Previous research in syntactic gender congruency effects has indicated that German and Dutch speakers exhibited priming effects in the production of noun phrases (La Heij, Mak, Sander & Willeboordse 1998; Schriefers 1993; Schriefers & Teruel 2000), whereas speakers of Spanish and Italian showed no such effects (Miozzo & Caramazza 1999; Costa, Sebastián-Gallés, Miozzo & Caramazza 1999). Until recently, the production of bare nouns had only been examined in Dutch (La Heij, et al. 1998) and no effect was found. It was concluded that gender information is only accessed when specifically required for the selection of agreement morphemes. Cubelli, Lotto, Paolieri, Girelli, and Job (2005), however, found an inhibitory gender congruency effect for bare noun production in Italian. The goal of the current experiment was to determine if such an effect could be elicited in Spanish. The current experiment examined the production of bare nouns and noun phrases (NPs) by native Spanish speakers within the picture-word interference paradigm, in which subjects named a picture accompanied by a distractor word which was either gender congruent or incongruent with the target. Congruency effects were determined by naming latencies. An analysis of the data showed that there was no gender congruency effect in bare noun production. Naming latencies in the two conditions were virtually identical (f (1,15) = 0.017, p < 0.90). In addition, separate analyses were performed on target words of each gender (masculine and feminine) and no gender specific effect was found. As predicted, there were no congruency effects for NP production. The fact that, in bare noun production, Spanish behaves like Dutch rather than Italian indicates that there is a critical difference between Spanish and Italian relating to gender access.

Javanese has an applicative suffix –ake, which serves to license a benefactive, instrumental or theme suffix as a core object. Each of them has a thematic paraphrase in which the applicative argument is contained in a PP. The multiplicity of –ake poses problems for Marantz (1993) with his single applicative head. First, the uses of the applicative morpheme –ake must be lumped together in a single applicative head. Second, there is no attempt at all to account for the relation between the applicative constructions and their thematic paraphrases. I argue that Bowers’s (2010) framework can solve the problems with multiple argument heads merged in accordance with a fixed Universal Order of Merge (UOM). There are three primary argument-types, Ag(ent), Th(eme) and Aff(ectee) and secondary argument-types of various kinds, including Instr(ument), Ben(eficiary), Source, Goal, and others. Any head can potentially host an applicative morpheme. In Javanese, the morpheme -ake can be associated with an Aff-head, an Inst-head or a Th-head. Furthermore, in each case, applicative construction and its thematic paraphrase are derived from virtually identical structures because the argument head may have more than one selectional possibility for a DP with unvalued case feature or a PP.

This study investigates the influence of frequency on the production of bimorphemic words, and considers which frequency measure is most apt to explain the differences. Previous studies have reported that frequent words are produced faster and more casually than infrequent ones, and that medial segments will have shorter durations. The present study examines the relation between frequency and the duration of medial segments in English derived words by conducting a production experiment with 6 native speakers of American English using 74 English '-ment' derivatives, and pits word frequency, base frequency, and relative frequency (wordfreq/basefreq) against one another as predictors. The results show that models incorporating any of the three frequency measures strongly predict medial segment duration (R-squared = 0.56, with the differences in R-squared between them on the order of 1%. Among the three frequency measures, whole word frequency explained the most variance, across all consonant types. The duration of segments in highly frequent words tends to be shorter than that in relatively infrequent words. Overall, this study confirms that speakers are sensitive to the extralinguistic information associated with the words such as frequency, and in this case, traditional frequency measures (whole word and base frequencies) are better predictors than relative frequency.

In this research, we explore the linguistic structure of the Spanish of Heritage Speakers, those who have acquired Spanish as the home language in a minority language context (Iverson, 2010). We contribute to the discussion of the properties of Heritage Languages here by examining Preposition Stranding in Heritage Speakers versus native monolingual speakers of Spanish. We claim that the distinct behavior of Heritage Speakers of Spanish supports the claim that Heritage Languages may differ from native monolingual language in the narrow syntax, affecting uninterpretable features of the grammar.

This paper aims to account for Double Accessibility effects found in Korean. Clearing out confusions in the previous discussion on the phenomenon, it claims that Korean does not have a Double Access reading in a semantic sense, unlike English, but Double Accessibility effects arise as a result of pragmatic repair which is employed in order to interpret a focused indexical element causing a conflict in the interpretation process. The advantages of the pragmatic analysis defended in this paper over the movement analyses proposed in the literature will be shown in details.

Previous analyses of Blackfoot’s demonstrative system by Uhlenbeck (1938), Taylor (1969), and Frantz (1971, 2009) share the same tendency to conflate the meanings of different functions of demonstratives into one overly broad meaning. I address this problem by analyzing only the situational uses of demonstratives in 25 stories from Uhlenbeck (1912) and additional data from Uhlenbeck (1938). My solution is built upon the framework outlined in Imai’s (2003) cross-linguistic study of spatial deixis and informed by the typological demonstrative studies of Dixon (2003) and Diessel (1999). I argue that Blackfoot’s demonstrative system encodes features of Imai’s four parameters: anchor, spatial demarcation, referent/region configuration and function.

This paper analyses the phenomenon of Suspended Affixation (SA) which refers to a situation in coordinated constructions when affixes on the final conjunct have scope over all the non-final conjuncts. The main goal of this paper is to look at the structure of SA for Noun Compound Coordination and to find out how pl and poss suffixes behave regarding suspension. Previous studies have shown that in N and NP coordination poss cannot be suspended leaving pl on the non-final conjunct. This study tests the suspendability of poss in the context of Noun Compound coordination. Since SA seems to represent gradient judgment data two acceptability judgment studies were conducted to find out the (un)grammaticality of Noun Compound constructions. The results show that pl and poss suffixes cannot be suspended for independent reasons. The suspendability of poss does not depend on the presence/absence of pl in the structure due to its structural position. This article proposes an analysis of SA in N and NP coordination which represents a combination of two approaches on SA already proposed in literature and is based on the idea of Parallel Merge proposed by Citko (2005). SA in N and NP coordination is considered to be a coordination of fully inflected conjuncts where the inflections are parallel-merged with two conjuncts (final and non-final). I show that due to the structure of Noun Compound coordination constructions, pl and poss cannot be parallel-merged because of a minimality condition: a non-final conjunct has to be a Minimal Morphological Word.