Weekly Digest, 4/15/24

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Inked ✍️

Zuzanna Fuchs, Maria Polinsky and Gregory Scontras. “Explaining gender: Lessons from heritage Spanish.” Multifacted Multilingualism, edited by Kleanthes K. Grohmann [Studies in Bilingualism]. Link to paper.

Colloquium today: Michelle Yuan (UCLA)

Please join us for a colloquium talk by Michelle Yuan (UCLA) on Monday, April 15 at 3:30pm in GFS 330. See below for title and abstract.

Pronominal cliticization and verb-initial word order in San Juan Piñas Mixtec 

San Juan Piñas Mixtec (SJPM) is a previously undocumented variety of Mixtec spoken in Oaxaca, Mexico and in diaspora communities in California. In this talk, I investigate two restrictions on the pronominal clitics of SJPM as a window into morphosyntactic and potentially prosodic aspects of VSO word order.

The primary focus of this talk is a ban on clitic combinations in monotransitives—an instance of the Person Case Constraint (PCC) (Perlmutter, 1971, et seq.). Crucially, in SJPM, this effect arises not only in combinations of subject and object clitics, but also when the subject is a lexical DP. That non-clitic elements may induce the PCC is cross-linguistically rare, though is attested in languages both related and unrelated to SJPM (e.g., Postal 1989, Sichel & Toosarvandani to appear). For SJPM, I argue that this pattern emerges as a natural consequence of the syntax needed to derive VSO word order in the language. Specifically, the phi-probe responsible for the PCC, located in the vP-domain, is independently required for argument licensing purposes, because functional heads such as T0 are solely responsible for verb-raising (e.g., Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou 1998). As such, PCC violations involving lexical DP subjects are effectively violations of the Case Filter. 

The remainder of this talk then explores what appears to be a prosodic restriction on vowel-initial pronominal object clitics, blocking them from coalescing with lexical DP subjects (this effect is empirically distinguishable from the PCC). I (tentatively) suggest that the latter restriction may be analyzed as a “Crisp Edge” requirement on DP arguments (cf. Ito & Mester 1999) and may have more general implications for the prosodic phrasing of the verb and its arguments in verb-initial languages (Kalivoda 2018, Clemens 2021).

Upcoming Events

Department Events

• Monday, April 14 at 1pm @ PhonLunch: no meeting this week

• Tuesday, April 2 at 9:30am @ Psycholing Lab: no meeting this week

• Tuesday, April 15 at 7:30pm @ PhonLunch: Spring 2024 JUMP (Joint USC/UCLA Meeting on Phonology)

• Wednesday, April 17 at 2pm @ S-Side Story: Daniel Altshuler

• Monday, Mar. 4 at 3:30pm @ MeaningLab: no meeting this week

USiL Events

Please check out https://www.usilusc.org/ for the latest on Undergraduate Students in Linguistics (USiL) events this semester.