Browsing Coyote Papers by Issue Date
Now showing items 1-20 of 201
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Immediate-local MERGE as pair-MergeOne of the structure-building operations—pair-Merge/adjunction—is conceptually implied to be dispensable in the minimalist MERGE model. This article proposes that immediate-local MERGE (IL-MERGE)—extremely local application of internal MERGE—yields the asymmetric property of adjunction. IL-MERGE forms {a, {a, b}} that is equivalent of <a, b> built by pair-Merge.
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Escaping siloed phonology: Framing Irish lenition in Emergent GrammarIrish displays a complex mutation system in which regular phonological alternations are sensitive to arbitrary morphological information. The Emergent Grammar (EG) model is well-suited to address this phenomenon. This paper details how the model's technology accounts for the phonological regularity and morphological opacity of lenition in Irish.
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Dialectal, Gender-Based, and Cross-Generational Variation in Negev Arabic Spatial RepresentationsSpace is a fundamental domain of human thinking, universally experienced, yet culturally specific. I describe variations in linguistic and cognitive projective spatial representations (frames of reference) across dialects, genders, and age groups among the Bedouin Arabs of the Negev. Their tribes preserve a unique, culture-specific system of spatial representations.
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A-Movement: Successive Cyclic or One Fell Swoop?This paper discusses A-movement, focusing on its successive cyclicity, and argues that it can be both successive cyclic and non-successive cyclic. I claim that whether A-movement is successive cyclic or not depends on how Merge applies, proposing that the structure-building operation plays a key role in determining the successive cyclicity.
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Unifying Labeling under Minimal Search in "Single-" and "Multiple-Specifier" ConfigurationsBuilding on recent proposals of Chomsky (2013, 2015), we explore a definition of minimal search that allows an elegant (since simple) analysis of multiple nominative subjects in Japanese, and the absence of such subjects in English. We propose an analysis yielding these results unifying labeling under minimal search in single- and multiple-specifier configurations.
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Resistance, Consciousness, and Filipina Hip Hop Identity: A Phonological AnalysisIn this paper, I investigate the phonology and Hip Hop Language of two Filipina American rappers, Ruby Ibarra and Rocky Rivera, and how they express their understandings of identity and language and race, all in the context of Hip Hop and Asian America.
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Good Times, Bad Times: A keyword analysis of letters to shareholders of two Fortune 500 Banking InstitutionsThis corpus-based keyword analysis study investigated the letters to the shareholders from two commercial banks, Bank of America and Citigroup, over a three-year period from 2008, 2009, and 2010. The letters were compiled to facilitate a diachronic assessment of profit/loss reporting from two prominent institutions over a time period in which the recession commenced, peaked, and concluded. To conduct the analysis on the node texts, two sets of reference corpora were compiled. The first reference corpus set consisted of the letters to shareholders from eight consistently high-performing corporations not within the commercial banking industry for each of the three years; the second reference corpus set consisted of the letters from the 10 banking institutions that also appeared in the Fortune 500 listings for the three period. The corpus-based analysis revealed that in years of low performance companies create messages that assert a vision and forward a strategy for ensuring future success while also deflecting responsibility for past failure. In contrast, when companies perform well, the keyword lists display a clear tendency of the company and the author to accept praise and responsibility for high performance.
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Can Idioms Be Passivized?: Evidence from Online ProcessingThis paper presents the results of an experiment designed to access native speakers’ underlying grammatical knowledge concerning the passivizability of English Verb-Object (VO) idioms. Although it has long been noted that some VO idioms retain their idiomatic meaning in the passive while others do not (Katz & Postal 1964, et seq.), the source of this variation is unclear, and native speaker intuitions on a large number of idioms are not as clear cut as previous accounts might suggest. Taking as a starting point Folli and Harley’s (2007) hypothesis that there is a structural distinction between passivizable and nonpassivizable idioms, the current study tests one prediction of this hypothesis, namely that there should be a categorical distinction between the two types of idioms in the grammars of native speakers. The experimental results contradict this hypothesis, as evidenced by a normal distribution of response times to passive idioms. However, it is hypothesized that this online task is not appropriate to access the fine-tuned syntactico-semantic judgments underlying native speaker intuitions of idiom passivizability, due to the fact that the methodology employed here—a self-paced reading task—does not yield the expected results even for canonically passivizable and nonpassivizable idioms.
