Whamit!

Speaker: Michael Kenstowicz and Filomena Sandalo

Title: Vowel Harmony and Dispersion in Brazilian Portuguese

Time: Tuesday 3/8, 5-6pm, 32-D831

Like Standard Italian, Brazilian Portuguese distinguishes seven vowels in stressed syllables. The inventory is reduced to five in unstressed syllables (through merger of open and closed mid vowels) and to just three in unstressed final syllables (through merger of mid and high vowels). Earlier phonetic studies of Major (1986) and Clegg & Fails (1992) find that the duration of vowels as well as the relative openness of the low vowel decreases in the order stressed > medial unstressed > final. Flemming (2004) points to these data as support for his dispersion theory of vowel inventories where the neutralization of contrasts results from the interplay of constraints on articulatory effort and phonetic distance. The earlier literature does not consider the behavior of pretonic syllables where the open vs. closed mid vowel contrast is also neutralized but a height harmony process occurs that disperses the mid vowels to three values as a function of the height of the following stressed syllable. The result is a phonetic inventory of seven vowels in pretonic position. Our presentation is a progress report on a study of the harmony process and its potential bearing on the dispersion theory.

Upcoming talks:

Mar 8: Michael Kenstowicz and Filomena Sandalo

Mar 15: AVAILABLE

Mar 29: Sverre Johnsen

Apr 5: Anne-Michelle Tessier

Apr 12: Ricardo Bermudez-Otero

Apr 13, 3-5pm: WCCFL Practice Talks ***Note Special Day and Time

Apr 26: Jongho Jun

May 3: Nina Topintzi

May 10: AVAILABLE (RUMMIT Practice Talks)

You can view the current, up-to-date version of the schedule here (click ‘agenda’ to see the schedule as a list), or subscribe via iCal here.

Speaker: Marc Authier (Penn State University)
Title: PF-deletion, Topicalization and French modal Ellipsis
Time: Thursday, March 10, 11am-12pm
Location: 32-D461

This paper shows that the hypothesis briefly discussed in Busquets and
Denis (2001) that French displays both PF-deletion and pro-form ellipsis of
sentential complements with different classes of verbs is indeed correct. It
subsequently focuses on the PF-deletion type (i.e., modal ellipsis) and
argues that like English VP ellipsis, this type of ellipsis should be
syntactically derived by way of movement and that French elided TPs stand
in a topic position. The syntactic chain thus created by Move is composed of
two links: the first merge copy, which is always silent, as is the case with
most types of movement, and the remerge copy, which also remains silent,
being recoverable from the discourse, but sometimes allows phrasal
subparts to undergo further A?-movement to Spec, FocP, a position where
they are fully spelled-out at PF. The absence of intervention as well as
freezing effects associated with the latter movement are then explained using
the rescue by PF deletion account developed in Bo?kovi? (2011). This
novel theory of French modal ellipsis is shown to correctly predict the
existence of what Busquets and Denis (2001) named French Pseudo-
Gapping, as well as the much more restricted distribution of modal ellipsis
in untensed contexts. It also provides a partial answer to why French does
not have VP ellipsis and why English does not have modal ellipsis.

Speaker: Lisa Reed (Penn State University)
Title: Modifying and strengthening the PRO hypothesis
Time: Thursday, March 10, 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract (PDF)

Date: Friday, March 11, 2011
Time: 3:30-5:00 PM
Place: 32-141 (PLEASE NOTE THE ROOM)
Speaker: Jason Merchant, University of Chicago
Title: Predicate/argument asymmetries, Agreement, and gender

Abstract:

Building on similar results from Romance, I show that Greek animate masc/fem noun pairs fall into three classes with respect to their behavior under ellipsis: those that license mismatches in gender in either direction (epicence nouns like jatros ‘doctor’), those that don’t alternate in either direction (e.g., adhelfos/adheli ‘brother/sister’) and those whose masc form license ellipsis of a feminine but not vice versa (e.g., pianistas/pianistria ‘pianist’). I argue that this pattern can be accounted for if masc/fem can be variously specified as (in)delible, where delible features are subject to deletion under Agreement (extending von Stechow, Heim, and others), before ellipsis resolution is computed. This analysis, unlike previous underspecificational approaches, can account for the novel observation that these alternations are found only on NPs in predicate positions, and that no noun pair alternates when the target of ellipsis is in an argument position. Finally, I demonstrate how easily this account can be implemented using LF-copy as the ellipsis identity mechanism, while mainstream LF-identity/semantic identity theories find it surprisingly difficult to capture the asymmetry.

Speaker: Sasha Podobryaev
Title: Ergative vs. Active-Stative Alignment
Time: Monday, February 28, 11.30-12.30PM
Location: 32-D461

This talk addresses some issues raised by Legate’s (2008) theory of ergative
alignment and its “dependent case” alternatives. We will discuss the
empirical basis for Legate’s ABS=DEF/ABS=NOM distinction in ergative
languages and the applicability of this distinction to active-stative
(split-S) systems.

Recent MIT alum Gillian Gallagher (currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at New York University) will speak on Monday at Harvard.

Title: Contrast and non-local dependencies
Time: Monday, February 28, 5:00pm
Location: Boylston Hall, third floor, room 335

In this talk, I argue that long-distance phonological dependencies are
grounded in perceptual asymmetries. The analytical claims are

1. That laryngeal cooccurrence restrictions are restrictions on the
   perceptual strength of contrasts between roots, as opposed to
   restrictions on laryngeal configurations in isolated roots, and

2. That laryngeal cooccurrence restrictions are restrictions on auditory, as
   opposed to articulatory, features.

Both long-distance laryngeal dissimilation, where roots may have one but
not two laryngeally marked stops (MacEachern 1999), and assimilation,
where stops in a root must agree in laryngeal features (Hansson 2001;
Rose and Walker 2004) are given a unified account based on a
grammatical pressure to neutralize indistinct contrasts. The contrast
based analysis is supported by the empirical finding that certain non-
adjacent sounds interact with one another in perception. Specifically, the
perception of a contrast in ejection or aspiration is degraded in roots with
another ejective or aspirate, as compared to roots with another plain stop
(e.g. the pair k’ap’i-kap’i is more confusable than the pair k’api-kapi).
Roots that are minimally distinguished by having one vs. two laryngeally
marked stops are confusable with one another (e.g. k’ap’i is confusable
with kap’i), and thus languages may avoid having both types of forms.

The analysis integrates long-distance phonological neutralizations with
analyses of local neutralizations based on phonetic cues and contrast
strength (Flemming 1995, 2004, 2006; Steriade 1997), showing that both
local and non-local phenomena are driven by grammatical constraints
against perceptually indistinct contrasts.

Weekly meetings of the Phonology Circle will resume next week, on 3/8, with a talk by Michael Kenstowicz and Filomena Sandalo. If you would like to sign up for one of the remaining slots this semester, please contact Adam.

Upcoming talks:

Mar 8: Michael Kenstowicz and Filomena Sandalo

Mar 15: Igor Yanovich

Mar 29: Sverre Johnsen

Apr 5: Anne-Michelle Tessier

Apr 12: Ricardo Bermudez-Otero

Apr 26: AVAILABLE

May 3: AVAILABLE

May 10: AVAILABLE

You can view the current, up-to-date version of the schedule here (click ‘agenda’ to see the schedule as a list), or subscribe via iCal here.

Speakers: Hadas Kotek and Yasutada Sudo
Time: Wednesday, March 2, 4:00pm-5:30pm
Location: 32-D461

Hadas and Yasu will present results from a recent experiment showing that in English, “most” in subject position has a (previously unnoticed) superlative reading, in addition to the usual proportional reading.

Speaker: Jim Huang (Harvard)
Title: Variation in non-canonical passives
Time: Thursday, March 3, 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461

Cross-linguistically, there are two major strategies to produce passive sentences. One
produces passives by an operation that de-transitivizes (rather, unaccusativizes) the main
verb, and the other does so by superimposing an unaccusativized causative verb on a
clause that may itself be active. The first, ‘canonical’ strategy is exemplified by the
English be passive, and the second, ‘non-canonical’ strategy is exemplified by the
Mandarin bei passive. The English get-passive involves a combination of both strategies,
with an unnacusativ(ized) get superimposed on a passivized verb. My talk will address
three somewhat related aspects of the non-canonical passives.

In Huang (1999) and Huang, Li and Li (2009) the Chinese bei passives are analyzed as
involving a semi-lexical verb with a thematic subject that is related to the event clause by
control or predication. In view of recent discussions of the control-vs-raising analysis of
get-passives and the chameleon character of unaccusatized causatives, I shall show that
both analyses of the non-canonical passives are possible, depending on the scenarios
involved, up to certain limits, each exhibiting its own characteristic grammatical
properties.

I shall then look at three different verbs that have been treated as related to the passive in
Chinese: bei, rang and gei. It is shown that the verbs differ in the ‘bandwidths’ in the
spectrum of meaning from the causative to the pure unaccusative, both internally and
cross-linguistically. The cross-linguistic variation is particularly true of gei between
Southern and Northern Mandarin. With respect to Northern Mandarin gei-VP sentences,
which has been the topic of important treatment by Shen and Sybesma (2010), I argue
that gei is best treated as a raising verb, an unaccusative verb akin to gibt as in German es
gibt and give as in English what gives.

Finally, I discuss a new form of non-canonical bei passive that has emerged in Mainland
China, particularly in satirical writings on the web, exemplified by bei zisha, bei xiao-ang,
bei siwang, bei lüyou, bei shizong (literally, ‘be suicided, be middle-classed, be died, be
traveled, be disappeared’), etc. Relying on the lexical decomposition analysis of
causatives as in the previous two points, I propose that these involve the passivization of
‘mental causative’ sentences. I liken these to some examples in English, and surmise on
their parametric differences.

WHO: Luka Crnic
WHAT: Semantics of bouletic predicates
WHEN: March 4, 2:00PM-3:15PM
WHERE: 32-D831

Luka Crnic will discuss certain issues in the semantics of bouletic predicates. Suggested reading is Maria Aloni’s “Free choice, modals, and imperatives.” doi:10.1007/s11050-007-9010-2

There are no meetings of Phonology Circle, Ling-Lunch, or LFRG this week.

Speaker: Bethany Lochbihler
Title: Transitivity and animacy mismatches in the Ojibwe verbal paradigms
Time: Tuesday, February 22, 11:30am-12:30pm
Location: 32-D461

This paper proposes a unifying account of verb finals in Ojibwe
(Central Algonquian) using Cyclic Agree (Béjar & Rezac 2009) to license
Person features. I give an account of the long-standing puzzle of transitive
inanimate verbs bearing animate intransitive theme-signs, even though these
two types of verbs mismatch in both animacy and transitivity. Further, I
argue for revisions to the mechanics of Béjar & Rezac’s (2009) Cyclic Agree,
and account for the Inverse System found with transitive animate verbs in
Ojibwe, which is extended to the verbal finals on ditransitive verbs.

Speaker: Karen Jesney (UMass Amherst)
Title: TBA
Time: Thursday, February 24, 5:00pm
Location: Boylston Hall, third floor, room 303

Speaker: Maziar Toosarvandani (UCLA)
Title: The role of nominalization in Northern Paiute embedding
Time: Monday, February 14, 11.30-12.30PM
Location: 32-D461

Northern Paiute—a Uto-Aztecan language of the western United States—has two
strategies for creating nonsubject relative clauses: one that previous authors
have treated as an externally-headed relative clause and another, previously
unnoticed, that has the profile of an internally-headed relative clause. Both
types involve a suffix “-na” on the embedded verb that is formally
identical to a nominalizer that creates nonsubject event participant and event
nominalizations. This is not an accidental similarity, since I argue that
nominalization lies at the core of both nonsubject relative clause strategies.

Speaker: Matthew Wolf (Yale)
Title: Candidate Chains, unfaithful spell-out, and outwards-looking phonologically conditioned allomorphy
Time: Monday, February 14, 5:00pm
Location: Boylston Hall 335 (third floor)

If the phonological realization of morphemes proceeds serially, and in an
cyclic, inside-out manner, it is predicted that the choice of allomorphs for
some morpheme M cannot be ‘outwards looking’: it cannot be sensitive
the phonological shape of morphemes that are structurally external to M,
since these will not be phonologically realized until later in the derivation.
By contrast, if the computation of allomorph choice proceeds in parallel
for whole words (or utterances), outwards-looking suppletion should
always be possible. The problem addressed in this talk is that outwardslooking
phonologically conditioned suppletion is clearly not as freely
available as a purely parallel approach would lead us to expect, but
neither is it totally unattested, as a purely serial approach would predict.

In this talk I propose that the right balance between serialism and
parallelism can be struck by using an OT with Candidate Chains grammar
(McCarthy 2007) as the environment in which allomorphic choices are
made. Specifically, I explore the idea that the potential for outwardslooking
phonologically conditioned allomorphy is restricted to cases
where the competing allomorphs differ as to which (if any) faithfulness
constraints on morpheme/morph similarity they violate. This revision of
certain assumptions made in Wolf (2008) would bring the treatment of
morphological operations in OT-CC nearer to the way the phonological
operations are treated, and it arguably does allow outwards-looking
phonologically-conditioned allomorphy just in those cases where it is
indeed attested. Examples from Western Armenian (Vaux 2003) and
Tzotzil (Aissen 1987; Woolford to appear) are used to motivate the
proposal.

