We discuss how we use the Japanese version of PAPPI, a multilingual parsing engine in the Principles-and-Parameters framework (Chomsky 1981), to computationally model a theory that accounts for the grammaticality of certain Japanese wh-constructions. In this theory, a Q-feature is base generated within a wh-phrase and raises to C, where it checks an uninterpretable Q-feature. Qfeature movement can be blocked by an intervening quantificational head; an effect due to the Minimal Link Condition (Chomsky 1995). Furthermore, certain multiple wh-questions in which Q-feature movement is not subject to the Minimal Link Condition are accounted for in terms of the Principle of Minimal Compliance (Richards 2001), which is basically the notion that once a constraint is satisfied it may be subsequently ignored. In this paper, we describe modifications to the parsing engine of PAPPI necessary to implement this Q-feature movement theory.

Preclassic Maya centers were vibrant stages of performance where communities gathered to reaffirm and redefine themselves. Ceremonial pyramids and plazas were tangible and powerful receptacles of past and present forms of community identity. Archaeological remains enable us to develop a multi-generational sketch of public ritual life in the Maya lowlands from 400 BC to AD 300. Transformations in public performance and community participation corresponded with a series of modifications to ceremonial precints. Public architecture in many communities became increasingly less accessible to a large audience of observers. The artistic imagery associated with these buildings also changed markedly - initially depicting zoomorphic or masked beings and ultimately culminating in the portraiture of real historic personages. Concomitant with these changes were pronounced innovations in ritual interment as certain community members began to be entombed in and around public architecture. Taken together, these features suggest Preclassic Maya communities altered their ritual practices to accommodate emerging social realities and inchoate political identities.

Social memories and collective representations act as vehicles for configuring, legitimizing, and sustaining particular constructs of knowledge and power in the world of lived relations, while simultaneously marginalizing or negating others. This paper explores constancy and change in popular and official histories of a Southern Paiute man who lived in southern Nevada from the 1880s-1940. Accused of killing between seven and thirty people between 1910 and 1940, Queho became the center of multiple historical accounts written over the course of one hundred years. This diachronic analysis highlights the continuous reconfiguration of Queho's ethnicity and place of origin followed by a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of reconstructing these social memories.

Ultrasound imaging experiments were conducted to study vowel-to-vowel coarticulation patterns involving the environment of vowel assimilation in Korean. Results showed that anticipatory coarticulatory effects occur and that vowel assimilation is truly phonological and that the degree of coarticulation is stronger in assimilated words than in non-assimilated words. These results imply that phonological rules might directly influence coarticulation in a phonology-phonetics unified grammar.

In Mandarin Chinese topic constructions of the possessor, optional resumptive pronouns (RP) seem to occur. Meanwhile, the data also show a difference in the extractability of the possessor, i.e., the so-called subject-object asymmetry in extractability (Huang 1982). That is, when the possessor of a subject possessive phrase is topicalized/left-dislocated, a gap is grammatical, and an RP is also allowed; when the possessor of an object possessive phrase is topicalized, a gap is disallowed, and an RP saves the otherwise illicit extraction of the possessor. This paper first argues that the Chinese possessive phrase has a phrase structure that resembles the English counterpart, and adopts Abney’s (1987) DP-Hypothesis for the Chinese possessive phrase. Based on the Left Branch Condition (LBC; Ross 1986), the paper then proposes the Symmetrical Hypothesis, i.e., extraction of the possessor is equally illegal from either argument position. With respect to the occurrence of the seemingly optional RPs along with the extraction of the possessor from the subject possessive phrase, the paper posits two distinct possibilities for the extraction: extraction from the subject position directly, which is an argument position, or from the topic position instead, which is a derived position in the left periphery. LBC is at work with the former possibility, and therefore the subject-object asymmetry dissolves; LBC is violable in the latter possibility, given the specific nature of the left periphery (Rizzi 1997). The analysis for the latter possibility leads to the claim that the RP is in fact obligatory, and that the RP and the gap are in different derivations. Further data from Lu (1995) present a challenge to Huang’s asymmetry as well as the proposed Symmetrical Hypothesis. That is, when the possessor is 3rd person non-human, the extraction of the possessor from the object position renders the gap grammatical, but the RP ungrammatical. The analysis of the data finds that the animacy of the possessor plays an important role in eliciting the different grammaticality judgment here. As a result, the utterance of the 3rd person nonhuman RP is prohibited, hence the proposed No Pronunciation Rule. In this sense, Mandarin Chinese also has null RPs.

This paper provides a Distributed Morphology (DM) approach to the thematic licensing of verbs and extends that approach to the licensing of strong verb alternations such as eat/ate. These verbal behaviors have been captured in the DM literature by limiting the morphological environments that condition the insertion of Vocabulary Items (c.f. secondary exponence). In this paper, I show that the verbs in question gain the features of the environment they appear in by undergoing fusion with the relevant heads. In this way, DM does not need to rely upon conditioning the insertion of irregular verbs, but need only rely upon the Subset Principle to license the insertion of these verbs.

This paper describes a technique for aligning ultrasound images of the tongue to images of the palate, providing both a fixed point of reference and a means to consider the tongue in the context of passive articulators, thereby addressing two major challenges presented by ultrasound as a means of articulatory imaging, without compromising its portability.

It has been well documented in the literature that translation equivalents have special status in bilinguals’ lexical system and can be treated as synonymy across languages. It has been claimed that translation equivalents are overlapped at the conceptual level across languages with different orthographic and phonological forms. Evidence to support this claim comes from cross-language priming studies in which subjects respond to L2 targets faster if targets are preceded by their translation equivalents (translation primes), compared to unrelated primes in lexical decision. Evidence observed in the masked priming paradigm is more convincing in the sense that subjects are not aware of the existence of primes but still produce priming effects from L1 to L2 in lexical decision. In order to have a complete understanding of the semantic organization of bilinguals’ lexical system, a question worthwhile to ask is whether crosslanguage word pairs that are semantically related but not translationequivalents bear any relation with each other at the conceptual level. Previous studies have shown even semantically related cross-language word pairs can generate priming from L1 to L2 when the primes are visible. However, visible primes usually involve strategic processing, which cannot be taken as evidence to support the argument that semantically related cross-language word pairs are conceptually-mediated. This study attempts to investigate whether an L1 prime could generate a more ‘general’ level of semantic priming to enhance the processing of the L2 target under the masked priming condition. This will test the hypothesis of whether semantically related cross-language word pairs are conceptually-mediated by using the lexical decision task. The results show strong priming from L1 to L2 for translation equivalents, but not for semantically-related word pairs. It is suggested that cross-language processing is specific and priming is unique to translation equivalents. In conclusion, it can be argued that semantically-related cross-language word pairs do not conceptually overlap and their mental representations could be very separate.

This paper is an initial descriptive analysis of noun phrases in Southern Ute. This analysis begins with a brief sociolinguistic introduction to the Southern Ute tribe located in southwestern Colorado. Next Southern Ute phonemes are presented in the current official tribal orthography and the International Phonetic Alphabet. Various verb phrases are presented to develop a basic understanding of word order in Southern Ute. The internal structure of nouns is discussed followed by examples and discussions of various noun phrases. This paper is a springboard for further analysis of the Southern Ute language.