Whamit!

Speaker: James Morley (MIT)
Title: An “Only-You” restriction in Chamorro and the problems it poses for the theory of hierarchy effects
Time: Tuesday, November 4th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: This talk investigates a person-animacy restriction - henceforth PAR - in Chamorro (Malayo-Polynesian; Austronesian), previously reported in Chung (1998, 2014, 2020) but which has otherwise been subject to little theoretical attention. Chamorro’s PAR prohibits internal arguments from ‘outranking’ external arguments with respect to the hierarchy in (1).

Chamorro-specific person-animacy hierarchy
2nd person > 3rd person animate pronouns > 3rd person animate lexical nouns > Inanimate

Chamorro instantiates what Stegovec (2019, i.a.) calls a *3>2 or “Only-You” person restriction: although 2nd and 3rd person have their distributions constrained by the restriction, 1st person does not. In this talk I make two kinds of argument. First, I argue that this restriction should not be reduced to a language-specific morphological restriction, pace Chung (2014), but should rather be treated as (at least partly) syntactic in nature. The null hypothesis is thus that it should be explained by the same mechanisms postulated elsewhere to capture other syntactic PARs. Second, I argue that this has not been achieved. More specifically, current theories of PARs are either logically incompatible with the Chamorro data, or else incur conceptual or empirical problems when amended to accommodate it. I then sketch some preliminary ideas about how to go about solving this.

Speaker: Thomas Truong (MIT)
Title: Plural superlatives and cumulativity
Time: Wednesday, November 5th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: In this talk I will present some ongoing work on the interactions between plurals and superlatives.

To do so, I examine a unique reading of sentences containing plurals and superlatives.

(1) Rafa climbed each of the tallest mountains that his students climbed.

Under one reading of (1), the truth conditions require us to look at each of the students, check which mountains each student climbed, and then take the tallest mountain climbed for each of the students.

I will break down this construction. I claim that this reading is generated as a case of cumulative readings, where the superlative operator is in the scope of the cumulativity operator.

I show that if we assume the ** operator (Krifka 1986, Sternefeld 1998, Beck and Sauerland 2000) to derive cumulativity along with an account of superlatives following Heim (1999), covert movement outside of a relative clause seems to be necessary to derive the correct LF for the relevant interpretation of sentence (1).

Speaker: Gasser Elbanna (Harvard)
Title: A model of speech recognition reproduces behavioral signatures of human speech perception and reveals mechanisms
Time: Monday, November 3rd, 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: Humans dexterously extract meaning from variable acoustic signals and can faithfully repeat back novel utterances—hallmarks of spoken communication. Speech perception is thought to subserve these downstream tasks via transforming sound into robust perceptual representations. Yet progress on the nature of these representations and their mechanisms has been limited by the lack of (i) stimulus-computable models that replicate human behavior and (ii) large-scale behavioral benchmarks for comparing model and human speech perception. In this talk, I will present our work on developing candidate artificial neural network models of human speech perception along with new behavioral experiments to compare phonetic judgments in humans and models. Our models reproduce patterns of human responses and confusions alongside recapitulating key behavioral signatures of human speech perception. I will also show how our models enable us to investigate the role of contextual integration and its directionality in speech perception.

Speaker: Cooper Roberts (MIT)

Title: A rational solution to an agreement-interpretation puzzle

Time: Thursday, November 6 12:30pm - 2pm

Location: 32-D461



Abstract: In some Indo-European languages, a fraction partitive (FP) which embeds a plural DP licenses an optional-agreement phenomenon—-in the appropriate syntactic position, an agreeing predicate can copy the features of either the fraction (1b) or the complement (1a). This is puzzling enough if we assume FPs have a DP-within-DP structure (as do Ionin et al., 2006; Benbaji-Elhadad & Wehbe, 2024; a.o.), which under a Locality-governed model of Agree (Chomsky, 1995) would predict that the fraction is the sole target of Agreement. The plot thickens when we observe that the two agreement possibilities yield different interpretations. (1a) is true in a world where, for example, two out of six walls are covered in mold (I call this the COUNT reading). (1b), on the other hand, is true in a world where, given a plurality of walls which have a cumulative surface area of 12m^2, 4m^2 are covered in mold (a MEASURE reading).

(1) [Italian]
a. un terzo delle pareti sono coperti di muffa
‘A third(m.sg) of the walls(f.pl) are covered(f.pl) by mold’
*MEASURE, COUNT
b. un terzo delle pareti `e coperto di muffa
‘A third(m.sg) of the walls(f.pl) is covered(m.sg) by mold’
MEASURE, *COUNT

The goal of this study is to give a theoretical account of the alternation in Italian-like languages while also explaining why some languages in the family lack the equivalent to (1b) (American English). Following the tenet of One Form/One Meaning, I pursue an analysis where measure and count FPs are structurally-distinct. Specifically, I assume that count FPs are the structurally-simpler of the two, bearing a syntax where the complement is actually the head (see Selkirk 1977) and the semantics are s.t. cardinality functions win over other measurement possibilities (Barner & Snedeker, 2005; Bale & Barner, 2009; Wellwood, 2019; Wagiel 2021). To get the measure FP, I posit a special operator TOTAL which takes the bare FP structure and makes two important contributions. First, TOTAL re-merges the fraction via projecting movement (Bhatt, 2002) to make it the new head of the structure. Second, TOTAL changes the “matrix” parameter of evaluation for measure functions to one where cardinality will lose to other forms of measure. Crucial evidence from this proposal comes from Russian, where FPs which include the part-word chast’ lose the agreement-optionality and necessarily have a measure reading. I interpret this item as a realization of TOTAL and conclude that it can be optionally-overt in some languages.

Gi?ku?yu? has two types of backcopying? (1) optional backcopying (i.e., backcopied and non-backcopied variants are in free variation) when prenasalized stop formation (/Nt, N?/ ? [?d], /N?/ ? [?d?], /Nk, N?/ ? [?g]) and foot reduplication interact; (2) obligatory backcopying when prenasalized stop formation, foot reduplication, and Meinhof’s law (NC?…N?(C) ? N?…N?(C)) interact.  To account for the obligatory backcopying cases, I propose that the distinguishing factor lies in the onset’s ratio of nasality in the base vs. the reduplicant. On a ratio-of-nasality scale of [t, k, ?, ?, ?] = 0, [?d, ?d?] = 1, [n] = 2, a Distantial Faithfulness constraint penalizes segments in RED that differ too much from their Base correspondents. Consequently, Base-Reduplicant pairs like [?d?]…[?] are acceptable because their nasality distance is ?1, whereas [n]…[?] is disfavored because the ‘distance’ is 2.

Speaker: Yvette Yi-Chi Wu (Harvard)

Title: Verb classes and affix ordering in Seediq

Time: Thursday, October 30th, 5pm - 6pm

Location: 32-D769



Abstract: This talk looks at verbal morphology in Seediq, with supplementary data from other Formosan languages. I will focus on the ordering of “voice” morphology with respect to derivational and TAM morphology, which allows us to examine the interactions of infixation, reduplication, stress-conditioned suppletion, and more. I show that the actor voice (AV) infix is located in the middle field (below perfective Asp and above Voice), which goes against theories where voice is high (e.g. in T or C). I also attribute apparent allomorphy of AV to regular argument structural morphology in Seediq (cf. Ross 1995, Chen 2020), and discuss the implications this has on verb classes and (anti-)causative structures.

Speaker: Vsevolod Masliukov (MIT)
Title: Participial Complementation in Russian
Time: Tuesday, October 28th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: In this talk I will present a syntactic analysis of Russian sentences such as (1), which feature participles marked with the so-called ‘Predicate instrumental case’ (Bailyn 2001). I will argue that these participial clauses are arguments with a PredP (small clause structure, Bowers 1993 et seq.) built on top, whose subject is raised to the structural case licensing position in the matrix clause. I will also compare the properties of these constructions with participles used as adnominal adjuncts, which always require case matching, (2) and finite complements of the same class of verbs (3).

(1) Ona nikogda ne vide-l-a Maš-u pla?-uš?-ej.
she never NEG see-PST-F.SG M.-ACC cry-PTCP.IPFV-F.SG.INSTR
‘She has never seen Masha crying.’

(2) Ona nikogda ne vide-l-a [pla?-uš?-uju Maš-u] .
she never NEG see-PST-F.SG cry-PTCP.IPFV-F.SG.ACC M.-ACC
Lit.: ‘She has never seen crying Masha.’

(3) Ona nikogda ne vide-l-a, [kak Maša pla?-et].
she never NEG see-PST-F.SG COMP M.NOM cry-NPST.3SG
‘She has never seen Masha cry.’ (lit.: ‘how Masha cries’)

Speaker: Bergül Soykan (MIT)
Title: Limitations on meta questions: insights from Turkish
Time: Wednesday, October 29th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: In this ongoing work, I present data on the basic patterns of Turkish meta questions (MQs) and show that Turkish appears to allow meta-meta questions as in (1), which Trinh, Fox, and Bassi (2025) predict to be problematic according to their recent NELS talk. They claim that speech act verbs are phase heads, and complements of phase heads are spelled out (á la Chomsky 2001), which implies that there can be only one silent speech act verb in every (audible) sentence.
(1) ??A1: Ela gel-ecek mi?
come-Fut PolQ
[IA ask [whether Ela will come]]
?????B1: Ela nere-ye gel-ecek mi? wh-MQ
where-Dat come-Fut PolQ
[where1 youB ask [whether Ela will come where1]]
A2: Ela nere-ye gel-ecek mi mi? pol-MQ
*[whether youB ask [where1 IA ask [whether Ela will come where1]]]

I suggest that the difference between Turkish and English MQs results from 1) their distinct question-formation strategies (e.g., English uses wh-phrases in situ only for MQs, while in-situ-ness is the default form of all questions in Turkish) and 2) from differences in their Spell-Out domains. Given that Turkish always uses wh-in-situ for constituent questions, I propose that C is the phase head in Turkish, not the speech-act verb (or any other v). Also, revising Krifka (2014) and Woods and Vicente (2021), I assume the following structure in (2) for Turkish questions, where Force P indicates whether an utterance has question force [+Q] or not [-Q], and say is the speech act for all utterances that is merged when needed. Thus, I offer a solution to the seeming issue in Turkish MQs along the lines of Trinh, Fox, and Bassi’s (2025).

(2)???A1: Ela gel-ecek mi?
come-Fut PolQ
[whether1 [Ela will comeF mI1 ForceP[+Q]] Cthat]
B1: Ela nere-ye gel-ecek mi? wh-MQ
where-Dat come-Fut PolQ
[where2 [whether1 [Ela where2 will comeF mI1 ForceP[+Q]] Cthat] sayA]
A2: Ela nere-ye gel-ecek mi mi? pol-MQ
[whether3 [where1 [whether1 [Ela where1 will comeF mI1 ForceP[+Q]]F mI3 Cthat] sayA]ForceP[+Q]]

Later, I provide evidence from embedded clauses with an overt C head for the interpretation layers of MQs in Turkish. Finally, if time allows, I share cross-linguistic data from various languages, supporting that the Spell Out domain and question-formation strategies are the two parameters that affect MQ layering.

Speaker: Ivy Sichel (UC Santa Cruz)

Title: How resumptive pronouns ameliorate island violations - evidence from Hebrew

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

Location: 32-D461



Abstract: While some resumptive pronouns (RPs), in some languages, ameliorate island violations (Hebrew, Irish, Lebanese Arabic, among others), not all do (Vata (Koopman 1982), Welsh (Tallerman 1983), Nupe (Kandybowicz 2007)). The variation in this domain is perplexing: what is it that allows RPs to ameliorate island violations in the languages in which they do, and how might this be parametrically constrained? According to the ‘Classic View’ (Chomsky 1977, Borer 1984, McCloskey 1990), the repair is only indirect: RPs are associated with a distinct, non-movement, derivation (1a), in which an island violation is simply not incurred. By now, however, it has become clear that RPs are at least sometimes compatible with movement derivations, even in languages which exhibit island repair (Aoun, Choueiri & Hornstein 2001, Sichel 2014). This raises the possibility that an RP that repairs an island violation is similarly compatible with movement, and that the repair is direct, due to the realization of the gap as an RP within a movement derivation (Perlmutter 1972, Pesetsky 1998). The present study argues for the ‘Classic View’ based on the syntax of RPs in high positions in Hebrew RCs - because in this situation, the RP is not realizing the gap at the foot of the chain. This suggests that languages with island-sensitive RPs lack the non-movement RC structure. Along the way, I will develop a particular view of movement-compatible RPs, according to which RPs directly realize a position in an A-bar movement chain, regulated by Economy of Pronunciation.

Speaker: Filipe Kobayashi (Paris Lodron University of Salzburg)

Title: Syntactic constraints on fake indexicals in relative clauses (joint work with Caroline Gardner, Franziska Keller, Anita Riedl and Susi Wurmbrand)

Time: Thursday, October 23rd, 5pm - 6pm

Location: 32-D769



Abstract: Fake indexicals (i.e., bound occurrences of 1st and 2nd person pronouns) have a much more restricted distribution when they are bound by relative pronouns than when they are directly bound by an indexical pronoun (Kratzer 2009; Charnavel, Meadows and Sportiche 2025). Contra previous claims that the licensing of fake indexicals in these sentences is tied to verbal agreement or subjecthood, we argue for a new generalization: a relative pronoun can bind a fake indexical only if it is the highest argument in its clause. We then propose an account of this generalization grounded on a particular theory of how relative pronouns are able host person features.

Speaker: Ioannis Katochoritis (MIT)
Title: Micro-variation is a conspiracy: Condition C, Case and Wholesale Late Merge in Balinese vs. Malagasy
Time: Tuesday, October 21st, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: (joint work with Lena Lohninger)

This talk aims to illustrate the idea that microvariation is an epiphenomenonal conspiracy of the derivation. The focus will be two Malayo-Polynesian languages, Balinese and Malagasy, which share the Austronesian voice/pivot system: one (any) argument per clause is promoted to a syntactically and pragmatically salient status by becoming the so-called pivot.

When the internal argument becomes the pivot, the so-called Object Voice forms a non-canonical passive: the internal argument A-moves high to map into the surface subject, while the agent is not demoted to oblique, but remains a syntactically core argument that is licensed via strict right-adjacency to the verb.

