A San Diegan debate: Take 8 or Take the 8: Investigating the use of the determiner “the” before numeric freeways in San Diego

The determiner “the” before numeric roadways in Southern California has become salient enough that it has reached mainstream media. However there has been little formal research done on this linguistic variant, and especially in subregions of California such as San Diego county. This study examines the use of the by ten speakers through sociolinguistic interviews and a map task. It was found that people from San Diego had the highest usage of the, long term transplants also favored the but to a lesser degree, and recent transplants disfavored the. Additionally, it was found when recent transplants used this variable they did not apply it to unknown roads, though long term transplants used the not only for roads in San Diego but also for unknown roads. These differences between transplants may inform us about factors influencing second dialect acquisition. Furthermore a mixed methods analysis revealed that the might have diffused from Los Angeles to San Diego in the 1980s

Donkey disjunctions and overlapping updates

This paper is devoted to an analysis of anaphoric dependencies in disjunctive sentences, and consequences for the understanding of the ∃/∀ ambiguity observed with donkey anaphora. The primary focus is on donkey disjunctions, which are sentences where a (negated) existential in an initial disjunct appears to bind a pronoun in a later disjunct, such as "Either there\u27s no bathroom, or its upstairs". The main empirical focus is that donkey disjunctions, like donkey anaphora, exhibit the ∃/∀ ambiguity, and more generally oscillate between homogeneous and heterogeneous readings in a context-sensitive fashion. The paper then proceeds in two steps: first, a principled analysis of donkey disjunctions is developed in the context of a Bilateral Update Semantics (BUS). BUS, by default, generates heterogeneous readings for donkey anaphora/donkey disjunctions (i.e., ∃ readings, in a positive context). In order to account of homogeneous readings, the conjecture is that sentences may be interpreted exhaustively relative to their negations. This has non-trivial consequences due to the non-classicality of BUS — specifically, a failure of the Law of Non-Contradiction

Movement and interpretation of quantifiers in internally-headed relative clauses

This paper addresses the semantic typology of internally-headed relative clauses using a case study of two West African languages, Atchan (Kwa) and Bùlì (Gur). Both languages exhibit syntactically-similar relatives, involving overt movement of the head. However, quantifiers on the head are interpreted differently in the two languages. In Atchan, quantifiers on the relative-clause head take the entire relative clause as their restriction; in Bùlì, quantifiers on the head take only the head noun as their restriction. I propose that the former is interpreted via NP reconstruction and Trace Conversion, the latter via DP reconstruction. The empirical difference between these two languages motivates a revision to the typology developed by Grosu (2012), which tightly links head movement and the Atchan-like quantifier interpretation pattern. This work further supports a a modular view in which languages can adopt different strategies to interpret movement-involving structures

Information-theoretic applications to Hupa verbal morphology

Hupa (Na:tinixwe Mixine:whe’) is a Pacific Coast Dene language spoken in Hoopa Valley in Northern California. Like its Dene sisters, Hupa exhibits complex verbal morphology which has attracted decades of theoretical research. One approach that has yet to have been applied to these languages is information theory. Previous information-theoretic research into verbal morphology has uncovered a cross-linguistic trend of grouping predictive information closer together and finding morphemes that are more mutually-informative to the root closer to the root, which in turn reduces overall surprisal and is easier on memory constraints. However, these studies analyzed prominently suffixing languages of Afro-Eurasia. This project is the first application of these information-theoretic concepts to a Dene language to investigate if these approaches also apply to explain morpheme order in a low-resource, Indigenous American language with intricate, prominently-prefixing morphology. The results indicate similar findings to previous research. Hupa demonstrates a word-level linear morpheme order that, on average, orders most mutually-informative morphemes closest to the verb root compared to a randomized baseline. This morpheme order also resulted in an average surprisal that was more comparable to optimized morpheme orders than a randomized baseline. Morpheme-type mutual information, however, demonstrates the discrepancies between word- and templatic-level information content in Hupa, which exemplifies the word-level efficiency that Hupa shares with other languages despite the typological uniqueness of its morphological grammar

