Conference Presentations by Lena Borise
Papers by Lena Borise
Journal of the International Phonetic Association, Jan 29, 2024
NELS 53: Proceedings of the Fifty-Third Annual Meeting of the North East Lingusitic Society, Volume 1, 105–118 , 2023
Prepring version of:
Borise, Lena & Ekaterina Georgieva. 2023. The role of Lowering and non-cycl... more Prepring version of:
Borise, Lena & Ekaterina Georgieva. 2023. The role of Lowering and non-cyclic heads in Udmurt stress placement. In: Suet-Ying Lam & Satoru Ozaki (eds.), NELS 53: Proceedings of the Fifty-Third Annual Meeting of the North East Lingusitic Society, Volume 1, 105–118. Amherst (MA): Graduate Linguistics Student Association.
In this paper, we propose that stress assignment in three different types of verbs in Udmurt (indicatives, stressed on the final syllable, and negated verbs and imperatives, stressed on the initial syllable) is determined by their morphosyntactic structure, and offer an account of these facts within the Distributed Morphology framework. Specifically, we claim that the position of T, a non-cyclic/non-categorizing head, determines stress placement in Udmurt. Our analysis, therefore, provides evidence in favour of approaches that allow for non-cyclic/non-categorizing heads to determine stress placement. The Udmurt facts also show that approaches that only allow for stress placement to be determined by cyclic/categorizing heads are too restrictive. The analysis proposed here also makes correct predictions for stress placement in more complex contexts in Udmurt: those that contain clitics.
This paper argues that Georgian, a language with a fixed structural position reserved for the foc... more This paper argues that Georgian, a language with a fixed structural position reserved for the focused element (immediately preverbal), also uses prosody to signal focus. Specifically, data from a preliminary study reported here shows that various types of foci – wh-questions (WHQ), yes-no questions (YNQ), and contrastive contexts – bear the same prosodic marker of focus: the phrase accent L, rigidly aligned with the penultimate syllable of the predicate. The advantage of the approach advocated here is that it provides a unified account for the prosodic realization of different types of focus in Georgian. The double-marking of the same feature in syntax and prosody raises questions as to why language does not rely on just one of these strategies.
Phonological data & analysis, Feb 13, 2023
This paper investigates the interaction of word stress and phrasal prosody in Georgian by studyin... more This paper investigates the interaction of word stress and phrasal prosody in Georgian by studying the distribution of acoustic cues (duration, intensity, F0) in controlled data. The results show that initial syllables in Georgian words are marked by greater duration than all subsequent syllables, regardless of syllable count and phrasal context. After excluding domain-initial strengthening as an alternative explanation, this finding provides evidence in favor of fixed initial stress. Likewise, initial syllables are marked by greatest intensity, but the consistent gradual drop in intensity throughout the word suggests that this effect may not be stress-related. The F0 results align with the existing accounts: individual lexical words form ACCENTUAL PHRASES marked by a low pitch accent on the initial syllable and a high final boundary tone on the final syllable. Additionally, new evidence for a phrasal accent, aligned with the penult, is presented. F0 targets are shown to be completely absent in the context of post-focal deaccenting, which shows that F0-marking in Georgian is reserved for phrasal prosody and is not intrinsic to stress-marking. These results help account for the facts related to word stress, phrasal intonation, and their interplay in Georgian, the object of debate in the literature.
Speech prosody, May 23, 2022
Based on instrumental results, this paper provides an Autosegmental-Metrical analysis of the patt... more Based on instrumental results, this paper provides an Autosegmental-Metrical analysis of the patterns of formation and acoustic marking of Phonological Phrases (φs) in Iron Ossetic, an understudied East Iranian language of Russia. We demonstrate that (i) nominal phrases in Iron Ossetic correspond to φs, (ii) left φ-edges are consistently marked with stress-aligned rising pitch accents, (iii) there are two distinct rising pitch accents, which we label L*+H and L+H*, and (iv) the anchoring of individual tones to metrical targets is determined by the moraic structure of the stressed syllable. We account for these facts by extending the analysis of rising pitch accents in Romance in [1] and the analysis of Franconian prosody in [2]. We argue that stressed vowels carry a rising pitch accent. Strong vowels are bi-moraic; when stressed, the two morae can either carry L and H (with H undergoing secondary association with the next syllable), producing L+H*, or both carry L, with H docking on the next syllable, producing L*+H. Mono-moraic stressed vowels can only host L, with H realized on the next syllable, producing L*+H. Our account, therefore, provides further support for the contrastive metrical structure approaches to tonal phenomena [2]–[6].
