Whamit!

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

Time: Monday May 12, 5pm
Location: 32-D831

Claire Halpert: Overlap-Driven Consequences of Zulu Nasal Place Assimilation

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

Guillaume Thomas: An Analysis of the Xiamen Tone circle

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

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

Friday, May 9, 3:30 PM
32D-141

Junko Shimoyama
McGill University

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time: Monday 5 May, 5pm
Location: 32-D831

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

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

Adam Albright
Chaotic evolution in an unbiased learner

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

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

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

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

For more information about the MIT Linguistics Society, visit our website at http://web.mit.edu/mitlings.

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

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

Friday, May 2, 3:30 PM
32D-141

Jaye Padgett
University of California, Santa Cruz

Nathan Sanders
Williams College

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

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

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

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

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

Monday 4/28, 11.30AM
36-112

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

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

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

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

Speaker: Elena Benedicto
WHEN: May 1, 12:30-1:45
WHERE: 32-D461

Monday, April 28, 5-6pm
32D-831

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

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

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

Title: “Finding one’s meaning”.
When: Tuesday 4/22, at 4:30p.
Where: Room 46-5056 (fifth floor seminar room)

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

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

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

Dong-Whee Yang
Seoul National University
“Phase-internal Scrambling and Edge Feature Movement.”

WHEN: April 24, 12:30-1:45
WHERE: 32-D461

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

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

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

References

Bošković, Željko. 2007. On the locality and motivation of move and agree: an even more minimal theory. Linguistic Inquiry 38:589-644.
Chomsky, Noam. 2001. Derivation by phase. In Ken Hale: A Life in Language, ed. by M. Kenstowicz. 1-52. The MIT Press.
Chomsky, Noam. 2005. On phases. Ms., MIT.
Heck, Fabian and Gereon Müller. 2000. Successive cyclicity, long-distance superiority, and local optimization. WCCFL 19:218-231.
Preminger, Omer. 2007. Toxic syntax: yet another theory of syntactic movement. Ms., MIT.
Rizz, Luigi. 2004. On the form of chains: criterial positions and ECP effects. Ms.
Yang, Dong-Whee. 2008. On edge feature movement. Ms., MIT. (downloadable)

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

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

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

This week’s phonology circle presentation will be by Joan Mascaró
Title: A prosodic analysis of stress-dependent harmony
Time: Mon Apr 14 5pm, 32-D831

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

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

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

Abstract:

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

Friday, Apr. 18, 3:30 PM
32D-141

Henk van Riemsdijk
Tilburg University

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

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

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

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

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

This week’s installment of Phonology Circle features a talk by Peter Graff
Title: A Metric for Systemic Dispersion – Evidence from Artificial Grammar
Time: Mon Apr 7 5pm, 32-D831

In this talk I present the results of a 4-week-long artificial language study which was set up to investigate the deeper motivations of sound change. In the experiment 18 native speakers of English were asked to learn an Artificial language with an obstruent system exhibiting a 3-way VOT contrast {ph, p, b, th, t, d, kh, k, g}. Subjects were recorded weekly over a period of 3 weeks. After the third week, subjects were assigned to three groups, which were each taught a different “Dialect” of the artificial language; in the “Northern Dialect” voiced stops spirantized, in the “Southern Dialect” voiced stops nasalized, the third dialect acted as a control. After a week of training, subjects were recorded speaking their respective Dialects. Based measurements of closure duration and VOT of voiceless aspirated and voiceless unaspirated stops before and after treatment, I conclude that:

• Subjects independently created a new contrast for closure duration to alleviate the VOT spectrum.
• Subjects eliminated the new contrast when their VOT spectrum was alleviated by nasalization of voiced stops.
• Subjects adapted the new contrast when their VOT spectrum was partially alleviated by spirantization of voiced stops.

I will provide an analysis of the different types of systemic adaptation utilizing conjoined MINDIST constraints in the spirit of Flemming (1995) and conclude that the complex computation of contrast warrants the postulation of a system-wide Dispersion requirement, which I will formalize as a Sysdist constraint. This approach is in line with more recent proposals of weighted cumulative markedness metrics (e.g. Coon and Gallagher, 2007).

