Phonology circle will return next week, after the Thanksgiving holiday break.

Upcoming schedule:

Stay up to date! Check out the online schedule, or subscribe via iCal

“Person Agreement and Subject Ellipsis at the CP Level”
Nobuko Hasegawa (Kanda University of International Studies)

Japanese has been considered as a non-agreement language unlike English and other European languages (cf. Kuroda 1988, Fukui 1986). It is in fact not easy to convincingly argue that Japanese exhibits agreement between the subject and the predicate at the IP level (or in embedded sentences). In this presentation, however, I will show that Japanese does exhibit rather extensive agreement processes between the subject and the predicate, once matrix phenomena are taken into consideration, such as Imperatives and Volitionals. I will resort to Rizzi’s (1997) CP system to account for these phenomena. That is, the sentential Force (Clause Type) marked at the CP projection, such as Imp(erative), Vol(itional), requires a particular predicate form, which in turn requires (or agree with) a particular type of a subject, [+Addressee], [+Speaker], respectively. With such agreement, the subject can be null.

I will then extend this analysis to other null subject cases, which I will argue result from agreement at CP level. One is the 1st person deletion phenomenon, which is allowed only at the matrix subject. The other case is PRO in infinitives, whose interpretation is also tied with the structure of CP, as pointed out in Borer (1989) (cf. (5)). Our analysis of PRO provides an account for an interesting (and novel) fact of matrix arbitrary PRO in Japanese. Based on these cases, I claim that a null subject is allowed only when Force of the CP requires a particular predicate form that agrees with a particular person of subject.

If the analysis proposed is on the right track, we seem to come up with a picture quite different from what has been assumed in the GB framework with respect to null subject phenomena in general. Null subject phenomena are relevant to what a head of the CP level specifies and even pro of null subject languages (NSLs) may be analyzed in a similar way, if the predicate (or Infl) is supposed to communicate with CP, as often has been assumed. Then, a null subject is not special to NSLs but is to be observed in more prevalent environments where the function of a CP is more apparent, namely, at the matrix level.

References:

• Hasegawa, Nobuko. 2009. Agreement at the CP Level: Clause Types and the ‘Person’ Restriction on the Subject. The proceedings of the Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics 5: 131-152. MITWPL, MIT.
• Portner, Paul. 2004. The Semantics of Imperatives within a Theory of Clause Types. ms. Georgetown University.
• Rizzi, Luigi. 1997. The Fine Structure of the Left Periphery. In L. Haegeman (ed.) Elements of Grammar: Handbook of Generative Syntax. 281-331. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
• Ueda, Yukiko. 2009. Person Restriction on C in Japanese , The proceedings of the Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics 5, MITWPL, MIT.

Readings: Hasegawa 2009, Portner 2004

Phonology circle is on hiatus this week, recuperating from a highly successful weekend of NELS talks. There is also a slot available next week (11/23)—please contact Adam if you would like to sign up for it.

Upcoming schedule:

Stay up to date! Check out the online schedule, or subscribe via iCal

Speaker: Omer Preminger
Time: Thurs 11/19, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461
Title: On the nature of ergativity: New and old evidence from Basque

Basque unergatives have long been held as evidence that unergatives have an implicit object (Hale & Keyser 1993). Recently, I have argued that the presence of absolutive agreement-morphology in Basque is by no means an indication of an agreement relation being successfully established with a nominal target (Preminger 2009, LI). Building on this, I present two new arguments (and one old one) that Basque unergatives systematically lack an implicit object.

Since the single argument of these predicates is nonetheless marked with ergative Case, these facts furnish an argument against ergative in Basque adhering to a Case-competition logic (i.e., against ergative in Basque being “dependent Case”; Marantz 1991). At first glance, this seems to favor an account of ergative as inherent Case (Woolford 1997, Legate 2008, among others). However, there is evidence internal to Basque which casts doubt on such an account: (i) raising-to-ergative constructions (Artiagoitia 2001), and (ii) the existence of ergative Theme arguments (Etxepare 2003, Holguín 2007, among others).

In response to these facts, I propose a slight variation on the inherent Case theory of ergativity: ergative Case is still assigned in [Spec,vP], but [Spec,vP] is not unambiguously a base-generation site; it can be the target of movement, as well. If a DP is base-generated in [Spec,vP], it will receive not only ergative Case, but also an Agent theta-role; but if a DP moves into [Spec,vP], it will get ergative Case but retain whatever theta-role it already had.

Speaker: Jonathan David Bobaljik (University of Connecticut)
Title: Idiosyncratic syncretic patterns: Some Chukotko-Kamchatkan evidence
Time: Friday, November 20, 2009, 3:30pm
Place: 32-141

Syncretism (homophony within paradigms) has played a significant (if somewhat controversial) role in morphological theory. There is relatively broad agreement that there are no limits on the patterns of surface homophony that may be attested. In addition to stipulated accidental homophony, many current theories have powerful mechanisms (feature-manipulating rules, for example) that ultimately allow for essentially any pattern to be described. In this talk, I aim to support the rather conservative notion that there is nevertheless a line to be drawn between natural syncretic patterns on the one hand, and idiosyncratic patterns on the other. The natural patterns are those that can be represented as underspecification of vocabulary items (exponents), while the idiosyncratic patterns require the invocation of special rules, the residue of contingent factors such as historical changes.

I start with a brief discussion of a feature inventory motivated by categorical universals in the area of person marking, which are independent of the issue of syncretism. I show that this feature inventory defines a division between natural and idiosyncratic patterns that is robustly supported by the distribution of language types in large scale surveys (thus converging with Pertsova 2007 over a different sample). I then turn to an in-depth investigation of one set of extremely idiosyncratic patterns in a single language family, looking at the reflexes of Proto-Chukotko-Kamchatkan agreement prefix *næ-. Comrie (1980) has famously discussed this prefix as providing evidence for a functional “inverse” alignment in these paradigms, leading to a complicated form:function mismatch, and requiring a theory in which rules of vocabulary insertion are governed by constraints on the overall shape of the paradigm. Continuing a line of work arguing against appeals to such paradigm-level constraints (e.g., Bobaljik 2002, 2008), I argue that the proper description of the quirky Chukotko-Kamchatkan facts is best stated in terms of deletion (impoverishment) rules (ranging over specific features, or in some cases entire terminal nodes, cf. Arregi & Nevins 2007, Calabrese 2008), but that the explanation of these rules is entirely diachronic. An appeal to paradigmatic constraints is neither sufficient, nor necessary to explain the observed idiosyncratic syncretic patterns.

In this week’s installment of Phonology Circle, Jen Michaels will give a practice talk for NELS:

Time: Monday 11/9, 5pm, 32-D461
Speaker: Jennifer Michaels (MIT)
Title: To alternate or not to alternate: What is the boundary?

Abstract: http://web.mit.edu/nels40/program/abstracts/NELS40Michaels.pdf

Upcoming schedule: (contact Adam for open slots)

Stay up to date! Check out the online schedule, or subscribe via iCal

Syntax-Semantics Reading Group: NELS practice talk on Uyghur indexicals

Time: Monday at 11.30AM in room 32-D461
Speakers: Kirill Shklovsky and Yasutada Sudo
Title: Shifted indexicals in Uyghur (NELS practice talk)
Abstract: here

We hope to see you there!

