here - Linguistic Society of America

Sarah Ouwayda (University of Southern California) Session 8Oils and waters: on Lebanese Arabic mass-pluralsLebanese Arabic (LA) mass nouns can be ‘plural’ marked yet remain semantically non-plural. Based on novel LA Mass-Pluraldata, I argue that Mass-Plurals’ properties are best explained by treating this so-called ‘plural’ marking exclusively as a countmorpheme that entails countness/atomicity but not multi-atomicity. Other proposals—on Syrian Arabic and Greek Mass-Plurals—cannot explain all properties of LA Mass-Plurals. Specifically, I examine Acquaviva’s (2008) proposal that the masscountdistinction is non-binary and Mass-Plurals are intermediate cases; Tsoulas’s (2006) claim that the Mass-Plural ‘plural’-marking is semantically vacuous; and Alexiadou’s (2010) proposal that the marking is lexical and contributes exclusivelyidiosyncratic meaning.Olga Pahom (Texas Tech University) Session 46Does syntactic position determine adjective meaning? Evidence from RomanianThis paper argues that Cinque’s (2010) syntax-driven proposal of accounting for adjective meaning does not hold for Romanian.Evidence from four semantic distinctions (individual vs. stage level, restrictive vs. nonrestrictive, specificity-inducing vs. nonspecificity-inducing,and evaluative vs. epistemic) shows that Romanian adjectives do not pattern like their Italian counterparts.This challenges the assumption that different syntactic positions are associated with different semantic meanings in all Romancelanguages. In Romanian, inherent lexical properties and pragmatic context affect adjective meaning. The paper calls for a closerwork between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics to uncover the meaning of adjectives.Robert Painter (D’Youville College) Session 34Jeruen E. Dery (Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft)Alveolar [z] as a conditioner of R-Umlaut in North GermanicR-Umlaut in North Germanic is the fronting of back vowels before a segment represented by . However, 's phoneticvalue is currently unknown. Suggested values include (i) alveolar fricative [z]; (ii) postalveolar fricative [ʒ]; or (iii) rhoticapproximant [ɹ]. We conducted an acoustic experiment investigating the 'fronting' effect of these segments on formants of apreceding /u/. Our findings support the hypothesis that [z] can condition R-Umlaut, suggesting that had not undergonerhotacism by the time that the umlaut was an active sound change. The Runic distinction between and is thus anopposition between */z/ and */r/.Bożena Pająk (University of Rochester) Session 31Roger Levy (University of California, San Diego)Distributional learning of non-native phonetic categories: the role of talker variabilityDistributional learning guides the acquisition of phonetic categories, both native and non-native, but its underlying mechanismsare still relatively poorly understood. In this study we investigated the role of talker variability in the adults’ ability to extractdistributional cues from a non-native speech signal. Previous work suggested that talker variability might interfere with learners’ability to learn from distributional cues. Here we show that – while talker variability seems to add to the complexity of trackingsound statistics – adults not only learn from distributional cues in a multi-talker setting, but they also robustly generalize to anovel speaker and novel segments.Brigitte Pakendorf (Université de Lyon) Session 48Evaluative suffixes and definiteness in ĖvenĖven is a dialectally fragmented Tungusic language spoken in northeastern Siberia that has an extensive complement ofevaluative suffixes. As will be shown in this paper, among others there exist pairs of diminutive and augmentative suffixes,respectively, which make a distinction in referential status: One member of each pair is used with both specific and unspecificindefinites, while the other occurs with anaphorically, associatively, and situationally identifiable referents. They thus appear verysimilar to English indefinite and definite articles, with the exception that they are optional, their use being restricted by theirprimary semantics of size description.Enrique L. Palancar (SeDyL-CELIA/CNRS/Surrey Morphology Group) Session 103Revisiting the conditioning and distribution of the subject suffixes in Lealao ChinantecLealao Chinantec (LeCh) is Chinantecan language of the Oto-Manguean phylum of Mexico. Like other Chinantecan languages,the verbs of LeCh fall into many different inflectional classes for the purpose of encoding subject and TAM values, but whatmakes LeCh remarkable with respect to other Chinantecan languages is that its verbs must also simultaneously belong to one of191