Whamit!

Speaker: Kirill Shklovsky

Title: Syntactically-Conditioned Phonology: The Case of Tseltal Vowel Hiatus Resolution

Time: Thurs 5/14, 12:30-1:45

Place: 32-D461

Tseltal, a Mayan language of southern Mexico, has a strict prohibition against vowel hiatus: all vowel hiatus must be resolved either by deleting one of the vowels or epenthesizing a consonant. The choice of the strategy is not predictable from the nature or quality of the vowels involved. In this talk I will argue that the choice of the hiatus resolution strategy can be accounted for by making recourse to syntactic structure; specifically to the presence or absence of strong phase boundaries between the vowels in hiatus. Building on the work of Marvin 2003, Piggott and Newell 2006, and Michaels 2008 I will propose a set of constraints that favor greater faithfulness to material spelled out in an earlier phase to account for the choice of Tseltal vowel hiatus resolution strategy.

This week we will have two practice talks for the upcoming MUMM meeting:

Time: Monday 5/4, 5pm

Location: 32-D831

First speaker: Hyesun Cho

Title: The problem of generalization in a statistical learning model of phonotactics

Achieving a proper level of generality in OT-style constraints has not been a problem in most of the phonological grammar learning models up to now (such as GLA (Boersma, 1997); a Maximum Entropy model (Goldwater and Johnson, 2003); a GLA-HG model (Coetzee and Pater, 2008)), because in those models, constraints do not have to be learned. Instead, learning a grammar mainly involves finding rankings or weights of the given set of constraints. In contrast, the phonotactic learning model of Hayes and Wilson (2008) is different from others in that the model derives constraints themselves from the surface forms in the training data. This paper shows that in doing so, it is not trivial to learn constraints with a proper level of generalization.

I ran the Hayes and Wilson model on Korean training data. In the resulting grammar, the model makes overly-broad generalizations, i.e., the constraints that penalize both possible (grammatical) and impossible (ungrammatical) sequences equally, especially when the frequency differences between the possible sequences and the impossible sequences are very small. Because of this, some of the possible sequences are predicted to be worse than impossible sequences. The three problem cases include: post-obstruent tensing, diphthong restrictions, and labials-[?] sequences. I discuss two possible solutions: adjusting feature specifications and employing an additional learning bias.

The grammar learned by the Hayes and Wilson model consists of markedness constraints only. I ran a model that uses both faithfulness constraints and markedness constraints (Goldwater and Johnson, 2003) for the problem cases above. It turns out that a proper level of generalization in the constraints is crucial in a faithfulness model as well.

Second speaker: Patrick Jones

Title: Evidence for the Phonological Stem in Kinande

A number of recent studies on Bantu verbal phonology (Downing 1994, 1998, 1999, 2000; Herman 1996) have argued that the phonological processes which affect the Bantu verb, rather than referring directly to constituents of morpho-syntactic structure (M-Constituents), instead refer exclusively to morpho-prosodic constituents (P-Constituents) which are derived from them. Evidence for this view, which has its origins in the work of Selkirk (1986) and Inkelas (1989), is found in a number of phonological processes whose domains of application approximate constituents defined by morpho-syntactic structure, but do not match them exactly.
In this talk, I will argue that the existence of a Phonological Stem (PStem) domain is strongly supported by the verbal phonology of Kinande, and that by recognizing the PStem as a morpho-prosodic domain to which phonological constraints can refer, it is possible to provide straightforward and unified analyses of four distinct phonological processes - Verbal Reduplication, Intonational Tone Assignment, Lexical Tone Assignment, and Purposive Suffix Affixation - that must otherwise be explained in terms of arbitrary and idiosyncratic constraints. However, I will argue against the position that only morpho-prosodic constituents, and not morpho-syntactic ones, may be referred to by phonological processes. I will argue that reference to the MStem as well as reference to the PStem is necessary in order to successfully account for Verbal Reduplication and Lexical Tone Assignment, and will therefore argue for a theory in which phonological processes make necessary, but not exclusive, reference to morpho-prosodic domains.

As part of the Language@MIT Lecture Series, Deb Roy (MIT Media Lab) will be presenting in the LF Reading Group this Wednesday, May 6, 3-5pm, 34-303. Deb has suggested that we read the following paper for the meeting, titled “Semiotic Schemas: A Framework for Grounding Language in Action and Perception.”

http://web.media.mit.edu/~dkroy/papers/pdf/roy_aij_2005.pdf

Speaker: Verner Egerland (Lund University)

Title: Tense in Gerunds

Time: Thurs 5/7, 12:30-1:45

Place: 32-D461

In the unmarked case, the English ing-form expresses a process, that is, a homogenous non-culminated eventuality, simultaneous with that of the main clause:

1. I spent the afternoon sleeping on the couch.

However, exceptions to the simultaneous reading are known to exist. To some extent, gerunds can refer to events following the matrix event (2), or preceding it (3):

2. He entered college at the age of fifteen, graduating four years later at the head of his class. (From Jespersen 1940: 407)
3. Setting sail for the island in the fall of 1740, he reached his destination in the spring of 1741. (From Stump 1985: 97)

This paper is concerned with the English ing-form, the French present participle, the Italian gerund, and the Swedish present participle. It will be shown that the «tense-shifting» property illustrated in (2) and (3) is attested in English, French, and Italian, but not in Swedish. It will be argued that «tense-shifting» as illustrated in (2)-(3) does not follow from the aspectual properties of gerunds but is in fact linked to grammatical Tense. By assumption, then, grammatical Tense is projected in gerundival clauses in English, French, and Italian. In these languages, we observe that (a) clausal negation may be licensed, (b) copular and auxiliary Vs are allowed, and (c) a subject argument is licensed. Swedish differs systematically from the other three languages in disallowing clausal negation, copular and auxiliary Vs, as well as explicit subject arguments. These observations have consequences for a number of Tense-related issues in generative grammar, such as the theoretical status of Finiteness, the relation between Tense and the Aspect-Event system, as well as the acquisition of Tense.

Speaker: Sharon Rose (UCSD)

Title: Tone Distribution and Affix Order in Moro

Time: Friday, May 8th, 2009, 3.30pm-5pm

Place: 32-155 ***Please note special place***

This talk investigates two separate, but related phenomena in the verbal
morphology of Moro: tone distribution and the order of object markers.
Moro is a Kordofanian language spoken in Sudan; the research is part of
the Moro Language Project at UCSD.

The interaction between tone and syllable weight has primarily focused on
the distribution of contour tones. In Moro verb roots, high tone is
distributed according to syllable size or weight. Heavy syllables
preferentially bear high tone, whereas light onsetless syllables cannot
bear high tone. I argue in favor of prominence constraints as in
onset-sensitive stress systems (Gordon 2005) rather than
extraprosodicity, an approach which fails to explain the onsetless
syllable?s participation in other prosodic processes. The domain for
tonal restrictions in Moro is the macrostem rather than the word. Onsets
from within the macrostem (progressive prefix v-) license high tone on
the initial root vowel, but those outside the macrostem do not. In
addition, macrostem affixes that bear high tone cause deletion of root
high tone and prevent the realization of tone-licensing prefixes. The
macrostem as a whole only allows a single high tone.

The macrostem constituent is important not only for regulating tonal
processes, but also affix order. Object markers in Moro attach as
prefixes in imperfective aspect, but the same markers appear as suffixes
in perfective aspect, outside the macrostem. Object markers longer than a
syllable or without high tone also appear as suffixes. I argue that these
data point to a templatic approach to the mobile affixes, in the sense of
both a position and prosodic requirements within the macrostem. This is
further confirmed by double object markers. In perfective aspect, both
object markers appear as suffixes. The linear order of the two objects is
determined not based on grammatical role, but by a hierarchy of
person/number features (1 > 2 > 3 and pl > sg). In imperfective aspect,
the first object marker is realized as a prefix and the second as a
suffix; the discontinuous linear order follows the same person/number
hierarchy. The Moro data point to a templatic approach to linear ordering
(Nordlinger 2008), and also provide support for approaches to morphology
that are independent of syntactic operations.

Speaker: Philippe Schlenker (Institut Jean-Nicod and NYU)

Time: Friday, May 1st 2009, 3.30pm-5pm

Place: 32-141

Title: Local Contexts: Problems and Extensions

Since the 1980’s, it has been standard to assume that the presupposition of
an expression must be entailed by its local context (Heim 1983). But how is
a local context derived from the global one? Analyses developed within
dynamic semantics offer a lexicalist solution: the meaning of any operator
specifies what its ‘Context Change Potential’ is. However the explanatory
depth of these solutions has been called into question because they can in
effect stipulate in their lexical entries the data to be accounted for. We
will offer a reconstruction of local contexts that circumvents this problem,
and can be developed within a classical (non-dynamic) semantics. We will
also discuss problems that recent experimental results raise for our
analysis.

A non-technical summary of our reconstruction of local contexts is available
in:

Schlenker, P. 2009. Presuppositions and Local Contexts, Manuscript,
Institut Jean-Nicod and NYU

A longer and more technical version is developed in:

Schlenker, P. To appear. Local Contexts. Forthcoming in Semantics and
Pragmatics

Both papers are available at https://files.nyu.edu/pds4/public/

Time: Monday 4/27, 5pm

Location: 32-D831

Speaker: Eulàlia Bonet

Title: Stem extensions in Catalan encliticized imperatives

In Catalan, conjugation II and III 2sg imperatives consist of a bare root (e.g. [‘tem] ‘fear!’). When pronominal enclitics are added, some extra material (a stem extension) surfaces (e.g. [‘temAla] ‘fear it (fem)!’). The form of the extension can vary from dialect to dialect and from verb to verb ([A], [i], [gA], [igA]), but it is totally predictable. I will argue that the presence of the extension is enforced by a phonological constraint, and that the choice of specific extensions is determined by Lexical Conservatism constraints (Steriade 1999, 2007), epenthesis being blocked by other constraints.

Please join us Wednesday at 3:00 for our talk by Tue Trinh. His talk is titled “Constraining Copy Deletion”

Speaker: Tue Trinh

Title: “Constraining Copy Deletion”

Time: 3:00-4:30 Wed., 4/29

Place: 34-303

More information, incl. the schedule for the rest of the semester:

http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/groups/synsem/index.html

TIME: Wed 4/22 3:00pm

PLACE: 34-303

TITLE: “Presuppositions of the gender features of anaphoric pronouns”

The common wisdom about the interpretation of phi-features of pronouns is that
they contribute to the meaning the corresponding presuppositions (cf.
Heim&Kratzer 1998, Sauerland 2003, etc. etc.). Namely, a pronoun “she"
contributes presuppositions about its referent requiring it to be an atom and a
female. This particular view of the gender features goes back to Cooper's 1983
book.

However, one important detail is missing: in an intensional environment where
some individual have different genders in different sets of worlds under
consideration, where must the requirement to be female be fulfilled? While the
common wisdom usually does not go that far when talking about gender features;
Cooper himself started to investigate the question and came to the conclusion
that the features of bound pronouns contribute real normal presuppositions,
while the features of free pronouns contribute a special kind of
presuppositions - indexical presuppositions, which can only be fulfilled in the
actual world.

As a closer look at the relevant data shows, Cooper's was a wrong
generalization. After the discussion of relevant examples, I hope you will
agree that, first, Cooper was right saying that presuppositions associated with
gender features are special - they cannot be accommodated in the way “normal"
presuppositions usually can; secondly, that it is not only free pronouns that
trigger such special presuppositions, but bound pronouns as well - there is no
difference between the two classes (which is probably good news.) The empirical
generalizations emerging, however, seem to require a lot of work to accommodate
into current semantic frameworks. I will discuss the demands the new data makes
of the semantic theory, and will try to sketch a schema of a theory that should
be able to accommodate those.

More information, incl. the schedule for the rest of the semester, can be found here.

The MIT Linguistics Department is pleased to announce the penultimate linguistics colloquium of the spring semester, which will take place on April 24th, 2009:

Speaker: Daniel Buering, University of California, Los Angeles

Title: At Least and At Most: The Logic of Bounds and Insecurity
Time: Friday April 24th, 3:30pm

Location: 32-141

This talk addresses the meaning of the complex determiners at least and at most and their kin in related languages. I explore the idea that the basic meaning of these is ‘exactly n or more/less than n’, and that this meaning triggers an implicature familiar from disjunction: That the speaker is not sure that exactly n, nor that more/less than n. This, I submit, covers the basic meaning of simple sentences with these, which I call speaker insecurity. Adopting a proposal in Klinedinst (2007), I then argue that at least/most trigger embedded implicatures when embedded under modal verbs, resulting in a second reading I call authoritative (making such sentences ambiguous). I then speculate about a third construal in which the determiners are split up, yielding another, stronger authoritative reading. A compositional semantics for the numerical use of these is provided, and the proposal is compared to that in Geurts and Nouwen (2007), which derives the same set of meanings by more semantic means. (This talk is based on my 2007 WCCFL paper (Buering, 2008), but more comprehensive in that it addresses the full range of meanings you get with at most, including the third construal.)

References

Buering, Daniel. 2008. The Least at least Can Do. Proceedings of the 26th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, edited by Charles B. Chang and Hannah J. Haynie, 114–120. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.

Geurts, Bart, and Rick Nouwen. 2007. At Least et al : The Semantics of Scalar Modifiers. Language 83:533–559.

Klinedinst, Nathan. 2007. Plurality and Possibility. Ph.D. thesis, UCLA.