Speakers: Jonah Katz and David Pesetsky
Time: Thurs 11/12, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461
Title: The Identity Thesis for Language and Music

This paper argues for the following proposal:

Identity Thesis for Language and Music:
All formal differences between language and music are a consequence of differences in their fundamental building blocks (arbitrary pairings of sound and meaning in the case of language; pitch-classes and pitch-class combinations in the case of music). In all other respects, language and music are identical.

In particular, we argue, developing but also extending earlier proposals by Lerdahl and Jackendoff (1983), that music, like language, contains a syntactic component in which headed structures are built by iterated, recursive, binary Merge. This is the component that Lerdahl and Jackendoff called Prolongational Reduction, which represents hierarchical patterns of tension and relaxation in tonal harmony. We further argue that the distinct component that Lerdahl and Jackendoff called Time Span Reduction is a musical prosodic component (a point anticipated by Lerdahl and Jackendoff themselves) — whose interface with the syntactic component is strikingly similar to the comparable interface between syntactic and prosodic structure in language.

Though our discussion takes Lerdahl and Jackendoff’s work as a starting point and touchstone throughout, our proposals also constitute a significant realignment of their model — necessary in order to reveal similarities between musical and linguistic structure that were not evident in their presentation. This realignment also reflects a distinction in goals between our proposal and theirs. Their work took as its starting point the question “Given a piece of music in a particular musical idiom I, what laws govern the class of analyses that a listener assigns to it in I?” Our proposals arise from a related but distinct question, more typical of generative linguistic work: “What general laws define the class of possible pieces in I?” That is, what is the grammar of I?

Our realignment of Lerdahl and Jackendoff’s proposals in light of the Identity Thesis allows us to ask questions not taken up in their work. For example, does Internal Merge (i.e. syntactic movement) apply in the construction of musical syntactic structure, in addition to External Merge? We argue that the phenomenon of cadence is an instance of exactly this: head-movement from the penultimate constituent of a musical passage (the dominant) to the final tonic chord.

Finally, we will suggest (but probably not have time to argue) that the output of musical syntax feeds a Tonal-Harmonic Component whose formal relation to the music syntax strongly resembles the relation between linguistic syntax and the semantic system that interacts with it — and is subject to a Principle of Full Interpretation with respect to that component.

(A draft of a paper related to this talk is available on LingBuzz.)

To get the ball rolling, here’s some news from last week and this week:

Two students presented papers at the Ehu International Workshop on Ergativity in Bilbao, Spain, November 4-6. Jessica Coon gave a talk entitled ‘Rethinking Aspectually Based Split Ergativity’ and Omer Preminger gave a talk entitled ‘Basque Unergatives, Case-competition, and Ergative as Inherent Case’.

Moving north, Jeremy Hartman gave a paper entitled `When e-GIVENness over-predicts identity’ at the 4th Brussels Conference in Generative Linguistics, November 9-10. Former visiting students Gary Thoms and Marlies Kluck also presented papers.

Coming back to Cambridge, a slate of MIT students will be presenting at NELS 40 this weekend:

Hadas Kotek (joint work with Alexander Grosu): ‘On ‘restricted degrees”
Jen Michaels: ‘To alternate or not to alternate: What is the boundary?’
Kirill Shklovsky and Yasutada Sudo: ‘Shifted indexicals in Uyghur’
Bronwyn Bjorkman: ‘The syntax of syncretism’
Gillian Gallagher: ‘Perceptual similarity in laryngeal cooccurrence restrictions’

Shigeru Miyagawa’s new Linguistic Inquiry Monograph has just been published by MIT Press. Why Agree? Why Move? Unifying Agreement-based and Discourse Configurational Languages comes with a terrific endorsement by Mark Baker (see back cover, and also the website).

This week, we will have two talks in preparation for the upcoming NELS meeting:

Time: Monday 11/2, 5pm, 32-D461

• Speaker: Gillian Gallagher (MIT)
  Title: Perceptual similarity in laryngeal cooccurrence restrictions
• Speaker: Sverre Stausland Johnsen (Harvard)
  Title: Perceptual distance in Norwegian retroflexion

Upcoming schedule: (contact Adam for open slots)

Speaker: Artemis Alexiadou
Time: Thurs 11/5, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461
Title: TBA

In Monday’s Syntax-Semantics Reading Group, Igor Yanovich will talk about the nature and formal analysis of indexical presuppositions (this is a practice talk for LENLS 6).

TIME: Monday 11.30AM - 1PM
PLACE: 32-D461

For further information, please visit: http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/groups/synsem/

This week’s Phonology Circle features a double-header of two talks, in preparation for UMMM at UMass this weekend

Time: Monday 10/26, 5pm, 32-D461

Speaker: Claire Halpert (MIT)
Title: Place assimilation changes its triggers

Speaker: Peter Graff (MIT) and Gregory Scontras (Harvard)
Title: Metathesis as Asymmetric Perceptual Realignment

We investigate the perceptual salience of consonant order in intervocalic stop–fricative (ST/TS) and stop- nasal clusters (NT/TN) and present evidence that speakers of English (N=24) more readily perceive these clusters with the stop in prevocalic position, regardless of their native lexical statistics or whether the fricatives or nasals are native sounds. This bias is amplified when the stop-burst is removed, indicating that perceptual repairs increase as a function of the availability of phonetic cues. Our findings support the proposal that CC-metathesis is driven by optimization of auditory cues in consonant clusters (Hume 2001; Steriade 2001) rather than symmetric confusability.

Upcoming schedule: (contact Adam for open slots)

Speaker: Evelina Fedorenko, Ph.D. (Post-doctoral Fellow, Kanwisher Lab)
Title: Functional localization in the domain of language: A new take on the questions of functional specificity
Time: Tues 10/27, 12:00 to 1:00
Location: 46-3310

Speaker: Ted Gibson
Time: Thurs 10/29, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461
Title: Quantitative investigations of syntactic representations and processing

Joint work with Denise Ichinco, Ev Fedorenko, Steve Piantadosi, Nat Twarog, and Melissa Troyer.

We present a new method to quantitatively evaluate similarity and differences in language representations and processes: Inter-Subject Analysis of Covariation (ISAC). The method is a quantitative version of an approach that has been traditionally used in the syntactic literature. In this method, participants rate materials for their acceptability. It is assumed that judgments will correlate more across individuals on materials with overlapping structures or similar processing demands. In order to evaluate this novel method, we demonstrate that relative clauses and wh-questions are rated very similarly to each other across different kinds of transformations, much more so than several control structures. This method holds a lot of promise for addressing questions concerning the nature of linguistic representations and processes.

Speaker: Maria Gouskova (NYU)
Title: Exceptionality as a Property of Morphemes: the Case of Yers
Time: Friday, October 30, 2009, 3:30pm
Place: 32-141

Most languages have some phonological rules that apply only to a subset of eligible morphemes (for example, in English, regressive voicing assimilation, “thie[f]”/”thie[vz]” vs. the default progressive assimilation, “chie[f]”/”chie[fs]”). The question examined in this talk is whether there are rules that apply only to a subset of eligible segments. I will explore the hypothesis that exceptionality is a property of whole morphemes. This theory of exceptionality has many incarnations (Chomsky and Halle 1968 et seq.), but my version is formalized as Lexically Indexed Constraints in Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993): in any given language, a universal constraint can be indexed to individual morphemes in the lexicon and ranked in two different positions in the language’s hierarchy (Pater 2000, 2006). I test this theory on a famous purported case of segment-by-segment exceptions: Slavic yers, vowels that idiosyncratically alternate with zero (e.g., [mox] vs. [mx-a] `moss (nom/gen sg)’ alongside [mex] vs. [mex-a] `fur (nom/gen sg)’). The dominant analysis of these “ghost vowels” is that they must be underlyingly marked as exceptional on a segment-by-segment basis. Yers are also usually underlyingly marked as representationally defective—either nonmoraic or lacking features (Kenstowicz and Rubach 1987, Melvold 1990, Yearley 1995, inter alia). In this talk, I revisit yers from a different perspective. Instead of treating the individual vowels as special, I argue that entire morphemes are indexed to special phonologies. I show that there are generalizations as to the quality and the position of alternating vowels in Russian. These generalizations are phonologically sensible, but they are lost in accounts where vowels are labeled as deletable on a segment-by-segment basis. Finally, I survey yers in other Slavic languages and test the OT hypothesis that a phonological rule can only be exceptional in one language if it is general in another.

