Volume 32, 2022

Permanent URI for this collection

https://prism.ucalgary.ca/handle/1880/114419
We, the editors, are pleased to present the thirty-second volume of the Calgary Working Papers in Linguistics (CWPL). CWPL is a publication affiliated with the School of Languages, Linguistics, Literatures and Cultures (SLLLC) at the University of Calgary, focusing on recent and ongoing work in linguistics and related disciplines by researchers affiliated with the University of Calgary. This and all previous volumes of CWPL since Volume 1 (originally published in print in 1975) are digitally stored in PRISM: The University of Calgary Digital Repository and can be accessed at: http://dspace.ucalgary.ca/handle/1880/51236. Before further discussing the papers in this volume, we would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge that the University of Calgary and city of Calgary, called Mohkinstsis in Blackfoot, exists within the traditional territories of the people of the Treaty 7 region in Southern Alberta, which includes the Blackfoot Confederacy (comprising the Siksika, Piikani, and Kainai First Nations), the Tsuut’ina First Nation, and the Stoney Nakoda (including the Chiniki, Bearspaw, and Wesley First Nations). The city of Calgary is also home to members of Métis Nation of Alberta, Region 3. Each paper submitted to Volume 32 has been reviewed and edited by two editors, all graduate students of linguistics at the University of Calgary. It should be noted that the papers published in CWPL represent works in progress and should not be considered as final or definitive papers. Therefore, publication in CWPL does not preclude submission of further revisions of the same papers to another journal or publication. Volume 32 contains three papers from both undergraduate and graduate students at the SLLLC. These papers explore topics in phonology, dialectology, nominal syntax, and particle syntax. The languages featured in this volume include Spanish and Mandarin Chinese. Finally, we thank and express our most sincere gratitude to all contributors, editors, and advisors and supervisors of those contributors and editors for their time, effort, and patience in their participation in the editing and publishing process of this volume. This continuation of CWPL’s longstanding tradition at the University of Calgary would be impossible without you and your work.

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    Calgary Working Papers in Linguistics, Volume 32, Spring 2022
    (2022-03) Nelson, BrettC; Abdalla, Summer; Boyede, Charles; Goddard, Quinn; Xu, Kang
    We, the editors, are pleased to present the thirty-second volume of the Calgary Working Papers in Linguistics (CWPL). CWPL is a publication affiliated with the School of Languages, Linguistics, Literatures and Cultures (SLLLC) at the University of Calgary, focusing on recent and ongoing work in linguistics and related disciplines by researchers affiliated with the University of Calgary. This and all previous volumes of CWPL since Volume 1 (originally published in print in 1975) are digitally stored in PRISM: The University of Calgary Digital Repository and can be accessed at: http://dspace.ucalgary.ca/handle/1880/. Before further discussing the papers in this volume, we would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge that the University of Calgary and city of Calgary, called Mohkinstsis in Blackfoot, exists within the traditional territories of the people of the Treaty 7 region in Southern Alberta, which includes the Blackfoot Confederacy (comprising the Siksika, Piikani, and Kainai First Nations), the Tsuut’ina First Nation, and the Stoney Nakoda (including the Chiniki, Bearspaw, and Wesley First Nations). The city of Calgary is also home to members of Métis Nation of Alberta, Region 3. Each paper submitted to Volume 32 has been reviewed and edited by two editors, all graduate students of linguistics at the University of Calgary. It should be noted that the papers published in CWPL represent works in progress and should not be considered as final or definitive papers. Therefore, publication in CWPL does not preclude submission of further revisions of the same papers to another journal or publication. Volume 32 contains three papers from both undergraduate and graduate students at the SLLLC. These papers explore topics in phonology, dialectology, nominal syntax, and particle syntax. The languages featured in this volume include Spanish and Mandarin Chinese. Finally, we thank and express our most sincere gratitude to all contributors, editors, and advisors and supervisors of those contributors and editors for their time, effort, and patience in their participation in the editing and publishing process of this volume. This continuation of CWPL’s longstanding tradition at the University of Calgary would be impossible without you and your work.
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    ItemOpen Access
    On the syntax of Mandarin sentence-final particles: a neo-performative analysis
    (2022-03) Xu, Kang
    Mandarin sentence-final particles have been analyzed uniformly as sentence-final complementizers by a group of researchers (Paul & Pan, 2017; Pan, 2019). However, in the present paper, I draw evidence from co-occurring sentence-final particles to demonstrate that in Mandarin, sentence-final particles must co-occur in a fixed order. This observation casts doubts on the assumption that these particles are complementizers because treating them as complementizers does not explain why they appear in a fixed order. Following Wiltschko (2020), I propose that these particles belong to different categories of the interactional structure. I focus my discussion on three representative particles, namely, ne 呢 , me 么 and ha 哈 . An analysis that assumes an interactional structure above CP can account for some poorly understood co-occurrence restrictions among these particles.
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    An exploration of neuter determiner 'lo' and 'lo que' constructions in Spanish
    (2022-03) Levinstein Rodriguez, Andrea
    This paper presents an exploratory overview of the syntactic properties of ‘lo’, a polysemic definite determiner that is standardly characterized as having a ‘neuter’ grammatical gender. I argue that ‘lo’ is better characterized as a referential pronoun lacking φ features, which refers to non-individuated entities. In addition to this referential ‘lo’, and following Zulaica Hernandez (2018), I argue that there is a non-referential, expletive ‘lo’, which relates a possible world to a predicate which may contain morphologically expressed φ features. However, the distribution and referentiality of ‘lo’ in ‘lo que’ constructions (prepositional clauses where ‘lo’ can be external or internal to the CP; see Plann, 1980) indicate that whether ‘lo’ is referential or expletive is not a matter of syntactic position, contrary to Zulaica Hernandez (2018). Referential ‘lo’ stands in contrast with most structurally defective pronouns, such as impersonal pronouns and expletives, in that it is a definite pronoun with a specific referent. This goes against the standard assumption that a nominal phrase that has properties associated with ‘higher’ layers of structure, such as definiteness (associated with DP), must therefore also have ‘lower’ layers like NumP and nP. Although this paper does not present a solution, it does point out that standard theory cannot account for it and argues for the need to continue developing our understanding of nominal structure.
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    Approaches to coda /s/ in Ecuadorian Spanish
    (2022-03) Giudice Grillo, Andrés
    Ecuadorian Spanish displays significant regional variation affecting the realization of coda /s/. Within the highlands of Ecuador, the pronunciation of coda /s/ as [z] occupies different phonological environments depending on the subregion: While in the far north and south [z] is only found preceding voiced consonants, central and central-southern varieties display [z] in more environments, namely word-final prevocalic and prefix-final environments, which makes them unique in the Spanish-speaking world. In this investigation, I review the main studies that have focused on the description and analysis of coda /s/ voicing in Ecuadorian Spanish (Lipski, 1989 and Bradley & Delforge, 2006) and combine their insights with those of other studies (Muñiz Cachón & Cuevas Alonso, 2012, Navarro Tomás, 1968) which have explored the sonority of preconsonantal /s/. Stemming from this exploration, I present a conciliatory solution to the problem of /s/-voicing. I modify Lipski’s formal analysis to include a voice-neutral [S] that appears in pre-consonantal position, which resonates with the findings by Muñiz Cachón and Cuevas Alonso (2012) and the observations by Navarro Tomás (1968), both of which show that pre-consonantal /s/ in Spanish has gradient voicing.