here - Linguistic Society of America

Elizabeth Krawczyk (Georgetown University) Session 46Inference, source, and evidentialsEvidentials are usually categorized as the grammaticalized expression of a speaker’s evidence source type for a proposition. Forsome inferential evidentials, there are scenarios where we find this evidential infelicitous, although the type of source (evidence)appears to be the correct one given by its description. To uncover the root of this infelicity, I take a closer look at the type ofinference that inferential evidentials can express. This analysis can be shown to extend to all types of evidentials, not justinferential, which provides new insight into how evidentials form a natural semantic class.Bonnie Krejci (Stanford University) Session 14Antireflexivization as a causativization strategyTwo classes of verbs, middles and ingestives, display unexpected causativization behavior crosslinguistically. This behavior isexplained by an analysis wherein the causativization process delinks two coidentified arguments rather than adding a causer. Ipropose a unified analysis of middles and ingestives wherein the base forms are lexically reflexive with bieventive, causativeevent structures. I demonstrate the viability of this analysis with an account of the lexical entailments of English middles andingestives, suggesting that the lexical and periphrastic causatives are derived differently. This proposal mirrors recent work byKoontz-Garboden (2009), who analyses the anticausativization operation as a kind of reflexivization.William A. Kretzschmar, Jr. (University of Georgia/University of Oulu) Session 56Ilkka Juuso (University of Oulu)C. Thomas Bailey (University of Georgia)Computer simulation of dialect feature diffusionComputer simulation is the only practical way to model diffusion. This paper describes the use of cellular automata to modeldialect feature diffusion as the adaptive aspect of the complex system of speech. Throughout hundreds of iterations thatcorrespond to the daily interaction of speakers across time, we can watch regional distributional patterns emerge as a consequenceof simple update rules. The key feature of our simulations is validation with respect to distributions known to occur in surveydata. Our successful simulation confirms our complex systems approach, and also suggests how we can simulate features amongdifferent social groups.Paul Kroeber (Indiana University) Session 102Case marking of possessed and unpossessed nominals in Hanis CoosHanis Coos (Oregon coast, possibly Penutian -- extinct but attested in texts and a grammar) has both prepositionlike proclitics andpostpositionlike enclitics. Possession is marked by a paradigm of pronominal proclitics. Surprisingly, the possessive procliticscooccur with the prepositionlike oblique markers, but not with the postpositionlike markers. Locative, directional, andinstrumental enclitics are replaced by proclitic n= when the oblique noun is possessed, neutralizing the opposition among theenclitics. Possessive constructions also reveal differences in the syntactic position of prepositions.Jianjing Kuang (University of California, Los Angeles) Session 17Phonation effects on tonal contrastsMulti-level contrasts are typologically dispreferred because they violate both dispersion principles: maximize auditory distancebut minimize articulatory efforts. This study investigates the tonal spaces of multi-level tones by exploring the cues used inproducing and perceiving the five level tones of Black Miao. Both production and perception experiments show that these fivelevel tones are well dispersed due to the significant contribution of non-modal phonation cues. Non-modal phonations play tworoles to the dispersion of the five level tones: either enhance pitch contrasts or provide an additional contrastive dimension.Victor Kuperman (McMaster University) Session 17Olga Piskunova (McMaster University)Affective and sensory structure of the poetic lineRecent computational-linguistic analyses explored the affective impact of texts on readers. We complement this inquiry byexamining the distribution of emotional and sensory information, based on subjective ratings, in lines of poetic texts.Correlational analyses of 222 English poems demonstrate consistent affective patterns within lines created via nonrandom wordchoice. The tendency is to use attention-capturing (more negative, more arousing and more tangible) words towards the end of the172