However, the two languages differ with respect to Condition C: while Balinese pivot movement obligatorily reconstructs, and thus feeds connectivity, Malagasy pivot movement does not obligatorily reconstruct, and can thus bleed connectivity. To account for this apparent microparameter, we suggest that, while Malagasy allows Wholesale Late Merge (Takahashi & Hulsey 2009) of the pivot’s restrictor to the high landing site, Balinese does not.

We then provide two possible reasons for this: first, Balinese Object Voice still assigns accusative case to its internal argument, while Malagasy has lost this capacity, with the pivot being only licensed with nominative at the landing site; this forces pivots in the former, but not in the latter, to be early merged entirely at their base position. Evidence will come from asymmetries in multiple extraction, resumptive pronouns, quantifier scope and the inventory of Object Voice morphemes. Second, Balinese, but not Malagasy, exhibits DP-internal head movement to derive the suffixal nature of its determiner, which would be completely countercyclic under any tenable formulation of the Extension Condition.

Speaker: Giuseppe Varaschin (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Title: From descriptions to epithets: A structurally uniform account of definites
Time: Wednesday, October 22nd, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Slurs are nominal expressions that contribute meaning on both the truth-conditional (TC) and use-conditional (UC) dimensions, functioning as constraints on utterance contexts (Kaplan 1999; McCready 2010; Gutzmann 2015, i.a.). When such expressions appear as complements of definite determiners, as in the Brazilian Portuguese example in (1), they exhibit a systematic ambiguity (Saab 2022). On one reading — the definite-description reading — the DP refers to the unique individual satisfying the property denoted by the NP (in this case, being rural). On the other — the epithet reading — the descriptive property need not hold; it suffices that the referent have epistemically accessible properties that are contextually inferable from that property (e.g. driving a tractor, having a rural accent, wearing rural clothes).
(1) O jeca chegou.
??the JECA arrived
??‘The hillbilly arrived.’

Prior analyses derive this split via structural ambiguity inside the DP (Patel-Grosz 2014; Orlando & Saab 2020, i.a.). In this talk I defend a structurally uniform alternative, where the interpretive differences between descriptive and epithet readings follow from two main ingredients: (i) an optional type-shifting operation — encoded by a syntactic EX feature (Gutzmann 2019) and correlated with prosodic deaccenting (Umbach 2002) — that moves NP content from the TC to the UC dimension; and (ii) the presence or absence of a pronominal index associated with the D head (Schwarz 2009; Jenks & Konate 2022). Under the epithet derivation, the NP property is mapped to a contextually determined superset that serves as a constraint on assignments for the index introduced by D; this mapping to a superset (defined by epistemically accessible properties) accounts for the misdescription tolerance characteristic of epithet readings. Because the property is shifted from the TC to the UC dimension where it is a function on contexts, it cannot address relevant QUDs. I show that the same interpretive mechanism also accounts for referential readings of definite descriptions (Donnellan 1966; Gutzmann & McCready 2014, i.a.). Drawing on novel Brazilian Portuguese data involving modification, iteration, binding, and ellipsis, I argue that this analysis is not only conceptually simpler but also more empirically adequate than structural-ambiguity accounts. A key consequence is that DP structure is essentially uniform across definites of all types (slurs, ordinary definites, epithets, and referential pronouns), with variation reducible to fully interpretive lexically-anchored features: whether D supplies a pronominal index, and whether triggers of UC-shifting (correlated with deaccenting) are present on NP nodes.

Speaker: Bingzi Yu (MIT) and Michael Kenstowicz (MIT)

Title: Tones and tone sandhi in Chengdu Mandarin

Time: Monday, October 20th, 5pm - 6:30pm

Location: 32-D831



Abstract: Chengdu Mandarin is a variety of Mandarin Chinese spoken in southwestern China. Like Standard Mandarin, it has four citation tones, but the tone contours and sandhi patterns differ notably. The table below summarizes the etymological correspondences between tones in the two dialects:

In this talk, we will present acoustic description of both the citation tones and tone sandhi in Chengdu Mandarin based on recent recordings and propose a constraint-based account that captures most of the observed sandhi patterns. In addition, we raise some interesting yet unsolved puzzles. Among them, we will focus on the phonological representation of the Chengdu dipping tone (T4 in the table above) and its unusual sandhi behavior.

Speaker: Ido Benbaji-Elhadad (MIT) & Omri Doron (UMass Amherst)

Title: Saving FACE: Fragment answers, copy theory, and radical trace conversion

Time: Tuesday, October 14th, 1pm - 2pm

Location: 32-D461



Abstract: Jacobson (2016) observes that fragment answers to which-questions seem to have different felicity conditions than fully spelled out answers and even ones with VP ellipsis, as demonstrated in (1). Jacobson takes this fact as evidence against an analysis of Fragment Answers as the result of Clausal Ellipsis (FACE, in short; Merchant, 2005), and proposes an analysis that treats them as connected to their preceding questions via a special syntactic relation. But FACE has its merits: (i) It explains why fragments seem sensitive to constraints on movement and morphosyntactically connected to their hypothesized “original position”; and (ii) it unifies fragment answers, VP ellipsis and sluicing under the same recoverability conditions. In this talk, we propose a novel account of Jacobson’s puzzle which does not give up FACE, and instead points at the parallelism constraint on ellipsis as the source of infelicity in (1a). Specifically, assuming trace conversion (Fox, 1999), we propose that the mismatch between the trace left by which Math professor and the one left by Mary prevents them from satisfying parallelism. In doing so, we argue for a modification to the process of trace conversion.

(1) Q: Which Math professor left the party early?
a. #Mary, but she’s not a Math professor.
b. Mary left the party early, but she’s not a Math professor.
c. Mary did, but she’s not a Math professor.

Speaker: Lorenzo Pinton (MIT)
Title: VP-ellipsis and parasitic gaps: observations on temporal modifiers and parallelism
Time: Wednesday, October 15th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: As the title suggests, in this LFRG I present ongoing work on PV-ellipsis and Parasitic Gaps. I discuss novel data involving parasitic gaps (henceforth PGs) in VP-ellipsis constructions. In particular, I present a series of minimal pairs and claim that the grammatical contrasts are mainly accounted for by the combination of a local parallelism condition on ellipsis in the style Takahashi and Fox (2005)/Fox and Katzir (2011), and Nissenbaum’s (1998; 2000) theory of PGs. First, the contrast between (1a) and (1b) is introduced to show that adjuncts with a PG cannot appear in the clause containing ellipsis, in contrast with adjuncts with no gap:

(1) a. *This is the song that John listened to,
and this is the song that Mary did [listen to] after reading about.
b. This is the song that John listened to,
and this is the song that Mary did [listen to] after having a coffee .

More data in (2) show that there are actually instances in which a PG-adjunct can appear in the elided clause, but only if another PG-adjunct is present in the antecedent:

(2) a. This is the song that Rosa listened to after reading about,
and this is the song that Karl did [listen to] before hearing about.
b. *This is the song that Rosa listened to after turning on the radio,
and this is the song that Karl did [listen to] before hearing about .

A third - semantic - constrast will also be introduced tin the talk. After considering observations from Hartman (2011) on the size of elided phrases, I will show the need for a silent element that merges in the same position as adjuncts that do not contain a PG. This need can be implemented either with a tense restrictor analysis of temporal modifiers (as for example presented in von Fintel and Heim (2011)) or with a silent pronominal version of temporal adjuncts, as long as this is restricted to non-PG adjuncts.

Speaker: Janos Egressy (UCLA)
Title: Size-sensitive Sequence of Tense in Hungarian
Time: Tuesday, October 7th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: In Sequence of Tense (SOT) Analyses (e.g. Ogihara 1995), it has been argued that past-under-past configurations (e.g. John said that Mary was pregnant) have a simultaneous reading if the embedded past head undergoes “deletion” under agreement with the matrix past head: While the deletion does not affect the verb form, the reading becomes John said: ‘Mary is pregnant’. If no such deletion happens, the embedded past tense remains backshifted compared to the matrix past tense, so the reading remains John said: ‘Mary was pregnant’. Previous SOT research has claimed that the availability of this deletion rule is a parameter for entire languages, e.g. English has such a rule but Japanese does not, so the simultaneous reading is never available for Japanese clauses. This paper shows that Hungarian exhibits language-internal SOT-variation in past-under-past configurations: While speech-reporting clauses are Japanese-like, i.e. obligatorily backshifted, non-speech-reporting clauses are English-like, i.e. they have a simultaneous reading. My syntactic analysis proposes a size-difference between the clause types: speech-reporting clauses are structurally larger. Hence, the availability of deletion-under-Agree can be described as a case of Williams Cycle (Williams 2003) or size-dependent opacity in Agree (Keine 2020).

(This talk is a practice talk for NELS.)

Speaker: Yiannis Katochoritis (MIT)

Title: Long-distance agreement on Procrustes’ bed: a revival of spec-head

Time: October 9, 12:30pm - 2pm

Location: 32-D461



Abstract: Long-distance agreement (LDA) refers to the phenomenon where a matrix verb may (optionally) agree in ?-features with an embedded argument of its complement clause, otherwise showing default agreement with the entire complement clause. Spanning a clausal boundary and appearing to involve no displacement of the embedded goal, LDA has been one of the core empirical arguments in favor of the operation Agree, which dissociates agreement from movement.

This talk has a double aim: first, to present a previosuly unnoticed observation; that is, (almost) all geographically diverse LDA languages share fundamental typological properties: they are verb-final, with a (full or split) ergative alignment, and with default SOV order; moreover, LDA-transparent embedded clauses are always either restructuring VPs or nominalized/participial TP/CPs; and once a potential LDA goal somehow overtly fronts to the left of the matrix verb, LDA (usually) becomes obligatory.

Second, I attempt to account for this empirical picture through little bits of Kayne’s (1994) Antisymmetry, Bobaljik’s (2008) m-case hierarchy, and the magic power of pied-piping. Specifically, I will suggest a unified analysis of LDA as local feature-checking in a (covert) spec-head configuration, which may allow for iterative feature-copying under recursive merge. Depending on two parameters, the specifier of the agreeing verbal head is filled either directly by the moving DP goal or by the complement clause that pied-pipes the goal at its edge. Hence, LDA is derived via Merge, not Agree. This will eventually yield a typology of (at least) four types of LDA systems, among which I will (struggle to) intergrate the outlier named Algonquian.

The analysis hinges on two crucial premises: one, LDA often features movement properties/constraints; two, the optionality of LDA is only apparent, as it obligatorily interacts with scope and/or information-structure, reducing to the reflex of independently motivated syntactic processes. Thus, I will distinguish between two types of agreement: narrow-syntactic agreement feeds LF or further syntactic operations, and involves downwards valuation by some interpretable feature, (plausibly) under spec-head. This contrasts with uninterpretable agreement, which is pushed post-syntactically, at early PF, and may operate from a distance, via upwards valuation (though still c-command-based).

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.

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.

Speaker: Yvette Yi-Chi Wu (Harvard)

Title: Morphological decomposition in Austronesian voice: evidence for intermediary movement

Time: Tuesday, September 23rd, 1pm - 2pm

Location: 32-D461



Abstract: This talk takes a morphological starting point to Austronesian voice, and argues in favor of positing several distinct syntactic projections whose various combinations give rise to surface voice alternations (cf. Pearson 2005, Travis 2010). In particular, this includes 1) the functional projection E(vent), responsible for (non-)finite and (ir)realis marking, and 2) functional projections M(iddle)T(opic) (cf. LaCerda 2020) and Appl (cf. Georgala 2012), responsible for argument advancement as a sort of “leapfrogging” movement (Bobaljik 1995). Evidence comes from affix ordering of verbal morphemes, morphological decomposition in indicative and irrealis voice paradigms, and the distribution of voice markers in clausal complementation in Seediq and other Formosan languages. This is ongoing work as part of a dissertation on Austronesian voice in Seediq [Taiwan; Atayalic], and its implications on movement within the extended Voice domain.

Speaker: Juan Cancel (MIT)
Title: A Reanalysis of Syllabic and Rhythmic Gradation in Nganasan As A Single Consonant Gradation Process
Time: Monday, September 22nd, 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: The literature on Avam Nganasan (Helimski 1998; Wagner-Nagy 2018) has argued that the language exhibits two kinds of Consonant Gradation: Syllabic Gradation (SG), in which an onset consonant alternates in voicing depending on whether a syllable is open or closed as in ?i.k? ”mountain” vs. ?i.g?-? ”mountains”, and Rhythmic Gradation (RG), in which an onset consonant alternates in voicing depending on whether it aligns with the left-edge of a foot or not as in (n?-r?)(g?) ”woman-like” vs. (?ot?)-(r?ku)”grass-like”.

In contrast to the description above, this analysis will argue in terms of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 2004) that we should instead reanalyze SG and RG as a single Consonant Gradation process. In particular, it will argue that Consonant Gradation in Nganasan involves a special fortition process that occurs on the onset of a foot-medial open syllable in combination to other cross-linguistically attested lenition processes such as intervocalic and postnasal voicing This reanalysis not only clearly explains why the single consonant alternations in both in SG and RG happen to be the same - they would just be the same instantiation of intervocalic voicing - but it also serves as the ground for reanalyzing in more concrete terms some of the problems involving the homorganic nasal alternations that Vaysman (2009) looked at such as the apparent NT ? T ? D chain-shift that we see in RG or the cases of counterbleeding that we see in words such as (?i.g?)-(t?.nu) ”mountain-LOC.SG”, where we have a voiced onset in an unexpected environment.

Speaker: Elise Newman (MIT)
Title: Some thoughts on clefts and wh-fronting
Time: Tuesday, September 16th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: To kick off the new semester of syntax square, I want to explore a question: why do some languages primarily use clefts for question-formation when wh-fronting should be a possibility? I don’t know the answer, but I’m hoping that by making the question more concrete, we can start to see a path towards an eventual solution. I’ll explore questions in two languages, Tagalog and Passamaquoddy, which both have the following in common: they use different strategies for DP-questions than non-DP questions. Tagalog uses a pseudo-cleft strategy for DP questions but a regular fronting strategy for non-DP questions; Passamaquoddy uses different clause type for each one. I’ll revisit some properties of clefts and relatives clauses in each case and show that while the behavior of and restrictions on non-DP wh-phrases are fairly straightforward to understand, the behavior of DPs is less obvious.