Upcoming phonology talks at Harvard:
2/24: Karen Jesney (UMass Amherst)
2/28: Gillian Gallagher (NYU)

Speaker: Jessica Coon (Harvard)
Title: The role of Case in A-bar extraction asymmetries: Evidence from Mayan
Time: Thursday, February 17, 12:30pm
Location: 32-D461
(Collaborative work with Pedro Mateo Pedro and Omer Preminger.)

Many morphologically ergative languages display asymmetries in the extraction of core arguments, sometimes referred to as “syntactic ergativity”: while absolutive arguments (transitive objects and intransitive subjects) extract freely, ergative arguments (transitive subjects) cannot (see e.g. Dixon 1972, 1974; Manning 1996). This is the case in many languages of the Mayan family. In order to extract agents (for focus, question, or relativization), a special construction known as the “Agent Focus” (AF) must be used. These AF constructions have been described as syntactically and semantically transitive, because they contain two non-oblique DP arguments, but morphologically intransitive because the verb appears with only a single agreement marker and takes the intransitive status suffix (Aissen 1999; Stiebels 2006). Though AF constructions have been the topic of much recent work, there is no consensus on how to best analyze them. To complicate matters, in languages of the Q’anjob’alan branch of the Mayan family, the Agent Focus morphology has been extended to another domain: non-finite transitives. This construction is known in Mayanist circles as the “Crazy Antipassive”, and to this point it has remained unexplained.

In this paper we offer a proposal for (i) why some morphologically ergative languages exhibit extraction asymmetries, while others do not; and (ii) how the AF construction circumvents this problem. Through a comparison of Q’anjob’al and Chol we argue for an analysis which unifies the two environments which trigger AF morphology in Q’anjob’al. We propose further that the inability to extract ergative arguments does not reflect a problem with the ergative subject, but rather is a problem with how absolutive arguments are licensed in the clause. We argue that the AF morpheme -on circumvents this problem by assigning Case to internal arguments. We show how the appearance of intransitive verbal morphology is connected to this change in Case-assignment properties of these clauses.

WHAT: Jäger’s papers on game-theoretical pragmatics
WHEN: February 18, 2:00PM-3:15PM
WHERE: 32-D831

We will continue to discuss Jäger’s and related work, this time concentrating more on the technical side of the analyses.

Speaker: Gerhard Jäger, Universität Tübingen
Time: Friday, February 18, 2011, 3:30pm-5pm
Location: 32-141 (PLEASE NOTE ROOM)
Title: Game Theoretic Pragmatics

Abstract:

Game theory is a mathematical framework that is being used in economics and biology,
but also in philosophy, political science and computer science, to study the behavior of
multiple agents that are engaged in strategic interaction. It has manifold applications
in linguistics as well. In particular, it has been utilized to investigate stability
conditions of linguistic features in a large speech community, and to explore the
strategic aspects of single speech acts.

The talk gives an introduction into a particular incarnation of this
research paradigm, the /Iterated Best Response model/ of game-theoretic
pragmatics. It can be seen as a formalization of the neo-Gricean program of
pragmatics. Empirical issues touched upon include exhaustivication, free choice
readings, ignorance implicatures, embedded implicatures and the pragmatics of measure
terms.

All talks are from 3:30 to 5:00 p.m. in room 32-141 (Please note we have the old room back). For further information, please contact Liudmila Nikolaeva or Natalia Ivlieva. This schedule is subject to change.

Spring 2011

February 18 - Gerhard Jäger (Tübingen)
March 11 - Jason Merchant (University of Chicago)
March 18 - Milan Rezac (University of the Basque Country)
April 1 - David Adger (Queen Mary, London UK)
April 8 - Rick Nouwen (Utrecht)
April 22 - Junko Ito (UC Santa Cruz)
May 6 - Shinichiro Ishihara (J.W. Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main)

Syntax Square resumes this week with a talk by Coppe van Urk.

Speaker: Coppe van Urk
Title: On Visser’s Generalization
Time: Monday, February 7, 11:30a-12:30p
Place: 32-D461

This talk deals with Visser’s Generalisation (VG), the claim that subject control is incompatible with passivisation (Jenkins 1972, Bresnan 1982). On the basis of new cross-linguistic data, VG is argued to be evidence for models of control in which T plays a facilitating role in establishing subject control (e.g. Borer 1989; Landau 2000 et seq.). In addition, VG stated in this way is shown to be derivable from independent proposals about the syntax of implicit arguments and control.

There will be five phonology talks at Harvard in February, with the first two this week.

Speaker: Kevin Ryan (UCLA)
Title: Gradient weight in phonology
Time: Monday, February 7, 5:00pm
Location: Boylston Hall 335 (third floor)

Research on syllable weight in the generative tradition has focused almost exclusively on systems in which weight is treated as an ordinal (strict domination) scale of clearly delineated categories (e.g. heavy and light). As I discuss, stress and poetic meter can also treat weight as a gradient interval scale in which (1) differences between types are matters of relative degree and (2) there is no clear segregation of types into categories. I propose modeling such systems in a probabilistic Harmonic Grammar framework (as in e.g. Goldwater & Johnson 2003, Hayes & Wilson 2008, Ryan 2010) with gradiently violable constraints (cf. Flemming 2001, Zhang 2007, Pater to appear). Investigating gradient weight systems allows the phonetics/phonology of weight to be put under a microscope, so to speak, yielding new evidence supporting and extending phonological universals: First, the scales that emerge language-internally in the gradient realm recapitulate the universal hierarchy inferred from the crosslinguistic categorical typology (Gordon 2006). Second, factors in weight that are relatively marginal in the categorical typology (e.g. properties of onsets) are shown to exert statistical effects even in languages in which such factors play no role in categorization.

Upcoming phonology talks at Harvard:
2/10: Michael Becker (Harvard), “Universal Grammar protects Initial Syllables” (Abstract, PDF)
2/14: Matthew Wolf (Yale)
2/24: Karen Jesney (UMass Amherst)
2/28: Gillian Gallagher (NYU)

Speaker: Youngah Do

Title: Interaction of the top most and the bottom most: pragmatic bias and perceptual confusability

Time: Tuesday 2/8, 5-6pm, 32-D831

It is well known that multiple linguistic levels interact in language processing (e.g. lexical knowledge to phoneme perception, Ganong 1980; pragmatic contexts to syntactic parsing, Crain & Steedman 1985). This study explores a very challenging case; the interaction of the top most level, pragmatics, and the bottom most level, phonetics.

I conduct an experiment in which listeners were presented with nouns containing acoustically ambiguous phonemes, the interpretation of which was potentially biased by (a) the pragmatic context (implicit causality: IC) and (b) the phonological context (velar softening before a high and back vowels).

I expected IC verbs to bias listeners’ expectation for which participant cause the event as in (1).

1. 1. Subject-biased context
      
      Ko apologizes Cho because ?
      
      Expectation for ?: Ko over Cho
      
   2. Object-biased context
      
      Ko admires Cho because ?
      
      Expectation for ?: Cho over Ko
   
   
   

   I also expect that perceptually more confusable nouns such as Ki and Chi override pragmatic inference more.

   Results show that pragmatic contexts do bias the perception: listeners perceive confusable nouns more as a subject in subject-biased context. At the same time, acoustic confusability also affects the interpretation of the nouns: [k~ch] before a front vowel [i] context affects pragmatic bias toward or against pragmatically expected noun more than back vowel context.
   

Upcoming talks:

Feb 11 3:30-5pm: Jonah Katz (Note special day and time!)

Feb 15 5-6pm: AVAILABLE

Mar 1 5-6pm: AVAILABLE

Mar 8 5-6pm: Michael Kenstowicz and Filomena Sandalo

Mar 15 5-6pm: Igor Yanovich

Mar 29 5-6pm: AVAILABLE

Apr 5 5-6pm: AVAILABLE

Apr 12 5-6pm: WCCFL practice talks

Apr 26 5-6pm: AVAILABLE

May 3 5-6pm: AVAILABLE

May 10 5-6pm: AVAILABLE

You can view the current, up-to-date version of the schedule here (click ‘agenda’ to see the schedule as a list), or subscribe via iCal here.

WHAT: Jaeger’s papers on game-theoretical pragmatics
WHEN: February 9 (Wed), 4:00PM-5:30PM
WHERE: 32-D831 (in case of a change of venue, there will be a note with the new room number on the door)

At his colloquium talk on Feb 18, Gerhard Jaeger is going to talk mostly about the Iterated Best Response game-theoretical model of pragmatics. He has just finished an overview here.

Igor suggests that everybody interested look before next Wednesday into these two earlier, and shorter, papers:

• Jaeger&Ebert 2009, SuB Proceedings (15 pages)
• Jaeger 2011, for Handbook of Logic and Language (25 pages)

The second phonology talk this month at Harvard is by Michael Becker.

Speaker: Michael Becker (Harvard)
Title: Universal Grammar protects Initial Syllables
Time: Thursday, February 10, 5:00pm
Location:  Boylston Hall 303 (third floor)

(Joint work with Lauren Eby Clemens, Jonathan Levine, and Andrew Nevins)

In English, voicing alternations (e.g. knife ~ knives) impact mostly monosyllables, while polysyllables are rarely impacted. The opposite is true of Turkish: most monosyllables keep their base faithful under affixation (e.g. top ~ topu ‘ball’), while most polysyllables tolerate a voicing alternation (gurup ~ gurubu ‘group’). In this talk, I examine the two types of languages, and show that the symmetry is only superficial. The Turkish trend is accessible to the grammar and extends readily to novel words, whereas English speakers treat novel words the same regardless of size. In other words, English speakers fail to find the generalization (“the surfeit of the stimulus”).

Initial syllable faithfulness explains this asymmetry: The [p] in top ~ topu is protected by initial syllable faithfulness and by general faithfulness, while the [p] in gurup is protected by general faithfulness only. English goes against the Universal bias, requiring monosyllables to be less faithful than polysyllables. But with general faithfulness highly ranked, the ranking of initial syllable faithfulness is irrelevant, and the speakers are blocked from forming the required generalization.

Having established the asymmetry in the novel word tasks, we press English speakers further and ask them to learn unfamiliar morphophonological alternations (e.g. mi?p ~ mi?b-ni). Unencumbered by the accidental nature of actual English, the speakers fall back on their Universal Grammar and exhibit the Turkish pattern.

This line of investigation, which goes from real words to novel words and from novel words to novel alternations, allows us to trace the biases that humans use in the phonological organization of the lexicon, and allows us to expose behavior that roundly contradicts the ambient language, yet conforms to the biases we see in the world’s languages.

Upcoming phonology talks at Harvard:
2/14: Matthew Wolf (Yale)
2/24: Karen Jesney (UMass Amherst)
2/28: Gillian Gallagher (NYU)

Speaker: Wataru Uegaki
Title: Controller shift in centered-world semantics
Time: Thursday, February 10, 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461

(This is a practice talk for the workshop “Grammar of Attitudes” at
the 33rd meeting of DGfS to be held on February 23rd at University of
Göttingen.)

English control shift (CS) (Hust & Brame 1976) is a phenomenon where
the understood subject of an obligatory control complement corresponds
to an argument that is different from the verb’s ordinary controller,
as exemplified in (1).

1. a. John_i was promised by Mary_j PRO_i to be allowed to perjure himself_i.
   b. John_i asked Mary_j PRO_i to be allowed to leave.

In this talk, I will argue that this long-standing problem can be
given a straightforward analysis within the centered-world analysis of
attitude ascription (cf. e.g., Lewis 1979), which is independently
motivated to deal with the semantics of de se attitude reports. The
basic proposals are the following: (i) the participants of the event
predicated of by the control complement must consist of the
counterparts of those of the matrix attitude (i.e. obligatory de se
reading), (ii) the lexical semantics of “subject/object control” verbs
are such that their subject/object arguments correspond to the agent
of the complement event, (iii) In CS, the complement contains an
implicit agent argument in addition to PRO, which makes the complement
denote a ‘double-centered’ proposition with both the author-center and
the addressee-center. Among these, (i) and (ii) apply to obligatory
control in general, and only (iii) is the proposal specific to CS. In
the talk, I will show how this system allows a straightforward
analysis of CS, and discuss its implications.

On Friday, there will be a special meeting of the Phonology Circle, featuring a talk by Jonah Katz. Please note the special day and time!

Speaker: Jonah Katz (CNRS, Institut Jean Nicod)

Title: Compression effects, perceptual asymmetries, and the grammar of timing

Time: Friday 2/11, 3:30-5pm, 32-D831

This paper examines the nature of the information that is relevant to speech timing and the
consequences of this domain for phonetic/phonological theory. We report the results of two
English experiments on timing and perception. The first experiment demonstrates asymmetries in
timing between consonants and vowels, which depend on the manner of the consonant. The
second experiment shows that these asymmetries in speech production are mirrored by
perceptual asymmetries among consonants with different manner features. We argue that these
phenomena are best described in terms of auditory recoverability. A formal analysis is developed
using weighted, gradiently-violable constraints on segment and syllable duration. Because the
constraints make reference to the auditory features of segments, the analysis can derive the
relationship between asymmetries in speech production and asymmetries in speech perception.
The patterns of timing discovered here appear to interact in limited ways with systems of
phonological contrast. We incorporate the duration constraints proposed here into a phoneticallydriven
model of phonology, examining the predictions that such an approach makes about
phonological typology

Syntax Square will meet this semester on Mondays from 11:30-12:30 in 32-D461. If you would like to lead a discussion or give an informal presentation of your work, please contact Natasha Ivlieva or Coppe van Urk.

