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View the meeting handbook - Linguistic Society of America

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Ozge Ozturk (University <strong>of</strong> Delaware) Session 52Anna Papafragou (University <strong>of</strong> Delaware)How do you know: Evidentiality in TurkishThis paper investigates <strong>the</strong> acquisition <strong>of</strong> evidentiality (<strong>the</strong> linguistic encoding <strong>of</strong> information source) and its relation to evidentialreasoning in Turkish children. We focus on two evidential verbal morphemes in Turkish: -di, and -mis, which indicate direct evidenceand hearsay/indirect experience, respectively. Six experiments asked whe<strong>the</strong>r Turkish children have acquired <strong>the</strong> semantics andpragmatics for <strong>the</strong>se morphemes and understand <strong>the</strong> source concepts behind <strong>the</strong>m. We conclude that <strong>the</strong> acquisition <strong>of</strong> evidentialmorphology lags behind source-reasoning abilities and that <strong>the</strong> unavailability <strong>of</strong> stable/obvious situational correlates, when anevidential morpheme is produced, complicates <strong>the</strong> process <strong>of</strong> mapping morphemes onto evidential categories.Anna Papafragou (University <strong>of</strong> Delaware) Session 52Ozge Ozturk (University <strong>of</strong> Delaware)Modality & <strong>the</strong> development <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> semantics/pragmatics interfaceEpistemic modal (EM) verbs encode <strong>the</strong> speaker’s attitude towards <strong>the</strong> probability <strong>of</strong> a proposition (It may/has to rain today).Previous literature has shown that children have difficulty with EM verbs (Wells 1985, Hirst & Weil 1980). We show that, contrary toprior findings, 5-year-olds have <strong>the</strong> correct semantics for EMs such as may and have to. We also show that children recognize <strong>the</strong>relative certainty conveyed by EMs in contrastive contexts on <strong>the</strong> basis <strong>of</strong> a modal scale defined in terms <strong>of</strong> logical entailment. Wediscuss implications <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong>se findings for <strong>the</strong> development <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> semantics/pragmatics interface.Jong Un Park (Georgetown University) Session 5Syntactic & semantic licensing conditions on <strong>the</strong> non-nominal plural marker in KoreanI show how <strong>the</strong> non-nominal usage <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> plural marker -tul is licensed in Korean. I claim that in order for <strong>the</strong> non-nominal marker(NNM) -tul to be licensed, not only syntactic but also semantic condition must be satisfied. I <strong>the</strong>n turn to some interesting caseswhere 'distributivity' in events arises due to <strong>the</strong> NNM in <strong>the</strong> VP domain. This analysis, particularly, discusses how <strong>the</strong> NNM ei<strong>the</strong>reliminates a collective reading or denotes a series <strong>of</strong> subevents from ambiguous predicates and allows a distributive or dispersedreading from collective predicates.Soyoung Park (University <strong>of</strong> Sou<strong>the</strong>rn California) Session 5How many types <strong>of</strong> comparatives are in Korean?There have been two contrastive approaches to comparatives: <strong>the</strong> direct phrasal analysis and <strong>the</strong> reduced clausal analysis. I proposethat Korean has three types <strong>of</strong> comparatives; <strong>the</strong> first type has a degree clause with a CP-structure, <strong>the</strong> second type has a SC-structure,and <strong>the</strong> third type has a DegP-structure. The phrasal analysis should be modified in that <strong>the</strong>re are clausal comparatives despite <strong>the</strong>irabsence <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> structures at surface. The clausal analysis also should be revised in that some comparatives don't involve clausalstructures, and <strong>the</strong>re are various types <strong>of</strong> comparatives, not just one full clausal type.Gabriela Pérez Báez (University <strong>of</strong> Buffalo, State University <strong>of</strong> New York) Session 105The encoding <strong>of</strong> locative & path relations in locative constructions in JuchitecoI explore <strong>the</strong> use <strong>of</strong> body part terms (BPTs) in locative descriptions in Juchiteco (JCH), focusing on <strong>the</strong>ir role as adnominal spatialrelators (ASRs) and heads <strong>of</strong> ‘ground phrases’, i.e., expressions in locative or motion descriptions that refer to <strong>the</strong> location <strong>of</strong> a‘figure’. My aim is to determine whe<strong>the</strong>r Juchiteco ASRs encode locative and path relations or merely object parts. I focus on BPderivedASRs and explore whe<strong>the</strong>r <strong>the</strong> mapping from a THING function to a PLACE function and onto a LOCATIVE/PATH function asproposed in Jackend<strong>of</strong>f 1983, is expressed in <strong>the</strong> ground phrases <strong>of</strong> JCH locative constructions.Katya Pertsova (University <strong>of</strong> California, Los Angeles) Session 26Towards learning form-meaning correspondences <strong>of</strong> inflectional morphemesOne <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> tasks <strong>of</strong> language acquisition is to figure out morpheme meanings and legal morpheme sequences. I present a learner thataddresses this problem in <strong>the</strong> presence <strong>of</strong> homonymy and null morphology. The learner receives pairs <strong>of</strong> morpheme strings andcombinations <strong>of</strong> semantic features representing a hypo<strong>the</strong>sis about <strong>the</strong> environment. At <strong>the</strong> end <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> learning process, <strong>the</strong> learnerdetermines which <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> semantic features are relevant in her language, how morphs (phonological units) line up with <strong>the</strong> meanings(sets <strong>of</strong> features), and what <strong>the</strong> legal morph combinations are.155

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