here - Linguistic Society of America

Charles Yang (University of Pennsylvania) Session 27Anton Karl Ingason (University of Pennsylvania)The evolutionary trajectory of the Icelandic new impersonal passiveA new construction has emerged in Icelandic that bears passive morphology and exhibits certain syntactic behaviors of a passive.This construction is the functional equivalent of the canonical passive construction, and has been gradually replaced the latter inrecent generations of native speakers. Using the variational model of learning and change (Yang 2002), we can assess the“fitness” values of these grammatical variants from corpus data (Wallenberg et al. 2011) and determine the time course of change.The model correctly predicts the current acceptance level of the new construction in the population (Thrainsson et al. 2010) andpoints to its inevitable completion of change in the near future.Kazuko Yatsushiro (Harvard University/Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft) Session 17Uli Sauerland (Harvard University/Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft)Remind-me readings: evidence for question act decompositionOur talk concerns remind-me readings of questions like (1) "What is your name again?" The particle "again" forces (1) topresuppose that I once knew the answer to (1). We relate two properties of remind-me question markers in German and Japanese:German "nochmal" is question medial and cannot trigger remind-me readings with yes/no questions. Japanese "-kke" is sentencefinal and works also with yes/no questions. Proposal: Question acts decompose into an imperative ("I want you to ...") plus anquestion-specific part ("... make us know ...") (Sauerland 2009). Our decomposition offers direct evidence for Searle's (1975)classification of questions as directives.Yuri Yerastov (Kutztown University of Pennsylvania) Session 57Transitive be perfect in North America: a comparative corpus studyIn Canadian English, as well as some dialects of American English, there occurs a transitive be perfect construction, limited tothree participles only, e.g. I’m done dinner, I’m finished my homework, I’m started this project. This paper tracks the geographicaldistribution of the construction in Canada and the US through a comparative corpus study of North American news media. Theresults show that the done dinner construction is widespread in Canadian English, and marginal in American English, and that itis distributed proportionate to population size across Canada.Alan C. L. Yu (University of Chicago) Session 22Ian Calloway (University of Chicago)Coarticulation is mediated by “autistic traits” in neurotypicalsRecent studies have shown that speech processing is mediated by “autistic traits”, as measured by the Autism Spectrum Quotient(AQ), in neurotypicals. That is, cognitive processing styles that are associated with skills such as communication, socialinteraction, attention-switching, and empathy, affect the way lexical and coarticulatory information is perceived by humanlisteners (Stewart & Ota, 2008; Yu, 2010; Yu et al., 2011). Do such individual differences also mediate the way one speaks? Thispaper reports an acoustic study which shows that the effects of vocalic coarticulation on sibilant production in Hong KongCantonese are mediated by subjects' “autistic traits”.Suyeon Yun (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Session 34Phonetic grammar of compensatory lengthening: a case study from FarsiThis study investigates a scalar nature of compensatory lengthening, which has traditionally been treated as a categoricalphenomenon (Hayes 1989, Kavitskaya 2002, Yun 2010). The present production study of Tehrani Farsi shows that compensatorylengthening in Farsi takes place in a systematically gradient fashion, and this gradient occurrence of compensatory lengtheningserves as evidence that speakers’ knowledge of duration preservation is active in synchronic grammar (cf. Hayes and Steriade2004), not originating from “innocent misapprehension” (Ohala 1981, Blevins 2004).Georgia Zellou (University of Pennsylvania) Session 38Similarity avoidance at the phonetics-phonology interface: Moroccan Arabic pharyngeals and nasalsAcoustic and articulatory studies reveal that nasality is present during pharyngeals and nasals in Moroccan Arabic, whichoverlaps on adjacent vowels. These coarticulatory patterns from nasals and pharyngeals are systematically different in degree andtiming of peak nasalization. Differences in phonetic realizations of nasality serve to avoid perceptual similarity between theseconsonants: nasality is controlled to avoid conflict between phonologically distinct segments in MA. There is much phonological218