Whamit!

Linguistic Theory and the Japanese Language (24.946) will be taught on Tuesdays, 10 - 1, in 4-144. The tentative schedule is as follows. For a list of readings (more will be added), see the Stellar site:

http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/24/fa08/24.946/index.html

Tentative syllabus

In this course we will explore some of the major topics studied in Japanese linguistics over the past 15 years or so. Each topic not only represents an important construction in Japanese, but its analysis has significant implications for linguistic universals.

September 9 Genitive Subjects
September 16 Floating Quantifers
September 23 Ditransitives, Nominalization
September 30 Scrambling/Focus/Agreement/EPP
October 7 Pro-drop and related matters, Ellipsis
October 14 Indeterminate Pronouns
October 21 TBA
October 28 Wh-questions
November 4 Causatives, Double-o Constraint
November 11 No Class, Veteran’s Day
November 18 TBA
November 25 Subject and object honorification
December 2 TBA
December 9 TBA

24.964 (Topics in phonology) meets Wed 12-3 this semester, in 32-D831.

The topic is: Mechanisms of morpho(phono)logical change

Description: The early days of generative phonology saw a flurry of work applying the tools of the new theory to the problem of characterizing language change (e.g., Kiparsky 1965, King 1969). More recent phonological and morphological frameworks have brought with them a range of new mechanisms and perspectives on why and how morphological and phonological systems might change, but on the whole, there has less of a concerted effort to link synchronic and diachronic analysis.

The purpose of this seminar is to explore the mechanisms that recent grammatical theories offer for explaining morphological and morphophonological change. We will review the contributions of early generative phonology to the study of language change, and then consider how more recent developments may change the predictions about likely changes. Along the way, of course, we will also need to consider the contribution of extra-grammatical factors, and the interplay of competence, performance, and learning in shaping morphological change.

Topics will include: (subject to substantial revision, according to needs or interests of participants)

• Overregularization (lexical simplification); Grammar simplification
• Phonological markedness, morphological markedness
• Paradigm uniformity constraints
• Implicational relations between forms
• Informativeness and lexical distinctness; Antihomophony, morphological distinctness

9.591 / 24.495 Language processing: An introduction to the experimental investigation of language, above the word level

Instructors: Ted Gibson, Evelina Fedorenko

Location: 46-3015

Requirements: Students need to have either (a) a good experimental psychology background; or (b) a good linguistics background.

Currently scheduled: Mondays 2-5. We already know of some conflicts with students who would like to take this class. So we may re-schedule the class to 4-7 or 6-9 on Mondays, or possibly some other time slot, depending on the schedules of the students who want to take the class. Please send me or Ev email if you plan on taking the class for credit, and if so, please tell us your scheduling constraints.

This course has two goals: (1) to teach students about experimental design and basic results in language processing; and (2) to tutor students through the design and execution of an experiment of their choosing, in a language research area above the word level (e.g., syntax, semantics, pragmatics, discourse, working memory).

This is a project-oriented class. Because of the time needed to work on each project, registration is limited in this class to 10 people. If more than 10 people sign up, we will form groups so that the total number of projects does not exceed 10. We will meet with students individually (or in groups) early in the semester in order to decide on a topic area for an experiment to be run during the term. During the semester, students will design, run and analyze at least one psycholinguistic experiment. A paper presenting the study will be due at the end of the semester.

The course will meet once a week for three hours at a time. The lectures will survey some critical results from the field of sentence processing. Throughout the course we will emphasize quantitative methods for investigating language. We will also discuss how to design experimental materials to evaluate hypotheses (including basic statistics, using the language R) from all areas of language, controlling for factors not relevant to the hypothesis in question. Some later lectures will be devoted to discussing students’ experiments.

Students taking the course may come with their own hypotheses to evaluate. Alternatively, we have suggestions for projects in different areas of language. One requirement of any proposed experiment is feasibility. Consequently, most experiments will need to evaluate a question using English participants, because of the availability of this group locally. Proposed experiments on other languages are possible, but only if the experimenter can demonstrate feasibility of getting access to the relevant participant group during the term.

