Whamit!

Speaker: Sarah Ouwayda (USC)
Date/Time: 15 Mar (Thursday) 10-11:30am
Location: 32-D831
Title: The Mass-Like Behavior of Plurals of Mass

Abstract:

Plural marking, when it occurs on a noun that is typically mass, usually results in a plural count DP (1). This has been used to show the flexibility of nouns’ occurrence in both mass and count contexts and to argue for a universal packager (cf. Pelletier 1975, Chierchia 1998, Borer 2005 inter alia).

1. (much) oil -> (three) oils

In some cases, Levantine Arabic follows suit (2), but in others, the addition of a plural marker (specifically, the sound feminine plural), results in DPs that trigger plural agreement, but do not admit cardinals (3), and allows primarily an amount comparison (in the sense of Barner and Snedeker 2005).

2. (ktiir) zeit —> (tlat) zyuut
  (much) oil     (three) oil-plb
much oil     three oil types

3. (ktiir) zeit —> (*tlat) zayt-eet Tayyb-iin
  (much) oil     (*three) oil-plf    tasty-pl
much oil         tasty oil (but not three oils)

The mass-like behavior of this type of mass+pl nouns has been taken to suggest that the plural marking is epiphenominal (Tsoulas 2006, for Greek), that the plural marking is lexical/idiosyncratic (Alexiadou 2010, for Greek), or that mass/count is not a strictly binary distinction (Acquaviva 2008, 2010, for Levantine Arabic).

I show that in Levantine Arabic, such DPs (a) do not allow kind or generic readings, (b) must be specific, (c) do not occur with measure words (e.g. ‘a cup of’, ‘a bag of’), and (d) do not allow comparison unless definite. Based on these and other restrictions independent of the mass-count distinction, I propose that the same thing (specifically, that DPs like those in (3) are count but are also specified for quantity) is responsible both for (a)-(d) and for the misleading mass-like behavior.

Title: The Constituency of Hyperlinks in a Hypertext Corpus
Speaker: Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (MIT)
Date/Time: Thursday, Mar 15, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

While many have advocated for the use of Internet corpora in traditional corpus linguistics, no previous work has used one of the greatest characteristics of hypermedia—inline hyperlinks—as a tool in the generative study of syntax. In this talk I argue that the hyperlink-authoring behavior of naive speakers reflects the underlying syntactic constituency of sentences. I show that inline hyperlinks show a highly statistically significant tendency to be constituents in their host sentences (96% in our preliminary sample). In addition, hyperlinking behavior is sensitive to structural distinctions, distinguishing between complement and adjunct PPs. Finally, hyperlinks identified as non-constituents will be discussed as a unique natural class of nonconstituent linguistic structure.

Speaker: Masa Yamada (University of Kyoto/University of Chicago)
Date/Time: 3/16 (Friday) 3:30-5 pm **(Note unusual time)**
Location: 32-D831
Title: Reciprocal and Pluraction in Japanese

Abstract:

Numerous languages employ a morpheme that signals plurality,
distributivity, or pluractionality to describe real world reciprocal
situations. The Japanese verbal suffix -aw has reciprocal and
non-reciprocal pluraction uses, but the previous studies only focus on
the former use. I will propose two type-shift variants for the lexical
meaning of the suffix and argue that the two uses are due to some sort
of structural ambiguity in the verbal projection. When it combines
with a semantic transitive predicate (i.e. a relation between two
individuals), the canonical reciprocal interpretation obtains; when it
combines with a semantic intransitive predicate (i.e. a property of
individual, a context sensitive pluraction meaning results. I will
also demonstrate that the proposed analysis of the verbal reciprocal
correctly captures its interaction with other verbal suffixes such as
causative and applicative. This is a formal case study of the widely
observed phenomenon of (seemingly) polysemy of a linguistic reciprocal
expression.

Speakers: Yasu Sudo and Hadas Kotek
Date/Time: Monday, Mar 5, 5:30p
Location: 32-D461

In this talk we will discuss our latest work on many and most. We will argue that the three readings of many that have been previously recognize in the literature, (1), can be detected for most as well.

(1) Many Scandinavians are Nobel prize winners
a. Cardinal: |Scandinavian Nobel prize winners| is largeC
b. Proportional: |Scandinavian Nobel prize winners| / |Scandinavians| is largeC
c. Reverse Proportional: |Scandinavian Nobel prize winners| / |Nobel prize winners| is largeC

In particular, we will show that most has a reverse-proportional reading, and in addition we identify a new reading of most which we call the fragile reading: a superlative reading which is sensitive to the number of comparisons that are made and to the distance between the numbers compared. The fragile reading prominently manifests itself in “strong” environments, for example in the subject position of individual-level predicates. These findings lend support to Hackl’s (2009) analysis of most as being composed of many and the superlative morpheme -est. We will suggest that the familiar proportional and superlative readings of most are derived from cardinal many; RP most is derived from RP many and fragile most is derived from proportional many. We will argue that proportional many is cardinally evaluative and discuss the implications of this suggestion.

Speaker: Omer Preminger
Title: Syntactic Ergativity in Q’anjob’al
Date/Time: Tuesday, Mar 6, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

(Full paper available at LingBuzz.)

Many morphologically ergative languages show asymmetries in the extraction of core arguments: while absolutive arguments (transitive objects and intransitive subjects) extract freely, ergative arguments (transitive subjects) cannot. This falls under the label “syntactic ergativity” (see e.g. Dixon 1972, 1994; Manning 1996).

Extraction asymmetries of this sort are found in many languages of the Mayan family, where in order to extract transitive subjects (for focus, wh-questions, or relativization), a special construction known as “Agent Focus” (AF) must be used (Aissen 1999; Stiebels 2006, Preminger 2011). In this talk — which presents collaborative work with Jessica Coon and Pedro Mateo Pedro — we offer a proposal for (i) why some morphologically ergative languages exhibit these extraction asymmetries, while others do not; and (ii) how the Mayan AF construction circumvents this problem.

We adopt recent proposals that ergative languages vary in the locus of absolutive case assignment (Aldridge 2004, 2008a; Legate 2002, 2008), and demonstrate that the same variation can be found within the Mayan family itself. Based primarily on comparative data from Q’anjob’al and Chol, we argue (contra previous accounts) that the inability to extract ergative arguments is not due to properties of the ergative argument itself, but rather comes about as the result of the locality conditions on absolutive case assignment in the relevant languages.

We show how the AF morpheme “-on” circumvents this problem in Q’anjob’al, by assigning structural case of its own to the internal argument. Evidence for this approach comes from reflexive and extended reflexive constructions, incorporated objects, nominalized embedded clauses, and the distribution of so-called “hierarchy effects” in related Mayan languages.

This Wednesday’s installment of the Phonology Circle features a talk by Peter Graff and Emad Taliep. They will also be presenting the same talk earlier in the day, at Wednesday 10am in TedLab.

Speakers: Peter Graff and Emad Taliep
Title: English Speakers Track Absolute Frequency in Consonant Co-occurrence

Date: March 7 (Wednesday)

Time: 5:00–7:00

Location: 32D831

Phonotactic wellformedness has been shown to affect behavior in a
variety of linguistic tasks such as word-likeness judgments (e.g.,
Coleman and Pierrehumbert 1997). However, different researchers have
often employed rather different measures for phonotactic
wellformedness. This is particularly evident in the literature on
consonant co-occurrence where two distinct measures of the
wellformedness of constellations of consonants separated by vowels
(e.g., p_t in pat) have been hypothesized. The first measure is the
joint probability (i.e., absolute frequency) of the constellation
P(C1_C2). Studies have found, e.g., that the joint probability of
labial-coronal constellations (e.g. pat) is greater than the joint
probability of coronal-labial ones (e.g. tap) in many different
languages (MacNeilage et. al 1999, Carrissimo-Bertola 2010) and
children as young as 7 months have been shown to be sensitive to this
phonotactic (Nazzi et al. 2009, Gonzalez Gomez and Nazzi 2012). The
second measure of wellformedness often employed is the observed-
overexpected ratio (O/E) also known as pointwise mutual information
(PMI). The difference between PMI and joint probability is that PMI
relativizes the joint probability of a constellation to the
independent probabilities of its parts such that PMI(C1;C2) =
log(P(C1_C2)/(P(C1)·P(C2))), i.e. log(O/E). PMI has been hypothesized
as a measure of wellformedness in studies of OCP-Place type phenomena
(e.g. Frisch et al. 2004, Coetzee and Pater 2008) and PMI-based
generalizations have been shown to affect wordlikeness judgments in
languages like Arabic (Frisch and Zawaydeh, 2001). In this study, we
compare the patterning of PMI and joint probability in the English
lexicon and show that English CVCs present an ideal test-case for
disambiguating the two measures. We present results from an online
wordlikeness judgment study (N=50) and find that speakers’ judgments
are more accurately predicted by joint probability (i.e., absolute
frequency) than PMI.

Speaker: Guillaume Thomas
Date/Time: Thursday Mar 8, 10:00AM-11:30AM
Location: 32-D831
Title: Mbyá tense

Abstract:

Since I didn’t have time to address the main point of my work on tense in Mbyá
during my ling-lunch talk, I will do it during this LFRG session—although I
won’t assume that you have been to my ling-lunch talk. (1) and (2) both entail
that there is a time before the time of utterance (TU) at which Juan is a
teacher, but (2) also entails that Juan is not a teacher at TU, while (1) only
implicates it. I propose that -kue is interpreted as a simple past tense in
both cases, and that both (1) and (2) implicate that Juan is not a teacher at
TU, but that this implicature can be canceled only in (1). During this
session,
I want to discuss (a) how we can generate this implicature and (b) how we can
make sure that it stays in place in (2).

(1) Juan o-iko va?e-kue ñombo?ea.
Juan 3-be REL-PAST teacher
Juan was a teacher.

(2) Juan ñombo?ea-kue
Juan teacher-PAST
Juan is an ex-teacher.

Speaker: Cristiano Chesi (NETS ? IUSS Pavia, CISCL ? University of Siena)
Title: Top?Down, Left?Right Derivations
Date/Time: Thursday, Mar 8, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

The full abstract is available here (PDF).

The goal of this talk is to provide empirical arguments in favor of a derivational view of the
grammar in which structure building occurs, incrementally, top-down (Chesi 2004a, 2007) and from
left to right (Phillips 1996, 2003).

Following the Minimalist research spirit (Chomsky 1995-2008), I will show that the bottom-to-top
orientation of phrase structure building is not a “virtual conceptual necessity” and that we can gain in
descriptive adequacy if we drift away from the idea that the basic recursive operation is a set formation
operation like Merge.

Speaker: Yosef Grodzinsky — McGill University
Date/Time: Friday 3/9 3:30 pm
Location: 32-141
Title: The Analysis of Negative Quantifiers: Multi-modal Evidence

Abstract:

 
Recent discussion of
 negative
 quantifiers
 (see
 Penka,
 2011
 and
 references
 therein)
focuses
 on
 two
 main
 questions:
 do
 these
 quantifiers
 decompose,
 and
 if
 so,
 what
 are
the
 mechanisms
 for
 decomposition?
 In
 this
 talk,
 I
 will
 describe
 a
 series
 of
 neuro-­
 and
psycholinguistic
 experiments
 my
 colleagues
 and
 I
 have
 conducted
 with
 healthy
 and  
brain-damaged
 participants
 that
 aim
 to
 provide
 relevant
 evidence.
 These
experiments
 recorded
 responses
 from
 several
 modalities,
 as
 participants
 were
analyzing
 sentences
 with
 positive
 and
 negative
 proportional
 and
 degree
 quantifiers  
in
 German
 and
 English
 (e.g.,
 mehr/weniger-­als-­die-­Hälfte
 die
 Kreise
 sind
 Gelb,
many/few
 of
 the
 circles
 are
 blue).

 

All
 experiments
 used
 a
 Parametric
 Proportion
 Paradigm
 (PPP):
 participants
were
 exposed
 to
 sentence-scenario
 pairs,
 and
 were
 requested
 to
 make
 truth
 value
judgments.
 Sentences
 contained
 a
 quantifier
 in
 subject
 position,
 and
 scenarios  
depicted
 a
 proportion
 between
 2
 types
 of
 objects.
 Proportion
 was
 a
 parameter,
systematically
 varied
 across
 images
 that
 were
 presented
 with
 each
 sentence
 type.
 

 
Our
 first
 experiment
 used
 functional
 MR
 imaging
 to
 extract
 a
 signal
 that
represents
 localized
 brain
 activity.
 It
 aimed
 to
 identify
 brain
 loci
 that
 evince
 an
intensity
 differential
 between
 the
 contrasting
 stimuli.
 Signal
 intensity
 for
 sentences
with
 negative
 quantifiers
 was
 higher
 than
 that
 for
 their
 positive
 counterparts
 only
 in
Broca’s
 region.
 Importantly,
 no
 other
 localizable
 intensity
 contrasts
 were
 found.
 

 

A
 second
 experiment
 (currently
 only
 a
 pilot)
 confronted
 English
 speaking,
focally
 brain
 damaged,
 Broca’s
 aphasic
 patients
 with
 the
 same
 task.
 However
 here,
the
 dependent
 measure
 was
 error
 rate.
 The
 results
 suggest
 a
 remarkably
 selective  
deficit:
 While
 patients
 performed
 near-normally
 on
 the
 positive
 quantifiers,
 their
scores
 were
 drastically
 reduced
 when
 the
 stimuli
 contained
 negative
 quantifiers.
 

 
A
 third
 experiment
 attempted
 to
 take
 a
 deeper
 look
 at
 the
 behavioral
signature
 of
 quantifier
 analysis
 through
 a
 study
 of
 complex
 RT
 functions
 obtained
from
 healthy
 participants.
 Here,
 too,
 we
 observed
 that
 the
 signature
 of
 negative
quantifiers
 is
 quite
 distinct
 from
 that
 of
 their
 positive
 counterparts.
 

 
In
 this
 talk,
 I
 will
 try
 to
 connect
 these
 results,
 obtained
 through
 different
modalities
 from
 different
 populations,
 to
 previous
 ones
 that
 come
 from
 parametric
studies
 of
 overt
 syntactic
 movement
 with
 healthy
 participants
 in
 fMRI,
 and
 with
Broca’s
 aphasic
 patients.
 I
 will
 propose
 that
 a
 generalization
 over
 the
 experimental
results
 supports
 an
 analysis
 of
 sentences
 with
 negative
 quantifiers
 that
 assumes
covert
 movement.
 I
 will
 then
 try
 to
 situate
 these
 results
 in
 the
 broader
 context
 of
 a
research
 agenda
 that
 tries
 to
 create
 a
 brain
 map
 of
 syntactic
 and
 semantic
knowledge.
 

Title: Blocking Effects Reading Group
Speaker: Ayaka Sugawara
Date/Time: Monday, Feb 27, 5:30pm
Location: 32-D461

Please join us for the first meeting of a short two-session reading group on morphological Blocking effects. The goal of this group is to educate ourselves about theoretical and experimental work relating to blocking effects, and discuss ideas for an ERP study on blocking effects in English. This week, Ayaka will lead the discussion of theories of blocking effects. The second session, dedicated to ERP studies of blocking effects, will be held on March 12. As always, dinner will be served.

