here - Linguistic Society of America

Andrew McKenzie (University of Kansas) Session 98A new survey of switch-reference in North AmericaIn this paper, I present a new typological survey of switch-reference (SR) in North America. The survey reflects developments inSR research since Jacobsen¹s (1983) survey. The talk introduces these developments through its emphasis of the categories andlanguages that Jacobsen did not discuss, notably non-canonical SR marking, the use of SR with auxiliaries and quantifiers, andhomophony between SR markers and other categories. In addition, I argue that such homophony is not significant forunderstanding the meaning of SR; instead, it is the result of exapting existing markers after SR was borrowed through arealdiffusion.Katherine McKinney-Bock (University of Southern California) Session 34Elsi Kaiser (University of Southern California)Using visual world eye-tracking to investigate semantic differences between adjectivesAdjectives appear in attributive (the big/yellow bee) and predicative positions (the bee is big/yellow). Using eye-tracking, weprovide novel psycholinguistic evidence of incremental semantic differences with the use of a comparison class betweenattributive/predicative dimension adjectives, but not color adjectives. Results show participants used contrasting objects todisambiguate targets when only the adjective has been heard, earlier than patterns found in the literature, with attributivedimension adjectives but not color adjectives or predicative dimension adjectives. This reveals a fine-grained sensitivity toadjectives’ semantic properties: the comparisonBrittany McLaughlin (University of Pennsylvania) Session 51Animacy effects on verbal -s variation and copula deletion in African American Vernacular EnglishI investigate conditioning on variability in AAVE 3SG-s and copula deletion. The former has been attributed to hypercorrection(Labov et al. 1968) or aspect (Moody 2011), while the latter has been linked to contraction (Labov 1969) or creole history(Rickford 1991). 1000 null and overt tokens of each variable from 155 AAVE speakers from the Frank Porter Graham Corpuswere coded for subject animacy/concreteness. Mixed effects regression models show significant and large effects:animate/concrete subjects predict the null forms, inanimate/non-concrete subjects predict the overt. This holds for bothpronominal and non-pronominal subjects, which has implications for AAVE roots and grammar.John McLaughlin (Utah State University) Session 93Central Numic innovations in dual number markingDavid J. Medeiros (University of Michigan) Session 4A cyclic linearization approach to VP-remnant formation in Niuean and HawaiianNiuean and Hawaiian have similar word order patterns, despite differing with respect to case marking, ergative/absolutive forNiuean and nominative/accusative for Hawaiian. I extend Massam's (2001) VP-remnant movement analysis of Niuean toHawaiian, but argue that Massam's case-based explanation of VP-remnant formation (prior to VP-movement) fails to predict arange of data, particularly since case marking is a major locus of variation between the two languages; an additional longstandingproblem involves CP complements, which also must vacate VP. The proposed analysis unifies the two grammars within a 'shapeconservation' analysis of VP-remnant formation, formalized in terms of cyclic linearization.Rodrigo Romero Mendez (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) Session 91The grammaticalization of the past tense in Mixe languagesMixe-Zoque languages, spoken in Southern Mexico, are usually considered to be tenseless, they only mark aspect. However,some Mixe languages have an innovative characteristic: they have developed past tense. This characteristic has been recognizedin only a few publications but it has not been explained how this happened. This paper deals with the development of the pasttense particle from a particular motion construction. The development of tense is also related to the shift of marking temporalityfrom aspect suffixes to particles.182