Suggested readings:

• Pater, Joe (2006) Locus of Exceptionality: Morpheme-specific phonology as constraint indexation.
• Yearley, Jennifer (1995) Jer vowels in Russian.

For the full program, click here (via John Kingston)

In this week’s installment of the Phonology Circle, Youngah Do will present on the acquisition of Korean morphophonology.

Time: Monday 10/19, 5pm, 32-D461
Speaker: Youngah Do
Title: Child Preference of Base Correspondence: the Asymmetry of the Inflection of Regular and Irregular Verbs in Korean

In this talk, I examine the distinctive ways in which children inflect Korean verbs with respect to the (ir)regularity of the verbal stem. An experiment of picture description asks children to inflect two verb forms in a coordinated sentence. The result shows that the inflectional structure of the two coordinated verbs are always identical. Interestingly, an asymmetry of the inflection is found according to the order of the appearance of regular and irregular verbs in a sentence. When the first verbal position is occupied by regular verb and irregular verb follows, children inflect both verbs in a simple way(C category stem+C category suffix), not using any extra morpheme. On the contrary, when the inflection of irregular verb is required first and regular one is following, they inflect the verbs in a complex way by using an extra morpheme (A category stem+A category suffix+ Extra morpheme +C category suffix).Adopting the hypothesis that that the A category is the base in the Korean verbal inflectional paradigm (Albright and Kang 2009), I argue that this asymmetry is due to children’s tendency for respecting base correspondence in the process of verbal inflection.

Upcoming schedule:

All are welcome to attend! If you plan on coming, it would be helpful if you could let Adam know so we have a rough nose-count.

NECPhon 3 - The Northeast Computational Phonology Circle
Date: October 24, 2009
Location: MIT, 32-D461

Speaker: Andrew Nevins
Time: Thurs 10/18, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461
Title: TBA

“Murasaki Shikibu Meets Generative Grammar: What Can the Old Japanese Particle ‘wo’ Tell Us About Human Language?”

1730 Cambridge St, Room S250

Please note the special day (Tuesday) for this week’s Phonology Circle- normal place and time!

Speaker: Michael Kenstowicz
Title: Laryngeal (Mis)alignments: the Adaptation of Mandarin Loanwords into Yanbian Korean
Coordinates: TUESDAY (10/13) 5pm, 32-D461

This presentation (based on Ito & Kenstowicz 2008 and 2009) examines the ways in which two laryngeal categories of Mandarin Chinese are adapted into the Yanbian dialect of Korean in a corpus of c. 250 contemporary loanwords. The first concerns the mapping of the Mandarin binary aspirated-unaspirated distinction with respect to the Yanbian ternary tense-lax-aspirated contrast and the second the correspondences between the Mandarin four-way tonal contrast with respect to the Yanbian high-low pitch opposition. In both cases the phonetic correlates of the phonological categories play a crucial role in understanding the correspondences.

Speaker: Asya Arylova
Time: Thurs 10/15, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461

The talk will focus on the Russian predicative possession BE-construction.

Speaker: Nadya Modyanova, PhD, Simons Postdoctoral Fellow, BCS
Date: Tuesday, Oct 13, 12pm, 46-3015 (Note special location!)
Title: Semantic and Pragmatic Language Development in Typical Acquisition, Autism Spectrum Disorders and Williams Syndrome

This talk focuses on understanding the reasons for children’s overuse of definite article ‘the’, to refer to one of several objects in a context set, as opposed to the unique established referent. Competing theories argue the deficit is either in children’s semantic computational knowledge (of uniqueness/maximality), or in their pragmatic/social awareness/theory-of-mind development. Experiments in this dissertation focused on children’s comprehension and interpretation of the indefinite and definite determiners, as well as ‘that’, anaphors ‘another’ and ‘same’, and free relative clauses.

The results suggest that in typically developing (TD) children the late acquisition of determiner ‘the’ is due to the late maturation of the semantic principle of maximality. Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and with Williams syndrome (WS) either manifested an adult-like competence, an absence of manifestation of knowledge, or a pattern found in TD younger children (where ‘that’ is understood better than ‘the’ as referring to the salient unique referent) - indicating delay of development of the language faculty, but no deviance. This suggests that the observed deficits in ASD and WS pattern with those in TD, and hence are also semantic in nature.

Beyond posing an explanatory challenge to linguistic theories, the research comparing typical and atypical development sheds light on the mechanisms of language development and impairment, and provides endophenotypic descriptions of ASD and WS, which are crucial for elucidating not only genetics of neurodevelopmental disorders, but also the genetic basis of the human language faculty.

This week, Peter Graff will present the background/design of an experiment that he is proposing to run (abstract below).

The format is intended to be like a lab meeting for discussing experimental work in progress, and is the kick-off of what we hope will be more regular meetings of this sort. Since we already have a full docket of regular talks throughout the semester, we will discuss on Monday the scheduling of future lab meeting sessions.

Speaker: Peter Graff
Title: Evolutionary vs. Phonetically Driven Phonology: An Iterative Learning Experiment
Time: 10/5 5pm, 32-D461

In this talk, I will propose an iterative learning experiment trying to test the predictions of Evolutionary Phonology (Blevins, 2006) and Phonetically Driven Phonology (Hayes and Steriade, 2004). Both hypotheses about phonological learnability and knowledge predict phonological systems to be optimized for transmission. The crucial difference is that Phonetically Driven Phonology hypothesizes phonetic optimization of phonology to be speaker driven, while Evolutionary Phonology attributes phonetic optimality to unbiased or “innocent” misperception and production independent of the grammar of the speaker. I will suggest simulating diachronic transmission in iterative learning and propose ways in which to manipulate speaker driven optimization to see whether such manipulation affects the course of simulated linguistic history as might be predicted by certain conceptions of Phonetically Driven Phonology.

Speaker: Norvin Richards
Time: Thurs 10/8, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461

Title: TBA

The syntax of apparently unbounded dependencies in Irish has for long been viewed as providing evidence for the (successive) cyclic view of long WH-movement, and also as making available a rich set of puzzles by which the nature of such movement operations could be probed. In Irish, this set of puzzles is further enriched by the relatively free availability of resumption as an additional option for forming A-bar binding relations. This paper (a progress report in a long-running struggle) is concerned with a couple of inter-related questions in this area: (i) how we should understand the choice between resumption and movement and what the availability of that choice implies (ii) how the choice, once made, is reflected in the morphosyntax of the language. At stake ultimately is the fundamental question of how we should understand locality requirements in syntax.

Join us on Monday for Phonology Circle! Please note the new location: 32-D461.