Speaker: DaeYoung Sohn
Title: Word order restriction in a raising construction in a scrambling language.
Date/Time: Tuesday February 28, 1:00-2:00pm
Location: 32-D461

I will be discussing word order restriction in a raising, or topicalization, construction in Korean. It has been noted in the literature that scrambling is not completely free in languages like Korean and Japanese (e.g., Saito 1985; Miyagawa 1989), and Ko (2005) recently argued that some restrictions on scrambling can be explained by the theory of Cyclic Linearization (Fox and Pesetsky 2005). In the current study, I expand the empirical domain of study to the raising construction and show that a similar restriction holds there and does so more strongly than in scrambling. Specifically, I introduce two slightly different cases where word order is fixed with a raised DP: First, when a DP raises across another phrase(s) clause-internally, the word order relative to each other is fixed for good; secondly, when an embedded subject raises across a clause boundary, the relative order between the raised subject and the embedded object is fixed for good. Lastly, I show that when raising and scrambling co-occur in the same domain, they behave similarly with each other in a sense that they both lack a reconstruction effect with respect to reflexive binding. I provide a sketchy analysis for those facts in terms of Cyclic Linearization and Shortest Move (Richards 2001).

The Phonology Circle will meet on **Wednesday** this semester, from 5–7 (except when otherwise announced).

This week’s meeting with feature a talk by Youngah Do and Michael Kenstowicz.

Title: Kyungsang Korean Accent Patterns: Lexical Drift, Loanwords, Novel Words
Date: Feb. 29 (W)

Time: 5:00–7:00

Location: 32D831

South Kyungsang is a pitch accent language with three lexically contrastive tonal patterns for monosyllabic nouns and four patterns for di- and tri-syllables. Our Phonology Circle presentation of last fall (10/26) focused on deviations from the etymologically expected accent class based on a word’s attested accent in Middle Korean. We showed that words are attracted to the statistically more frequent class and that this lexical drift tends to affect less frequent words (a common trait of analogical change Phillips 1984). Our data also indicated that sonorant codas, syllable weight, and the presence of fortis or aspirated consonants bias a word towards a particular accent class. In this presentation we show that these factors also emerge in a novel word experiment. We also present results of elicitations from 13 speakers designed to track the correlation between the well-known T > s analogy in the infection of nouns and the substitution of the High-High tonal pattern in place of the etymologically expected High-Low. We invite suggestions on the proper statistical measures to evaluate and present our results.

Title: The English suffix -ish as a degree head
Speaker: Ayaka Sugawara
Date/Time: Thursday Mar 1, 10:00AM-11:30AM
Location: 32-D831

In this talk, I would like to discuss the semantics of the English suffix -ish. Little theoretical work has been done on the nature of the English suffix -ish, whose suffixation is highly productive (see Morris (2009) for descriptive work). Intuitively -ish modifies the degree of the base it appends to. Contrary to this naive view, I will argue that -ish is a degree head of type ⟨⟨d, ⟨e, t⟩⟩, ⟨e, t⟩⟩ (cf. “pos” of Kennedy (2007)). I will also discuss the consequences of this analysis on the semantic theory of gradable adjectives, especially their scale structures and the semantics of their positive forms. I will focus on -ish in Adjective-ish, but would like to discuss briefly Adverb-ish (such as now-ish or ?regularly-ish) and Noun-ish (such as childish or toy-ish).

Speaker: Guillaume Thomas
Title: The role of topic times in the computation of temporal implicatures: evidence from Mbyá.
Date/Time: Thursday, Mar 1, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

(1) and (2) both entail that there is a time in the past of the time of utterance (TU) at which John is a teacher. However, (2) appears to entail that John is not a teacher at TU, while (1) only implicates it. In addition, (2) is infelicitous in a context in which John is dead at the time of utterance, contrary to (1).

(1) John was a teacher.

(2) John is an ex-teacher.

One might try to give a unified analysis of the past tense and ex-, but since one is a tense and the other a nominal modifier, one might as well be content with an analysis that hard-wires the additional properties of ex- in its denotation. Of course, if the past tense and ex- were synonymous, one would feel more pressure to come up with a unified analysis. As it turns out, this is the case in Guarani Mbyá, as illustrated in (3) and (4), which are interpreted as (1) and (2), respectively:

(3) Juan o-iko va’e-kue ñombo’ea.
Juan 3-be REL-PAST teacher
Juan was a teacher.

(4) Juan ñombo’ea-kue
Juan teacher-PAST
Juan is an ex-teacher.

I propose that -kue is a relative past tense in (3) and (4), and that its additional properties in (4) are due to the interaction of the past tense with independent constraints on the temporal interpretation of NPs. In this talk, I will focus on the inference that Juan is not a teacher at TU, which I argue is a scalar implicature triggered by -kue. The challenge is to explain why this implicature is obligatory in (4), while it can be blocked in (3). Doing so will lead us to a discussion of the role of discourse topics in the restriction of the domain of quantification of tenses. Time permitting, I will also give an analysis of the inference that Juan is alive at TU in (4).

Title: The Relationship Between Back and Front Articulations in Moroccan Arabic
Speaker: Karim Shoul (CNRS)
Date/Time: Tuesday, Feb 21, 5:30-7p
Location: 32-D831

For this study, we considered /t/ and the back counterpart /T/ in the sequences /#CVb/, /VCV/ and /bVC#/, where /C/ is /t/ or /T/, and /V/ is /a/. The bilabial stop /b/ was chosen in order to minimize possible coarticulatory effects. The different positions (initial, intervocalic and final) permit to examine their possible effects on the realisation of the target consonants (Straka, 1963). The low vowel /a/ was chosen since it shows less linguo-palatal contact than /i/ and /u/ (Marchal, 1988).

The data was examined by direct palatography and linguography. Six native speakers of Moroccan Arabic participated in the experiment and none of them suffer from any articulatory disorders (Shoul, 2007).

Palatographic results show that both /t/ and /T/ are alveolars in all three positions. These findings are in accordance with Ghazeli’s (1977) observations concerning different Arabic dialects. However, linguographic results show that /t/ is laminal whereas the back corresponding /T/ is apical. The apicality of /T/ can be explained by a concave configuration of the tongue since it is produced with a backward movement of the the back of the tongue towards the pharynx, unlike the convexe configuration which characterizes /t/. This tongue configuration for /T/ favours the contact between the palate and the tongue with the tip (Clements, personal communication).

The apicality of /T/ and the laminality of /t/ can also be explained in terms of their acoustic consequences. According to Ladefoged and Maddieson (1996) laminal consonants are more often produced with more important frication noise than apical ones, and for Dart (1991) the separation of the tongue and the palate is shorter for apicals than for laminals. This seems to be supported by our data, since the laminal /t/ is produced with the participation of the blade of the tongue and then an important frication noise, whereas the apical /T/ is manifested by the contribution of the tip of the tongue and then a weak frication noise.

Ling-Lunch returns this week at its usual time with a talk by Igor.

Speaker: Igor Yanovich (MIT)
Title: Modal hopes and fears: a diachronic case study
Date/Time: Thursday, Feb 23, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

In this talk, I will show what the history of English modals in CP complements of one semantic class of attitude verbs can tell us about the mechanics of semantic change. Data for the study come from two historical corpora of English (covering the time periods of 1425-1520, and 1640-1680, respectively), each of size >350K words, drawn from the Penn Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence. The talk will include of brief tutorial on the use of Penn parsed corpora.

Phonology Circle resumes on Tuesday 2/14 at 5pm in 32D-831. (Please note the day and time!)
We’ll have a brief organizational meeting in which we discuss scheduling for the remainder of the semester.

Speaker: David Beaver (University of Texas, Austin)
Time: Friday 2/10 3:30 PM
Location: 32-141
Title: IT-constructions

Abstract:

Within the context of a broader project concerning what speakers take to be at-issue, I will present an analysis of the semantics and discourse function of a large range of constructions that I refer to as Inquiry Terminating (IT) constructions. In English, these include it-clefts and exclusives such as “only”, “just”, and “mere(ly)”. I claim that despite their many differences, such constructions cross-linguistically have much in common: they are always focus-sensitive or focus markers, they have a uniform semantics (modulo differences related to syntactic category), and as a discourse function they are always used to mark that a proposition provides a complete answer to what the speaker takes to be the current question.

The similarity of a cleft sentence of the form “It’s X that Ys” to a sentence “only X Ys”, with the exclusive “only” is easily seen: in both cases X is realized with an intonational focus, and both constructions are used when X Ys and nothing else does. Yet cleft sentences and exclusive sentences have many differences. Some of these are shown in the following minimal pairs, each of which shows a contrast in acceptability when an exclusive is replaced by a cleft.

1a) Not only did Kai laugh, but Irene laughed too.
1b) # It wasn’t Kai who laughed, but Irene laughed too.

2a) Mary ate pizza and she only ate pizza.
2b) # Mary ate pizza and it was pizza she ate. (cf. Horn 1981)

3a) Kai: Only David laughed.
Irene: # Yes, and Brady laughed too.

3b) Kai: It was David who laughed.
Irene: Yes, and Brady laughed too.

I aim to account for the main similarities and differences between the meanings of clefts and exclusives, the interaction both types of construction have with focus, and a puzzling range of further data, including evidence drawn from experiments that I’ve been conducting with colleagues on IT-constructions in English, French, German, and Hungarian. I’ll then compare with other accounts, showing e.g. that a recent proposal for the meaning of clefts due to Buring can be subsumed under the current account in all the cases where it works, but not where it doesn’t.

The Phonology Circle will resume its weekly meetings next Tuesday, 2/14 at 5pm, in 32-D831, with a brief planning meeting. (Please note the new time!)

Speaker: Liuda Nikolaeva
Title: The Case for Wholesale Late Merger
Date/Time: Tuesday, Dec 6, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

The syntactic literature has traditionally distinguished two types of phrasal movement, A-movement and A’-movement. Left-Periphery Fronting (LPF hereafter), usually referred to as “scrambling”, in Russian and other languages poses a challenge to this traditional dichotomy, because it exhibits a mix of common diagnostic properties. In this paper, I offer a unified account of Russian LPF, based on Takahashi and Hulsey’s (2009) theory of Wholesale Late Merger (WLM). On the account I propose, LPF is A-movement, but crucially it is A-movement from a cased position, which accounts for the properties that it shares with A’-movement. In addition to providing an empirically satisfactory account of the Russian phenomena, my proposal provides new support for Takahashi and Hulsey’s original theory.

Speaker: Ian Roberts (University of Cambridge)
Title: Parametric Hierarchies
Date/Time: Thursday, Dec 8, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

This work presents a new approach to comparative syntax, developing the notion of parameter hierarchy originated in Baker (2001). Hierarchies define the ways in which properties of individually variant categories may act in concert; this creates macroparametric effects from the combined action of many microparameters. The highest position in a hierarchy defines a macroparameter, a major typological property, lower positions define successively more local properties. Parameter-setting in language acquisition starts at the highest position as this is the simplest choice; acquirers will “move down the hierarchy” when confronted with primary linguistic data incompatible with a higher setting. In this way, the hierarchies simultaneously learning paths and typological variation.

The idea will be illustrated by five hierarchies: those determining word-order, null arguments, word structure, discourse-configurationality and case/agreement alignment. These five hierarchies, although not exhaustive, combine to give a typological footprint of many languages, as well as providing the basis for the study of the interaction of micro- and macroparameters. In this way, the criticism that formal comparative syntax has little to offer typological studies can potentially be answered. Finally, we show that the nature of the hierarchies is determined, not directly by UG, but by UG interacting with domain-general principles of learning and optimisation: parametric variation is an emergent property of the learning device, UG and primary linguistic data, reflecting the three factors in language design.

Speaker: Donca Steriade
Title: The cycle without containment: the phonology of the Romance perfect
Location: 32D-831
Time: Monday, Nov 28, 5:00pm

The stems of all perfect forms in Latin and Romanian are systematically similar to each other, and distinct from all other forms of the verb. E.g.,

Despite their similarity, the perfect forms have no affix in common. In each language, the perfect participle uses different affixes from the non-participial perfect forms. I show that in the absence of a general perfect affix, these languages mark the aspectual identity of all perfect forms through their global shape similarity: e.g., all Latin perfect stems are required to have identical syllable count; Romanian perfect forms are required to be accentually identical.

In both systems, the phonological similarity between perfect stems has two of the characteristics of the Base-Derivative relation (Benua 1998): it is unexpected, given the ranking of general Markedness and IO Faithfulness conditions in each language; and it is enforced asymmetrically, with one form functioning as a Base and the other as its Derivative. But the analysis of both cases requires an essential modification relative to Benua’s theory and its classical cyclic antecedents (Chomsky, Halle and Lukoff 1965): the correspondence between exponents is established based on the shared properties of their associated syntactic structures, but without any requirement of syntactic containment between the base structure and its derivative (Steriade 2008). In these two systems global phonological similarity functions as a substitute for a shared affix. The phenomenon of cycle-without-containment is predicted by the proposed change in the theory of cyclic inheritance and supports it against competing mechanisms.

Speaker: Ayaka Sugawara
Title: Accent of Japanese given names
Location: 32D-831
Time: Monday, Nov 21, 5:00pm

In this talk, I will show that there are gaps between the accent patterns of Japanese common
nouns and those of Japanese given names. For example, although an n-mora common noun
generally has n+1 contrastive accent patterns including an unaccented one (e.g. háshi
‘chopsticks,’ hashí ‘bridge,’ hashi ‘edge’), the accent pattern that given names show is more
limited (e.g. ^okµ’µ, *µµ’, *µµ). To capture the special accent pattern Japanese given names show,
I will propose (i) that the given names are accented in the default case, regardless of the length of
the name, (ii) that some suffixes make names unaccented, (iii) that some suffixes do not allow
accent to immediately precede them, and (iv) that longer names (6-or-more-mora names), which
can be analyzed as being divided into two parts, behave according to compounding rules. I am
pursuing an OT analysis for this, but this is very much a work in progress, so I will be all-ears to
the advice you might have.

Speaker: Snejana Iovtcheva
Title: WH-questions in Bulgarian: Evidence for [focus]-movement in a Feature Based Syntactic Theory
Date/Time: Tuesday, Nov 22, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

The presentation is based on my masters thesis from Syracuse University, in which I analyze the multiple wh-fronting (MWF) structure of Bulgarian under the Move-F(eature) approach to syntactic displacement (Chomsky 1995, 2004). I propose an alternative syntactic model that challenges Boškovi?’s (1998) and Lambova’s (2001) move-to-SpecCP analyses by proposing that wh-phrases do not target SpecCP in Bulgarian. Instead wh-phrases move to a preverbal focus position, which is the SpecTP following Motapanyane’s (1997) proposal that [focus] is generated in T in Romanian. The proposed clausal structure ultimately allows us to: (1) propose a unified [focus]-driven discourse-oriented movement with a systematic featural distribution, (2) capture the distribution of focalized constituents not only in interrogative, but also in declarative clauses and in yes/no questions in both root and embedded contexts, and (3) provide an explanation for the different behavior of relative pronouns and wh-phrases in Bulgarian. In addition, my analysis provides an account of the previously discussed properties of the Bulgarian MWF, such as the V2-order, the Superiority effects, and the obligatory Pair-list interpretation.