Speaker: Yurika Aonuki (MIT)
Title: On the QUD sensitivity of a third reading
Time: Wednesday, September 17th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: We provide the first experimental evidence for the hypothesis that transparent readings are sensitive to the QUD (Question Under Discussion) (Schwager (Kaufmann) 2009; Percus 2020; Benbaji-Elhadad 2023; Mayr and Schmitt 2023, 2024), using third readings (Fodor 1970) in attitude reports. In particular, we test Mayr and Schmitt’s (2023, 2024) claim that there is difference in transparent-reading-licensing abilities even among QUDs about the attitude holder’s mental state. Our results have consequences for (replacement) theories of transparent readings and shed light on how a QUD about someone’s mental state can be manipulated.

The 12th TripleA workshop for semantic fieldworkers was held at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan on September 10-12, 2025. The following members of our community presented at the conference:

• James Cooper Roberts (3rd year), Yizhen Jiang (3rd year) & Haoming Li (4th year): How to talk about groups in a language without group nouns: The case of Passamaquoddy
• Junri Shimada (PhD 2009)[Meiji Gakuin University] & Abdul-Razak Sulemana (PhD 2021)[University of Ghana]: Embedded tenses in Bùlì
• Tim Jantarungsee, Christopher Davis & Yasutada Sudo (PhD 2012)[UCL]: Selectional restriction in Mlabri ingestion verbs

Speaker: Aljoša Milenkovi? (Harvard) and Kevin Ryan (Harvard)
Title: Stress-weight and stress-tone interaction in South Slavic folk verse
Time: Monday, September 15th, 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: We analyze the distribution of stress, tone and syllable weight in the epic decasyllable, a traditional verse form of South Slavic folk poetry. The meter imposes strict distributional constraints on tone and
weight in stressed syllables. The stress-modulated nature of tone and weight mapping places the epic
decasyllable in the category of hybrid meters of the interactive type (in the sense of Ryan 2017). The
contribution is twofold: we demonstrate that hybrid meters can display multiple interactive mappings in
parallel (in this case, stress-weight and stress-tone) and offer evidence for stress-tone interaction,
previously undocumented in hybrid meters. This is also, to our knowledge, the first demonstration of
tone-sensitivity in an Indo-European meter. We provide a MaxEnt model for the epic decasyllable.
Building on recent work in MaxEnt metrics (Hayes & Schuh 2019; Henriksson 2022), we discuss different
methods for incorporating ordinary language baselines in MaxEnt analyses of metered verse.

Speaker: Eric Bakovi? (UC San Diego)

Title: A computational typology of vowel harmony patterns

Time: , 3:30pm - 5pm

Location: 32-141



Abstract: We propose a typology of vowel harmony patterns using Boolean Monadic Recursive Schemes (BMRS; Bhaskar et al. 2020, Chandlee & Jardine 2021). BMRS describe input-output maps as logical transductions using conditional IF…THEN…ELSE… syntax, and unite computational universals from formal language theory with substantive universals from phonological analysis. We identify how different computational structures (extension) and basic predicate types (intension) systematically derive distinct harmony patterns. Our typology emerges from varying the presence, type, and scope of redundancy conditions within BMRS harmony functions. When potential targets fail to receive or propagate harmonic features, redundancy conditions override harmony in predictable ways by blocking feature reception, halting feature propagation, or preventing both reception and propagation, depending on their type and scope within the function. This proposal builds upon recent work relating phonological generalizations to specific BMRS structures, offering a unified computational account of typological variation in vowel harmony without the representational assumptions of traditional approaches.

Course announcements in this post:

• Topics in Semantics (24.979)
• Topics in Phonology (24.964)

24.979: Topics in Semantics

• Instructor: Amir Anvari & Martin Hackl & Viola Schmit
• Time: Thursday, 2pm-5pm
• Room: 32-D461

The very basic observation that expressions can refer to semantic objects raises two general questions. The first concerns the mapping, i.e., how a particular expression with a given conventional meaning actually gets to pick a particular semantic object (an entity, a function, etc.)? This issue is raised, for example, by pronouns, but also by expressions without overt pro-forms whose values seem to be (partially) dependent on the context. The second question concerns the status of the semantic objects that are being picked out themselves. We often take them to be given (as in standard model theoretic semantics), setting aside e.g. issues concerning how the context might contribute to individuating these objects. The seminar will consist of various explorations and case studies, which we hope will bring these foundational issues into sharper focus. Issues we hope to discuss include:  What are grammatically relevant notions of identity or similarity and distinctness? When do we take two expressions to refer to the same semantic object? When can we use expressions that intuitively relate to identity, like pronouns or operators like same? When do we take two expressions to refer to different objects? And when are those grammatical devices licensed that intuitively seem to relate to distinctness, like different, plurals or numerals?

• Instructor: Adam Albright
• Time: Wednesday, 10am-1pm
• Room: 32-D461

Speaker: Yiannis Katochoritis (MIT)
Title: Long-distance agreement on Procrustes’ bed: a revival of spec-head
Time: , 12:30pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Long-distance agreement (LDA) refers to the phenomenon where a matrix verb may (optionally) agree in ?-features with an embedded argument of its complement clause, otherwise showing default agreement with the entire complement clause. Spanning a clausal boundary and appearing to involve no displacement of the embedded goal, LDA has been one of the core empirical arguments in favor of the operation Agree, which dissociates agreement from movement.

This talk has a double aim: first, to present a previosuly unnoticed observation; that is, (almost) all geographically diverse LDA languages share fundamental typological properties: they are verb-final, with a (full or split) ergative alignment, and with default SOV order; moreover, LDA-transparent embedded clauses are always either restructuring VPs or nominalized/participial TP/CPs; and once a potential LDA goal somehow overtly fronts to the left of the matrix verb, LDA (usually) becomes obligatory.

Second, I attempt to account for this empirical picture through little bits of Kayne’s (1994) Antisymmetry, Bobaljik’s (2008) m-case hierarchy, and the magic power of pied-piping. Specifically, I will suggest a unified analysis of LDA as local feature-checking in a (covert) spec-head configuration, which may allow for iterative feature-copying under recursive merge. Depending on two parameters, the specifier of the agreeing verbal head is filled either directly by the moving DP goal or by the complement clause that pied-pipes the goal at its edge. Hence, LDA is derived via Merge, not Agree. This will eventually yield a typology of (at least) four types of LDA systems, among which I will (struggle to) intergrate the outlier named Algonquian.

The analysis hinges on two crucial premises: one, LDA often features movement properties/constraints; two, the optionality of LDA is only apparent, as it obligatorily interacts with scope and/or information-structure, reducing to the reflex of independently motivated syntactic processes. Thus, I will distinguish between two types of agreement: narrow-syntactic agreement feeds LF or further syntactic operations, and involves downwards valuation by some interpretable feature, (plausibly) under spec-head. This contrasts with uninterpretable agreement, which is pushed post-syntactically, at early PF, and may operate from a distance, via upwards valuation (though still c-command-based).

Speaker: Yiannis Katochoritis (MIT) and Magdalena Lohninger (Paris Lodron Universität Salzburg)

Title: Austronesian pivots: topics or subjects? A Malayo-Polynesian typology

Time: Thursday, September 4, 12:30pm - 2pm

Location: 32-D461



Abstract: A long standing debate on the Austronesian voice system is whether pivots–the pragmatically and syntactically most salient clausal argument- are V2-like topics or derived subjects. By investigating micro-variation across the Malayo-Polynesian branch (Tagalog, Balinese, Malagasy, Acehnese, Standard Indonesian), this talk proposes that the syntactic status of pivots varies across languages, though in a unidirectional manner, ranging from pure topicalization to argument-structure alternation. We focus on the A/A’ status of pivots (weak crossover and reconstruction), their subjecthood properties (obligatory control and their impact on licensing of non-pivot agents) and info-structural effects (formal and pragmatic discourse restrictions). Crucially, this variation is not arbitrary but aligns pivots on a continuous cline from topichood to subjecthood, with intermediate stages in-between.

We suggest that this cline results from an ongoing process of topic-to-subject grammaticalization, instantiated as topic-to-subject lowering. We examine four stages of this reanalysis, showing that they stand in an implicational hierarchy, each step incrementally feeding into the next. In stage 1 (Tagalog), the pivot is an obligatory topic, driven by information-structure, but already exhibits some A-movement properties due to the status of Malayo-Polynesian languages as discourse-configurational systems. In stage 2 (Balinese), the pivot acquires a surface-subject status, and its (high) landing site is re-interpreted as a case-assigning position; in Object/Theme Voice, this triggers the voice domain to become a non-canonical passive, which enforces the in-situ (non-demoted) agent to be licensed via strict verbal adjacency. In stage 3 (Malagasy), the voice domain loses its ability to case-license its internal argument with accusative. In the last stage (Acehnese, Standard Indonesian), the topic flavor and discourse restrictions on pivot promotion disappear.

Finally, we address the status of Malayo-Polynesian pivots with respect to the two other typical subject properties, namely, imperatives/hortatives and anaphor binding. Though these diagnostics are sensitive to independent confounds and seem to only target the agent, we show that, once these caveats are dispensed with, they align with obligatory control in targeting the surface subject, whether the agent or not. Relevant case studies on the matter will be the Tagalog non-volitive construction and the several passive-like constructions of Indonesian-type languages.

Whamit! will be on semi-hiatus over the summer, as usual. We will continue to publish breaking MIT Linguistics news as it happens. Weekly posts will resume in the Fall.

Thanks to our editors, contributors, and of course all our readers! See you all in the Fall!

Sad news has reached us of the death on May 10 of John Frampton, an important figure in linguistic research on both syntax and phonology for several decades, and a beloved member of the MIT Linguistics community — though he was neither faculty nor an alum of our department. John was an Associate Professor of Mathematics at Northeastern University (across the river from us). In the 1990s, John became fascinated with recent developments in theoretical linguistics and started attending classes at MIT, most notably Chomsky’s famous Thursday afternoon lectures — where he was a prominent participant, the sharpest mind in the room, it always seemed. Always seated next to his friend, colleague, and linguistics collaborator Sam Gutmann (also a member of the mathematics faculty at Northeastern), whose interests had turned in the very same direction, John could be counted on to spot every error in Noam’s presentation, and (more important) every unsuspected consequence and interesting road not taken as well — roads that he explored in numerous influential papers over many years. In more recent years, John’s interests turned to phonology, where he was a strong advocate for rule-based phonological systems, authoring the monograph Distributed Reduplication (MIT Press) and many other publications. Many linguists who use LaTex to write their papers will also know John as the author of ExPex, a widely used, enormously flexible package for numbering and formatting example sentences and other illustrative material — specifically designed for linguistics.

His daughter Prof. Stephanie Ann Frampton is an MIT colleague, a member of the Classics faculty in the Literature section and co-chair of the Program in Ancient and Medieval studies. She writes that John spent his last months, aware that his health was failing, finishing papers on prosody in Winnebago and Arabic, and adds: “Whether he was in agreement or disagreement with trends of linguistic theory among the faculty, John took enormous inspiration from being a member of the linguistics community at MIT for over three decades.” We in turn took enormous inspiration from John, who followed his intellectual passions wherever they led him with the most rigorous honesty, sparkling creativity, and insistence that the results should make sense. A great loss, we will miss him.

His daughter requests “in lieu of flowers, please send donations to the ACLU in his memory: https://action.aclu.org/give/make-gift-aclu-someones-memory”.

Speaker: Soledad Chango (MIT) & William Pacheco (MIT)

Title: Prosody in Salasaka Kichwa & Developing Inquiry and Research in Eastern Keres Ki:wa-Dialect

Time: Thursday, May 15th, 12:30pm - 2pm

Location: 32-D461



Abstract: This week’s LingLunch will consist of two presentations by MIT Indigenous Language Initiative (MITILI) students:

Title: Prosody in Salasaka Kichwa (Soledad Chango, MIT)
Abstract: This thesis investigates the prosodic features of Salasaka Kichwa, focusing on the interaction between pitch, stress, and syntactic structure in both natural and elicited speech. Adopting a descriptive and analytical approach, it examines how pitch peaks align with informational focus and morphosyntactic elements such as topic and question particles—particularly -mi and -chu. Data was collected from ten native speakers (ages 13–65), including the author, in the Salasaka community, through a combination of read-aloud tasks and spontaneous speech, yielding approximately 150 utterances. Prosodic analysis was carried out in Praat and annotated using ToBI-style conventions. The results show that in non-interrogative utterances, nuclear pitch accents consistently fall on the final element of the verb phrase—typically the object in SOV or the verb in SV constructions—reflecting the language’s head-final syntax. This default pattern shifts when focus particles like -mi are present, which attract the pitch peak regardless of their position. In interrogative utterances, suffixes such as -chu override default prosodic alignment and compete with other morphemes like -wan, often determining the placement of nuclear stress. This study contributes to the documentation of an underrepresented variety of Northern Quechua and offers empirical insight into the syntax-prosody interface in head-final languages. It also situates Kichwa within broader conversations on language endangerment, standardization, and revitalization.

Title: Emerging Questions: Developing Inquiry and Research in Eastern Keres Ki:wa-Dialect (William Pacheco, MIT)
Abstract: As a first-year student in the MITILI program and a Kewa Pueblo educator — I approach theoretical linguistic research as both a learner and a community member. In this casual talk, I will share the questions and observations that are shaping my developing research on Eastern Keres (Ki:wa dialect), grounded in a commitment to community use and knowledge continuity. Drawing on my background in education and language revitalization, I’ll reflect on areas of linguistic interest that have emerged through teaching and listening: the complexity of the Keres verb conjugation system (which has been described as having between 12 and 30 classes), consonant clusters and sibilants, and semantic uses of reflexive prefixes. Rather than presenting findings, this talk will be a preview of the fieldwork I will be conducting this summer, with the goal of supporting both deeper linguistic analysis and practical outcomes in curriculum and teacher development for my community.

Speaker: Si Berrebi (MIT)

Title: Absolute neutralization in Modern Hebrew? An experimental study

Time: Monday, May 12th, 5pm - 6:30pm

Location: 32-D831



Abstract: In a controversial analysis, Chomsky and Halle (1968) proposed that the underlying representation of the English word “nightingale” contains /x/, a velar fricative that never surfaces in the language. This state of affairs, where an underlying segment is never pronounced, is referred to as “Absolute Neutralization”, and the possibility of such neutralization has been under debate at least since Kiparsky’s 1968 “How abstract is phonology?”. In this presentation, I will discuss a phonological case study from Modern Hebrew for which the simplest analysis assumes an abstract pharyngeal consonant that never surfaces. I will present two experiments that aim to probe Hebrew speakers’ phonological knowledge in order to distinguish between an absolute-neutralization analysis and competing accounts.

