Whamit!

Speaker: Yurika Aonuki (MIT) & William Pacheco (MIT)

Title: Questions and conditionals with disjunction in Gitksan & My Language, My Tools: AI-Assisted Documentation of Ki?w? Keres

Time: Thursday, April 16, 12:30pm - 2pm

Location: 32-D461

This week’s LingLunch will consist of two talks.

Talk 1: Questions and conditionals with disjunction in Gitksan (Yurika Aonuki, MIT)

Abstract: A morpheme ji in Gitksan (Rigsby 1986; Hunt 1993; Aonuki 2025) (and cognates in Nisga’a (Tarpent 1987) and Sm’algyax (Sasama 2001; Brown 2022, 2023, 2024, 2026)) introduce conditional antecedents and embedded polar questions. At the same time, ji is also allowed in declarative attitude complements when the attitude holder is uncertain or wrong (Hunt 1993; Gogag et al. in prep; Aonuki 2025); similar patterns are observed in Sm’algyax (Brown 2022, 2023). I will argue that there are reasons to attempt a unified analysis of ji in conditional antecedents and questions on one hand and declarative complements on the other. Against this background, I will provide novel data from disjunction, which shows that ji can introduce each disjunct in conditional antecedents, embedded alternative questions, and polar questions with disjunction. I will propose that ji constrains the set of epistemic possibilities associated with a speech or thought event, via the alternative semantic value of its argument. The proposal highlights a shared component between questions and uncertainty and has implications for an ongoing debate about the semantic relationship between polar and alternative questions (Roelofsen and Van Gool 2010; Pruitt and Roelofsen 2011; Meertens 2021).

*This will be a practice talk for GLOW and SULA-TripleA.

Talk 2: My Language, My Tools: AI-Assisted Documentation of Ki?w? Keres (William Pacheco, MIT)
Abstract: Ki?w? W?k???i is an underdocumented dialect of Keres — a language isolate spoken in seven Pueblos in New Mexico. I am a native speaker and relatively new to linguistics, and I quickly found that the tools available for documenting my dialect weren’t built with my needs in mind.

Speaker: Giovanni Roversi (MIT) & Jéssica Mendes (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen)

Title: Light-ish attitudes, heavy complements: the view from Äiwoo” (GLOW practice talk, LFRG take-over)

Time: Tuesday, April 14, 1:00pm - 2pm

Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Some attitude predicates in various unrelated languages have been reported to have variable flavor interpretations, covering doxastic (“think”), assertive (“say”), and bouletic (“want”) readings; cf. Navajo (Bogal-Allbritten 2016) and Koryak (Mo?nik & Abramovitz 2019, Mo?nik 2025). These have prompted analyses where much of the semantic contribution that distinguishes these readings is taken away from the lexical entry of the attitude verb itself (against the standard Hintikkan view), and rather offloaded to the semantics of the complement clause. Based on novel fieldwork data, we report on another such attitude verb in Äiwoo (Austronesian; Solomon Islands), and we show that in this language there is clearer morphological evidence for this type of analysis: overt elements in the embedded clause determine the reading of the matrix attitude predicate, whose interpretation is derived fully compositionally, and the semantics of these elements is independently verifiable from their use in unembedded contexts. We arrive at a picture where the attitude predicate itself is relatively underspecified, but not fully (against e.g. Bogal-Allbritten). We draw (tentative) cross-linguistic predictions about the range of meanings we expect “variable-flavor” attitudes to cover: these should not extend beyond what can be composed out of independently available elements already in the language (chiefly, relatively underspecified attitudes and already existing modals). Thus, we predict these kind of verbs to receive “think, say, want” interpretations, but not readings like “forget”, “imagine”, “dream”, which cannot be composed out of these simpler more basic atoms.

Note: This week’s Syntax Square will feature a special LFRG take-over: the talk will be fully focused on semantics, so we especially encourage those with an interest in semantics to attend. The presentation will also serve as a practice talk for GLOW, so it’s a great opportunity to hear the work in progress and offer feedback.

LEAP Workshop 4/14 - Cora Lesure and Maya Honda

Title: Communicating Your Research: Defining the Knowledge Gap

Time: Tuesday April 14, 5pm - 6pm

Location: 32-D461

We invite you to the first-ever LEAP (Linguistics Education and Pedagogy) workshop on Communicating Your Research. Across four one-hour sessions, we will explore how the task of communicating key aspects of your linguistics research (eg., your GP or your thesis) can be informed by formal pedagogical theory, and vice versa.

Workshop sessions will take place on Tuesdays from 5-6pm starting this week, in 32-D461. The Research Slam will take place during the final week of the semester on May 12th.

This week, we begin with “Defining the Knowledge Gap”, considering the questions, “What does your audience already know, and what do you want them to learn from you?”

Snacks will be served!

On behalf of LEAP (Linguistics Education and Pedagogy), the department’s outreach effort to K-12 students, Christopher Legerme, Cora Lesure, Vincent Zu (MIT Chem E), and Jacob Kodner (Harvard Linguistics) designed and team-taught a Saturday high school linguistics course at Spring HSSP, an initiative of the student-run MIT ESP (Educational Studies Program). The six-week-long course, An Introduction to Linguistics: The Science of Language, concluded last Saturday. 

Across the six weeks, students examined the linguistics of poetry, as well as phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and machine learning in diverse languages. The teaching team focused on bringing to students’ awareness their unconscious knowledge of language, using the tools of science to formulate and test ideas about the hidden structures of language, and identifying and appreciating similarities as well as differences across diverse languages. The 15 high school students who attended each week can now answer the question that Cora posed to them the first day, What is Linguistics? 

The course grew out of earlier work that the team has done, both individually and collectively, at Spark and Splash, day-long events also organized by MIT ESP, as well as in partnership with teachers for Maya Honda’s Linguistics in K-12 Education seminar.

The book entitled The Acquisition of Relativization by Suzanne Flynn and colleagues was recently published by Cambridge University Press in the series of Cambridge Studies in Linguistics. Congratulations, Suzanne!

You can find the book here.

We are excited to announce that the paper “Optimal Paradigms: A Challenge from Judeo-Tripolitanian Arabic” by our first-year student Eyal Marco and alum Ezer Rasin (PhD 2018)[Tel Aviv University] was accepted to Linguistic Inquiry and published online. Congratulations, Eyal and Ezer!

Here is the abstract:

This paper reevaluates Optimal Paradigms (OP), an extension to Optimality Theory proposed by McCarthy (2005). In OP, candidates are full inflectional paradigms and faithfulness constraints can require uniformity between all members within a paradigm. McCarthy (2005) proposed that OP can replace the assumption that prosodic templates are grammatical entities and other phonological mechanisms, which he regards as stipulations. One of the case studies used in McCarthy (2005) to showcase OP comes from Moroccan Arabic, where a noun-verb asymmetry in the distribution of schwa is claimed to be predicted by paradigmatic constraints as a means to achieve uniformity within an inflectional paradigm. We reevaluate this proposal using new fieldwork data from Judeo-Tripolitanian Arabic, an endangered variety of Arabic that is closely related to Moroccan. We show that if adjectives are added to the picture, OP can no longer predict the distribution of schwa in the different categories. The conclusion is that OP cannot replace the mechanisms it was supposed to replace, and is therefore a redundant complication to phonological theory.

Linguistic Inquiry is an open-access journal so everyone can access the paper here: https://doi.org/10.1162/LING.a.575