Speaker: Gary Thoms (Strathclyde University)
Title: Roll up! PBC effects, anti-locality and Japanese scrambling
Date/Time: Tuesday, Nov 15, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

One of the consequences of Kayne’s (1994) Linear Correspondence Axiom (LCA) is that head-final word order must be derived by movement of the complement into a specifier position; this is known as “roll-up movement” (RUM). In most cases the only evidence for RUM comes from the word order facts themselves, and this lack of independent support thus leaves RUM and other such LCA-related movement operations open to criticism. However, the LCA approach to head-finality makes a clear prediction: in harmonically head-final languages, apparent complements should in fact behave like they are in specifier positions with respect to conditions like locality and anti-locality (Abels 2003).

In this paper I explore these predictions and argue that we can in fact find such evidence for RUM in a harmonically head-final language like Japanese. First, I consider Proper Binding Condition effects in VP-scrambling constructions with the light verb `su’ (where the lexical verb stays in the VP); I show that the distribution of these effects indicates that this is indeed VP and not vP-scrambling, a kind of scrambling that should be banned by anti-locality. Considering the nature of anti-locality as a constraint, I argue that this follows if we accept that RUM gives the VP a `free ride’ to the edge of the vP phase. With this established, I then turn `remnant VP scrambling’, where the VP is scrambled after the verb has raised out of it (Koizumi 2000). Considering the apparent *lack* of PBC effects in remnant VP-scrambling, I argue that the position of the lexical verb with respect to its arguments is the crucial factor in determining PBC effects. I propose an analysis in terms of Fox and Pesetsky’s (2005) Cyclic Linearization, and I show that in order to derive the cases of PBC-free remnant VP-scrambling within this framework (and a set of independently required assumptions), we need to allow arguments to get to the edge of the vP phase without moving there directly. I argue that this provides further evidence for RUM. I thus conclude that the linearization asymmetries in Japanese VP-scrambling give language-internal evidence for the LCA.

Speaker: Maria Aloni (University of Amsterdam)
Time: Friday 11/18 3:30 PM
Location: 32-141
Title: Modal inferences in marked indefinites

Abstract:

In this talk I will discuss two marked indefinite determiners which are normally classified as epistemic (Jayez & Tovena 2006, Alonso-Ovalle & Menendez-Benito 2010): Italian un qualche (Zamparelli 2007) and German irgendein (Haspelmath 1997, Kratzer & Shimoyama 2002). In the first part of the talk I will identify a number of functions (context-meaning pairs) for marked indefinites, and discuss the distribution of un qualche and irgendein with respect to these functions (Aloni & Port 2011). The most striking aspect of the observed distribution is the different behavior the two indefinites display under epistemic and under deontic modals. Under epistemic modals both indefinites are licensed and give rise to an ignorance inference; under deontic modals only German irgendein is licensed and gives rise to a free choice inference. In the second part of the talk I will give a formal account of these facts in the framework of a Dynamic Semantics with Conceptual Covers (Aloni 2001).

Speaker: Timothy J. O’Donnell (MIT)
Title: Productivity and Reuse in Language
Date/Time: Thursday, Nov 17, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

A much-celebrated aspect of language is the way in which it allows us to make “infinite use of finite means.” This property is made
possible because language is fundamentally a computational system: Novel expressions can be composed out of a large inventory of stored, reusable parts.

For any given language, however, there are many more potential ways of forming novel expressions than are actually used in
practice. For example, English contains suffixes which are highly generalizable (e.g., -ness; Lady-Gagaesqueness,
pine-scentedness) and suffixes which can only be reused in specific words, and cannot be generalized (e.g., -th; truth, width, warmth).How are such differences in generalizability and reusability represented? How can the child acquire this system of knowledge? This
set of related questions can be called the “problem of productivity.”

I will discuss a mathematical model of productivity and reuse which addresses the problem by treating it as a structure-by-structure inference in a Bayesian framework. I will compare this model to four other probabilistic models which formalize historical proposals from linguistics and psycholinguistics.

I will discuss the evaluation of these proposals on two very different sub-systems of English morphology: the English past tense, which is characterized by a sharp dichotomy in productivity between regular (i.e., -ed) and irregular (e.g., sing/sang) forms, and English derivational morphology, which is characterized by greater variability in productivity: from wholly productive (e.g., -ness), to productive in certain contexts (e.g., -ity; agreeability), to completely unproductive (e.g., -th). I will discuss several different aspects of the development and the adult state of these two systems, possibly including developmental overregularization, suffix ordering phenomena, and the generalizability of suffix combinations.

Speaker: mitcho (Michael Erlewine)
Title: Focus islands
Location: 32D-831
Time: Friday, Nov 18, 1:00PM-2:30PM

Abstract:

In this talk I discuss the phenomena of “focus islands”: that F-marked constituents cannot move out of the scope of focus-sensitive operators. This phenomenon was first noted by Tancredi (1990) for overt movement and Aoun & Li (1993) argued that this constraint also affects quantifier scope.

1. * [Who_i]_F does John only like t_i? (Tancredi 1990)
     Intended: ‘Who is the person x such that John only likes [x]_F?’
2. A teacher only likes every [boy]_F.
     a teacher > every boy, * every boy > a teacher (Aoun & Li 1993)

In this talk I share some work-in-progress thoughts on explaining focus islandhood. The presentation may (or may not) involve a discussion of recent literature on computing focus alternatives with or without variables in semantics (Shan 2004, Novel & Romero 2009).

Speaker: Suyeon Yun
Title: Opacity and Serial Phonology-Morphology Interaction in Kyungsang Korean
Location: 32D-831
Time: Monday, Nov 7, 5:00pm

Abstract:

Kyungsang Korean shows an interesting noun-verb asymmetry where phonological processes interact opaquely in verbs but transparently in nouns; consonant cluster simplification (e.g., /kaps/ -> [kap] ‘price’) counterbleeds post-obstruent tensing (e.g., /cap+ta/ -> [capt’a] ‘to catch’) in verbal inflections (e.g., /malk+ta/ -> [malt’a], *[malta] ‘to be clean’) but not in noun inflections (e.g., /talk+to/ -> [talto], *[talt’o] ‘chicken’ + ‘also’). In order to explain both opacity and the noun-verb asymmetry, I will show stratal OT (Kiparsky 2000) is not an adequate solution for this puzzle and propose an analysis based on Optimality Theory with Candidate Chains (OT-CC; McCarthy 2007). In this approach, opacity between post-obstruent tensing and consonant cluster simplification will be explained by PREC (IDENT(TENSE), MAX). Adopting Wolf (2008), I will also claim that serial phonology-morphology interactions in candidate chains (Wolf 2008) can explain the noun-verb asymmetry in Kyungsang Korean. Specifically, highly ranked PREC(MAX, insert-affixN), which penalizes a candidate chain with the insertion of nominal affixes before violating MAX, will lead a transparent result in nominal inflections only. In addition, I will lay out a non-opacity account of the same data. Based on the difference in the base form between verbs (A-suffix form) and nouns (citation form), the noun-verb asymmetry in tensification will be explained by phonetic duration preservation of each base.

This week’s Syntax Square features NELS 42 practice talks by Claire and Jeremy.

Time/Date: Tuesday, Nov 8, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

Speaker: Claire Halpert
Title: Structural case and the nature of vP in Zulu

The full abstract is available (PDF).

Bantu languages like Zulu have been claimed to lack Case Filter effects on the distribution of nominals
(Harford Perez 1985, Diercks to appear). In this talk I argue against this view of Bantu as an exception to
standard case theory. In particular, I propose that by adopting (1) Ndayiragije’s suggestion that there is a
head that probes for DP in a manner familiar from case-checking in other languages, but which can check
DPs not in need of case; and (2) Preminger’s (2009, 2010) proposal that agreement is obligatory where
possible, but is permitted to fail without inducing a crash, I can account for two distinct puzzles in Zulu – the
‘conjoint/disjoint’ alternation (van der Spuy 1993; Buell 2005) and the distribution of augmentless nominals
(Buell 2011) – if we assume that Zulu DPs are subject to the Case Filter just like their counterparts in other
languages. Taken together, then, these two puzzles and their proposed solution suggest that Case Theory is
perhaps fundamentally invariant across languages, despite a large amount of surface variation. They also
provide evidence for Preminger’s theory of agreement.

Speaker: Jeremy Hartman
Title: (Non-)Intervention in A-movement: some cross-constructional and cross-linguistic considerations

It is well known that English is cross-linguistically exceptional in
allowing constructions like (1), where subject-to-subject raising proceeds
across an overt, full-DP experiencer:

(1) John seems to Mary to be happy.

Although this point has been the subject of much discussion (Kitahara
1997, McGinnis 1998, Boeckx 1999, Chomsky 2000, Collins 2005), the
literature still lacks a satisfyingly predictive account of when and why
English is able to avoid the standard ‘defective
intervention’ effect. This paper makes both an empirical and a theoretical
contribution to these questions. I begin by laying out an expanded set of
intervention phenomena in English. Building on work in Hartman (2009), I
present data showing that English does in fact display intervention in a
variety of other NP-raising constructions. In other words, examples like
(1) are the exception even within English: in several similar
environments, the cross-linguistically typical effect is revealed. Next, I
sketch an analysis of the newly expanded data set, inspired by Mu?ller’s
(2001) ‘Parallel Movement’ constraint. The analysis accounts both for the
cross-linguistic variation between English and other languages, and for
the cross-constructional variation within English.

Speaker: Wataru Uegaki
Title: Inquisitive knowledge attribution and the Gettier problem
Location: 32D-831
Time: Wednesday, Nov 9, 4:00PM-5:30PM (Please note the unusual day and time; Friday is a holiday)

Abstract:

The Gettier problem (Gettier 1963) in epistemology concerns
cases of intuitively false knowledge attribution that is predicted to
be valid by the traditional view that a knowledge consists of a
justified true belief. This problem can be recast as a puzzle for the
standard semantic analysis of “know”. In the situation described in
(1), (2) is intuitively false. However, a semantics that equates
knowledge with justified true belief predicts it to be true.

(1) Smith justifiably believes that Jones owns a Ford. (He saw Jones
having a key of a Ford, washing a Ford etc.) He justifiably deduces
from this belief that Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona
although he is unopinionated about Brown’s whereabouts. It turned out
that Jones in fact did not have a Ford, but Brown was in Barcelona.
(2) Smith knows that [Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona].

In this talk, I will provide a new solution to this puzzle by giving
“know” a meaning that operates on a question-denotation (ie. a set of
alternative possibilities) even when it combines with a declarative
complement, making crucial use of the proposals in Alternative
Semantics (Kratzer and Shimoyama 2002, Alonso-Ovalle 2006 a.o.) and
Inquisitive Semantics (Groenendijk 2009, Groenendijk and Roelofsen
2009). In the proposed analysis, “x knows p” is true iff x has a
justified true belief of an alternative contained in p, and x has no
justified belief of any stronger alternative. I will also claim that a
natural extension of the current proposal accounts for the selection
restrictions of other attitude predicates, such as “believe” and
“wonder”.

Speaker: Amy Rose Deal (Harvard University)
Title: Nez Perce embedded indexicals
Time/Date: Thursday, Nov 10, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

Nez Perce is a language where indexical expressions embedded under speech and attitude verbs may show “shifty” behavior. I present a first empirical overview of this system in this talk. Nez Perce person and locative indexicals are like their English counterparts in showing immunity to modal quantification in matrix contexts. Once embedded in a speech or attitude complement, however, Nez Perce indexicals optionally show quotation-like behavior, even in the face of clear indications that the entire speech or attitude complement is not a quotation. I show that this phenomenon is not straightforwardly accounted for in terms of partial quotation or binding, configurations that can lead to exceptional indexicals in English. In response to a version of the “shift together” phenomenon identified by Anand and Nevins (2004) for Zazaki, I present an approach to Nez Perce indexical shifting which makes use of operators that manipulate contextual parameters. I conclude with evidence that indexicals shifted in this way need not be interpreted de se.

Speaker: Michael Kenstowicz
Title: Accent Classes and Lexical Drift in Kyungsang Korean
Location: 32D-831
Time: Monday, Oct 31, 5:00pm

In the Kyungsang dialects nouns fall into several lexically contrasting tonal patterns: three for monosyllables and four for di- and tri-syllabic stems. In this presentation (based on collaborative research with Youngah Do and Chiyuki Ito) we report some of the results of a survey of five native speakers with respect to c. 1,900 native lexical items. The following questions are addressed. How regular are the correspondences between the contemporary accent classes and their attested Middle Korean sources? Which classes have expanded and which have contracted? Have any segmental factors biased the observed changes? What role does lexical frequency play in the correspondences? How do the accentual changes align with the much-discussed segmental analogies in coronal codas? Finally, can the statistical profiles in the lexicon account for the default accent that is assigned to loanwords?

Speaker: Yusuke Imanishi
Title: How to Merge a Possessor WH in Kaqchikel (Mayan): Null Resumption and Non-Uniform Merge
Time/Date: Tuesday, Nov 1, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

This is a practice talk for NELS 42.

In this talk I will claim that a possessor WH in Kaqchikel undergoes non-uniform Merge: One type of the possessor WH is External-Merged into Spec-CP, while the other type undergoes movement to Spec-CP via Internal-Merge.
If this claim is correct, it can be argued that a possessor WH in Kaqchikel takes on different forms, depending on how it is merged: it is sensitive to the manner of Merge in a similar manner to the complementizer system in Modern Irish (McCloskey 1979, 1990, 2002, 2006, 2009).

Step 1: I will support this proposal by looking at extraction out of PP.

Step 2: It will be shown that the proposed non-uniform Merge of the possessor WH can make correct predictions about independent syntactic properties of the two wh phrases. It will be also demonstrated that Kaqchikel provides further evidence that the chain formation including movement and resumptive chains must be successive-cyclic and that UG allows for mixed chains of movement and resumption in a single non-local dependency.

Step 3: To explain why the resumptive strategy is only possible in a possessor position in the language, I will argue that extractability obeys the Agreement Hierarchy (Bobaljik 2008).

Speaker: Lisa Bylinina
Title: Low degrees, comparatives, and how they are related
Location: 32D-831
Time: Friday, Nov 4, 1:00PM-2:30PM

Abstract:

Very little is known about the diachronic sources of comparative morphemes. Even in cases when the origin of a comparative morpheme is clear, the development is quite often hard to make sense of.

The case I will discuss is hypothesized in (Dixon 2008): “It is
possible that a diminutive affix could develop into an Index of
comparison. No examples of such a path of development are currently
known.”

Tatar and Bashkir are examples of precisely this pattern, modulo
terminology: morpheme “-rak” performing low degree modification in
both of them also marks gradable predicates in comparative
constructions. However, while in Bashkir “-rak”-comparative has
replaced the common Turkic unmarked comparative, in Tatar the two
strategies co-exist in free variation.

Another pair of languages to consider is Russian and Bulgarian.
Bulgarian comparative morpheme “po” is a relative of Russian low
degree modifier “po-” that appears on comparative forms of adjectives.

