here - Linguistic Society of America

Dan Michel (University of California, San Diego) Session 37Individual on-line processing differences are not necessarily reflected in off-line acceptability judgmentsRecent debates concerning island phenomena being due to grammatical syntactic properties (Sprouse, Wagers and Philips2012a,b) or processing factors (Hofmeister, Staum Casasanto & Sag 2012a,b) have highlighted a need for a focused examinationinto the relationship between online processing data and offline acceptability judgment data. The current study compares onlineand offline results of whether-islands by high and low working memory span (WMS) participants. High WMS participants didprocess island violations more easily, but didn’t rate the same sentences differently than low WMS participants did, indicating therelationship between WMS and online processing is not straightforwardly reflected in acceptability judgments.Elena Mihas (James Cook University) Session 24Composite gesture-ideophone utterances in the Ashéninka Perené ‘community of practice’, an Amazonian Arawak society fromCentral-Eastern PeruBased on extensive fieldwork among Ashéninka Perené Arawaks, this study is a preliminary report on gesture-ideophoneutterances, with special focus on the meaning and functions of depictive-gesture-ideophone couplings. The collected video corpusshows that ideophones co-occur with depictive, pointing, emblematic, and interactive (beats) gestures. The data are alsoillustrative of Streeck’s (2009) vision of the hands’ involvement in meaning-making, i.e. that some of the ways in which depictivegestures evoke the world ascend from a basic set of everyday activities of hands in the world, within particular ecological andcultural settings.Serge Minor (University of Tromsø) Session 46Phi-features as complex indicesI propose that the index of any pronoun should be construed as a set consisting of the pronoun’s phi-features, and a numericvalue, which is assigned freely to all pronouns. All unbound pronouns and traces are uniformly interpreted by applying theassignment function to this complex index, and the semantic contribution of phi-features is incorporated into the definition of theassignment function. I argue that this approach has several advantages with respect to the interpretation of both bound and freepronouns, compared to the presuppositional treatment of phi-features proposed by Cooper (1983).Serge Minor (University of Tromsø) Session 17Natalia Mitrofanova (University of Tromsø)Low Locatives and the function of verbal prefixes in RussianWe argue for the existence of two types of Locative modifiers in Russian: High and Low. High Locatives modify the whole VP,and hence can only combine with stative verbs or non-statives, which do not involve spatial dislocation of the theme. LowLocatives, on the other hand, can be merged within the decomposed VP, modifying the Result State in a complex event structure.Hence they are compatible with change-of-state verbs involving dislocation. We then use Low Locatives to probe into the eventstructure of motion verbs, and the function of spatial verbal prefixes in Russian.Marianne Mithun (University of California, Santa Barbara) Session 96Contact among relatives: challenges and benefitsNot all language features are equally susceptible to contact effects. Transfer depends on bilinguals establishing equivalencesbetween elements of their languages, and morphology is notoriously inaccessible to speaker consciousness. It is also wherelanguages differ most. The most similar languages morphologically are related, which presents challenges: distinguishing contacteffects from common inheritance and drift. Here effects on complex morphology are examined in Tuscarora, whose speakersrejoined their Iroquoian relatives in the 18th century after centuries of independent development. Significant effects can beidentified, not only in vocabulary but also bound lexical and grammatical morphemes and their meanings, and grammaticaldevelopments.Susanne Mohr (University of Cologne) Session 16Anne-Maria Fehn (Humboldt University of Berlin)Phonology of hunting signs in two Kalahari Khoe-speaking groups (Ts’ixa and ||Ani)Only recently, the hunting signs of certain Kalahari Khoe-speaking groups in Southern Africa have come to scientific attention.Our preliminary linguistic analysis reveals that they present alternate sign systems similar to those described for Aboriginalcommunities in Australia, for example. The current paper presents a first phonological analysis of the hunting signs used among183