Person:

Bobaljik, Jonathan

Bobaljik & Zocca (2011) argue that ellipsis reveals the existence of (at least) two classes of gender-paired nouns: in theactor/actressclass, the grammatically feminine form is specified for conceptual gender, while the unaffixed form is unspecified, exemplifying the classic markedness asymmetry (Jakobson 1932); in theprince/princessclass, both forms are specified for conceptual gender. Here we test two theories of this asymmetry: one that encodes markedness in the linguistic representation (e.g. Merchant 2014, Sudo & Spathas 2016, and Saab 2019), and one that traces the asymmetry to differences in the relative frequency of the forms in each pair (Haspelmath 2006). The frequency approach predicts that the size of the asymmetries (as quantified by acceptability judgments) will correlate with the size of the relative frequency ratio for each pair. We test this prediction in two experiments: the first is a curated set of 16 pairs in English, and the second is a test of 58 pairs that nearly exhausts such pairs in English. We use frequencies from COCA (Davies 2008) to test the prediction of the frequency approach. Our results suggest that the relative frequency hypothesis is not an empirically adequate competitor for the explanation of gender asymmetries.

We examine a traditional Itelmen song type (itl; Chukotko-Kamchatkan) from the perspective of text setting: the phonological correspondence between spoken language and sung text. We suggest that the algorithm that relates spoken text to song in Itelmen is unlike the majority of examples considered in the literature on English and other languages, in that linguistic stress and metrical prominence play no discernible role, nor does syllable weight. Instead, the driving force appears to be matching word edges to (half-)measure boundaries, resulting in predictable anaptyxis (vowel epenthesis) and lengthening. The process is paraphonological in that it is related to, but distinct from, the regular phonology of the language, both in the quality of the epenthetic elements and in their placement. While the algorithm makes use of (and thus may inform us about) Itelmen phonotactics, the relationship is not readily characterizable as being phonotactically motivated but is instead controlled by a pattern of mapping linguistic syllables to musical beats.

Like other syntactic elements, affixes are sometimes said to be heads or modifiers. In Russian, one suffix,-onok, can be either: as a head, it is a size diminutive denot- ing baby animals, and as a modifier, it is an evaluative with a dismissive/affectionate flavor. Various grammatical properties of this suffix differ between the two uses: gen- der, declension class, and interaction with suppletive alternations, both as target and trigger. We explore a reductionist account of these differences: the baby diminutive comprises a lexical morpheme plus a functional nominalizing head, while the eval- uative affix is the lexical morpheme alone. We contend that our account is superior to two conceivable alternatives: first, the view that these are homophonous but un- related affixes, and second, a cartographic alternative, whereby diminutives attach at different levels in a universal structure.