Interestingly, there are certain comparative contexts in which Tatar
“-rak” and Russian “po-” are obligatory — all of these are contexts
without (overt) standard of comparison. Exploring the landscape of
these “incomplete comparatives”, I suggest that the relevant ones are
so-called “superlative comparatives”, as in “the taller building in
the picture” (Gawron 1995). I will try to push the idea that the
meaning of superlative comparatives makes them particularly useful for
reasoning about small differences within a domain in a way that
neither positives nor superlatives are; this is where low degrees and
comparatives meet.

Speaker: Laura McPherson
Title: Morphological distance and optional harmony in Tommo So
Location: 32D-831
Time: Monday, Oct 24, 5:00pm

Tommo So (Dogon, Mali) has two harmony processes: backness harmony and ATR harmony, which are both exceptionless in stems. Stem harmony is gradiently correlated with the order of derivational and inflectional suffixes. Broadly, the propensity to harmonize decreases as we move away from the stem, with a range of obligatory harmony, followed by optional harmony, followed by no harmony; backness harmony shuts off more quickly than ATR harmony. The range of optional backness harmony further breaks down into different rates of harmony, with a set of suffixes harmonizing 90% of the time, followed by a suffix with 35% harmony, followed by a suffix with 7%, again correlating with distance from the stem, which is measured in abstract morphological distance based on affix ordering, not on phonological distance. This talk addresses issues of optionality, gradience, and opacity in the system, suggesting an analysis of vowel harmony based on lexical access and decomposition.

Speaker: Bronwyn Bjorkman & Claire Halpert
Title: In search of (im)perfection: the illusion of counterfactual aspect
Date/Time: Tuesday, Oct 25, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

This is a practice talk for NELS 42. The full abstract is available (PDF).

Puzzle: We examine the puzzle of “fake” imperfective aspect in counterfactual conditionals (CFs).
“Fake” tense and aspect (Iatridou, 2000) – i.e. morphology that does not seem to make a temporal interpre-
tive contribution – is used in many languages to mark CFs. The following example from Greek illustrates
both past and imperfective morphology used to mark a future-less-vivid conditional:

[An pe?ene      o   ar?i?os] ?a  ton ?avame       stin   korifi tu  vunu

 if die.PST.IMP the chief    FUT him bury.PST.IMP on.the top    the mountain
‘If the chief died, we would bury him on the top of the mountain.’
(Iatridou, 2000, ex. (14))

The use of “fake” past morphology associated with CF interpretations has been well-documented (Steele,
1975; James, 1982; Iatridou, 2000, a.o.). Several proposals analyze fake past as the locus of CF semantics,
either by construing “past” as a marker of modal, rather than temporal, remoteness (Steele, 1975; Iatridou,
2000; Ritter and Wiltschko, 2010) or by deriving CF meaning from a purely temporal past (Ippolito, 2002;
Arregui, 2009). It has been claimed that fake imperfective is also involved in the marking of counterfactu-
als, though its use is less well-understood: for Iatridou (2000, 2009) imperfective in CFs is a default aspect;
Arregui (2004) claims that it reflects incompatibility between perfective and CFs; while Ippolito (2004) pro-
poses that a “modal imperfective” reflects a speaker’s indirect evidence for a proposition. Iatridou (2009)
proposes that imperfective-marked CFs occur in a subset of the languages with past-marked CFs, a general-
ization she based on the fact that Slavic languages have “fake” past but “real” aspect in CFs. We argue that
a full typology includes languages with “fake” perfective aspect in CFs as well, to which we return below.

Proposal: We argue that the apparent requirement for imperfective in CFs in some languages is illusory,
merely a morphological reflex of the need to realize a true PAST feature. We argue that “past imperfective”
morphology inthese languages actually expresses only PAST; itreceives animperfective interpretation dueto
contrast with a true PERFECTIVE morpheme. In CFs, this “past imperfective” morphology reflects only CF
“past”; in other words, it does not reflect syntactic IMPERFECTIVE features. We illustrate this proposal with
the morphological paradigm of three types of languages: (1) Greek, Romance, and Zulu, where imperfective
is default and occurs in CFs; (2) Arabic, where perfective is default and occurs in CFs; and (3) Slavic, where
PAST is specified independently of aspect, and CFs preserve full aspectual contrasts.

Speaker: Dennis Ott (University of Groningen)
Title: Peripheral fragments: an ellipsis approach to dislocation
Time/Date: Thursday, Oct 27, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

Germanic-type dislocation constructions, in which a dislocated XP (dXP) appears at the periphery of a clause containing a resumptive anchor, have been a long-standing problem for syntactic theory. In both Contrastive Left-dislocation (CLD; extensively studied since Cinque’s 1977 and Vat’s 1981 seminal works) and its counterpart Right-dislocation (RD; largely neglected in theoretical works, but see Zwart 2001, Averintseva-Klisch 2008, and Truckenbrodt forthcoming), the dXP is an optional “add-on” to a complete (gapless) clause, suggesting that it is base-generated clause-externally. At the same time, however, the dXP shows connectivity into the clause (case agreement with the pronominal anchor, reconstruction). This paradoxical situation has typically been ‘resolved’ by resort to stipulative mechanisms relating a clause-external adjunct (the dXP) to the movement chain comprising the pronominal anchor and its trace (cf., e.g., van Riemsdijk & Zwarts 1974, Zaenen 1997, Wiltschko 1997, and Frey 2004).

In this talk, I propose an alternative to these approaches, according to which the dXP in CLD and RD is a remnant of clausal ellipsis (cf. Tanaka 2001, a.o., on Japanese RD). That is, the underlying structure of dislocation constructions involves two juxtaposed clauses which are structurally parallel, modulo dXP vs. anchor. At PF, one of the two clauses (the “left” one in CLD, the “right” one in RD) undergoes IP-ellipsis (as familiar from sluicing, fragment answers, etc.; see Merchant 2001, 2004), leaving only the dXP. On this approach, connectivity effects in CLD and RD are due to ordinary reconstruction of the dXP internally to the reduced clause (cf. den Dikken et al. 2000 on pseudoclefts). I show that this analysis straightforwardly explains all central properties of CLD and RD, reducing the phenomenon traditionally labeled “dislocation” to A-bar movement and IP-ellipsis at PF.

WHO: Igor Yanovich
WHAT: Standard contextualism strikes back
WHEN: Oct 28, 1:00PM-2:30PM
WHERE: 32-D831

WHAT EXACTLY:

Lately, “standard contextualist” analyses of epistemic modals (think Kratzer 1977, 1981, 1991, on the linguistic side) have been attacked, and even judged to be inadequate on the basis of some data from dialogues. Instead, various authors (to name a few, MacFarlane 2011, von Fintel & Gillies 2011) proposed fancier theories, which can deal with the problematic data.

In this talk, I won’t argue that the fancier theories are wrong. But I will propose a new variant of standard contextualism which accounts for the relevant data.

Speaker: Edward Flemming (Joint work with Hyesun Cho)
Title: The phonetic specification of contour tones: The rising tone in Mandarin
Location: 32D-831
Time: Monday, Oct 17, 5:00pm

In this talk I will report on joint work with Hyesun Cho investigating how contour tones are specified phonetically. It has been proposed that all tones are realized by point targets for pitch, so the pitch movement associated with a rising tone is simply the result of interpolation between low and high point targets. Other analyses argue that pitch movements in contour tones are governed by targets, e.g. specifying the slope of the pitch movement. We investigate this question through a case study of the Mandarin Chinese rising tone. The patterns of variation in the realization of the rising tone as a function of speech rate indicate that the specifications of this tone involve targets pertaining to both the pitch movement and its end points: the slope of the f0 rise, the magnitude of the rise, and the alignment of the onset and offset of the rise. In addition, this analysis implies that the rising tone is over-specified in the sense that the targets conflict and thus cannot all be realized. The conflict between the tone targets is resolved by a compromise between them, a pattern that is captured by formulating the targets as weighted, violable constraints.

Upcoming Phonology Circle Talks:
Oct 24 - Laura McPherson
Oct 31 - Michael Kenstowicz
Nov 7 - Suyeon Yun
Nov 28 - Donca Steriade

Speaker: Claire Halpert
Title: Surprising Subject Agreement in Zulu: Some new facts about raising
Date/Time: Tuesday, Oct 18, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

I’ll be discussing a novel variation on the raising-to-subject construction in Zulu. I’ll present evidence that this construction involves movement of the embedded subject to a preverbal A position in the matrix clause without the matrix subject agreement that typically is required with nominals in such positions (cf. Buell 2005). Instead, the verb bears the same agreement marker found in expletive constructions. A comparison with the standard raising case, in which agreement with the raised subject does occur, yields no interpretive differences between the two constructions, which suggests that agreement with the raised subject is optional in this construction. I’ll compare this construction with one other instance of apparent optional subject agreement—the case of complex NP subjects—and explore potential explanations that unite the two constructions, including the possibility that the “expletive” agreement in both constructions is actually agreement with a CP.

WHO: Ayaka Sugawara
WHAT: First language acquisition of Antecedent-Contained Deletion
WHEN: Friday 21 October, 1:00PM-2:30PM
WHERE: 32-D831

Abstract:

In this talk, I will report the previous studies on first language acquisition of Antecedent Contained Deletion (ACD) sentences and will discuss some thoughts about possible follow-up/refined experiment.

ACD is a version of VP-ellipsis, in which the elided VP is a part of the relative clause within its antecedent, as shown in (1a). ACD is problematic if we do not assume QR, because the elided VP will never be identical to the antecedent VP without QR (1b). In order for the structural identity between the antecedent VP and the elided VP to be realized, the operation QR is necessary to interpret ACD sentences (1c).

(1) a. John read every book that Bill did.
      b. John [_aVP read [_DP every book that Bill did <_eVP read every book that Bill did <…>]]
      c. (after QR) [every book that Bill did <read t>] John read t.

Previous studies (Kiguchi & Thornton (2004), Syrett & Lidz (2009)) show that 4- and 5-year-old kids can correctly interpret ACD sentences in which Binding Principles are relevant such as (2). This suggests that QR is innate (given that the input of ACD sentences is quite rare for kids and we cannot interpret ACD without QR), and that kids have adult-like knowledge of the Binding Principles.

(2) a. The Mermaid baked him_i the same food that Cookie Monster_*i did.
      b. Dora gave him_i the same color paint that Smurf’s_i father did.
      c. He_i jumped over every fence that Kermit_*i tried to.

Syrett & Lidz (2011) conducted experiments to test whether people (adults and kids) can target the embedded VP and the matrix VP as the landing site of QR. Their results, in my opinion, are not very clear.

(3) a. Miss Piggy wanted to drive every car that Kermit did.
      b. (targeting the embedded VP) … Kermit did .
      c. (targeting the matrix VP) … Kermit did .

Adding to introducing those papers in more detail, I would like to discuss some thoughts about what will be a better experiment. Reading those three papers I mentioned will be very helpful (references below).

• Kiguchi, Hirohisa & Rosalind Thornton (2004) “Binding Principles and ACD Constructions in Child Grammars,” Syntax 7, 234-271.
• Syrett, Kristen & Jeffrey Lidz (2009) “QR in Child Grammar: Evidence from Antecedent-Contained Deletion,” Language Acquisition 16, 67-81.
• Syrett, Kristen & Jeffrey Lidz (2011) “Competence, Performance, and the Locality of Quantifier Raising: Evidence from 4-Year-Old Children,” Linguistic Inquiry 42, 305-337.

Speaker: Barbara Citko (Visiting Scholar, University of Washington)
Title: In Search of MDDs (Multidominance Diagnostics)
Location: 32-D461
Time: Thursday, Oct 13, 12:30-1:45p

Many existing multidominant (MD) proposals have focused, either directly or indirectly, on various types
of coordinate structures, such as right node raising (Wilder 1999, De Vries 2009, Johnson 2007, among
others), across-the-board wh-questions (Citko 2005, in press, De Vries 2009, among many others),
gapping (Goodall 1987, Kasai 2007, among others), questions with coordinated wh-pronouns (Gracanin-
Yuksek 2007), determiner sharing (Citko 2006, Kasai 2007). However, the presence of coordination is not a reliable diagnostic of MD for two reasons. First, there exist coordinate structures that do not involve MD (simple coordinate structures with no ellipsis or movement whatsoever), and second, there are many non-coordinate structures that can be (and have been) analyzed in a MD fashion. These include (but are not limited to): free relatives (Van Riemsdijk 2006, Citko 2000, in press), parasitic gaps (Kasai 2007), serial verb constructions (Hiraiwa and Bodomo 2008), amalgams (Kluck 2008), comparatives (Moltmann 1992), discontinuous idioms (Svenonius 2005). Thus, given the fact that multidominance is independent from both coordination and ellipsis, the search for reliable diagnostics of a MD structure continues.

The intuition that all MD approaches build on is that the shared element has to simultaneously
satisfy the constraints imposed by it by the two elements between which it is shared. In other words, it
must match these two elements. In this talk, I explore the nature of this matching requirement with an
eye towards developing a set of diagnostics for a MD structure. More specifically, I address the following
three questions:

A.	What kind of matching do MD structures require?
B.	What kinds of mismatches do MD structures tolerate?
C.	Why are different types of MD structures appear to be subject to different matching requirements?

Drawing on data from Polish, I compare the matching requirements in four types of arguably
multidominant constructions: two coordinate ones (right node raising and across-the-board wh-questions) and two non-coordinate ones (parasitic gaps and free relatives), focusing on the differences
between them and ways to account for these differences.

WHO: András Kornai
WHAT: Lexical semantics by machines
WHEN: Friday 14 October, 1:00PM-2:30PM
WHERE: 32-D831

Abstract:

A simple information-theoretic argument shows that about 90% of the
information in a sentence is carried by the choice of words, and only
10% depends on function-argument structure. In light of this, it is
somewhat surprising that 90% of formal semantics (basically, all of
Montague Grammar and its descendants) deals with the compositional
aspects of meaning, with lexical semantics relegated to the fringes of
formal work. In this talk we discuss how a classical piece of algebra,
Eilenberg’s (1974) theory of machines, can be used to provide a
nontrivial formal theory of word meaning, and how the resulting model
interfaces with compositional tecto- and phenogrammar.

References: (* = suggested reading)

S. Eilenberg (1974) Automata, Languages, and Machines. Academic Press
[This book is excellent background for those interested in the
algebraic theory of finite state automata, transducers, and machines
that this work puts to use for semantics.]

*A. Kornai (2010a) The treatment of ordinary quantification in English
proper. Hungarian Review of Philosophy 2010 54/4 150-162
[This is a summary of what is wrong, in this author’s view, with MG and
related theories of formal semantics. Formal issues are discussed,
but no heavy machinery is used.]

*A. Kornai (2010b) The algebra of lexical semantics. In C. Ebert, G.
Jaeger, J. Michaelis (eds) Proc. 11th Mathematics of Language workshop
(MOL11) Springer LNCS 6149 174-199
[This is the intro to the new approach.]

*A. Kornai (2011) Eliminating ditransitives. To appear in M. Egg, P. de
Groote, M-J Nederhof, F. Richter (eds) Selected Papers from the 15th
and 16th Formal Grammar Conferences, Springer LNAI, in press.
[One area where the algebraic approach shows some promise.]