This paper investigates the properties of stress in Georgian (Kartvelian). There is no agreement ... more This paper investigates the properties of stress in Georgian (Kartvelian). There is no agreement in the literature as to the existence or location of stress in Georgian; initial, penultimate or antepenultimate syllables are often quoted as possible stress loci, with potentially more than one of these carrying stress in longer words. It has also been noted that the F0 contour of a word/phrase plays an important role in Georgian, leading to hypotheses that pitch might be the primary cue for stress in Georgian. This paper reports on a pilot study that contributes to disentangling these issues. It concludes Georgian has fixed initial stress, which is primarily duration-based and is easiest to detect in shorter words, while in longer words its durational effect is obscured by polysyllabic shortening. There is no evidence, however, for a similar duration-based stress-like target on the antepenultimate/ penultimate syllable. Instead, it is a pitch target that is part of the prosodic makeup of a phrase. The high importance of this pitch target for the prosodic felicity of an utterance, and the insignificant role that stress plays in the overall phonological make-up of Georgian, raise questions about the typological properties of the loci of wordlevel and phrase-level prominence.
Oxford University Press eBooks, Jan 13, 2021
for helpful comments on earlier versions of this chapter, as well as Maka Tetradze, David Erschle... more for helpful comments on earlier versions of this chapter, as well as Maka Tetradze, David Erschler, Nina Sumbatova, George Moroz, Yury Lander and Arthur Laisis for helping me access some of the literature and data. All remaining errors are my responsibility. PROH AGR.cry.IMP 3 'don't cry!' (Nichols 2011:104) The suffixes specified for high tone include:-ʌt ͡ s (negative in present and imperfect tenses),-ʌndz-(negative in witnessed past),-ʌr (witnessed past marker),-ʌd/ad (non-witnessed tense marker specified for gender), and-ʌl (imperative). Enclitics 'ʌ (chaining particle/ coordinating conjunction), ji (NP-coordinating conjunction) and j/-iː (interrogative) also bear H (Nichols 2011: 105). See Borise-stress (this volume), section 5.2, as well as Komen et al. (this volume) for the Chechen facts, and Borise-stress (this volume), section 5.2 for stress-attracting properties of negative morphemes in other Nakh-Dagestanian languages. Nichols (2011: 106) shows that H in Ingush cannot be analyzed as an inherent property of all negative morphemes. For instance, while witnessed negative past forms carry H on the negative marker-ʌndz-(2a), nearly homophonous negative past participles do not (2b): 2 The examples have been converted into the IPA from the transcription standards used in the respective languages. Aspiration is marked in the examples if the source indicates that (non-ejective) voiceless stops and affricates in a given language are aspirated; the degree of aspiration in the voiceless series varies widely between the languages of the Caucasus. 3 Glosses used (following the Leipzig Glossing Rules and including some additional glosses not listed in the Leipzig Glossing Rules): 2second person, 3third person, Aagent, ABLablative, ABSabsolutive, AGRagreement, ALLallative, APPLapplicative, AORaorist, CAUScausative, CVconverb, DATdative, EMPHemphatic, ERG ergative, EVIDevidential, GENgenitive, IMPimperative, INFinfinitive, IOindirect object, IPFVimperfective, LOClocative, Mmasculine, NEGnegation, NOMnominative, OBLoblique, PLplural, PRSpresent, PTCPparticiple, PROH-prohibitive, PROXproximative, PSTpast, PVpreverb, Qquestion marker, REFLreflexive, SG singular, VOCvocative. Glosses in examples cited from other work are modified for uniformity.
Oxford University Press eBooks, Jan 13, 2021
for helpful comments on earlier versions of this chapter, as well as Maka Tetradze, David Erschle... more for helpful comments on earlier versions of this chapter, as well as Maka Tetradze, David Erschler, Nina Sumbatova, George Moroz, Yury Lander and Arthur Laisis for helping me access some of the literature and data. All remaining errors are my responsibility.