Friday, Apr. 11, 3:30 PM
32D-141

Adamantios Gafos
New York University

“On the temporal organization of phonological form”

Are phonological atoms static or dynamic (with internal temporal structure)? The talk will address this question in three parts. The first, theoretical part focuses on the notion of ‘dynamic’ unit and highlights its differences from precursor static notions. The second part is devoted to experimental work aimed at the temporal organization of phonological form. In the final part, on prospects & modeling, I present ongoing computational work establishing a link between theory and experimental data.

Phonology Circle returns this week with a presentation will be by Gillian Gallagher
Title: Identity and laryngeal phonotactics
Time: Mon Mar 31, 5pm, 32-D831

In this talk, I look at phonotactic restrictions on the cooccurrence of laryngeal features (aspiration, ejection and implosion). Many languages disallow roots or words with two distinct consonants with the same laryngeal feature, *k’-t’. Some languages with this restriction also disallow identical consonants with the same laryngeal feature *k’-k’, while other languages allow identical consonants, k’-k’. I show that the (un)grammaticality of identical consonants sharing a laryngeal feature (k’-k’) correlates with the (un)grammaticality of consonants differing only in that laryngeal feature (k’-k). In all the languages in MacEachern’s (1999) survey, one of these forms is ungrammatical and one grammatical. The trading relationship is shown in (1).

1. k’-k’ <—> *k’-k
   *k’-k’ <—> k’-k

I argue that the pattern in (1) results from the interaction of phonotactic constraints with *two* kinds of laryngeal faithfulness constraints: faithfulness to individual features (standard Ident[F] constraints) and faithfulness to word level laryngeal contrasts (this is a new idea).

There will be no Ling-Lunch this week.

This week’s Phonology Circle presentation will be by Nabila Louriz
Title: He Loves Me… He Loves Me Not: Irregularities in nasal vowel adaptation in Moroccan Arabic
Time: Mon Mar 17, 5pm, 32-D831

The aim of this talk is to analyse the repair strategies of nasal vowels in French loanwords in Moroccan Arabic. The claim has been that in languages that lack phonemic nasal vowels, the latter is repaired as a sequence of oral vowel + nasal consonant (VN, henceforth). That is the nasal vowel undergoes the process of “unpacking” and is adapted as VN (Paradis & Lacharite 1996, Paradis and Prunet 2000, Rose 1999, to name but a few). Paradis and Lacharite (1996) introduce evidence from French loans in Fula, Kinyarwanda, and Moroccan Arabic to show that the nasal vowel is “universally” adapted as a sequence of VN as long as the requirement of the Theory of Constraints and Repair Strategies (1986) (TCRS, hereafter) are met, namely the Threshold Principle. Subsequently, Rose (1999) introduced a structural account of Root node deletion/preservation to explain nasal adaptation, presenting evidence from Fula and Kenyarwanda. He basically claims that the nasal part of the nasal vowel (which is the result of unpacking) is preserved when there is an available licenser, and deleted only when there is none. I will bring these two approaches together to account for the adaptation of nasal vowels in French loanwords in Moroccan Arabic. The latter does not seem to adopt one strategy to “fix” the ill formed segments. Consider the following examples:

MA	French	Gloss
gufəl	Gonfler	Swell
klakson	klaxon	Horn
kwansa	coincer	To block
zbiktur	inspecteur	Inspector
kofra	Coup-franc	Out-of-boards
Fran	frein	Brake

It seems that there is no uniform for adapting nasal vowels in Moroccan Arabic. It is repaired is as (i) VN , (ii) V (iii) or deleted altogether. Maybe that is what drives some researcher to blame it on “complicating analogical factors” (Paradis & Prunet, 2000), or morphological factors (Heath, 1989). I shall present an analysis that cam account for the different strategies manifested in the examples above, namely, one that incorporates both phonology and phonetics. I will discuss how phonology and phonetics interact in accounting for the asymmetry manifested in the loanwords data.