SPEAKER: Anders Holmberg — Newcastle University
TIME: 3:30 PM, Friday 10/14
LOCATION: 32-141
TITLE: On the Syntax of Yes and No in English

Abstract:

The paper discusses systems of answering yes/no- questions in general,
as background to a discussion of two theories articulating the idea
that answers to yes/no-questions are derived by propositional ellipsis
under identity with the proposition of the question. The first theory
is articulated by Kramer & Rawlins (2009,2010), the other is based on
Holmberg (2001, 2007). The paper focuses on a particularly vexing case
of answers to negative questions in English: the ambiguity of yes as
an answer to negative questions with the negation not (called
‘negative neutralization’ by Kramer & Rawlins). It is argued that the
ambiguity is due to the structural ambiguity of not, as either
negating the sentence or constituent-negating the predicate. An
argument is also presented that affirmative declaratives have an
affirmative polarity head, a counterpart of the negative polarity head
of negative declaratives.

Please join us for Syntax Square on Tuesday. Coppe will be discussing some data from Sorani Kurdish and dialects of Neo-Aramaic to do with split ergativity and PCC effects.

Speaker: Coppe van Urk
Title: Split Ergativity in dialects of Kurdish and Neo-Aramaic
Date & Time: Tuesday, Oct. 4, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

Speaker: Ivan Sag (Stanford)
Title: Sex, Lies, and the English Auxiliary System
Location: 32-D461
Time: Thursday, Oct 6, 12:30-1:45p

Ever since the grammar of the English auxiliary system presented in
LSLT/Syntactic Structures, it has been widely believed that movement
operations must be part of grammatical theory. Moreover, it is generally
accepted within Minimalism and related fields informed by it that human
biology determines that movement rules are ‘structure dependent’. I
will show why both of these claims are false. In addition, the
construction-based analysis of the auxiliary system that I will
present treats generalizations and exceptions that have never been
properly analyzed (or else have not been analyzed at all) in
transformational terms.

WHO: Rick Nouwen
WHAT: The projection of appositives
WHEN: Friday 7 October, 1:00PM-2:30PM
WHERE: 32-D831

Nominal appositives (NAs) have non-trivial projection behaviour. For instance, Wang et al. 2005 observed that while NAs are normally interpreted with widest scope, the nominal appositive in (1) restricts the if-clause. This reading is unavailable with an appositive relative in that same position.

(1) If a professor, a famous one, writes a book, he will earn a lot of money.

I discuss a potential approach to the projection behaviour of NAs that on a syntactic and semantic level is identical to Schlenker’s 2010 proposal for non-restrictive relative clauses, but which differs with respect to pragmatic conditions. In a nutshell, what accounts for the complex projection behaviour is that nominal appositives have flexible syntactic attachment, are interpreted as conjuncts with an e-type subject pronoun and prefer wide-scope interpretations.

SPEAKER: Ivan Sag — Stanford University
TIME: 3:30 PM, Friday 10/07
LOCATION: 32-141
TITLE: Sluicing without Ellipsis

Abstract:

This talk examines various arguments that have been made by Merchant
(2001, 2004, 2008, to appear) against the direct-interpretation theory
of Sluicing and Bare Argument Ellipsis put forth by Ginzburg and Sag
(2000) [GSOO] (see also Culicover and Jackendoff, 2005). With more
careful examination of GS00’s proposal, however, specifically in
relation to the role of salient utterance (SAL-UTT) and the maximal
question under discussion (MAX-QUD) supplied by context, the arguments
made against the direct-interpretation approach are seen to lose their
force. We also examine data from a number of languages which are
problematic for any deletion-based analysis of Sluicing, showing how
the direct-interpretation approach avoids these difficulties.
Finally, we show how GS00’s analysis interacts with Ginzburg’s (in
press) theory of dialogue to provide an account of `sprouting’ that
answers the arguments against GS00 offered in Chung, Ladusaw, and
McCloskey, to appear.

Date: Monday Sept 26
Time: 4 pm (please note the unusual time!)
Location: 36-112 (please note the change of venue!)
Presenter: Gillian Gallagher, NYU
Title: Speaker awareness of non-local phonotactics in Quechua

I present evidence that speakers of Cochabamba Quechua are aware of non-local restrictions on laryngeal features in their language. A repetition task was run to investigate the synchronic status of two of the laryngeal restrictions in Quechua: the cooccurrence restriction on ejectives, which prohibits roots with two ejectives (e.g., *[k’ap’i]), and the ordering restriction on ejectives, which prohibits roots with an initial plain stop and a medial ejective (e.g., *[kap’i]). Medial ejectives are generally attested in the language, but only occur in roots with an initial fricative or sonorant e.g., [mat’i] ‘forehead’. Native Quechua speakers from the Cochabamba area of Bolivia were asked to repeat a mixture of real and nonsense words with medial ejectives, where the nonsense words were either phonotactically legal but unattested roots or phonotactically illegal roots that violated either the cooccurrence restriction or the ordering restriction. Medial ejectives are accurately repeated significantly more often in nonce roots where the medial ejective is phonotactically legal than when it is illegal. Moreover, there is no significant difference in error rate between attested and unattested but legal roots, nor any signficant difference in error rate between roots that violate the cooccurrence restriction and those that violate the ordering restriction. These results show that both restrictions are synchronically active. Additionally, there is variation in how roots that violate the ordering restriction are repaired, both deletion of medial ejection, e.g., target [kap’i] produced as [kapi], and movement of ejection, e.g., target [kap’i] produced as [k’api] are common. This variation in repair strategy has implications for the formal analysis of the restriction, which must predict all well-attested repairs.

Please join us Tuesday, when John Berman (one of our ling majors) will be presenting his work on Chol.

Speaker: John Berman
Location: 32-D461
Time: Tuesday, Sept. 27, 1-2p

In Chol Mayan, there are a variety of nominalizing suffixes in –Vl. One such suffix, –el, appears throughout the language in four apparently unrelated places – imperfectives of unaccusatives, derivations of unergatives and antipassives, and derivations of inalienable nouns. While –el is traditionally analyzed as a nominalizer in Mayan (Kaufman calls it a gerund), there have been no proposals to link its four Chol meanings together, nor have there been any explanations for its comparatively widespread distribution in Chol relative to other Mayan languages. I hope to answer these questions by providing a unified analysis of Chol –el as a little nº head used to nominalize nouns and verbs which take internal arguments. This proposal will draw upon and support claims that inalienable possessors are generated as internal arguments to their nouns.

Speaker: Peter Graff
Title: Perceptual Dispersion in the Lexicon
Time: Thursday, Sept. 29, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

We explore the hypothesis that the global organization of the lexicon maximizes the perceptual distinctness of words, by preferentially relying on highly perceptible contrasts, even when the phonotactics of the language permit less perceptible ones. We predict that distinctions among words will predominantly rely either on few highly perceptible contrasts (e.g. /t?n/ vs. /k?n/ with a place contrast in prevocalic position) or on many globally distributed contrasts, with multiple differences keeping the words apart (e.g. /s?ts/ vs. /??ks/ with a postvocalic place contrast further disambiguated by other differences). We present evidence for this hypothesis from a study investigating the typology of minimal pairs in 58 languages and a study relating the frequency of English minimal pairs to patterns of perceptual confusion. These results evidence a link between distinctness of words in the lexicon and the perception of speech as indicated by the significant effect of perceptibility beyond the phonotactic control variables. They suggest that the lexicon preferentially assigns minimal pairs for any feature to contexts where that feature is better perceived. We discuss implications of these findings for competing theories of the relation between perceptual distinctiveness and phonological patterns (e.g. Ohala 1981, Steriade 2001, Blevins 2004, Hayes and Steriade 2004).

WHO: Igor Yanovich
WHAT: Embedded epistemic claims in the light of the recent epistemics debate
WHEN: Sept 30, 1:00PM-2:30PM
WHERE: 32-D831

WHAT EXACTLY:

Rather than give a formal talk, I plan to introduce a certain current debate in the literature, and discuss some thoughts about new data bearing on it. This is very much work in progress - I have just started to think about those issues. But I do hope I’ll convince you that at the very least the issues are fun.

There is currently a big debate between epistemic relativists (e.g., MacFarlane) and “cloudy contextualists” (von Fintel and Gillies) about what is going on in the scenarios like this:

(1) a. Sarah: The keys might be in the car.
    b1. Mary: Yeah, that’s right. Let me check. / b2. Mary: No, I’ve checked there an hour ago.
    c. Sarah, after (b2): OK, then I guess I was wrong.

Suppose that the epistemic claim in (1a) is relative to a modal base representing the speaker’s, Sarah’s, knowledge. Then (1a) is only about the private knowledge, and it is mysterious why Mary can reject that claim, why she can act as if Sarah’s claim was about their common knowledge, and why Sarah may want to retract her earlier claim - even though at the time she made it, she may have been fully right in doing that.

Relativism and cloudy contextualism are two families of approaches which aim to explain puzzles like (1). Both have put forward a lot of evidence in their favor, and despite serious disagreements, converge on many important points. It is hard to evaluate all the arguments, and I will not try to do that on Friday, though I will try to give you their flavor.

Instead, I want to look more closely into an area which has not yet been subject to much scrutiny during the debate: epistemic claims embedded under attitude verbs. The key observation is that in some circumstances, such embedded epistemic claims may behave just as matrix epistemic claims - even though Hacquard (2010) has shown that they have to be dependent on a different source of knowledge than matrix epistemics. As they stand, I think neither relativist nor cloudy contextualist theories can explain the data.

There is a quick fix which seems to favor cloudy contextualism. However, I believe that once we look more carefully at the evidence coming from the functioning of embedded claims in discourse, a more complex and interesting picture emerges. It is that picture which I’d like to talk about on Friday. Rather than a quick fix, it seems to call for a more thorough analysis of how different sorts of attitude verbs work.

Speaker: Kie Zuraw (UCLA)
Title: Korean sai-siot: phonological and non-phonological factors
Date: Friday, 9/30
Time: 3:30 PM
Location: 32-141

Some Korean compounds are pronounced as though /s/ were inserted,
followed by various automatic rules of the language. A following lenis
obstruent becomes tensified (/twi+s+pa?/ ? [twip’a?] ‘back room’), and
a following nasal becomes lengthened (/p?+s+nol?/ ? [p?nno??]
‘sailors’ song’). This phenomenon is known as sai-siot ‘middle s’.
Much literature has debated the nature of the sai-siot morpheme, rule,
or constraint (/s/-insertion, mora insertion, etc.), but this talk
focuses on sai-siot’s distribution.

This talk uses corpus data to investigate phonological and other
predictors of sai-siot that have been noted in previous literature, as
well as some new ones. These include the branching structure of
compounds, their etymology (Sino-Korean vs. native Korean), frequency
of the whole compound and its members, syllable counts of compound
members, sonority of the segments surrounding the compound boundary,
and presence of an underlying tense consonant.

A recurring finding is that most of these factors interact
quantitatively rather than in a strict hierarchy. For example, it’s
not the case that compounds can be divided, based on their branching
structure, into those that can’t undergo sai-siot and those that may,
depending on other factors. Rather, branching structure and other
factors all contribute to the probability that a compound will undergo
sai-siot. This suggests that phonological and certain non-phonological
factors can interact directly, rather than belonging to completely
separate modules.

Speaker: Mafuyu Kitahara
Date: Sept 19 (Monday)
Time: 5 pm
Location: 32-D831
Title: Alignment and scaling of pitch accent in Japanese
Infant-Directed and Adult-Directed Speech
Authors: Mafuyu Kitahara, Ken’ya Nishikawa, Yousuke Igarashi, and
Reiko Mazuka

Abstract:

The present study examined F0 contour in Infant-Directed Speech (IDS)
and Adult-Directed Speech (ADS). It has been pointed out that the
timing of F0 fall in Japanese sometimes occurs later than the
lexically accented syllable (Sugito, 1982). As reported earlier, the
amount of delay is larger in IDS than in ADS (Kitahara et al.,
2008). Their analysis was based solely on the highest point of F0,
however. The present study gives a more detailed analysis of the F0
contour of the whole accentual phrase by fitting a three-piece linear
regression (Cho, 2010) for the rising part and the falling part
separately.

The acoustic data were taken from Riken Japanese Mother-Infant
Conversation Corpus (R-JMICC) and a list-reading corpus spoken by the
same group of mothers as R-JMICC. A preliminary analysis of the data
showed that the delayed-fall tokens tend to have a delayed-rise as
well. It was also found that the timing of the lower and the upper
elbows in the F0 contours have a systematic difference in IDS than in
ADS. Theoretical implications for autosegmental/metrical phonology
based on these results will be discussed.

Speaker: Ted Levin
Title: Sakha’s One Modality of Case Assignment
Location: 32-D461
Time: Tuesday, Sept 20, 1-2pm

Baker and Vinokurova (2010) adopt a Chomskyan theory of case assignment to account for the realization of case in Sakha. They suggest that case is assigned within the narrow syntax, and that the Case Filter (Chomsky and Lasnik 1977) is real. However, they must also propose that a configurational wrinkle be added to the theory of Chomsyan case assignment to accurately account for the distribution of accusative and dative case. Specifically, accusative and most instances of dative are dependent cases. They are realized on an NP given the relative position of another NP, meeting certain requirements, within an appropriate domain. Their configurational rule is given in (1).

(1)	a.	If there are two distinct NPs in the same VP-phase such that NP1 c-commands NP2, then value the case feature of NP1 as dative unless NP2 has already been marked for case.
	b.	If there are two distinct NPs in the same phase such that NP1 c-commands NP2, then value the case feature of NP2 as accusative unless NP1 has already been marked for case.

In (1), functional heads determine the appropriate domain, and thus only play an indirect role in assigning these case markers. Conversely, the realization of nominative and genitive case is directly determined by functional heads as is expected. Baker and Vinokurova note that nominative case is only assigned when subject agreement is realized on the verb. The co-occurrence of agreement and case morphology prompts the rule for nominative and genitive assignment given in (2).

(2)

If a functional head F C {T, D} has unvalued phi-features and an NP X has an unvalued case feature (and certain locality conditions hold), then agreement happens between F and X, resulting in the phi-features of X being assigned to F and the case associated with F (nominative or genitive) being assigned to X.

While the hybrid system advocated by Baker and Vinokurova captures the facts of case in Sakha, it is my goal to sketch the beginnings of a strictly Marantzian account of the data. As we shall see, such an exercise requires some alterations to Marantz’s original theory. I incorporate a version of (1) into the disjunctive hierarchy of morphological case assignment to treat both dative and accusative cases as dependent, and I adopt a unique view of what items are assigned case. Specifically, an NP which undergoes movement is assigned case more than once. Each trace (or copy) of the moved item is assigned case according to the case disjunctive hierarchy. Which case(s) is pronounced is subject to cross-linguistic parametric variation. This second modification has been shown to be effective in accounting for other complex case phenomena (Levin 2010). Further, a purely Marantzian account must follow Bobaljik (2008) in treating agreement as a post-syntactic operation which follows case assignment. In this way, I suggest that it is not the presence of agreement morphology which indicates the presence of nominative morphology, but that the presence of nominative case conditions the presence of agreement morphology.

Syntax Square, the department’s informal discussion group for syntax, will be starting back up this week with a talk by Prof. Shigeru Miyagawa. The talks will be held on Tuesdays, 1-2pm in 32-D461.