Proceedings of the annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 2015
As the Executive Committee of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, we wou... more As the Executive Committee of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, we would like to express our gratitude to the conference participants, volunteers, session chairs, faculty, and staff members for their participation. It was your contributions that made the conference a success. We are especially grateful for the patience, hard work, and support of Paula Floro and Belén Flores, without whom BLS 41 would not have been possible. We would also like to thank the following departments and organizations of the University of California, Berkeley for their generous financial support:
In the course of their development, many Indo-European languages modified the system of three gra... more In the course of their development, many Indo-European languages modified the system of three grammatical genders − masculine, feminine and neuter − inherited from Proto-Indo-European, usually by eliminating neuter or merging feminine with masculine. The reasons and processes of such modifications in most cases are poorly understood. The Baltic languages are no exception to this tendency, having lost neuter gender before the time of historical record (Latvian and Lithuanian) or shortly after it started (Old Prussian). It is usually assumed that phonological factors played the crucial role in the Baltic neuter loss, causing minimally different masculine and neuter paradigms to merge. However, this account is unsatisfactory, since it can be shown that paradigm merge alone is insufficient for gender merge. In this paper, I propose that contact with genderless Finnic languages shares the responsibility for elimination of neuter in Baltic. This hypothesis is supported by the distribution of remnants of old neuter gender across Baltic languages (the further north the less remnants), as well as the loss of the remaining gender categories in Baltic dialects (Tamian) spoken on the former Finnic territory.
One of the South-Eastern dialects of Belarusian exhibits an unusual phonological property: in cer... more One of the South-Eastern dialects of Belarusian exhibits an unusual phonological property: in certain environments, the immediately pretonic syllable is pronounced with prominence which is equal to or greater than that of the stressed syllable. This phenomenon has been analysed, albeit tentatively, as stress retraction (Kurylo 1928; Kryvicki 1959; Belaja 1974), and also as pitch peak retraction (Bethin 2006a, 2006b). Instrumental data presented in this paper confirms that the pretonic vowel can be higher in intensity and longer in duration than the stressed one, as well as comparable to it in pitch, depending on the respective heights of the pretonic vowel and the stressed one. However, the acoustic data does not lend support to either the stress retraction or pitch peak retraction hypothesis. Instead, this paper argues that the phenomenon at hand results from redistribution of the acoustic prominence associated with stress over two syllables. The paper is structured the following way. Section 1 lays out the basic facts of the Aŭciuki dialect, spoken in the villages of Malyja Aŭciuki and Vialikija Aŭciuki (Kalinkavičy region, Homel province) in Belarus. Section 2 presents acoustic data illustrating the Aŭciuki phenomenon, collected during fieldwork done in 2014 and 2015. Section 3 summarises an earlier investigation by Belaja (1974).
This dissertation provides an account of the syntactic and prosodic properties of focus in Georgi... more This dissertation provides an account of the syntactic and prosodic properties of focus in Georgian, a Kartvelian language spoken in the Caucasus. A verb-final language, Georgian is typologically similar to other such languages, in that it has a preverbal focus position, which houses wh-phrases and narrow foci. At the same time, Georgian also allows for postverbal placement of narrow foci. I show that, despite appearances, immediately preverbal placement of wh-phrases and narrow foci does not have the same underlying syntax. The evidence for this conclusion comes from standard syntactic tests, such as island effects and scope and binding facts, as well as some Georgian-specific evidence. In particular, I show that neg-words, another class of constituents that occur either immediately preverbally or postverbally in Georgian, are always found in situ, and, as such, can serve as a tool for determining the structural properties of other constituents. I further show that narrow foci and wh-phrases have different distributional properties with respect to neg-words. Based on this evidence, I demonstrate that wh-phrases in Georgian undergo A-bar movement to the specifier of PredP, accompanied by raising of the verb to Pred 0. In contrast, preverbal narrow foci remain in situ and are accompanied by displacement of the material that would otherwise intervene between the narrow focus and the verb. Postverbal foci, in turn, are derived via right-adjunction. Having established these facts about the formation of narrow focus constructions and wh-questions on the basis of simple 1. Why Georgian? Georgian is spoken by ca.4 million people, predominantly in the Republic of Georgia, a state in the region of Caucasus, wedged between two mountain ranges, the Greater Caucasus in the north and the Lesser Caucasus in the south. Georgian is the largest in the small family of four Kartvelian languages, which also includes Megrelian and Svan, spoken in the northwest of Georgia, and Laz, a Kartvelian language spoken in Turkey. The Kartvelian languages are not known to be related to any other languages in the Caucasus or outside of it. 12 Non-verbs (nouns, adjectives, and participles) were used in the current study. The conclusions about stress placement that are reached here, therefore, might not apply to verbs in Georgian.