Speaker: Andrew Nevins
Date: Monday, Sept 28
Location: 32-D461
Title: Encoding and decoding in the whistled phonology of Antia, Greece

This is intended to be a discussion about the phonetics and phonology of whistled languages, and participants are invited to read the attached paper by Annie Rialland on the topic as a starting point. I will also present some production data from words and non-words collected in Antia, the results of perception tasks with both whistlers and non-whistling Greek speakers, and offer some ideas about the encoding mechanism used in this surrogate speech system.

Recommended reading: Rialland (2005) Phonological and phonetic aspects of whistled languages

Speaker: Ivy Sichel
Time: Thurs 10/1, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461

Title: Economy and the Interpretation of Pronominals

Natural languages use pronominal material for a variety of purposes which extend beyond the ordinary use of pronouns to denote independent theta-roles. In some of these other uses, pronominal material appears to double another DP, including, for example, resumptive pronouns and agreement. The talk addresses how these forms are interpreted, and in particular whether the pronominal form allows reconstruction of its associated DP. The central claim is that form alone does not determine interpretation, and that the existence of alternatives does to a significant extent. The first part of the talk demonstrates this for resumptive pronouns and focuses on a correlation between interpretation and extraction. In non-island contexts, Hebrew has optional and obligatory resumptive pronouns. Optional resumptives block reconstruction of the RC head and also block extraction from the RC; obligatory resumptives allow reconstruction and also allow extraction, exactly like traces. I argue that (1) The possibility for reconstruction depends on the structure of the RC, and in particular the division into Matching and Raising RCs (Bhatt 2002; Sauerland 2004; Hulsey & Sauerland 2006), and (2) that the structure associated with reconstruction is best realized with a trace and is realized with a pronoun only if no trace alternative is available. The second part of the talk extends the alternatives-based analysis to agreement in Palestinian Arabic (PA). PA exhibits an alternation between full-Agr and no-Agr, and clauses with full-Agr lack inverse scope readings, analyzed as absence of reconstruction. This is related to the availability of an alternative structure in which agreement is absent, the surface position of the subject is low and its scope is fixed at that position.

Who: Jacopo Romoli
When: 11:30AM
Where: 32-D461
Title: Towards a Structural Account of Conservativity

Abstract can be found on the Sinn und Bedeutung webpage.

Who: Patrick Grosz & Pritty Patel-Grosz
When: 3:30PM
Where: 56-191
Title: The Typology of Pronouns: Two Types of Anaphora Resolution

Abstract can be found on the Sinn und Bedeutung webpage.

If you are interested in presenting your work or someone else’s work in the Syntax-Semantics Reading Group, there are still some slots available for this semester - please check the group’s webpage.

Speaker: Kirill Shklovsky
Title: Person-Case Effects in Tseltal
Time: Thurs 9/24, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461

Person-Case Constraint (PCC) is a restriction on the nature of the direct object argument in the presence of an indirect object: in many languages, the the direct object in a ditransitive construction can only be third person (Bonet, 1991). Tseltal, a Mayan language of southern Mexico, exhibits PCC restrictions not only in with ditransitive verbs but also in a construction involving non-finite complement embedded under an intransitive verb. Curiously, the restriction is not in effect when the same non-finite complement is embedded under a transitive verb. In this talk I will show that the phenomenon can be accounted for using theories of PCC in Béjar and Rezac (2003) and Anagnostopoulou (2003) in combination with inherent case theory of ergative case (Woolford (1997), Legate (2008)). This should provide support for the idea that ergative is inherent case in Tseltal. The rest of this talk will deal with case-assignment and agreement in non-finite complement clauses.

Who: Chris Collins (NYU)
When: 1:00-2:30PM
Where: 32-144

Title: A formalization of Minimalist Syntax

The goal of this formalization is to give a precise, formal account of certain fundamental notions in minimalist syntax, leading up to the definition of a convergent derivation. We would like this formalization to be useful to minimalist syntacticians in evaluating their own proposals (both conceptually and empirically), and comparing their proposals to others.

The talk is joint work with Ed Stabler.

In this paper we argue that the functional category TENSE, sometimes viewed as the head of the clause can be decomposed. It consists of the universal functional category INFL and language specific features of temporal content: [past] and [present]. Thus, the functional category TENSE is not a primitive category of UG, but INFL is. Specifically, we argue that INFL has a universal function, namely anchoring, but that the substantive content associated with it is language specific or can be lacking alltogether.

We present three arguments for this view:

i) Arguments from language variation. We show that in some languages INFL exists without features of temporal content. Instead, in Halkomelem INFL is associated with substantive features of spatial content. In Blackfoot, INFL is associated with substantive features relating the participants of the event to those of the utterance (Ritter & Wiltschko, in press). This much establishes that the category INFL exists independent of its substantive content, at least at the initial state.

ii) Arguments from tenseless constructions. The independence of INFL from its substantive content is further supported by the existence of constructions where INFL appears without temporal content – even in a language which otherwise appears to be a tensed language: Infinitives and imperatives. This much establishes that INFL exists without substantive content even within a given language. The proposal correctly predicts that in contexts where INFL is used without substantive content the difference between English, Halkomelem and Blackfoot vanishes.

iii) Arguments from nominal licensing. Finally, we show that the licensing of nominal arguments varies with the substantive content associated with INFL. In languages with temporal features, nominal arguments are licensed via dependent marking (structural case), while in languages with spatial or participant features, nominal arguments are licensed via head-marking. This indirectly supports Pesetsky & Torrego’s 2001 idea according to which structural case reduces to tense features on D. However, since tense is not a primitive category in our analysis, we argue that case reduces instead to the substantive features that make up tense: [present = NOMINATIVE] and [past = ACCUSATIVE].

We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our proposal for our understanding of functional categories.

Phonology Circle resumes its weekly meetings on Monday with an organizational meeting, and a brief presentation by Peter Graff on what he has learned about a local MIT resource, the Behavioral Research Lab.

Time: Mon 9/14, 5pm
Location: 32-D831

If you cannot make it to the meeting, but wish to present some time this semester, please contact Adam to request a slot.

Language acquisition, variation and change
24.921, Fall 2009
Michel DeGraff and Ken Wexler

There’s a long and strong tradition, going back to at least the Neo-Grammarians, of attempting to explain language change via the processes of language acquisition. Yet, in each of the relevant sub-disciplines of linguistic theory, historical linguistics and language-acquisition research there are several competing hypotheses that enlist incompatible assumptions about the nature of grammar and variation.

The purpose of this seminar is to discuss the most up-to-date approaches in the study of language acquisition and language change, as well as linguistic theory, toward providing the best possible framework for the connection among the corresponding empirical domains. We understand “language change” broadly—-to include diachronic syntax (in the history, say, of English) alongside the creation of “new” languages (in the history of, say, Haitian Creole). We’ll examine all of these diachronic patterns as examples of the human linguistic capacity coming to terms with varying input in the linguistic ecology. Thus, processes of first- and second-language acquisition, and the differences between the two, should be crucial to understanding language-change phenomena. The results of our discussion should contribute to our understanding of the nature of language in the human mind and the conditions and limits whereby language can vary.

The first couple of lectures will discuss central issues in, and a sample of models from, the study of historical change and language acquisition, including:

• the relationship between language contact and language change;
• whether language change is ever possible in absence of language contact;
• the nature of “creolization”;
• the relationship between first- and second-language acquisition and language change;
• whether the language acquirer comes equipped with a set of “cues” that enable parameters to be set.

