Whamit!

We are ecstatic to announce that Viola Schmitt will be joining our faculty next academic year as Associate Professor of Linguistics with tenure! Most of Viola’s research focuses on semantics, but with deep connections to syntactic and philosophical issues as well. Viola comes to us from the Humboldt University, Berlin, and has also taught at the Universities of Graz and Vienna.  She was a visiting professor in our department last year, and her influence on our department as a superb teacher and advisor from just that brief visit is already profound. We could not be more pleased or more proud that she will be joining us. Welcome Viola!

Viola’s website: https://sites.google.com/view/viola-schmitt/home

We are delighted to announce that Peter Grishin (PhD 2023) has accepted a position as Visiting Professor of Linguistics at Brown University for the next two academic years! Congratulations Peter, and congratulations Brown as well!

Peter’s website: https://www.petergrishin.com

Speaker: Jad Wehbe (MIT)
Title: Redundancy and presuppositional exhaustification
Time: Thursday, May 8th, 12:30pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Recent work has argued that different truth-value gaps, such as homogeneity and implicatures, are in fact presuppositions, based on similarities in their pragmatic status and their projection properties (Fox, 2018; Bassi et al., 2021 a.o.). Nevertheless, these inferences seem to differ from presuppositions in some ways: (i) as evidenced by the Hey, wait a minute! test, homogeneity and implicatures don’t interact with the common ground in the same way as presuppositions (Spector, 2013; Bassi et al., 2021) and (ii) homogeneity and implicatures project differently from presuppositions in some environments, like the scope of certain quantifiers (Spector, 2013; Križ, 2015; Chatain and Schlenker, 2023). In this talk, I argue that under the view that homogeneity and implicatures are due to a syntactically represented presuppositional exhaustification operator pex, (i) follows from an independently needed redundancy constraint which requires that presuppositions due to pex are obligatorily accommodated with the A operator. I then show that on a modular view of presupposition projection, this result can be exploited to account for at least some of the differences in projection.

Speaker: Hani Na’eem (MIT)

Title: The Nature of Emphasis Harmony in Jordanian Arabic

Time: Monday, May 5th, 5pm - 6:30pm

Location: 32-D831



Abstract: Most varieties of Arabic retain a set of uvularized or pharyngealized coronals (e.g. /t?, s?, ð?/) – called emphatics – which contrast with their non-uvularized – or plain – counterparts (e.g. /t, s, ð/). These emphatics trigger a type of back harmony, most salient on the low front /æ/ vowel, turning it into back [?]. In Jordanian Arabic (JA), the extent and magnitude to which this harmony process affects its trigger’s context have seen notable disagreement, contributing to a scarcity of formal analyses that highlight the underlying mechanism behind the process. In this talk, I report on in-progress work attempting to establish/confirm/reaffirm empirical facts about the harmony pattern in JA and couching it within a theory of harmony systems attested cross-linguistically. Making provisional assumptions about the pattern – particularly regarding the transparency of certain segments – I specifically outline possible analyses within three models: (i) Generalized Alignment constraints (McCarthy, 1997), (ii) Optimal Domains (Cole and Kisseberth, 1994), and (iii) Agreement by correspondence (Rose and Walker, 2004). The aim is to discuss the validity of such analyses for the JA data and their implications for how we conceive of the harmony process, its phonetic basis and the grammatical principles governing how it applies.