This paper argues for a specific hierarchical syntactic structure for Kaska, a Northern Athabaskan language spoken in the southern Yukon Territory and northeastern British Columbia. The arguments herein are grounded in Minimalist Syntax (Chomsky 1995; Collins 1997) and Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1994; Harley & Noyer 1999). Traditionally, Athabaskan morphology has exemplified templatic morphology, which by definition, has no meaningful correspondence between the underlying, morpho-syntactic hierarchy and the surface, morpho-phonological linear form. Using the derivation of transitive sentences, this paper shows that, in Kaska, there is a direct, meaningful correspondence between the hierarchical syntactic structure and the linear order of morphemes within the verb complex at spell-out.

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.

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.

This paper describes the development of a metric for measuring the semantic distance or similarity of words using the WordNet lexical database. Such a metric could be of use in development of search engines and text retrieval systems, tasks for which the richness of natural language can cause difficulty. Further, such a metric can prove invaluable to psycholinguists who wish to study lexical semantic similarity or speech errors (specifically malapropisms). The paper first explores an adjusted distance metric, a la Rada et al. 1989, and the problems such a metric presents. Additional analysis shows that adjustments can be made to such a distance metric using density calculations, both based on depth within the network and based on local density. The paper ends with a discussion about automating the task of identifying regions within the semantic space over which density calculations can be made.

This paper is a study of reported speech in Nez Perce (Sahaptian), an endangered language presently spoken in the southern Columbia Plateau region of western North America. This paper will focus on the use of reported speech in Nez Perce narrative to determine 1) the range and types of reported speech registers, and 2) discern how such reported speech registers might be patterned so as to indicate their cultural functions.

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 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.