Linguists and teachers collaborating in an ELA classroom: Teaching around the test

In this paper, a scholar of English Education (Michelle) and a linguist (Chris) discuss their four-week research study in a ninth-grade classroom. Highlighting the collaborations with the classroom teachers, this paper discusses the importance of integrating linguistic concepts with current curricular demands. A focus on the final activity, in which students were asked to explore how linguistic concepts relate to areas of the everyday world like social media and the law, demonstrates that students were able to engage with the linguistic concepts in critical and important ways. The paper finishes with a discussion of how linguists can consider future collaborations with stakeholders in K12 spaces, and the importance of integrating these concepts into the existing curriculum.

Video chat exams in an online general education linguistics course

Video chat exams are a potential solution in online, general education introductory linguistics courses that seek to promote academic integrity, differentiate instruction, center student language and rhetorical practices, and offer multiple assessment modalities. Instructors who try video chat exams will want to clearly communicate expectations, offer practice exams, take steps to mitigate bias, and be sure this strategy aligns with their student learning outcomes as well as logistical concerns, like class size

Exploring variation in English and Italian relative clause attachment: The role of coordination

This study investigates the effect of coordination on the resolution of relative clause attachment ambiguity in English and Italian. We also examined the interplay of RC length and DP positions on attachment preferences in coordinate structures, conducting a partial replication of previous results on English (Hemforth et al. 2015). In two offline force-choice tasks, English speakers favored local attachment, while Italian speakers showed a strong preference for non-local attachment across all conditions. This pattern aligns with established variation across the two languages, but interestingly deviates from earlier reports showing the effects of RC-Head type, RC length, and DP position on attachment decisions. Our findings thus suggest that further attention needs to be paid to the complex interaction of different, potentially understudied, structural factors when investigating disambiguation mechanisms across languages

Disjunction in Ket

We explore how disjunction is expressed in Ket, an understudied and highly endangered Yeniseian language of Siberia. We show that Ket has multiple strategies of disjunction, which share morphological resources with indefinites and which differ in their scope-taking properties. We present a preliminary analysis and discuss the broader typology, showing that while Ket’s system of disjunction resembles those of Sinhala (Indic; Sri Lanka) and Tiwa (Tibeto-Burman; India), it differs from these systems in several respects. We conclude that multiple disjunction strategies appear to be widespread, but show significant variation, and require additional investigation cross-linguistically

Goals for teaching the history of linguistics

A history of linguistics course is as an opportunity to revisit some important linguistic concepts students have learned. Students are usually exposed to the larger goals of linguistic theory, but it is not the primary focus in syntax and phonology courses, for example. By examining the historical development of these concepts, e.g., phonemes, transformations, universal grammar, linguistic relativity etc., a history of linguistics course can be used to explore the nature of linguistics and the connections between linguistics and other disciplines. Note: A video of the session in which this was presented and the associated slide deck are available in the foreword to this issue.

Ethnic visibility and ethnolinguistic repertoires: Dearborn English and the hijab

This study explores the intersection of ethnic visibility and linguistic behavior by analyzing the speech of two groups of Muslim female speakers in Dearborn, MI: one group wearing the Islamic hijab and another not wearing the hijab. Recent research shows that the variety of American English spoken in Dearborn is locally recognized and includes certain ethno-local markers such as higher rates of word-final /t/ glottalization and the convergence of voice onset time for lenis and fortis members of bilabial and velar stops. The Dearborn ethnolinguistic repertoire also features a vowel pattern not consistent with surrounding mainstream patterns. The sociolinguistic analysis in the present study explores the intersection between female Dearborners’ sartorial choices in terms of the Islamic hijab and their linguistic behavior with reference to the features of Dearborn English. Labovian Sociolinguistic Interviews were conducted with 16 female Dearborners: 9 with the Islamic headcover and 7 without the headcover. The results show both groups of speakers display similarly high rates of /t/ glottalization, a prominent feature of Dearborn English, in their speech. However, the hijab-wearing group’s stop VOT distribution and vowel patterning is more strongly aligned with the features of Dearborn English, showing compatibility between their sartorial and linguistic choices