Prosody and EPP in Swahili

The precise motivation for affixation has not been entirely settled. Noyer (1992) and Hankamer & Mikkelsen (2018) argue that the identity of an affix is recognized in syntax-free contexts or in postsyntactic environments. On the other hand, Richards (2010, 2016) proposes a way of identifying affixes by looking into their metrical dependencies initially detected in narrow syntax. Here, I argue alongside Richards (2016) that these suprasegmental features are visible in syntax and that they trigger XP-movements (see also Branan 2018). According to Contiguity Theory (Richards 2016), overt movements triggered by syntactic features such as [uwh] and Extended Projection Principle (EPP) in the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1993, 1995) are reanalyzed as operations sensitive to the interaction between syntax and prosody. To be more specific, narrow syntax looks at certain phonological information that works in favor of the initial shape of prosody. This suggests that syntactic movement is sensitive to prosodic contiguity prior to spell-out. Richards (2016) discusses some key motivations for movement. They include Probe-Goal Contiguity, Affix Support, and Untethering. Adopting some of the basic assumptions proposed in Match Theory (Selkirk 2009, 2011), Contiguity Theory looks into phonological motivations for wh-movement and EPP. In this paper, I argue that Swahili demands additional explanation as to how prosodic requirements are satisfied. In detail, I present an analysis accounting for the wh-in-situ phenomenon as well as the presence of EPP in Swahili. With regards to the presence of EPP, I propose that Swahili tense affixes require metrical boundaries on both left and right of their peripheries. The metrical boundary on the right is satisfied by the phonological content inside vP. The metrical boundary on its left is satisfied by an XP targeting [Spec,TP] which gives rise to the desired EPP-effect

Introducing arguments beyond the thematic domain

Extensive research has focused on how VoiceP (Kratzer 1996), ApplP (Pylkkänen 2008), and i* (Wood & Marantz 2017), an overarching term for Voice and Appl, establish argument structure inside the thematic domain (below TP). A question arises as to whether argument structure can be established outside the thematic domain (above TP). This work provides empirical evidence from Korean in suggesting that an argument can be introduced by Voice/Appl (i*) in the left periphery. Specifically, it lends support to the claim that the discourse participant ‘addressee’ is represented in syntax (Haegeman & Hill 2013; Miyagawa 2017; 2022; Portner et al. 2019 among others). In this regard, this work draws parallels between the thematic domain and the speech act domain, which have been considered to be two separate domains

Digital Divide and Growth Gap: A Cumulative Relationship

IT, growth gap, cumulative relationship

Can language models capture syntactic associations without surface cues? A case study of reflexive anaphor licensing in English control constructions

We examine GPT-2 (Radford et al., 2019), which is trained only on surface strings, to see whether or not the model makes correct predictions about the agreement patterns of a reflexive anaphor in English control constructions. Our findings show that GPT-2 struggles with transitive subject control constructions, but does well on transitive object control constructions. One reason might be that the model tries to associate the anaphor with the closest noun phrase. Moreover, while we find that a model with a larger number of parameters shows higher accuracy on the tasks related to subject control constructions, performance remains below chance

Do language models know how to be polite?

Politeness is often associated with a degree of formality that the speaker conveys to the addressee of a conversation. There are multiple ways to convey politeness in natural language. Languages such as Korean and Japanese, for instance, have politeness markers that appear in certain positions inside a given sentence. Sometimes, the absence of these politeness markers leads to inappropriateness. This work focuses on a particular case in which a politeness marker can be realized only when its dependency requirement is satisfied. While language model (LM) performance on syntactic dependencies such as filler-gap dependencies (Wilcox et al., 2018), subject-verb agreement (Linzen et al., 2016), anaphor binding (Hu et al., 2020), and control phenomena (Lee and Schuster, 2022) have been explored in recent years, little work has been done on non-syntactic dependencies that reflect politeness or even pragmatic effects in general. The phenomenon at issue is unique in that the dependency is not fulfilled by any of the commonly assumed syntactic disposition or agreement patterns observed elsewhere in the human grammar. Our results suggest that the overall performance of the Transformer-based LMs such as GPT-2 and the variants of BERT on this dependency test is unexpected. Since their performance is below or around chance accuracy for the main task of our experiment, we posit that these pretrained LMs fail to fully capture the politeness phenomenon in Korean. The performance of ChatGPT on a related task, however, is significantly better than its predecessors. While it is tempting to conclude that ChatGPT is better suited for capturing this specific phenomenon, we show that the model is right for the wrong reason. We demonstrate that the model merely selects the sentence that ends with the politeness marker, instead of recognizing the true dependency between the cue word and the target word

Korean Case Stacking and the Nominal Template

Korean exhibits a phenomenon known as case stacking, where a single nominal can bear two markers traditionally associated with case. We show that while the inner markers in stacked nominals reflect genuine case, the outer markers are instead associated with discourse marking. Stacked “nominative” and “accusative” are in fact focus markers, whose distributions are distinct from those of genuine case marking (Schütze 2001). We propose that the inner markers are associated with the argument introducing heads Voice and Appl, and the outer markers are associated with focus and topic. By assigning inner markers low and outer markers high, our analysis derives the templatic ordering of morphemes in Korean nominals (Cho & Sells 1995) and explains the difference in distribution of honorific nominative (HON.NOM) and plain nominative (NOM). Our analysis that only external argument introducing heads (Voice and Appl) can assign honorific-sensitive case markers captures an independent fact about Korean: the case paradigm contains HON.NOM and HON.DAT but no *HON.ACC

Increased Risk of Ischemic Stroke during Sleep in Apneic Patients.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE:The literature indicates that obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) increases the risk of ischemic stroke. However, the causal relationship between OSA and ischemic stroke is not well established. This study examined whether preexisting OSA symptoms affect the onset of acute ischemic stroke. METHODS:We investigated consecutive patients who were admitted with acute ischemic stroke, using a standardized protocol including the Berlin Questionnaire on symptoms of OSA prior to stroke. The collected stroke data included the time of the stroke onset, risk factors, and etiologic subtypes. The association between preceding OSA symptoms and wake-up stroke (WUS) was assessed using multivariate logistic regression analysis. RESULTS:We identified 260 subjects with acute ischemic strokes with a definite onset time, of which 25.8% were WUS. The presence of preexisting witnessed or self-recognized sleep apnea was the only risk factor for WUS (adjusted odds ratio=2.055, 95% confidence interval=1.035-4.083, p=0.040). CONCLUSIONS:Preexisting symptoms suggestive of OSA were associated with the occurrence of WUS. This suggests that OSA contributes to ischemic stroke not only as a predisposing risk factor but also as a triggering factor. Treating OSA might therefore be beneficial in preventing stroke, particularly that occurring during sleep

Nominal mismatches in Swahili locatives

According to Carstens (2008), Bantu locatives in general project double DPs. However, recent works have presented convincing evidence for a reduction in nominal size for Bantu locatives (Fuchs & van der Wal 2017, 2018). We argue that the actual size of nominals in Swahili, a language of the Bantu family, depends on the type of locative expression. In this regard, a mismatch in terms of nominal size is observed for Swahili. By means of analyzing such mismatches, we adopt the PP analysis as well as the stacked-n analysis suggested by Kramer (2015). In doing so, we demonstrate that there are two distinct ways of forming Swahili locatives. The first is to utilize a prepositional head, P (e.g., kwa), projected above a full nominal whereas the other is to make use of the head, n (e.g., -ni), projected within a reduced nominal. Such dissimilarity in constructing locatives, in turn, gives rise to mismatches in Swahili nominals