Speaker: Omer Preminger

Title: Failure to Agree is Not a Failure: phi-agreement and (un)grammaticality

Time: Thurs 4/23, 12:30-1:45

Place: 32-D461

Based on the patterns of phi-agreement with post-verbal subjects in Hebrew, I argue against the idea that failure to establish a phi-agreement relation between a phi-probe and its putative target (e.g., due to intervention) results in ungrammaticality, or a “crash”; at the same time, I argue that phi-agreement also cannot be optional.

At first glance, these claims—-that phi-agreement is neither optional, nor does its failure result in ungrammaticality—-might seem contradictory. However, I argue that there is a third possibility, which is in fact the only one that can account for the data under consideration: phi-agreement must be attempted by every phi-probe; but if it fails (e.g., due to the presence of an intervener), its failure is systematically tolerated.

Interestingly, this mirrors the behavior of the ruled-based systems of early generative grammar, where rules were composed of a Structural Description (SD) and a Structural Change (SC). In these terms, the effects of phi-agreement, as far as valuing the features on the phi-probe, could be thought of as the SC; the locality conditions associated with phi-agreement (incl. intervention) could be thought of as the SD.

Finally, I note that these result are in conflict with the idea that Case arises as a result of phi-agreement (e.g., as a result of valuing a full phi-set on a probe; Chomsky 2000, et seq.); I show independent evidence—-from empirical domains outside of the ones discussed above—-that a theory claiming that Case is dependent on phi-agreement is untenable.

Please note: this Monday, Phonology Circle will meet at a special place and time, in order to allow participants to attend Kiparsky’s talk at Harvard at 4.

Time: Monday 4/13, 1:30-3:30pm

Location: 32-D461

Speaker: Bronwyn M. Bjorkman

Title: Uniform Exponence and Reduplication: Evidence from Kinande

In this talk I argue that verbal reduplication in Kinande (a Central Bantu language spoken in parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo) is subject to constraints enforcing identity between reduplicants of a single root.

Kinande verbal reduplication is typical for a Bantu language: a bisyllabic reduplicant is prefixed to the verbal stem (the root plus any suffixes), and means ‘quickly’ or ‘iteratively’. What is unique about the Kinande system, however, is that reduplication of morphologically complex bases is regulated by a Morpheme Integrity Constraint (MIC, Mutaka and Hyman 1990), which prohibits partial morpheme-copying: individual morphemes must be reduplicated in their entirety or not at all.

What is interesting is the form that reduplicants of morphologically complex verbs take in order to avoid violating the MIC (1b-d): such reduplicants are identical to each other and to the reduplicant of the bare, unsuffixed verb stem (1a):

(1)	a. eri-huk-a	to cook	eri-huka-huk-a
	b. eri-huk-w-a	to be cooked	eri-huka-huk-w-a or eri-hukwa-huk-w-a
	c. eri-huk-ir-a	to cook for	eri-huka-huk-ir-a (*eri-huki-huk-ir-a)
	d. mó-tw-á-huk-ire	we cooked (yes.)	mó-tw-á-huka-huk-ire (*mó-tw-á-huki-huk-ire)

The data in (1) present a challenge for a correspondence-based approach to reduplication (McCarthy and Prince, 1995): in (1b-c) we see that the reduplicant can correspond to a non-contiguous substring of the Base, and in (1d) the reduplicant contains a final [a] that is not present in the base at all.

To account for these data, I propose that Kinande reduplicants are subject to Output-Output (OO) constraints enforcing faithfulness between reduplicative morphemes themselves, not only between morphologically related whole words. Within a set of verbs sharing the same root, reduplicants are thus subject to two separate and sometimes divergent correspondence requirements: they are required by standard Base-Reduplicant (BR) faithfulness to be identical to their linearly adjacent base, but they are also required by OO constraints to be identical to all other reduplicants within the root-defined set (RED-Uniformity). When BR and OO faithfulness requirements compete, the result is optionality, as in (1b). When the MIC rules out the BR faithful candidate, as in (1c-d), the uniform reduplicant is the only grammatical option.

Speaker: Paul Kiparsky (Stanford University)

Title: Words and Paradigms

Time: Monday 4/13, 4pm

Location: Harvard Hall 202 (2nd floor)

Speaker: Guillaume Thomas

Title: Incremental comparatives

Time: Thurs 4/16, 12:30-1:45

Place: 32-D461

In this talk I will investigate a form of comparison of superiority that one
could call `incremental', as in (1) and (2):

(1) Give me (some) more coffee.

(2) Five customers bought a laptop yesterday, and one more customer bought a
desktop this morning.

In its incremental reading, the request in (1) is satisfied even if the quantity
of coffee that I receive is less than the quantity of coffee that I got
before. In the same way, (2) is true even in case only one customer bought a
computer this morning. Incremental readings are not attested with all
predicates under all conditions, cf. (3) and (4):

(3) Bob was happy right after the talk, and he is going to be happier tonight at
the party.

(4) The temperature rose by 4C yesterday afternoon, and it's going to rise some
more this afternoon.

(3) entails that Bob will be happier at the party than he was right after the
talk — hence, no incremental reading is available. (4) has an incremental
reading according to which the temperature might rise by less than 4C this
afternoon. And it might even be the case that the temperature fell down during
the night, and rose back again before now. However, it has to be the case that
the temperature rises from the degree it had reached yesterday afternoon — not
from a lower degree. A proper analysis of incremental comparison must capture
these restrictions on the availability of incremental readings.

It will be argued that incremental comparison arises from the use of a specific
incremental comparison operator. Lexical ambiguity is supported by the absence
of incremental comparison in languages that do not lack standard comparison of
superiority (eg. German). The incremental comparison operator combines with a
property G of eventualities and degrees, and asserts that G is satisfied by an
eventuality E to some degree D. It also introduces a presupposition that a
specific eventuality E' that is associated with a degree D' precedes E, such
that G is satisfied by the sum of E and E', to the degree D plus D'. In other
words, the incremental comparison operator asserts that G(E)(D) is true and
presupposes that D increments a previous degree D' associated with a previous
eventuality E'. It is argued that the reference to a sum of eventualities E+E'
in the presupposition suffices to rule out unattested/limited incremental
readings with examples such as (3) and (4).

Date: 4/17/09

Time: 2.30pm-4pm

Place: 32-141 (the usual)

Speaker: Hedde Zeijlstra (University of Amsterdam)

Title: On the origin of Berbice Dutch VO

>Intriguingly, Guyanese creole Berbice Dutch is a VO language, whereas both its substrate languages (Ijo languages, in particular Kalabari) and its superstrate (16th and 17th century Dutch) are OV (see Kouwenberg (1992)). Ever since the introduction of Bickerton’s bioprogram (Bickerton (1984) et seq), universalist creolists have taken Berbice Dutch to be a perfect illustration of VO as a default setting for basic word order.

>We argue that the VO emergence in Berbice Dutch directly results from the grammatical structure of Kalabari and 17th century Dutch and therefore counts as an argument against this universalist claim that Berbice Dutch word order must result from a UG default setting.

>Closer inspection on Kalabari and 17th century Dutch reveals (i) that, contrary to what has been assumed in. Kouwenberg (1992) and Lightfoot (2006), Kalabari does not exhibit any Verb Second effects and (ii) that 16th and 17th century Dutch still allowed VO object leakages. Given these facts, VO emergence in Berbice Dutch directly follows:

>First Kalabari had no movement causing VO in their native language. Since Kalabari had no way of recognizing the V2 property, Kalabari speakers learning Dutch must have misinterpreted Dutch VO surface strings and subsequently overgeneralized VO to all sentence types. Further input however did not lead Kalabari speakers to reject their initial VO hypothesis and adopt a more complex OV+V2 hypothesis as the VO overgeneralizations were in compliance with the existing Dutch VO leakages. Finally, this explains why Dutch planters adopted counterintuitive VO in depth orderings: those VO constructions were not considered fully ungrammatical in those days. This opened up the way for the next generation to interpret this linguistic input as VO with exceptional leakage to OV. With the loss of syntactic flexibility, finally, word order for Berbice Dutch was set on VO.

This week we have a special extra edition of Phonology Circle, featuring a talk by Shigeto Kawahara. Please note the special time!

Speaker: Shigeto Kawahara (Rutgers University)

Title: Probing knowledge of similarity through puns

Time: Friday April 17, 4-6pm

Location: 32-D831

This talk outlines the aims, results and future prospects of a general research program which investigates knowledge of similarity through the investigation of Japanese imperfect puns, dajare. I argue that speakers attempt to maximize the similarity between corresponding segments in composing puns, just as in phonology where speakers maximize the similarity between, for example, inputs and outputs. In this sense, we find non-trivial parallels between phonology and pun patterns. I further argue that we can take advantage of these parallels, and use puns to investigate our linguistic knowledge of similarity. To develop these arguments, I start with an overview of the results of some recent projects, and follow that with patterns that provide interesting lines of future research.

This week’s installment of Phonology Circle features a talk by Diana Apoussidou.

Speaker: Diana Apoussidou (UMass Amhert/University of Amsterdam)

Title: Modeling the acquisition of French liaison using allomorphy

Time: 4/6 5pm

Location: 32-D831

As language acquisition research shows (e.g. Chevrot et al. 2008), children learning French are creative when segmenting nouns starting with a vowel. Words like arbre ‘tree’ are in adult speech rarely produced in isolation and undergo a liaison with the final consonant of the preceding word, e.g. un arbre is pronounced as oe.narbr, or des arbre as de.zarbr. Children until the age of 4;6 therefore produce errors such as narbr or zarbr. Chevrot et al. (2008) analyze these errors in terms of templates that the children use in the course of development. The templates are made up of un+/Nword2/ or deux+/Zword2/ etc., where the extra consonant in front of a word depends on the preceding word.
I propose instead that the errors produced by the children can be analyzed in terms of allomorphy: children hypothesize different underlying representations for words (e.g. literally /arbr/, /narbr/ and /zarbr/ for ‘tree’) depending on what they can observe. This can be modeled with an optimization-based grammar where different underlying forms of a word are represented by lexical constraints. The results show that even with a resulting ‘correct’ lexicon (e.g. vowel-initial /arbr/ as underlying representation of ‘tree’), interference with the grammar can lead to the use of allomorphs in production (e.g. /narbr/ in combination with un, yielding /oe#narbr/ instead of /oen#arbre).

Manfred Krifka will give a talk at the LF Reading Group this coming Wednesday (April 8), at the usual time (3pm) and
place (Room 34-303). He will present his work with Alexander Grosu on equational intensional ‘reconstruction’ relatives.

This Friday, Peter Graff will give a practice talk for his upcoming CLS paper (with Florian Jaeger). Please note the special time and location!

Speaker: Peter Graff (with Florian Jaeger)

Title: The OCP is a pressure to keep words perceptually distinct: Evidence from Javanese

Time: Friday 4/10 3:30pm, 32-D831

In this study we advance two claims about co-occurrence restrictions on consonants (OCP;
Leben 1973) based on a case study of Javanese: i) belonging to the same perceptually salient
natural class significantly decreases the likelihood of two consonants co-occurring, ii) that this probabilistic penalty increases linearly with the number of similar segments within a root evidencing cumulativity of OCP effects. Generalizing from perceptual experiments, we hypothesize that the OCP functions as a lexical optimization constraint to keep the words of a language perceptually distinct.

In the first part of this study we investigate whether perceptually salient natural classes have stronger OCP effects associated with them than other sets. In order to not over-parameterize the model we chose a subset of possible natural classes, some with perceptual correlates (e.g. rhotic, lateral, strident) and some with articulatory correlates (e.g. alveolar, glide, palatal). Of 9,261 theoretically possible C1VC2VC3-templates, 1,913 are attested (Uhlenbeck, 1978). We use logistic regression to test whether C1VC2VC3-templates where any two of C1, C2, C3 belong to a natural class are less likely to occur. We simultaneously control for the frequency of C1, C2, and C3 in their respective positions as well as identity (C1=C2), which is known to be favored in Javanese. We find highly significant OCP effects of both articulatory and perceptually motivated classes. By far the strongest similarity avoidance effects, however, are observed for features that are independently known to be highly perceptually salient (rhotic-/r/ and lateral-/l/, Heid and Hawkins 2000; β/r/=-3.86,p<0.0001; β/l/=-2.47,p<0.0001; cf. mean β’s for other OCP effects=-1.47).

Gallagher (2008) shows that, for some features, listeners are better at discriminating words with 0 instances of a feature from words with 1 or 2, than at distinguishing words with 1 instance from words with 2. . Given this result, we generalize that if the OCP is a pressure to optimize perceptual distinctness of words, then additional similar segmentsmake roots even less likely. Indeed, model comparison shows that a cumulative model explains the data significantly better than a non-cumulative model (Bayesian Information Criterion difference=82.5).

Our aim is to place this study in a larger context of logistic regression models of five more languages on which we are currently conducting similar studies. We hope to see i) whether perceptually salient classes of segments co-occur less and ii) whether OCP effects are cumulative as expected under our hypothesis. We will compare our models to other models of similarity avoidance (Frisch et al. 2004, Coetzee and Pater 2008) to see whether our generalizations hold up independent of modeling approach and whether any of these models has an inherent advantage in predicting possible roots.