This week marks the return of the Syntax-Semantics reading group, featuring a double-header, with talks on both Monday and Wednesday. To stay on top of announcements concerning titles, times, and locations, check out the website

MONDAY March 17, 11:30am-1pm, 36-112
Ezra Keshet will give a a short poster presentation on situation variables (click for abstract) as well as a talk about his recent work.

Speaker: Steve Piantadosi
Affiliation: TedLab
Time: 3/18/08 at 12PM
Room: 46-3310
Lunch: Beauty’s Pizza
Title: A Bayesian model of compositional semantics acquisition

We present an unsupervised, cross-situational Bayesian learning model for the acquisition of compositional semantics. We show that the model acquires the correct grammar for a toy version of English using a psychologically-plausible amount of data, over a wide range of possible learning environments. By assuming that speakers typically produce sentences which are true in the world, the model learns the semantic representation of content and function words, using only positive evidence in the form of sentences and world contexts. We argue that the model can adequately solve both the problem of referential uncertainty and the subset problem in this domain, and show that the model makes mistakes analogous to those made by children.

E. O. Aboh
University of Amsterdam/MIT
“Multiple copies and parallel chains”

WHEN: March 20, 12:30-1:45
WHERE: 32-D461

Abstract:

This paper discusses predicate fronting with doubling cross-linguistically and demonstrates that it is an instance of parallel chains in the sense of Chomsky (2005). Under this analysis, what superficially looks like a spell out of multiple copies within a single uniform chain turns out to be the expression of two simultaneous chains of which the heads only are spelled out. The analysis extends to subject intrusion in Dutch, as discussed in Barbiers and van Koppen (2006), and to auxiliary doubling in English child language.

The Syntax-Semantics Reading Group will meet for the first time this semester on Monday 3/17 at 11.30AM in 36-112 for a talk by Ezra Keshet. In the same week, Andreas Haida (ZAS, Berlin) will give a talk on Wednesday (details TBA). An incomplete schedule for the rest of the semester can be found here. If you would like to give a talk or suggest a reading, please contact Jeremy, Luka or Tue.

Phonology circle this week will feature a presentation by Patrick Jones.
Title: “Accounting for Falling Tones in Kinande Infinitive Verbs”
Time: 5pm, 32-D831

In this talk, I will propose a novel analysis of Kinande infinitive tone that explains why (a) most infinitives receive penultimate high tones at the end of an utterance (/eri-hum-a/ → [erihúma] ‘to hit’), but some (passives, causatives, and forms with CV/VC roots) receive final falling tones (/eri-so-a/ → [eriswâ] ‘to grind’); and (b) H-toned consonant-initial roots surface with a high tone on the first vowel before the root (erítâ ‘to bury’), while H-toned vowel-initial roots surface with a falling tone on the first vowel of the root (eryôtâ ‘to bask’).

The principal elements of the analysis will be:

1. Phrasal Tone Assignment (PTA) results from the interaction of
   • a) constraints on tonal alignment
   • b) constraints against effortful pitch movements
2. Lexical Tone Assignment (LTA) results from the interaction of
   • a) faithfulness to underlying H and L pitch targets
   • b) constraints against effortful pitch movements
3. Verbal roots commonly referred to as “H-toned” are better analyzed as roots containing an underlying pitch accent that falls from H to L.
4. Both PTA and LTA make crucial reference a phonologically-defined Stem (the P-Stem) that is distinct from the morphologically-defined Stem (the M-Stem). The P-stem will be shown to be independently required in order to account for reduplication facts and alternations involving the purposive suffix –irir.

Roumyana Pancheva
USC

“One -er, (sort of) two thans”

Friday
March 14th, 2008, 3:30pm

Room 32-141

There will be a party in Roumi’s honor beginning at 6:30pm at Sabine’s place.

