Whamit!

There is a syntax-semantics reading group meeting on Monday at 11:30am
in room 32-D461. Floris Roelofsen will talk about inquisitive
semantics. The relevant background readings can be found on the group’s website. Everyone is welcome!

TIME: 11.30AM-1PM

PLACE: 32-D461

Time: Monday 11/30, 5pm, 32-D461

Speaker: Sverre Johnsen (Harvard)

Title: Contrast maintenance effects in Norwegian retroflexion

Norwegian contrasts morpheme initial /s/ and /ʂ/ before a vowel (/sV-/
- /ʂV/), but not before a consonant (/sC-/ - */ʂC-/). Initial /s/
undergoes retroflexion to /ʂ/ when preceded by a morpheme ending in
/-r/. Before a vowel, the contrast between /s/ and /ʂ/ is then lost
(/sV-/, /ʂV-/ > /ʂV-/), but no contrast is lost before a consonant
(/sC-/ > /ʂC-/). I present data from two experiments showing that
Norwegian speakers apply this retroflexion significantly more often
before a consonant than before a vowel. The effect is that a contrast
is better maintained. Retroflexed /ʂV/-tokens have, however, more
lexical neighbors and a higher phonotactic probability than
retroflexed /ʂC/-tokens. Experiments in lexical access have shown that
items with a high lexical neighborhood and phonotactic probability are
more prone to be misidentified. I show that under an exemplar model of
speech perception/production, the asymmetry in retroflexion between
/sV-/ and /sC-/ is a direct consequence of such misidentifications.

Upcoming schedule:

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This week, Mamoru Saito will give a double-header guest lecture in the East Asian Linguistics seminar.

Speaker: Mamoru Saito

Tuesday, December 1, 10-1, 66-156

Talk 1: “A Comparative Syntax of Ellipsis in Japanese and Korean”

Talk 2: “Clause Types and the Japanese Right Periphery”

Please join us for Ling-lunch this week:

Speaker: Coppe van Urk

Time: Thurs 12/3, 12:30-1:45

Place: 32-D461

Title: Movement and Antecedency in Obligatory Control

The two most prominent contemporary theories of control echo early theories in transformational grammar, Equi-NP Deletion (Rosenbaum 1967) and Postal’s (1970) null pronoun Doom. Hornstein (1999) suggests that control is derived through movement. Landau (2000 et seq.), on the other hand, argues for a PRO analysis. Regardless of what conceptual problems are associated with each analysis, there are significant empirical arguments for both approaches. In this talk, I go over some of these and conclude that both strategies are necessary. The empirical observation behind this is that some control complements behave like raising: the thematic positions have to be non-distinct, can share a single Case and the lower copy can be spelled out. Others behave more like non-obligatory control: they allow partial control and the lower position needs to have independent Case. These properties correlate across languages. I show that this account greatly simplifies the theory of control. Many of the special mechanisms that are necessary in Hornstein’s and Landau’s account can be dispensed with. In addition, the empirical coverage derived in this way is superior to that of other theories.

Michael Tanenhaus, visiting MIT to give a colloquium talk, will talk about speech at a special meeting of the Phonology Circle December 4th, 1:30pm-2:30pm. Please stay tuned for an announcement about the exact location.

Speaker: Michael Tanenhaus (University of Rochester)

Title: Fine-grained phonetic detail in spoken word recognition

Time: Friday 12/4, 1:30-2:30 pm

Location: TBA

Despite considerable evidence to the contrary, it is widely assumed
that some classes of
speech sounds are perceived categorically in a way that exemplars from
other types of
non-speech categories are not. Yet, the articulation of many sounds, including
consonants, varies systematically with position in a prosodic domain.
A system that
discarded sub-phonetic detail would thus be ignoring potentially useful
information. I’ll
review recent data from eye-tracking studies demonstrating that spoken
word recognition
does, in fact, exploit fine-grained sub-phonetic detail to make
probabilistic hypothesis
about lexical candidates, including within-category variation for stop
consonants—the
poster child for categorical perception.

MIT Linguistics Colloquium 12/04: Michael Tanenhaus (University of Rochester)

Speaker: Michael Tanenhaus (University of Rochester)

Title: Common ground and perspective-taking in language processing

Time: Friday, December 04, 2009, 3:30pm

Place: 32-141

Successful communication would seem to require that speakers and
listeners distinguish
between their own knowledge, commitments and intentions, and those of their
interlocutors. A particularly important distinction is between shared
knowledge (common
ground) and private knowledge (privileged ground). Keeping track of
what is shared and
what is privileged would seem, however, to be too computationally
expensive and too
memory intensive to inform real-time language processing—a position
supported by
striking experimental evidence that speakers and listeners act
egocentrically, showing
strong and seemingly inappropriate intrusions from their own privileged
ground. I’ll
review recent results from my laboratory demonstrating that (a)
speaker’s utterances
provide evidence about whether they believe information is shared or
privileged and (b)
listeners are extremely sensitive to this evidence. I’ll suggest an
integrative framework
that explains discrepancies in the literature.