The new time and room for Graduate Language Acquisition 9.601/24.949J is:

Mondays 2 to 5

46-4199

This was determined at first meeting, by all who were there. If you missed the first meeting, feel welcome to come to the next one, which will be this Monday, September 8, 2 PM.

24.956
Topics in Syntax
Kyle Johnson
T 2-5
32-D461

In the 1980’s, Elisabet Engdahl responded to the problems posed by reconstruction effects with an interesting proposal concerning the representations that the “movement” relation invokes. She suggested that movement produced multidominant phrase markers, and adopted the “Phrase Linking Grammars” that Stanley Peters was developing at the time. This seminar will examine how this thesis might play out with today’s syntactic tools. While her focus was almost exclusively on producing a working semantics for movement, ours will be to, first, better match that semantics with a working syntax and, second, relate those multidominant representations with the strings that movement creates. Our journey might include dalliances in: resumptive pronoun strategies, the structure of relative clauses, the internal organization of DPs, events and the semantics of quantification, linearization schemes, island effects, remnant movement, pied-piping, and the roots of the “Empty Category Principle.” We’ll review, and build upon, work by Sauerland, Fox, Elbourne, Nunes, Kayne and, of course, Engdahl.

Course requirements: a paper on a topic related to movement, linearization, quantification, ellipsis, binding theory, DPs, pronouns or syntax, and a short presentation of that paper in class.

The statistics workshop from IAP will continue meeting every two weeks this semester. The plan is to meet at 12:10 on non-colloquium Fridays. Participants alternate in presenting a mathematical model and showing how to analyze some interesting linguistic data with it. Models we will be covering this semester include: Correlation, Regression, Logistic Regression, Mixed Models, Bootstrapping, ANOVA, MANOVA, ANCOVA and many more. (The agenda is open to suggestions.)

The first meeting will be Friday, February 22 at 12:10, in the phonetics lab (32-D958). Adam Albright will present Pearson and Spearman correlations, and how to do them in R.

Instructors: Adam Albright, David Pesetsky
Thursdays 2—5, 32-D461

Course description:

Topics in the structure of words and their components, including why such things should exist in the first place (if, indeed, they do). What is the evidence for structure below the level of the word? What (if anything) distinguishes word structure from sentence structure? What principles account for the phonological shape of complex words? Why does morphology sometimes fail to express syntactic/semantic differences (one affix, two functions), and why does it sometimes “overexpress” them (two affixes, one function). The big question underlying the course will be: is there a distinct morphological grammar, or can morphological phenomena all be understood as arising from the interaction of syntax and phonology?

Course website: http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/24/sp08/24.965

Schedule of Topics (subject to revision):

Instructors: M. Kenstowicz and D. Steriade
Fridays 9—12, 32-D461

Brief description:

This class discusses the analysis of opaque phonological processes, beginning with the latest proposal, John McCarthy’s OT-with-Candidate-Chains (OT-CC). The broad aim of the class is to reach a conclusion about the need for any unified approach to opacity within OT (as against a divide-and-conquer approach that deals separately with the different phenomena comprising the set of opaque structures); and to explore related issues about the origins and continued productivity of opaque systems.

Instructors: E.O. Aboh and M. DeGraff
Thursdays 9:30—12:30, 32-D461

Course description

In this class, we will study various aspects of Gungbe (a Gbe language of the Kwa family) and Haitian Creole. A question that one may want to ask immediately is why these two and not any other combination, say Gungbe versus Mandarin Chinese or Haitian Creole versus Mohawk?

One motivation for focusing on Gungbe and Haitian Creole is historical: Some of the creators of Haitian Creole were native speakers of Gbe languages (Ewe, Fon, Gun, etc.). Accordingly, we can naively think that certain properties of their native languages were transmitted, via “relexification,” into the new language variety—-the “Creole”—-they created in the colonial Caribbean. Yet, while Gbe and Haitian Creole appear to share certain general syntactic properties, close scrutiny reveals that they also display drastic and fascinating contrasts. Therefore comparing Haitian Creole to Gungbe is, in some sense, an exercise in relatively fine-grained comparative syntax where we try to elucidate the principles that govern variation across languages that are historically related and that exhibit a substantial inventory of morphosyntactic parallels.