Journal of historical linguistics, Jul 15, 2022
Prior to widespread contact with Russian, Khanty (Uralic; Finno-Ugric) did not have overt conjunc... more Prior to widespread contact with Russian, Khanty (Uralic; Finno-Ugric) did not have overt conjunctions or phrasal coordination. Instead, Khanty texts from the late 19th-early 20th centuries only include examples of conjunction-less clausal juxtaposition, which was used for both clausal and phrasal coordination. By comparing Khanty texts over the 20th century, we trace the emergence of overt conjunctions and coordination of phrasal constituents. We show that overt conjunctions first appeared in the context of clausal coordination, followed by coordination of smaller phrases. Based on novel elicitation data, we demonstrate that, in contemporary Khanty, (i) overt conjunctions are commonplace, (ii) coordinated clausal constituents may be derived via phrasal coordination or clausal coordination with conjunction reduction/ellipsis, but (iii) ellipsis of syntactic heads is banned (nouns & postpositions) or dispreferred (verbs). Based on this diachronic picture, we conclude that the coordination of phrasal constituents only emerged in Khanty once overt conjunctions became available. We derive this correlation from the Maximize On-line Processing principle (Hawkins 2004), and show that this maxim, usually invoked in the context of speech planning and production, can be successfully applied to modelling language change.
Phonology, Mar 1, 2023
This paper provides new evidence in support of the hypothesis that the syntax-prosody mapping of ... more This paper provides new evidence in support of the hypothesis that the syntax-prosody mapping of Intonational Phrases is flexible (Hamlaoui & Szendrői 2015). In the traditional 'rigid' approaches, Intonational Phrases are taken to map onto particular syntactic projections. In contrast, in the 'flexible' approach, the Intonational Phrase corresponds to the highest projection of the verb (HVP). Accordingly, the 'flexible' approach predicts that the HVP should also determine the size of Intonational Phrases in a language where the verb height depends on the utterance type. Our evidence comes from a language of this type, Iron Ossetic (East Iranian). First, we demonstrate that verbs in Iron Ossetic occupy different functional heads in different contexts. Then, based on novel prosodic data, we show that the HVP indeed directly determines the size of Intonational Phrases in clauses with narrow foci and negative indefinites. Additionally, in wh-questions, language-specific mapping constraints come into play.
This paper reconsiders the approach to Tagalog sluicing developed in Kaufman & Paul (2006) and Ka... more This paper reconsiders the approach to Tagalog sluicing developed in Kaufman & Paul (2006) and Kaufman (2006), and puts forward an alternative analysis. I propose that Tagalog has two distinct strategies for sluicing that follow the two whquestion formation strategies available in the language: pseudoclefts for argument wh-questions, and wh-movement for adjunct wh-questions. Such a bifurcation is problematic for the traditional approaches to sluicing. I therefore propose that the Tagalog data discussed here provides support for the Unconstrained Pseudosluicing Hypothesis as argued for in Barros (2014).
The Linguistic Review
This paper demonstrates that narrow foci and wh-phrases, even in a language where they have (near... more This paper demonstrates that narrow foci and wh-phrases, even in a language where they have (nearly-)identical surface distributions, do not have the same syntax – and, as such, are not a uniform category. Specifically, it shows that foci and wh-phrases in Georgian appear immediately preverbally but are derived differently. The evidence comes from standard syntactic tests and language-specific ones: I show that, in Georgian, neg-words can serve as a tool for determining the structural positions of other constituents, and foci and wh-phrases have different distributional properties with respect to neg-words. Based on this, I demonstrate that wh-phrases in Georgian undergo A-bar movement to the specifier of a dedicated projection, accompanied by verb raising. Preverbal foci remain in situ, while the material intervening between the narrow focus and the verb undergoes displacement. This demonstrates that what looks like unified preverbal placement of foci and wh-phrases corresponds to ...