The organizers are Coppe van Urk and Ted Levin. Please send them an e-mail if you have ongoing or completed syntactic work that you would like to present or if there is a recent article or book you would like to discuss. Keep in mind that Syntax Square is there for work in various states of disarray. Feel free to use it to present an interesting problem or a theory you are developing.

Speaker: Shigeru Miyagawa
Title: Minimal Parametric Variation
Time: Tuesday, Sept 13, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461

A linguistic theory should minimally tell us the following:

• How are natural languages the same?
• In what ways can they be different?

GB theory had a straightforward answer to these questions. All languages contain the same set of principles such as subjacency; where languages differ is in the setting of the parameter built into many of the principles. In MP, there are no principles like those in GB, and obviously no parameters based on such principles. Chomsky suggests the following.

Uniformity Principle (Chomsky 2001: 2)
In the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary, assume languages to be uniform, with variety restricted to easily detectable properties of utterances.

The first part is clear, but the second portion that speaks to how the languages may differ needs clarification. I will attempt to provide a concrete instantiation of both portions of the Uniformity Principle (UP) by extending the proposal in Miyagawa (2010), in order to understand both the content of the universal statement and the precise nature of the variation being described in the UP. In so doing, I will look at the variations in the way agreements arise, particularly paying attention to languages that do not evidence any overt agreement such as Chinese and Japanese.

Speaker: Aya Meltzer-Asscher (Northwestern University)
Title: Training verb argument structure production in agrammatic aphasia: Behavioral and neural recovery patterns
Time: Thursday, Sept. 15, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

Many individuals with agrammatic aphasia have difficulty producing verbs. However, relatively little is known about the effects of treatment for this deficit, with most research in the area examining semantic or phonological cueing approaches, adopted from object naming treatments. Interestingly, although such treatments generally improve production of trained verbs, they result in little to no generalization to untrained verbs.

The current study examines the effects of treatment focused on argument mapping in sentence contexts. Based on previous studies showing a complexity effect in treatment, three-argument verbs were trained, and generalization to two- and one-argument verbs was tested, in both action naming and sentence production. In addition, the study addressed the neural substrates of treatment effects using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during verb naming pre- and post-treatment.

In the behavioral portion of the study, we found successful learning of three-argument verbs, as well as generalization to untrained verbs with simpler argument structures, in all participants who received treatment. Significant differences between treated and control participants were found in both constrained verb production and sentence production. Treated participants also showed improved verb production in spontaneous speech. As for the neural activation patterns associated with recovery, post- compared to pre-treatment fMRI scans revealed upregulation in cortical regions implicated for verb and argument structure processing in healthy controls.

We conclude that treatment for verb deficits incorporating thematic role mapping is effective for improving both verb and sentence production and results in recruitment of brain regions engaged for verb and argument structure processing in healthy individuals. Further, the finding that training verbs with complex argument structure results in generalization to verbs of lesser complexity reinforces the tenet that treatment of more complex language structures promotes generalization to less complex, linguistically related, structures (Thompson, Shapiro, Kiran, & Sobecks, 2003).

Speaker: Line Mikkelsen - University of California, Berkeley
Title: Verb-second structures: Evidence from Danish VP anaphora
Date: Friday, 9/16
Time: 3:30 PM
Location: 32-141

Abstract:

Most work on verb-second order in Germanic languages assumes that the choice
of initial constituent in declarative verb-second clauses is a matter of
textual organization which falls outside the domain of syntax. In this talk
I give evidence that in at least one Germanic language there are
intrasential syntactic principles that restrict what may occupy initial
position in declarative verb-second clauses. I further show how these
principles bear on one of the central disagreements in the generative
literature on Germanic clause structure, namely whether subject-initial
verb-second clauses have the same structure as non-subject-initial
verb-second clauses. The proposed analysis uses dedicated wh and
information-structural features to drive A-bar movement and thereby offers a
theoretical counterpoint to recent work arguing against the existence of
such features and their involvement in A-bar movement, including Fanselow
and Lenertová (2011) and Chomsky (2008).

The MIT Linguistics Colloquium schedule for this academic year is below. All talks are on Fridays, 3:30-5:00 p.m. in room 32-141 unless otherwise noted. For further information, please contact Sam Al Khatib or Natalia Ivlieva. This schedule is subject to change, especially for Spring 2012.

Fall 2011

September 16: Line Mikkelsen (UC Berkeley)
September 30: Kie Zuraw (UCLA)
October 7: Ivan Sag (Stanford)
October 14: Anders Holmberg (Newcastle)
November 18: Maria Aloni (Amsterdam)

Spring 2012

February 10: David Beaver (UT Austin)
March 9: Yosef Grodzinsky (McGill)
March 16: Sun-Ah Jun (UCLA)
April 6: Benjamin Spector (Institut Jean Nicod, CNRS-ENS–EHESS)
April 13: Meghan Sumner (Stanford)
April 27: Uli Sauerland (ZAS)
May 4: Hagit Borer (USC)
May 11: Milan Rezac (University of the Basque Country) [rescheduled from Spring 2011]

Update, Sept. 7: Anders Holmberg’s talk will be on Oct. 14, and David Beaver’s talk will be on Feb. 10.

Speaker: Robert Henderson (UCSC)
Title: A corpus-based approach to quantifier scope disambiguation
Time: Monday, May 9, 11:30am
Location: 32-D461

(Joint work with Scott AnderBois and Adrian Brasoveanu)

Most investigations of quantifier scope are concerned with the range of possible scopes for sentences with multiple quantifiers. Instead, this study examines the actual scopes, i.e., the pragmatics of quantifier scope disambiguation. Although actual usage facts fall outside of semantics proper, we are interested in them because they too are facts about natural language interpretation. Moreover, they are facts which provide indirect evidence about the semantics of quantifiers, e.g. if “some” has a stronger preference for narrow scope than “a”, then their semantic representations should arguably be different. To address these questions, we assembled a corpus of sentences from LSAT logic puzzles and tagged it for quantifier scope. In this talk I’ll present our corpus and compare several models of quantifier scope disambiguation.

Speaker: Melissa Kline

Title: Children’s comprehension and production of transitive sentences is sensitive to the causal structure of events

Time: Tuesday 5/10, 46-3189, 12-1pm

Young children learn about causal relationships not only from observation, but also from the language they hear. Two novel-verb studies show that preschoolers recognize that transitive sentences like `Sarah broke the lamp’ express a relationship between cause and effect. Previous work has explored only differences between prototypical events of different categories, systematically conflating causation with a number of other semantic features. The present studies show that children attend specifically to causal structure, as indicated by spatiotemporal contiguity between action and outcome subevents. Children were more likely to give transitive descriptions (‘She wugged it’) to causal than to noncausal versions of an event. Children also reliably selected a causal event when asked to ‘find where she wugged [it].’ Transitive sentences thus provide children with a rich source of evidence about the verbs they learn and the events they encounter in the world.

The last regularly scheduled Phonology Circle for the semester will feature practice talks for RUMMIT (which will take place at Rutgers on Mon 5/16):

Speaker: Coppe van Urk

Title: On the distribution of clashes

Speaker: Suyeon Yun

Title: String-based domains of duration preservation

Time: Tuesday 5/10, 5-6pm, 32-D831

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

There will be two meetings of the LFRG next week.

WHO: Ciro Greco
WHAT: Double Access Reading
WHEN: May 11, 5:00PM-6:30PM (note the unusual time)
WHERE: 32-D831

ABSTRACT:

In many languages, when a present tense stative predicate is embedded under a past tense attitude verb we observe a particular temporal interpretation of the sentence know as Double Access Reading (DAR). In particular, the embedded eventuality must be interpreted as temporally overlapping both the attitude’s time and the utterance time:

(1) Ezra ha detto che Frida è incinta.
     Ezra said that Frida is pregnant

The present tense in (1) seems to be sensitive both to the matrix tense and to the utterance time. Many scholars claimed that DAR is a consequence of a core property of temporal dependencies, namely that tenses in embedded attitude contexts cannot take their denotation only with respect to the utterance time (Enç 1987, Higginbotham 1995, Giorgi 2010). Therefore, tenses in embedded attitude contexts cannot be interpreted as mere indexicals.

However, in the following example, the present tense need not to be interpreted as to the matrix time; the crucial point is the overlapping with the utterance time. Prima facie, (2) represent a problem for the generalization above:

(2) Ezra ha detto che Frida è a casa oggi.
     Ezra said that Frida is at home today.

Although (2) seem to show that there are cases in which an embedded tense can be interpreted as a mere indexical, we will argue that this kind of examples do not represent a real counterexample to a theory of DAR. Our aim is to show that these cases can be accounted for using a semantics of futurates along the lines of Copley (2009).

WHAT: SALT practice talks
WHEN: Friday 5/13, 2pm (the usual time)
WHERE: 32-D831

Speaker: Bronwyn Bjorkman
Title: The crosslinguistic defaultness of be
Time: Thursday, May 12, 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461

In this talk I propose that auxiliaries such as be are a morphological strategy for realizing verbal inflection that has been “stranded” by the syntactic derivation. This is an alternative to the view that auxiliaries head dedicated projections idiosyncratically subcategorized for in particular inflectional contexts. I argue that viewing auxiliary verbs as morphological defaults allows us to unify two superficially different patterns of auxiliary use: a pattern like the one we find in English, where auxiliary-taking categories always occur with an auxiliary (i.e. the passive and progressive), and a pattern that we find in languages like Latin and Kinande (Bantu) (among other languages), where auxiliaries only arise in certain combinations of categories. Kinande, for example, has synthetic past tense and progressive forms, but requires an auxiliary to express both at once (the past progressive). In addition to developing a model of verbal inflection that can account for both these patterns, I discuss some implications of the approach for inflectional marking in counterfactuals.

Time: Monday, May 2, 11:30am

Location: 32-D461

Kirill Shklovsky will be discussing Elena Anagnostopoulou’s “The Syntax of Ditransitives.”

Speaker: Nina Topintzi

Title: The (morpho)phonology of the Greek glide and the palatals

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

The glide [j] has been notorious in the Greek literature as a segment whose nature alternates in complex ways between that of an allophone of /i/ as well as of a phoneme distinct from it. Past accounts have managed to capture a fairly limited set of the data, most frequently by making recourse to historical or sociolinguistic factors. The aim of this talk is to improve on this situation by analysing a wider set of facts and by promoting the role pure grammatical factors play. The first part of the talk offers a proposal for the glide which attempts to elucidate its various facets uniformly with the added bonus that it can extend to an analysis of palatals (also problematic in the literature). In the second part, I present a first take on the behaviour of the glide in various morpho-phonological environments. It will become obvious that while the preceding analysis works satisfactorily for a large part of the data, a lot remains to be understood.

Upcoming talks:

May 10: RUMMIT practice talks

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

Speaker: Shin Ishihara

Title: Japanese Focus Prosody Revisited: Freeing Focus from Prosodic Phrasing

Time: Thurs 5/5, 11am-12pm, 32-D461 ***NOTE SPECIAL DATE, TIME, AND LOCATION

This talk revisits empirical and theoretical problems of focus prosody
in Japanese, and proposes a new analysis. Contrary to the widely
accepted assumption that focus directly or indirectly modifies
prosodic phrasing, various studies have shown that prosodic boundaries
remain unchanged when a focus is added to a sentence. It is proposed
that phonetic effects of focus (F0-rise on the focused word, and
reduction in the post-focal areas) result from manipulations of
metrical prominences (addition of focal prominence on the focused word
and deletion of head prominences in the post-focal area) that have no
effect on prosodic boundaries. In order to allow prominence
manipulation while keeping prosodic phrasing intact, two modifications
are made to one of the widely accepted Optimality-Theoretic analyses
of focus prosody. First, the syntax-prosody alignment constraint will
be ranked higher, which allows it to dictate the location of prosodic
boundaries. Second, metrical culminativity (one metrical prominence
per prosodic constituent) is treated as a violable constraint, and it
is proposed that this constraint is low-ranked in Japanese. As a
result, Japanese allows multi-headed phrases (when focus adds a
prominence), as well as headless prosodic phrases (when focus deletes
post-focal prominences).

Speaker: Marios Mavrogiorgos
Title: V-movement to a V-related head and enclisis: a view from finiteness sensitive and Tobler-Mussafia languages
Location: 32-D461
Time: Thursday, May 5, 12:30-1:45pm

The proclisis-enclisis alternation is found in most languages having clitic pronouns. One basic observation made by many researchers is that clitic languages can be distinguished into two basic types depending on whether finiteness plays a role in the alternation or not. In the literature there have been different analyses of enclisis. For example, we can find both syntactic and PF approaches either for finiteness sensitive languages or for non finiteness sensitive languages, or for both. However, most of the existent analyses face problems, and moreover it is not clear what underlies the basic distinction between the two language types. In this talk I will propose a unified analysis for both finiteness sensitive and non finiteness sensitive languages. My main claim will be that enclisis arises in both language types only when V moves across the cliticization site to a V-related head (in the sense of Chomksy 1993, Rizzi 1997). The finiteness factor will be reduced to impoverished person agreement that correlates with V-related features in a head higher than the cliticization site, which trigger V movement. The difference between the two language types wrt. to their sensitivity in finiteness will be accounted for as a difference in the spelled-out morphology of different types of V-related features in each language type: agr/mood features in finiteness sensitive languages/structures vs. affective features in non finiteness sensitive languages. Checking of V-related features in both language types will be argued to be subject to an economy principle which requires that the feature is checked by an overt element which is either a head or a spec. In this respect, two types of features will be distinguished: V-related features, which carry a PF-requirement and give rise to enclisis, and non V-related features, which do not carry a PF requirement and which correlate with proclisis. According to this distinction, enclisis is seen as morphological (re)ordering of V-related heads. A theoretical implementation of this basic intuition will be provided, and further typological and other issues will be discussed.

WHO: Alan Bale
WHAT: Singular, Plural, and Obligatory Competition
WHEN: May 6, 2:00PM-3:15PM
WHERE: 32-D831

ABSTRACT:

Several theories have proposed that number marking, in particular singular and plural marking, compete with one another and that this competition influences how nouns are interpreted. Evidence in support of this proposal usually comes from languages like English where singular nouns have a strict singular interpretation. In such languages, it is hypothesized that plural nouns are literally unspecified for number but receive a strict plural interpretation through (obligatory) competition with the singular (see Krifka, 1989; Spector, 2007; and Sauerland et al., 2005).

This talk investigates whether singular and plural marking in Turkish and Western Armenian compete with one another. Unlike English, the so-called singular nouns in these languages do not have a strict singular interpretation, but rather can be used to quantify over both groups and individuals. In contrast, the plural nouns have a strict plural interpretation. As will be shown, there is evidence of competition in these languages but such competition critically relies on a comparison of syntactic complexity. Such a conclusion has cross-linguistic consequences for all types of competition, especially with respect to number marking.