Abstract:

The syntax of comparatives shows a fair amount of variability cross-linguistically, but there are also patterns that call for an explanation. A number of languages have phrasal comparatives like the English ‘Mary is taller than me’. The syntactic behavior of the nominal following ‘than’ appears to support a direct analysis of these comparatives, with a degree operator ‘-er’ selecting an individual-denoting PP argument. Such an analysis, however, comes at a cost. The phrasal ‘-er’ has to be different from the ‘-er’ in clausal comparatives (‘Mary is taller than I am’), but languages do not seem to distinguish morphologically between two ‘-ers’. ‘Than’ is required to be semantically empty, yet its counterparts are commonly drawn from among certain spatial prepositions. In this talk, I suggest that the lexical inventory of comparative operators is limited to a single ‘-er’, whose arguments are predicates of degrees. ‘Than’ and its counterparts are partitive prepositions. Like partitive ‘of’ (‘a liter of the water’) and pseudo-partitive ‘of’ (‘a liter of water’), ‘than’ may have a definite description of degrees or a predicate of degrees as a complement. Clausal comparatives may instantiate both partitive types, depending on the nature of the ‘wh-’ degree operator in the ‘than’-clause. Phrasal comparatives may be derived from clauses that lack the CP layer and the ‘wh-’ degree operator residing there; consequently, such small clauses are interpreted as predicates of degrees, complements to pseudo-partitive ‘than’. Ultimately, the syntax of comparatives turns out to be rather tightly constrained, and to show cross-domain parallels.

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

Conor Quinn
“Applicative and antipassive: Algonquian transitive “stem-agreement” as differential object marking”

WHEN: March 13, 12:30-1:45
WHERE: 32-D461

This week’s phonology circle presentation will be by David Hill

Title: Matching minimalities: quantitative correspondence in Ancient Greek textsetting
Monday 5pm, 32-D831

This preliminary talk has three main ingredients: a new empirical finding, an observation, and a simple analytical concept. The finding is that in Ancient Greek vocal music, the mapping between syllable rime type and musical quantity (the number of grid positions occupied), already known to be tight, is too fine-grained to be captured by a binary L/H weight contrast, or even by a skeletal classification of rime structure (V, VC, VV, VVC), since not all VC rimes behave alike.

The observation, surprising at first, is that the meter of Greek song is demonstrably quantity-insensitive. Its currency is an abstract prominence alternation, which does not map directly to syllable weight. Quantity sensitivity emerges from the way that text, meter and time grid inter-correspond. The existence of a class of songs defined by a tempo specification—half time—from which L syllables are categorically barred, but which are nevertheless completely normal metrically and in text-to-time grid alignment, confirms that Greek song meters do not care about the weight of the rimes they align with. The fine-grained mapping mentioned above is therefore primarily a text-to-time grid phenomenon.

I use these phenomena to explore the viability of a notion of “(non-)minimality correspondence.” The rough idea is that there is a cross-modal notion of minimality defined in some domains, and that objects in those domains that correspond with each other are required to both be minimal or both be non-minimal according to the appropriate definition. I apply this notion to quantity in textsetting, using a cardinal definition of minimality for meter and the time grid and structural definitions of minimality in rimes and segments.

Friday, Mar. 7, 3:30 PM
32D-141

Bart Geurts
Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen

Piggyback Pronouns

Dynamic theories of discourse interpretation seek to describe and explain antecedent-anaphor relations with the help of discourse referents. In a dynamic framework, it is the function of indefinite expressions to introduce new discourse referents, whilst anaphoric expressions serve to reintroduce them. This approach has proved to be as fruitful as it is intuitive, but it is not without its problems. One of the main worries has been to account for what I call “piggyback anaphora” (examples by Karttunen):

(1) You must write a letter to your parents. It has to be sent by email.
(2) Harvey courts a girl at every convention. She always comes to the banquet with him.

The characteristic feature of this type of anaphora is that, intuitively speaking, the anaphoric link is enabled by the fact that the anaphor sits in the scope of an expression that quantifies over the same range of entities as the expression whose scope contains the intended antecedent. This is the guiding intuition underlying most accounts of the phenomenon, but although I agree that this is the right way to go, I also believe that these accounts are systematically flawed. The key to the problem, I argue, is that the anaphors in (1) and (2) also rely on bridging inferences. A theory based on this assumption is a great deal simpler than all of its predecessors, but it also raises issues that go to the heart of dynamic semantics.