Speaker: Shigeru Miyagawa

Title: Distinguishing A- and A’-movements Without Reference to Case

Time: Thurs 4/9, 12:30-1:45

Place: 32-D461

In GB, A-movement was characterized in two, parallel ways. First, A-movement targets a potential theta position (thus A(rgument) movement) while A’-movement is to a non-theta position. Second, A-movement is Case-driven. The first distinction became obsolete with the advent of the predicate-internal subject hypothesis, which deprives Spec,TP of ever being a theta-position. This leaves only the second characterization for defining A-movement. S. Takahashi (2006) and S. Takahashi and Hulsey (in press, LI) propose an intriguing Case-based analysis for A-movement within MP. In this talk, I will suggest an alternative to Case by exploring instances of A-movement across a number of languages that do not involve Case (e.g., Finnish, Japanese). Based on these cases, I will introduce an entirely different approach to distinguishing A- and A’-movements that takes advantage of the phase architecture of grammar ? what I term the “Phase-Based Characterization of Chains” (PBCC) (Miyagawa, in press). This proposal notes that movements that do not cross a Transfer Domain have A-movement properties while those that cross a Transfer Domain have A’-properties. The analysis provides a straightforward account of not only the familiar A- and A’-movements including scrambling, but it also successfully accounts for more exotic and mysterious types of movements that rely on the notion of“mixed A/A’ position” found in languages such as Finnish (Holmberg and Nikanne 2002).

Miyagawa, Shigeru. In press. Why Agree? Why Move? Unifying Agreement-based and Discourse Configurational Languages. Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 54, MIT Press.

Speaker: Jeroen van Craenenbroeck (KU Brussels)

Title: Ellipsis and accommodation: the (morphological) case of
sluicing

Time: Friday, April 3, 2009, 3:30pm

Place: 32-141

>In this talk I examine instances of sluicing whereby the ellipsis site is not
structurally isomorphic to its antecedent. The data are presented in three incremental
steps: (1) copular clauses can be used in sluicing to circumvent preposition stranding
violations in non- preposition stranding languages; (2) such copular rescue is blocked in
languages with morphological case marking; (3) this blocking is overruled when (a) the
underlying copular clause is case-sensitive, or (b) the sluiced wh-phrase is syncretic
between the case assigned by the preposition and the case found in a copular clause. As
none of the existing constraints on accommodation of ellipsis antecedents (Fox 1999,
2000; Sauerland 2004; Hardt 2004, 2005) can account for this data pattern, I propose a
new constraint, which states that an ellipsis remnant has to be in the licensing
potential (cf. Chung, Ladusaw and McCloskey 1995) of both the actual and the
accommodated antecedent. This proposal will be shown to receive support from
pragmatically controlled sluicing and the interaction between spading and morphological
case in dialect Dutch.

Phonology circle returns next week with a talk by Diana Apoussidou. The schedule for the remainder of the semester is as follows:

4/6 Diana Apoussidou

4/13 Bronwyn Bjorkman

4/20 Patriots Day

4/27 Eulàlia Bonet

5/4 Peter Graff

5/11 Jelena Krivokapi?

This week’s Ling Lunch presentation has been cancelled— Ling Lunch will resume next Thursday with a talk by Shigeru Miyagawa.

Speaker: Maria Giavazzi

Title: Output driven morpho-phonological alternations in the adjectival paradigm? Preliminary results from a study with French Huntington Disease patients.


Time: Mon 3/16, 5pm

Location: 32-D831

Join us for this week’s installment of Ling Lunch, featuring a presentation by Patrick Grosz:

Speaker: Patrick Grosz

Title: “Movement and Agreement in Right-Node Raising Constructions”

Time: Thurs 12:30-1:45

Place: 32-D461

Speaker: Anna Szabolcsi (NYU)

Title: Raising Verbs as Quantifiers

Time: Friday, Mar 20, 3:30-5:00pm

Place: 32-141

>Quantification over times and worlds in natural language is traditionally considered to be
syntactically implicit. More recently tenses and modals have been treated as syntactically explicit
quantifiers. I propose that new kind of evidence for the explicitly quantificational character of
raising verbs of the “begin” and “threaten” type can be obtained from their scope interaction with
the subject.

>Consider the following two scenarios:

>“HI scenario”

Who is getting good roles before April? Mary: no; Susan: no; Eva: yes

after April? Mary: yes; Susan: no; Eva: yes

>“LO scenario”

Who is getting good roles before April? Mary: yes/no; Susan: no; Eva: yes

after April? Mary: yes; Susan: no; Eva: no

>The following English sentence may describe either situation (the ambiguity is enhanced by the
presence of the temporal adjunct). Notice that HI and the LO readings are logically independent.

>In April only Mary began to get good roles.

HI: ‘only Mary went from not getting good roles to getting them’

LO: ‘it began to be the case that only Mary is getting good roles’

>Other languages, Hungarian and Shupamem among them, have verb-initial orders that
unambiguously carry the LO reading. They do that in two different ways. In Hungarian, “only
Mary” is a nominative subject inside the infinitival complement (see Szabolcsi 2009). This talk
will focus on the Shupamem type, where the fronting of “begin” appears to assign “begin” wide
scope over the operator subject that has properly raised to the tensed clause. I will argue that
“begin” does not only have quantificational content but explicitly quantifies over a time
argument. Possibly the argument carries over to “threaten” type verbs binding a world argument.

Kusumoto 2005, On the quantification over times in natural language. Natural language
Semantics 13: 317-357.

Lechner 2007, Interpretive effects of head movement. http://ling.auf.net/lingBuzz/000178

Schlenker 2006, Ontological symmetry in language: A brief manifesto. Mind and Language 21:
504-539

Szabolcsi 2009, Overt nominative subjects in infinitival complements in Hungarian. To appear in
den Dikken & Vago, eds. http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/jBkM2QxZ/

Speaker: Herbert H. Clark (Stanford University)

Title: Rational Ways of Using Language

Time: Fri 3/20 4:00 PM, Singleton Auditorium, 46-3002

Weekly meetings of the Phonology Circle will resume next week (3/16, 5pm) with a presentation by Maria Giavazzi.

Tamina Stephenson will present on Wednesday at 3:00 PM in room 34-303. For more information about the schedule for the semester, see the LF Reading Group webpage.

Ling Lunch will resume its weekly installments on Thursday, Mar 19.

Speaker: Asaf Bachrach

Title: Syntactic Sharing and Semantic Interpretation

Time: 5:30-7pm, 32-D831

In recent minimalist literature, transformations (Move) have been
re-conceptualized as iterative applications of the basic syntactic operation
Merge. We will begin by adapting Heim and Kratzer’s (1998) semantic treatment
of movement in light of this new state of affairs. We will then propose a
generalization of the movement interpretation rule that can handle cases of
multidominance other than the canonical movement configuration. Finally we will
propose a modified and generalized Predicate Composition and Modification rule
which will also depend on syntactic sharing. These new rules will provide an
original insight into a number of well known syntactic and semantic puzzles
such as extraposition, ECM, object control, small clauses and complex causative
constructions.

(Work in progress with Roni Katzir)

Guillaume Thomas will give a talk titled “Against the use of counterpart
functions in the analysis of proxy counterfactuals” on Wednesday at 3:00
PM in room 34-303. We hope to see you there! More information,
including a tentative schedule for the semester, can be found on the [LF
Reading Group’s webpage](http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/groups/synsem/index.html).

Speaker: Lisa Travis (McGill University)

Time: Friday, March 6th, 2009, 3:30pm

Place: 32-141

The Malagasy cleft: what and why

>There are two goals of this talk. One is to discuss the particular characteristics of a certain construction in Malagasy that is used both for focus and for wh-questions. The second goal is to investigate the different ways one can go about creating an analysis for a construction that, on the surface, can look similar to an English construction but in a language that is otherwise quite different from English.
Malagasy has a construction, sometimes called a no-[nu]-construction, named for the no particle that it contains. It has the following format where the pre-no material encodes new information.

>Rasoa no mividy ny vary

Rasoa no pres.at.buy det rice

‘It is Rasoa who buys the rice.’

>Many papers have been written on the Malagasy no construction since Keenan’s (1976) seminal paper (e.g. Law 2005, Paul 2001, Pearson 2006, Potsdam 2004), but the exact nature of the construction is still being debated. Much of the controversy has centred around three issues.

>(i) the nature of the [no XP] (clause or DP?),

(ii) the nature of no (Det, Focus head, or Comp?), and

(iii) the relation between the pre-no constituent and the following material
(movement, predication, or something else?).

>In this talk I revisit these issues and bring new data into the discussion arguing in the end that (i) the [no XP] is nominal, (ii) no is in Det, and (iii) the pre-no constituent has not moved from the [no XP].

>While the details of the analysis are partly driven by the data, they are also partly driven by the inherent nature of Malagasy within a language typology delineated by a movement typology. I have argued elsewhere (Travis 2005, 2006) that languages differ as to whether a feature triggers XP or X0 movement. In a language like English (or Italian), a V feature triggers X0 movement while a D feature triggers XP movement, and in a language like Malagasy, the reverse is true (there is VP and D0 movement). Given that Malagasy differs fundamentally from English, we might expect that a surface similar construction would have a fundamentally different analysis.

References

Keenan, Edward L. 1976. Remarkable Subjects in Malagasy. In Subject and Topic, ed. Charles Li, 249-301. New York: Academic Press.

Law, Paul. 2005. Questions and clefts in Malagasy. In Proceedings of Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association, eds. Jeffrey Heinz and Dimitris Ntelitheos, 195-209. UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics.

Paul, Ileana. 2001. Concealed pseudo-clefts. Lingua 111:707-727.

Pearson, Matt. 2006. What’s No? Clause linking in Malagasy. San Diego: Workshop on Comparative Austronesian Syntax.

Potsdam, Eric. 2004. Wh-questions in Malagasy. In Proceedings of the 11th Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association ed. Paul Law, 244-258. ZAS Working Papers in Linguistics.

Travis, Lisa deMena. 2005. VP, D0 movement languages. In Negation, Tense and Clausal Architecture: Cross-linguistic Investigations, eds. Raffaella Zanuttini, Héctor Campos, Elena Herburger and Paul Portner. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

Travis, Lisa deMena. 2006. Voice Morphology in Malagasy as Clitic Left Dislocation or Malagasy in Wonderland: through the looking glass. In Clause structure and adjuncts in Austronesian languages, eds. Hans-Martin Gärtner, Paul Law and Joachim Sabel, 281-318. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

There is no Phonology Circle meeting this week; the schedule for the remainder of the semester is below. Please contact Adam if you wish to sign up for an available slot.

3/2 [open]

3/9 [open]

3/16 Maria Giavazzi

3/23 Spring Break

3/30 [open]

4/6 Diana Apoussidou

4/13 Bronwyn Bjorkman

4/20 Patriots Day

4/27 Eulàlia Bonet

5/4 Peter Graff

5/11 Jelena Krivokapi?

Speaker: Alistair Knott

Title: “A sensorimotor interpretation of Minimalist syntax”

Time: Thurs 12:30-1:45

Place: 32-D461

Abstract: in PDF format

The MIT Linguistics Department is pleased to announce the first linguistics colloquium of the spring semester:

Speaker: T. Florian Jaeger (University of Rochester)

Title: Efficient Language Production?

Time: Friday, February 27th, 2009, 3:30pm

Place: 32-141

Abstract:

In this talk, I return to a question that has fascinated language researchers from various disciplines for a long time (Zipf, 1929; Mandelbrot, 1965; Givon, 1987; Hawkins, 1994; Hale, 2001; Bybee, 2002; Genzel & Charniak, 2002; Manin, 2006, among many others), although it has arguably never been at the heart of language research: To what extent is human language processing efficient?

More specifically, I ask to what extent speakers structure their utterances so as to
be communicatively efficient. I present a series of studies that test the Uniform
Information Density hypothesis (Jaeger, 2006; Levy & Jaeger, 2007; based on Genzel
& Charniak, 2002): Within the bounds defined by grammar, speakers prefer to
structure their utterances so that information is distributed uniformly across the
signal (information density; where the information content of a linguistic unit is
defined information theoretically, Shannon, 1948, as -log p(unit)). Where speakers
can choose between several variants to encode their message, they prefer the variant
with more uniform information density. Uniform Information Density is theoretically
optimal in that it maximizes the amount of successfully transferred information and
minimizes average processing load.

I discuss evidence from phonetic, phonological, morphosyntactic, and syntactic
reduction (word durations; weak vs. full vowels; t/d deletion; contractions such as he’s
vs. he is; whiz-deletion in passive subject-extracted relative clauses), as well as studies
on discourse planning beyond the level of the clause. I also present new experimental
evidence from the distribution of disfluencies and gestures in information dense
stretches of speech. The results of all these studies lend to support to the hypothesis
that language production is organized to be efficient. When encoding their intended
message into linguistic utterances, speakers are sensitive to the information density
of the variants they can choose from.

(In collaboration with: Susan Wagner Cook, Austin Frank, Carlos Gomez Gallo, Ting Qian, and Matt Post)

Speaker: Michael C. Frank (MIT)

Title: Early Word Learning Through Communicative Inference

Time: Thurs 2/19, 10am

Location: 46-3189

Please note special day; Tuesday 2/17 follows a Monday schedule

Speaker: Tara McAllister

Title: Articulatory and Perceptual Factors in a Child-Specific Error Process

Time: Tues 2/17, 5pm

Location: 32-D831

> Several commonly observed processes in child speech lack counterparts in adult phonologies. Particularly problematic are child processes of neutralization in prosodically strong positions, which contravene our
understanding of positional neutralization as a phonetically motivated process governed by the relative
strength of perceptual cues. Previous analyses have implicated both child-specific patterns of perception
(Dinnsen & Farris-Trimble, 2008) and limitations of the immature articulatory apparatus (Inkelas & Rose,
2008) as the source of this reversal of the adult pattern. I will evaluate the evidence for child-specific
perceptual and articulatory factors in an experimental investigation of one child’s pattern of velar
fronting in strong position. It will be shown that this child exhibited an adult-like perceptual advantage
for contrasts in word-initial position. This suggests that articulatory rather than perceptual factors are
responsible for his pattern of neutralization in strong position. Acoustic data from neutralized /d/ and
/g/ tokens will also be presented to extend our understanding of articulatory factors that contribute to
the process of velar fronting.