Phonological data & analysis, Feb 13, 2023
Phonology
This paper provides new evidence in support of the hypothesis that the syntax–prosody mapping of ... more This paper provides new evidence in support of the hypothesis that the syntax–prosody mapping of Intonational Phrases is flexible (Hamlaoui and Szendrői 2015). In the traditional ‘rigid’ approaches, Intonational Phrases are taken to map onto particular syntactic projections. In contrast, in the ‘flexible’ approach, the Intonational Phrase corresponds to the highest projection of the verb (HVP). Accordingly, the ‘flexible’ approach predicts that the HVP should also determine the size of Intonational Phrases in a language where the verb height depends on the utterance type. Our evidence comes from a language of this type, Iron Ossetic (East Iranian). First, we demonstrate that verbs in Iron Ossetic occupy different functional heads in different contexts. Then, based on novel prosodic data, we show that the HVP indeed directly determines the size of Intonational Phrases in clauses with narrow foci and negative indefinites. Additionally, in wh-questions, language-specific mapping constr...
We provide novel evidence in favor of the proposal by Hamlaoui and Szendrői (2015, 2017), who arg... more We provide novel evidence in favor of the proposal by Hamlaoui and Szendrői (2015, 2017), who argue for a flexible mapping between an Intonational Phrase (ɩ) and syntactic constituents. According to them, ɩ corresponds to the highest projection that hosts verbal material, together with its specifier. The prediction is that the size of ɩ co-varies with the height of the verb, if the latter is variable. Our evidence comes from Iron Ossetic (East Iranian), a language with multiple projections available for verb raising, depending on context. The flexible ɩ-mapping approach – but not more rigid approaches to ɩ-formation – can account for the properties of ɩ-formation in Iron Ossetic. This applies to the prosody of utterances that contain negative indefinites, narrow foci, and single wh-phrases. More complex wh-questions (those with multiple wh-phrases and/or negative indefinites) provide evidence that syntax-based flexible ɩ-mapping approach interacts with language-specific eurhythmic constraints. The Iron Ossetic facts, therefore, provide support for the flexible ɩ-mapping approach, which has not been tested until now on languages of this type.
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Conference Presentations by Lena Borise
Papers by Lena Borise
Borise, Lena & Ekaterina Georgieva. 2023. The role of Lowering and non-cyclic heads in Udmurt stress placement. In: Suet-Ying Lam & Satoru Ozaki (eds.), NELS 53: Proceedings of the Fifty-Third Annual Meeting of the North East Lingusitic Society, Volume 1, 105–118. Amherst (MA): Graduate Linguistics Student Association.
In this paper, we propose that stress assignment in three different types of verbs in Udmurt (indicatives, stressed on the final syllable, and negated verbs and imperatives, stressed on the initial syllable) is determined by their morphosyntactic structure, and offer an account of these facts within the Distributed Morphology framework. Specifically, we claim that the position of T, a non-cyclic/non-categorizing head, determines stress placement in Udmurt. Our analysis, therefore, provides evidence in favour of approaches that allow for non-cyclic/non-categorizing heads to determine stress placement. The Udmurt facts also show that approaches that only allow for stress placement to be determined by cyclic/categorizing heads are too restrictive. The analysis proposed here also makes correct predictions for stress placement in more complex contexts in Udmurt: those that contain clitics.
Borise, Lena & Ekaterina Georgieva. 2023. The role of Lowering and non-cyclic heads in Udmurt stress placement. In: Suet-Ying Lam & Satoru Ozaki (eds.), NELS 53: Proceedings of the Fifty-Third Annual Meeting of the North East Lingusitic Society, Volume 1, 105–118. Amherst (MA): Graduate Linguistics Student Association.
In this paper, we propose that stress assignment in three different types of verbs in Udmurt (indicatives, stressed on the final syllable, and negated verbs and imperatives, stressed on the initial syllable) is determined by their morphosyntactic structure, and offer an account of these facts within the Distributed Morphology framework. Specifically, we claim that the position of T, a non-cyclic/non-categorizing head, determines stress placement in Udmurt. Our analysis, therefore, provides evidence in favour of approaches that allow for non-cyclic/non-categorizing heads to determine stress placement. The Udmurt facts also show that approaches that only allow for stress placement to be determined by cyclic/categorizing heads are too restrictive. The analysis proposed here also makes correct predictions for stress placement in more complex contexts in Udmurt: those that contain clitics.