LFRG will meet this semester on Wednesdays, 2:30-3:30PM. The first meeting of the semester will take place on February 2, in 32D-831. For more information, contact Igor Yanovich or Yasutada Sudo.

The first meeting of the Phonology Circle for the semester will be this Tuesday (in our new time slot)

Date: Tues 2/1 5-6pm

Location: 32-D831

It will be an organizational meeting in which we arrange the schedule for the semester, and also possible topics and papers for discussion. Also, if you can’t make it on Tuesday, but would like to sign up for a slot this semester, let Adam know.

Speaker: Suyeon Yun (MIT)

Title: Implicational Universals in Compensatory Lengthening: A phonetically-based OT approach

Time: Monday 12/6, 5pm, 32-D831

Based on a crosslinguistic survey, Yun (2010) argues that the typological patterns of compensatory lengthening are not “hard” universals as suggested in the previous works (Hayes 1989, Kavitskaya 2002) but more adequately described as implicational relationships; (i) if the deletion of prevocalic consonants triggers compensatory lengthening, so does the deletion of postvocalic consonants, (ii) if the deletion of obstruents triggers compensatory lengthening, so does the deletion of sonorants, and (iii) if the deletion of non-adjacent consonants triggers compensatory lengthening, so does the deletion of adjacent consonants. It is shown that these typological patterns of compensatory lengthening are not random but originate from relevant phonetic and perceptual grounding. Based on the difference in relative perceptibility between the deleted consonants, the typological patterns of compensatory lengthening are explained by the universal rankings of perceptually-driven faithfulness constraints, adopting the P-map hypothesis (Steriade 2009). Also, language-specific patterns of compensatory lengthening can be analyzed in terms of variable interactions between the proposed faithfulness constraints and Id[V-length] prohibiting the change of input vowel length. To conclude, this phonetically-based OT account can explain both universal and language-specific patterns of compensatory lengthening in a unified way. Based on Yun (2010), this talk will give a more unified account of compensatory lengthening, more generally duration preservation, adding more data of compensatory lengthening through vowel deletion.

You can view the current, up-to-date version of the schedule here (click ‘agenda’ to see the schedule as a list), or subscribe via iCal here.

Please join us for the final Syntax Square of the semester this Tuesday, 12/7. Stefan Keine from UMass Amherst will present his work.

Speaker: Stefan Keine (UMass Amherst)

Title: Deconstructing Switch Reference

Time: Tuesday, December 7, 1-2PM

Location: 32-D461

The term ‘switch reference’ refers to morphological marking on a verb indicating whether the subject of this verb is coreferent with the subject of another verb or not. Although switch reference has not received much attention in the theoretical literature, it poses a number of challenges to current theorizing in that it appears to require the use of referential indices, chains, non-local computation, etc. In this talk, I investigate how the switch reference facts can be reconciled with a strictly local, autonomous, and ‘blind’ syntax as envisaged within the Minimalist Program. My core proposal is that, despite appearance, the alleged switch reference markers do not in fact directly track reference relations. Rather, they constitute the context-sensitive spellout of a coordination head. In a nutshell, if two VPs are conjoined (with a single vP projection, and hence a single agent, above them), the coordination head is realized by some exponent A; vP coordination, on the other hand, leads to spelling out the coordination head as B. It follows that occurrence of A will coincide with a same subject interpretation. Marker B, by contrast, is compatible with an arbitrary reference relation between subjects. I will develop this hypothesis in more detail, and argue that it provides an account for a number of properties of switch reference systems that remain puzzling under an approach directly built around reference relations. Finally, I will identify places of cross-linguistic variation within the system.

What: Syntax-Semantics Experimental Lab special end-of-semester meeting
When: Wed. Dec. 8th 3:30pm (duration approx. 1.5 hours)
Where: 4th floor seminar room
Refreshments: Yes

Program for meeting includes:

*  Review of the lab’s achievements for this semester
*  Planned projects for next semester
*  Possibilities of working with eye-tracker
*  Outlook

As we’re planning on serving refreshments, please confirm (via email to micha.breakstone@gmail.com) you’ll be participating so that we can estimate accordingly.

Also, this meeting is open to anyone curious about the activities of the Syntax-Semantics Experimental lab, so if you’re interested in experimental work, don’t be shy!

Speakers: Adam Szczegielniak (Warsaw University/Harvard University)

Title: Degree/amount relatives, equative comparatives, and, as parentheticals

Time: Thursday, December 9, 12:30-1:45pm

Location: 32-D461

In this talk I will make an attempt to show that amount relative clauses and equal comparatives (identity of amount) have a common underlying derivation involving overt raising of [d amount] (Carlson 1977, Heim 1987, Landman and Grosu 1998, Pancheva 2006, Herdan 2008). Support for this claim will come from, among other things, indirect binding in amount relatives (Sharvit 1996). Differences between fully pronounced and elided amount relatives and comparatives will be shown to stem from restrictions on recoverability in ellipsis (Johnson 2001, Lechner 2001, Szczegielniak 2008).

Furthermore, I will explore the possibility that in languages like Polish ‘as parentheticals’ (Potts 2002) are closely related to both comparatives and degree relative clauses not only because all three constructions utilize the same marker ‘co’, which is a hybrid of English ‘as’ and ‘that’ (Kayne 2000), but also because it will be shown that all three constructions require overt XP movement out of the CP and/or ellipsis, which will be argued to be a result of the inherent lexical requirements imposed by the marker ‘co’.

PDF Abstract

Speaker: Patrick Jones

Title: Tonal Opacity and Paradigm Structure in Kinande (RUMMIT practice talk)

Time: Monday 11/29, 5pm, 32-D831

Upcoming talks:

Dec 6: Suyeon Yun (MIT)

You can view the current, up-to-date version of the schedule here (click ‘agenda’ to see the schedule as a list), or subscribe via iCal here.

Please join us for Syntax Square this week. Sam Steddy will be discussing joint work with Vieri Samek-Lodovici.

Speaker: Sam Steddy

Title: On the Ungrammaticality of Remnant Movement in the Derivation of
Greenberg’s Universal 20 (with Vieri Samek-Lodovici)

Time: Tuesday, November 30, 1-2PM

Place: 32-D461

We propose an analysis that derives Cinque’s 2005 typology of fourteen
linear orders (from a theoretical twenty-four) involving a
Demonstrative, Numeral, Adjective, and Noun through four Optimality
Theory constraints requiring leftward alignment of these items. We
show that remnant movement is ungrammatical whenever it produces
universally suboptimal alignments, compared to remnant-movement-free
structures. Any movement is permitted, but only the best alignment
configurations surface as grammatical. Our analysis need not make
similar structural stipulations to Cinque’s, as the different attested
structures emerge from exhaustive constraint reranking.

Please note I’ll only present the OT analysis of the typology from our
paper, along with a few of its interesting predictions and problems,
rather than go into the indepth comparison of our analysis to
Cinque’s.

Speakers: Peter Graff, Jeffrey Lim and Sophie Monahan (MIT)

Title: The Determiner Complexity Hierarchy (practice talk for LSA)

Time: December 1, 1:30PM-3:00PM

Location: 32-D831

We present experimental evidence for a hierarchy of complexity for possible denotations of determiners that goes beyond the traditional constraint of conservativity (Keenan and Stavi 1986). Conservative determiners obey the bi-conditional D(A,B) iff D(A, A?B) where A is the restrictor and B is the nuclear scope and thus only predicate over individuals in set A. Results from three online artificial determiner learning studies (N=454) are consistent with a hierarchy of learnability for determiners depending on the set they predicate over where (A?B)>(A-B)>(B-A)>(A?B)c. These results support a learnability-based account of the patterning of determiner typology and exceptions to Conservativity.

Upcoming LFRG meetings:

Dec 8: Luka Crnic, more on “even” and different kinds of intensional verbs

The semi-annual Rutgers-UMass-MIT Phonology Meeting (RUMMIT) will take place at MIT on Saturday 12/4, in 32-D461, from mid-morning until around 6pm. Stay tuned for further details- all are welcome!

Phonology Circle resumes after the Thanksgiving break, with practice talks for the upcoming RUMMIT (the semesterly Rutgers, UMass, MIT phonology meeting).

Upcoming talks:

Nov 29: RUMMIT Practice talks

Dec 6: Suyeon Yun (MIT)

You can view the current, up-to-date version of the schedule here (click ‘agenda’ to see the schedule as a list), or subscribe via iCal here.

Please join us for Syntax Square this week. Matt Tucker, from UCSC (currently visiting at UPenn), will be leading the discussion.

Speaker: Matthew A. Tucker (UCSC)

Title: Even More on The Anaphor Agreement Affect: When Binding Does Not Agree

Time: Tuesday, November 23, 1-2PM

Place: 32-D461

Many recent proposals have taken Principle A to be reducible to the syntactic relation of AGREE (e.g., Chomsky, 2008), understood to be established between a locally c-commanding functional head and the anaphoric element. In this talk I discuss the so-called Anaphor Agreement Effect (AAE; Rizzi, 1990; Woolford, 1999, et seq.) and show that it is counter-evidence to the claim that binding is mediated by local inflectional heads. I then propose a theory of Principle A effects which meets four theoretical desiderata: (i) anaphoric binding is an instance of AGREE, (ii) the anaphor receives agreement features directly from the antecedent, (iii) AGREE can only operate downward, and (iv) the anaphor does not move to a position c-commanding the antecedent before binding is established. This theory is shown to provide an elegant understanding of AAE effects in subject, object, and possessor positions cross-linguistically. Finally, I explore the implications of this proposal for the typology of reflexives and the contrast between local and long-distance anaphora.

WHO: Luka Crnic

WHAT: On factive NPI licensers

WHEN: November 24, 1:30PM-3:00PM

WHERE: 32-D831

In LFRG this week, we will look at some factive NPI licensers. The recommended reading is Kai von Fintel’s paper on Strawson-entailment, doi:10.1093/jos/16.2.97. The session will facilitate a leisurely transition to Thanksgiving.

Upcoming LFRG meetings:

Dec 1: Peter Graff

Speaker: Michael Kenstowicz

Title: The Origin and Development of Kinande Tonal Classes

Time: Monday 11/15, 5pm, 32-D831

In his analysis of Kinande tone Hyman (1990) proposes a ternary High-Low-Toneless contrast on the final syllable vs. a binary High-Toneless opposition elsewhere. In this paper we trace the historical development of this distinction from its origins in Proto-Bantu to its distribution in the contemporary language.

Upcoming talks:

Nov 29: RUMMIT Practice talks

Dec 6: Suyeon Yun (MIT)

You can view the current, up-to-date version of the schedule here (click ‘agenda’ to see the schedule as a list), or subscribe via iCal here.

Please join us for Syntax Square this week. Isaac Gould will present his work on the Grassfields Bantu language Lamnso’.

Speaker: Isaac Gould

Title: Who Isn’t There? A preliminary description of the absentive in Lamnso’

Time: Tuesday, November 16, 1-2PM

Location: 32-D461

In this descriptive talk, I sketch out some of the basic uses of the absentive morpheme ‘siiy’ in
Lamnso’ (Grassfields, Cameroon). Its primary use is to indicate someone’s spatial absence in
requests or when reporting information, but it might also have a temporal use as well. I will also
give a brief overview of absentive constructions in some other languages. The way that absence
is expressed in Lamnso’ appears to be typologically uncommon, but it does seem to have
parallels in other languages.

WHO: Guillaume Pierre Yves Thomas

WHAT: Additive “more” and “another”, PART 2

WHEN: November 17, 1:30PM-3:00PM

WHERE: 32-D831

Upcoming LFRG meetings:

Nov 24: Luka Crnic

Dec 1: Peter Graff

Speaker: Tom Roeper (U Mass Amherst)

Title: Vacate Phase: How acquisition data provides subtle support for the Strong Minimalist Thesis

When: Nov 17, 2010, 5pm (pizza provided!)

Where: Polinsky Language Processing Lab Conference Room (4th floor of 2 Arrow St)

Speakers: Peter Graff & Jeremy Hartman (MIT)

Title:Constraints on Predication

Time: Thursday, November 18, 12:30-1:45pm

Location: 32-D461

In this talk we propose a novel semantic universal “Myopia”, which we argue constrains the denotations of lexical predicates in natural language.
We generalize that for any lexical predicate P, the only entities relevant to determining the truth of a formula involving P are the entities identified by P’s arguments. Roughly, a predicate P is “myopic” if the truth of a formula involving P in a universe consisting exclusively of the individuals identified by the arguments of P is always identical to its truth value in the full domain of individuals. We show that this constraint not only excludes many denotations of natural language determiners previously excluded by Conservativity (Keenan and Stavi 1986), but also generalizes to predicates of other lexical categories, including nouns, verbs, adpositions and adjectives. We support the psychological reality of our typological observation with evidence from an on-line artificial determiner learning study (N=454), showing that both Conservativity and Myopia are active in determiner learning. Conservative determiners are easier to acquire than non-conservative myopic determiners, which in turn are easier to acquire than non-conservative non-myopic determiners, showing that typological universals may have a more or less profound impact on word learning.

Speaker: Jon Nissenbaum (Syracuse University)

Title: Pseudo Pseudo-Scope

Date: Friday, November 19, 2010

Time: 3:30-5:00PM

Place: 32-155 (PLEASE NOTE ROOM)

The ability of an infinitival clause to contain a gap is often dependent on
the syntactic environment. At first glance, infinitival clauses with degree
operators (too, enough) seem exceptional, freely alternating between a gapped
and gapless version: Bob is too mean [for me to talk to (him)]. But this
alternation turns out to be dependent on the syntactic position of the degree
phrase at LF, as Bernhard Schwarz and I have argued in recent work. An
infinitival degree phrase with a gap must (ordinarily) be interpreted as the
sister of a gradable adjective (in situ), while a gapless one must raise at LF.
We argued, in other words, that the distribution of gaps in degree phrase
infinitives is well-behaved after all, following from semantic
compositionality.