Then we’ll turn to particular domains of language variation related to basic parameters of clause and nominal structure, possibly including the following issues:

• Does the language have V-to-I? Yes: French / No: Haitian Creole
• Does the language have (non-residual) V-to-C? Yes: German / No: English
• Is a (phonetically overt) copula required for non-verbal predication? Yes: English / No: Haitian Creole
• Distribution and interpretation of determiners

For each of these domains we’ll look for evidence in comparative syntax, historical change, and language acquisition.

We expect the seminar to be of interest to colleagues interested in:

• linguistic theory;
• first- and second-language acquisition;
• language change/creation;
• the relationship between language and larger issues of cognition.

Jorie Koster-Moeller is from Corrales, New Mexico. She got her BA from Pomona College, and is currently doing a joint program through the linguistics department and the brain and cognitive science department. She’s particularly interested in semantics, both formal and experimental, and psycholinguistics. She also enjoys most anything mountain-related, such as backpacking and rockclimbing.

Edwin Martin Howard apologises that you’ve had to wait a whole week to hear about him, but he was out of email contact last weekend whilst enjoying a break in the wilds of rural Quebec - the Canadian province that he now also, in addition to his native Scotland, calls home. During his time in Montreal, he has become a proficient French speaker, and he completed a BA in Linguistics at McGill, writing an honours thesis on the semantics of superlatives and NPI licensing. The best thing that’s ever happened to him was the birth of his son, just over a year ago.

Patrick Grosz and Pritty Patel-Grosz are going to present their work on pronominal anaphora next week, which they will also present at Sinn und Bedeutung 14. For the title and abstract of their presentation see below. Note that this is not a 30-minute practice talk, but intended to be a longer, more interactive presentation where comments, discussion and feedback are encouraged throughout.

DATE: Monday, September 21, 2009
TIME: 3:30-5PM
ROOM: to be announced
TITLE: The Typology of Pronouns: Two Types of Anaphora Resolution
ABSTRACT: can be found on the Sinn und Bedeutung webpage

This will be a special session of the LF Reading Group (Syntax-Semantics Reading Group).

The yearly meeting of the Northeast Computational Phonology circle will take place this year at MIT.

Title: NECPhon 3
Date: Oct 24, 2009
Location: 32-D461

Details of the event, including the precise time and schedule of talks, will be announced as the date gets closer. In the meantime, save the date, and if you may be interested in presenting, please contact Adam Albright.

http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/phonlab

In addition, if you are not sure about the correct way to do something in the lab, please just ask someone who knows. (This includes signing up for times to reserve the booth, recording to a file, adjusting the levels or switch mics, adjusting the fitting of the head-mounted microphone, and so on). Finally, if you know of others who use the lab but who might not be on one of the ling lists, such as RA’s/UROPs, class participants, and so on, please forward this to them, and be sure they know where to look for instructions/training, and who to go to for help.

Speaker: Keith R. Kluender, PhD, Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Title: Speech perception as efficient coding
Time: Friday, 18 September, 4pm
Place: Singleton Auditorium, 46-3002

Fundamental principles that govern all perception, from transduction to cortex, are shaping our understanding of perception of speech and other familiar sounds. Here, ecological and sensorineural considerations are proposed in support of an information-theoretical approach to speech perception. Optimization of information transmission and efficient coding are emphasized in explanations of classic characteristics of speech perception, including: perceptual resilience to signal degradation; variability across changes in listening environment, rate, and talker; categorical perception; and, word segmentation. Experimental findings will be used to illustrate how a series of like processes operate upon the acoustic signal with increasing levels of sophistication on the way from waveforms to words. Common to these processes are ways that perceptual systems absorb predictable characteristics of the soundscape, from temporally local (adaptation) to extended periods (learning), and sensitivity to new information is enhanced. [Supported by NIDCD]

For more info: http://mit.edu/bcs/newsevents/colloquia.shtml

The Syntax-Semantics Reading Group, also known as the LF Reading
Group, is still looking for presenters. If you would like to discuss
your research or present stimulating work done by others, please let
Tue or Luka know. The group’s first meeting is scheduled for:

Monday, Sept 21, 11.30AM
Location: 32-D461

For more information, please visit the group’s website.

Speaker: Patrick Grosz
Title: Grading Modality: A New Approach to Modal Concord and its Relatives
Time: Thurs 9/17, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461

Abstract can be found here

Aysa Arylova: PhD student at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Aysa is investigating the morphosyntactic realization of syntactic dependency as a function of the structure building operation Merge. Her work will include an extensive typological survey and the development of a formal analysis.

Micha Breakstone: PhD student at Hebrew University, Israel. Micha is fascinated by “Universal Degrees.” Different assumptions regarding the nature of degree processing (e.g., universal density) have led him to exciting speculations about how the linguistic module in the mind/brain may interact with other cognitive modules, as well as with pragmatic knowledge about the world.

Marcus Lunguinho: PhD Student at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Marcus’s research focuses on “Auxiliary Verbs and the Theory of Grammar,” and the following two areas in particular: 1) the defective morphological paradigms of certain auxiliaries; 2) the syntax of the non-finite domains selected by auxiliary verbs.

Dimitris Michelioudakis: PhD student at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. Dimitris’s current research is on the syntactic status of Inherent (“Dative”) Case in different diachronic and diatopic varieties of Greek.

Coppe van Urk: MA student at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. Coppe’s research mainly concerns issues in modern generative syntax, specifically in the area of Control.

Visiting Scholars (3)

Manchun Dai: Professor at the National Research Center for Foreign Language Education at Beijing Foreign Studies University, China. Professor Dai’s interests revolve around Second Language Acquisition and Syntax.

Jeongah Kim, Researcher at the Institute of Language and Information Studies at Yonsei University, Korea. Professor Kim’s research interests are in phonetics, phonology, morphology and the phonology-phonetics interface. She is interested in recent developments in phonology, including Optimality Theory, Correspondence Theory and Sympathy Theory.

Anna Roussou: Associate Professor at the University of Patras, Greece. Professor Roussou’s main research interests are in syntax (Greek, comparative, diachronic) and its interfaces with morphology/lexicon and semantics.

[Thanks, Michel!]

Later in August, he spent a couple of days at NYU working with Anna Szabolcsi and Julia Horvath (who was visiting from Israel) on the phenomenon of overt (nominative) controlees in infinitival clauses in Hungarian and, it turns out, other languages as well (something that looks a little bit like “backwards control”, but probably isn’t). This work is scheduled to resume in early November.

• Kai von Fintel (MIT) & Anthony S. Gillies (Rutgers), “CIA Leaks”
• Agustín Rayo (MIT), “Vague Representation”

24.981 Topics in computational phonology and morphology
M 2:30-5:00pm, plus lab sessions to be determined
Location: TBA

Description:

Computational modeling can usefully inform many aspects of phonological theory. Implementing a theory provides a more rigorous test of its applicability to different data sets, and requires a greater degree of formal precision than is found in purely expository presentations. By training learning models on realistic training samples, we can test whether a posited analysis can actually be discovered from representative data, and we can observe what proportion of the data is actually accounted for by that analysis. Modeling also provides a direct means of testing whether a proposed formal device facilitates the discovery of generalizations, or whether it hampers learning by greatly increasing the size of the search space. In the most interesting cases, computational modeling uncovers facts about the language that would have been difficult to discover by eye, and forces us to ask which facts are treated as linguistically significant by speakers.