Ling lunch this week (February 12th) features a talk by Joseph Perkell



Title: “Movement goals and feedback and feedforward mechanisms in speech production.

Time: Thurs 12:30-1:45

Place: 32-D461



Next week (2/19), Pritty Patel, Patrick Grosz, Evelina Fedorenko and Ted Gibson will be speaking about “Restrictions on E-type pronouns: Making the case for Uniqueness”

The Phonology Circle will be moving back to its regular Monday meeting time for the spring semester. (Mondays 5pm, 32-D831)
The first meeting of the semester will be next Monday, Feb 9. We’ll start with a brief organizational meeting to decide on the schedule for the semester, and then Hrayr will give a BLS practice talk on the topic of Stress-dependent vowel reduction.

If you would like to give a presentation this semester but can’t attend the organizational meeting, please send a message to Adam to let him know.

Lisa Selkirk will be speaking in the Linguistic Theory Group at Harvard this Friday:

January 30th, 4:00pm

Boylston Hall 104

Elisabeth Selkirk, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

“Spelling out syntactic constituents as prosodic domains: match constraints and the syntax-prosodic structure interface”

>Domain-sensitive phenomena of sentence phonology provide evidence for a parsing of phonological representation into three basic levels of constituency above the foot: intonational phrase (?), phonological phrase (?) and prosodic word (?), as shown, for example, in the Kisseberth 1994 study of the tonal phonology of the Bantu language Tsonga. On the basis of data from Tsonga and other languages it will be argued that the relation between syntactic constituency and phonological domain structure should be captured in terms of syntactic structure faithfulness constraints calling for syntactic clauses, phrases and words to match up with corresponding constituents of an independent prosodic structure representation (namely ?, ? and ?, respectively). Fully satisfying these interface Match constraints would produce a prosodic constituent structure that is isomorphic to the syntactic constituency and at variance with the so-called Strict Layer Hypothesis, creating systematic violations of the alleged prosodic markedness constraints Exhaustivity and Nonrecursivity (contra Selkirk 1986, 1995, Truckenbrodt 1999). This paper argues that the evidence supports a theory of the interface which takes an isomorphism between syntactic and prosodic constituency as an ideal. But the evidence also shows that this ideal may fail to be met, due to the role for prosodic structure markedness constraints like Exhaustivity, Nonrecursivity, prosodic minimality and so on, which may force the domain structure to conform to the (potentially conflicting) ideal of a phonological organization that is appropriate for pronunciation. Indeed, it is the role prosodic markedness constraints play in the characterization of phonological domain structure that makes the case that domain-sensitive phenomena are sensitive to an independent prosodic structure and not directly to syntactic structure. The working hypothesis is that the prosodic structure realization component of a grammar consists of an optimality theoretic ranking of interface Match constraints and prosodic structure markedness constraints. The claim is that such a grammar allows for a descriptively accurate account of the range of attested phonological domain structures in individual languages, and for a characterization of typological differences in domain organization found cross-linguistically.

>Any theory of constraints on the relation between syntactic constituency and prosodic constituency must specify which types of syntactic constituency are relevant to phonology. It will be argued that Match Phrase and Match Clause each stand for a family of constraints. Match Phrase includes Match constraints distinguishing between phrases that are specifiers and those that are complement of the phasal heads ? (Chomky 2001) and Top⁰ (Kratzer and Selkirk 2007); the Match Clause constraints distinguish between comma phrases (Potts 2005) and those that are the complement of the phasal head C (Chomsky 2001, Pak 2008). Motivation for distinguishing subtypes of Match constraints comes from differences in their interaction with prosodic structure markedness constraints in different languages, expressible in terms of distinct constraint rankings.

Raj Singh will be giving a practice job talk today (Monday 1/26), 10:55-11:55, in Room 32-D461:

“Symmetric and Interacting Alternatives for Implicature and Accommodation.”

The talk is geared to two interdisciplinary audiences (the Institute of Cognitive Science at Carleton University, and the departments of linguistics and philosophy at Yale), so feedback from psychologists and philosophers would be especially welcome.

Speaker: Michael C. Frank (Graduate Student, Gibson Lab)

Title: Numerical cognition in the absence (or temporary unavailability) of language for number

Time: Tues 12/9 Noon, 46-3310

Come join us for the last Phonology Circle of the semester, featuring a talk by Giorgio Magri.

Title: The Ranking Problem in Optimality Theory

Time: Wed 12/10, 5pm, 32-D831

> Every learning problem can be formulated as an optimization problem: within a
given typology, pick the grammar that is best given the data. Very little work
has been done within Generative Grammar on how to actually solve the
optimization problem itself. Recently, a small but growing body of literature
within the framework of Optimality Theory (OT) has started to study the
optimization problem itself. I will introduce the main ideas of this enterprise
and I will illustrate it by focusing on a problem currently open in
computational OT, namely that of devising incremental ranking algorithms that
perform both promotion and demotion. I will explain why the problem is
interesting. I will review one such algorithm, namely Boersma’s (1994) GLA. I
will discuss why the algorithm does not work, by explaining in detail what goes
wrong in the case of a counterexample discovered by Pater (2007). I will then
note that the ranking problem within OT can be described as a linear
feasibility problem. This very simple observation has far reaching consquences.
In particular, it offers a straightforward way do device the desired incremental
algorithm.

This week Shigeru Miyagawa will speak at the Harvard Linguistics Theory Group

Title: Why Agree? Why Move? Unifying Agreement-based and Discourse-configurational Languages

Time: December 2nd, Tuesday

Location: Boylston Hall Room 303; 6 p.m.

Why do we find agreement in human language? And why is there movement? I will propose a unified answer to these questions based on a specific design for human language that we have assumed in generative grammar since the early 1980s — in GB, LFG, MP and others. What I will show is that agreement must be a universal phenomenon, occurring in every language, and with it, movement. This is obviously a more abstract notion of agreement than phi-feature agreement since many languages lack such agreement. I will show that informational structural features such as topic and focus play a role in “agreementless” languages that is computationally equivalent to phi-features. That is, topic/focus and phi-feature agreement are two sides of the same coin, both there to implement “agreement” and “movement” within exactly the same mechanism.

The Language @MIT series returns this week, featuring a talk by Regina Barzilay.

Title: Learning to Model Text Structure

Speaker: Regina Barzilay, CSAIL

When: Wednesday Dec 3, 3-4:30pm

Where: 26-310

Discourse models capture relations across different sentences in a document.
These models are crucial in applications where it is important to generate
coherent text. Traditionally, rule-based approaches have been predominant in
discourse research. However, these models are hard to incorporate as-is in
modern systems: they rely on handcrafted rules, valid only for limited domains,
with no guarantee of scalability or portability.

In this talk, I will present discourse models that can be effectively learned
from a collection of unannotated texts. The key premise of our work is that the
distribution of entities in coherent texts exhibits certain regularities. The
models I will be presenting operate over an automatically-computed
representation that reflects distributional, syntactic, and referential
information about discourse entities. This representation allows us to induce
the properties of coherent texts from a given corpus, without recourse to manual
annotation or a predefined knowledge base. To conclude my talk, I will
show how these models can be effectively integrated in statistical generation
and summarization systems.

This is joint work with Mirella Lapata and Lillian Lee.

Phonology circle this week features a presentation by Jen Michaels.

Title: Summing Up Constraint Interaction: Chain Shifts in a Split Additive Model

Time: Wed 12/3, 5pm, 32-D831

Please join us for this week’s Ling-lunch:

Peter Graff

“The Culture-Phonology Interface: Implications of Laboratory Sociophonetics for Phonological Theory”

Thursday, Dec. 4

12:30-1:45

Room 32-D461

>In this talk we will address the impact of social factors on phonological generalizations. The notion of a social variable in speech will be defined. An overview of laboratory and corpus-based studies of the interaction of phonetic variation and different social variables will be provided. Common factors of categories affected by sociophonetic variation and possible causes for sociophonetic variation will be identified. Cross-linguistic evidence for high-level phonological alternations interacting with social factors will be presented and possible models will be discussed.

>In the second part of the talk we report on research probing selective imitation in the laboratory, comparing male and female subjects’ imitation of male and female talkers. We also compare male and female subjects’ imitation of the same stimuli when they are phonetically ambiguous but labeled as “Michael” or “Jessica” to shed light on the question of whether socially motivated phonetic imitation is conditioned by acoustic or cultural factors.

Speaker: Leston Buell (Leiden University Centre for Linguistics)

Title: Purpose WHY in vP, reason WHY in CP: evidence from Zulu

Time: Friday, December 5th, 2008, 3:30pm

Place: Room 32-141

There are two postverbal strategies for asking ‘why’ in Zulu. The first is the purpose applicative question, which is akin to English what for questions. This is in a sense a bipartite strategy, exhibiting a wh enclitic (-ni ‘what’) and a applicative verbal affix that licenses it. The second strategy uses the word ngani ‘why’ and is used only to question the reason of a negative clause. While in both cases the wh element is postverbal, it is argued to be in very different syntactic positions in the two cases. The enclitic -ni ‘what’ of the purpose applicative is shown to be below the inflectional domain, while ngani of a reason question is in the complementiser domain.

In these questions, several types of evidence show that purpose WHY is below the inflectional domain in Zulu, including the distribution of conjoint and disjoint verb forms and the point of attachment of the applicative morpheme. Furthermore, purpose questions are shown to exhibit transparency effects, in the sense that within a “restructuring domain”, both parts of this question (the particle -ni ‘what’ and the applicative verbal affix that licenses it) attach to the lower verb but are interpreted on the upper verb. Beginning with Rizzi’s (1999) analysis of Italian, it has been claimed for a growing number of languages that, unlike other wh phrases, reason WHY is introduced in the complementiser field rather than moving there from a position below the inflectional domain. In all of the languages for which such an analysis has been proposed, the ‘why’ word appears in some left-peripheral or otherwise preverbal position. Zulu ngani ‘why’ is argued to need a similar analysis, even though it appears in postverbal position. Arguments for the analysis are made on the basis of the distribution of conjoint and disjoint verb forms, interactions between WHY and negation, the absence of transparency effects, and previous analyses of Zulu’s elocutionary force particles yini and na. Specifically, ngani is argued to be an Int0 head (a head in the complementiser domain), around which the IP must move. It is suggested that reason WHY (as opposed to purpose WHY) is universally introduced above negation.

This Tuesday (11/18) Ken Wexler will speak at the Harvard Linguistics Theory Group.

Title: Clefts, Inverse Copulas, and Passives: Understanding Their Delayed Acquisition as Phasal Difficulties

Time: Tuesday, November 18th, 6 p.m. Boylston Hall Room 303

This week’s Phonology Circle presentation is by Jonah Katz.

Title: Phonetic similarity in an English hip-hop corpus
Time: Wed 11/12, 5pm, 32-D831

> In this talk, I present preliminary results from a corpus study of hip-hop. Previous studies on half-rhyme in Romanian poetry (Steriade 2003) and Japanese hip-hop and imperfect puns (Kawahara 2007, 2008) have established that the frequency of specific imperfect rhymes varies with the phonetic distance between the correspondents involved in the rhyme. The current study extends that finding to English hip-hop. The complex nature of the data poses special challenges for data extraction and analysis. I’ll discuss in some detail how the corpus was constructed and what the proper statistical methods are for testing generalizations about half-rhymes.

Please join us for this week’s Ling-lunch:

Vanja de Lint

“Argument Structure in Classifier Constructions in ASL”

Thursday, Nov. 20

12:30-1:45

Room 32-D461

Ora Matushansky (University of Utrecht)

“Special Cases”

Friday, November 21st, 2008, 3:30pm

[Room 32-141](http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg?mapterms=32-141)

There will be a party in honor of Ora, beginning at 6:30pm. Directions to the party will be provided at the talk venue.

[Abstract in pdf format](http://whamit.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/special-cases-abstract.pdf)

This week’s Phonology Circle will feature a presentation by Hrayr Khanjian.

Title: Formerly stressed vowels in Western Armenian

Time: Wed 11/12, 5pm, 32-D831

In this talk, I examine the stressed and unstressed vowels of related forms of Western Armenian. Stressed high vowels [i] and [u] either change to [ə], as seen in (1) or delete, seen in (2) and a stressed diphthong [uj] changes to [u], as seen in (3), when stress shifts off of them. The rest of the vowels and diphthongs (mostly) are unaffected.

1. • “letter” [kír] → [kər-él] “to write”
   • “lie” [súd] → [səd-él] “to make false”
2. • “monkey” [gabíg] → [gabg-él] “to mime”
   • “clean”[makúr] → [makr-él] “clean”
3. • “color” [kújn] → [kun-avór] “colorful”
   • “culture” [məʃagújt] → [məʃagut-ajín] “cultural”

Many languages exhibit phonological differences between stressed and unstressed vowels.
There are languages, like Catalan, Bulgarian and Russian, where all unstressed vowels reduce.
In another set of languages, like Palauan, Romanian and Armenian, only a certain set of
vowels that once bore stress reduce when stress shifts.