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.

Speaker: Nadine Bade (University of Konstanz)

Title: Shared Mechanisms Behind Local and Global Implicatures: Evidence from Priming

Time: Friday, May 2nd, 3:30pm - 5pm

Location: 32-141



Abstract: The mechanisms underlying implicature derivation remain a topic of active debate. Competing theoretical accounts make distinct predictions about the role of different types of alternatives in implicature computation. Recent experimental work has begun to address this issue using priming paradigms (Chemla & Bott 2016; Rees & Bott 2018; Waldon & Degen 2021; Marty et al. 2024). In this talk, I present an extension of the existing priming paradigm that includes both matrix and embedded (downward-entailing) contexts, as well as conditions that manipulate the visual salience of alternatives. The findings suggest that both embedding and visual highlighting influence the rate at which implicatures are derived. I will discuss the implications of these results for theories of implicature and alternative-based reasoning.

Speaker: Noa Bassel (UMass Amherst/MIT)

Title: Toward a simpler binding theory

Time: Tuesday, April 29th, 1pm - 2pm

Location: 32-D461



Abstract: Classical Binding Theory has been successful at capturing basic facts about the distribution of DPs. It has also raised some long standing concerns at the empirical and conceptual level. These include high-profile violations of Principles A, B, and C that are nonetheless grammatical, and questions on these principles’ explanatory adequacy. This talk explores whether broader empirical coverage may be achieved by reducing the number of principles.

Specifically, I will show that many known counterexamples to the Binding Theory dissolve when we collapse its principles to a single rule based on default disjointedness. Building on ideas by Heim (1989) and Sauerland (2013), I will propose that covaluation between local DPs requires an identity statement at the level of presupposition (in anaphors) or assertion (in full DPs).

Speaker: Cooper Roberts (MIT)
Title: Agreement determines the interpretation of fraction partitives in some languages, but why?
Time: Wednesday, April 30th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: This LFRG presents in-progress work on the syntax-semantics of fraction partitives (e.g., one-third of the cakes). In several Indo-European languages (but not American English), FPs are ambiguous between two readings if the complement is plural. On one reading, the FP is understood to denote a subplurality of the plural individual denoted by the complement. On the other, it can refer to any subpart of the plural individual measuring a fraction of that individual along some non-cardinal dimension. I call these readings count and measure, respectively. Apart from the cross-linguistic variation previously mentioned, this ambiguity is particularly interesting as Agreement determines which reading is licensed. If a DP-external element (e.g., a verb) Agrees with the phi-features of the complement, only the count interpretation is available. If that element Agrees with the fraction, only the measure interpretation is available.

While I ultimately will not offer a satisfying treatment for FPs, this talk outlines the relevant data and theory which may yield useful in understanding the alternation. Ideally, this session will mostly be discussion and deliberation. I welcome any thoughts!

Speaker: Cynthia Zhong (MIT)
Title: Coronal consonant typology in Japanese
Time: Monday, April 28th, 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: In Japanese, the voiced coronal consonants /z/ and /d/ used to contrast before high vowels /i/ and /u/, forming a 4-way distinction among /zi, di, zu, du/. A merger that began around the 16th century neutralized these contrasts to different extents in different regions in Japan, and today we could observe 4, 3, 2, and 1-way contrasts across various Japanese dialects. Furthermore, in the same high vowel contexts, there are asymmetries in the number of contrasts available for voiced coronals versus voiceless coronals. One notable example of asymmetry is found in Standard Tokyo Japanese, which maintains a 4-way contrast among voiceless coronals /si, ti, su, tu/ but neutralizes the continuancy contrast between /d/ and /z/, resulting in a 2-way contrast [(d)?i, (d)z?] in voiced coronals. In this talk, I will present generalizations about the typology of Japanese coronal consonants that I gathered from the Japanese linguistics literature, then I will discuss a sketch of an analysis for the realization of coronals in Standard Japanese using the P-map (Steriade, 2008). The hope is that some of the constraints proposed and the general structure of analysis would be extendable to other dialects of Japanese.

Speaker: Adam Przepiórkowski (Warsaw / MIT)

Title: Concord as Insatiable Agree

Time: Thursday, April 24th, 12:30pm - 2pm

Location: 32-D461



Abstract: The aim of this talk is to present an analysis of concord – nominal agreement in case and phi features – as insatiable Agree (e.g., Deal 2023, 2024; Clem and Deal 2024). On this approach, typical modifiers do not agree with nominal heads directly but are flagged with the relevant features by a higher functional head (e.g., D or K). This provides an immediate account of some otherwise puzzling facts about the number of exponed cases in overt case-stacking languages (e.g., as discussed in Richards 2013 and Pesetsky 2013 with respect to Lardil) and allows for a straightforward analysis of heterogeneous case patterns in Slavic and Finnic. I will argue that this approach to concord is theoretically superior to the current alternatives (Norris 2014, 2018; Bay?rl? 2017), which require ad-hoc feature percolation principles. Moreover, given an appropriate rule of exponence of stacked feature bundles, it is immune to Norris’s 2018 Estonian challenge for case-stacking approaches to nominal concord. Empirically, this approach predicts some of the typological generalizations discussed in Bay?rl? 2017 (when a language has both phi features and case, it may exhibit concord in phi features alone, but not in case alone) and naturally accounts for cross-linguistic observations in Norris 2018.

A draft manuscript on which this talk is based is available at https://tinyurl.com/4k97try2; at one point the slides will appear there as well. (There’ll be no paper handouts.)

Speaker: Zachary Feldcamp and Ido Elhadad-Benbaji (MIT)
Title: Structure matters: missing implicatures and their consequence for the theory of alternatives
Time: Wednesday, April 23rd, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: A central component to theories of conversational implicature is the delimitation of the set of alternative sentences that could have been uttered, but were not. Yet there is considerable disagreement about the mechanism underlying the computation of alternative utterances and the kind of objects that alternatives are claimed to be. Examining the domain of English aspect marking, we provide a novel case of implicatures disappearing when syntax independently rules out the alternatives required to generate them, and argue that this data supports a theory in which alternatives are syntactic objects, computed by an algorithm that appeals to the notion of structural complexity (Katzir 2007; Fox & Katzir 2011) but challenges theories in which alternatives are semantic objects, as in the focus theory (Rooth 1992), and the conceptual alternatives theory (Buccola et al. 2022).

Speaker: Philip Shushurin (Higher School of Economics, Moscow)

Title: How to do voice restructuring in a language without voice: Transitivity Concord in Chechen.

Time: Tuesday, April 22nd, 1pm - 2pm

Location: 32-D461



Abstract: The paper presents an analysis of a construction known as Transitivity Concord in Chechen. I argue that this construction presents a novel and previously undescribed type of Voice Restructuring. In the Transitivity Concord Construction, certain matrix transitive verbs impose a requirement to embed a strictly transitive structure.

(1) Asa kniga j-esa d’a-j-ol-ira
I.erg book f-read prf-f-begin-rpst
‘I began reading the book.’

(2) *So/*Asa ida d’a-d-oli-ra
I.abs/I.erg run prf-n-begin-rpst
‘I began running.’

I argue that this condition is in fact a requirement on the matrix verb to contain an agreeable (Absolutive) Direct Object in the embedded clause with which it establishes a long-distance Agree relation. The embedded verb in such a construction is shown to be syntactically deficient, despite bearing agreement morphology. The construction is analyzed in terms of Pietraszko (2021), Bryant, Kovac and Wurmbrand’s (2023) system whereby the embedded structure is featurally dependent on the matrix structure in terms of the ID feature. I depart from this system in assuming that (a) the embedded verb’s deficiency needs not be conditional on its case assigning potential (Absolutive assignment is very low in Chechen) (b) the voice dependency might be encoded as just ?. Furthermore, I assume that v and Voice are featurally dependent in Chechen which results in automatic feature transmission between the two heads.
I discuss the TCC’s implications for both the theory of restructuring and infinitives.”

Speaker: Yasutada Sudo (UCL)

Title: Specific indefinites and dynamic presuppositions

Time: Friday, April 18th, 3:30pm - 5pm

Location: 32-141



Abstract: This is an attempt to explain the exceptional scope behavior of specific indefinites in terms of ‘dynamic presuppositions’—presuppositions with anaphoric content in addition to propositional content. It is also claimed that puzzling interpretive properties of ‘certain’ indefinites are straightforwardly explained as dynamic presuppositions with functional anaphora.

Speaker: Adam Przepiórkowski (Warsaw / MIT)

Title: Cases are partially ordered: Evidence from Estonian

Time: Thursday, April 17th, 5pm - 6pm

Location: 32-D769



Abstract: Caha 2009 et seq. argues that cases are universally totally ordered: NOM < ACC < GEN < PAR < obliques, with obliques also totally ordered. Arguments for this include case syncretisms and morphological containments in various languages, including Estonian. The aim of this talk is to present arguments from Estonian for a partial ordering, where in particular GEN(initive) and PAR(titive) are unordered: NOM < ACC < {GEN, PAR} < obliques. Some of the arguments are morphological (syncretism, containment), but I also adduce a syntactic argument, from covert case stacking in so-called pseudopartitives (‘piece of bread’, etc.). This provides support for the views that case hierarchies are only partially ordered (e.g., Bárány 2021, Graf 2019, Zompì 2019), as well as for the view in Zompì 2023 that *ABA is not violated as long as there exists at least one path between the two A items that does not violate *ABA.

Speaker:Oddur Snorrason (QMUL) and Zhouyi Sun (MIT)

Title: How are Icelandic degree questions moving many phrases

Time: Tuesday, April 15th, 1pm - 2pm

Location: 32-D461



Abstract: Icelandic, despite being a language which does not permit Left Branch Extraction in general, allows an exceptional way of forming degree questions in addition to the standard pied-piping structure, as shown in (1):

(1) a. Hvað  ertu        __ gamall?
           what  are.you         old
           ‘How old are you?’

      b. Hvað skrifaðir þú    __ langa bo?k?
          what  wrote      you         long book
          ‘How long a book did you write?’

More interestingly, evidence from parasitic gaps and reflexive licensing suggests that the apparently in-situ containing phrase is undergoing movement as well.

In this talk, we sketch a derivation in which both the degree operator and its containing phrase move simultaneously, drawing a comparison with Fox and Nissenbaum’s (2018) proposal for English pied-piping. We suggest that the difference between the English and Icelandic patterns can be reduced to distinct PF conditions. Finally, we show why alternative approaches, such as direct subextraction, remnant movement (with the left branch as a remnant), and covert pied-piping with distributed deletion, fail to account for the Icelandic data.

Speaker: Michael Kenstowicz (MIT) & Sixing Cui (Central China Normal University, Wuhan)

Title: The replacement of Beijing Mandarin neutral tones in AABB reduplications: part 2

Time: Monday, April 14th, 5pm - 6:30pm

Location: 32-D831



Abstract: Earlier research (Cui 2012, 2021) suggests that when Mandarin disyllabic adjectives of the form AB such as [da?fang] ?? ’generous’ are reduplicated to AABB [da?da?-fa?ngfa?ng] ????, the B syllable is placed in a stressed position. Mandarin neutral tones (T0) are banned from stressed syllables (as well as the initial syllable of a word or phrase).  What tone is assigned to a T0 syllable when a disyllabic AB base with a final neutral tone is reduplicated to AABB? We present the results of a study that poses this question for six Beijing Mandarin native speakers. Our results indicate that the tone that is associated with the T0 character/morpheme helps the speaker choose among the four possible substitutes for the T0: specifically when the original tone of the B morpheme is T3 or T4 the speaker is significantly more like to substitute T3 or T4 while original T2 is more likely to change to T1.  We see this as a conflict between faithfulness to the original (remote) base and a markedness preference for a H tone in a stressed syllable. We then investigate whether there are traces of the original tone in the acoustic properties of the neutral tone of the AB base form. Finally, we consider possible phonetic correlates of the underlying metrical structure of the AB and AABB words.

Speaker: Zhouyi Sun and Peter Grishin (MIT)
Title: Ordering postsyntactic operations within domains
Time: Thursday, April 10th, 5pm - 6pm
Location: 32-D769

Abstract: In Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993, et seq.), a number of postsyntactic morphological operations are proposed, such as Impoverishment, Fission, and Vocabulary Insertion (henceforth VI), among others, raising the question of how these operations are ordered (Arregi and Nevins 2012, Kalin 2022, Hewett 2023, a.o.). One underexplored aspect of this question (though see Kalin 2022) involves the distinction between what we can call “hypercyclic” vs. “non-hypercyclic” ordering: Given a set of postsyntactic operations a, b, and c ordered a ? b ? c (where ? is read ‘precedes’), under the hypercyclic derivation you apply operations a, b, and c in that order at each node, from bottom up, while under the non-hypercyclic derivation you first apply operation a from bottom up (within the domain), and then b, and then c. For a continuous sequence of syntactic terminal X, Y, and Z, in the order from bottom up, the hypercyclic derivation dictates the order Xa ? Xb ? Xc ? Ya ? Yb ? Yc ? Za ? Zb ? Zc, whereas the non-hypercyclic derivation Xa ? Ya ? Za ? Xb ? Yb ? Zb ? Xc ? Yc ? Zc. Here, we argue (i) for the order of operations given in (1), and (ii) this order is non-hypercyclic, examining data from verb agreement in Algonquian languages which evidence crucial interactions between Impoverishment, Fission, Displacement, and VI (e.g. contextual allomorphy).

(1) Impoverishment ? Fission ? Displacement ? Vocabulary Insertion (VI)

Speaker: J. Cooper Roberts (MIT)

Title: Honorification as omnivorous Agree in Kikai Amami

Time: Tuesday, April 8th, 1pm - 2pm

Location: 32-D461



Abstract: Japanese (Japonic > Yamato) is well-known for its complex systems of honorification, both of clausal arguments (sonkeigo) and discourse participants (teineigo). However, the honorific systems of the related Ryukyuan languages have received comparatively little attention. This Syntax Square will consider the interaction of addressee and subject honorification in Kikai Amami (Japonic > Ryukyuan > Northern > Amami), an endangered language spoken in Kagoshima-ken, Japan. Briefly, both kinds of honorification can be realized by a single suffix -ee, whereas Japanese has separate morphological processes for addressee and argument. A blocking effect is also observed in certain dialects of Kikai Amami if the subject is of a certain animacy status. I will also present (a draft of) an analysis of this honorification system in Generative terms. This analysis has three key ingredients: representation of speech-act participants in the syntax (Ross, 1970; a.o.) Honorification as Agree (following Miyagawa, 2017, 2022; a.m.o) and (plausibly binary) HON features (contra Wang, 2023).