This class is intended to serve two distinct functions:

• We will discuss recent theoretical work informed by computational implementations, and tools for modeling phonological knowledge of various kinds. Special attention will be paid to the relation between formal learning models and empirical data concerning phonological acquisition.
• The class also functions as a practical introduction to some scripting techniques, allowing those who have no programming background to gain some hands-on experience with modeling. No previous programming experience is assumed or required.

Topics will include: (subject to revision)

• Statistical “baseline” models (n-gram models, exemplar models)
• Algorithms for constraint ranking and weighting
• Algorithms for constraint discovery
• Integrating learned and innate constraints
• Learning in the midst of variation and exceptions, and discovery of gradient patterns

Requirements: readings and small regular problem sets, final project+presentation.

24.956 Seminar on Topics in East Asian Linguistics
T 10-1, 66-156 (when meeting at MIT, including the first class on 9/15)
C-T James Huang, Shigeru Miyagawa

We will take up some recent studies of East Asian syntax that have important theoretical relevance.

Issues include:

• agreement/topic/focus
• NP structure: the status of classifiers, plurality, and no/de, etc.
• ellipsis and null arguments in clauses and nominals
• comparatives
• intervention effects
• Case alternation

While the focus will be on Chinese and Japanese, we will make an attempt to bring in data and analysis from Korean whenever possible. Students are expected to do one class presentation and a final paper. We will alternate the meeting location between Harvard and MIT. See Calendar for the location of each class.

• Presentations: Although we have turned into a practice talks group in the last couple of years, we again hope to turn the tide a little bit and have some presentations this semester in which actual reading is required from the participants. There are already two such meetings planned: McCloskey prep & Bobaljik prep. We are also planning to have some discussions of readings relevant for the upcoming NELS talks. We will also have an occasional invited speaker.

If there are papers that you would like to see discussed, please let us know. Also contact Tue and Luka if you have any other suggestions for the group or, naturally, if you want to give a practice talk.

• Suggested time: Mondays 3.30PM; the room will be announced. Let us know if you have planned to attend but can’t make it at that time.
• Website: it will be updated once the scheduling is settled

See you soon!
Your LFRG organizers

Phonology Circle will resume its fall schedule next Monday, 9/14, at 5pm in 32-831. If you cannot make this meeting, but would like to reserve a slot for the fall semester, please contact Adam.

See you there!

mitcho (Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine) grew up in Minnesota and is thus actively looking forward to the Boston winter. While at the University  of Chicago he worked on the syntax/semantics of Mandarin comparatives.  Since then, he’s lived in Taiwan and Japan, most recently working for  Mozilla.

Hadas Kotek grew up in a small town in northern Israel. Hadas reports: “My name literally means myrtle and is a shortened version of Hadassah, the Hebrew name of the biblical queen Esther. I did a BA in linguistics at Tel-Aviv university, then studied the first year of my MA at the Humboldt university in Berlin and the second year back at Tel-Aviv university. My previous work focused mainly on formal semantics and its interface with syntax. At present I am planning to continue working in these same areas.”

Junya Nomura reports: “I’m from Japan. My main interst is in syntax. I’ve studied especially Japanese syntax, but I’m planing to study other East Asian languages such as Korean, Vietnamese, Thai and Khmer, too. Apart from linguistics, I like sports, especially basketball and baseball, and shogi (Japanese chess).”

Daeyoung Sohn reports: “I am from South Korea. I have an MA in linguistics, and BAs in international relations study and English. I am interested mainly in Syntax and also have interest in Semantics. ”

Yusuke Imanishi reports: “I was born and grew up in Nara, Japan. The city is not as famous and large as cities like Tokyo and Osaka. Nevertheless, it is filled with nature preserves, forests and temples/shrines!! We also have a big Buddha, which reaches the height of approx. 50m. I completed my MA in Linguistics at Osaka University in Spring 2009. My thesis proposes that dative subjects in the Standard Japanese and some Japanese dialects are structurally Case-assigned, opposed to traditional analyses. I also extended empirical coverage to other languages and attempted to devise a unified account of dative subject constructions. My research interests include syntactic theory and comparative syntax based on a macro/micro-parametric approach. I’m also interested in the interfaces of phonology and semantics with syntax. 

Iain Giblin is from Australia. He reports: “My academic background is in music, but I’ve had a long interest in linguistics and in my postgraduate music studies I sought to apply generative models of language to music. I’m also interested in the philosophical questions that arise from the generative approach. I’m looking forward to the program here at MIT and learning all the techniques of modern linguistic theory so I won’t commit myself to one domain just yet. I still like to noodle around on the guitar and Boston is a great guitar town.”

Stay tuned for intros to the rest of the incoming class.

24.993*: Topics in Syntax
Leftward, Rightward, Overt, Covert: Rules of Linearization
Danny Fox, David Pesetsky
Time: Wednesdays 10-1
Place: 32-D461 (but first class will meet in a different room; look for e-mail)

*Note about the subject number: This class was announced as 24.956, but since that same number is being used by Shigeru Miyagawa and Jim Huang for their seminar, we will be teaching ours under 24.993. If you register for the class, please register for the new number, 24.993. This class will satisfy any requirements that mention 24.956.

TOPIC

On the surface, syntactic movement appears to raise two independent questions for the phonology:

1. Leftward vs. rightward movement: How is the moved element ordered relative to the constituent with which it has just merged — to its left or to its right?
2. Overt vs. covert movement: Which of the two positions occupied by a moved constituent is relevant for its ordering — its new position or its old position (the trace)?

In this class, we will investigate the possibility that these two questions are closely connected. In particular, we will argue that when a moved element is ordered to the right of the constituent with which it has just merged, the result is covert movement. More generally, we will argue that the answer to question 1 for each instance of movement determines the answer to question 2.

We further propose that the answer to question 1 itself might be predictable from Rules of Linearization that are not specific to movement, but order the constituents of the language more generally. That is, the direction of particular movement operations in a given language may be predictable from other basic word order facts of the language.

Among the topics relevant to this investigation are:

• (a) Extraposition: Why do extraposed modifiers appear on the right, and why does this type of extraposition appear to influence scope?
• (b) Scrambling and scope rigidity: Why do OV languages generally allow scrambling but disallow inverse scope in the absence of scrambling?
• (c) Parasitic gaps: Why does covert A-bar movement license parasitic gaps only in very restricted configurations?
• (d) Righthand subject phenomena: Why do certain types of fronting, including Locative Inversion and wh-movement, allow or require an otherwise preverbal subject to appear on the right in many languages?
• (e) Object shift and quantifier movement in Scandinavian languages: Why is Object Shift subject to a requirement of order preservation (Holmberg’s generalization) and Quantifier Movement subject to a seemingly opposite constraint?

Particular attention will be devoted to the implications of our ideas for the timing of linearization—in particular, for the Cyclic Linearization proposal of Fox & Pesetsky (2005).

PLAN FOR THE COURSE

Part 1: We will begin by sketching our proposals and conjectures over the first few weeks. This presentation will leave many questions open, and will certainly yield many unsolved problems.

Part 2: After this, we will back up and spend the middle portion of the class investigating many of the topics raised in the first part in greater depth. The discussion of these topics will be along the lines of other syntax classes in which such topics are discussed, and will not necessarily be limited to questions that are relevant to our proposals in any obvious way.