Unlike Romanian and Palauan, Armenian has a phonological process of ə-epenthesis. I argue
that the surface schwas that seem to be corresponding to the once stressed high vowels are
also part of this epenthesis process. Without positing a new phonological mechanism to
account for the high vowel disappearance, I incorporate the derived environment effect into
the already present phonology of Western Armenian.

This week is the kick-off installment of a new talk series, Language @MIT.

Title: Spoken Conversational Systems

Speaker: Stephanie Seneff, Spoken Language Systems group, CSAIL

When: Wednesday Nov 12, 3-4:30pm

Where: 26-310

The Spoken Language Systems group in CSAIL has been developing multimodal
dialogue systems for over two decades. These systems typically provide
information on a specific topic such as flight scheduling, weather,
geographical information, calendar management, etc. Our goal has been to build
systems that engage in natural spoken conversation, using a so-called
“mixed-initiative” dialogue strategy. In this talk, I will first give a high
level overview of system architecture and components. The main content of the
talk will emphasize discourse and dialogue modelling, in the context of these
spoken dialogue systems. I will also describe techniques used to stress test the
system and guide system development, such as simulated dialogue interaction.
I will mainly use the multimodal restaurant domain and the telephone-access
flight scheduling domain as illustrative examples. Audio and video clips will
be played to demonstrate system capabilities.

Please join us for this week’s Ling-lunch:

Claire Halpert

Thursday, Nov. 13

12:30-1:45

Room 32-D461

Please join us for this week’s Ling-lunch:

Thursday, Nov. 6

12:30-1:45

Room 32-D461

Jeremy Hartman

“The Semantic Effects of non-A’ Traces: Evidence from Ellipsis Parallelism”

>A central puzzle in the syntax/semantics interface concerns the interpretation of movement. A-bar movement has evident semantic consequences, but the status of A-movement and head-movement is less evident—with the result that some authors have called these types of movement into question, or relegated them to the phonological component of the grammar. This talk presents evidence from ellipsis parallelism that all three types of movement have effects on semantics.

>Takahashi and Fox (2005) and Merchant (2008) propose that ellipsis is subject to a constraint “MaxElide” that prefers a larger elided constituent over a smaller one, within a given Parallelism Domain determined by semantic identity to an antecedent. I examine new data concerning the interactions of MaxElide with wh-adverbials, embedded clauses, and T-to-C movement. I present and account for an expanded MaxElide paradigm by arguing that all types of traces (A-traces, A-bar traces, and traces of head movement) count towards the calculation of the Parallelism Domain.

On Wednesday, November 5, Prof. Judy Kegl will give a talk at UMass Boston. The title of her talk is “Four Instincts that Lead us to Language.”

Sponsored by the Hispanic Studies Department, the Undergraduate Program in Linguistics, and the Friends of Healey Library of the University of Massachusetts Boston, the event will be from 3:30 to 5:00 at the Center for Library Instruction, Healey Library, 4th floor, UMass Boston.

The UMass Boston campus is accessible by public transportation. For directions, go to http://www.umb.edu/parking_transport/directions.html.

For disability services, please contact the Customer Service at least 48 hours in advance at 617-287-4000 or via email at customter.service@umb.edu.

For further information, you can contact Luis Alonso-Ovalle (luis.alonso-ovalle@umb.edu) or Wanda Rivera-Rivera (wanda.rivera-rivera@umb.edu).

Please join us for this week’s ling lunch:

Norvin Richards

“Beyond Strength and Weakness 2: EPP and head-movement”

Thursday, Oct. 30

12:30-1:45

32-D461

>In an earlier paper, “Beyond Strength and Weakness”, I attempted to develop a
theory that could predict whether wh-movement would be overt or covert in a
given language, on the basis of observable properties of the language’s word
order and prosody. This talk is the sequel to that paper; I will try to
predict whether languages should exhibit EPP effects or not, and (time
permitting) how far their verbs move, again on the basis of observable
properties. As in the earlier paper, the goal will be to do away with
syntactic diacritics like ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ (and, for that matter, ‘EPP’), by
allowing the syntax to make more direct reference than usual to the phonological
representation. We will see more evidence bearing on the nature of that
reference, helping us to understand how much syntax knows about phonology.

Phonology Circle will return next week (Wed Nov 12) with a presentation by Hrayr Khanjian.

On Friday, we will have a special additional session of Phonology Circle, with a talk by Larry Hyman (UC Berkeley). (Please note special time and place!)

Title: Situating Phonologization: The role of Contrast

Time: Friday Oct 24, 10am-12pm, 26-142

In this talk I have three goals: (i) to define and delimit the notion of "phonologization"; (ii) to determine how phonologization fits into the bigger picture; (iii) to discuss a few examples of
(continued) interest to me, e.g. the effects of voiced obstruents ("depressor consonants") on pitch; vowel harmony; word- and utterance demarcation. I begin by considering the original definition of phonologization ("A universal phonetic tendency is said to become 'phonologized' when language-specific reference must be made to it, as in a phonological rule." (Hyman 1972:170)), a concept which can be traced back at least as far as Baudouin de Courtenay (1895 [1972:184]). Particular attention is paid to the role of contrast in the phonologization process. After presenting canonical examples of phonologization (particularly transphonologizations, whereby a contrast is shifted or transformed but maintained), I suggest that the term "phonologization" needs to be extended to cover other ways that phonological structure either changes or comes into being. Throughout the talk emphasis is on what Hopper (1987:148) identifies as "movements towards structure": the emergence of grammar (grammaticalization) and its subsequent transformations (regrammaticalization, degrammaticalization). After showing that phonologization has important parallels to well-known aspects of "grammaticalization" (Hyman 1984), I conclude that phonologization is but one aspect of the larger issue of how (phonetic, semantic, pragmatic) substance becomes linguistically codified into form.

Please join us for this week’s Ling-lunch:

Patrick Grosz

“Particle-izing Imperatives”

Thursday, Oct. 23

12:30-1:45

32-D461

>The semantics of imperatives has been in the focus of recent research such as
Portner (2005, 2007) and Schwager (2005, 2006). Schwager assumes a covert
performative modal with universal force. Portner claims that imperatives do not
encode modal force and suggests a pragmatic account in which imperatives
contribute to the hearer?s To-Do List and a rational speaker aims to realize
as many entries on her To-Do List as possible. To account for the difference
between universal, “commanding” imperatives and existential, “permissive”
imperatives, Schwager (2005) develops a pragmatic account that crucially
assumes that the hearer has already wanted to carry out the action expressed in
the imperative, but has felt that it was prohibited to do so (see also Han 2000
in this context). In contrast, Portner (2007) suggests that such differences
are linked to various sections of the hearer’s To-Do List, corresponding to
different ordering sources (e.g. orders are deontic and invitations/permissions
are bouletic, referring to the hearer’s wishes). Crucially, both assume that
imperatives always express “necessity” and the feeling of “possibility” is a
derived effect. In this talk I show that this cannot be correct.

>In this talk I revisit the semantics of imperatives in the light of the
German discourse particles JA (pronounce: “stressed JA”, homophonous with ja
‘yes’) and ruhig (homophonous with ruhig ‘quietly’). These elements occur only
in imperatives and in modalized declaratives, but not in non-modalized
declaratives. They restrict the modal type of the modal operator they occur
with, and are sensitive to modal force (JA only combines with universal force
and ruhig with existential force). I show that the distribution of JA and ruhig
can only be accounted for by assuming that imperatives contain a covert element
that introduces modal necessity or modal possibility. The empirical evidence
thus favors an approach that assumes an element introducing modal
quantification (such as Schwager’s) over an approach that does not involve
quantification (such as Portner’s). However, it also requires a fundamental
revision of Schwager, in that we need to assume the imperative operator to be
lexically ambiguous between a universal necessity reading and an existential
possibility reading.

This week’s Phonology Circle will feature a presentation by Stefano Versace on Italian meter.

Title: Metrical form and Montale’s meter

Time: Wed 10/22, 5pm, 32-D831

(1)	nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita	“in the middle of our life’s stride”
(2)	mi ritrovai per una selva oscura	“I found myself in a dark wood”
(3)	e tu seguissi le fragili architetture	“would you follow the frail architectures”

At first blush, the three lines above may appear to be written in the same meter, but in fact they
are not. Famously, example (1) and (2) are the first two lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and
instantiate two different patterns of endecasillabo, the most common meter in the Italian tradition:
Generative Metrics (Cf. Nespor & Vogel (1986)) has provided a scansion of this meter in terms of
an abstract iambic pattern, elaborating on Halle & Keyser (1966) proposal. Example (3) instead is
a line from Montale’s poetry, and it differs from an endecasillabo in that it has more syllables than
expected. It therefore exemplifies what the metrical tradition has labelled tredecasillabo (i.e. a 13-
syllable line), simply acknowledging a difference in measure. Here I am going to claim instead
that such lines can be scanned as endecasillabi by applying some deletion (Δ-) rules (as proposed by Fabb & Halle (2008)). After providing the necessary specifics about scansion rules in Italian
metrics, the talk will focus on the interpretation of this meter, also discussing different
frameworks for motivating the deletion. Beside the aforementioned Fabb & Halle (2008) modular
approach, they mainly include constraint-based and prosodic-constituency-based interpretations;
here, I will argue for the first one to be the most appropriate.

The schedule for the rest of the term is:

• November 12: Hrayr Khanjian
• November 19: Jonah Katz
• December 3rd: Jen Michaels
• December 10: Giorgio Magri

Larry Hyman (University of California, Berkeley)

Title: Tonal and Non-Tonal Intonation in Shekgalagari

Time: Friday, October 24th, 2008, 3:30pm, Room 32-141

There will be a party in honor of Larry, beginning at 6:30pm, at Donca’s place.

The study of intonation in a (fully) tone language presents both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is to see how a language which exploits F0 mainly for the purpose of lexical and grammatical contrasts succeeds in encoding the functions often expressed by means of intonation in non-tonal languages. As is well-known, word-level distinctions can be quite rich in tone systems, which contrast up to five pitch levels and a dozen or more tonal contours or clusters, e.g. Wobe (Kru; Liberia) (Bearth & Link 1980, Singler 1984). Word-level tones, in turn, can be subject to considerable manipulation by the postlexical phonology, where juxtaposition, syntactic conditioning, or phonological phrasing can modify the word-level inputs and introduce additional pitch features, e.g. the phrase-final H% boundary tone of Kinande (Bantu; DRC) (Hyman 1990). Particularly when tone systems are complex in these ways, the question is how there can be much room left for intonation to modify or add pitch specifications without obscuring the word-level tonal contrasts. On the one hand, there are specific strategies that different tone languages employ to keep tones and “intonemes” separate. For example, in Mazahua (Otomian; Mexico), there are no lexical tonal contrasts on the last syllable of a word. As Pike (1951:101) puts it, “The pitches of all syllables which do not immediately precede word space are those of the tonemic system. The pitch of any syllable immediately preceding word space is part of the intonemic system.” On the other hand, there are languages where intonation clearly overrides lexical tones. In Coreguaje (Tukanoan; Colombia), for instance, CVCV nouns contrast H-H, H-L, L-H, and L-L tones. However, when such nouns occur in isolation, their tones merge as L-HL with statement intonation and H-L with question intonation (Gralow 1985). If these two strategies can be termed “accommodation” vs. “submission”, a third option is “avoidance”: In many languages with highly developed tones systems there doesn’t seem to be “structured” as opposed to what Ladd (1996) terms “paralinguistic” intonation, e.g. the raising or lowering of pitch associated with excitement, fear, etc. Can a language do without such structured intonation, and if so, what does it put in its place? The strongest limiting cases are probably languages with highly developed tone systems. This constitutes the opportunity side of the above-mentioned challenge: Since they have more reason to resist, tone languages offer a particularly appropriate forum for investigating the essential properties of intonation, e.g. the universal tendency to phonologize Gussenhoven’s (2005) “three biological codes”.

In this paper we take a close look at the intonational properties of Shekgalagari, a Bantu language of the Sotho-Tswana (S.30) subgroup spoken in Botswana. We begin by presenting the tone system, which has two underlying tones /H, Ø/ and a derived phonemic downstep (!H). We then turn to the relatively rich intonation system. We start with what we term “declarative” penultimate length + L tone (PLL): the vowel of a prepause-penultimate syllable is lengthened and a marked L is assigned to its second mora. We then go through the different contexts where PLL typically fails to occur: (1) yes-no and WH-questions; (2) imperatives and hortatives (e.g. ‘may he enter!’); (3) vocatives and exclamatives (e.g. ‘what a fool!’); (4) paused lists (e.g. ‘I ate corn… rice… and beans’); (5) ideophones (e.g. ‘it went splash!’). While other Southern Bantu languages have also been noted to “suspend” penultimate lengthening in questions, Shekgalagari is unusual in having so many other contexts where the vowel remains short. Recall that the declarative not only lengthens the penultimate vowel, but also assigns a L tone. It is therefore striking that all five of the above are speech act types where speakers might be expected to raise their voice, and hence resist the L tone. We claim therefore that non-declarative = unmarked in Shekgalagari: penultimate lengthening (+ L) is not suspended, but rather is not assigned in questions, imperatives, vocatives etc. (Shekgalagari also differs from related languages in not assigning PLL when the prepause word is monosyllabic.)