However, the picture cannot be so simple. The gapless degree infinitive,
in addition to being able to scope past an intensional verb, allows a third
reading distinct from either the ordinary wide or narrow scope interpretation.
This resembles familiar cases of transparent readings of DPs: interpreted in
the scope of an intensional operator without being bound by that operator. But
our transparent readings give rise to a conundrum: they are incompatible with
gaps—the opposite of what is expected under narrow scope.

The first part of this talk will report continued joint work with
Schwarz, rejecting our earlier proposal about these mysterious readings. We
argue instead that the third reading is really a species of wide scope LF. I
will sketch a proposal about how its peculiar truth conditions are derived. The
second part of the talk will attempt to re-situate infinitival degree phrases
within a more general theory of gapped and gapless infinitivals.

Speaker: Natalie Boll-Avetisyan (Utrecht/Potsdam)

Title: Does the lexicon bootstrap phonotactics or vice versa?

Time: Monday Nov 8, 5pm, 32-D831

Speech segmentation is a prerequisite to lexical acquisition. The distribution of phonemes in speech provides important cues to word boundaries: Co-occurrence probabilities of phonemes are generally higher within than across words. Infants rely on phonotactic cues in segmentation (e.g. Mattys, Jusczyk, Luce, & Morgan, 1999), but: where does phonotactic knowledge come from?

It has been generally assumed that phonotactics is derived from lexical knowledge (Juszcyk, Luce, & Charles-Luce, 1994). This theory has advantages: Learners would only need to acquire which sound sequences typically occur within words. When listening to continuous speech, infants merely need to attend to cues to which sequences need to be chunked, and the word boundaries would fall out themselves (e.g. Perruchet & Pacton, 2006). From an infant’s perspective, however, a paradox arises: Facilitative cues from phonotactics for segmentation could only be acquired after the onset of lexical acquisition. Avoiding this paradox, phoneme distributions in continuous speech might be proposed as an alternative source of phonotactic knowledge, which has the additional advantage of containing not only chunking information, but also information about low-probable sequences, which should be split (Adriaans & Kager, 2010).

We hypothesize that the prior source of phonotactics is continuous speech, and that infants use knowledge of both over- and underrepresentations of consonant co-occurrences as a cue for speech segmentation. We focus on infants’ knowledge of the probabilities of non-adjacent pairs of phonemes as a cue for speech segmentation. Non-adjacent dependencies are cross-linguistically common (e.g. OCP, McCarthy, 1986) and have been found to influence segmentation in infants (vowel harmony, Van Kampen Parmaksiz, van de Vijver, & Höhle, 2008). Regarding that non-adjacent dependendies are more difficult to acquire than adjacent dependencies, and learning might require additional cues, we used dependencies of identical consonants for our study. In Dutch infant-directed speech (van de Weijer, 1998), some CVC sequences with identical Cs (e.g. /pVp/) are over-represented, and others (e.g. /sVs/) are under-represented. We predict Dutch infants to chunk /pVp/, but split /sVs/ in segmentation.

This was tested in two artificial language (AL) segmentation experiments using the head-turn preference procedure. In Experiment 1, 9 and 15 month-olds were familiarized with an AL that employed 6 syllables, of which four started with /p/ (p1={pe, po}, p2={pa, pe}) and two with /t/ (t={ta, to}), each assigned to a fixed slot and concatenated into a speech stream without pauses (…p1p2tp1p2tp1p2t…). Transitional probabilities between syllables were held constant, rendering three possible segmentations: ptp, ppt, or tpp. If overrepresentation of /pVp/ is used for segmentation, ptp should be dispreferred. Unexpectedly, infants did not exhibit a looking preference for either ptp-words (e.g. /patape/) or ppt-words (e.g. /popata/).

Experiment 2 tested whether 15-month olds use the under-representation of /sVs/ as a segmentation cue in a similar AL, with /p/ replaced by /s/, and /t/ by /x/ (…s1s2xs1s2xs1s2x…). Here, infants had a novelty preference for ssx-words (e.g. /sosaxa/), suggesting that during familiarization, they had split /sVs/ and consequently heard sxs-words (e.g. /saxase/). Furthermore, there was an interaction of the experiments testing /sVs/ and /pVp/. This indicates that that the distribution of specific sequences in the input affects segmentation, rather than some innate bias for either grouping or splitting identical consonants.

The results indicate that during infancy, splitting cues might be more relevant than chunking cues in speech segmentation. This suggests that the source of phonotactic knowledge is continuous speech rather than the lexicon.

References

Adriaans, F. & Kager, R. (2010). Adding generalization to statistical learning: The induction of phonotactics from continuous speech. Journal of Memory and Language, 62, 311-331.

Mattys, S., Jusczyk P., Luce, P., and Morgan, J. (1999). Phonotactic and prosodic effects on word segmentation in Infants. Cognitive Psychology 38, 465-494.

Jusczyk, P.W., Luce, P.A., & Charles-Luce, J. (1994). Infants sensitivity to phonotactic patterns in the native language. Journal of Memory and Language, 33, 630-645.

McCarthy, J. (1986). OCP effects: gemination and antigemination. Linguistic Inquiry, 17, 207-263.

Perruchet, P. & Pacton, S. (2006): Implicit learning and statistical learning: one phenomenon, two approaches. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10(5), 233-238.

Van Kampen, A., Parmaksiz, G., van de Vijver, R. & Höhle, B. (2008). Metrical and statistical cues for word segmentation: vowel harmony and word stress as cues to word boundaries by 6- and 9-month old turkish learners. In A. Gavarró & M. J. Freitas (eds.) (2008). Language Acquisition and Development. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 313-324.

Weijer, J. van de (1998). Language-Input for Word Discovery. P.h.D. Thesis. Max-Planck Series in Psycholinguistics 9.

Upcoming talks:

Nov 15: Michael Kenstowicz (MIT)

Nov 29: RUMMIT Practice talks

Dec 6: Suyeon Yun (MIT)

You can view the current, up-to-date version of the schedule here (click ‘agenda’ to see the schedule as a list), or subscribe via iCal here.

Please join us for Syntax Square this week:

Speaker: Erik Schoorlemmer

Title: The indirect licensing of agreement on Germanic attributive adjectives

Time: Tuesday, November 9, 1-2PM

Place: 32-D461

In most Germanic languages, attributive adjectives display an agreement asymmetry. Depending on properties of D (like definiteness or the presence of agreement), these adjectives display either full agreement with the noun or no (or only partial) agreement. The inflection of adjectives displaying full agreement is often referred to as ‘strong inflection’, while its counterpart marking only partial or the absence of agreement is called ‘weak inflection’ (Grimm 1871; Zwicky 1986). In this talk, I propose that agreement on attributive adjectives is always licensed indirectly by a third element that mediates between the adjective and the noun. I then argue that weak adjectival inflection, i.e. no agreement or only partial agreement on the adjective, is licensed in case the mediating element is (partially) blocked as a mediator for independent reasons. Strong adjectival inflection, i.e. full agreement on the adjective, occurs in case the mediating element is not blocked.

WHO: Guillaume Pierre Yves Thomas

WHAT: Additive “more” and “another”

WHEN: November 10, 1:30PM-3:00PM

WHERE: 32-D831

Both “more” and “(an)other” can be used to express additivity in DPs [(1) and
(2)] or in adverbial phrases [(3) and (4)]:

• (1) Today in Detroit I witnessed 2 more accidents.
• (2) Today in Detroit I witnessed another 2 accidents.
• (3) You’ve got 2 more hours to enter today’s final drawing for a trip to LA for
  the Emmys Red Carpet.
• (4) You’ve got another 2 hours to enter today’s final drawing for a trip to LA
  for the Emmys Red Carpet.

However, the distributions of additive “more” and “(an)other” are different with
stative predicates. Whereas additive “more” cannot be used in the degree
argument of a gradable stative predicate [c.f. (5) and (6)], “(an)other” is
attested in this context [c.f. (7)]:

• (5) *The washi and bamboo kite is six inches in diameter with an extended spar
  three more inches long.
• (6) The washi and bamboo kite is six inches in diameter with an extended spar
  another three inches longer. [comparative reading only]
• (7) The washi and bamboo kite is six inches in diameter with an extended spar
  another three inches long.

In this talk, I will consider possible analyses of additive “more” and
“(an)other”. I will use the data in (5)/(7) to argue that additive “more” is a
pluractional operator that quantifies over eventualities, while “another” does
not relate to eventualities.

Speaker: Caroline Heycock, University of Edinburgh

Title: Riding the tail of the S-shaped curve: detecting the end of a syntactic
change in Faroese.

Date: Friday, November 12, 2010

Time: 3:30-5:00PM

Place: 32-155 (PLEASE NOTE ROOM)

Since the seminal work of Jonas 1996, the Scandinavian language Faroese has
been considered to be a crucial test case for claims concerning the relation or
lack of it between agreement morphology and verb movement. In this language,
syncretism has expanded in the agreement system, and Jonas argued that there
are now two dialects, one in which verb movement over negation has been lost
entirely, and one in which verb movement is optional, although preferred. In
this talk I will present new data from a 3-year project on the status of verb
movement in current Faroese. I will argue that there is no evidence for
dialectal variation; more surprisingly, there is also no evidence of
generational difference. I will claim that it is nevertheless possible to
detect in Faroese the prints of a syntactic change that is not yet quite
complete: a change at the very tail of the S-shaped curve.

Please join us for Syntax Square this week. Kirill Shklovsky will discuss a part of the Algonquian agreement system and one of the proposed ways of accounting for it within the minimalist framework, namely Bejar and Rezac’s Cyclic Agree.

Speaker: Kirill Shklovsky

Title: Algonquian Direct/Inverse

Time: Tuesday, 11/2, 1-2PM

Place: 32-D461

Speaker: Hal Tily

Title: Linguistic representations are probabilistic: evidence from production
choices, articulation, visual attention and reading times

Time: Tues 11/2, 12pm

Location: 46-3189

Comprehenders are sensitive to the probability of linguistic material:
they read more predictable words faster, resolve ambiguities to a more
likely outcome, and complete sentences in ways similar to actual
speakers’ productions. However, this does not necessarily mean that our
knowledge of language includes knowledge about the probability of
linguistic material, since we could simply be sensitive to the
probability of events in the world (plausibility), which is typically
confounded with the probability of the words used to describe them.
Luckily, languages sometimes give multiple ways of expressing a single
event which may differ in their probability, such as the English
ditransitive: “give the princess the necklace” means the same thing as
“give the necklace to the princess”. I present work showing that these
constructions are indeed used by speakers with different probabilities
depending on the linguistic environment. Those probabilities even
influence the realization of the utterance in speech: using the more
probable construction in a given situation leads to shorter word
durations and improved fluency. Using eyetracking, we next show that
comprehenders are sensitive to linguistic probabilities and use them to
anticipate the order that referents will be mentioned. Finally, in
online self paced reading, I show that low probability construction
choices lead to difficulty in comprehension. These results suggest that
linguistic forms which do not differ in meaning nevertheless have
associated probabilistic usage patterns which are fundamental to both
production and comprehension.

Speaker: Valentine Hacquard, University of Maryland

Title: Epistemics, mood and attitudes

Date: Friday, November 05, 2010

Time: 3:30-5:00PM

Place: 32-155 (PLEASE NOTE ROOM)

Epistemic modals are notoriously difficult to embed. This talk will focus
on epistemic modals in complements of attitudes verbs. I will show that
epistemics can appear in the complements of some, but not all attitudes. A
rough generalization is that they are prohibited in complements of verbs
that select for subjunctive mood in Romance. I will present joint work
with Pranav Anand that aims at explaining this generalization: why is the
distribution of epistemics restricted, and what role, if any, does mood
plays?

Speaker:Sverre Stausland Johnsen (Harvard)

Title: Phonetic naturalness in Norwegian retroflexion

Time: Monday 11/1, 5pm, 32-D831

In some approaches to phonology, phonetically motivated processes are
given a special status within the grammar. Under this view,
phonetically motivated processes are cross-linguistically common
because the synchronic grammar favors it.

In other approaches, these processes are not granted such a status.
Under this view, phonetically motivated processes are common because
they emerge more easily over time due to errors in perception and
articulation. The presence of a certain pattern is therefore caused by
its diachronic development.

Since these approaches make the same predictions about phonetically
motivated processes (i.e. they should be common), one place to
evaluate them against each other is within the domain of phonetically
unmotivated processes.

In this talk, I present data from several dialects in Norway in
support of the diachronic perspective, since it is able to make
correct predictions about how phonological processes behave in these
dialects.

I end the talk with a discussion of experimental support, or lack
thereof, for positing phonetic naturalness in grammar.

Upcoming talks:

Nov 8: Natalie Boll-Avetisyan (Potsdam)

Nov 15: Michael Kenstowicz (MIT)

Nov 29: RUMMIT Practice talks

Dec 6: Suyeon Yun (MIT)

You can view the current, up-to-date version of the schedule here (click ‘agenda’ to see the schedule as a list), or subscribe via iCal here.

