Week of October 24

October 18, 2022

Language Universals Workshop

Title: A theory of argument indexation: Insights from Kurdish varieties

Abstract: The relationship between agreement and movement operations is a central topic in syntactic theory. In the domain examined in this study, the differences between agreement and movement implicate another putative difference, between what are commonly called (agreement) affixes versus (pronominal) clitics. This study aims to present an analysis of Sorani Kurdish alignment patterns that speaks to the question of how agreement and movement operations relate to their morphological expressions and to highlight the role played by abstract case in producing the complex patterns of argument indexation seen in Sorani.

Thus, we illustrate a general approach to case/indexation relations in Iranian with a case-study of Garmiani (GK), a variety of Sorani Kurdish spoken in Iraq, with comparisons to Standard Sulimaniyah Sorani (SSK). The analysis of these patterns identifies a hitherto understudied Oblique/Oblique alignment system in GK, and has a number of implications for how φ-features are realized. Of these the study focuses on the indexing effects shown by a certain type of possessor, along with the prepositional-arguments of ditransitives.

The study argues that the indexation patterns cannot be due to an alignment split per se or a prohibition of clitic-stacking, but are sensitive to abstract case features. As such, we adopt an approach to case in which syntactic case features must be ‘decomposed’ and the decomposed syntactic features are visible to the morphology as well. In essence, it is a return to the original insights behind decomposing case labels into primitives (Jakobson 1936). Crucially, the syntactic and morphological patterns exhibited by case features may sometimes be misaligned. This approach also provides arguments against a substantive “clitic versus agreement” dichotomy.

Friday October 28 | 12-1:30 PM | Sever Hall 102 (zoom link https://harvard.zoom.us/j/95585895295?pwd=UU9tWFlsbXpFZUlUMUlnTnhNdy9Idz09 )

LangCog

Yağmur Sağ (Harvard University)

Title: Cardinality and (In)definiteness Abstract: Counting constructions vary across languages. Languages like English that distinguish between the unmarked and plural forms of the noun also reflect this in their numeral constructions, e.g., two apple-s. Other languages like Chinese, which lack a systematic number marking system, use the unmarked form for all numerals but require the mediation of classifiers in counting. e.g., san zhi bi 'three CL pen'. While we have well-worked-out semantics for these systems, there is yet another type we know relatively little about. I aim to fill this gap by analyzing Turkish numeral constructions. Turkish is a language with a systematic number marking system, where numeral constructions bear the morphologically unmarked form of the noun for all numerals and feature an optional classifier, e.g., iki (tane) elma 'two CL apple.' Intriguingly, tane may seem optional syntactically, but it also has a non-optional aspect with consequences regarding interpretation. While numeral constructions are cross-linguistically indefinite when not accompanied by an overt determiner, Turkish numeral constructions are exceptional in being both definite and indefinite in the absence of tane.
To explain the variation in number marking, I pursue an agreement-based approach, combining insights from recent views on numeral and number marking semantics and drawing on evidence from two more optional classifier languages, Western Armenian and Farsi. I propose that tane and the classifiers in these languages are the overt forms of a cardinal head that typically surfaces covertly in numeral constructions and denotes a counting function. Analyzing the non-optional aspect of tane and a similar pattern that exists in Farsi demonstrates a connection between the cardinal head and the inherently indefinite characteristics of numeral constructions. The lesson we learn from this part of the investigation is that indefiniteness is essentially sourced from the cardinal head in counting constructions as a universal tendency. What remains for a future line of research is to understand the nature of this connection between indefiniteness and cardinal semantics. Tuesday, October 25 | 5:30- 7:00 PM | William James Hall, Room #1550

PhonLab

Rosalía Rodríguez Vázquez (University of Vigo)

Title: The Identification of Basic Emotions by American English Subjects: The Effect of the Speakers’ L1 and the Listeners’ Level of Musical Training

Abstract: The study of emotional prosody examines the way in which specific emotions are associated to certain intonation patterns which, in turn, function as cues to recognize those emotions. The research dealing with emotional prosody has undergone considerable development in the last two decades, with a good number of studies exploring the identification of the so-called basic emotions (e.g. Castro & Lima, 2010; Ma, Zhou & Thompson, 2022; MoonKyoung Cho & Dewaele, 2021). Parallel to this, studies about musical training and enhanced auditory skills confirm the influence of musical experience on several aspects of auditory processing, such as pitch (e.g. Habibi et al., 2016; Moreno et al., 2009; Tervaniemi et al., 2005), timing (e.g. Rammsayer & Altenmüller, 2006; Slater et al., 2013), and timbre processing (e.g. Chartrand & Belin, 2006; Putkinen et al., 2019). This could entail that musically trained individuals will be better at identifying specific intonation patterns and the emotions associated to those patterns in a given language.

Although there is a growing interest in the perception of emotions by L1 (first language/s) and LX (languages other than L1) users, the studies that have delved into the identification of basic emotions when conveyed by non-native speakers of a language are still scarce (Dewaele et al. 2019; Lorette & Dewaele, 2015, 2020). Moreover, only a handful of studies have investigated the effect that the listeners’ musical training has on the degree of accuracy in identifying those emotions through speech prosody (Correia et al., 2020; Farmer et al., 2020; Fuller et al., 2014; Lima & Castro, 2011; Park et al., 2015; Pinheiro et al., 2015). This talk aims at enhancing the research on this topic by presenting the results of a pilot study conducted with 30 English-speaking subjects with varying degrees of musical training, who were exposed to utterances pronounced by speakers of English L1 and EFL (English as a foreign language).
The objective of the study was to identify which variables—the speakers’ biological gender, the prosodic makeup of the utterances as pronounced by speakers of English L1 and EFL, and the listeners’ degree of musical training—could influence the identification of the emotions on the part of the listeners.

To fulfil those objectives, we conducted a behavioral experiment where 30 subjects who were speakers of American English had to listen to 32 randomized, lexically-neutral, grammatically simple sentences in English uttered by i) one male and one female whose L1 was American English, and ii) one male and one female whose L1 was European Spanish and spoke English as a foreign language (EFL). The four speakers were trained ad hoc about the emotional tone that they had to adopt (happy or sad). The subjects/listeners were asked to identify the emotion conveyed by each utterance as “Happy”, “Sad”, or “Neither happy nor sad”, in which case they were forced to choose among four further emotions, namely “Angry”, “Disgusted”, “Scared”,“Surprised”, along with “Neutral”. As well as the accuracy rate in the identification of the emotions, the experiment also measured the listeners’ reaction time when deciding the emotion conveyed by each utterance.

The results show, first of all, that the prosodic makeup of the utterances had an effect on the accuracy with which the listeners identified emotions: the degree of accuracy decreased and the reaction time increased when the subjects listened to the English sentences uttered by European Spanish speakers. Crucially, a significant interaction was observed between the subjects’ level of musical training and the correct identification of the emotions in sentences uttered by speakers of EFL, as the rate of accuracy was higher for participants with a higher level of musical training. Secondly, the type of emotion transmitted had an effect on both accuracy and reaction time, as “Happy” utterances were identified more easily and more quickly than “Sad” ones regardless of whether the prosodic pattern of an utterance corresponded to English L1 prosody or EFL prosody. Last, there was no significant effect of the gender of the speaker, i.e. whether the stimuli were uttered by a male or a female speaker did not have an impact on the accuracy rate and the reaction time.

Wednesday, October 26 | 1-2PM | Room 007, 90 Mt Auburn Street (zoom link https://harvard.zoom.us/j/95991470694?pwd=YmlUUTN4NlVWL1d2dHR0eGZRYnM1Zz09)