After illustrating the above speech act types, we discuss their interactions. For example, words which occur in paused lists may optionally lengthen their final vowel in the declarative, but not in questions or imperatives. Also, polysyllabic ideophones obligatorily devoice their final vowel, but not in hortatives (‘may it go splash!’) and questions (‘did it go splash?’). We then discuss two types of intonational overlap. The first, termed “emphasis”, allows PLL to be assigned in all of the above contexts except (1), with varying results, e.g. making a WH-question or imperative seem more like a statement, repeating the question or command in exasperation, or other “emphasis”. Although receiving PLL, the intention of these utterances remains clear, since the speech act is still decipherable from the various redundancies, e.g. a WH word, the lack of a subject in an imperative, PLL on the final word of the paused list, etc. However, if PLL is assigned to a yes-no question, there is no such redundancy, and the result is a statement. In addition, an intonation which we call “urgency” takes the declarative form with PLL and raises the whole register, exaggerating the pitch intervals (e.g. ‘Fire!’, ‘Thief!’). We interpret this as a case of Ladd’s paralinguistic intonation.

After demonstrating that Shekgalagari has a rich and interesting intonational system, we draw two conclusions. The first is that the so-called avoidance strategy needs to be refined: A tone language may resist a tonal implementation of intonation, which poses potential complications, but there are other intonational features that do not necessarily have to be avoided: lengthening, devoicing, glottalization, breathiness, and even nasalization. Perhaps we have been too tonocentric? On the other hand, Shekgalagari confirms the strategy of accommodation: While many Eastern and Southern Bantu languages have penultimate lengthening, it has long been recognized that such lengthening exists only in languages which have lost the historical lexical vowel-length contrast. (Languages which have preserved the contrast would, in turn, tend to avoid penultimate lengthening, which could merge long and short vowels.) Although the effect of the L of PLL is rather noticeable (short H-H alternates with long HL:-L), here too there is no loss of contrast, and similarly for the other intonations. We end with some speculations on the limitations on what features can be used for intonation and on how lexical contrasts accommodate, submit to, or avoid intonational competition.

This week’s Cog Lunch features a talk by Asaf Bachrach.

Title: fMRI investigation of incremental language processing in a naturalistic context

Time: 10/14 at 12pm, 46-3189

Our study examined brain activation in a naturalistic language processing task, with a particular focus on the temporal dynamics inherent to this complex cognitive task.

Sentence processing, in particular in the auditory modality, is incremental. The structure and associated compositional meaning of a sentence are not provided to the listener instantaneously, but require integration over multiple temporally spaced inputs. Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence (a small sample of which will be reviewed) point out that the human parser makes use of an `eager’ strategy, incrementally constructing the eventual sentential representation based on partial input. In addition, it appears that this incremental strategy is probabilistic and parallel. The parser considers potentially multiple alternative analyses, which are probabilistically weighted.

Most behavioral and imaging paradigms used to explore aspects of incremental auditory sentence processing have been limited by the use of qualitative or binary contrasts and by a sparse sampling approach (often only one data point per sentence). In this talk we will present the results of a novel imaging paradigm that attempts to overcome the above limitations.

We used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to monitor brain activation while subjects passively listen to short narratives. The texts were written so as to introduce various syntactic complexities (relative clauses, embedded questions, etc.) not usually found (in such density) in actual corpora.

With the use of computationally implemented probabilistic parser (taken to represent an ‘ideal listener’) we have calculated a number of temporally dense (one per word) parametric measures reflecting different aspects of the incremental processing of each sentence. We used the resulting measures to model the observed brain activity (BOLD). We were able to identify different brain networks that support incremental linguistic processing and characterize their particular function.

In the talk we will present data regarding the effect of contextually based prediction (or surprisal), distinguishing lexical and syntactic prediction, and the effect of local structural ambiguity, distinguishing the effects of uncertainty from these of reanalysis.

Olga Vaysman (MIT) will be presenting in this week’s meeting of the Phonology Circle

Title: Segmental Alternations and Metrical Theory

Time: Wed 10/15, 5pm, 32-D831

This talk focuses on segmental alternations that are dependent on word-internal prosody, such as prominence and foot boundaries. Ever since the earliest work in metrical theory that introduced metrical foot (e.g. Liberman and Prince 1977) and in contemporary metrical theory (Hayes (1995), de Lacy (2004), among others) stress has customarily been considered to be synonymous to the notion of the head of the foot; stress is the main diagnostic for foot assignment in languages, as well as the main argument for the very existence of feet as constituents in the grammar. Some researchers, like Gordon (2003) argue that foot structure is not a notion we need to use to account for stress patterns at all.

Stress assignment, however, is not the only evidence for foot structure; segmental phenomena can be sensitive to foot structure as well. If, indeed, stressed vowels head feet, then rhythm-sensitive segmental alternations should follow the same footing pattern. If, on the other hand, the notion of prosodic constituency is independent from stress, we can expect mismatch between stress placement and foot assignment.

By exploring prosody-sensitive segmental alternations, I show that there is empirical, in addition to theory-internal, evidence that prominence and foot structure are distinct entities in the grammar. I further propose an OT-based model to account for the interaction of prosodic constituency and stress assignment.

Please join us for this week’s Ling-lunch:

Thursday, Oct. 16, 12:30-1:45

32-D461

Ezra Keshet

“Split Intensionality: A New Theory of the De re/De dicto Distinction”

>The traditional scope theory of intensionality (STI) is inadequate, as evidenced by the scope paradoxes discussed in Fodor (1970), Bauerle (1983), and Percus (2000). This talk will therefore propose a replacement for the STI, called split intensionality. Compared to an earlier replacement for the STI, the situation pronoun theory, split intensionality represents a more modest departure. The split intensionality system separates each intensional operator’s quantificational force from its intensional force, by use of a new operator, ^ (after Montague 1970). This move proves enough to solve the problems of the STI without overgenerating — as the situation pronoun theory does. In particular, the talk will focus on new data involving island constraints and negative polarity items that supportsthe split intensionality system over the situation pronoun system.

This week’s installment of Phonology Circle features a talk by Anthi Revithiadou

Title: Recessive accentuation in Ancient Greek revisited

Time: Wednesday 10/8, 5PM, 32D831

The issue of accent assignment in Ancient Greek (AGr, 7th c. BC &mdash; 3rd c. BC)
has been a favorite topic of investigation both in generative (Kiparsky 1967,
1973, 2000, Kiparsky & Halle 1977, Steriade 1982, 1988, Golston 1989, a.o.) as
well as in pre-generative phonology (Lejeune 1945, Vendryes 1945, Allen 1966,
1973, Devine and Stephens 1974, 1995, a.o.). AGr was a pitch-accent system
which inherited its accents from Proto-Indo-European but also developed
certain innovations that distinguish it from other IE accentual systems. More
specifically, a cluster of changes took place in Proto-Greek (late 3rd
millennium BC) which involved, among other things, the development of
recessive accentuation, that is, the limitation of the accent on the last three
syllables of the word (1).

(1)	Attic (Bubenik 1983: 153)
a.	pherómenos < pherómenos Proto-Greek
	< *phéromen-o-s	'carried-MASC.NOM.SG'
b.	ánthroopos	'man-NOM.SG'
c.	patrída	'homeland-ACC.SG'
d.	agorá	'market-NOM.SG'

What adds to the complexity of the system, however, is that weight
distinctions,
confined mainly to the right edge of the word, caused accent to shift
if it was
too distanced (i.e. more than three moras) from the edge of the word (2).

(2)	a.	pheroménoo	'carried-MASC.GEN.SG'
	b.	anthróopou	'man-GEN.SG'

Previous accounts exploit a variety of analytical tools to account for the
window and the restricted weight effects. In this talk, I will propose that a
more efficient and straightforward analysis of the AGr facts can be made if we
implement insights from a representational model that segregates metrical from
prosodic structure (Hyde 2001, 2006). Moreover, I will propose that the same
theory can also account for the intricate patterns of clitic accentuation:

(3)	a.	ánthroopós tinos	'someone's man'
		óikós tinos	'someone?s house'
	b.	phílos tinós	'someone?s friend'
		phóiniks tinós	'someone?s phoenix'
		daímoon tino?s	'someone?s god'

Please join us for this week’s Ling-lunch:

Jonah Katz & Lisa Selkirk

“Focus, phonetic scaling, and prosodic prominence”

Thursday, Oct. 9

12:30 - 1:45

32-D461

>In this paper we bring new experimental data to bear on three theoretical issues of current concern in the literature on focus and prosody. The first concerns the notion of focus itself. The second concerns the nature of phonetic scaling in sentences with focus constituents. And the third concerns the question whether there is a phonological representation of focus in terms of prosodic stress prominence.

>The experiment reported on in this paper involves a paradigm comparing the prosody of broad focus all-new sentences with a novel class of sentences that contain a combination of discourse-new constituents and (putative) cases of Focus in English; these involve pitch-accented, prosodic phrase-final sequences of New-New vs. Focus-New vs. New-Focus constituents. We call the latter mixed focus sentences. Such an experimental paradigm permits the phonetic properties of New and Focus constituents to be examined in identical surrounding contexts, and so overcomes the drawbacks faced by classical comparisons of New in all-new broad focus sentences and (putative) Focus in narrow focus sentences, where the Focus is surrounded by discourse-given material. One finding of this experiment is that, in between sentence comparisons, Focus constituents do indeed show greater phonetic prominence than corresponding New constituents in identical contexts; in so doing, they provide important phonetic support for the hypothesis that a grammatical category Focus must be distinguished from discourse-new in the theory of grammar (contra Selkirk 1984, 1995, for example).

Chris Kennedy (University of Chicago)

“Vagueness and Comparison”

Friday, October 10th, 2008, 3:30pm

[Room 32-141](http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg?mapterms=32-141)

There will be a party in honor of Chris, beginning at 6:30pm, at
Gillian and Omer’s place.

*Abstract*:

Vagueness and comparison are linked together in a number of different ways, both empirically and analytically. Vague predicates typically support comparison (though not all predicates that support comparison are vague); some notion of comparison or similarity plays an important role in many accounts of vagueness; and several influential semantic analyses of (grammaticized) comparative constructions are based on prior semantic analyses of vagueness. However, despite (or maybe because of) these connections, the subtlety and significance of the places where vagueness and comparison do not line up have not been fully appreciated, either by philosophers or linguists. The goal of this talk is to examine such cases and discuss their significance. I will take a close look at the semantic and pragmatic properties of several different ways of expressing comparison, and show that some of them preserve canonical features of vagueness while some of them do not. I will then discuss the implications of the facts for the analysis of vagueness, for the semantics of comparison, and for our understanding of the ways that natural languages do and do not differ in encoding these concepts.

This week’s Cog Lunch features Steve Piantadosi, presenting work with Noah Goodman and Josh Tenenbaum.

Title: A formal model of number word acquisition

Time: Tues 9/30, 12PM

Location: 46-3310

We present a formal computational model for learning number word
meanings from noisy, cross-situational evidence. The model learns to
construct number word meanings in a developmentally-plausible “language
of thought” and shows how rational probabilistic inference can explain
several key developmental patterns. The model also illustrates how
infinite, structured, recursive concepts may be learned from relatively
little data in a fairly unrestricted hypothesis space.

The model also provides a formal framework for studying conceptual
change. It implements bootstrapping, where each successive numerical
concept is defined in terms of the previous one (Carey & Sarnecka 2006,
Carey 2004). However, we provide a new formalization of bootstrapping
that avoids a key problem posed by Rips, Asmuth & Bloomfield (2006,
2008)—that bootstrapping presupposes knowledge of number and therefore
cannot explain how children learn numerical concepts. The model also
shows how linguistic and conceptual structures may be crucially related
in number word learning.

Come join us for this week’s Ling-lunch talk:

Speaker: Conor Quinn

“Medials in the Northeast”

When: Thursday, Oct. 2, 12:30-1:45

Where: 32-D461

Come join us for this week’s Ling-lunch talk:

Speaker: Marlies Kluck

“Syntactic amalgams in the paratactic domain”

When: Thursday, Sept. 25, 12:30-1:45

Where: 32-D461

Mitlings-Munch
Thursday, Sept. 25, 5pm
32-155.

“Writing & Language in JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth”
Dr. Marc Zender, Lecturer on Anthropology, Harvard University

Although readers of many different backgrounds have enjoyed The Lord of the Rings, few are aware of just how fundamentally linguistic JRR Tolkien’s great novel is. As a philologist specializing in the history of the Germanic languages (particularly Old English), Tolkien did more than just indulge an interest in strange sounds and symbols. He invented a detailed proto-language, followed its divergence into distinct speech communities, and thereby produced the different but nonetheless related Elvish languages Quenya and Sindarin; he even invented several different alphabets with which to write these languages. Posing as the translator of the Lord of the Rings gave him free reign to employ archaisms, dialectal forms and even Old English itself to reflect the varying speech styles of his characters and their often complex relationships with one another. Understanding the linguistic foundations of Middle Earth greatly increases one’s enjoyment of the novel, and also provides insight into Tolkien’s view of the relationship between language and literature.

