Volume 27, Fall 2011

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    The opacity of s-irregular verbs in Korean: confronting Optimality Theory approaches
    (University of Calgary, 2011-09) Lee, Joan
    In Korean phonology, the vowel ɨ deletes when it appears in a vowel hiatus context across the boundary between a root word and a suffix (e.g. [pe:na] (/pe:-ɨna/) 'since (it) goes'). The class of “s-irregular verbs”, however, exhibits opacity in that ɨ fails to delete in some surface forms although the conditioning environment appears to be present. Instead, these verbs undergo a process of vowel shortening (e.g. [kɨəsə] (/kɨ:s-əsə/) 'marks and'), despite the fact that long vowels are allowed in other forms as shown above. This paper treats the underapplication of ɨ-deletion and the overapplication of vowel shortening as potentially two instances of opacity exhibited by the same class of verbs in Korean. Standard Optimality Theory (OT) cannot model problems of opacity, but other OT approaches for dealing with opaque processes have been proposed. I show that Comparative Markedness (McCarthy 2003) is a more suitable OT approach in accounting for the opacity of these s-irregular verbs compared to Sympathy Theory (McCarthy 1999) and Contrast Preservation Theory (Lubowicz 2003), although not without new implications.
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    Hungarian information structure: a comparison of Lexical-Functional Grammar and cartography
    (University of Calgary, 2011-09) Hracs, Lindsay
    A comparison of a Lexical-Functional Grammar analysis and a Cartography-based analysis of information structure suggests that Lexical-Functional Grammar can better account for phenomena associated with information structure. Also, Lexical-Functional Grammar seems to better capture the fact that the subject and topic roles do not have to coincide. Ultimately, Cartography lacks a method of expressing the interactions with respect to syntax, semantics, and prosody in a systematic way. This is because Cartography deals with information structure as a phenomenon of the peripheries. Principles and Parameters based theories such as Cartography do not exhibit an interface between PF and LF, which is important for Hungarian. In Hungarian, prosody can affect scope-based interpretation. Lexical-Functional Grammar on the other hand, fully integrates c-structure, f-structure, i-structure, and p-structure in the Correspondence Architecture allowing for an interface between all of these components. Thus, Lexical-Functional Grammar is better suited to deal with the phenomena associated with information structure in Hungarian.
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    Focus marking in a language lacking pragmatic presuppositions
    (University of Calgary, 2011-09) Koch, Karsten A
    This study investigates the effect of a language-wide lack of pragmatic resuppositions on focus marking (often taken to be inherently presuppositional). The language of investigation is Nɬeʔkepmxcin (Thompson River Salish). I show that discourse participants treat presuppositions triggered by focus in the same way as lexical presuppositions. Addressees do not challenge presuppositions that they do not share (strikingly unlike in English). Speakers, however, typically avoid using presuppositions not shared by the addressee. As a result, speakers avoid using their own utterances to mark narrow focus at all, a striking difference from English. I argue that this is due to another pragmatic constraint subject to cross-linguistic parameterization: while the speaker’s own utterance counts as being in the common ground for the purposes of marking presuppositions in English, Salish speakers do not generally mark presuppositions unless they have overt evidence that the addressee shares these presuppositions. This results in a radically different focus marking strategy within a discourse turn as opposed to across discourse turns.
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    On the boundaries of Irish prosodic words
    (University of Calgary, 2011-09) Windsor, Joseph W
    This study uses the facts of Irish lenition, gemination processes and stress placement constraints to refute the theory of the syntax-phonology interface proposed by Truckenbrodt (1999) where it is claimed that the only structure visible to phonology at the interface is that of phrases. I use these same facts in support of Match Theory (Selkirk 2009; to appear) which allows a direct 1:1 mapping between syntactic and phonological structure at the word, phrase and clausal levels. Further, I go on to propose strength conditions on the boundaries of prosodic words dependant on whether those words are maximal, or non-maximal recursive word structures. I conclude that while *STRUC constraints eliminate redundant word bracketing structure, it does not target recursive word bracketing provided that that bracket contain at least some segmental information. This fact will account for Geminate Inalterability (Ní Chosáin 1991; Green 2008) found in Irish coronal clusters as well as secondary stress placement present only in recursive word structure. These facts can only be handled by a theory that allows a direct mapping of all types of syntactic structures to prosodic structure and not just syntactic phrases to phonological phrases.