November 6, 2015

UTA Graduate Student Showcase (UTASCILT 2015)This year’s conference is designed to showcase the department’s graduate students and their recent research. Topics range over the various subdisciplines of linguistics, including psycholinguistics, semantics, phonology, pragmatics, and morphosyntax. The presentations demonstrate the breadth and diversity of our linguistics & TESOL department.

8:00-8:45am Coffee, Breakfast, Meet & Mingle

8:45-9:00am Introductory Remarks & Opening of Conference

9:00-9:30am First Presentation: Darcey Browning

9:30-10:00am Second Presentation: Iya Price & Jeffrey Witzel, Ph.D.

10:00-10:30am Coffee Break

10:30-11:00am Third Presentation: Kent Rasmussen

11:00-11:30am Fourth Presentation: Kimberly C. Johnson

11:30am-noon Fifth Presentation: Kristen Fleckenstein

12:00-2:00pm Lunch

2:00-3:00pm Keynote Speaker: John T. Beavers, Ph.D.

3:00-3:30pm Coffee Break

3:30-4:00pm Judges’ deliberation

4:00-5:00pm Presentation of Awards and Closing of Conference

UTA Dept. of Linguistics & TESOL Graduate Student Showcase (UTASCILT 2015)

POINTS OF INTEREST

1. All presentations will take place in Trimble Hall, Room 200.

2. Breakfast and refreshments will be available throughout the day in Hammond Hall, Room 132I.

3. Each presentation will last approximately 20 minutes, with 10 minutes total for Q&A and transition to the next speaker.

4. Lunch will be on-your-own, though groups may want to plan to lunch together at one of the many local eateries close to campus.

5. The Officers of LINGUA would like to thank the UTA Dept. of Linguistics & TESOL and especially Department Chair, Dr. Laurel Stvan, LINGUA advisor Dr. Suwon Yoon, and executive assistant Cecilia Garcia-Blizzard for their support and unceasing assistance in planning this year’s conference and bringing it to fruition.

Schedule of Events

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Hesitation via hashtag placement: Patterns of delay markers in public accounts of survivor stories Darcey Browning

Overview: This study shows how early hashtag placement can act as a delay device in tweets that convey survivor stories.

While people naturally hesitate when talking (Erard 2008), more hesitation is typically used when discussing sensitive information; as Romano (2014) notes, discourse markers frequently appear in emotional narratives. Since tweets are often colloquial, one should expect to find delay devices in these emotional narrative tweets; however, the character limitations on Twitter complicate how hesitations are realized.

Corpora: Analyzing 177 tweets from the 2014 #whyIstayed / #whyIleft campaign, I examine hashtag position and content to determine one pragmatic role of hashtags. The findings from this were supported by further inquiry of delay devices in a corpus of videos by survivors of violence.

Evidence for hesitation hashtag placement: When comparing the hashtag placement of this survivor tweet corpus to a non-specific corpus of 1000 tweets, there are significantly more early hashtags in the survivor tweet corpus (p < .001). I postulate that this significant difference is due to the function of the hashtags: they act as delay devices when appearing before sensitive information.

Furthermore, when the referring expression for the abuser appears in the subject position (70 tweets), there are almost twice as many tweets with early hashtags (44 tweets) than with late hashtags (26 tweets). This difference also appears to be due to the content of these tweets: early hashtags were more common in a sentence where the speaker lacks power in the situation (as in (1)) or where the abuser has power, as in (2).

(1) #whyistayed I thought he would kill me #whyileft I saw his eyes the moment he decided to kill me and I wanted to die free

(2) #whyileft he hit our 4 year old and shook her till she vomited.

Evidence from hesitation and: To support these findings with hashtags, I found similar patterns of power in the use of hesitation and. While many tokens of and assist with discourse organization or function as an idea connector (Schiffrin 1987), some go beyond this function and act as delay devices. Hesitation and was found in similar contexts to hesitation hashtags in the survivor videos, as shown in (3).

(3) and um at that point he uhh pulled his pants down and forced me to give him oral sex and um I was raped in the back of that car (Survivor corpus)

UTA Dept. of Linguistics & TESOL Graduate Student Showcase (UTASCILT 2015)

Abstracts

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Delay devices, like early hashtag placement and discourse markers, occur more often before a statement where the speaker is powerless, or when the perpetrator has the power, like in (3). In this example, hesitation and signals to the audience that the speaker is hesitant to disclose the violent details from the past, and it distances the speaker from the revelation.

Conclusion: While not all early hashtags and tokens of and are hesitations, speakers employ such delay markers as tools in these survivor corpora to distance themselves when discussing personal, traumatizing information.