Posters:
,

Sponsored by the MIT Linguistics Society

This week’s phonology circle presentation is by Mahasen Abu-Mansour (Umm Al-Qura Univerty, Makkah, Saudi Ararabia and M.I.T)

Wednesday 9/24 at 5PM

32D-831

Title: Phrasal Syncope in Makkan Arabic: An Optimality Theoretic Account

In this talk I investigate the proper domain of the application of phrasal syncope in Makkan Arabic using Selkirk’s Edge-Based theory of the syntax-phonology interface as well as McCarthy and Prince’s theories of Correspondence and Generalized Alignment. I show that both word-level and phrasal syncope result from the interaction of the same syllable structure constraints. The alignment of the right edge of the prosodic constituent (the phonological phrase) with the right edge of a maximal projection in syntactic structure accounts for the under-application of phrasal syncope. The present analysis captures significant generalizations about syncope. It demonstrates that the domain of phrasal syncope is internal to the phonological phrase with the plausible consequence of substituting the traditional reference to right-hand and left-hand syncope with the application versus under-application of the process. In addition, it provides evidence that Makkan Arabic is among the languages that exhibit right-edge effects.

Schedule for the remainder of the term:

• October 1st: Seokhan Kang
• October 8th: Anthi Revithiadou
• October 15: Olga Vaisman
• October 22: Stefano Versace
• November 19: Jonah Katz
• December 3rd: Jen Michaels

Friday, Sept. 19, 3:30 PM

32D-141

Jason Riggle

University of Chicago

“Learning and Linguistic Typology”

>In this talk, I present results on the learnability of phonological grammars for two constraint-based models,
Harmonic Grammar (HG; Legendre, Miyata, and Smolensky 1990) and Optimality Theory (OT; Prince
and Smolensky 1993). I first establish that grammars in these models are learnable from reasonably sized
samples of data and then present a learning algorithm for OT that is guaranteed to make no more than
k log2 k mistakes when learning grammars with k constraints, which is only logarithmically worse than the
best possible learning algorithm for OT.

>The proposed learning algorithm calculates the number of rankings that are consistent with a set of data.
This makes possible a simple and effective Bayesian heuristic for learning – all else equal, choose can-
didates that are preferred by the highest number of rankings consistent with previous observations. This
general strategy can be applied to HG or to any parameterized model of grammar, and it associates with
each language generated by the theory an abstract quantity measuring the fraction of the parameter space
corresponding to grammars that generate that language.

>The p-volume seems to encode ‘restrictiveness’ in a way similar to Tesar and Prince’s (1999) r-measure.
Preliminary investigations indicate that p-volume is significantly correlated with typological frequency
(cf. Bane and Riggle 2008). This fact is neatly explained if language learners use a strategy that is some-
times called a Gibbs leaner wherein they keep track of the region of the parameter space consistent with
previous observations but make guesses according to a single hypothesis grammar randomly selected from
that region. Upon making an error the Gibbs leaner updates the parameter region and randomly selects a
new hypothesis grammar from that region. Following this strategy, learners will be predisposed towards
grammars with large p-volume in cases where the hypotheses are underdetermined by the data. Moreover,
priors other than the ‘flat’ distribution over rankings can be included to implement models of ranking bias.

>One of the primary assets of this strategy is that it allows linguistic theory to be informed by the relative
frequencies of patterns in linguistic typologies rather than only by the boolean distinction of whether or not
a pattern is attested. Though some of the frequency asymmetries surely come from non-linguistic historical
accidents, a model of learning that is able to account for some of the frequency variance is clearly of interest
and makes a range of predictions that can be tested in experimental settings.

The LF Reading Group will meet this semester on Wednesdays from 3:00-4:30, in room 26-310.

Our first meeting will be this coming Wednesday, September 17th. Patrick Grosz will lead an informal discussion on Christopher Potts’ “The Logic of Conventional Implicatures”.

Phonology Circle will move to Wednesday at 5PM this term: this works for a majority of those who sent in responses.

With appropriate time adjustments, from Monday to Wednesday, the schedule this term looks like this:

* October 1st: Seokhan Kang
* October 8th: Anthi Revithiadou
* October 15: Olga Vaisman
* October 22: Stefano Versace
* November 19: Jonah Katz
* December 3rd: Jen Michaels.

Titles and abstracts will be announced closer to the time of each talk. If you want to schedule a talk, talk to Donca.

Ling-lunch is a forum to present work in progress for critique and discussion. It meets Thursdays from 12:30 to 1:45, and bagels/light snacks will be served. Please consider presenting if you have any kind of work in progress. If not, please come to discuss others’ work. So far, scheduled speakers this semester are:

Sept. 25: Marlies Kluck

Oct. 2: Conor Quinn

Oct. 9: Jonah Katz

Oct. 16: Ezra Keshet

Oct. 23: Patrick Grosz

Nov. 20: Peter Graff

Dec. 4: Vanja de Lint

There are many spots still available (including the coming two weeks). Please get in touch with Jonah Katz at jikatz@mit.edu if you’d like to sign up for a speaking slot.

2008-2009 MIT Linguistics Colloquium series:

9/19/08 - Jason Riggle (University of Chicago)
10/10/08 - Chris Kennedy (University of Chicago)
10/24/08 - Larry Hyman (UC Berkeley)
11/21/08 - Ora Matushansky (University of Paris VIII)
12/5/08 - Leston Buell (Leiden University Centre for Linguistics)
2/27/09 - T. Florian Jaeger (University of Rochester)
3/6/09 - Lisa Travis (McGill)
3/20/09 - Anna Szabolcsi (NYU)
4/3/09 - Jeroen van Craenenbroeck (KU Brussels)
4/17/09 - Sharon Rose (UCSD)
4/24/09 - Daniel Buring (UCLA)
5/1/09 - Philippe Schlenker (Institut Jean-Nicod)

Phonology Circle

Monday, September 8, 2008 at 5PM

Stata Center, 32-D831

Adam Albright (MIT)

Flapometry and palatography: An argument for surface identity between derived forms?

*Abstract*

It is well-known that affixes may differ in the extent to which derived forms deviate from the realization of the base in isolation: suffixes like -ation attract stress, condition vowel changes, and aspiration (distíll ~ dìstillátion, provó[k]e ~ pròvo[kh]átion), while affixes like -ery do not (distíll ~ distíllery/*dìstilléry). Numerous mechanisms have been proposed to derive this difference, assigning affixes different morphological levels (Siegel 1970; Allen 1978; Pesetsky 1979; Kiparsky 1982), different syntactic structures (Marvin 2003), different prosodic structures (Raffelsiefen 1998), or different faithfulness conditions (Benua 1997). However, surprisingly little attention has been paid to affixes with mixed properties, such as attracting stress but not conditioning consonant alternations.

One such case, described by Bermúdez-Otero (2008), concerns learned affixes like -ómeter and -ógraphy. These affixes attract main stress (speedómeter), but unlike other stress-attracting affixes, they do not preserve final clusters of nasal + voiced stop: swi[?]ómeter/\*swin[?g]ómeter. In this talk, I present data from American English showing that the phonological inconsistencies surrounding these affixes go well beyond nasal+stop clusters. For example, the suffix -ometer unexpectedly fails to condition aspiration (lea[p]ómeter/\*lea[p?]ómeter) and does condition flapping (floa[?]ómeter\*floa[t?]ómeter), much like a word boundary; yet unlike a word boundary, it blocks t-deletion (cou[nt]ómeter/\*cou[n]ómeter). The suffix -ograph(y) similarly blocks aspiration for non-coronal stops (lea[p]ógraphy/\*lea[p?]ógraphy), but for coronal stops, aspiration is preferred over flapping: floa[t?]ógraphy. For /nt/ clusters, where flapping is blocked, this results in a subtle aspiration contrast: curren[t]ómeter vs. curren[t?]ógraphry. These differences are a challenge for syntactic or prosodic accounts, which generally rely on a two-way distinction of presence or absence of a boundary or spell-out domain. They also pose a challenge for the stratal account, since they appear to require additional levels with no external motivation. I show that they follow straightforwardly from an account in which learners must learn different rankings of OO faithfulness for different affixes, based on the available set of data.

The fall installment of Phonology Circle begins next Monday, Sept 8, at 5pm in 32-D831. We will start with a brief organizational meeting, after which Adam Albright will present on “Flapometry and palatography: An argument for surface identity between derived forms?”

In preparation for WCCFL, this week’s Phonology Circle will feature another double header, with talks by Claire Halpert and Guillaume Thomas.

Time: Monday May 12, 5pm

Location: 32-D831

Claire Halpert: Overlap-Driven Consequences of Zulu Nasal Place Assimilation
> I examine the behavior of two noun class prefixes in Zulu, um- and iN. Nasals in iN- prefixes must become homorganic to a following C; they delete when there is no adjacent C. The nasal in um- prefixes surface in all contexts, with invariant features. I assume that the former nasals are underlyingly placeless and can only surface when place-assimilated. All Zulu homorganic NC clusters where the nasal has undergone place assimilation display secondary effects on C. I focus on three effects: de-aspiration of aspirated consonants, affrication of fricatives, and loss of implosion. The presence of these effects in assimilated NC clusters contrasts with their absence in non-place-assimilated mC clusters, suggesting that the secondary effects are directly linked to the process of place assimilation. I propose that nasal place assimilation in Zulu results in close transition between N and the following C, allowing place gestures of C to overlap the nasal, providing it with a place of articulation. A side effect of close transition, however, is that other of C’s gestures also overlap the nasal. This overlap becomes problematic for recovering nasality (cf. Silverman 1997, Browman & Goldstein 2000), particularly when it is overlapped by aspiration and glottalization. I argue that as a result of this close transition, some of these problematic features are lost from the entire cluster. In contrast, mC clusters remain in open transition, avoiding instances of problematic overlap.

Guillaume Thomas: An Analysis of the Xiamen Tone circle
> The tone system of Xiamen presents systematic tone sandhi, organized in a
circular fashion. This process is notorious for appearing to rely on a
noncomputable function that is not analyzable in classical OT (Moreton: 1999).
The analysis of circular shifts of this type faces two challenges: one is the
identification of the constraints that motivate the circular move. The other
challenge is completeness: the analysis of the Xiamen circle must evaluate
3,125 candidates, the number of permutations with repetitions of the five
citation tones (assuming that the set of possible sandhi tones is identical to
the set of citation tones).

> I will a present a simple analysis of the phenomenon, that uses Contrast
Preservation (Lubowicz: 2003) and a modified notion of Faithfulness, in a
grammar where each candidate is a scenario that represents a mapping between
each of the five citation tones of Xiamen, and its corresponding sandhi tone.
Using a simple Perl script (written with the indispensable help of Adam) to
automate the OT analysis, I will demonstrate that my analysis picks out the
attested winner among the 3,125 candidates.

Friday, May 9, 3:30 PM

32D-141

Junko Shimoyama

McGill University

“Cross-linguistic (Non-)Variation in Clausal Comparatives”

>Cross-linguistic variation in comparative constructions has attracted much attention in recent years. There has been much discussion, for instance, on how the phrasal comparatives (John is taller than Bill) should be analyzed. While the phrasal complement of than is claimed to be derived from a full clause in English (Lechner 2001) and from a small clause in Slavic languages (Pancheva 2006), the phrasal complement of than in Hindi-Urdu and Japanese may very well be base generated as is (Bhatt and Takahashi 2007a,b).

>This talk looks at another area of possible cross-linguistic variation in comparatives. In particular, it has recently been claimed that some languages lack clausal comparatives, and that what appears to be the clausal complement of than is in fact a DP that receives a free relative interpretation (Beck, Oda and Sugisaki 2004, Kennedy to appear). These studies propose parameters to which the lack of clausal comparatives is attributed: a parameter that allows or disallows abstraction over degrees in the syntax (Beck et al.); or a parameter that restricts some languages to have only individual comparison, but no degree comparison. These claims on typological variation are based on data from Japanese, and how they differ from English.

>I will show that a closer look at Japanese data reveals that genuine clausal comparatives do exist in the language. The cross-linguistic claims on parametric variation are thus not well supported, and require evidence from other languages. More specifically, I will present data where the clausal complements of yori ‘than’ cannot be free relative DPs that denote individuals. Such data are expected if we assume that genuine clausal comparatives exist in Japanese, and that they involve degree abstraction and degree comparison that are familiar from analyses of their English counterparts.

Pritty Patel will talk about her research today in LF Reading Group. The talk, entitled “Exploring Case in Kutchi Gujarati”, is at 11:30 in room 36-112.

This week’s Phonology Circle will feature the first round of WCCFL practice talks, with presentations by Franz Cozier and Adam Albright.

Time: Monday 5 May, 5pm

Location: 32-D831

Franz Cozier

Encoding perceived contrast between CC-clusters and simplified counterparts in coda CC simplification

> This paper examines grammatical constraints on word-final consonant cluster inventories
(VC1C2#). Crosslinguistically, languages such as Trinidad dialectal English (TE), African
American English, Cameroon English, Quebec French, and Catalan show striking consistency in
the set of clusters that are illicit word-finally as shown in (1) (cf. Côté 2004, Green 1992, Bobda
1994, Mascaro 1976). Languages that ban these clusters do not release their final stops (cf.
Archambault & Dumochel 1993). This makes it seem likely that simplification is related to the
perceptibility of C2 in the absence of release. The central claims of this paper are (1) that C2
deletion is triggered when the distinctiveness of VC1C2 and VC1, as a function of phonetic cues,
falls below a particular threshold and (2) that speakers encode this perceptually based difference
between simplified and preserved clusters in their grammars. Experimental results will show
how the synchronic grammar of TE reflects the historical simplification process. A second
experiment will confirm that perceptibility is not just something that causes loss of C2 over time
but that the grammar attributes simplification to perceptual difficulty raised by unreleased C2’s

Adam Albright

Chaotic evolution in an unbiased learner
> A premise of channel-base) explanations of typology is that isolated misproductions or miscategorizations may cause the signal to deviate from the speaker’s original intent in a way that may be misinterpreted as a phonetically natural change. For example, /np/ may be perceived as [mp] due to articulatory overlap and the difficulty of distinguishing coarticulated [np] from [mp]. Over time, deviations are assumed to create patterns corresponding to cross-linguistically common processes, which may then be learned and reinforced even by unbiased learners. Numerous studies have investigated whether human infants or adults behave like unbiased learners, while less attention has been paid to a prior question: are series of misperceptions actually sufficient to create the patterns observed typologically?

