here - Linguistic Society of America

Erich Fox Tree (Hamilton College) Session 104Julia Gómez Ixmatá (K'iche'-Maya Pueblo de Nahuala, Guatemala)Absence of color terms in an indigenous sign language dialect of GuatemalaThe autochthonous sign language dialect of Nahualá, a K’ichee’-Maya community in Guatemala, lacks “basic color terms,”relying instead on a deixical shifter meaning, “this color.” The system depends on two pragmatic understandings: (1) that contextoffers a diverse palette of indexable colors, and (2) that such visual phenomena must be co-acknowledged by interlocutors. Thesign dialect, which belongs to an ancient language complex Mayas call Meemul Tziij (Fox Tree 2009), challenges the universalperceptual realities and evolutionary schemas for color categories asserted by linguists since Berlin and Kay (1969), in favor ofmore context-sensitive (Green 2011) linguistic models.Puktada Treeratpituk (Pennsylvania State University) Session 63C. Lee Giles (Pennsylvania State University)Name-ethnicity classification and ethnicity-sensitive name matchingPersonal names are often used as queries for retrieving records and linking documents from multiple sources. Matching personalnames can be challenging due to variations in spelling and formatting of names. Furthermore, personal names are highly cultural.In this paper we explore relationships between ethnicities and personal names. First, we propose a name-ethnicity classifier basedon the multinomial logistic regression. Next, we propose a novel alignment-based name matching algorithm, based on Smith–Waterman algorithm and logistic regression. Different name matching models are then trained for different name-ethnicitygroups. Surprisingly, textual features carry more weight than phonetic ones in name-ethnicity classification.Alex Trueman (University of Arizona) Session 102Lexical verb compounds in HiakiIn this paper I document and describe some properties of compound verbs in Hiaki, and ask the following question: What is theunderlying structure of a Hiaki compound verb? In particular, what is the structure when the head verb is intransitive (and thuscannot take the second verb or verb phrase as its complement)? I focus on compound structures in which the head verb is anintransitive motion verb, and provide evidence that these constructions are biclausal, despite containing only a single Tense node,and that the subordinate verb and its arguments, are a phrasal modifier to the head verb.Cheng-Yu Edwin Tsai (Harvard University) Session 25Generic dou in Chinese: a cleft analysisGeneric dou-sentences in Mandarin behave differently from other, more frequently discussed dou-constructions in requiring an‘adjunct’ to the right of dou. With evidence from syntactic distribution and focus-related interpretations, I argue that (i) dou is amorphologically complex operator analogous to always, and (ii) the obligatory ‘adjunct’ is a clefted/focused NP semanticallycorresponding to the Scope of dou, whereas the apparent matrix predicate is a cleft/relative clause modifying the NP andcorresponding to the Restriction. This cleft analysis invites a novel view on the argument structure of dou and echoes Cheng’s(2009) proposal which treats dou as a definite determiner.Matthew A. Tucker (University of California, Santa Cruz) Session 17On the heterogeneity of clitic derivations: evidence from MalteseThis poster presents data from Maltese showing that the language allows both dative and accusative verbal enclitics withditransitives. It also shows with data from word order, variable binding, and passivization that the language lacks double-object orapplicative syntax for many ditransitives. It presents the argument that these data support a theory of cliticization wherein someclitics (the accusatives) require agreement with the verb for cliticization to obtain, whereas other clitics (the datives) may cliticizewithout a preceding agreement relation. This correctly predicts the previously observed absence of accusative clitics with passiveverbs in Maltese, among other properties.Rory Turnbull (The Ohio State University) Session 49Paul Marty (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)Peter Graff (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)Complementary covariation in acoustic cues to place of articulationStudies have shown that speakers communicate efficiently by avoiding peaks and troughs in information density in languageproduction. We report on a corpus study of the production of American English voiceless stops in post-vocalic word-final211