Speaker: Nina Haslinger (MIT)
Title: Strengthening under quantifiers: Gap projection rules vs. supervaluationism
Time: Wednesday, April 9th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: In line with the goal of moving to a more informal, interactive format for the LFRG, this will not be a talk presenting results, but an attempt to start a discussion and figure out the theoretical options in an ongoing debate together.

I want to look at a recent line of work on strengthened meanings under quantifiers, which makes use of the idea that exhaustification results in trivalent meanings that follow a Strong Kleene projection pattern, and explore an alternative account of some of the basic data motivating this approach, based on a supervaluation principle.

The core data points I am interested in involve embedded strengthening of *some* to a ‘not all’ interpretation in sentences like (i)/(ii) (e.g. Chemla & Spector 2011). At first sight, an LF along the lines of (iii) with a standard bivalent exhaustifier is problematic for at least two reasons. First, without further stipulations it leads us to expect strengthening under negative quantifiers (‘no student’) as well, but such readings are marginal. Second, with a non-monotonic embedding environment such as (ii), it seems possible to get embedded strengthening in the UE (‘at least two’) component without also strengthening the DE (‘at most two’) component (Bassi et al. 2021, Gotzner & Benz 2022).

(i) Every student did some of the reading.
possible reading: ‘Every student did some, but not all of the reading.’
(ii) Exactly two students did some of the reading.
possible reading: ‘There are two students who did some, but not all of the reading, and it is not the case that there are three students who did some of the reading.’

(iii) {every student / exactly two students} [1 [exh [[some of the reading] [2 [t_1 did t_2]]] ]]

One currently popular account of this pattern (Bassi et al. 2021) makes use of the idea that exh triggers presuppositions that project following a Strong Kleene pattern (cf. George 2008, Fox 2013). An analogous puzzle arises for homogeneity effects triggered by definite plurals, as in (iv)-(vi), whose projection pattern has been studied experimentally in Križ & Chemla (2015) and Romoli et al. (2024). Motivated by these similarities, the presuppositional exhaustification account has been extended to definite plurals (Guerrini & Wehbe to appear, Paillé 2023).

(iv) Every boy opened the presents.
(v) Exactly two boys opened the presents.
(vi) No boy opened the presents.

For the plural case, Križ & Spector 2021 have developed an alternative account that relies on a supervaluation principle applying to a set of ‘candidate meanings’ that involve stronger and weaker interpretations of the plural. One reason why this account is conceptually attractive is that, since the truth-value gap comes about ‘after’ composition, there is no need to specify gap projection rules. There are also subtle empirical differences from the Strong Kleene pattern (Križ & Chemla 2015) that seem to favor this approach.

However, since their approach does not make use of exh, it does not lead us to expect an analogy with scalar strengthening as in (i)/(ii). I will discuss a way of extending this approach to exhaustification, so that the core projection facts motivating the presuppositional exhaustification approach are derived without using trivalent meanings in the composition. This provides the background for us to discuss the empirical pros and cons of both approaches, and potential ways of combining their core insights.

Speaker: Christopher Legerme (MIT)

Title: Non-Optimization and Locality in Phonology

Time: Monday, March 31st, 5pm - 6:30pm

Location: 32-D831



Abstract: Drawing on recent proposals from Storme & Otilien (2022) and Lahrouchi & Ulfsbjorninn (2024), I discuss various linguistic patterns of Haitian Creole (HC) to illustrate how different grammatical architectures account for “null alternations” and apparent “non-optimizing” behavior in the language. For instance, in HC the alternation between the two forms of the definite determiner, la and a, has traditionally been analyzed as a case of phonologically conditioned suppletive allomorphy: la surfaces after consonant-final stems, while a appears after vowel-final stems. However, it is often pointed out that this distribution fails to align with phonotactic optimization, as it results in marked VV and CC sequences that contrast with the language’s strong preference for CV syllables. The la ~ a alternation resists resolution when treated in isolation; instead, it forces us into a broader look at the nature of grammatical representation and the theoretical constructs invoked to explain the interaction of phonetic silence and phonological locality. Therefore, we will turn to the broader landscape of null alternations, patterns in HC where phonological material is variably silenced depending on structural context. Along the way, we consider two competing approaches: a parallel OT architecture that invokes morphological optimization (Storme & Otilien 2022), and a representational framework rooted in skeletal licensing and floating segments (Lahrouchi & Ulfsbjorninn 2024). The la ~ a alternation, when situated among the broader set of null alternations in the language, offers a critical vantage point for evaluating competing theoretical commitments. While the theories to be discussed each capture important properties of the puzzles for which they were developed to explain, I argue that a phonological rather than morphological or “morphonological” account offers a better unified explanation for locality disruption and the structural conditions on segment realization in HC.

Speaker: Eyal Marco (MIT); joint work with Ezer Rasin (Tel-Aviv University)
Title: On the nature of phonological cyclicity: Evidence from Nazarene Arabic
Time: Sunday, March 16th, 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: We present new evidence supporting the cycle as a grammatical mechanism in phonology. The evidence comes from the distribution of stress and vowel length in Nazarene Arabic, an understudied variety of Palestinian Arabic spoken in Nazareth. We show that the Nazarene Arabic pattern can be accounted for by cyclic versions of both rule-based phonology and Optimality Theory. The same pattern poses a challenge to Base-Derivative Correspondence – an alternative mechanism within Optimality Theory, according to which cyclic effects result from transderivational constraints that enforce similarity between related surface forms. We show that Base-Derivative Correspondence cannot account for the data, because the cyclic application of processes in Nazarene Arabic decreases rather than increases similarity between surface forms. Overall, this study highlights a divergent prediction of the cycle and Base-Derivative Correspondence, suggesting that phonological theory should include the former mechanism.

Speaker: Amy Rose Deal (UC Berkeley)

Title: Pseudo-de re, generalized

Time: Thursday, March 6th, 12:30pm - 2pm

Location: 32-D461



Abstract: Let’s call an element of an attitude report “exportable” if it can be replaced with a co-extensional element salva veritate. In linguistic semantics, the long-standing analysis of exportable terms in attitude reports runs on acquaintance: the attitude holder is acquainted with the referent of the exportable term (under a guise/description). Serious problems for the acquaintance requirement have been known about since the 1970s. Some recent attempts to grapple with them have called for a wholesale replacement of the acquaintance-based semantics; others have called for an acquaintance-based semantics for some cases but not others. I present an argument for a theory of the second type, wherein there is indeed a non-acquaintance-based semantics available for exportable terms (“pseudo-de re”), which is indeed highly generalized, but which can in certain linguistic phenomena be productively contrasted with true acquaintance-based semantics.

Speaker: Ben Flickstein and Ezer Rasin (Tel Aviv)
Title: Towards a phonological feature system for birdsong
Time: Monday, February 10th, 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: A foundational assumption in theoretical phonology is that phonological representations are built from distinctive features, typically stated in articulatory terms. Those features define natural classes that phonological processes typically apply to or are conditioned by. Even though birdsong shares important properties with human phonology, the dominant approach in birdsong research has not yet explored the possibility that the sound patterns of birdsong could be tied to cognitive, articulatory-oriented features. This presentation of an ongoing research project reports on a preliminary attempt to create such a feature system for the song of canaries.

Course announcements in this post:

• More Advanced Syntax (24.955)
• Topics in Syntax (24.956)
• Topics in Semantics (MIT 24.979/Harvard LING 207R)
• Topics in Computational Phonology (24.981)

24.955: More Advanced Syntax

• Instructor: Elise Newman & Sabine Iatridou
• Wednesdays, 10am-1pm
• Room: 32-D461

This class is a requirement for the syntax specialization and strongly recommended for those interested in the syntax-semantics interface.

It explores many topics, all of which have the property that they have not been taught in the 24.951/24.952 classes of the previous two years. Each topic will be covered in at most two class sessions. Registered students will be required to write three snippets. The first snippet has to be on a topic taught in the first 4 weeks, the second on a topic of the second 4 weeks, and the third on a topic taught in the last 4 weeks.

The topics we plan to cover include (subject to change):

• The Plural Pronoun Construction
• Polydefiniteness
• Allocutive agreement
• Asymmetric coordination
• Puzzles about the perfect
• Temporal adverbials
• Syntax of comparatives
• Expletives
• Ergativity
• V-initial languages
• Ne-que construction
• Imperatives
• Selection/subcategorization
• NP ellipsis and ne-cliticization
• Long distance agreement

This class is offered biannually, so if you are considering taking it, please note that the next time it will be offered will be in the ’26-’27 academic year.

24.956: Topics in Syntax

• Instructors: Peter Grishin & David Pesetsky
• Mondays, 2-5pm
• Room: 32-D461

MIT 24.979/Harvard LING 207R: Topics in Semantics 

• Instructors: Athulya Aravind & Kathryn Davidson
• Thursdays 9:45-11:45AM
• Room: Harvard Boylston 303; MIT 32D-461

Experimental methodologies have increasingly been employed within the field of linguistics to collect data in service of theory building, especially understanding points of variation across languages, understanding the process of language acquisition, and understanding how linguistic representations interact with other aspects of cognition. In this course we’ll survey the field of experimental semantics and its interfaces with syntax and with pragmatics with an eye toward giving students coming in with foundational graduate-level background in theoretical linguistics a framework for reading current experimental literature in syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and for developing their own experimental designs. We plan to explore experimental and developmental case studies from well-established areas of formal semantics, including presupposition and anaphora, connectives, quantification and modality, with the possibility of incorporating additional topics based on student interests.

24.981: Topics in Computational Linguistics

• Instructor: Adam Albright
• Tuesdays, 2-5pm
• Room: 32-D461

Computational modeling can usefully inform many aspects of phonological theory. Implementing a theory provides a more rigorous test of its applicability to different data sets, and requires a greater degree of formal precision than is found in purely expository presentations. By training models on realistic training samples, we can test whether a posited analysis can actually be learned from representative data, and we can observe what proportion of the data is actually accounted for by that analysis. Modeling also provides a direct means of testing whether a proposed formal device facilitates the discovery of generalizations, or whether it hampers learning by greatly increasing the size of the search space. Finally, modeling has played an increasingly important role in modeling gradient experimental data, since it provides a way of comparing human behavior with statistical properties of linguistic input, filtered through a possibly non-trivial learning procedure.

This class is intended to provide an introduction to the theory and practice of computational models of phonology.  We will discuss recent theoretical work informed by computational implementations, and tools for modeling phonological knowledge of various kinds.  Special attention will be paid to the relation between formal learning models and empirical data concerning early phonological acquisition.

Speaker: Si Berrebi (MIT)
Title: Category mergers are irrecoverable even with robust distributional evidence
Time: Sunday, February 9th, 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: Can a covert phonological category be learned based on the distribution, without phonetic evidence? Although this idea was debated extensively, it has yet to be tested whether individual speakers have successfully acquired covert categories. I examine a case from Modern Hebrew in which [?] and [?] have undergone a merger in the majority dialect, yet historical alternations triggered by the pharyngeal are preserved in hundreds of words. Speakers of a minority dialect still produce [?] and [?] as distinct, thus allowing for a direct comparison between the status of /?/ among speakers who have phonetic evidence for the distinction, and those who received only phonological evidence. Using a new linguistic game paradigm, validated by a small study of non-merged dialect speakers, I show that merged Hebrew speakers generally cannot represent /?/ as distinct from [?] based on its distribution. I’ll discuss tentative conclusions and future directions for this project.

January at MIT is a quiet month, without regular classes and regularly scheduled events — so you might not hear from us again until the new semester begins in February 2025.  Of course, we will report any interesting events as they happen, even before the start of the new semester.  Meanwhile, we wish you a Happy New Year, and hope to welcome you back to Whamit next semester.

Speaker: Stanislao Zompì (Universität Potsdam) and Zhouyi Sun (MIT)

Title: Augmenting Vocabulary Insertion: From Monotonic to Output-driven

Time: Thursday, December 5, 5-6pm

Location: 32-D769



Abstract: It has been argued that *ABA in root suppletion patterns can be reduced to the principle of monotonicity: given a partial order among feature bundles, if two feature bundles x and z are mapped to the same value, then any y between x and z in terms of the given order must also be mapped to the same value (Graf 2019; Moradi 2021). We show that Underspecification/Overspecification combined with P??inian ordering as rules for Vocabulary Insertion are both inherently monotonic. In other words, previous works deriving *ABA using these approaches all implicitly share the monotonicity thesis.

However, given the independently motivated featural successive containment relations in the domains of Case (Nom ? Acc ? Dat) and Gender (Neu ? Msc ? Fem) in Germanic languages, we find monotonicity falls short in capturing attested paradigms, and therefore both Underspecification and Overspecification undergenerate. Monotonicity in the form as explicitly posited by Graf (2019) or implicitly assumed by many others may thus not be a desirable property for language. Our survey further suggests that the empirical picture instead aligns with an concept that’s properly weaker that monotonicity—Output-driven (Tesar 2014; Magri 2018a,b), which requires monotonicity not between any two feature bundles with the same output, but only between any feature bundle and the output it maps to.

We propose an optimization-based approach to Vocabulary Insertion which allows for and penalizes feature addition and deletion, with penalties tied to specific features. Realization of a feature bundle is determined by minimizing the penalty incurred to reach a feature bundle associated with a dedicated Vocabulary Item. We argue it generates—and only generates—output-driven mappings, fitting the empirical picture.

Speaker: Oddur Snorrason (QMUL)

Title: Pseudo-ABA patterns in pronominal morphology (Middleton 2021)

Time: Thursday, November 21, 5pm - 6pm

Location: 32-D769



Abstract: I‘ll be presenting Middleton‘s (2021) paper on the pseudo-ABA patterns of morphology found in pronominal forms. Apparent ABA patterns in languages like Babanki, Malayalam, Yoruba and Tok Pisin challenge proposed containment relationships for prominal morphology (see Harbour 2016, Middleton 2020). In this paper, Middleton shows how the problematic data can be dealt with in an analysis which adopts spanned exponents (Svenonius 2012), while null allomorphy and impoverishment analyses overgenerate.