> In this talk, I report a series of simulations designed to address this question. An unbiased inductive learner was used to investigate what patterns might arise in languages partway through a phonetically motivated change. I consider languages with a typologically dispreferred contrast such as [np] vs. [mp], with [np] words occasionally reanalyzed as [mp]. I explored the properties of hypothetical languages at a stage with a 3:1 preference for [mp] by generating 1,000 artificial lexicons, each containing 50 words with nasal+[p] clusters. Lexical items were randomly constructed to obey basic syllable constraints, with a skew towards shorter (di- or trisyllabic) words. In all of these languages, there is a 75% tendency for labials before [p] (nasal place assimilation). The question of interest is whether there are even stronger statistical patterns, due to coincidences elsewhere in the word. To test this, I submitted all 1,000 languages to an inductive model of phonological constraint discovery, which compares words that share a particular property (such as [n] or [m]) to determine the best predictors in the surrounding phonological context (such as a following [p]). It emerged that in 678/1000 languages, the algorithm found specific contexts that were more reliable predictors of nasal place. If taken seriously and extended productively to derived contexts, this constraint could lead to highly unnatural alternations. Thus, it appears that rather than leading to neutralization, phonetically natural changes may be derailed, creating unnatural statistical correlations that may be picked up and extended by an unbiased learner. I consider several biases which would prevent the learner from being lead astray by such patterns, and provide a more accurate account of the attested typology.

MIT Linguistics Society presents the first talk in its new lecture series.

SPEAKER: Norvin Richards
TITLE: “Lessons from Lardil: Tense Concord, Generation Harmony, and the Rainbow Serpent”
WHEN: May 7, 5pm
WHERE: 32-144
FOOD: Yes!

For more information about the MIT Linguistics Society, visit our website at
.

To receive announcements of future events, blanche yourself onto mitlings
[at] mit [dot] edu, or email mitlings-request [at] mit [dot] edu.

This event is co-sponsored by the MIT Societo por Esperanto’s Lecture Series
on Language Diversity and Language Rights.

Friday, May 2, 3:30 PM

32D-141

Jaye Padgett

University of California, Santa Cruz

Nathan Sanders

Williams College

The role of dispersion, focalization, and articulation in vowel system simulations

>Since the seminal work of Liljencrants and Lindblom (1972), a key testing
ground for functional, evolutionary, or emergentist approaches to sound
systems has been the typology of vowel inventories (e.g., Lindblom 1986,
Schwartz et al. 1997, and de Boer 2000). An important innovation of Schwartz
et al.’s Dispersion and Focalization Theory (DFT) was calculating the
optimality (“energy”) of a vowel system as a weighted combination of:

>(i) dispersion: minimization of the auditory distance between vowels (as in
Liljencrants and Lindblom 1972) and
(ii) focalization: maximization of the importance of “focal” vowels such as
[i] and [y] (cf. Stevens’s (1972) quantal vowels).

>In this paper, we report results of new vowel system simulations, following
the original DFT calculations of Schwartz et al. for the optimality of a
given vowel system. However, our algorithm for selecting candidate systems
for comparison explores the search space more effectively, allowing for more
thorough and accurate computation of DFT’s predictions.

>Our results for DFT differ significantly from those published. Specifically,
we find a greater number of optimal systems throughout the entire range of
possible parameter settings in DFT. Some of these are attested, meaning the
DFT does better at modeling the facts than it was originally thought to do.
Other optimal systems are unattested, and these help us better determine the
parameter space within which the model performs well. We discuss
implications and further work.

Monday 4/28, 11.30AM

36-112

Pascal Amsili and Claire Beyssade (University Paris 7 & CNRS)

“Obligatory redundancy in discourse: presupposition, antipresupposition and non-asserted content”

For more information about the remaining schedule of the Syntax-Semantics Reading Group, please visit our website: http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/groups/synsem/index.html

Come and join us for this week’s Ling-lunch talk:

Speaker: Elena Benedicto

WHEN: May 1, 12:30-1:45

WHERE: 32-D461

Monday, April 28, 5-6pm

32D-831

Presenter: Chiyuki Ito

Title: “Analogical Changes in the Accent of Sino-Korean Words in Yanbian Korean”

> This paper presents the results of the analysis of accent changes in a corpus of c. 8,000 lexical items. The major results include different analogical paths depending on the word classes (native HL -> LH, Sino-Korean LH -> HL), an Island of Reliability effect (Albright 2002) based on coda consonants, a model of accent changes based on weighted constraints employing Jager (to appear)’s Stochastic Gradient Ascent learning algorithm, and notable deviations from the general LH -> HL trend which take into account sonorant vs. obstruent onsets and token frequencies.

This Tuesday, Dave Barner will give a talk in BCS:

Title: “Finding one’s meaning”.

When: Tuesday 4/22, at 4:30p.

Where: Room 46-5056 (fifth floor seminar room)

> I’ll talk about how children distinguish
integers and quantifiers in early development, discovering sets as a
hypothesis space, and the origin of exactness. I may also touch on
some cross-linguistic data from Japanese integer and quantifier
acquisition.

Arnim von Stechow will give a talk in the Syntax-Semantics Reading Group entitled “Tense and Presupposition in Conditionals.” The group will meet on Friday 4/25, 3.30PM in Room 32-141 (this is the usual colloquium time/place). Further information about the remaining meetings can be found on the group’s website.

Come join us for this week’s Ling-lunch talk, to be presented by:



Dong-Whee Yang

Seoul National University

“Phase-internal Scrambling and Edge Feature Movement.”



WHEN: April 24, 12:30-1:45

WHERE: 32-D461

In this paper the notion of EF (edge feature) movement (Chomsky 2005) is
characterized as pure internal merge, which is optional, hence induces
D(=discourse) effects according to (1), leading to the chain condition of
EF-movement (2):

1. Optional operations can apply only if they have an effect on outcome
   (Chomsky 2001).
2. Each chain of EF-movement contains one D-effect (Yang 2008).

Given this characterization of EF-movement, it is shown that not only phasal
scramblings but also phase-internal ones are EF-movements, offering a unified
account of long-distance and very short clause-internal scramblings.
Furthermore, given that Agree and EF-movement are separable for an
Agree-movement, i.e., need not occur together, it is shown why an optional
Agree-movement may function as an EF-movement inducing D-effects, along with
Agree in situ, like OS and Subject Raising in languages like Icelandic, Korean,
etc. Thus, it is captured that all and only optional movements induce D-effects.
This paper also offers an explanation for why EF-movements are not subject to
the minimality-type constraints though subject to island-type constraints. Note
that EF-movements are only subject to the architectural conditions of the
minimalist theory, and I claim that island-type constraints are essentially
those against violating the architectural conditions of the grammar like the
PIC unlike the minimality-type constraints. This paper also shows how the
EF-movement theory of (2) offers optimal accounts for problems like successive
cyclic A?-movements (Boškovi? 2007, Preminger 2007, Heck and Müller. 2000)
and the criterial freezing (Rizzi, 2004). This paper also suggests constraints on
movements based on the chain condition of EF-movement (2), accounting for why
idiom chunks may not optimally undergo EF-movement though corresponding
non-idiom chunks may. Lastly, this paper claims that reconstruction and covert
movement are the two sides of the same coin in the minimalist theory, offering
a new analysis of the two phenomena, given the characterization of EF-movement
in this paper.

References

Boškovi?, Željko. 2007. On the locality and motivation of move and agree: an
even more minimal theory. Linguistic Inquiry 38:589-644.

Chomsky, Noam. 2001. Derivation by phase. In Ken Hale: A Life in Language, ed.
by M. Kenstowicz. 1-52. The MIT Press.

Chomsky, Noam. 2005. On phases. Ms., MIT.

Heck, Fabian and Gereon Müller. 2000. Successive cyclicity, long-distance
superiority, and local optimization. WCCFL 19:218-231.

Preminger, Omer. 2007. Toxic syntax: yet another theory of syntactic movement.
Ms., MIT.

Rizz, Luigi. 2004. On the form of chains: criterial positions and ECP effects.
Ms.

Yang, Dong-Whee. 2008. On edge feature movement. Ms., MIT. (downloadable)

Phonology Circle will not meet this week, due to the Patriot’s Day holiday. It will return next week, with a talk by Chiyuki Ito.

“The Linguists” will be screening this Thursday (April 24) from 7:00p–8:30pm in 26-100. The film will be followed by a discussion with David Harrison.

For more information, see the MIT Events Calendar website. This event is co-sponsored by the Societo por Esperanto, MIT, LSC, Amnesty International, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, GSC Funding Board, and the MIT Linguistics Society.

This week’s phonology circle presentation will be by Joan Mascaró

Title: A prosodic analysis of stress-dependent harmony

Time: Mon Apr 14 5pm, 32-D831

In some harmonic systems the trigger or the target must be a stressed vowel. These systems have been analyzed as limited by a prosodic domain, the stress foot, but more recently as long-distance assimilation of the stressed vowel to an unstressed vowel (Walker 2005, 2006), grounded on the need of “weak trigger” positions to realize their feature content on prominent positions. I will examine the evidence presented in favor of a weak trigger analysis and discuss additional evidence that suggests that a prosodic account should be preferred.

Robert Ladd
University of Edinburgh
“Correlations between Interpopulation Differences in Two Human Genes (ASPM and Microcephalin) and the Distribution of Lexical and/or Grammatical Tone.”

WHEN: April 17, 12:30-1:45
WHERE: 32-D461

Abstract:

>We consider the relation between allele frequencies and linguistic typological features. Specifically, we focus on the derived haplogroups of the brain growth and development-related genes ASPM and Microcephalin, which show signs of natural selection and a marked geographic structure, and on linguistic tone, the use of voice pitch to convey lexical or grammatical distinctions. We hypothesize that there is a relationship between the population frequency of these two alleles and the presence of linguistic tone and test this hypothesis relative to a large database (983 alleles and 26 linguistic features in 49 populations), showing that it is not due to the usual explanatory factors represented by geography and history. The relationship between genetic and linguistic diversity in this case may be causal: certain alleles can bias language acquisition or processing and thereby influence the trajectory of language change through iterated cultural transmission.

Friday, Apr. 18, 3:30 PM

32D-141

Henk van Riemsdijk

Tilburg University

“Parameterizing Laws of Nature: Some Thoughts on Identity Avoidance”

>In earlier work (Van Riemsdijk, 1989), I had argued that headed relatives in Swiss German do not involve wh-movement. Instead there is an invariable relative complementizer wo and regular pronominals are used as resumptive pronouns. These pronouns tend to be clitic-like, and as such they can be adjoined to the C°-position. And if that C°-position is the one adjacent to the head of the relative clause, then a configuration of local licensing for deletion is obtained. One major question arising from this state of affairs is that deletion is absolutely obligatory in the sense that clitic movement, normally optional, must apply here to feed deletion. This was handled in Van Riemsdijk (1989) by means of a global version of the Avoid Pronoun Principle.

>Two other major problems had been largely ignored in my earlier work. First, the resumptive pronoun is not obligatory as such. In fact, part-whole relations will suffice to establish a semantic connection between the head of the relative clause and the relative clause itself. In this sense, Swiss relatives are quite similar to English such that relatives like ‘a triangle such that the sum of the squares of the two shorter sides equals the square of the longest side’. The question then arises whether there is any reason (presumably syntactic and not semantic) to assume that some covert correlative element is involved in such cases.

>Second, there is one other situation (in addition to the deleted clitic) in which a gap is found. This is when the correlative element is a locative. The overt locative wh-word is wo, that is, it is identical to the relative complementizer. The relation between the locative gap and the head of the relative clause is characterized by the usual movement diagnostics. We must conclude therefore that wh-movement is involved in this case. Predetermining the choice of the strategy (wh-movement, resumptive pronoun, mere semantic aboutness) in the derivation of Swiss German headed relative clauses thereby becomes a serious problem. What seems to be going on, quite patently, is that wo when moved to Spec,CP, can then be deleted in a process of haplology, a kind of OCP-effect in syntax, cf. Van Riemsdijk (1998). Thereby we have established a situation rather reminiscent of the generalization concerning clitic resumptive pronouns: wo must move in order to be deleted.

>I will also argue that the aboutness cases that apparently lack a correlative element altogether actually involve a locative (wo) expletive adjunct that also moves only to be deleted. It appears, then, that annihilation of the correlative element is the true generalization underlying the analysis of headed relatives in Swiss German. The major principle forcing deletion is the Doubly Filled COMP Filter, which can also be interpreted as a principle that avoids (relative) identity.
I will conclude with a discussion of the possible status of such a general principle of ‘identity avoidance’ as a general principle of design that is at work in (among others) grammar.