This exercise is also relevant for understanding variation across certain language types. Gungbe and Haitian creole display certain core properties of isolating languages like Mandarin Chinese (e.g., “bare” noun, serial verb construction). But again, it appears under inspection that the languages differ radically in certain domains (e.g., DP). Therefore, one of the questions we are concerned with in this class is to what extent the similarities between Gungbe and Haitian Creole are due to the structural make-up of isolating languages and how the unraveling of this structural make-up will help understand the commonly assumed typological partition between isolating and non-isolating languages.

Provisional outline:

[From Andrew Nevins:]

In case you’ve always wanted to write papers with beautifully formatted trees, automatically numbered examples and footnotes, smooth IPA fonts without feeling guilty about supporting SIL, platform independent PC/Mac compatible, straight-to-PDF, free software that involves no fighting with animated paperclips but only pure logical function application, I’ll hold a 3 day tutorial on the basics of LaTeX Tuesday 1/22 through Thursday 1/24 in Boylston 303 at Harvard. All are welcome. If you could let me know in advance whether you are a Mac or PC user, I can send you some pointers to get LaTeX installed before you come. Bring your laptop if you want — but our primary focus will be on the syntax of LaTeX and how to do linguistics-specific things.

Mac: http://www.tug.org/mactex/
PC: http://miktex.org/2.7/Setup.aspx

A Brief Introduction to the Kinande Language and Kinande Linguistics

This IAP class (organized by Jessica Coon and Patrick Jones) will introduce basic elements of the morphology, syntax, and phonology of Kinande, a Bantu language spoken in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Over the course of the 3 day class, students will develop a basic understanding of how words and sentences are formed in the language, and will also be introduced to the body of work on Kinande currently extant within the linguistics literature.

Specifics linguistic topics will include: vowel harmony, vowel coalescence, tone, nominal and verbal morphology, the role of word-internal domains, agreement, clause structure, topicalization, and question formation.

Time: 2:00—4:00 PM on Jan 28, 29, 30.
Place: 8th floor conference room in the Linguistics and Philosophy Dept.

Food will be provided!

Reminder: The IAP statistics/R tutorial will take place this week M-F 11am-1pm in 32-D831. Contact Peter Graff (graff@mit.edu) for details.

We will be learning about probability theory and how to implement it in the R language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. No previous knowledge of Statistics is required. The tutorial will take place in daily 2 hour long sessions from the 21st until the 24th of January 2008.

(For details, stay tuned, or contact Peter Graff: graff@mit.edu)

Patrick Jones and Jessica Coon are planning a short introduction to Kinande for the last two weeks of IAP. The intro is primarily intended for students who will be taking Topics in a Less Familiar Language next semester, but is of course open to all. More details will follow.

6.911 Transcribing Prosodic Structure of Spoken Utterances with ToBI
Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel, Nanette Veilleux, Alejna Brugos
Tue, Thu, Jan 8, 10, 15, 17, 22, 24, 29, 31, 11am-01:00pm, 32-044

Training in the ToBI system (for ‘To’nes and ‘B’reak ‘I’ndices) to transcribe the prosodic structure of spoken utterances in American English. 8 sessions will combine new ToBI tutorial presentation with extensive practice and discussion; opportunities to practice labelling outside of class. Participants are encouraged to submit sample utterances of particular interest to them, for general discussion. Class is appropriate for undergrad or grad students with background in linguistics (phonology or phonetics), cognitive psychology (psycholinguistics), speech acoustics or music, who wish to learn about the prosody of speech, i.e. the intonation, rhythm, grouping and prominence patterns of spoken utterances, prosodic differences that signal meaning & phonetic implementation.

More info: Web page from 2006 version of the class