here - Linguistic Society of America

Mark A. Sicoli (Georgetown University) Session 92Gary Holton (University of Alaska Fairbanks)Methods and questions in applying computational phylogenetics to Na-DeneWhile the Na-Dene language family has long been recognized as a distinct stock among Native American languages, details ofthe internal relationships of the family have remained puzzling. Athabascan in particular has been notably resistant to reckoningcoherent sub-groupings through the traditional comparative method and has been claimed to have a relatively shallow time-depth,while other factors including sub-arctic archaeology and the proposed Siberian connection to Yeniseian suggest a greaterantiquity. In this talk we describe two computational phylogenetic methods that we applied to large typological and lexicaldatabases and present our results.Jonathan Silverman (University of Massachusetts Lowell) Session 68Tom Henthorne (Pace University)The Big Bang, String Theory, and the God Particle: naming, branding, and the marketing of scienceThis paper traces how, in recent years the scientific community has come to brand research programs so as to better compete forfinancial resources and other support. We will consider three particular scientific brands in detail – the Big Bang, String Theory,and the God Particle – discussing how the brands were established and promulgated not only by researchers but by governments,corporations, universities, religious institutions, and even the entertainment industry.Michael Silverstein (University of Chicago) Session 77The Hermes of Cambridge linguistics: Jakobson regnantRoman Jakobson arrived in Cambridge in 1949, after three years teaching Czech at Columbia. He brought Moscow Schoolpoetics and Prague School “functionalist structuralism” to America, setting out a distinctive, linguistics-and-philology-friendlymodel in Cambridge that persists today. As go-between and translator for some of the greatest figures of the Harvard-MITintelligentsia, he revitalized European linguistic and philosophical thought in the American context, insistently insertinglinguistics into the conversation and fostering centrality for a field once nothing more than “comparative philology” of the mostmarginal sort at Harvard. Linguistics flourished on the Charles River, in both its upriver Harvard and its downriver MIT style,with Jakobson as ringmaster of the two-ringed circus.Mandy Simons (Carnegie Mellon University) Session 17Karin Howe (Binghamton University)An investigation of scalars in the antecedents of conditionalsThis experiment compares the interpretation of conditionals whose antecedents contain scalar items with the interpretation ofunembedded clauses containing scalars. Participants in the experiment were asked for judgments about the interpretations ofsentences, while a think-aloud protocol was used to investigate their reasoning about plausible interpretations. Our results showcontextual effects on strengthening in antecedents which differ from those seen in unembedded cases. In addition, the think-aloudportion suggests that participants carry out strengthening in the unembedded case with familiar Gricean reasoning, but in theembedded case, reason instead about the real-world consequences of alternative situations.Andrea D. Sims (The Ohio State University) Session 48Structural attraction effects in case-marking languages: the role of inflectional structureIn case-marking languages, structural attraction (local rather than structural agreement) increases when a (non-nominative) localnoun looks like nominative (Hartsuiker et al. 2001, Nicol and Wilson 2000). However, it is unclear whether the identity effectstems from shallow processing of the local noun's form or deeper processing of its inflectional feature structure. This paper usesCroatian to tease apart these issues. Naturally-occurring examples and production and ratings tasks suggest that attraction inCroatian is sensitive to the systematicity with which the local noun’s case is syncretic with nominative -- a deep fact aboutinflectional organization. This contrasts with general assumption.Tanya Slavin (McGill University) Session 88Possessive noun incorporation in OjicreeOjicree (a dialect of Ojibwe, an Algonquian language) has two different possessive constructions that require the incorporation ofthe possessed noun into the verb stem. In this paper I compare the morphosyntax and semantics of these constructions arguingthat the main difference between them is semantic: one of them asserts possession while the other one presupposes it. This paper204