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Stages of processing for complex sentences: Evidence from Russian

Iya Khelm Price & Jeffrrey Witzel, Ph.D.

Recent attempts to establish how grammar and language processing could be part of the same cognitive system (Lewis & Phillips, 2015; Phillips & Lewis, 2013) have called for comparisons of offline and online responses to the same input. Such comparisons show how these responses complement each other even when they are not perfectly aligned. In particular, it has been suggested that while online responses show intermediate steps in building grammatical representations, offline judgments reflect different stages of computation in the same system.

The present study investigated this idea by examining the processing of Russian relative clauses (RCs) with online (self-paced reading) and offline (acceptability judgment) measures. The sentences of interest were subject-extracted RC (SRC) and object-extracted RC (ORC) sentences in which an NP argument intervened between the modified noun and the RC verb. This created a configuration in which the same number of NP arguments was available for integration at RC verb, across the same linear distance, in both SRCs and ORCs. Furthermore, the influence of structural expectations was investigated by using different NP types -- descriptive NPs and pronouns -- inside the embedded clause. An offline acceptability judgment experiment, complemented by a corpus analysis, indicated that these NP types are associated with different word order frequencies/preferences.

Some indications of online processing difficulty patterned with the offline measures. Specifically, in sentences that were dispreferred in offline judgments or less frequent in the corpus, longer reading times were revealed at the first unexpected word -- the embedded-clause NP. Other online effects did not correspond to the offline measures. For example, ORCs were rated higher and were more frequent than their SRC counterparts. However, there were comparable integration costs for SRCs and ORCs at/after the RC verb when distance and the types of integrated elements were held constant. Moreover, although ORCs with descriptive NPs were judged offline as highly acceptable, late-stage comprehension difficulty was revealed for these sentences in particular. This indicates that similarity-based interference, combined with ORC structural processing difficulty, also influences processes related to retrieving and assigning thematic roles to NPs during RC processing. These results thus suggest that intermediate steps in online structure building related to expectation-based processing correspond to offline measures, whereas online processing disruptions and comprehension difficulty that appear to relate to memory demands do not. These differences between the online and offline results might be taken to reflect different stages of computation in a single cognitive system for language processing.

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Ndaka [ndk] (D.R. Congo): Another Bantu D30 Language with Nine Vowels and Depressor Consonants

Kent Rasmussen

Proto-Bantu has been reconstructed with seven vowels and two tones (Hyman 2003, Odden 2014), but a number of Bantu D30 languages show innovation both in the number of vowels and in the complexity of the tonal system. Bila [bip] (D31) has nine phonemic vowels (Kutsch Lojenga 2003). Nyali-Kilo [nlj] has nine phonemic vowels, as do other D33 languages Vanuma [vau], Budu [buu] (Kutsch Lojenga 1994), and Mbo [zmw]. This paper adds Ndaka [ndk] to that list, confirming that reports of nine vowel Bantu languages are can no longer be dismissed as outliers or the product of isolated or questionable research.

In addition to showing the vowel system of Ndaka, this paper shows the three tone patterns found on infinitive verbs in Ndaka: low, high, and a rising pattern found mostly with depressor consonants. These three tone patterns are shown in pitch trace overlays in (2), (4), and (6) respectively.

The first (low) tone pattern is low and level, as exemplified by the word kɔ-kpata ‘follow’ in (1). This spectrogram and pitch trace in (1) contains a lot of information, not all of which is relevant to the tone analysis. In addition to reading individual pitch traces to understand the detail more precisely, confirmation that the relevant information has been extracted out of a pitch trace may be performed by overlaying multiple pitch traces from words judged to have the same tone pattern, as in (2). In (2) one may see that despite lots of individual variation from word to word, there is a clear pattern of pitch moving at one level across the word. As indicated in the thicker trend bars, the second syllable pitch tends lower, and the third syllable pitch tends lower even more so. That is, the variation which is due to the phonetic implementation of consonants, etc. is obscured, while the effects which remain constant across the majority of words (i.e., declination and the final falling tone) come clearer into view.

In the high tone pattern, the pitch is no longer level across the word, but is significantly higher on the first root syllable. The final syllable is still falling, though from a level higher than the initial low prefix syllable. This is exemplified by kotito ‘push’ in (3), and again generalized in (4).

The above two tone patterns are observed where the root consonants are voiceless obstruents, implosives, sonorants, or obstruents modified by sonorants. That is, the consonants that Bradshaw (1999) predicts would not be depressor consonants. But where voiced obstruents are present in the first root syllable of a high verb, the rising tone pattern in (5) is observed. The rising pitch is on the first root syllable, showing a low to high transition. The final syllable is again falling, though from an initial level between high and low, as defined by the two previous syllables. This description can again be generalized, as in (6).

