San Diego Linguistic Papers

Ethiopian Semitic languages all have some form of internal reduplication. The characteristics of Tigre reduplication are described here, and are shown to diverge from the other languages in two main respects: i) the meaning and ii) the ability to incur multiple reduplication of the reduplicative syllable. The formation of internal reduplication is accomplished via infixation plus addditional templatic shape requirements which override many properties of the regular verb stem. Further constraints on realization of the full reduplicative syllable outweigh restrictions on multiple repetition of consonants, particularly gutturals.

This paper offers a detailed analysis of reduplicative patterns in Kirundi. In it, I show that what looks like simple OCP effects preventing the reduplicant and the base from being identical are due to the interaction of markedness and faithfulness constraints giving rise to what McCarthy and Prince (1994) call the emergence of the unmarked (TETU). Moreover, in accounting for the non-identity of the base and reduplicant, I show that a ranking paradox occurs when applying McCarthy and Prince’s (1995) Full Model of reduplication to Kirundi reduplicated words. I show that models with a broad Input-Output correspondence, like those advocated by Spaelti (1997) and Struijke (1998), easily account for Kirundi reduplicated words.

This work argues against the claim that a structural distinction is the necessary source of the divergent patterns of behavior attested in /s/- and non-/s/ consonant sequences. Previous treatments of linguistic phenomena as wide-ranging and manifold as Sanskrit reduplication (Steriade 1988), Italian allomorphy (Davis 1990), and the acquisition of English word-initial clusters (Barlow 2001) have all converged on the assumption that /s/-sequences require structural representations that are different from those assigned to other consonant clusters. In each of these cases however, I show that analyses of the data that do not assume a structural distinction are simpler, and either have more explanatory power, or generate more accurate predictions.

In Cyprus today systematic changes affecting all levels of linguistic analysis are observed in the use of Standard Greek, giving rise to a distinct linguistic variety which can be called Cypriot Standard Greek. The changes can be attributed to the influence of English and Cypriot Greek (the local linguistic variety), and to the increasing use of the Standard in semi-formal occasions. Equally important is the reluctance to recognize the diglossic situation on the island (in which Standard Greek is the H variety and Cypriot Greek the L), for political and ideological reasons. This in turn means that the attention of the Cypriot speakers is not drawn to the differences between Standard Greek as spoken in Greece and their usage of it; thus the differences become gradually consolidated, while the users remain unaware of them.

The Greek speech community of Cyprus is characterized by classic diglossia, with the local varieties forming the L, and Standard Greek the H. It is argued here that this diglossic situation is maintained against what the sociopolitical and economic conditions would predict, because the prevailing linguistic ideology—according to which Cypriots are ethnically Greek, an ethnic identity that is primarily defined by the use of (an almost uniform) Greek language—has led to the erasure of diglossia. The case of Cyprus shows that linguistic ideology and the role of language in indexing ethnicity may be crucial for the maintenance of diglossia in some linguistic communities and may prove more powerful than socio-economic conditions in sustaining the linguistic status quo.

An in-depth examination of sluiced prepositional phrases reveals sluices for which interpretation is unobtainable by parallelism with an antecedent. To accommodate these, I propose sluices are licensed by serving to question an inferred argument of a semantically compatible and salient antecedent. Both a corpus investigation and a grammaticality survey provide corroboration.

Keenan's account of the DEFINITENESS EFFECT associated with the English there-construction based on the notion of INTERSECTIVE DETERMINER is well-known. In Part 1 of this paper, I will consider a similar kind of effect in Japanese constructions. In particular, I shall show that a very general form of Quantifier Float and the Head Internal Relative Clause, two phenomena particularly prominent in Japanese syntax, allow us to extend the idea of the Definiteness Effect to predicates with more than one argument. I will then show in Part 2 that this idea provides an empirical motivation for extending Keenan's idea of intersective determiners to 2-dimensional (transitive) spaces. Part 2 thus concerns a mathematical extension of the classical mathematical theory of determiners to 2-dimensional spaces with its empirical grounding in Japanese syntax. Part 3 generalizes the mathematical theory introduced in Part 2 to n-dimensional spaces in general, without any empirical concern.

Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 can in principle be read independently. Part 1 primarily concerns Japanese and is empirical and descriptive. The reader who is not particularly interested in mathematics may wish to read only Part 1. Those who are interested in the "mathematics of language" but not particularly in details of Japanese syntax may wish to skim through Part 1 and start careful reading from Part 2. On the other hand, those who are only interested in mathematics and do not care about, or wish not to be bothered by, empirical facts may wish to read only Part 3. Due to the intended relative independence of the three Parts, the reader who wishes to read through the paper from Part 1 through Part 3 may encounter some redundancy through the paper.

Part 1, sections 1-5, is a slightly revised version of the first five sections of Kuroda (2007). I wish to express my gratitude to the CSLI Publications for granting me a permission to reproduce this portion in this paper.