Working Papers in Linguistics: Volume 59 (Winter 2010)

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https://kb.osu.edu/handle/1811/80861

Edited by Marivic Lesho, Bridget J. Smith, Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, and Peter W. Culicover

Front Matter
pp. i-vi
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Greek ts/dz as Internally Complex Segments: Phonological and Phonetic Evidence
Joseph, Brian D.; Lee, Gina M. pp. 1-9
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Word-Initial Consonant Clusters in Albanian
Klippenstein, Rachel pp. 10-32
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The Early Modern English Genitive Its and Factors Involved in Genitive Variation
Sampson, Salena pp. 33-43
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Lettered Words in Chinese: Roman Letters as Morpheme-Syllables
Riha, Helena pp. 44-51
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Multilingual Animacy Classification by Sparse Logistic Regression
Baker, Kirk; Brew, Chris pp. 52-74
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Now showing 1 - 6 of 6

Front Matter (Number 59, Winter 2010)
(Ohio State University. Department of Linguistics, 2010)
Greek ts/dz as Internally Complex Segments: Phonological and Phonetic Evidence
(Ohio State University. Department of Linguistics, 2010) Joseph, Brian D.; Lee, Gina M.
The "affricate dream" of Householder (1964), in which Modern Greek ts/dz are reduced to clusters of independently occurring segments (thus, ts is analyzed as /t + s/), is examined here in the light of two types of evidence not previously considered: instrumental measurements of the duration of the sounds in question compared with related sounds, and the proper formulation of a dissimilatory dialectal sound change. This evidence shows that the best analysis recognizes these sounds as single segments but with internal complexity, as suggested, but not overtly argued for, in Joseph & Philippaki-Warburton (1987).
Word-Initial Consonant Clusters in Albanian
(Ohio State University. Department of Linguistics, 2010) Klippenstein, Rachel
Albanian has a wide but not unrestricted range of initial consonant clusters. This paper lays out some constraints on such clusters; e.g., there are no clusters of two voiced stops, nor of voiced obstruent + voiceless obstruent. Dictionary data is supplemented by phonetic data from a native Albanian speaker, which helps determine how well orthographic evidence reflects pronunciation. I find that vowel epenthesis in obstruent-obstruent clusters is rare; schwa is sometimes elided to form clusters that are not orthographically evident, but less often than expected; and clusters written with voiceless obstruent + voiced obstruent are pronounced as such, at least sometimes.
The Early Modern English Genitive Its and Factors Involved in Genitive Variation
(Ohio State University. Department of Linguistics, 2010) Sampson, Salena
This article explores the variation between the emergent genitive its and the periphrastic form of it in Early Modern English, situating this case in the larger picture of English genitive variation. As previous studies have often focused on non-pronominal possessors (given that Present Day English pronominal possessors often appear prenominally, with limited variation), this early pronominal genitive variation provides unique insight as it illustrates some of the same factors significant in pronominal genitive variation as in other cases. Additionally, as neuter pronouns commonly correlate with inanimate referents, this variation provides new evidence on the independence of weight and animacy in genitive variation. The importance of another factor, pressure from the pronoun paradigm, is also illustrated.
Lettered Words in Chinese: Roman Letters as Morpheme-Syllables
(Ohio State University. Department of Linguistics, 2010) Riha, Helena
In English individual letters are used to represent syllables, morphemes, and words in abbreviations. These uses of letters have been borrowed readily into Chinese, while the use of letters to represent phonemes in spelled words is less common. I discuss why the use of letters to represent units larger than the phoneme is more common in Chinese than their use in spelled words and what this reflects about Chinese morphology. I also argue that since abbreviations and letter-symbol words use letters as components of their structure, they show an interaction between orthography and morphology that should be recognized in morphological studies.
Multilingual Animacy Classification by Sparse Logistic Regression
(Ohio State University. Department of Linguistics, 2010) Baker, Kirk; Brew, Chris
This paper presents results from three experiments on automatic animacy classification in Japanese and English. We present experiments that focus on solutions to the problem of reliably classifying a large set of infrequent items using a small number of automatically extracted features. We labeled a set of Japanese nouns as ±animate on the basis of reliable, surface-obvious morphological features, producing an accurately but sparsely labeled data set. To classify these nouns, and to achieve good generalization to other nouns for which we do not have labels, we used feature vectors based on frequency counts of verbargument relations that abstract away from item identity and into class-wide distributional tendencies of the feature set. Grouping items into suffix-based equivalence classes prior to classification increased data coverage and improved classification accuracy. For the items that occur at least once with our feature set, we obtained 95% classification accuracy. We used loanwords to transfer automatically acquired labels from English to classify items that are zerofrequency in the Japanese data set, giving increased precision on inanimate items and increased recall on animate items.

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