Speaker: Tania Ionin

Title: Long-distance indefinites: an experimental perspective

Time: Thursday, November 4, 12:30-1:45pm

Location: 32-D461

It is well-known that English indefinites are able to escape scope islands such as relative clauses (as in (1)), obtaining widest scope readings (WSR, (2a)), and intermediate scope readings (ISR, (2b)), in addition to narrow-scope readings (NSR, (2c)) (Farkas 1981, Fodor & Sag 1982, and much subsequent literature). Theories of long-distance scope of indefinites include the choice-function approach (Reinhart 1997, Winter 1997, Kratzer 1998, among others), the implicit domain restriction approach (Schwarzschild 2002, among others), and the topicality approach (Endriss 2009, among others).

(1) Every student read every book that a professor assigned.

(2) a. WSR: a professor>every student>every book: There is a specific professor such that every student read every book that this professor assigned.

b. ISR: every student>a professor>every book: For every student, there is a (potentially different) professor such that the student read every book that this professor assigned.

c. NSR: every student>every book>a professor: Every student read every book that was assigned by any professor.

While many theoretical points rely on rather subtle judgments, there has been very little experimental investigation into native English speakers judgments’ of indefinite long-distance scope. The present work aims to fill this gap, by experimentally testing the availability of long-distance scope readings, using truth-value judgment tasks with adult, linguistically naive native English speakers. The goals of this research program are (i) to collect empirical data on which factors facilitate long-distance scope readings; and (ii) to test the predictions of specific semantic theories of indefinite scope. This talk will report on four studies testing indefinites in relative clause island configurations such as (1). Study 1 compares the availability of long-distance scope for ‘a’ indefinites vs. ‘a certain’ indefinites. Study 2 examines whether modification inside ‘a’ indefinites facilitates long-distance scope. Study 3 examines the avability of functional vs. non-functional ISRs for both ‘a’ and ‘a certain’ indefinites. Study 4 compares bare and modified numeral indefinites, as well as considering collective and distributive long-distance readings. Taken together, the findings across the four studies pose problems for the choice function approaches while offering tentative support for the topicality approach. More work remains to be done, and planned future studies will be discussed.

Speaker: Young Ah Do (MIT)

Title: Foreignness, Word Structure and Lexical Stratum

Time: Monday 10/25, 5pm, 32-D831

In many languages, loanwords undergo a different set of phonological rules from native items: loanwords sometimes allow a subset of the structures present in native phonology (Kenstowicz 2005), they might allow a superset (Inkelas, Orgun, and Zoll 1997) or two can be disjunctive (Jurgec 2009). All such phenomena could be due to (a) unfamiliarity of loanwords or (b) formal marking as a member of distinctive lexical stratum.

I support hypothesis (b), showing a Korean case in which phonological behavior of loanwords and native items with similar frequency behave differently: loanwords are more resistant to alternations. Interestingly, a lexical strata effect is found only from morphologically complex words: foreign compounds resist native alternations, but lexicalized monomorphemic items don’t (e.g. ‘sun light’ ? [s?n lait] vs. ‘lonely’ ? [lolli]). To analyze this result, I separate indexed Faithfulness constraints (Itô and Mester 1995, Pater 2000) into two components—Input-Output and Output-Output correspondence constraints.

In some cases, however, compounds participate in native alternations; (1) when native inflectional suffix is added (e.g. ‘sun light-i(nom)’ ? s?l lais-i) and (2) when a native morpheme is at the right edge of compound (e.g. back madang ‘yard’ ? ba? mada? vs. c?k ‘red’ napkin ? c?k nap?kin). Assuming that (1) an inflectional suffix is head of the word and (2) Korean posits head of compound at the right edge of the word, I argue the head is always relevant in determining the stratal behavior. Notably, the only constraints where head makes a difference are OO-F constraints, so processes are free to apply within foreign monomorphemic words.

Upcoming talks:

Nov 1: Sverre Stausland Johnsen (Harvard)

Nov 8: Natalie Boll-Avetisyan (Potsdam)

Nov 15: Michael Kenstowicz (MIT)

Nov 29: RUMMIT Practice talks

Dec 6: Suyeon Yun (MIT)

You can view the current, up-to-date version of the schedule here (click ‘agenda’ to see the schedule as a list), or subscribe via iCal here.

Speaker: Peter Graff (MIT)

Title: Constraints on Possible Meanings

Time: Tues 10/26, 12pm

Location: 46-3189

The meanings of natural language determiners can be understood as relations
between sets (Barwise and Cooper, 1981). It has since been noted that natural
language determiners are crucially constrained in the set relations they can
express. One influential formalization of this typological pattern is
Conservativity (Keenan and Stavi, 1986), a constraint taken to universally hold
for all denotations of natural language determiners. In this talk we propose a
second universal generalization over possible denotations in natural language,
which we term Myopia. We show that this constraint not only excludes many
denotations of natural language determiners previously excluded by
Conservativity, but also generalizes to predicates of all other lexical
categories, including nouns, verbs, adpositions and adjectives. We go on to
present evidence from an on-line artificial determiner learning study (N=217),
showing that both Conservativity and Myopia are active in determiner learning.
Conservative determiners are easier to acquire than non-conservative myopic
determiners, which in turn are easier to acquire than non-conservative
non-myopic determiners providing further evidence that absolute typological
universals may have different relative impact on language learning.

Please join us for Syntax Square this week. Patrick Grosz will be leading a discussion on the link between the syntax of utterances (specifically focusing on their left periphery) and their use in
conversation. This discussion will touch on the work of Rizzi (1997, 2001), Haegeman (2003, 2006, 2010) and Coniglio (2009).

Speaker: Patrick Grosz

Title: Where is the Force?

Time: Tuesday, October 26, 1-2PM

Place: 32-D461

Speakers: Filomena Sandalo & Charlotte Galves, UNICAMP (Brazil)

Title: Grammaticalization of enclisis in the history of Portuguese

Time: Thursday, October 28, 12:30-1:45pm

Location: 32-D461

In the history of European Portuguese, from the 16th to the 19th century, clitic-placement underwent significant changes with respect to the environments where enclisis obligatorily occurs. In this paper, we argue that the architecture of grammar proposed in Distributed Morphology (Embick and Noyer, 2001, 2006) can shed a light on this change. We analyze enclisis as the result of post-syntactic rules and we argue that the change involved a shift in the operation which displaces the clitic from Prosodic Inversion to Lowering, accounting for the different environments where enclisis obligatorily occurs across time. Moreover, the employment of such a view of the architecture of grammar allows us to interpret this shift as a case of grammaticalization, thus broadening the treatment of this concept in the framework of Generative Grammar. The traditional schema of grammaticalization includes two different moments (cf. the discussion in Askedaal, 2008). The first one has to do with
the change in categorization accompanied by semantic bleaching. The second one consists of further steps of phonological dependency and reduction. Roberts and Roussou (2003) propose a generative account of the first moment in terms of the emergence of new functional words out of lexical words. In their approach, grammaticalization is associated with structural simplification, which they argue is a natural mechanism of change. Here we consider the next step. We show that the framework of Distributed Morphology, which proposes a view of Grammar Architecture that models up the articulation between Syntax, Morphology and Phonology, allows us to define a path of grammaticalization in terms of whether the rules responsible for the movement of morphemes access syntactic structures or not.

Join us for this week’s Phonology Circle Presentation:

Speaker: Ari Goldberg (Tufts University)

Title: Gradient effects of consonant similarity and morphological boundaries

Time: Monday 10/18, 5pm, 32-D831

Functionalist accounts of the OCP propose that the dispreference for similar and repeated items originates in the limitations of the production and perception systems. The difficulty processing repeated elements in sequence (Berg, 1998; Frish, 2004) and the biomechanical effort needed to articulate homorganic consonants (Walter, 2007) are hypothesized to over time lead to an underrepresentation of words with repeated/similar consonants. I argue that an important prediction of any functionalist account of the OCP is that the severity of the effect should decrease across morpheme boundaries. Psycholinguistic theories hold that morphemes are processed relatively independently of each other (e.g., Dell, 1986) and it has been shown that articulatory gestures are less tightly coupled across morpheme boundaries (Cho, 2001). This means that sequences that are dispreferred on serial order or articulatory grounds within morphemes may be easier to process when present across morphemes. I report oral reading reaction time data from the English Lexicon Project that support this claim. Significant inhibitory effects of consonant similarity are found both tautomorphemically and heteromorphemically, with a weaker effect across morpheme boundaries than within. Within multimorphemic words, the effect is modulated by the likelihood that the word is processed via whole-word vs. compositional routes (Hay, 2003). Suffixed words that are more “multimorphemic” show weaker effects of consonant similarity than suffixed words that are more “monomorphemic”. The implications of these findings for typological patterns in heteromorphemic and tautomorphemic environments will be discussed.

Upcoming talks:

Oct 25: Youngah Do (MIT)

Nov 1: Sverre Stausland Johnsen (Harvard)

Nov 8: Natalie Boll-Avetisyan (Potsdam)

Nov 15: Michael Kenstowicz (MIT)

Nov 29: RUMMIT Practice talks

Dec 6: Suyeon Yun (MIT)

You can view the current, up-to-date version of the schedule here (click ‘agenda’ to see the schedule as a list), or subscribe via iCal here.

Please join us for Syntax Square: NELS Edition! Bronwyn Bjorkman and Alya Asarina will both be giving practice talks for their upcoming NELS presentations. Abstracts can be found here.

Speaker: Bronwyn Bjorkman

Title: A Syntactic Correlate of Semantic Asymmetries in Clausal Coordination



Speaker: Alya Asarina

Title: Neutrality vs. Ambiguity in Resolution by Syncretism: Experimental Evidence and Consequences



Time: Tuesday, October 19, 1-2PM

Place: 32-D461

WHO: Luka Crnic

WHAT: Pragmatic enrichment and concessive scalarity

WHEN: October 20, 1:30PM-3:00PM

WHERE: 32-D831

I am going to present an analysis of “concessive even” that avoids some of the issues that have plagued previous proposals. The account derives the appropriate meanings and explains “concessive even“‘s distribution. A tentative gesture is made towards understanding the distribution of some other scalar particles. Some questions are left open. The talk will be 20 min.

Rachel Walker, University of Southern California

Title: “Target scope in harmony processes.”

Thursday, October 21 at 4:00pm

Location: TBA

Abstract: click here

Speaker: Rachel Walker (University of Southern California)

Title: Locality, Scope, and Sour Grapes Effects in Vowel Harmony

Date: Friday, October 22, 2010

Time: 3:30-5:00PM

Place: 32-155 (PLEASE NOTE NEW ROOM)

Harmony that operates only when it reaches a specific destination, such as a word boundary or other landmark, presents a “sour grapes” effect (Padgett 1995). Unbounded harmony does not show this characteristic, because it can be partial in the domain in which it operates (Wilson 2003). This property of unbounded harmony presents an important test for theories of harmony in different frameworks. Wilson has characterized unbounded harmony as, in effect, local iterative spreading, a phenomenon that is challenging to replicate in the classic version of Optimality Theory but straightforward to generate using autosegmental rules.

This paper investigates the apparent benefits of local iterative spreading through an exploration of systems with nonlocal target scope: an unbounded round harmony in Baiyinna Orochen and a bounded height harmony in the central Veneto dialect. These patterns each show nonlocal target scope but harmony proceeds locally, that is, the operation of harmony between adjacent syllables can depend on information about vowels in nonadjacent syllables. These patterns point to a need to distinguish locality of assimilation from locality for target scope, a separation that presents difficulty for local iterative spreading rules as well as for any constraint that enforces harmony only over adjacent trigger-target pairs. These phenomena call for harmony constraints with nonlocal scope, readily implemented using the global evaluation that is intrinsic to OT.

The bounded pattern of central Veneto, which singles out a stressed target, also bears on a serial version of OT. In this system, unstressed vowels on the path to a stressed vowel undergo harmony as incidental participants but not otherwise. This suggests a need for a fell-swoop derivation, where a stressed vowel target and an intervening unstressed vowel undergo harmony at once rather than in successive steps. However, a derivation of this kind is not generated in the standard theory of Harmonic Serialism (e.g. McCarthy 2008a,b, 2009).

In conclusion, the harmony systems under study highlight empirical advantages of global evaluation and harmony-driving constraints with nonlocal scope rather than a local iterative procedure for harmony. Although harmony-driving constraints with global scope predict certain unattested systems, approaches with only local scope are too restrictive, signaling the need for a fresh look at issues of typological overgeneration.

Speaker: Donca Steriade (MIT)

Title: Constraint Interactions derive Morphomic Identity


Time: Thursday 10/21, 12:30—1:45pm

Location: 32-D461

Morphological paradigms sometimes display systematic identity (or syncretism) between cells that
share no syntactic properties. Such phenomena are widespread enough to have generated new
descriptive technologies: e.g. the rule of referral (Zwicky 1985, Stump 2001), the morphome
(Aronoff 1992) and the thematic space (Bonami and Boyer 2001, for stem syncretism). All these
devices were proposed in the belief that any pair of paradigm cells is as likely as any other to have
identical exponents.

I show that syncretism is frequently predictable when phonology is factored in: cells that are on the
surface strictly identical, without syntactic reason, are the ones that whose underlying
representations single them out as being very similar, in some local respect. Familiar data showing
this is the obligatory identity between English past tense and past participles when both end in t or d
(sat/sat; rid/rid; built/built; burnt/burnt; said/said). There is variation, but no paradigm internal
contrast between forms like burnt~burned or lit~lighted. Pairs not ending in t/d tend to be distinct in
strong verbs (wrote/written; swelled/swollen; dove/dived) showing that it’s the local similarity
between final alveolar stops that triggers syncretism. What we need then is a mechanism that
generates global identity between forms that are underlyingly distinct but similar, i.e. hypothetical
inputs like burnt/burned.