Dear friends of MIT Linguistics,

Sadly, we have been on hiatus for some weeks.  We are excited to share the news that will now be publishing a number of backdated issues to catch up with all we’ve been doing at MIT Linguistics in the meantime — and that we are now back! That said, January is always a quiet month at MIT (no regular classes, reading groups, or talks), so you might not hear from us for a while once again.  But once the new semester starts in February 2025, you will be hearing from us regularly, as before.

-the Editors

Speaker: Christopher Legerme (MIT)

Title: Sulemana (2024) on Passives without Morphology

Time: Thursday, October 10th, 5pm - 6pm

Location: 32-D769



Abstract: For this week’s Morphun, I’m looking forward to presenting a cool recent paper by an alum of our department, Dr. Abdul-Razak Sulemana, who investigated passive constructions without morphology in Buli (Gur, Ghana).  Despite lacking passive morphology, Sulemana argues that Buli exhibits true passive constructions with implicit arguments. We will explore the key evidence used in support of this analysis, including:

1. Semantic interpretation of implicit agents
2. A-movement of internal arguments
3. Compatibility with by-phrases

Speaker: Chelsea Tang (MIT)
Title: Overapplication in Reduplication in Gikuyu: Evidence for Back-Copying?
Time: Monday, October 7th, 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: Back-copying is an overapplication phenomenon where the reduplicant creates an environment for a phonological process to apply, after which the base “back-copies” from the reduplicant. Many scholars (McCarthy, Kimper, and Mullin 2012; Kiparsky 2010; Inkelas and Zoll 2005, among others) have argued that this phenomenon does not exist, thus presenting an overgeneration problem for Parallel Optimality Theory (OT) as proposed by McCarthy and Prince (1995). This presentation offers evidence from G?k?y? that back-copying (possibly) exists. If confirmed by native speakers, this data will pose a serious challenge to both serialist and cyclic theories of reduplication. The attested back-copying patterns will also provide strong empirical support for Parallel OT.

Speaker: Alma Frischoff and Ezer Rasin (MIT and Tel Aviv University)
Title: On the absence of crucially-simultaneous phonological interactions in natural language
Time: Thursday, October 10th, 12:30pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Theories of phonology should be able to generate attested types of interactions between phonological processes – including opaque interactions – and at the same time explain why certain conceivable types of interactions are unattested. We draw attention to three universals regarding unattested opaque interactions, which have been identified and defended in previous literature. These universals are expected in a rule-based theory of phonology where rules must apply serially and can never apply simultaneously. We propose to unify the three universals under a general universal called No Simultaneity, which states that there are no crucially-simultaneous phonological interactions in natural language. We then argue that this universal has important implications for theories of phonology, by showing that certain phonological theories that aim to generate opaque interactions in parallel are too permissive and over-generate unattested interactions, contrary to recent proposals that opacity is not as tied to serialism as previously thought.

The Understanding Obviation workshop was held at McGill University from October 4-6 (co-organized by MIT alum Jessica Coon - PhD ‘10). MIT Linguistics was well represented in the workshop with the following talks:

• Peter Grishin (PhD ‘23 and current post-doc) and Elise Newman (faculty) presented a talk based on joint work with Giovanni Roversi (current graduate student) entitled: Obviation in Passamaquoddy-Wolastoqey: Dependent case?
• Jessica Coon (PhD ‘10) - with Stefan Keine, and Juan Vázquez Álvarez presented a talk entitled: Animacy and obviation in Ch’ol

The workshop was a great success and was full of interesting crosslinguistic questions and parallels (and perhaps not-so-parallels). Congratulations to all presenters for their work!

MIT Linguistics was well represented at the 29th iteration of the Sinn und Bedeutung conference, held between 17-19 September in Noto, Italy. Current students, faculty, and alumni presented talks and posters (posters mentioned for current students only, more at conference website):

• Danfeng Wu (PhD ‘22): Why “not numeral NP” requires “but” but not “not many NP”
• Sam Alxatib (PhD ‘13) - with Andreea Nicolae: FC with discourse referents: the curious case of ‘any’
• Jad Wehbe, Omri Doron (current graduate students): Diagnosing the presuppositional properties of global and embedded implicatures
• Jad Wehbe (current graduate student): On the scope of together
• Despina Oikonomou (PhD ‘16) - with Vina Tsakali, Alexandra Samarentsi, Benedict Vassileiou: Temporal interpretation in Directive Speech Acts: A competition between imperative and 2nd-person subjunctive in Greek
• Wataru Uegaki (PhD ‘15) - with Anne Mucha, Mary Amaechi, Tim Jantarungsee: Disjunction with additives
• Omri Doron (current graduate student) - with Omri Amiraz: Definite plurals in comparatives
• Patrick G. Grosz (PhD ‘11) - with Mailin Antomo, Lea Fricke, Tatjana Scheffler: Lying and commitment with (not-)at-issue emojis
• Orin Percus (PhD ‘97) - with Mora Maldonado: Another look at contrafactive predicates: The case of Spanish ‘creerse’
• Keny Chatain (PhD ‘21) - with Benjamin Spector: Readings of pronouns across connectives are sensitive to monotony
• Paul Marty (PhD ‘17) - with Omri Amiraz, Patrick Elliott, Guillermo Del Pinal, Jacopo Romoli: Homogeneity in non-monotonic contexts
• Adèle Hénot-Mortier (current graduate student): Redundancy under Discussion (Poster)
• Johanna Alstott (current graduate student): On “very”-intensified superlatives (Poster)
• Haoming Li (current graduate student): The case for the strong and conditional analysis of permission (Poster)
• Anastasia Tsilia (current graduate student): (In)direct evidential futures in Colloquial Jakartan Indonesian (Poster)
• Adèle Hénot-Mortier (current graduate student): Unifying the French evidential construction on di(rai)t que (Poster)

The following department members also presented talks in post-event workshops:

In the workshop: Does semantics have a too many tools problem?

• Ido Benbaji-Elhadad (current graduate student): Worlds, times and the fate of ontological symmetry
• Amir Anvari (faculty): Indefinites as Indexed Definites 
• Adèle Hénot-Mortier (current graduate student): “One tool to rule them all”? An integrated model of the QuD for Hurford sentences

In the workshop: Evidentials in non-canonical speech acts

• Michela Ippolito (PhD ‘02) - with Crystal Chen: `Gosh, how X is that?!’ The case of Exclamative-Interrogatives
• Danfeng Wu (PhD ‘22): Corrective markers ‘bing’ and ‘you’ in Mandarin Chinese

Congratulations to all presenters for their work!

In the series organized by Michel DeGraff entitled Language & Linguistics in Decolonization and Liberation Struggles in Haiti, Palestine, and Israel, earlier announced here:

Speaker: Camelia Suleiman (Michigan State University)

Title: Palestinian Women in Higher Education in Jerusalem: Between Nationalism and Neoliberalism

Time: October 9, noon-2pm

Location: Room E51-095

How do Palestinian women students at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem resolve the tension between Jewish nationalism and neoliberalism? Based on ongoing ethnographic sociolinguistic research in the daily lives of Palestinian women, I find that students manage these tensions through the performative aspects of language. My analysis demonstrates critical consciousness of their collective identity.

Prof. Suleiman’s visit is co-sponsored by MIT’s MindHandHeart and by MIT Women’s and Gender Studies.

For suggested readings in preparation of Prof. Suleiman’s visit and for additional information about the seminar, please click here for the full description.

Speaker: Giovanni Roversi (MIT)
Title: Pronouns, DPs, and Omnivorous A-movement
Time: Tuesday, October 1st, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Some of us hope that one day we can reduce all instances of Movement to Agree. About Agree, we know that “omnivorous” patterns exist, where a probe will skip a more local goal to target one further away, if the less local goal has some special feature that the probe is interested in. If Movement is Agree, we should therefore expect “omnivorous” movement patterns, where out of two goals, a more featurally special one is favored for movement over a closer one. This is pretty much exactly what goes on in typical ?-context: in object questions, C move the wh-object and skips the closer (non-wh) subject. And indeed, we’re used to thinking that ?-movement can be non-local, but A-movement is strictly local. Given enough featural distinctions, however, there’s no principled reason why we shouldn’t expect omnivorous movement patterns to hold in the realm of pure A-movement as well (not even a little bit mixed A/?). I argue that a particular corner of Äiwoo grammar works exactly like this. Movement to spec,TP in this language favors pronouns over lexical DPs: T will skip a closer lexical DP goal to rather move an object pronoun. This also teaches us something about why and how syntax treats pronouns and full DPs differently, and I suggest that at least in this language, any explanations based on “greed” (“this pronoun needs to move because it’s deficient”) or any kind of “licensing” don’t work.

Speaker: Filipe Hisao Kobayashi (Paris Lodron Universität Salzburg)

Title: Structuring Concealed Questions

Time: Wednesday, October 2nd, 1pm - 2pm

Location: 32-D461



Abstract: Concealed Questions (CQs) are DPs that can be naturally paraphrased as embedded questions, e.g., “I know [Ann’s birthday]” <=> “I know [what Ann’s birthday is]”. This talk, like most of the literature on CQs, is focused on two puzzles identified by Heim (1979): (i) the ambiguity of quantified CQs, and (ii) the ambiguity of nested CQs. I build on Romero (2005) and Frana (2017) to advance a novel account of these ambiguities that synthesizes these works’ main insights into a general theory of quantification over individual concepts. A key feature of my proposal is that the ambiguities identified by Heim are due to the internal structure of the NPs within CQs.

Speaker: Eyal Marco (Tel-Aviv University)
Title: Optimal Paradigms: A challenge from Judeo-Tripolitanian Arabic
Time: Monday, September 30th, 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: In this talk we will reevaluate 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 candidate. According to OP, prosodic templates are not grammatical entities, and morphosyntactic categories like noun and verb are not available to the phonology. Instead, systematic phonological differences between categories are derived by special constraints that require uniformity between all members of an inflectional paradigm. One of the original cases McCarthy used to showcase OP with, comes from Moroccan Arabic. McCarthy proposed that a noun-verb asymmetry in the distribution of schwa in Moroccan Arabic can be predicted by OP using the different paradigm structures of nouns and verbs in the language. We will reevaluate this proposal using new fieldwork data from Judeo-Tripolitanian Arabic, an endangered variety of Arabic that is closely related to Moroccan. We will see 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 does not eliminate the necessity of templates or category reference in phonology, disputing the main original motivation for the theory.

Speaker: Andre Batchelder-Schwab (Boston University)
Title: Undocumented Whistled Languages in Africa
Time: Thursday, October 3rd, 12:30pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Although a few dozen whistled languages are attested across the world, it seems that sub-Saharan Africa could easily double that number, including Akan-Twi, Kinande, isiXhosa, TshiVenda, and many more. While many of these systems conform to expected typologies, some could contribute evidence towards theories about speaker/hearer syntactic heads, sonority scales, and intelligibility. The presentation will end with a discussion on current directions in research on whistled language, and possible uses in orthography and tone acquisition.

Speaker: Irene Heim (MIT)
Title: A better dissertation
Time: Wednesday, September 25th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: I will revisit the transition from the second chapter to the third chapter of my 1982 dissertation “The semantics of definite and indefinite noun phrases”. My purpose is to isolate and throw light on some of the individual ideas in the dynamic package deal. I will not address (let alone remedy) any empirical problems (such as bathroom sentence, weak readings, proportion problem).

Prerequisites: Familiarity with the technical core and conclusion of chapter II of Heim 1982 (i.e., sections II.2, II.3, and II.8). Familiarity with how trivalent truth functions account for presupposition projection. The handout will be technically self-contained but not an introduction to this background material.

Speaker: Edward Flemming
Title: Generating and parsing f0 contours using a model of f0 production
Time: Monday, September 23rd, 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: I will present ongoing work aimed at developing a framework for formulating phonetic grammars of tone realization that can derive complete fundamental frequency (f0) trajectories from phonological specifications.

The proposed framework consists of two main components: A model of f0 production that maps time-aligned tone targets to f0 trajectories, and a set of weighted constraints that select the optimal targets for a given phonological representation. The constraints can evaluate properties of both the underlying targets and the resulting f0 trajectory.

In addition to generating f0 contours, the model of f0 production can also be fitted to observed f0 contours to infer the underlying f0 targets, effectively parsing the f0 contour. This proves particularly valuable when analyzing tones with targets that are difficult to locate because they correspond to a turning point in the f0 contour that is not a local maximum or minimum (often referred to as ‘elbow’ targets).

This analytical approach will be illustrated through a study of variation in the realization of the Mandarin rising tone as a function of speech rate.

Speaker: Peter Grishin, Cora Lesure, Elise Newman, Norvin Richards, J. Cooper Roberts (MIT)
Title: What’s new with the Passamaquoddy Working Group?
Time: Thursday, September 26th, 12:30pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Passamaquoddy is an endangered Algonquian language spoken in parts of Maine, USA and New Brunswick, Canada (the dialect spoken in Canada is called Wolastoqey). In this Ling-Lunch, members of the Department’s Passamaquoddy Working Group—a coalition of faculty members, postdocs, and students interested in investigating the language and improving its vitality through pedagogy—will present some preliminary results of a recent fieldwork trip. Group members will discuss a variety of topics, including the syntax of the inverse and how it relates to control, different kinds of movement and its triggering of certain verb types, the syntax-semantics of container constructions, and more. Their findings not only improve our understanding of Passamaquoddy, but also inform linguistic theory in general. And hopefully some of you will be enticed to join us and explore some of these (or other) topics!

Speaker: Hedde Zeijlstra (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen)
Title: Pro drop and the morphological structure of inflection
Time: Tuesday, September 17th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: A central problem for pro drop theory is how to account for the distribution of argumental null subjects. A paradigmatic approach, in which the whole paradigm determines whether a language can have null subjects or not, undergenerates in that it does not predict the existence of partial pro drop languages. An approach in which the licensing of null subjects is determined per context overgenerates in that it is not obvious why e.g. English does not have null subjects in at least the 3rd person singular. This talk aims at repairing the overgeneration problem for contextual approaches. By contrasting the Romance pro drop languages with the Germanic languages and Standard French, we argue that only the latter express tense and agreement with the same underlying morpheme, which therefore contains features (tense) that are incompatible with the subject it would have to license: it is featurally overspecified. The question is then what determines the choice between a bi- or monomorphemic expression of tense and agreement, and we will argue that reasonable assumptions about the acquisition of morphological systems makes the right cut.

