Whamit!

Speaker: Zhouyi Sun (MIT)

Title: Magri and Anttila (submitted), “Probabilistic phonology is intrinsically categorical”

Time: Monday, September 29th, 5pm - 6:30pm

Location:32-D831



Abstract: We say that an implicational universal (x, y) ? (x?, ?) holds for a (probabilistic) phonological grammar G if the probability of realizing the underlying form x? as the surface form ? is at least as high as realizing x as y (G(y | x) ? G(? | x?)). I’ll try to present the general technique in Appendix F of the manuscript for exploring principles governing implicational universals in MaxEnt phonology, and then discuss two resulting properties developed in §§4–5, both of which are argued to be problematic.

The Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP 2025) was held September 25-27 at University of California, Berkeley. Several of our current students, faculty and alumni presented their work:

• Runqi Tan (4th year): The Role of Perceptual Contrast in Tone Inventories
• Edward Flemming (faculty) and Giorgio Magri (PhD 2009)[CNRS]: Gang effects: the perspective from variation
• Giorgio Magri (PhD 2009)[CNRS] and Arto Anttila: MaxEnt fails at reasoning by transitivity
• Frank Li Hui Tan, Shuang Zheng, Ming Liu, Youngah Do [PhD 2013](HKU): Modeling Prosodic Development with Prenatal Audio Attenuation
• Jian Cui, Hanna Shine, Jesse Snedeker, Youngah Do [PhD 2013](HKU): Investigating the Tone-Segment Asymmetry in Phonological Counting: A Learnability Experiment
• Jonah Katz (PhD 2010)[UCLA]: Boundary conditions on a theory of English footing
• Andrew Nevins (PhD 2005)[UCL] and Nicholas Rolle: Xiamen-Taiwanese tone sandhi: Natural and derivable via boundary tones
• Paul Kiparsky (PhD 1965)[Stanford]: The Phonology of the Nez Perce Floating Nasal

Speaker: Elise Newman, Cora Lesure, Norvin Richards, Cooper Roberts (MIT), Peter Grishin (Brown University)

Title: What’s new with the Passamaquoddy working group

Time: Thursday, October 2, 12:30pm - 2pm

Location: 32-D461



Abstract: In this talk, we (the Passamaquoddy working group) will each present a part of our research on the Passamaquoddy language, based on our most recent findings from our summer field trip. Topics include: argument-introduction, group-formation, agreement, coordination, and our language revitalization efforts.

Sinn und Bedeutung 30 (SuB30) took place at Goethe University Frankfurt from September 23-27, 2025. MIT Linguistics was well-represented by our current students and recent graduates:

• Paul Meisenbichler (3rd year): Upper limit effects beyond tenses and the interdependence of worlds and times
• Haoming Li (4th year), Yizhen Jiang (3rd year): Oddness and probability-sensitivity of number-marked indefinites in negation and questions
• Yurika Aonuki (4th year), Kathryn Davidson: On the QUD sensitivity of a third reading
• Yizhen Jiang (3rd year), Haoming Li (4th year), J. Cooper Roberts (3rd year): Passamaquoddy quantifiers: outlier of distributivity-number generalization?
• Adèle Hénot-Mortier (PhD 2025)[Queen Mary]: Covert operators are picked to minimize QuD-ambiguity: the view from pex and only

Several of our alumni also presented their work:

• Naomi Francis (PhD 2019)[University of Ottawa], Patrick Georg Grosz, Pritty Patel-Grosz: The FLING gesture asa marker of discoursestatus
• Keny Chatain (PhD 2021)[ENS]: Ignorance inferences andpresuppositions: a new Neo-Gricean challenge
• Despina Oikonomou (PhD 2016)[University of Crete]: Greek Directive Subjunctive Questions, High Negation Bias and Modality
• Paul Marty (PhD 2017)[Universidade de Lisboa], Guillermo Del Pinal, Patrick Elliott, Alexandros Kalomoiro, Jacopo Romoli: Presupposition projection in (non-)monotonic contexts
• Orin Percus (PhD 1997)[Nantes University]: Identity issues after Flight AF 006 (invited talk)