An initial comparison is made with Nyali-Kilo and Mbo, showing Ndaka to have depressor consonants which produce fewer infinitive verb tone patterns than observed in the other languages, presumably due to differential treatment of depressor consonants between the three languages.

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The Role of Context in Interpreting a Versatile Modal in Creek (Muskogean) Kimberly C. Johnson

Creek, an endangered Muskogean language, meets the descriptive standard of the Boasian triad: a dictionary (Martin 2000), a reference grammar (Martin 2011), and multiple collections of analyzed and translated texts (Gouge 2004; Haas and Hill 2015). As of yet, there has been no focused study of the modal system. Recent work on semantics of Native American languages documents modals that differ greatly from Indo-European modal systems (see Deal 2011 for Nez Perce; Rullmann et al. 2008 for St’át’imcets). Similarly to these languages, the Creek modal tay- is compatible with both necessity and possibility, but it differs in that both force and modal base are variable. This study provides evidence that the Creek auxiliary tay- is restricted to non-epistemic environments and that context determines the varying backgrounds, ordering sources, and strength.

Languages typically lexically encode one or more of the three main elements that comprise modals: quantificational force (necessity or possibility), conversational background (whether the modal draws on knowledge or circumstances), and ordering source which ranks possible worlds “according to ... some norm or ideal” (Kratzer 2012: 38). However, Creek tay- draws on context for all three of these elements. (1) is a mini-typology comparing English, St’át’imcets and Creek. The variable force in St’át’imcets is accounted for through a choice function (Rullman et al. 2008) and in Nez Perce through a lack of scalar dual (Deal 2011). I argue that the interaction of conversational background and ordering source accounts for the force of tay-.

(1) Conversational Background Quantificational Force

English Context Lexical

St’át’imcets Lexical Context

Creek Context Context

In (2), tay- has a weak obligation reading. In a stereotypical world, it is normal and possible for two people to marry, therefore an ability or potential reading is redundant. The context of an illegitimate child introduces a deontic conversational background (related to moral obligations) imposing external motivations, and gives us the weak necessity reading.

(2) Said of the mother by her relatives: [whoever the father of the illegitimate child is...]

is-apak-i:-sâ:s-i: tâ:y-it o:m-i:-ta:n

INST-be.with-I-some.FGR-DUR can.FGR-T be.LGR-DUR-REF.N

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‘he should marry her‘ (Gouge 2004.5)

In (3) tay- contributes circumstantial possibility. Combining with the stative verb sit, we have the potential for the state to be true of the old woman. In a stereotypical world some old women are able to sit while others are too infirm, thus what is at issue is the potential for her to sit and the force is existential.

(3) [And the man brought the woman to a place...]

ísta-n ma hokt-â:l-a:t léyk-i: tâ:y-a:t

where-N that woman-old-REF sit.SG-DUR can.FGR-REF

‘where that old woman might sit‘ (Gouge 2004.10)

Tonhauser and Matthewson (in prep.) claim that context is essential in research on meaning. This study, drawing on a collection of texts, exemplifies the importance of context in semantic research. Understanding the role of context in interpreting this Creek modal may well shed light on the mechanisms used to interpret other degree and non-scalar modals (Kratzer 2012; Deal 2011).

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Jespersen’s Cycle of negation in American Sign LanguageKristen Fleckenstein

Observed patterns of negation vary widely from language to language, which has resulted in negation becoming one of the most widely studied areas of semantics; for many contemporary logicians, negation is conceived of as purely sentential (wide scope) with no languages believed to have lexicalized the distinction between sentential and constituent negation. In American Sign Language (ASL), it is known that facial expressions and head movements serve grammatical functions rather than simply adding non-verbal emphasis, as they do in spoken languages (Zeshan 2004). ASL uses many non-manual behaviors, but the negative headshake is the only one capable of signaling negation in the absence of any manual negation marker (Veinberg and Wilbur 1990). Instances of structures containing multiple negation, in the form of a co- occurrence of manual and non-manual negation markers, in ASL have been found to create sentential negation. Recent research (Pfau 2014) suggests that this pattern of negation arose as the result of Jespersen’s Cycle, similar to the way negation in French has evolved, but the goal of the present paper is to show that the job of the manual negation marker was not nullified in this process. Instead, it has become a marker of constituent negation.

Existing research on the structure and semantics of negation in ASL has overlooked the possibility of constituent negation as separate from sentential negation. Some research mentions the possibility that constituent negation exists in ASL, but an in-depth analysis has not been undertaken for constituent negation the way that it has for sentential negation. Though Zeshan (2004) discusses the ways that a negative headshake could be applied for constituent negation in signed languages, her research only briefly touches on constituent negation in other sign languages and does not examine ASL.