Speaker: Wenkai Tay (UCL)
Title: Compound vs phrasal resultatives: the view from Mandarin Chinese
Time: Wednesday, September 18th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: In this talk, I will argue against a uniform syntactic analysis of V-V compound resultatives and V-de phrasal resultatives in Mandarin Chinese. I propose instead that V-V resultatives are built in morphology while V-deresultatives are built in syntax. My proposal predicts that V-V and V-de resultatives will exhibit distinct behaviour with respect to a number of processes. (i) V-de resultatives are accessible to syntactic operations while V-V resultatives are not. (ii) Since obligatory arguments must be projected in a syntactic structure, V1 must project its arguments in V-de resultatives but not in V-V resultatives. Furthermore, it seems that these differences in argument structure between compound and phrasal resultatives are observed in languages other than Mandarin. These differences cannot be captured within a theoretical framework that makes no reference to the notion of a “word”. Therefore, to the extent that it is on the right track, my proposal provides evidence for an architecture of the grammar in which morphology and syntax are distinct subsystems.

Speaker: Runqi Tan (MIT)
Title: Direction of Coarticulation in Retroflex Fricative – a case study from Mandarin
Time: Monday, September 16th, 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: Abstract: In many Australian and Dravidian languages, retroflex and apical alveolar stops only contrast after vowels (e.g. Steriade 1995, 2001). This is because the primary cues to the contrast between retroflex and apical alveolar stops are located in the VC transitions (Anderson 1997), thus this contrast preferentially appears after a vowel, where the sounds are more perceptually distinguishable (Steriade 1995, 2001). The fact that the primary cues are realized on the preceding vowel follows from the fact that the retroflex stop has a stronger coarticulatory effect on the preceding vowel than the following vowel (Steriade 1995, 2001, Hamann 2003, Tabain et al. 2020).
However, it is the following high front vowel that assimilates to retroflex sounds in Mandarin, a language with retroflex fricatives and affricates (Li & Zhang 2017), suggesting a stronger coarticulatory effect on the following vowel than the preceding vowel. In articulation, the characteristic flapping-out movement of retroflex stops does not happen to retroflex fricatives (Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996), which makes it possible for retroflex fricatives to have coarticulation on the following vowel. These observations lead to the hypothesis that the direction of coarticulation in retroflex fricatives differs from retroflex stops.
This study conducted a phonetic experiment to test this hypothesis. The experiment explored F3 transitions in a pair of Mandarin fricative /s/ and /?/. The lowering effect of F3 by /?/ is the primary cue to the contrast between retroflex and alveolar sounds (Hamann 2003). Ten native Mandarin speakers (age from 20 to 30, 5 male speakers and 5 female speakers) were asked to read 15 VCV minimal pairs in a carrier sentence “wo du __ gei ni ti?” (I read __ for you to hear), where the C was /s/ or /?/, and the two vowels in VCV were identical. Due to Mandarin CV syllable structure, in VCV structures, VC is necessarily between syllables and CV is within syllables. The stop study also allows C to be onset, which means that VCV also comes from two syllables, which is comparable to fricative study. F3 was measured in four positions in each VCV stimuli: midpoint of the first vowel (V1F3), endpoint of the first vowel (C1F3), beginning of the second vowel (C2F3) and midpoint of the second vowel (V2F3). The effect of place of articulation on F3 on left and right side of the consonant was calculated and compared by fitting a linear mixed effect model with consonant F3 as dependent variable, vowel F3 as independent variable, C as a fixed effect, and a random slope for sibilant place.
The lowering effect of F3 is found on both sides of the retroflex fricative and does not differ significantly between the left and right side. This result confirms that the direction of coarticulation in Mandarin retroflex fricative /?/ differs from that in retroflex stops. This difference leads to the prediction that retroflexion contrast in fricatives should not follow the same typology as retroflexion contrast in stops, as a result, different rankings of the markedness constraints and faithfulness constraints are expected for the two types of retroflex consonants.
Keywords: retroflex fricative, coarticulation, phonetic cue.

Speaker: David Beaver (University of Texas at Austin)

Title: Presupposing practice

Time: Thursday, September 19th, 12:30pm - 2pm

Location: 32-D461



Abstract: I will discuss reformulations of the notions of presupposition and accommodation, themselves based on a non-standard model of meaning, as developed in The Politics of Language (Beaver & Stanley, Princeton University Press, 2023). The goal is to develop a general model of transmission and change of ideology, including language practices, a model that can help explain how terrifying or divisive practices can be innocuously normalized, reinforced, and spread.

Building on work of Lynne Tirrell and others, the background to the theoretical developments includes cases of people, or entire peoples, referred to as if they were monsters, snakes, cockroaches, lice, parasites, or even, in the case of a concentration camp warden Victor Klemperer reported on, industrial raw materials. Standard tools of semantic theory were not designed with such issues in mind. I argue that a generalization of the notions of presupposition and accommodation can carry some of the weight.

The reformulation of presupposition hinges on three definitions:

1. Associative resonance: p(feature| instantiation of practice) ? p(feature)
2. Effect probability: The probability that a certain feature of the context is an effect of an action instantiating a practice, p(instantiation of practice caused feature).
3. Presuppositional resonance: Associative resonance ? Effect probability

The main goal of the LingLunch talk will be to discuss these definitions, their relationship to prior work on presupposition (and formal semantic theory more generally), and their application to difficult issues like presuppositions of divisive practices.

A secondary goal of the talk is to discuss an extension of accommodation that complements the changes in the notion of presupposition. Hearers accommodate not merely propositions, but practices, developing an increased tendency to behave in line with the practice. For example, if politicians and bureaucrats discussing a public health problem focus on the costs of alternative technologies that would potentially remediate the problem, their marginalization of human suffering carries a presupposition that it is reasonable to frame the issue in purely technocratic terms. What is accommodated is a tendency to treat a human life as a commodity. In response to sexist jokes, one may accommodate tendencies to discriminate based on gender.

In standard accounts of accommodation, the driving force is a driving desire to create common ground in the face of ignorance of a speaker’s assumptions. In the model I will discuss, however, accommodation is driven by a desire to avoid cognitive dissonance and find harmony, and these are in turn largely driven by a need to fit in with in-groups, and to mark oneself as distinct from out-groups.

MIT Linguistics research affiliate and alumn Hadas Kotek (PhD ‘14) is organizing a careers workshop series for linguists. The careers workshop will meet every other Tuesday at 5pm in room 32-D831, starting this Tuesday. All are welcome. Currently planned topics are below; Spring topics will include: resumes, networking, applying and interviewing, immigration considerations. Additional topics may be added based on audience request.

MIT alumn Pritty Patel-Grosz’s (PhD ‘12) work on dance in Gibbons has been accepted for publishing in the biology journal Primates. Pritty’s co-authored work offers a linguistically informed view of Gibbons’ dance behavior, showing it forms groupings based on isochronous rhythm.

The pre-print version can be found here: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.08.29.610299v1.full

The New York Times also offered a piece based on the work, found here: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/14/science/gibbons-dancing-apes.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Kk4.dsYX.XXFLiwNd-UiD&smid=url-share

Congratulations to Pritty and her collaborators!

In the series organized by Michel DeGraff entitled Language & Linguistics in Decolonization and Liberation Struggles in Haiti, Palestine, and Israel, earlier announced here:

Speaker: David Beaver (University of Texas at Austin)

Title: “Neutrality helps the oppressor”: how accommodation can become complicity with a radical agenda

Time: September 18, noon-2pm

Location: Room E51-095



Abstract:

In this election season, amid bloody global conflicts and the existential threat of climate change, we are all called upon to take sides. Let us say that public discourse is polarized if large subsets of society are unable to recognize the legitimacy of the perspectives embodied by other people’s speech. Then today we find ourselves in an extreme situation. We are witness both to polarization, in which groups diverge from each other, and to asymmetric polarization, in which one group (say a group centered on conspiracy theories) diverges rapidly from prior norms. And despite that chaos, we find some who claim, self-righteously, not to have taken sides, to be, in some sense, above the fray. I think here not only of Fox News’ preposterous claim to be “fair and balanced”, but also of the NYT publisher Arthur Sulzberger’s recent assertion that he, and hence his newspaper, has “no interest in wading into politics.”

Elie Wiesel began his Nobel prize address, from which my title quotation is drawn, imagining a conversation with the child he had been, a child sucked into the bewildering terror of the holocaust. Here is a little more of the famous quote:

And then I explained to him how naive we were, that the world did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.

Wiesel can be read as suggesting that neutrality is not merely ill-advised, but impossible: everything we say reflects affinities and disaffinities with the groups who surround us, and even the silent implicitly take sides. Building on my recent book “The Politics of Language”, with Jason Stanley, I will explore the idea that there can be no true neutrality. The thought here is that language, far from being neutral, inevitably reflects social affinities and associated ideologies. On this view, supposing one’s speech to be neutral is not evidence of objectivity, but of failure to recognize the legitimacy of other perspectives. The archetype here is not national media, for which few people take the claim of neutrality seriously, but bureaucratic language, supposedly neutral speech which can be the ultimate tool of an autocratic oppressor, or of any large organization that has no direct interest in the well-being of those it interacts with. I will consider the processes that lead to extremes of speech and ideology, whether extremes to the left, extremes to the right, or, incongruously oxymoronic though the phrase may seem, extremes of neutrality.

Speaker: Johanna Alstott (MIT)
Title: On “very”-intensified superlatives
Time: Wednesday, September 11th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Existing literature treats “very” as a prototypical modifier of gradable adjectives (Wheeler 1972; Klein 1980; von Stechow 1984; Kennedy & McNally 2005, a.o.). Focusing on cases like “Sarah is very tall,” these accounts propose that “very” is a standard-booster: while “Al is tall” is true iff Al’s height meets the contextual standard, “Al is very tall” is true iff he meets a higher standard. This talk concerns a previously unanalyzed use of “very”: namely, the productive occurrence of “very” with superlatives (“the very best applicant,” “the very most important day of my life”). On the basis of data with plural superlatives, I propose that “very” in superlative DPs is the same as the “very” we see with positive forms. After arguing for this unified analysis, I show that past theories of “very” and “-est” cannot generate “very X-est.” To fix things, I give a new theory of “very” built on (a) a new theory of comparison classes; (b) Fitzgibbons et al.’s (2008) claim that “-est,” like the positive morpheme “pos,” invokes a standard-degree. The upshot is that “pos” and “-est” not only similarly invoke a standard but have a modifier in common.

Speaker: Adam Przepiorkowski (University of Warsaw, Polish Academy of Sciences, MIT)
Title: Towards a Minimalist Theory of Coordination
Time: Thursday, September 12th, 12:30pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: To say that linguists do not agree on the syntactic structure of coordination is to say very little. Are phrases such as Lisa and Bart endocentric or exocentric? If they are endocentric, are they headed by one of the conjuncts (e.g., Lisa), or by the conjunction (e.g., and)? If they are headed by the conjunction (Conj), is their category ConjP? Or is it perhaps the case that the conjunction takes over some of the features of – “agrees with” – one of the conjuncts, so that Lisa and Bart is effectively an NP rather than a ConjP? Each of these options is implemented in a number of linguistic analyses.

Existing accounts often ignore – or try to explain away – coordination of unlikes: unlike categories (e.g., Bart is a rascal and proud of it), unlike cases (in languages such as Polish), and unlike grammatical functions (e.g., What and when to eat to stay healthy?). In this talk, I’ll argue that direct coordination of unlikes is real and that it provides arguments for the essentially exocentric nature of coordination. I’ll also recall arguments for the flat structure of n-ary coordinations, such as Lisa, Bart, and Maggie. Taken together, these aspects of coordination provide evidence for the existence of a general – not just binary – SetMerge operation in language. I’ll offer some initial thoughts on the nature of this operation, to be more fully developed during my stay at MIT in the coming months.

Speaker: Christopher Legerme (MIT)

Title: Complementizers and Verb Fronting with Doubling in Haitian Creole

Time: Tuesday, September 10th, 1pm - 2pm

Location: 32-D461

Abstract: For this Syntax Square, we will investigate the syntax of Haitian Creole and the interaction of the ki/ke complementizer alternation (1) with Verb Fronting with Doubling constructions (VFD, Glaude and Zribi-Hertz, 2012) (2). HC shows the following subject-object asymmetry where the form of the complementizer varies according to whether the subject or object undergoes wh-movement (Koopman, 1982; Law, 1995).