Most of this talk is about the Latin syncretism that inspired the morphome (Aronoff 1994; Matthews
1974) and the related hypothesis of an autonomous morphological component. The stem of many
Latin deverbal derivatives (e.g. agent nouns like laudator ‘praiser’) is always identical to that of the
passive-perfect participle (laudatus ‘praised’). I show that local similarity is the critical factor here
too, in ways reminiscent of the English case. The Latin pattern is more revealing because stem
syncretism violates here an otherwise general condition linking the referent of a deverbal derivative
to the argument structure of verb forms containing the same stem as the derivative: if the latter are
passive, the former must refer to a passive subject. The full picture suggests exactly the opposite of
Aronoff’s conclusions: syncretism is not arbitrary, and cannot be analyzed in an autonomous
component. Rather, it involves an interaction of phonological constraints seeking identity of similar
forms with conflicting preferences on the proper exponence of syntactic structures.

There is no Phonology Circle this week, due to the Columbus Day holiday. We’ll resume next week, with a talk by Ari Goldberg, from Tufts University.

Upcoming talks:

Oct 18: Ari Goldberg (Tufts)

Oct 25: Youngah Do (MIT)

Nov 1: Sverre Stauland (Harvard)

Nov 8: Natalie Boll-Avetisyan (Potsdam)

Nov 15: Michael Kenstowicz (MIT)

Nov 29: RUMMIT Practice talks

Dec 6: Suyeon Yun (MIT)

You can view the current, up-to-date version of the schedule here (click ‘agenda’ to see the schedule as a list), or subscribe via iCal here.

Speaker: Jessica Coon (Harvard) & Omer Preminger (MIT)

Title: Transitivity in Chol: A New Argument for the Split VP Hypothesis


Time: Thursday 10/14, 12:30—1:45pm

Location: 32-D461

In this paper we provide a new argument for the Split VP Hypothesis (Bowers 1993, Kratzer 1996, i.a.), the idea that external arguments are base-generated outside the syntactic projection of the stem, in vP. The new evidence comes from the different behavior of stems with and without complements in the Mayan language Chol. While our argument shares certain similarities with Kratzer 1996, the data we examine show a clearer correlation between the following properties: (i) projecting an external argument; (ii) assigning Case to the object; (iii) determining the categorical status of the stem as verb.

BCS SPECIAL LANGUAGE SEMINAR

TUESDAY, OCT. 12, 10:00 AM, 46-4062

Vera Demberg, University of Edinburgh

A Broad-Coverage Model of Prediction in Human Sentence Processing

Host: Ted Gibson

Recent psycholinguistic experiments have provided evidence for prediction in human language comprehension. However, none of the current sentence processing theories provide explicit mechanisms for the modeling the prediction process. Furthermore, two previous theories of sentence processing, Dependency Locality Theory (DLT) and Surprisal, have been argued to capture different aspects of processing difficulty. In this talk, I propose a new theory of sentence processing which incorporates a mechanism for modeling the prediction and verification processes in human language understanding, and which integrates aspects from Surprisal and DLT integration cost into a unified framework.

The theory is implemented based on a Psycholinguistically motivated Tree Adjoining Grammar (PLTAG), a variant of TAG that allows for strictly incremental parsing. I will briefly talk about the design of PLTAG and the algorithm for the incremental parser.

I evaluate the validity of the sentence processing theory in its PLTAG implementation on a range of specific psycholinguistic phenomena and show that it captures aspects of processing difficulty which previous sentence processing theories could not capture simultaneously. A theory of language processing in humans should however not only work in an experimentally designed environment, but should also have explanatory power for naturally occurring language. I therefore also evaluate the sentence processing theory on the eye-tracking records of newspaper texts, and show that it can explain a significant amount of the variance in the eye-movement data, and that it does so better than either Surprisal or DLT integration cost.

Speaker: Tue Trinh

Title: Luis Vicente: “The syntax of heads and phrases - A study of verb (phrase) fronting.”

Time: Tuesday, 10/12, 1-2PM

Place: 32-D461

Date: Friday, October 15, 2010

Time: 3:30-5:00PM

Place: 32-155 (PLEASE NOTE NEW ROOM)

Speaker: Vera Gribanova (Stanford University)

Title: On diagnosing ellipsis and argument drop: the view from Russian

Investigations of constructions that are the result of putative ellipsis
commonly face a trying analytical obstacle: the pronounced surface string can
be the result of more than one logically possible derivation. These alternative
derivations might involve a different underlying structure, and may not involve
genuine ellipsis at all (see, for example, Kizu 1997 and Merchant 1998 on
sluicing vs. pseudosluicing). The question of whether ellipsis is genuinely at
work has famously been a problem in the analysis of structures that strand a
finite verb, leaving its internal arguments and adjuncts unpronounced. One
analytical possibility involves Verb-Stranding Verb Phrase Ellipsis (VVPE), in
which the inflected verb escapes an ellipsis site and is pronounced, while its
internal arguments and adjuncts remain in the VP and are elided. The
alternative - and arguably simpler - analysis of VVPE-like structures involves
argument drop of the internal arguments of the verb.

Two properties of the controversy about VVPE-like structures in argument drop
languages are i) that the evidence distinguishing the two alternatives is
delicate and subtle (Otani and Whitman, 1991; Hoji, 1998; Kim, 1999; Doron,
1991; Goldberg, 2005a) , and ii) that the resulting picture sometimes involves
the claim that both strategies are available for the derivation of one surface
string in one language (Goldberg, 2005a,b). In this talk I examine similar
constructions in Russian (1), of which both these observations hold.

1. Eto daže esli ja vody v rot naberu?
   
   that even if I water.GEN in mouth collect.1SG.FUT
   
   ‘Is that even if I fill my mouth with water?’
   
   

   Daže esli i naberete. Da ved’ ne naberete, ne naberete
   že!
   
   even if and collect.2SG yes but NEG collect.2SG NEG collect.2SG EMPH
   
   ‘Even if you fill (it with water). But you won’t fill (it with water), you
   won’t fill (it with water)!’ (Ju. O. Dombrovskij. Fakul’tet nenužnyx
   veščej, čast’ 2, 1978)
   

I argue that argument drop and VVPE are both available as strategies for
deriving (1), and draw on evidence from a judgment questionnaire to demonstrate
that object drop is not acceptable inside islands in Russian (whereas VVPE is).
Distinguishing the two possibilities in this manner has the beneficial
consequence of shedding light on a constellation of heretofore unanalyzed and
unknown facts about Russian argument drop, such as:

• that Russian subject and object drop have asymmetric syntactic licensing
  conditions;
• that the possibility of A-bar extraction parallels the possibility of
  object drop across a series of syntactic constructions in Russian.

The investigation concludes with a discussion of evidence from verb
(mis-)matching in Russian VVPE-like constructions, arguing that this evidence
is not a reliable diagnostic for genuine ellipsis in such cases.

References

Doron, Edit. 1991. V-movement and VP ellipsis. Unpublished ms.

Goldberg, Lotus. 2005a. Verb-Stranding VP Ellipsis: A Cross-Linguistic Study.
PhD thesis, McGill University.

Goldberg, Lotus. 2005b. On the verbal identity requirement in VP ellipsis.
Unpublished ms., Presented at the Identity in Ellipsis workshop at UC Berkeley.

Hoji, Hajime. 1998. Null objects and sloppy identity in Japanese. Linguistic
Inquiry 28:127—152.

Kim, Soowon. 1999. Sloppy/strict identity, empty objects, and NP ellipsis.
Journal of East Asian Linguistics 8:255—284.

Kizu, Mika. 1997. Sluicing in Wh-in-situ languages. In K. Singer, R. Eggert, and
G. Anderson (Eds.), Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistic Society 33, 231—244.

Merchant, Jason. 1998. ‘Pseudosluicing’: Elliptical clefts in Japanese and
English. In A. Alexiadou, N. Fuhrhop, P. Law, and U. Kleinhenz (Eds.), ZAS
Working Papers in Linguistics 10, 88—112. Zentrum für Allgemeine
Sprachwissenschaft.

Otani, Kazuyo, and John Whitman. 1991. V-raising and VP-ellipsis. Linguistic
Inquiry 22:345—358.

Join us on 10/4 for a presentation by Kirill Shklovsky on his recent work on Tseltal intonation.

Speaker: Kirill Shklovsky (MIT)

Title: Tseltal Prosody: Un Primer Acercamiento

Time: Monday 10/4, 5pm, 32-D831

In this talk I will present (in English) some beginnings of an analysis of Tseltal (Mayan) prosody. In particular I will argue that intonational phrases in unmarked declarative sentences are marked by high (or rising) boundary tones, and that pre-verbal DPs in this verb-initial language project an intonational phrase boundary. I will consider some possible algorithms for assigning tones to syllables, and time permitting, we will discuss the prosody of wh- and yes/no questions in this language.

Upcoming talks:

Oct 18: Ari Goldberg (Tufts)

Oct 25: Youngah Do (MIT)

Nov 1: Sverre Stauland (Harvard)

Nov 8: Natalie Boll-Avetisyan (Potsdam)

Nov 15: Michael Kenstowicz (MIT)

Nov 29: RUMMIT Practice talks

You can view the current, up-to-date version of the schedule here (click ‘agenda’ to see the schedule as a list), or subscribe via iCal here.

Please join us for Syntax Square this week:

Speaker: Coppe van Urk

Title: Adjunct Infinitives and Parasitic Gaps in Dutch

Time: Tuesday, 10/5, 1-2PM

Place: 32-D461

This talk attempts to illustrate the value of using a more extensive classification of different adjunct types, drawing on Huettner’s (1989) survey of English infinitival adjuncts. To achieve this, a puzzle in the distribution of parasitic gaps in Dutch across adjunct types is presented. On the basis of independent properties of different adjuncts, it is argued that adjunct infinitives occupy at least three distinct positions in the Dutch clause. Under standard assumptions about parasitic gaps, this proposal is shown to derive the right distributional pattern. The relationship between this analysis and the analysis of Dutch object scrambling is then briefly discussed.

If you are interested in presenting in Syntax Square this semester, please contact Claire Halpert (halpert@mit.edu) or Natasha Ivlieva (ivlieva@mit.edu).

Speaker: Peter Graff (MIT)

Title: A Cross-linguistic Investigation of the OCP-Place

Time: Thursday 10/7, 12:30—1:45pm

Location: 32-D461

We expand the seminal work of Frisch et al. (2004) by presenting a
large scale investigation of place-driven consonant co-occurrence
restrictions (OCP-Place) in Arabic, Amharic, Aymara, Ch’ol, Dutch,
English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Javanese, Muna, Quechua,
Tagalog, Turkish and Zulu utilizing the framework of the Generalized
Linear Model. We propose a constraint set that successfully accounts
for OCP-Place and identity effects in all languages. A
markedness-based account of the cross-linguistic dispreference for
co-occurring similar consonants sharing place features and preference
for co-occurring identical consonants is presented. Concretely, it
will be shown that OCP-Place typology can be accounted for by a set of
probabilistic constraints that penalize featural co-occurrence of
similar consonant pairs according to the Similarity Metric of Natural
Classes (Frisch et al., 2004) weighted depending on the major place
feature they share (Similarity-LAB, Similarity-COR, Similarity-DOR;
contra FBP, who propose that the relative similarity of consonants
sharing different major place features follows from the organization
of the consonant inventory of the language). We also show that
identity effects are best accounted for by postulating a violable
markedness constraint penalizing non-identical pairs of consonants
(Identity; cf BeIdentical; MacEachern, 1997) but note that the domain
of this constraint must crucially be restricted to the first and
second position of a consonant template.

This week’s Phonology Circle features a double-header, with practice talks by Igor Yanovich and Youngah Do.

Time: Monday 9/27, 5pm, 32-D831

Speaker: Igor Yanovich (MIT)

Title: Making OT learning less algorithmic

(Practice talk for the upcoming meeting of NECPhon, Oct 9, UMass)

Investigations into OT boundaries of expressivity and learning in OT have been mostly empirical, with focus on devising algorithms that work. Yet the line of research trying to formally analyze OT properties and then devise algorithms that work better has also been prominent, including the foundational ERC theory of Prince 2002, which served as the basis for effective algorithm of FRed discovered by Brasoveanu & Prince 2005 that transforms tableaux into a much more comprehensible equivalent form, or Riggle 2008, who used the measure of number of rankings compatible with a set of data, r-volume, in a useful heuristic for his learning algorithm.

Following that line of research, I present an analysis of the structure of the domain of OT rankings, which provides the theoretical framework for computing the full solution to the OT Ranking problem and allows to make the OT learning theory less dependent on algorithms, using robust analysis in terms of static constraints instead. The framework provides means to describe the range of an algorithm non-procedurally, allowing a meaningful comparison between different algorithms; and provides the benchmark of the full set of rankings compatible with a given tableau, against which smaller sets returned by learning algorithms trying to mimick human learning can be compared, allowing a more analytical approach to the OT Subset problem.

