here - Linguistic Society of America

E-Ching Ng (Yale University) Session 34Paragoge as an indicator of language contactParagoge is vanishingly rare synchronically, diachronically and in child acquisition. However, it is robustly attested in secondlanguage acquisition, loanword adaptation and creolization. Occasional cases of diachronic paragoge in Romance, SouthDravidian and Austronesian are also associated with heavy language contact. One possible reason for this asymmetry is thatadults are more efficient self-monitors than children, and may prefer to preserve material that is difficult to pronounce instead ofdeleting it. It is also possible that paragoge is not a natural repair in L1 acquisition because children do not always find codaseasier to produce than onsets.E-Ching Ng (Yale University) Session 81When language contact doesn’t favor paragogeParagoge (word-final epenthesis) is robustly attested in most types of language contact: second language acquisition, loanwordphonology and English creoles. However, it is said to be missing from French lexifier creoles, although French has stronglyreleased codas that should lend themselves to paragoge. I consider the possibility that paragoge in English creoles occurred whenEnglish native speakers perceived interlanguage strong coda releases as paragoge and repeated it in their foreigner talk, whereasFrench speakers would not have done so. This suggests that such feedback loops may have a greater role in contact-inducedchange than previously suspected.Chieu Nguyen (University of Chicago) Session 25Left dislocation in Vietnamese universal quantification and contrastive focusThe Vietnamese wh-universal quantification and contrastive focus constructions employ left-dislocated syntactic structure, pairinga preposed licensed phrase with an apparent preverbal licensor (cũng and mới, respectively), but exhibit non-adjacency andmultiple-constituent licensing properties absent from similar constructions in languages such as Japanese. These propertiesinstead show a syntactic parallel to Clitic Left Dislocation in Romance and Greek, allowing a licensee to be generated in the leftperiphery. The peculiarities of the Vietnamese constructions can be handled by analyzing the apparent licensor as a pronoundistinct from the licensing operator, which remains unpronounced and generated adjacent to its associated licensee.Mark Norris (University of California, Santa Cruz) Session 48Case matching in Estonian (pseudo)partitivesThis paper investigates case matching in partitive-marked pseudopartitive constructions (PCs) in Estonian. When the measure isnominative or accusative, the substance is partitive (case); otherwise, they match in case. I argue that the substance in partitivemarkedPCs is smaller than DP, in contrast to the elative-marked PC. I treat partitive as a dependent case (Marantz 1992),assigned to the lower one of two caseless nominals in a single DP. It only emerges when the full DP is assigned nominative oraccusative; they are assigned too late to affect DP-internal case assignment. Other cases are assigned earlier and thus bleedpartitive case assignment.Jessamy Norton-Ford (University of California, Irvine) Session 37Jon Sprouse (University of California, Irvine)Dynamic spectral correlates of (morpho-)syntactic processingEEG-based sentence-processing techniques commonly average event-related data, revealing dynamic amplitude changes that aretime-locked and phase-locked to a stimulus. Such techniques identify ERPs that reliably follow myriad syntactic/semanticconditions, whose functional significance is obfuscated by a many-to-one relationship. This study examines dynamic spectral(frequency) activity (time-locked, not phase-locked) following theoretically disparate conditions that evoke similar ERPs:agreement, Case and Theta violations, and grammatical wh-dependencies. Initial results show late posterior decreases in betaactivity following violations and gaps and earlier increases in beta following fillers, which indicates participation of beta in(morpho-)syntactic processing but leaves the ``many-to-one” problem unresolved.Rama Novogrodsky (Boston University) Session 16Sarah Fish (Boston University)Robert Hoffmeister (Boston University)The development of semantic and phonological knowledge of native signers of American Sign Language (ASL)In word recognition tasks, hearing children show a shift from phonological to semantic errors with age. This study explored thisphenomenon in Deaf children of Deaf parents (DCDP). 250 DCDP aged 4;0-18;0 were tested on a receptive test of ASL186