[PLing] Einladung

Martin Prinzhorn martin.prinzhorn at univie.ac.at
Tue Sep 18 15:58:59 CEST 2018


Achtung: Knapp vor dem Semesterbeginn findet der folgende Vortrag statt:
 
Gender mismatches under ellipsis: An experimental investigation

Jonathan Bobaljik (Harvard)

Collaborators:
Jon Sprouse (UConn)
Kazuko Yatsushiro (Leibniz-ZAS, Berlin)
Troy Messick (Rutgers)

Bobaljik & Zocca (2011 Morphology) identify two classes of nouns in English that behave differently with respect to gender mismatches under ellipsis, even when the morphological alternations are the same: the actress class (AC) allows a masculine antecedent for an elided feminine noun: John is an actor, and Mary is an actor too, and the princess class (PC) does not: *John is a prince, and Mary is a prince too (cf. [2,3,4]).  BZ explain this asymmetry through underspecification: the (morphologically) masculine forms of AC words are (semantically) unspecified for gender/sex, whereas the masculine forms of PC words are specified for gender/sex (feminine forms of both are specified for gender/sex). In contrast, Haspelmath (2006 J Linguistics) proposes that differences of this sort should be explained with reference to the relative frequency of the two forms, thus eliminating markedness from the theory. Here, we (i) experimentally test the BZ claims for a wider range of lexical items, and (ii) investigate whether the empirical evidence can support the frequency-based account over the markedness account to these alternations. Finally, we discuss some of the considerations for an extension of the experimental design to German.

Zeit: Freitag der 28. 9. um 14 Uhr
Ort: Seminarraum 2, 1. Stock, Sensengasse 3A
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.univie.ac.at/pipermail/pling/attachments/20180918/c05096cc/attachment.html>


More information about the PLing mailing list