here - Linguistic Society of America

John J. Lowe (University of Oxford) Session 3The English possessive: clitic and affixThe synchronic status of the English possessive marker ’s is controversial since it displays both clitic and affixal properties. Iargue that purely affixal or clitic analyses prove inadequate simply because synchronically the English possessive is both. Thisposes a challenge to a formal syntactic analysis; I address this by adapting and constraining Wescoat’s ‘Lexical Sharing’ model ofLexical-Functional Grammar, in which lexical forms are separated from syntactic representations, allowing single lexical items tomap to two distinct phrase-structure positions. This approach also contributes to the modelling of (de)grammaticalization,capturing the synchronic variation caused by gradual or incomplete diachronic changes.Tatiana Luchkina (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) Session 17Clause-internal phrasal scrambling in Russian: processing and acoustic parameterizationThis study examines the relative processing accessibility of acoustically emphasized in- and ex-situ focused discourse constituentsand provides a parameterized description of the fundamental frequency contours of canonical SVO and non-canonical OVS wordorders in Russian, a language known for extensive use of scrambling. Results of a cross-modal probe recognition task followed byacoustic analysis of the task stimuli provide evidence for the internal acoustic consistency of word order configurations, as well asa complementary relationship between acoustic prominence and constituent dislocation in Russian, evident from the selectiveapplication of acoustic cues to prominence by the native speakers.John S. Lumsden (Université du Québec à Montréal) Session 85Tonjes Veenstra (Zentrum fur Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft)On the VP‐shell parameter of verb insertionLumsden and Veenstra (2012) combine the Action Tier/Thematic Tier account of verbal semantics with the VP‐shell hypothesis,arguing that languages with serial‐verb constructions insert phonological verb forms in the Action V 0 , while other languagesinsert verb forms in the Thematic V 0 . We argue here that this hypothesis offers insight into various constructions that aretypical of serializing languages. For example, it explains why the verb ‘to be’ is typically not pronounced in these languages, itexplains the punctual interpretation of verb-doubling constructions and it explains the dynamic interpretation of predicate cleftconstructions etc.Gretchen Lutz (North American College) Session 73What’s in a name? Finding identity in James Welch’s Native American novel, Fools CrowIn James Welch’s Native American bildungsroman, Fools Crow, when the reader meets the protagonist, she is struck by his name,White Man’s Dog, a name that sounds foreign and uncomplimentary. Not until well into the book does the reader learn thePikuni customs of naming. By establishing the mystery of the meaning of names does Welch send us to puzzle out the featuresand meanings of the novel’s culture.Tao Ma (Shanghai Sanda University) Session 66A comparative-corpus approach to patterns in the mapping and compounding process of body-part names in English and ChineseThis study is to compare naming differences in the lexical set of body-parts between Chinese and English. It is assumed that thereare two processes in metaphoric naming: domain mapping and lexical compounding. Besides socio-cultural constraints, it isproposed here that the contradiction between encyclopedic knowledge and linguistic knowledge underlies the variation betweenChinese and English in naming similar concepts. Two methods are used here to find patterns in variation: a comparativeetymologicalstudy on naming of body parts and a corpus study on naming by body parts so as to explain naming variationsbetween the two linguistic systems.Laurel MacKenzie (University of Manchester) Session 5Meredith Tamminga (University of Pennsylvania)Two case studies on the non-local conditioning of variationThis paper addresses the representation of variable phenomena in the linguistic systems of individual speakers. We present resultsfrom two case studies: one examining the effect of NP heaviness on English auxiliary contraction; the second on the effect ofpersistence on (TD) and (ING). We argue that heaviness and persistence, unlike the phonological and morphological factors thatalso condition these variables, are best interpreted as extra-grammatical, as they operate outside a grammatically local domain.179