here - Linguistic Society of America

Arthur K. Spears (City University of New York) Session 80An African American English (AAE) orthographyTalk of an AAE orthography necessarily requires not just a discussion of the orthography itself but also a review of extralinguisticissues. Among the most important of them are educational issues, especially in view of disturbingly low literacy rates amongAfrican American pupils overall. I first review the proposed orthography, concentrating on purely orthographical questions. ThenI review some of the more important sociopolitical issues related to an AAE orthography.Justin Spence (University of California, Berkeley) Session 92A computational phylogenetic appraisal of Pacific Coast AthabaskanThis study explores the historical status of Pacific Coast Athabaskan (PCA) as a sub-family of Athabaskan using Bayesianphylogenetic modeling, drawing on lexical and phonological characters. Results suggest that PCA has no more than geographicalsignificance, supporting a theory whereby Athabaskan languages arrived in California and Oregon in at least two distinctmigrations. Surprisingly, there is only weak support even for California Athabaskan as a clade unto itself. This is probably due tothe high degree of lexical replacement in those languages, and suggests that non-lexical characters may be more reliable as inputfor computational models of linguistic phylogenies.Susan Steele (Pacific Grove, CA) Session 102Word architectureKroeber and Grace 1960 bifurcate Luiseño words into two types – ‘verbs’ and ‘nonverbs’ – based on their final morph. In thefirst, the final morph indicates a temporal location (e.g. naachaxan-qu$ ‘was eating’); in the second, the final morph indicatescase or number (e.g. hunwut-um ‘bears’ or hunwut-i ‘bear (obj)’). The second type has two major subtypes, one lackingtemporality entirely (as in the previous examples) and the other with ‘internal’ temporality (e.g. naachaxan-qat-um ‘is eating (pl)’or naachaxan-qat-i ‘is eating (obj)’). This paper offers an analysis that captures the similarities and differences among these threeword types while giving none primacy. Specific to Luiseño in its details, the approach is, however, scalable. The theoreticalinterest of the approach proposed here rests in the explicit interplay between the notional aspect and the syntactic aspect ofinflection.B. Devan Steiner (Ithaca College/Indiana University) Session 34Information Structure and the loss of verb second in FrenchRecent work suggests that, in addition to interacting with synchronic syntax, Information Structure (IS) can influence syntacticchange. This study uses a new, annotated corpus to examine the role of IS in the loss of verb second (V2) in French. The resultssuggest that (i) the IS of Old French is similar to that of modern V2 languages; (ii) IS conditions the structure of V>2 clauses; and(iii) the preference for Frame-Setting Topic Verb Focus order increases over time. It appears there was an ordered, methodicalbuild-up to reanalysis. Furthermore, IS plays a more complex role diachronically than previously understood.Jon Stevens (University of Pennsylvania) Session 34Separating Givenness from Focus: arguments from English de-accenting and German scramblingPrevious work has proposed to unify the information-structural notions of Focus and Givenness. I present data from English andGerman that suggest the existence of Givenness as a syntactic feature independent from Focus. Contra recent proposals, I showthat Givenness-based de-accenting in English is syntactically constrained in a way that contrastive and wh-question Focus arenot—Givenness cannot shift accent onto an adjunct. This is explained by the projection behavior of a syntactic Givenness feature.This same projection behavior also correctly predicts a particular kind of limitation on scrambling possibilities which is borne outin German.Megan Schildmier Stone (University of Arizona) Session 91Investigating tense and aspect in result nominals: the case of CherokeeThis paper presents evidence from Cherokee (Iroquoian, Southern Iroquoian) which refutes accounts of the distinction betweenprocess and result nominals based on the presence or absence of AspectP in the nominal’s functional structure. I argue thatCherokee has result nominals which contain aspect morphology, directly contradicting the proposal of Alexiadou (2001) that suchnominals must lack an AspectP. Because all deverbal nominals in Cherokee conform to the same syntactic pattern, necessarilyincluding AspectP but excluding TP, I suggest that a semantic mechanism is likely necessary to account for the syntactic andsemantic differences between result and process nominals.206