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thus furthers our understanding of the Algonquian verbal syntax on the one hand, and contributes to the literature on the syntaxand semantics of possession, on the other.Peter Slomanson (Radboud University Nijmegen) Session 84New information structuring processes as morphosyntactic conversion triggersLearners can initiate permanent changes in contact language morphosyntax through changes in information structuring. Inbilingual speech communities with many adult acquirers of one of the community's languages, the development of new functionalcontrasts in the target L2, as well as their adoption by L1 speakers are processes likely to follow from pragmatic transfer. I showhow a finiteness contrast is a morphosyntactic contrast that can be motivated by this type of transfer. In Sri Lankan Malay (SLM),predicate focusing in sentences containing temporal sequences is a plausible trigger for the development of (non-)finitenessmorphology.E. Allyn Smith (University of Quebec at Montreal) Session 50Laia Mayol (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)Elena Castroviejo-Miró (Spanish National Research Council: CCHS-CSIC)Felicity of direct denial by meaning type in EnglishPresuppositions, Conventional Implicatures, 'not-at-issue' meanings and meanings explicitly relativized to the speaker are allthought to be infelicitous with direct denial, here defined as the ability to say No,... in response to a statement. We reportexperimental results from testing the direct deniability of all of these meaning types and some subtypes thereof. We show that thetype of direct denial (No,... vs. No that's not true... and No, [not x] vs. No, [alternative to x]) interacts with meaning type and thatthe heterogeneity of categories such as Conventional Implicature leads to heterogeneity in felicity ratings, also discussingtheoretical implications.Daeyoung Sohn (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Session 17Absence of reconstruction effects and successive-cyclic scramblingWhile scrambling usually shows reconstruction effects, there are cases where reconstruction is blocked (e.g., the scrambling of anNPI across a wh-phrase in Korean (Beck and Kim 1997)). I show that the lack of the reconstruction effects in such cases followsif we assume (i) that scrambling proceeds successive-cyclically through the edge of vP, (ii) that NPIs in Korean have to scopeover negation (Kim and Sells 2007), and (iii) that total reconstruction is the property of PF-movement whereas the lack of it isthat of stem movement (Sauerland and Elbourne 2002).Stephanie Solt (Zentrum für allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft) Session 50Chris Cummins (Universität Bielefeld)Marijan Palmović (University of Zagreb)The preference for roundingVarious evidence points to a speaker preference for communicating numerical information approximately rather than precisely,e.g. by reporting the time as ‘half past three’ when one’s watch reads 3:27. It has been proposed that the tendency to roundreflects a strategy aimed at lowering processing costs for the hearer. Focusing on the domain of clock times, we report on twoexperiments which demonstrate that round values are in fact recalled and manipulated more quickly and accurately than nonroundvalues, and further that this advantage is due not only to numerical roundness itself, but also to participation on a coarsegrainedscale.Usama Soltan (Middlebury College) Session 25On the syntax of exceptive constructions in Egyptian ArabicThe goal of this paper is to discuss the syntax of exceptive constructions in Egyptian Arabic (EA), particularly those headed bythe particle ʔillaa (= ‘except, but’). More specifically, I discuss the environments in which ʔillaa occurs and the conditionsregulating its distribution. I also provide evidence that ʔillaa cannot be a preposition or a focal adverb. Rather, the syntacticproperties of exceptive constructions in EA indicate that ʔillaa is a conjunction particle whose second conjunct is a CP thatundergoes ellipsis, along the lines suggested in the relevant literature for English and Spanish exceptive constructions.205