Speaker: Shin Ishihara (J.W. Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main)
Time: Friday, May 6, 2011, 3:30pm-5pm
Location: 32-141 (PLEASE NOTE THE ROOM)
Title: On the Clause-Mate Condition in Japanese: Implicit Prosody and
Argument Structure Parsing

Abstract:

In some syntactic constructions in Japanese, more than one constituent
can move together to a certain syntactic position. One example is the
cleft construction: Japanese clefts allow multiple constituents to
appear in the focus position (`It is x, y that … t(x) … t(y)…’).
It has often been claimed that such constituents must originate from
the same clause, i.e., they must be clause-mates (= the Clause-Mate
Condition, the CMC). This condition has often been analyzed as a
syntactic constraint that strictly bans any syntactic derivation
violating it. There are, however, cases where the CMC can be obviated.
For example, if the cleft sentence with multiple foci is a wh-question
(`Who(x), what(y) is it that … t(x) … t(y) …?’), the sentence
acceptability improves compared to its declarative counterpart. So
far, no account has been proposed that can explain both the CMC and
the CMC obviation cases.

In this talk, I claim that the Clause-Mate Condition in Japanese is
not a syntactic constraint, and propose that the CMC effect comes from
the influence of `implicit prosody’ on sentence parsing. Adopting the
Implicit Prosody Hypothesis (Fodor 1998, 2002), I will propose a
parsing principle which imposes a certain bias on the argument
structure comprehension according to the prosodic phrasing in the
implicit prosody. This analysis can explain both the CMC effect in
clefts with multiple focus constituents and its obviation effect under
certain conditions (including interrogatives) in a parallel fashion.

The analysis also makes further predictions on potential parsing
difficulties in other constructions such as long-distance scrambling.
It will be suggested that some of the mysterious restrictions found in
long-distance scrambling in Japanese (e.g., ban on long-distance
scrambling to a sentence-medial position, ban on scrambling of
nominative subjects) are related to the parsing difficulty caused by
the implicit prosody.

Speaker: Jongho Jun (Seoul National University)

Title: Speakers’ knowledge of alternation is uni-directional: evidence from Seoul Korean verb paradigms

Time: Tuesday 4/26, 5-6pm, 32-D831

In this talk, I will address the issue of whether and how speakers internalize lexical statistical patterns. I have investigated speakers’ responses when they are faced with unpredictability in allomorph selection by conducting a wug test on Seoul Korean verb paradigms. The test was performed in two directions. In forward formation test, the pre-vocalic base and pre-consonantal non-base forms were the stimulus and response respectively whereas in back formation test, the stimulus-response relation was switched.

The results show patterns approximating statistical patterns in Seoul Korean verb lexicon, thus confirming the lexical frequency matching reported in many previous studies. However, it seems that speakers do not internalize lexical patterns in the way suggested in most previous studies. It has been argued or assumed that different lexical statistics are usually active in forward and back formations since different sets of (non)alternation classes compete in different directions. This assumption has been adopted by mainstream phonological theories, whether rule or constraint-based, positing underlying representations to explain alternation.

Contrary to these conventional arguments and assumptions, the present study shows that lexical frequencies relevant to the forward formation are relatively consistent with the results of both forward and back formation tests. Lexical frequencies which have been considered active in back formation play almost no role in explaining test results. This observation can be understood only under the single base hypothesis (Albright 2002, 2005, 2008) in which only forward, not back, formation rules are in principle available to speakers.

Upcoming talks:

May 3: Nina Topintzi

May 5 11am-12pm Shin Ishihara ***** NOTE SPECIAL TIME (location TBA)

May 10: RUMMIT practice talks

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

Speaker: Sarah Ouwayda
Time: Thursday, April 28, 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461
Title: Systematic Optional Non-Agreement in Lebanese Arabic

Abstract:

I look at two cases of optional non-agreement in Lebanese Arabic (LA), an otherwise agreement-rich language. First, I look at optional non-agreement in number marking on adjectives, verbs, and pronouns, following cardinals and quantifiers in LA as well as in Armenian and Basque. In the presence of multiple agreeing elements, this optionality is restricted. I look at these restrictions and compare two syntactic accounts: one which assumes a traditional undivided DP structure, and explains the (non-)agreement facts by proposing an optional pluralizing functional node which triggers agreement and contributes semantic plurality; and another account which assumes a split DP (cf. Sportiche 2005), such that NP is in SpecV and raises to merge with the quantifier in D/Q somewhere higher in the clause. Assuming a split DP, the noun can theoretically compose with the verb either (i) before moving to the quantifier, resulting in non-agreement (and distributivity), or (ii) after moving to the quantifier, resulting in plural agreement. I also look at another case of optional non-agreement, this time in VSO word order. I argue that the two cases of non-agreement are different: in the former, the subject is known, and the agreement patterns depend on its properties, whereas in the latter, the subject may either be the apparent subject or an expletive subject.

WHO: Eva Csipak
WHAT: Drink doch a drop! German minimizer NPIs
WHEN: April 29, 2:00PM-3:15PM
WHERE: 32-D461 (note the change of room!)

ABSTRACT:

NPI licensing has puzzled several generations of linguists. While some of the data is now accounted for, I will present German minimizer data (e.g. einen Tropfen trinken ‘drink a drop’ that challenge the mainstream accounts. I will argue that there are contexts (such as in the scope of stressed Doch and some conditionals) where minimizers are only licensed if their compositional meaning is taken into account.

UPCOMING MEETINGS:

5/06 Alan Bale
5/13 Ciro Greco

As part of its 150th birthday celebration, MIT will be holding an Open House called Under the Dome on April 30, from 11:00am to 4:00pm. Even though MIT Linguistics is not located under a dome, strictly speaking - but instead resides in a multi-colored oddly-shaped Gehry-designed thingamajig, we are proud to be an important part of this great event!

Our contribution is called “Language and the Human Mind”. From 1:00pm-4:00pm, we will be welcoming the public to our department (32-D850) for a variety of language-themed activities. Here’s the description:

We will showcase a variety of examples of research on language and the human mind. Experts on some very interesting languages (such as the Mayan languages of Central America, and the Wampanoag language of the native inhabitants of Massachusetts) will be available to answer your questions about these languages and explain how they differ and do not differ from English.

You can also watch and learn about some experiments which were designed to reveal the unconscious mechanisms by which people generalize from examples when they learn a language, and by which fluent speakers produce and interpret speech and text.

We look forward to seeing you, your friends, your friends’ friends, and their families at our Open House!

Speaker: Pritty Patel
Title: Complex Reflexives and the Principle A Problem
Time: Thursday, April 21, 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461

The abstract of the talk is available here (pdf).

WHO: Sarah Ouwayda
WHAT: Cardinals Without Plurality
WHEN: April 22, 2:00PM-3:15PM
WHERE: 32-D831

Abstract:

Lebanese Arabic nouns display the singular-plural distinction morphologically, and adjectives and verbs typically show number agreement. Following cardinals larger than 10 in Lebanese Arabic, nouns are never plural-marked, and verbs and adjectives are optionally plural-marked. Notably, the presence vs. absence of plural marking on verbs and adjectives in this context is reflected semantically: When a verb is plural-marked, both a collective and a distributive reading are available, when it is not plural-marked, the collective reading is unavailable. Moreover, unmarked adjectives can modify only predicates of atomic individuals, and plural-marked ones can modify only predicates of pluralities. I take the absence of collective readings in unmarked cases to mean that, in this context, not just adjectives but verbs can compose semantically with the (non-plural) noun despite the presence of a cardinal, and that while a semantic plurality in this context may be dependent on the presence of some morpheme associated with plurality (e.g. cardinal or plural marking) the converse is not true for cardinals: the presence of a cardinal does not entail the presence of a semantic plurality. In other words, in Lebanese Arabic, not only do cardinals not compose with pluralities, but a noun phrase containing a cardinal, as a whole, is not necessarily semantically plural when composing with the verb. Based on these semantic effects, I argue that, if one assumes the noun phrase is an indivisible constituent, cardinals (at least cardinals larger than 10 in Lebanese Arabic) are best treated as being of type n (Zabbal 2005), rather than as modifiers (Ionin & Matushansky), determiners (e.g. Montague 1974), or predicates (Partee 1986).

Date: Friday, April 22, 2011
Time: 3:30-5:00 PM
Place: 32-141
Speaker: Junko Ito, University of California, Santa Cruz
Title: On the sources of (un)accentedness

ABSTRACT

Recent work on the distribution of unaccentedness in the lexicon of
Tokyo Japanese has found a concentration of unaccented words in very
specific areas, which are to a large extent defined in prosodic terms.
Thus 4-mora words are in their majority unaccented in both native
words and loans. On the other hand, 1-2 mora words and 5-mora words
are in the majority accented in both native words and loans. For
3-mora words we find a split: They are in the majority unaccented in
native words, but accented in loans. What is relatively clear is that
unaccentedness is some kind of default for words of these specific
shapes. What is less clear is the prosodic rationale of the particular
distribution of (un)accentedness. The goal of the talk is to
investigate the underlying structural reason, and to develop a formal
account in optimality-theoretic phonology.

The regular pitch accent pattern of Tokyo Japanese (i.e., the pattern
that is not lexically marked on a morpheme-by-morpheme basis, but
emerges, e.g., in loanwords) is characterized by two constraints
widely seen at work in other languages: Rightmostness (if the word has
an accent, it should fall on the last foot in the word) and
Nonfinality (the accent should not fall on a subconstituent that is
final in the word). There is a clear tension between these two
constraints, which is in many languages resolved by priority ranking
(Nonfinality beats Rightmostness in cases of conflict). Seen in this
light, unaccentedness is another way of dealing with the conflict: By
not assigning an accent, the conflict disappears.

More precisely, the guiding idea is the following: For words of
specific prosodic profiles (such as LLLL), unaccentedness is a default
because it fulfills both Nonfinality and Rightmostness (no accent
means no violation of either constraint). For other shapes, such as
LLL and LLLLL, both constraints can be fulfilled even by accented
words, so unaccentedness brings no prosodic benefit and is avoided
since it violates the ?-Accent constraint requiring words to be
accented. For short (one- to two-mora) words, a constraint calling for
the construction of the “perfect prosodic word” (a word coextensive
with a single foot) plays an important role. Other cases of perfect
word effects to be presented include Serbian and Danish.

Speaker: Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero (University of Manchester)

Title: Emergent Cyclicity?

Time: Tuesday 4/12, 5-6pm, 32-D831

Upcoming talks:

Apr 26: Jongho Jun

May 3: Nina Topintzi

May 10: RUMMIT practice talks

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

Please note the special time for a supernumerary meeting of the Phonology Circle on Wednesday this week!

Speaker: Young Ah Do

Title: Learning Alternations without Bias (WCCFL Practice Talk)

Time: Tuesday 4/13, 2-3pm, 32-D831

The abstract is here

Speaker: Charles W. Kisseberth (Emeritus, University of Illinois and Tel Aviv University)

Title: Prosody and Phonological Phrasing in Chimwiini

Time: Wed 4/13, 5-7pm, Location TBA

In this paper we explore the fundamentals of the prosody
and phrasing of sentences in Chimwiini, a Bantu language closely
related to Swahili. We look first at the pattern of vowel length
alternations at the word level, a system that Selkirk (1986) analyzed
in terms of an abstract system of stress that features the Latin
Stress Rule plus a principle that shortens unstressed vowels. Then we
look at the system of accent which, in the default case assigns penult
accent (H tone), but final accent in certain mostly morphosyntactic
environements.

It turns out that both the stress system and the accent
are phrasal in nature and work in exactly the same phrasal units.
After demonstrating this point, we summarize the main principles that
define the phrasing of a Chimwiini sentence: Align-XP R (align the
right edge of a lexical maximal projection with the right edge of a
phonological phrase) and Align-Foc R (align the right edge of a
focused element with the right edge of a phonological phrase). We
discusss briefly some phenomena that may be subcases of Align-Foc R or
related to it in terms of the pattern of behavior.

The final portion of the paper explores how final accent
is realized in Chimwiini sentences and suggests that the essential
principle is this: final accent is located on the final syllable of
any phonological phrase that contains the trigger of final accent. To
make this principle succeed, it turns out that we need a third
phrasing principle: Wrap-XP (all the elements in an XP must appear
inside a single phonological phrase) plus recursive phrasing.

Speaker: Charles W. Kisseberth (Emeritus, University of Illinois and Tel Aviv University)
Title: Focus, Phrasing, and Prosody in Chimwiini
Time: Thursday, April 14, 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461

It has been known for forty years that sentences in Chimwiini (a Bantu language closely related to Swahili spoken originally in the town of Brava in southern Somalia, but now distributed over a diaspora that includes Kenya, the United Kingdom, and the United States) are exhaustively parsed into a sequence of phonological phrases. The evidence for this claim originally derived solely from the complicated pattern of vowel length alternations in the language. In brief, only one long vowel can occur in a phrase and it must be located in either the penult or the antepenult syllable of the phrase. An expected long vowel in any other syllable in the phrase must shorten. However, it is not necessary for a phrase to have a long vowel.

It has been known since Selkirk’s 1986 analysis that phrases in Chimwiini are formed in considerable part on the basis of syntactic structure, specifically by the principle that we shall label Align-XP R: the right edge of a lexical maximal projection is located at the right edge of a Phonological Phrase.

In 2001 it was discovered that “accent” (High tone) is a second, independent source of evidence for phrasing. The Chimwiini accentual system is simple, but with some complexity in how it plays itself out. There is one accent/H tone per phrase, and it resides on the last prosodic word of the phrase. Accent is on the penult syllable in the default case, but on the final syllable in the presence of a small number of final-accent triggers.

The accentual evidence also led to the discovery of a critical role for focus (or more generally emphasis) in phrasing. Specifically, the presence of focus on a word requires that this word be at the right edge of a phonological phrase (indeed, in some cases the requirement is stronger: the focused word must be final in any phonological phrase that contains it). A careful examination of the focus evidence (as well as certain phenomena that seem to have parallels to focus in terms of their behavior) provides quite subtle evidence about the issue of whether phrasing in Chimwiini is recursive or not. The focus evidence also turns out to have interesting ramifications for the intonation of yes-no questions in Chimwiini, a matter that we will look at briefly, time permitting.

WHO: Igor Yanovich
WHAT: On counterfactual de re attitudes
WHEN: April 15, 2:00PM-3:15PM
WHERE: 32-D831

Descriptivist approaches to de re attitudes (Kaplan, Lewis, and numerous linguistic accounts) analyze a de re belief as involving a vivid description which 1) is true of the res in the actual world, and 2) uniquely identifies some object corresponding to the res in the epistemic alternatives of the believer.

This works fine for de re belief, but as Ninan 2010 points out, does not quite work for counterfactual attitudes. If Janell imagines the man she sees sneaking around (that is, Ortcutt) flying a kite in the Alpes, the description selecting Ortcutt in the actual world (namely, smth. like “the man Janell sees sneaking around”) will not be true of the man Janell imagines in her imagination worlds: he cannot be sneaking around and flying the kite at the same time, yet this is what simplistic descriptivist analysis predicts. Ninan himself tries to solve the problem, but his account does not quite succeed.

In the talk, I will give another account of counterfactual de re. The main idea is that the selection of the correspondent of the res in counterfactual attitude worlds is parasitic on the beliefs of the attitude holder.