Topics will include those listed above, but will also include discussion of other recent work on linearization and movement — especially some extremely interesting discoveries recently reported by Biberauer, Holmberg and Roberts (and colleagues).

Part 3: We hope to be able to return to part 1 (re-teaching it, in fact) in light of what we have learned from part 2 and earlier discussion.

REQUIREMENTS

• Reading assignments throughout the semester.
• In part 1, we will give some small problems and questions to be investigated.
• For part 2, students will be asked to collaborate with us and with each other on the presentation of particular topics.
• Finally, there will be a squib or short paper on some topic related to the class. This squib could reflect questions you have asked, investigations you have conducted, or scathing attacks on our proposals. It is up to you!

ASSIGNMENT FOR THE FIRST CLASS

Read the paper and handout on extraposition by Fox & Nissenbaum. Many of you have seen this material in 24.952 (or discovered some of it for yourself in a problem set from that class). This work will be our starting point for the topics discussed in this class.

There will be a class website on Stellar, to which subsequent readings will be posted.

24.960 Syntactic Models
Pesetsky

Time: Tuesdays 2-5
Place: 32-D461
Website: http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/24/fa09/24.960/

The course has twin goals:

First, it gives a quick introduction to at least two “frameworks” for syntactic research that compete with the Government-Binding/Minimalist tradition in the current syntax world: HPSG and Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG). We work speedily through much of the HPSG textbook by Sag, Wasow and Bender, and also look at the LFG textbook by Bresnan.

Next, the class turns historical, tracing the development of generative syntax from Syntactic Structures (1957) up to the early 1980s, when HPSG and LFG first separated themselves off from the research program that became GB/LSLT. An overarching theme of the course is the issue of derivational vs. representational views of syntax — a theme that offers some surprising observations about who said what at various points in the history of the field, but also gives the course a focus relevant to the most current work.

You can get a good sense of what the class will be like from its old Stellar pages: >http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/24/sp07/24.960/ and http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/24/fa03/24.960/. I plan to follow essentially the same structure, but I will work extra hard to make room for the book by Jackendoff and Culicover, which I did not end up teaching the last two (!) times I announced it and still want very much to.

The requirements are:

1. regular attendance and participation
2. problem sets in the first half of the class, and
3. three class presentations or co-presentations (depending on numbers): of an HPSG paper, an LFG paper, and a paper from the period of generative semantics/interpretive semantics debates

No paper! (A major attraction in the past.)

Many students have reported finding this class both fun and enlightening (and not just because there is no required paper). Ask some of your predecessors for their reviews.

The most important book to order right now is the following one:

• Sag, Wasow and Bender “Syntactic Theory” (e.g., here or here)

…and please start reading it. It will be great if you come to the first class already somewhat prepared. This book is intended as an introduction to syntax for undergraduates, so you will find the early chapters go quickly. But the syntax it introduces is HPSG, so fairly soon you will be learning new things.

The books we will be using later in the semester are:

• Bresnan “Lexical-Functional Grammar”
  [Out of print in paperback, but ">available used. I will, however, post relevant parts to Stellar, so we can make do even if you don’t get the book.]
• Chomsky “Syntactic Structures” (e.g., or here)
• Culicover and Jackendoff “Simpler Syntax” (e.g., here or here)

Other readings (papers and excerpts from books) will be downloadable from the Stellar website for the class.

Hope to see you there!

“Without glue, what do we do?”

The theme of our seminar is the question of how meanings are put together when there seems to be a lack of explicit marking of how things fit together. One famous example (seminally studied by Stump) is the variety of meanings a free adjunct can take on:

(1) Having long arms, John can reach the ceiling.
(2) Standing on a chair, John can reach the ceiling.

We will talk about the syntax & semantics of such adjuncts, of parentheticals, of free relatives, of appositive relatives, of conjunction, of concessives, of conditionals, and of paratactic coordinations. The reading list will evolve over the course of the semester, since this is a topic that is mostly new to us. We will be learning with you as we go along.

In a departure from our usual seminar format, we are meeting twice a week in more bite-sized chunks of time. To make this format be productive, preparatory reading will be even more important than usual.

Apart from keeping up with the reading and participating vigorously in the seminar discussions, which is an expectation for all seminar participants, registered students will write a term paper that is at least tangentially related to the topic(s) of the seminar. Early consultation about the term papers is advised.

For the first meeting on Wednesday September 9 at 1:30pm in Room 66-160, the preparatory reading is a (not completely randomly chosen) article on the meaning of conjunction:

Txurruka, Isabel Gómez. 2003. The natural language conjunction and. Linguistics and Philosophy 26(3). 255–285. doi:10.1023/A:1024117423963.

Everybody who intends to attend the seminar should read this article beforehand and think of questions and comments about it for the seminar discussion.

• Adam Albright taught “Morphological innovation and change”
• Kai von Fintel and Sabine Iatridou taught “Morphology, syntax, and semantics of modals”
• Donca Steriade taught “Correspondence and the phonological lexicon”

Donca also gave the Edward Sapir Lecture on “Units of representation for linguistic rhythm”. In addition, third-year grad student Peter Graff attended the institute on a LSA Summer Institute Fellowship.

During the summer now ending, Wayne taught a three-week course on Navajo phonology at the summer workshop of the Navajo Language Academy (6-24 July). Nearly all of the twenty or so 2009 workshop participants were Navajo teachers of the language and fluent speakers of Navajo.

NLA’s summer workshops are held annually at various Diné Bikéyah venues — NLA 2009 being located at Diné College near the high desert, intersection of Indian Roads 12 and 64 (Tsaile AZ, pop. about 1000).

The course was based on Ken Hale and Lorraine Honie’s unpublished Introduction to the sound system of Navajo (no date [1972?]), as revised and expanded by Wayne during spring 2009. Since returning from his NLA work, Wayne has continued to revise and expand the Hale-Honie ms., with a view toward making it available through the NLA.

(Hale and Honie’s ms. can be found at http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/tfernal1/nla/halearch/halearch.htm, from which there is also a link to NLA’s home page. As for Lorraine Honie [Navajo], she was briefly a graduate student in this department in the early 1970s; she is now at Rough Rock Community School, Rough Rock AZ.)

Immediately prior to working at Diné College, Wayne participated in the third annual Western Washington University Linguistics in Education workshop (WWULiE-2009) in Bellingham WA.

He also spent a weekend teaching and learning Wampanoag at the third annual Wôpanâak immersion camp (at which only Wampanoag is spoken).

And he went to Budapest for the Minimalist Approaches to Syntactic Locality (MASL) conference, where he gave a talk about Improper Movement and tough-movement

His other project over the summer was finishing his book, Uttering Trees, which is scheduled to come out as an LI Monograph in 2010.

Please join us this FRIDAY at 3:00 for our last LF Reading Group of the semester. Friederike Moltmann will give a talk titled “Reifying Terms”. Abstract below. Note the special day, room and time.

SPEAKER: Friederike Moltmann
TITLE: Reifying Terms
TIME: Mon. 5/18, 10:30am
ROOM: 32-D831

In this talk I will discuss the syntax and semantics of NPs of the following sort:

1. a. the person John
   b. the name John
   c. the fictional character Hamlet
   d. the number ten
   e. the numeral ten
   f. the color green

I argue that the semantics of such NPs uniformly consists in introducing an object on the basis of a non-referential occurrence of an expression, hence they are ‘reifying terms’. I argue that numerals, color words, and simple quotations in fact generally are not referential terms and that only with the help of the construction (1) reference to expressions, colors, and numbers as objects is possible.