The present research attempts to examine and compare the specific role of non-manual negation markers in sentential and constituent negation in ASL. The differences between sentential negation with negative concord and sentential negation with only a non-manual negation marker are explained, as are the differences between the negation structures used in constituent negation. In order to distinguish sentential negation from constituent negation, the following properties are used as diagnostic tools:

1. tag-questions 2. again-test 3. deliberately-test 4. metalinguistic negation 5. try-to-V constructions 6. expletive negation

The results from the present research seem to indicate that there is a co-existence of wide (sentential) and narrow (constituent) scope negation, rather than a reliance on sentential negation as suggested by most contemporary formal logicians. Languages use a variety of different strategies to mark different

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syntactic scopes, and ASL appears to have grammaticalized the two types of negation using different combinations of manual and non-manual negation markers. While a manual negation marker is not sufficient to produce sentential negation, it does appear to be a grammatical method of expressing narrow scope negation.

Data: The following data contain representations of the ASL signs via English glosses, as indicated by the words in all caps. Other gestural information, like a negative headshake, is depicted by a line appearing between the start and end points of the headshake. Because other types of headshakes are used in ASL, this specific type of non-manual gesture is marked by ‘neg.’ Sentences (1) and (3) show examples of constituent negation, while (2) and (4) show sentential negation of the same proposition.

1. JOHN NOT SEE MARY ON-PURPOSE ‘John avoided (did not see) Mary on purpose‘

2. _________________________________neg. JOHN NOT SEE MARY ON-PURPOSE ‘John avoided (did not see) Mary on purpose‘ ‘John saw Mary, but not on purpose’

3. BILL TRY NOT LAUGH ‘Bill tried not to laugh‘

4. ______________________neg. BILL NOT TRY LAUGH ‘Bill didn’t try to laugh’

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Roots and Templates in Verbal Meaning

John T. Beavers, Ph.D. — University of Texas at Austin

! Since at least Dowty (1979), it has been commonly assumed that verb meanings consist at least partly of an "event structure" that categorizes and defines the eventuality described by the verb.  Event structures themselves are assumed to be decomposable into two ontologically distinct types of semantic entities.  First is a generic "event template", itself built up from a small, universal set of basic event-denoting predicates (e.g. CAUSE, BECOME, GO), that captures thebasic temporal, causal, and thematic nature of the event described by the verb and groups verbs together into a small set of broad classes (e.g. changes-of-state, activities, etc.).  The second is an idiosyncratic "root" that fills in the real world details of the event structure on a verb by verb basis (e.g. specific actions or states involved in a given event).  A further assumption in such approaches is that only event templates are grammatically significant, determining (and thus identified by) the verb's argument structure and aspectual behavior, while idiosyncratic roots rarely if ever have any significant grammatical consequences other than the specific morphological shape of the verb.  This predicts far fewer grammatical classes of verbs to exist than specific verbs and verb meanings.! However, an open question is whether the ontological semantic distinction between roots and templates is justified, and in particular whether or not an idiosyncratic root can encode basic causal, temporal, or thematic notions.  Some recent work has suggested that this is not the case, and that the types of meanings encoded in templates vs. roots are distinct --- the "Root Hypothesis" of Arad (2005) (see also Embick 2009).  I argue instead that there are caseswhere roots encode exactly the type of information typically thought to be found in templates.  I take as my primary case study English ditransitive verbs (e.g. "give", "send", "throw", etc.), which exhibit two argument frames that reflect their association with two distinct event templates (caused motion as in "John sent a letter to Mary" vs. caused possession as in "John sent Mary a letter").  I show that these two templates are highly underspecified semantically, and thatthe idiosyncratic roots that occur in them flesh out many of their details, including even grammatically-relevant thematic and aspectual information such as causation, change, and possession.  I propose a model of roots and templates in which the meanings found in each do not differ ontologically, but instead only in degree of specificity --- templates encode very general eventive meanings, and roots encode highly specific eventive meanings, but crucially in some cases root

UTA Dept. of Linguistics & TESOL Graduate Student Showcase (UTASCILT 2015)

Keynote

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meanings subsume templatic meanings implicationally.  In such cases the template mainly serves to realize the meaning already found in the root, while in other cases each can augment the meaning of the other. However, while these conclusions bring into question some of the predictive power of event structural approaches to verb meaning, I ultimately conclude that there is still a need for the root/template distinction, showing that even in cases where a given root and template encode exactly the same meaning, some grammatical phenomena (sublexical scope and certain argument realization facts) are sensitive to that meaning only if it is encoded by the template.

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