here - Linguistic Society of America

John Foreman (University of Texas at Brownsville) Session 97Brook Danielle Lillehaugen (Haverford College)The morphosyntax of positional verbs in ZapotecZapotecan languages (Otomanguean; Oaxaca, Mexico) have a class of positional verbs, whose exact number, forms, andmeanings vary by language. While the verbs have core locative meanings, semantic criteria are insufficient for determining classmembership. We survey the languages, identifying formal features defining pan-Zapotec positional verbs. They differ from otherlocational verbs in heading locative, existential, and possessive 'have' clauses, having unprefixed stative/neutral forms, and havingrelated 'put'-type causatives. These criteria indicate potentially surprising adjustments to the class, with verbs like 'live/reside'added to it. Additionally, we explore how different languages have reconfigured the class, while preserving these centralproperties.David Frank (SIL International) Session 83Discourse analysis of Guinea-Bissau Portuguese Creole textsThis paper analyzes Guinea-Bissau Portuguese Kriol narrative and procedural connected discourse in terms of structure,prominence, cohesion and focus. Aspects of discourse analyzed include the use of pronouns and definite vs. indefinite referencein tracking participants in a text; lexical, phonological and grammatical signals of the logical structure of the text; tense, moodand aspect in relation to foreground vs. background information; and a survey of syntactic constructions in a text and an analysisof the discourse function attributable to those different types of constructions, including for the purposes of theme and focus.Aaron Freeman (University of Pennsylvania) Session 34Coronality in historical perspective: the case of Arabic ğThis presentation considers the interaction between Arabic definite article assimilation to coronals and the realization of ğ acrossdialects. We found three contrasting variants of the assimilation rule: (1) coronal ğ does not trigger assimilation, (2) coronal ğtriggers assimilation, and (3) velar g < ğ optionally triggers assimilation. Geographical and historical evidence indicates that (1)and (2) coexisted from an early stage of the language, while (3) arose in Egyptian from velarization of ğ. We propose thephonological markedness of (1) as crucial to the spreadof(2),andattributethepreservation of (1) in part to diglossic prestige.Melinda Fricke (University of California, Berkeley) Session 22Keith Johnson (University of California, Berkeley)Development of coarticulatory patterns in spontaneous speechWhile previous studies have focused on carefully controlled laboratory speech, this study compares fricative-vowel roundingcoarticulation in adults’ and toddlers’ spontaneous speech. We analyzed the spectra of /s/ when it occurred either before or afterfront vs. rounded vowels. For adults, we found clear evidence of anticipatory rounding coarticulation, as well as some transitoryperseverative coarticulation. For children, there was no obvious rounding coarticulation, but rather palatalization of /s/ in frontvowel contexts, especially in the perseverative direction. Compared to child speech, adult spontaneous speech thus exhibits lessmechanical linkage of articulators, and more anticipatory inter-articulator coordination.Valerie Fridland (University of Nevada, Reno) Session 42Tyler Kendall (University of Oregon)Low vowel shifts and mergers in U.S. EnglishLabov, Ash and Boberg (2006) note that various realizations of the low-front vowel /æ/ and presence or absence of the low-backvowel merger are pivotal in defining the dialects of U.S. English. Our paper examines cross-regional variation in these vowelsboth in vowel production and perception. Drawing on production and perception data from the same participants in fieldsitesacross the North, South and West, we ask: (1) what types of variation exist within each region acoustically and (2) do theproduction differences translate into similar differences in how these vowel classes are perceived by listeners in each of theseregions.Daniel Friend (Brigham Young University) Session 63The Ashley Pattern: female appropriation of historically male namesLinguistic literature has long observed a trend in English that names once given exclusively to males evolve into unisex namesand, eventually, names given only to females. This study utilizes the Social Security data stored in the nametrends.net database toanalyze the history of over two hundred and forty names ending in the phoneme /i/, commenting upon the trends observed from153