As we ease into the new academic year, here’s what some of us got up to this summer:

• May 21: Asherov, Fox and Katzir in Linguistics and Philosophy
  Alumnus and current postdoctoral associate Daniel Asherov (PhD ‘23) as well as current linguistics section head Danny Fox and Roni Katzir (PhD ‘08) have a new paper published in the journal Linguistics and Philosophy. The paper’s title is “Strengthening, exhaustification, and rational inference” and is available on open access here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10988-023-09406-0. Congratulations to the authors!
• May 28-30: Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT 34) was hosted by the Linguistics department at the University of Rochester. MIT Linguistics was well-represented by current students and recent alums:
  • Ruoan Wang: Tiered honorification in Eastern Indo-Aryan: [HON]-less, and also presuppositionless
  • Yurika Aonuki: Comparatives and differential measure phrases without -er in Gitksan
  • Enrico Flor: Coarse modality with Italian magari 
  • Tamari Berulava (incoming PhD student) and Clemens Mayr: Bare plurals in articleless languages as weak definites
  • Vincent Rouillard (PhD, 2023; MIT post-doc 2023/24): A note on any and simplification
  • Tatiana Bondarenko (PhD, 2022): Javanese veridicality mismatches: Q-to-P reduction amid uniformity
  • Itai Bassi (PhD, 2021): Pathological questions, focus, and unacceptable ellipsis
  • Filipe Hisao Kobayashi (PhD, 2023), Enrico Flor (dissertating student): Quantification Uncovered
  • Andreea Nicolae, Aron Hirsch (PhD, 2017), Anamaria Falaus: Exceptives under negation: Strengthening the case for p-Exh
    
• May 28 & 29: David Pesetsky @ the Romanian Academy of Sciences
  At the beginning of the summer, David Pesetsky gave two talks at the Romanian Academy of Sciences.  On May 28, he gave a talk on the topic “Is there an LLM challenge for Linguistics?” to the Academy itself, and the next day he participated in a celebratory conference honoring the 75th anniversary of the Institute of Linguistics of the Academy, with a talk on “Dissimilation: Shrinker of Clauses”.
• May 31: A number of recent PhDs received their diplomas and ceremonial hoods at MIT’s graduate commencement ceremony in May. Renewed congratulations to Christopher Yang, Daniel Asherov, Fulang Chen, Boer Fu, Vincent Rouillard, Cora Lesure, Peter Grishin, and Filipe de Salles Kobayashi! 
• June 4—6: The 27th International Symposium on Malay and Indonesian Linguistics (ISMIL 27) was organised by the National University of Singapore. Current students Omri Doron, Keely New, and Ruoan Wang gave presentations on their recent and ongoing field work on Jakarta Indonesian. The conference was co-organised by alum Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (PhD, 2014). Almost as important as the conference was the delightful local cuisine, as pictured.
• 
• June 27 & 28: Workshop on Speech Act Related Operators at ZAS, Berlin
  This workshop, organized by Clemens Mayr and Tue Trinh (PhD ‘11), featured contributions by Kai von Fintel, Sabine Iatridou, Danny Fox, Shigeru Miyagawa, Omri Doron, Jad Wehbe, Keny Chatain (PhD ‘21), Uli Sauerland (PhD ‘98), Marie-Christine Meyer (PhD ‘13), Roni Katzir (‘08), and Luka Crni? (PhD ‘11).
• July 4: Fox & Katzir in Theoretical Linguistics
  A new paper on LLMs and linguistic cognition was published by our colleague Danny Fox and alum Roni Katzir (PhD ‘08) in the journal Theoretical Linguistics. The paper is entitled “Large Language Models and theoretical linguistics” and discusses the validity of LLMs as theories of human linguistic cognition. You can access the paper here: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/tl-2024-2005/html. Congratulations to Danny and Roni!
• July 13-26: CreteLing
  The 6th Crete Summer School of Linguistics took place in Rethymnon at the University of Crete campus. MIT’s Sabine Iatridou was a co-director and an organizing committee member. Sabine also co-taught a class on Polydefiniteness during Week 1 of the school. MIT Linguistics was also well-represented by a number of faculty and alumni who (co-)taught courses as well as graduate students who TAed for classes.
  - Adam Albright taught a course entitled Exceptions
  - Athulya Aravind co-taught a course entitled Language Acquisition: Developmental Issues in Semantics
  - Ora Matushansky (PhD’02) co-taught a course entitled Realizational Morphology and Pieces of Inflection
  - Kai von Fintel co-taught a course entitled Enough! The Linguistics of Sufficiency
  - Paul Kiparsky (PhD ‘65) co-taught a class entitled Language Change
  - David Pesetsky co-taught a class on Ellipsis with Kyle Johnson (PhD ‘86)
  - Shigeru Miyagawa co-taught a class on The Morpho-Syntax and Semantics of the Altaic Languages
  - Ezer Rasin (PhD ‘18 and current visiting professor) & Donca Steriade taught a class on Phonological Opacity and Grammar Architecture
  - Six current MIT Linguistics graduate students were TAs for classes during the school: Adéle Mortier, Bergül Soykan, Johanna Alstott, Bingzi Yu, James Cooper Roberts, and Hani Na’eem
• 
• August 10—19: Passamaquoddy field trip
  The MIT Passamaquoddy group went on a field trip to Maine from August 10-19. They worked with native speaker informants in Sipayik, Motahkomikuk, and Indian Township. Among said informants was MITILI alumnus Roger Paul. Below are some pictures.
  

• Michel DeGraff reports steady progress this summer on the English version of a book manuscript for MIT Press, now under review, with the working title: “Our Own Language: Linguistics and Education for Decolonization, Liberation and Nation-building in Haiti and Beyond”. Work on the Kreyòl version will start in the fall once the reviews are in. Michel also forwarded links to various articles and presentations of his, including a talk at the Collège de France (6/7/2024) and an Inside Higher Ed piece (6/13/2024).

Maša Mo?nik defended her dissertation (“Strange attitudes on top”) on August 5. Her committee was Kai von Fintel (chair), Amir Anvari, and Danny Fox. About her dissertation, Kai writes:  ”In her extraordinarily rich investigation, Maša analyzes the interaction of several kinds of attitude predicates with embedded modal operators (epistemic, bouletic). In the first chapter, she studies the Slovenian doxastic possibility attitude ‘dopuš?ati’ (which lexicalizes the meaning of “consider it possible”) and the distribution of epistemic modals in its complement. In the second chapter, she explores the distribution of expressions of epistemic modality in the complement of desire predicates. In the third chapter, she extends and deepens earlier joint work with Rafael Abramovitz on the Koryak attitude verb ‘iv?k’ and how its variable force/variable flavor arises, sometimes in interaction with modal meanings in its complement. In all three chapters, she deploys a brilliant combination of insights from modal logic and its application to natural language, recent philosophical work on (local) information-sensitive modality, and detailed empirical investigations of multiple, unrelated languages.”

Congratulations Maša!!

On August 19th, Yeong-Joon Kim brilliantly and successfully defended his dissertation entitled “Phonetic faithfulness in phonological opacity”! Congratulations, Yeong-Joon!!

Here’s the abstract:

This dissertation presents a novel approach to phonological opacity, which is grounded in new findings regarding substantive restrictions on the patterns of opaque interactions. The central thesis posits that phonological opacity functions to preserve the phonetic properties specified in the input of a phonological operation. Specifically, it argues that inputs are enriched with phonetic auditory features, and surface opacity emerges as a result of processing these enriched inputs. This proposal can be detailed as follows. First, processes that become opaque are initially biased by certain phonetic markedness conditions. Second, these phonetic biases, encoded in the phonetically enriched inputs, are mapped onto the nearest phonologically contrastive sounds to satisfy the requirement of phonetic faithfulness, resulting in surface phonological opacity.
This hypothesis yields a testable prediction: only phonetically natural processes, which possess an appropriate phonetic markedness condition, can become opaque. The results of typological surveys of 87 counterfeeding and 65 counterbleeding interactions across languages support this prediction, revealing that opacified processes are subject to a narrow range of markedness conditions, such as coarticulatory assimilation (e.g., palatalization) and durational adjustments (e.g., segmental weakening). Other types of phonological processes, particularly non-natural ones, which are unlikely to have appropriate phonetic markedness conditions, are rarely, if ever, opacified. This asymmetry in the patterns of phonological opacity underscores that opaque interactions are not independent of phonetic substance.

In addition to this main finding, it is also shown that the current proposal offers additional advantages in explaining phonological opacity. First, it successfully accounts for various non-typical opaque interactions, such as feeding opacity and stress misapplications, alongside counterfeeding and counterbleeding interactions. The proposal also integrates various phonological phenomena, such as compensatory lengthening, coalescence, and incomplete neutralization, within the framework. Second, the proposed model suggests that learners can successfully acquire and reproduce opaque patterns. Learning simulations using a weighted constraint version of the proposed model demonstrate that intermediate hidden structures, such as phonetically enriched inputs, can be learned based solely on surface patterns when the mappings between abstract inputs and surface representations are known. This challenges the conventional notion that opaque patterns are more difficult to learn than transparent phonology.

Speaker: Marta Massaia (Utrecht University)

Title: Mapping the Left Periphery of Similarity construction in Germanic: Dutch dialects as case study

Time: Tuesday, May 14th, 1pm - 2pm

Location: 32-D461



Abstract: Similarity constructions in Germanic can be introduced by different elements that can be subsumed under four main types: like-, as-, so-, and how-elements. Especially in non-standard varieties, these elements can co-occur in what seems to be a strict order that holds cross-Germanically. I argue that this order can be explained if we take similative clauses to be prepositional relative clauses and these elements to be part of the head complex raising to the edge of the similative (in line with a raising analysis à la Kayne 1994). To support this idea, I will first provide data from a micro-comparative perspective (Dutch dialects), and then provide the meso-comparative perspective (English, Dutch, German, Swedish and Norwegian).

Speaker: Juan Cancel (MIT)
Title: A Lenition Approach to Consonant Gradation in Nganasan
Time: Monday, May 13th, 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: Nganasan (Szeverényi, Várnai, and B. B. Wagner-Nagy 2002; Endrédy et al. 2010; B. Wagner-Nagy 2018) is a Samoyedic language which exhibits a set of alternations commonly described as “Consonant Gradation”. What distinguishes these alternations from alternations seen in other languages is the environments which control them: whether the consonant in question is the onset of an open or closed syllable, or whether the consonant in question is in foot-initial position or not. In this presentation, I will argue that by using an effort-based lenition approach (Kirchner 1998) and by taking into account some diachronic changes (Castrén 1855; Mikola and B. Wagner-Nagy 2004), we can 1) analyze the alternations as a case of lenition similar to similar cases seen in other languages, and 2) provide principled reasons as to why the alternations are the ones that we see. In the end, what really distinguishes Nganasan from other languages which exhibit lenition is the blocking of lenition in one particular environment.

Speaker: Ruoan Wang (MIT)

Title: Tiered honorification in Eastern Indo-Aryan

Time: Thursday, May 16th, 12:30pm - 2pm

Location: 32-D461



Abstract: Longstanding tradition in the literature uses [HON] to analyze tiered honorification systems of Indo-Aryan. This work explores an analysis outside that tradition, using Wang’s (2023) presuppositional account which does not make use of [HON]. I make a crucial modification to Wang (2023) and show how it can explain the diachronic and synchronic patterns of Indo-Aryan honorification.

This weekend, visiting Professor Jon Rawski gave invited talks at the CUNY Computational Linguistics Lecture Series, and the Workshop on Theoretical Phonology (WTPh) in Montreal.

Speaker: Charlie Yan (QMUL)
Title: On the locality profile of verb doubling in Mandarin Chinese
Time: Tuesday, May 7th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Within Mandarin Chinese root clauses, verb doubling effects are attested in either a clause-medial or clause-initial position (Cheng 2007; Meadows and Yan 2023; a.o.). I treat this contrast as VP-fronting to a lower or higher position in the clausal spine. Crucially, I show in this talk that cross-clausal VP-fronting to the lower, clause-medial position is only possible out of a limited class of complement clauses, unlike VP-fronting to the clausal periphery. I offer an approach to such movement restrictions based on the Williams Cycle (Williams 2003, 2013; Poole 2022), and predictions about VP-fronting across multiple levels of embedding.

Speaker: Xinyue Zhong (MIT)
Title: Tone sandhi in Mandarin-English bilingual speech
Time: Monday, May 6th, 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: When bilingual speakers mix languages in their speech, two phonologies come into contact in real time, which raises the question of how potential incompatibilities between the two phonologies are resolved. This study investigates one such potential incompatibility concerning how Mandarin-English bilinguals handle Mandarin tone sandhi when the trigger is a word in English. Existing research (Cheng 1968, Gao and Wu 2022) suggests that tone sandhi can be triggered by English words based on pitch similarity. Nevertheless, my previous experiment (2021) additionally showed that English consonant clusters can block tone sandhi in places where sandhi is expected to apply based on pitch similarity.

Two hypotheses were proposed to explain this blocking effect: 1) an “illusory” vowel or low tone is associated with consonant clusters (cf. Dupoux et al. 1999), which interferes with the expected pitch patterns, or 2) the fact that consonant clusters are banned in Mandarin phonotactics prevents English syllables with clusters from participating in Mandarin phonological processes. A new production experiment was conducted this semester where two Mandarin tone sandhis, the Tone 3 sandhi and the bu sandhi, are tested with select English words embedded in otherwise Mandarin sentences. The results showed that neither of the hypotheses is fully consistent with the patterns in speakers’ sandhi production under the assumption that English syllables receive Mandarin tones in the tested sentences. The findings so far suggest that closer inspection of the phonetic properties of the English syllable triggers is needed, and that we might need to adjust our assumptions about what conditions tone sandhi in Mandarin.

Speaker: Viola Schmitt (MIT/Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Title: Possible worlds and ontological symmetry
Time: Thursday, May 9th, 12:30pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: The main point of this talk is a negative claim: I will argue that possible worlds differ from other objects via which construct meanings in terms (i) reference and (ii) plurality formation (i.e.., contra ontological symmetry, Schlenker 2006). Based on this claim, I will outline a puzzle, namely, why worlds should be constrained in this way and why — in the modal part of the language — quantification is seemingly dissociated from reference and plurality formation.

Speaker: Yosef Grodzinsky (The Hebrew University)
Title: High behavioral and neural selectivity in the processing of downward entailingness, and its theoretical implications
Time: Friday, May 10th, 3:30pm - 5pm
Location: 32-141

Abstract: (with I-An Tan)

A 50-year-old discovery, that Downward Entailing (DE) operators incur greater processing costs than their Upward Entailing (UE) counterparts (Just & Carpenter, 1971; henceforth the Monotonicity Effect) led to a series of psycho- and neuro-linguistic studies. These explored the manner by which DE operators license Negative Polarity Items (NPIs). We took several steps: first, we conducted behavioral studies that showed that the Monotonicity Effect is highly robust and replicable, demonstrably independent from generic psychological factors such as word frequency, length, on-the-fly learning, delayed verification, and more (Deschamps et al., 2015; Agmon et al., 2023, passim). Second, an fMRI study localized the Monotonicity Effect anatomically in a small and neuroanatomically coherent region that is adjacent to, but excluding, the left hemispheric Brodmann Areas 44,45 (famously known as Broca’s region, Grodzinsky et al., 2020).

These studies served as backdrop against which we conducted our next investigation: Once the Monotonicity Effect was indexed behaviorally and anatomically, we could use these indices to determine the role of DE-operators as NPI licensors. NPI licensing conditions have long been debated, with syntactic and pragmatic factors weighing in. We conducted a series of behavioral studies with English and Hebrew speakers, hoping to obtain evidence for a precise characterization of these licensing conditions. We tested sentences with 2 DE operators, hosted in Homer’s (2020) flip-flop environments, and in a series of controls. To enable a coherent interpretation of our results, we defined a direct mapping from DE-domains to processing costs. We found that (i) the Monotonicity Effect is determined not by the number of DE operators, but rather, by the monotonicity of the minimal constituent in which they reside; and (ii) that DE-ness is not a property of operators, but of environments (Gajewsky, 2005; Tan et al., 2024).

Finally, we tested the same materials in fMRI (Tan et al., in prep.). Despite difficulties, we not only replicated previous results, but also, provided a new perspective on the neural bases of DE-ness. We show how our results bear directly on the current debate about the nature of monotonicity, and conclude with some speculations about the cognitive functions of the new brain area our studies uncovered.