UPCOMING TALKS:

4/22 Sarah Ouwayda
4/29 Eva Csipak
5/06 Alan Bale
5/11 Ciro Greco

Speaker: Rafael Nonato
Time: Monday, April 4, 11:30am-12:30pm
Location: 32-D461

Please join us for Syntax Square this coming Monday at 11:30am. Rafael Nonato is
going to present the following paper:

Ritter, E. & Wiltschko, M. (2009) Varieties of INFL: TENSE, LOCATION,
and PERSON. In: H. Broekhuis., J. Craenenbroeck, H. van Riemsdijk
(eds.) Alternatives to Cartography. Berlin, New York: Mouton de
Gruyter.

The paper is available here (pdf).

Speaker: Anne-Michelle Tessier (University of Alberta)

Title: Learning Restrictively in Harmonic Serialism

Time: Tuesday 4/5, 5-6pm, 32-D831

This talk provides an initial attempt at a theory of restrictive error-driven learning for Harmonic Serialism grammars (as originally proposed in Prince and Smolensky 1993, but more so McCarthy 2000, 2008ab, Pruitt 2010 and others.) Harmonic Serialism (HS) is a derivational variant of OT with some compelling advantages for capturing phonological typology — but if HS is going to be a good theory of phonology, it requires a good theory of HS learning. In the talk, I will present a view of how existing OT ranking algorithms (Prince and Tesar 2004, Hayes 2004) can be adapted fairly simply to learn HS grammars, including those rankings that are ‘hidden’ from the learner and arise crucially from the workings of HS. I also point out that to successfully learn hidden rankings, the HS learner must be guided to learn unfaithful URs in a particular way, providing an interesting and unresolved challenge.

Upcoming talks:

Apr 12: Ricardo Bermudez-Otero

Apr 13: WCCFL Practice Talks ***Time TBA

Apr 26: Jongho Jun

May 3: Nina Topintzi

May 10: RUMMIT practice talks

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

This week, we have two LFRG meetings: one on Wednesday at 4pm, another one at the usual 2pm on Friday.

WHO: Alya Alsarina
WHAT: Constraints on Quantifier Lowering
WHEN: April 6, 4:00PM-5:30PM
WHERE: 32-D831

WHO: Guillaume Thomas
WHAT: “Another” and the meaning of measure phrases
WHEN: April 8, 2:00PM-3:15PM
WHERE: 32-D831

Speaker: Edward Gibson
Title: The communicative basis of word order
Time: Thursday, April 7, 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461

Some recent evidence suggests that subject-object-verb (SOV) may be the default word order for human language. For example, SOV is the preferred word order in a task where participants gesture event meanings (Goldin-Meadow et al. 2008). Critically, SOV gesture production occurs not only for speakers of SOV languages, but also for speakers of SVO languages, such as English, Chinese, Spanish (Goldin-Meadow et al. 2008) and Italian (Langus & Nespor, 2010). The gesture-production task therefore plausibly reflects default word order independent of native language. However, this leaves open the question of why there are so many SVO languages (41.2% of languages; Dryer, 2005). We propose that the high percentage of SVO languages cross-linguistically is due to communication pressures over a noisy channel (Jelinek, 1975; Brill & Moore, 2000; Levy et al. 2009). In particular, we propose that people understand that the subject will tend to be produced before the object (a near universal cross-linguistically; Greenberg, 1963). Given this bias, people will produce SOV word order – the word order that Goldin-Meadow et al. show is the default – when there are cues in the input that tell the comprehender who the subject and the object are. But when the roles of the event participants are not disambiguated by the verb, then the noisy channel model predicts either (i) a shift to the SVO word order, in order to minimize the confusion between SOV and OSV, which are minimally different (just one local swap apart); or (ii) the invention of case marking, which can also disambiguate the roles of the event participants. We test the predictions of this hypothesis and provide support for it using gesture experiments in English, Japanese and Korean. We also provide evidence for the noisy channel model in language understanding.

Speaker: Rick Nouwen (Utrecht University)
Time: Friday, April 8, 2011, 3:30pm-5pm
Location: 32-141 (PLEASE NOTE ROOM)
Title: Superlative modifiers and modality

Abstract:

In the literature on the semantics of “at least” and similarly
superlative modifiers, there has been much attention to the
interaction of such modifiers with modality. In this talk, I will
focus on two observations that are central to this interaction: (I)
sentences like (a) give rise to ignorance implicatures, in the sense
that (a) implies that the speaker does not know how many cards John
picked; and (II) such implicatures disappear in modal environments:
(b) has a reading that is simply a statement of minimum requirement,
with no implicature about the speaker’s knowledge.

(a) John picked at least 3 cards.
(b) John is required to pick at least 3 cards.

In this talk, I will compare two strategies to account for these
observations: (I) ignorance implicatures are due to the requirement
that the modifiers operate on a scalar argument; (II) the ignorance
implicatures triggered by “at least” are the ignorance implicatures
triggered by disjunctions. I will compare these approaches with
respect to a larger data set that includes the behaviour of ordinary
superlatives, adjectives like “minimal” and “maximal” and definite
descriptions that refer to scalar end-points, like “the earliest John
should arrive”.

Speaker: Steve Piantadosi (Gibson lab)

Title: What is the language of thought?

Time: Tues 3/29, 12pm

Location: 46-3310 (note the change from our usual location)

We present a computational model of learning compositional, structured
concepts in a “language of thought.” We show that language of thought
models out-perform alternatives such as exemplar models in capturing
people’s patterns of generalization in a massive, online,
concept-learning experiment. We additionally develop a method for
formally evaluating different representation languages using the
experimental results. We compare 9 different representation languages
for simple boolean concepts, and 12 for languages for concepts that move
beyond boolean logic, towards the types of representations necessary for
natural language semantics.

Speaker: Sverre Stausland Johnsen (Harvard University)

Title: Rhyme acceptability determined by perceived similarity

Time: Tuesday 3/29, 5-6pm, 32-D831

Intuitively, a-b is a better rhyme than a-c when a and b are more
‘similar’ to each other than a and c are. But how do we measure this
similarity? I show in this talk that the perceptual similarity between
segments as calculated from confusion matrices is a much better
predictor of people’s judgments of rhymes than are similarity measures
based on articulatory or acoustic feature systems.

Upcoming talks:

Apr 5: Anne-Michelle Tessier

Apr 12: Ricardo Bermudez-Otero

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

Apr 26: Jongho Jun

May 3: Nina Topintzi

May 10: RUMMIT practice talks

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

This week, we have two LFRG meetings: one on Wednesday at 4pm, another one at the usual 2pm on Friday.
Note the change of room on Friday (and perhaps on Wednesday too.)

WHO: Hadas Kotek & Yasutada Sudo
WHAT: A superlative reading for Most_PROP (practice talk for CLS)
WHEN: March 30, 4:00PM-5:30PM
WHERE: 32-D461 *or* 32-D831 - please stay tuned

WHO: Ben George (UCLA)
WHAT: Which answers matter, and how?
WHEN: April 1st, 2:00PM-3:15PM
WHERE: 32-D461 (CHANGE OF ROOM!)

[Click on the talk titles for abstracts]

Upcoming meetings:

4/06 Alya (special extra Wedn. meeting)
4/08 Guillaume
4/15 Igor
4/22 Sarah Ouwayda
4/29 Eva Csipak
5/06 UP FOR GRABS

Speaker: Micha Breakstone
Title: Inherent Evaluativity
Time: Thursday, March 31, 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461

Two related challenges have been the focus of research on the semantics of degree constructions. The first is the distribution of Measure Phrases (MPs), and the second concerns the distribution of evaluative readings. A theory of MP distribution should account for e.g. (1).

1. a. John is 6 feet tall.          
b. *John is 3 feet short.

Evaluativity (aka ‘norm-relatedness’) may be defined as the phenomenon in which the interpretation of an adjective in a given construction is dependent on a contextual standard. A theory of evaluativity should explain the pattern which emerges in (2) [(+E) denotes Evaluative].

2.	a. John is tall. (+E)	e. John is short. (+E)
	b. How tall is John? (-E)	f. How short is John? (+E)
	c. John is as tall as Mary. (-E)	g. John is as short as Mary. (+E)
	d. John is taller than Mary. (-E)	h. John is shorter than Mary. (-E)

It has been noted (Bierwisch 1989, Sassoon 2008) that these challenges are related: Adjectives that do not license MPs (1b) are evaluative in equatives and degree questions (2g,f). The goal of this talk is to meet these two challenges and account for the correlation noted by Bierwisch.

Previous approaches assume a semantics for gradable adjectives under which evaluativity must enter independently (see Rett (2008), Cresswell (1976)) and for which explaining MP distribution entails additional assumptions (with Bierwisch’s correlation left unexplained). I will present an alternative under which evaluativity is an inherent part of the semantics. Instead of accounting for evaluativity, the challenge will be to do away with it. As it turns out this simple reflective move holds promise of significant explanatory power.

Speaker: David Adger, Queen Mary, University of London
Time: Friday, April 1, 2011, 3:30pm-5pm
Location: 32-141 (PLEASE NOTE ROOM)
Title: The syntax of (some) apparent complements to N

Abstract:

The usual view of the syntax of the title of this talk is the following:

(1) [the [ syntax [ of [ some [ apparent [ complements [ to N ]]]]]]]

where the arguments of the nominal heads are introduced as complements. I will argue that at least PP arguments of Ns are introduced much higher up in the structure. The main argument is cross-linguistic and relies on the following:

(2) In a structure where an N is modified by an intersective AP and takes a PP complement, the unmarked order is one where the AP intervenes between N and PP (so we have [PP AP N] and [N AP PP]).

The standard view makes this generalization difficult to derive. What is required is that the surface position of the PP is high. But then the question is why? Standard views of the syntax/semantics interface (as well as of the linearization properties of specifiers) would suggest that the PP moves to a high position (e.g. Kayne 2004). I argue instead that it is Merged in a high position and that its semantics are negotiated directly by functional structure (cf Borer 2005, Ramchand 208 etc for `complements’ to V). I propose that the linear order of this high PP with respect to the N arises because the syntax allows part of the extended projection of N to be generated as a high left daughter, as well as as a lower right daughter, of the head in whose specifier the PP sits (cf. Brody and Szabolcsi 2003). This gives us:

(3) [ the [ [ alternative syntax] [ [ of [ some [ apparent [ complements ]] [ [ to N ] ]] ]]

Speaker: Patrick Grosz
Title: Analyzing non-canonical V1 in a V2 language
Time: Monday, March 14, 11:30am-12:30pm
Location: 32-D461

In this talk I discuss three types of V1 constructions in German (a language
that is otherwise V2 or V-final): V1-polar exclamatives and V1-optatives (cf.
Scholz 1991 for a discussion of both), as well as V1-antecedents in
conditionals. Given that V2 can be assumed to arise from two separate
processes, V-to-C movement and (obligatory?) filling of the SpecCP position
(cf. the HSK article by Holmberg 2010), I will address the following two
questions for such V1 clauses: What triggers V-to-C movement, and what (if
anything) occupies their null SpecCP position?

Speaker: Ev Fedorenko (MIT BCS)

Title: The power of individual subject analyses in investigating the functional architecture of the language system

Time: Tuesday 3/15 at noon

Location: 46-3189

Language is our signature human cognitive skill and one of the most studied. Yet many fundamental questions about how language is implemented in the brain remain unanswered. I have previously argued that at least part of the difficulty in making progress may be due to an almost exclusive reliance on traditional group analyses in neuroimaging studies of language. Because of anatomical differences across individual brains, such methods are bound to underestimate functional specificity and may thus obscure true functional organization. Furthermore, group-based methods make it difficult to compare results across studies and accumulate knowledge about the functional profiles of the relevant brain regions. In recent work (Fedorenko et al., 2010), we developed methods for defining key language-sensitive regions in each individual brain, enabling us to launch a research program aimed at carefully characterizing the profiles of each of these brain regions, with the ultimate goal of understanding the representations and the computations that enable us to produce and understand language. In this talk, I will first address the question of whether language-sensitive regions (including the classical Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas) also support non-linguistic processes that have been argued to share cognitive and neural machinery with language. I will show that these brain regions respond very little to a wide range of non-linguistic tasks, including arithmetic, domain-general working memory, domain-general cognitive control, and music. I will then present some preliminary findings from two other lines of work. First, I will describe a study investigating the relationship between the language system and abstract conceptual processing. And second, I will present preliminary results from ongoing experiments that are attempting to identify the precise linguistic computations conducted in each region.

Speaker: Claire Halpert
Title: Argument licensing in Zulu
Time: Thursday, March 17, 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461

Recent work on Bantu languages (e.g. Baker 2003, 2008; Carstens and Diercks to appear; Diercks to appear) has revived the notion that the Bantu family lacks abstract Case (Harford Perez 1985). In this talk, I address the issue of how arguments are licensed in Zulu by examining two types of constructions: raising constructions and constructions involving morphologically impoverished (“augmentless”) arguments. I show that Zulu has both raising-to-subject and raising-to-object out of agreeing finite CPs, which is empirically problematic for Case-driven analyses of raising, as well as for theories that link (subject) Case-licensing to agreement or EPP (e.g. Chomsky 2000; Bobaljik 2008; Boskovic 2002; Marantz 2000). While Carstens and Diercks (to appear) and Diercks (to appear) argue on the basis of similar data from other Bantu languages that Case is not active at all in Bantu, I use data on the distribution of augmentless arguments to argue that while T doesn’t assign Case in Zulu, we do find argument licensing effects associated with v. Augmentless arguments face a more limited distribution than their augmented counterparts in Zulu. I propose that the behavior of these augmentless arguments in raising-to-object and applicative constructions in particular stems from their need to receive structural case from v. Augmented arguments, in contrast, have inherent case and thus do not exhibit the same positional restrictions. Finally, I propose that we find additional evidence for v as a probe reflected in the “conjoint/disjoint” verbal morphology alternation, which is sensitive to the contents of vP (cf. Buell 2006).

WHO: Jan Anderssen
WHAT: Weak and strong readings of indefinites
WHEN: March 18, 2:00PM-3:15PM
WHERE: 32-D831

Suggested reading is Partee 1989 “Many quantifiers”, just to brush up on the issues.

There is no meeting of the Phonology Circle scheduled this week. We will resume on Tues Mar 29 (after spring break), with a talk by Sverre Johnsen.

Upcoming talks:

Mar 29: Sverre Johnsen

Apr 5: Anne-Michelle Tessier

Apr 12: Ricardo Bermudez-Otero

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

Apr 26: Jongho Jun

May 3: Nina Topintzi

May 10: RUMMIT practice talks

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

Speakers: Alya Asarina and Jeremy Hartman
Title: Genitive subject licensing in Uyghur subordinate clauses
Time: Monday, March 7, 11:30am-12:30pm
Location: 32-D461

In this talk we analyze embedded clauses in Uyghur, a Turkic language
spoken in the Xinjiang province of China. We make three main claims.
First, we claim that genitive case on the subjects of these clauses is
licensed by agreement with a clause-external D head. Second, we claim
that these clauses are always embedded by a head noun, though in some
cases this noun is phonologically null. Third, we show that these
clauses are full CPs that can be headed by an overt complementizer.
Putting these claims together, we conclude that Uyghur exhibits
agreement and case-assignment over a CP boundary, and thus provides a
challenge for certain proposals about the locality of these
relationships. We discuss several approaches to the Uyghur facts, as
well as similar phenomena in other languages, within the framework of
Phase Theory (Chomsky 2001 et seq.).