Prosodic structure refers to the level of linguistic structure above the segmental level, namely phrasal organization and prominence. This talk examines the temporal and structural properties of phrasal organization as reflected in production and perception. Previous research has shown that prosodic phrase boundaries introduce systematic phonetic variation in the temporal properties of segments. Acoustic studies have found that at boundaries segments increase in duration. Articulatory studies have shown that gestures become longer in the vicinity of boundaries and that this articulatory lengthening increases with boundary strength. I will present a series of experimental studies examining a) the effect of prosodic structure on pause duration in utterances, b) the extent of boundary effects as shown in the articulation of gestures near phrase junctures, c) the categoricity and gradiency in the perception of prosodic boundaries, and d) recursion in prosodic structure. The results inform our understanding of the linguistic representation of prosodic structure and its relation to processes involved in producing spoken language. A model incorporating the results of these studies is proposed.

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

http://web.mit.edu/sula5/program.html

And here is what SULA is all about: “The goal of the conference is to bring together researchers working on languages or dialects which do not have an established tradition of work in formal semantics. We especially encourage abstract submissions from those whose work involves primary fieldwork or experimentation as well as analysis.”

There will be very nice talks on the semantics of very exciting languages from North, Central and South America.

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

First speaker: Hyesun Cho
Title: The problem of generalization in a statistical learning model of phonotactics

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

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

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

Second speaker: Patrick Jones
Title: Evidence for the Phonological Stem in Kinande

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

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

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

1. I spent the afternoon sleeping on the couch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peter Graff and T. Florian Jaeger of the University of Rochester presented their talk, The OCP is a pressure to keep words distinct: Evidence from Aymara, Dutch and Javanese at the 45th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society.

Jessica Coon was an invited speaker at a “syntax brown bag” at NYU, where she talked about “Predicate Fronting and its Consequences: Ergativity in Chol”. Meanwhile, uptown a bit, Pritty Patel and Patrick Grosz were invited speakers at a CUNY Syntax Supper, where they spoke on “On the Typology of Pronouns: Two Types of Anaphor Resolutions”.

Finally, MIT will soon be invading Manchester, for the 17th Manchester Phonology Meeting (17mfm). Bronwyn Bjorkman will be presenting on “Uniform exponence and reduplication: evidence from Kinande”; Maria Giavazzi will presenting “On the application of velar palatalization in Italian nouns and adjectives”; and Peter Graff will be presenting a joint paper with alum Andrew Nevins, entitled “Vowel harmony provides a figure-ground relation for consonant phonotactics”. Adam Albright will also present, on “Cumulative violations and complexity thresholds: Evidence from Lakhota”

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

A non-technical summary of our reconstruction of local contexts is available in:
Schlenker, P. 2009. Presuppositions and Local Contexts, Manuscript, Institut Jean-Nicod and NYU

A longer and more technical version is developed in:
Schlenker, P. To appear. Local Contexts. Forthcoming in Semantics and Pragmatics

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

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

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

Speaker: Tue Trinh
Title: “Constraining Copy Deletion”
Time: 3:00-4:30 Wed., 4/29
Place: 34-303

More information, incl. the schedule for the rest of the semester:
http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/groups/synsem/index.html

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

Speaker: Daniel Buering, University of California, Los Angeles
Title: At Least and At Most: The Logic of Bounds and Insecurity Time: Friday April 24th, 3:30pm
Location: 32-141

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

References
Buering, Daniel. 2008. The Least at least Can Do. Proceedings of the 26th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, edited by Charles B. Chang and Hannah J. Haynie, 114–120. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Geurts, Bart, and Rick Nouwen. 2007. At Least et al : The Semantics of Scalar Modifiers. Language 83:533–559.
Klinedinst, Nathan. 2007. Plurality and Possibility. Ph.D. thesis, UCLA.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time: Monday 4/13, 1:30-3:30pm
Location: 32-D461
Speaker: Bronwyn M. Bjorkman
Title: Uniform Exponence and Reduplication: Evidence from Kinande

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(1) Give me (some) more coffee.
(2) Five customers bought a laptop yesterday, and one more customer bought a desktop this morning.

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

(3) Bob was happy right after the talk, and he is going to be happier tonight at the party.
(4) The temperature rose by 4C yesterday afternoon, and it's going to rise some more this afternoon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speaker: Shigeto Kawahara (Rutgers University)
Title: Probing knowledge of similarity through puns
Time: Friday April 17, 4-6pm
Location: 32-D831

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

Speaker: Diana Apoussidou (UMass Amhert/University of Amsterdam)
Title: Modeling the acquisition of French liaison using allomorphy
Time: 4/6 5pm
Location: 32-D831

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

Last week, Claire Halpert returned from Tervuren, Belgium where she presented a paper on “Superiority Effects in Zulu and Kinande Inversion” at a special workshop on Bantu inversion constrations at the 3rd International Conference on Bantu Languages.

Conference news of the present…

Meanwhile, this weekend was an active one for talks by the MIT linguistics community!

Third-year grad student Bronwyn Bjorkman and first-year grad students Igor Yanovich and Rafael Nonato all presented papers at ECO-5, the “Maryland-MIT-Harvard-UMass-UConn Workshop in Formal Linguistics”, held this year at Maryland. Bronwyn’s talk was entitled ‘Go Get, Come See: the Syntax of a Double Verb Construction in North American English’; Igor’s talk was called “How likely to be viable is a PF theory for A-reconstruction?’; and Rafael’s talk asked the question “What is quantification again?”

At the same time, a few states away, second-year student Jeremy Hartman presented his paper “The semantic effects of non-A-bar traces: evidence from ellipsis parallelism” at Semantics and Linguistic Theory (a.k.a. SALT) at Ohio State.

More or less simultaneously with all these talks, one state to the west, fourth-year student Jessica Coon and second-year student Guillaume Thomas presented papers at the 14th annual Workshop on Structure and Constituency in the Languages of the Americas (WSCLA 14) held at Purdue. Jessica’s paper was entitled “A biclausal analysis of aspect based split ergativity”, and Guillaume’s was “Incremental comparatives and inherently evaluative ‘many’ in Mbya”. Conor Quinn, who was a post-doc at MIT from 2006 through last Spring, also presented a paper at WSCLA, entitled “Incorporated verbal classifiers in a predictive typology of noun incorporation”.

And finally, one more state to the west, Adam Albright was at the University of Chicago, giving a linguistics colloquium talk about “Phonetic faithfulness and affix-by-affix differences in derived words”, and a talk in the Workshop on Language, Cognition, and Computation series entitled “Why are cumulative markedness effects so rare?”

Conference news of the future…

Peter Graff’s joint paper with Florian Jaeger entitled The OCP is a pressure to keep words distinct: Evidence from Aymara, Dutch and Javanese” has been accepted for presentation at the upcoming meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society

Papers…

Omer Preminger’s paper “Breaking Agreements: Distinguishing Agreement and Clitic-Doubling by Their Failures” has been accepted for publication by Linguistic Inquiry and should appear next Fall.

And please remember…

Please remember to send us your news items about talks and papers so we can announce them in Whamit!

The program for the 6th Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics (May 22-24, Nagoya, Japan) has been announced.

Speaker: Peter Graff (with Florian Jaeger)
Title: The OCP is a pressure to keep words perceptually distinct: Evidence from Javanese
Time: Friday 4/10 3:30pm, 32-D831

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

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

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

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