Speaker: Youngah Do (MIT)

Title: When focal cues are conflicting: Focus perception in Korean

(Practice talk for the 20th Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference at the University of Oxford)

This study explores perceptual cues to focus in Seoul Korean. While the production of focus marking has been widely studied, little attention has been given to focus perception in Korean. I tested focus perception by presenting listeners with spoken sentence frames (e.g. “John ate apples, not ___”) and asking them to fill in the blank: e.g., “not Mary” (if the subject was perceived to be focused) or “not bananas” (if the object was perceived as focused). In order to check whether listeners use both prosodic and structural cues, the first phrase was manipulated in order to vary the pitch range of subject and object, as well as the word order of the sentence. The results show that Korean listeners use (a) prosodic cues as well as (b) word order cues, and (c) they are biased to perceive object over subject as focus. Logistic regression analysis shows that the weight of the word order cue is highest, followed by prosodic cue and object bias. As expected, uncertainty is observed when cues are conflicting. Using the results of the logistic regression, I consider to what extent the observed uncertainty can be explained by the relative cue weights.

Upcoming talks:

Oct 4: Kirill Shklovsky (MIT)

Oct 18: Ari Goldberg (Tufts)

Oct 25: Youngah Do (MIT)

Nov 8: Michael Kenstowicz (MIT)

Nov 29: RUMMIT Practice talks

You can view the current, up-to-date version of the schedule here (click ‘agenda’ to see the schedule as a list), or subscribe via iCal here.

Please join us for Syntax Square this week. Sasha Podobryaev will discuss work by Sergei Minor (Tromsø) on object control peculiarities in Russian.

Speaker: Sasha Podobryaev

Title: Object control peculiarities in Russian

Time: Tuesday, September 28, 1-2PM

Place: 32-D461

If you are interested in presenting your work in Sytnax Square this semester, please email Claire Halpert (halpert@mit.edu) or Natasha Ivlieva (ivlieva@mit.edu).

Speaker: Hadas Kotek (MIT)

Title: Intervention effects in Hebrew multiple questions

Time: Thursday 9/30, 12:30—1:45pm

Location: 32-D461

There is no meeting of the Phonology Circle this week. We will resume next week, with two presentations, by Igor Yanovich and Youngah Do.

The schedule of currently spoken for dates is below. If you want to sign up for a week to talk, please let Adam know.

• Sep 27 — Igor Yanovich/Youngah Do


• Oct 4 — available


• Oct 18 — Ari Goldberg


• Oct 25 — Youngah Do


• Nov 1 — available


• Nov 8 — Michael Kenstowicz


• Nov 15 — available


• Nov 22 — available


• Nov 29 — RUMMIT practice talks


• Dec 6 — available

You can view the current, up-to-date version of the schedule here (click ‘agenda’ to see the schedule as a list), or subscribe via iCal here.

Please join us for Syntax Square this week. Jeremy Hartman will discuss a paper by recent MIT visitor Gary Thoms. The abstract and paper can be found here.

Speaker: Jeremy Hartman

Title: Thoms (2010): “‘Verb floating’ and VPE: towards a movement theory of ellipsis licensing”
Time: Tuesday, September 21, 1-2PM

Place: 32-D461

If you are interested in presenting your work in Sytnax Square this semester, please email Claire Halpert (halpert@mit.edu) or Natasha Ivlieva (ivlieva@mit.edu).

WHO: Frank Sode (ZAS)
WHAT: The German present subjunctive and the expression of the speaker’s attitude
WHEN: September 22, 1:30PM-3:00PM
WHERE: 32-D831

WHAT EXACTLY: [see the abstract](http://whamit.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/2010-09-22-lfrg-sode-abstract.pdf)

Colloquium 9/24 - Hubert Truckenbrodt

Date: Friday, September 24, 2010
Time: 3:30-5:00PM
Place: 32-141
Speaker: Hubert Truckenbrodt (ZAS Berlin)
Title: Wh is F: prosody and semantics

Abstract:

Why do many languages show a natural class of focused phrases and wh-phrases, by
way of movement to the same position or by marking of both by focus markers?
In focus (Rooth 1992), a scope operator ~C induces the calculation of
contextually relevant alternatives. The focus feature F marks the positions in
which the alternatives vary. In questions, the scope operator Q induces the
calculation of the question’s meaning as a set of answers. The feature wh marks
the position in which the answers vary. I argue, extending suggestions of Beck
2006, that the feature Wh in questions is really the feature F. Its contribution
in questions is thus not related to information structure, but part of the
meaning of the interrogative. In the prosodic part of the talk, I argue with
Japanese questions, English and German echo questions and multiple questions
that this F in questions is really the stress-attracting feature F that we know
from its use in information structure. However, the new extended use of F will
also bring into view a systematic exception of its stress-attracting behavior,
namely the presence of a checking-relation of a wh-word with the Q-marker. I
suggest that ‘visibility’ of F within its scope (~C or Q) may either be
satisfied by F carrying the strongest stress in its scope-domain, or by a
checking-relation between F and the scope-marker.

The MIT Phonology Circle resumes this coming Monday, 9/13, at 5pm in 32-D831

There is no talk scheduled for this week, so this will be a brief organizational meeting in which we determine the schedule for the semester. If you wish to present some time during the semester but cannot attend the meeting, please let me know that, too. Also, if you have papers that you wish to discuss in a week when there is no talk, you can propose those, as well.

Join us for the first Syntax Square of the semester!

Speaker: Bronwyn Bjorkman

Title: A (brief) history of exceptions to the Coordinate Structure Constraint

Time: Tuesday 9/14, 1-2PM

Place: 32-D461

If you are interested in presenting your work or leading a discussion of someone else’s work this semester, email Claire Halpert (halpert@mit.edu) or Natasha Ivlieva (ivlieva@mit.edu).

This week, David Spivak from the MIT math department will give a talk,
briefing us on his ideas and asking for our input.

WHO: David Spivak (MIT Math)
WHAT: Communication Networks
WHEN: September 15, 1:30PM-3:00PM
WHERE: 32-D831

WHAT EXACTLY:

Every person has his or her own ideolect, or way of using
language; in fact every subculture has its own language. I propose that
every interacting group, however small, has its own language. Two people
engaged in conversation have a common ground, which each can use to explain
new concepts to the other. As they learn from each other, the common ground
grows with shared terminology and experience, and the ability to communicate
new concepts is enhanced.

Consider then the network of all human interactions. These interactions are
not all “2-way”: when three people have a group conversation it brings a
different dynamic than when only the pairs can privately converse. I’ll
explain how the geometric notion of “simplicial complex” can be used to
model a network of n-way interactions.

Thus every node and every n-way connection in a network has its own
language and worldview. To make this precise we must define what these
worldviews are. To that end, I’ll explain what a category is and give
several examples. Then I’ll propose that we can model worldviews as
categories. The network of human interactions becomes a “sheaf” of
categories on a simplicial complex: local languages interacting to create a
higher-order entity trying to understand its world.

Speaker: Pranav Anand (UC Santa Cruz)

Title: The role of upward monotonicity in the interpretation of
plurals: A view from image verification

Time: Thurs 9/16, 12:30-1:45

Place: 32-D461

Plural DPs possess the vexing capability to be inclusive, capable of
allowing atomic reference in some sentences, but to be exclusive in
others. The several proposals for this double?life (Krifka 1989,
Sauerland et al. 2005, Spector 2007, Farkas & de Swart 2010) converge
in analyzing the distinction in terms of pragmatic competition,
suggested by dispreference for exclusive plurals in downward monotone
(DM) environments. A number of analyses (Spector 2007, Farkas and de
Swart 2010, Sauerland et al. 2005) connect this competition to the
Strongest Meaning Hypothesis, suggesting that, other things being
equal, an exclusive reading is preferred in UM contexts and an
inclusive reading is preferred in DM ones. This talk examines this
claim empirically in the context of image verification for bare
plurals under each. Although acceptability responses do show that
speakers verify exclusive plural readings significantly more often in
the nuclear scope (NS) of each than in the restrictor (R), the effect
size is small. This result comports with evidence that exclusive
plurality is sensitive to the ecological settings defeating scalar
inference (Khan et al. 2010) and argues that the principle driving
exclusivity is a factor subject to strong situational reduction.

All talks are from 3:30 to 5:00 p.m. in room 32-141 unless otherwise noted. For further information, please contact Patrick Grosz (grosz@mit.edu) or Liudmila Nikolaeva (liudmila@mit.edu). This schedule is subject to change.

Fall 2010

September 24 - Hubert Truckenbrodt (Tübingen, rescheduled from Spring 2010)

October 15 - Vera Gribanova (Stanford)

October 22 - Rachel Walker (USC)

November 5 - Valentine Hacquard (UMD)

November 12 - Caroline Heycock (Edinburgh)

November 19 - Jon Nissenbaum (McGill)

Spring 2011

February 18 - Gerhard Jäger (Tübingen)

March 11 - Jason Merchant (University of Chicago)

March 18 - Milan Rezac (University of the Basque Country)

April 1 - David Adger (Queen Mary, London UK)

April 8 - Rick Nouwen (Utrecht)

April 22 - Junko Ito (UC Santa Cruz)

May 6 - Shinichiro Ishihara (J.W. Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main)

MIT Linguistics now has a unified events calendar.

View from browser:
http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=mitlingevents%40gmail.com&ctz=America/New_York

subscribe via iCal and similar programs:
http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/mitlingevents%40gmail.com/public/basic.ics

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MIT students, faculty and staff can add events to the calendar (contact David if you’ve lost the e-mail with the password), but anyone can read it.

Announcing the 1st summer meeting of the Phonology Circle: Monday May 17 at 5PM.

Claire Halpert (MIT): “Place assimilation changes its triggers”

This is a rehearsal for a talk at the Manchester Phonology Meeting.

Well, it is not actually an extravaganza, but the idea is for our student semantic community to gather and celebrate the end of the semester - and at the same
time have some small talk related to our professional activities.

Among possible items on the agenda:

• who has been up to what during the semester, and who plans to work on what projects in the summer and the fall;
• what experiences we had taking classes outside of the department: which were useful and interesting, which were boring, which level of prior knowledge they
  presuppose, and whether it makes sense to take them;
• possible topics for more traditional reading group/small informal seminar activity in the fall - maybe in smaller focus groups?
• having coffee, tea, and (hopefully) cookies

See you at the usual place at the usual time, 11:35-12:25!

The last installment of Phonology Circle for the spring semester will feature a talk by Donca Steriade.

Speaker: Donca Steriade (MIT)

Title: Rhyming evidence for intervals

Time: Monday 5/10, 5pm

Location: 32-D831

Stress and meter operate on rhythmic units, each of which consists of a nucleus plus some neighboring consonants. Since Dionysius Thrax (2nd cent. BC), these units have been assumed to be syllables. This talk presents a survey of rhyming conventions whose analysis supports a different rhythmic unit, the Vowel-to-Vowel interval. An interval is the unit containing the nucleus plus any segments following it, up to the next nucleus or to the end of the domain. So interval divided into intervals = (?nt)(?rv)(?l). Intervals contain, like syllables, exactly one nucleus, but their left and right edges are shifted rightwards relative to those of syllables. Intervals have been invoked in the analysis of durational invariance effects, where syllables proved less useful (Farnetani and Kori 1986 JPhon, Fant and Kruckenberg 1989 PERILUS, McCrary 2005, UCLA diss.)

The goal of the talk is to find the constraints that characterize, for each rhyming tradition, the contents of the Rhyming Domain (RD). The RD is the recurring string in rhyming lines. There are three relevant findings. First, there is considerable diversity in the contents and location of the RD, much more than one expects from exposure to standard European poetry: the RD need not be line final, or word final, it need not contain a stressed syllable, or a heavy syllable; and the degree of similarity required between RD’s can be low. Second, despite the great diversity of rhyming practices, the RDs of all traditions share two properties: their left edge is the left edge of an interval, not the left edge of a syllable onset; and their right edge is the right edge of an interval, not the right edge of a syllable coda. Finally, RD internal sub-constituents are occasionally needed, to distinguish degrees of required similarity between rhyming lines: these sub-constituents are intervals too.

Taken together, these results suggest that only intervals – not syllables, or sub-syllabic units – are the units invoked by constraints on RD structure.

Please join us for the last Syntax Square of the semester* on Tuesday, 1-2PM. Mitcho Erlewine will present “Independent Dependency and the Mandarin b? Comparative.”

SPEAKER: Mitcho Erlewine

TIME: Tuesday, 5/11, 1-2PM

PLACE: 32-D461

TITLE: Independent Dependency and the Mandarin b? Comparative

Most recent analyses of the Mandarin b? comparative have posited a syntax with only one copy of the predicate in the derivation (Xiang 2003, Erlewine 2007, Lin 2009). In this talk I will argue that this assumption cannot explain a range of comparative data. I refer to this new hypothesis — that the Mandarin comparative must have two copies of the predicate, one for each of the compared items — as Independent Dependency. We will also touch on the phenomena of internal argument comparison with a restricted distribution that no theory on the market can currently account for. I will then hone in on two analyses — an ellipsis approach and a multidominance approach — which are compatible with Independent Dependency and show that they also give a natural account for the internal argument comparatives.

*Stay tuned for Syntax Square: Summer Edition!

WHO: Klaus von Heusinger (U. Stuttgart)

TITLE: Specifictiy, Referentiality and Discourse Prominence

WHEN: May 14, Friday, 3PM-4:30PM

WHERE: TBA, probably 32-D461

There are various notions of specificity, ranging from Fodor & Sag’s (1982) referentiality view to Givon’s discourse prominence view. Ionin (2006) discusses
the relation between these two perspectives by analyzing the English indefinite this. She represents indefinite this as a referential operator in the sense of
Fodor & Sag (1982), but also adds the felicitous condition of “noteworthiness”. She notes that there is an open question how these two properties of
indefinite this are linked to the discourse property of signaling high prominence in a discourse.

