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narratives, this rhetorical device attaches a focal event to happenings that occurred both before and after it, situating it in adistinguishable sequence. Glyph texts employed an additive glyph, the ‘anterior date indicator’, and a subtractive glyph, the ‘posteriordate indicator’. In Tojolab'al, the reflexes of these two are ti (ti xa/teya (ti ay xa)) 'until' and ay xa (axa) 'since', respectively.Susanne Gahl (University of Chicago) Session 32When that sounds unlikely: Sequential & syntactic probabilities in pronunciationWords shorten in high-probability contexts. This observation has been considered evidence that grammar is probabilistic. But whichprobabilities affect word durations? Two possible factors are the probability of a word, given its neighbors (word-to-word transitions)and the probability of a word's syntactic context. Most linguists assume that grammar is not reducible to word-to-word transitions.Therefore, if only word-to-word transitions, but not syntactic probabilities, affect pronunciation, then pronunciation cannot tell uswhether grammar is probabilistic. I present corpus evidence from the duration of verbs and optional that in complement clauses,reflecting the respective contributions of word-to-word transitions and syntactic probabilities.Gillian Gallagher (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Session 55Coalescence in West Greenlandic Eskimo: Survival of the well-cuedIn West Greenlandic Eskimo (WG), geminates are formed through coalescence in two derived environments (C 1 C 2 C: 1,2 ).Pharyngealization is preserved, when present, from either C 1 or C 2 while major place and manner features are preserved from C 1 inone environment and C 2 in the other. I argue that feature preservation in WG is predictable from the quality and duration of cues inthe underived, i.e., citation, form. Pharyngealization is consistently preserved because it is cued by the lowering of an adjacent vowelin the underived form; other place and manner features are preserved from the prevocalic consonant.MaryEllen Garcia (University of Texas, San Antonio) Session 57Sociolects in Mi Vida Loca: Indexing identities of Mexican American YouthsThe independent movie, Mi Vida Loca, ‘My Crazy Life’ (1993), depicts the lives of a girls' friendship network in the Echo Parkdistrict of Los Angeles. The Mexican American youths and their boyfriends live by their own code of ethics, values, and honor. Theirlanguage--primarily English with some codeswitching to Spanish--serves to underscore the unique identity of this group historically,ethnically, and societally. I examine how specific U.S. sociolects are employed by the characters and how the identities indexedthrough them serve to portray their ethnicity, peer alignment, and social rebellion.Susan Garzon (Oklahoma State University) Session 65The 18th-century roots of southern American discourse patternsThe speech of American southerners often juxtaposes polite indirection with potential hostility, as Barbara Johnstone hasdemonstrated. I trace this discourse pattern to the 18th century, when colonial Virginians battled to uphold their honor within ahierarchical social order. Amid drinking and wagers, convivial conversations easily turned to insult and challenge. However,threatening speech was often mitigated by ‘elaborate civility’, utilizing hypothetical structures and respectful address terms. Evidencecomes from 18th century letters and the comedies of Robert Munford. As southerners moved westward, they transplanted their socialorder, values, and discourse patterns, modifying them over time.Lewis Gebhardt (Northwestern University) Session 51Bare nouns aren't bareCommon bare count nouns are typically interpreted as -type predicates, on the assumption that they refer to sets of entities orproperties; or they are variously interpreted as or , depending on the language. I argue from Persian and English that nounsare always of type . Apparent differences in the distribution of bare nouns between classifier languages (Persian) and numbermarkinglanguages (English) stem from morphological differences. What look like bare nouns aren't bare. Rather they projectfunctional structure with potentially null heads. A standard cross-linguistic DP syntax reflects the same semantic interpretations ofnominals.Effi Georgala (Cornell University) Session 48Two distinct sources for the dative alternationIdiom facts from English and Greek pose a challenge to the uniform polysemy view that assigns two distinct underlying syntactic123