Session 83Codeswitching and the language of the dub poetry of Linton Kewsi JohnsonThis paper challenges the assumption that in the Jamaican diglossia (Fishman, 1980) abstract ideas are typically communicated inthe so-called High language, i.e SE, whereas JC is restricted to more mundane topics. This paper will show that while it is truethat SE remains more prestigious than JC, that the latter is capable of communicating abstract concepts as well. The concept ofcode-switching is implicated in the absence of code switching to the SE variety in LKJ’s poetry. Rather, the paper shows that LKJswitches from the colloquial English of his everyday speech to JC in his dub lyrics.Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Session 25Locality restrictions on syntactic extraction: the case (but not Case) of Kaqchikel Agent FocusAgent Focus (AF) is a morphological change to transitive verbs in many Mayan languages, commonly described as obligatorywhenever the verb’s ergative argument is extracted. I demonstrate that AF in Kaqchikel instead occurs iff the ergative argumentmoves to an immediately preverbal position, through an examination of sentences with multiple simultaneous A-bar extractions. Iargue that Kaqchikel AF must be characterized through locality restrictions on extraction, rather than through Case, as has beenrecently proposed. The finding has implications for the theory of Mayan AF as well as extraction asymmetries in syntacticallyergative languages in general.Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Session 34Isaac Gould (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)Domain readings of Japanese head internal relative clausesWe present novel data showing clear interpretational differences between head-external and head-internal relative clauses (HIRC)with quantificational heads in Japanese. In a context with a group of six apples of which Mary peeled half, the HIRC literallytranslated as [Mary peeled half of the apples] corresponds to all six apples (domain of half). The corresponding head-externalrelative refers to the three apples that were peeled (witness set). We propose that the HIRC denotes the maximally informative setwhich corresponds to the domain of the quantifier. Current theories of Japanese HIRC cannot account for this contrast.Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Session 17Hadas Kotek (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)Intervention effects and covert pied-piping in English multiple questionsWe argue for the existence of covert pied-piping in English multiple questions. Novel data shows that Focus Intervention Effectsoccur within a covertly pied-piped constituent containing the in-situ wh-phrase. Focus-sensitive determiners (e.g. no and few) inthe covertly pied-piped constituent cause ungrammaticality, while focus-sensitive interveners outside of the region do not, thusacting as a diagnostic for the size of covert pied-piping. These facts are accounted for through (a) covert pied-piping of in-situwh-phrases (through Cable’s Q-theory), (b) the interpretation of pied-piped constituents using focus alternative computation(following Horvath, Krifka, Cable), and (c) Beck’s theory of Focus Intervention.Allyson Ettinger (New York University) Session 50Sophia A. Malamud (Brandeis University)Mandarin utterance-final particle ba in the conversational scoreboardWe present a corpus study of the Mandarin utterance-final particle ba in interaction with the utterances to which it attaches, whichcan be declarative or imperative. We adopt a conversational model that includes an enriched notion of the Table (a list ofconversational goals corresponding to QUDs). We articulate the Table into two distinct parts, the first part establishing the goals,and the second part proposing a single move to update the conversational scoreboard. Ba marks a move as targeting the first part.Our analysis unifies the treatment of a variety of speech acts, with consequences for the semantics-pragmatics interface.150