The talk will address this open question by analyzing the two German equivalents of the English indefinite this: the indefinite demonstrative dies and the form
so’n, which is composed of do ‘such’ and the reduced and enclitic form ‘n of the indefinite article ein. Both forms are primarily used in informal
registers and signal discourse prominence, i.e. that more will be said about the referent introduced by these expressions. First, I argue that these two forms
are in fact two indefinite articles in German; I present some results from corpus searches that provide evidence for their discourse function, and I report on
a subtle difference in their referential behavior under extensional and intensional operators. I suggest some new links between the referential properties and
the discourse properties of these specific indefinite article in German and conclude with even more open questions.

1. Peter traf gestern eine Frau.
2. Peter traf gestern diese Frau.
3. Peter traf gestern so’ne Frau.
   
   Peter met yesterday a / this / such-a woman.

References

Fodor, Janet & Sag, Ivan 1982. Referential and Quantificational Indefinites. Linguistics and Philosophy 5, 355-398.

Givon, Talmy 1981. On the Development of the Numeral ‘one’ as an Indefinite Marker. Folia Linguistica Historia 2, 35-53.

Ionin, Tanja 2006. This is definitely specific: specificity and definiteness in article systems. Natural Language Semantics, 14, 175-234.

This Monday’s Phonology Circle presentation will be by Igor Yanovich and Donca Steriade.

Speaker: Igor Yanovich and Donca Steriade (MIT)

Title: Base priority effects in inflectional subparadigms: evidence from Ukrainian

Time: Monday 5/3, 5pm

Location: 32-D831

We present an analysis of stress in Ukrainian nouns that relies on two hypotheses about inflectional paradigms:

1. Paradigms have articulated internal structure: in the present case, the plural of Ukrainian nouns forms a distinct subparadigm from the singular. It is separately evaluated by paradigm uniformity constraints (e.g. McCarthy 2005). It also functions as a distinct unit with respect to paradigm contrast constraints (Kenstowicz 2005).
2. Relations between subparadigms are directional: some subparadigms have priority relative to others in a way that is comparable to the base priority effect obtaining between bases and their derivatives.

In derivational paradigms, base priority refers to the observation that the identity between bases and derivatives is obtained by adjusting the derivative’s shape, while keeping base properties constant (cf. Benua 1999). In a comparable way, we observe that when stress is computed in the inflectional paradigms of Ukrainian nouns, the entire singular subparadigm has priority: stress in the plural forms is adjusted to satisfy conditions of stem identity (within the set of plural forms) and stem distinctness (between the singular and the plural). By contrast, stress in the singular forms is computed as if the plural doesn’t exist. We suggest that the entire set of singular forms functions as a collective base for the plural subparadigm (see also Albright 2005 for related proposals).

Upcoming talks:

• May 3 Igor Yanovich and Donca Steriade
• May 10 Donca Steriade

Access real-time updates, on-line via the web (click ‘agenda’ to see the schedule as a list), or through iCal

Please join us for the penultimate meeting of Syntax Square this semester. Kirill Shklovsky will lead the discussion with a report from GLOW on “Switch Reference as an Interface Conspiracy,” by Stefan Keine (Leipzig).

Time: Tuesday, May 4, 1-2PM

Place: 32D-461

Gillian Gallagher will have a public dissertation defense this Friday, May 7, at 11 am in 32-155. The defense will begin with a presentation, which will be under an hour. There will be cherry scones and juice. Please come!

Title: The perceptual basis of laryngeal cooccurrence restrictions

Time: Friday, May 7, 11AM

Place: 32-155

The two main arguments in this dissertation are 1. That laryngeal cooccurrence restrictions are restrictions on the perceptual strength of contrasts between roots, as opposed to restrictions on laryngeal configurations in isolated roots, and 2. That laryngeal cooccurrence restrictions are restrictions on auditory, as opposed to articulatory, features.

Both long-distance laryngeal dissimilation, where roots may have one but not two laryngeally marked stops (MacEachern 1999), and assimilation, where stops in a root must agree in laryngeal features (Hansson 2001; Rose and Walker 2004) are given a unified account based on a grammatical pressure to neutralize indistinct contrasts. The contrast based analysis is supported by the empirical finding that certain non-adjacent sounds interact with one another in perception. Specifically, the perception of a contrast in ejection or aspiration is degraded in roots with another ejective or aspirate as compared to roots with another plain stop (e.g. the pair k’ap’i-kap’i is more confusable than the pair k’api-kapi). Roots that are minimally distinguished by having one vs. two laryngeally marked stops are confusable with one another (e.g. k’ap’i is confusable with kap’i), and thus languages may avoid having both types of forms. The analysis integrates long-distance phonological neutralizations with analyses of local neutralizations based on phonetic cues and contrast strength (Flemming 1995, 2004, 2006; Steriade 1997), showing that both local and non-local phenomena are driven by grammatical constraints against perceptually indistinct contrasts.

The interaction between ejectives and aspirates in Quechua provides evidence for auditory features. These two articulatorily disparate sounds pattern together in the cooccurrence restrictions of Quechua, showing that some feature must pick them out as a class. It is argued that ejectives and aspirates may pattern together because they share long voice onset time. It is shown that defining laryngeally marked stops based on their language specific auditory properties correctly accounts both for ejective-aspirate interactions in Quechua and also for the interaction between ejectives and implosives in Hausa and Tz’utujil. The results of a perception experiment further support the status of long VOT as a property to which the grammar refers.

Speaker: Danny Fox (MIT)

Time: Friday, May 7, 2010, 3:30pm-5pm

Location: 32-141 (Stata Center)

Title: Negative Islands and Maximization Failure

The goal of this talk is to discuss various questions that arise in the context of attempts to reduce
a class of weak islands to Maximization Failure (Fox and Hackl 2006, Fox 2007, Abrusan 2007,
in press, Nouwen 2008, Abrusan and Spector 2008, in press, Shimoyama and Schwarz 2010).
The basic idea that guides these attempts is that the the relevant islands arise from a maximality
requirement that cannot be met on semantic/logical grounds.

The questions we will discuss pertain to the possible sources of this Maximization Failure (MF).
According to Fox and Hackl, the source in certain degree constructions is the density of degree
domains. However, in later work, it was pointed out that some of the results could be derived if
alternative sources of MF are postulated, and Abrusan and Spector (A&S) present arguments for
one specific alternative that I will be focusing on (quantification over degree intervals).

The more specific goals of this talk are the following: (a) to argue that density is necessary
despite various observations made by A&S that seem to argue for intervals, and (b) to argue that
there is yet another source for MF beyond those identified in recent literature and that this source
for MF is responsible for another weak island observed in Spector (2008), and could also account
for A&S’s observations.

This week’s Phonology Circle presentation will be by Jae Yung Song, of Brown University.

Speaker: Jae Yung Song (Brown University)

Title: The development of acoustic cues to coda voicing and place of articulation

Time: Monday 4/26, 5pm

Location: 32-D831

Studies on young children’s speech perception and production suggest that voicing and place of articulation (POA) contrasts may be acquired early in life. However, most of these studies have focused on onset consonants; little is known about the development of cues to feature contrasts in codas. To this end, we investigated children’s representations of coda voicing (voiced vs. voiceless) and POA (alveolar vs. velar) by conducting detailed acoustic analyses of their speech. In particular, we examined longitudinal, spontaneous speech data from 6 American English-speaking mother-child dyads. The results showed that children as young as 1;6 exhibited many adult-like acoustic cues to coda voicing and POA contrasts, such as longer vowels and more voice bars before voiced codas, and more frequent releases, a greater number of bursts, and longer post-release noise duration for alveolar codas. In contrast, some cues, such as glottalization at the end of the vowel, were still not systematically produced by 2;6. In general, younger children used more exaggerated cues compared to mothers, but showed nearly adult-like patterns by 2;6. In conclusion, although 2-year-olds produced some adult-like acoustic cues to voicing and POA distinctions, others take time to become adult-like. Physiological and contextual correlates of these findings are discussed.

Upcoming talks:

• May 3 Igor Yanovich and Donca Steriade
• May 10 Donca Steriade
• May 17 Ari Goldberg (Tufts)

Access real-time updates, on-line via the web (click ‘agenda’ to see the schedule as a list), or through iCal

Join us this week for Syntax Square. Kirill Shklovsky will lead the discussion with a report from GLOW.

TIME: Tuesday, April 27, 1-2PM

PLACE: 32D-461

If you would like to lead the discussion at next week’s Syntax Square, please email Claire (halpert@mit.edu).

Speakers: Max Bane (University of Chicago), Peter Graff (MIT), Morgan Sonderegger (University of Chicago)

Title: Longitudinal phonetic variation in a closed system

Time: Thurs 4/29, 12:30-1:45

Place: 32-D461

Previous work shows that in short term, laboratory settings, aspects of one’s speech can change under exposure to the speech of others (e.g. Goldinger 1998, Nielsen 2007), and that this change is mediated by social variables such as (speaker) gender (e.g. Namy et al. 2002, Pardo 2006). An implicit hypothesis is that these effects can help explain dialect formation and the social stratification of speech. However, it is not known whether such change occurs in natural interaction over a longer term.

This study shows longitudinal change in VOT in a closed linguistic system, mediated by social interaction. Our corpus consists of speech from Big Brother UK (2008), a reality TV show in which 16 contestants live in a house for 93 days, subject to 24 hour audio/video recording. VOT was measured for 4 contestants over the season. We model the effect of time on VOT for different contestants, controlling for known confounds (e.g. speech rate, place of articulation), and allowing for intrinsic differences in the VOTs of different words. Each contestant’s modeled VOT time trajectory shows significant longitudinal change, and all trajectories appear to move closer together over time.

We then examine the effect of two measures of social interaction on differences between VOT trajectories for pairs of contestants. The more a pair interacts, as measured via live blog entries by a UK newspaper, the closer their VOTs become. When a pair is on the same side of an artificial divide in the house (present for half the season), their VOTs become closer than if they are on different sides.

Speaker: Bruce Hayes (UCLA)

Time: Friday, April 30, 2010, 3:30pm-5pm

Location: 32-141 (Stata Center)

Title: Accidentally-true constraints in phonotactic learning

The phonotactic learning system proposed by Hayes and Wilson (2008) follows the principle of the inductive baseline: it tries to learn phonotactics using as few principles of Universal Grammar (UG) as possible. The leading idea is that one could learn from such a system’s failures just as much as from its successes. For instance, the simplest version of the system fails to learn patterns of vowel harmony or unbounded stress, but it becomes able to learn them when amplified with UG principles corresponding to classical autosegmental tiers and metrical grids—thus forming a new kind of argument for such representations.

There is a second way in which failures of the baseline system might be informative: it could learn too much rather than too little. The baseline system involved a rather permissive concept of what can be a phonotactic constraint: a constraint’s structural description is simply a sequence of feature matrices, each representing one of the natural classes of segments in a language. Where there are C natural classes and constraints are allowed to have n matrices, there will be Cⁿ possible constraints. In actual practice, this can be a very large number.

With such a large hypothesis space, it is imaginable that the system might find constraints that are “accidentally true”: they have few or no exceptions in the lexicon, but are not apprehended by native speakers and play no role in their phonotactic intuitions. Hayes and Wilson’s learning simulation for the phonotactics of Wargamay may have done this. While the 100 constraints the system learned included 43 that successfully recapitulate the known phonotactic restrictions of this language (Dixon 1981), a further 57 constraints were discovered that struck the authors as complex and phonologically mystifying. An example is *[–approx, +cor][+high,+back,–main][–cons], which forbids sequences of coronal noncontinuants ([d, ?, n, ?]), followed by unstressed or secondary-stressed [u, u?], followed by a vowel or glide. Almost any phonologist would agree that this an unlikely configuration for a language to forbid.

Do real speakers apprehend constraints of this kind? I will report an experimental study now in progress that addresses this question for English. When trained on English data, the Hayes/Wilson system behaves just as it did with Wargamay, learning both sensible and accidental-seeming constraints. The experiment used 20 nonce-word quadruplets, each containing:

1. a word that violates exactly one constraint, of the “accidental” type


2. a word that is violation-free but otherwise similar to (1)


3. a word that violates exactly one constraint that would be considered by phonologists to be natural (e.g. a sonority-sequencing constraint), and has a weight similar to the constraint in (1)


4. a violation-free control word similar to (3).

The results of the experiment indicate that the (1)-(2) difference is considerably smaller than the (3)-(4) difference—i.e. that unnatural constraints really do have a weaker effect on native speaker judgment than natural constraints.

I will then explore two hypotheses that might explain the disparity: (a) a statistical approach based on comparing the explanatory power of added constraints (Wilson 2009); (b) a UG-based approach under which language learners are biased (Wilson 2006) to assign the natural constraints high weights relative to unnatural ones.

References

• 
  Dixon, Robert M. W. 1981. Wargamay. In Handbook of Australian languages, volume II, ed. Robert M. W. Dixon and Barry J. Blake, 1–144. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• 
  Hayes, Bruce and Colin Wilson (2008) A maximum entropy model of phonotactics and phonotactic learning. Linguistic Inquiry 39: 379-440.
• 
  Wilson, Colin and Marieke Obdeyn (2009) Simplifying subsidiary theory: statistical evidence from Arabic, Muna, Shona, and Wargamay. Ms., Johns Hopkins University.