Martin Hackl will visit MIT on Monday and Tuesday, March 3 - 4.

Please plan to come to his talk:

Monday, March 3, 3 - 4:30pm
32-D461
“Quantifiers in Object Position”

Abstract:

Quantifiers play a central role in syntax and semantics because they raise fundamental questions about the expressive power and the combinatorial processes found in natural language. A good portion of these questions are due to the fact that quantifiers don’t refer, yet they seem to combine freely (just like referring DPs) with expressions that describe n-place relations between individuals.

This talk compares three classes of approaches to this puzzle in terms of their implications for real time processing of quantifiers in extensional and intensional environments. I will argue, based on evidence from a series of sentence processing studies, for the view that quantifiers and referring expressions have different combinatorial properties and that the grammar employs syntactic mechanisms (e.g. Quantifier Raising) to maintain distributional uniformity of all DPs at surface structure rather than purely semantic mechanisms (e.g. Type-shifting).

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

Sverre Johnsen
“Binding in complements of perception verbs”

WHEN: March 6, 12:30-1:45
WHERE: 32-D461

ABSTRACT:

Norwegian is one of the most discussed languages in the literature on reflexive binding, with its system of simple and complex reflexives seg vs. seg sjøl. This talk will present new Norwegian data showing not only a previously unknown pattern in Norwegian for long-distance binding of seg, but also a generalization for long-distance binding that has not been reported in any language before. The data will reveal that the reflexive seg is exceptionally allowed in complement clauses only if the clause is the complement of a perception verb.

Across languages, perception verbs exhibit a special behavior in a different domain, namely in terms of tense dependency. In languages without the phenomenon known as sequence of tense, a past tense in the complement clause of another past tense verb only allows a past-shifted reading. This is the case in Russian and Hebrew. In the complement clause of a perception verb, on the other hand, a past tense has a preferred simultaneous reading, meaning that its temporal interpretation fully depends on the tense of the matrix verb. In languages where ‘sequence of tense’ generally exists, such as English and Norwegian, the tense in complements of perception verbs still behaves differently from other complements in that it shows a greater dependency on the matrix clause tense.

I will adopt the common view of tense dependency as being caused by structural syntactic binding of tense (Enç 1987). With the analysis of reflexive binding within the minimalist framework developed in several papers by Reuland, I will show that interclausal reflexive binding can be a natural fall-out of interclausal tense dependency.

This week’s BCS colloquium speaker will be Jesse Snedeker (Harvard University)

Title: “Starting Over: International Adoption as a Natural Experiment in Language Acquisition”
Time and location: Fri 2/29 4:00 PM, 46-3002

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

Edward Garrett (Eastern Michigan University) and Leah Bateman (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
“Impersonal Subjects Have No Taste”

WHEN: Feb 28, 12:30
WHERE: 32-D461

Abstract in pdf

Friday, Feb. 29, 3:30 PM
32D-141

Paul Boersma
University of Amsterdam

“Emergent ranking of faithfulness explains markedness and licensing by cue.”

I show computer simulations of an Optimality-Theoretic learner who starts out with a constraint set without any bias towards the natural; that is, the set itself has no preference (e.g. it has *Onset, *Coda, Onset, and Coda), and the initial ranking of every constraint is the same. The language environment of this learner, however, does have some biases: there are frequency biases (e.g. final coronals are more frequent than final labials) as well as transmission biases (e.g. the value of the feature [place] is harder to hear for nasals than for plosives). The simulations (assuming a parallel three-level model of phonology and phonetics) show that when the learner listens to this language environment, she will automatically come to rank her (place) faithfulness constraints according to both frequency (higher for labials than for coronals) and cue reliability (higher for plosives than for nasals). When subsequently using these rankings in her own productions, she will automatically exhibit phenomena traditionally ascribed to “markedness” and to “licensing by cue”.

This week’s Phonology Circle presentation will be by Sasha Makarova (Harvard University)
Feb 25, 5pm, 32-D831

Our fourth candidate in the syntax-semantics search, Alexander Williams, will be here on Monday and Tuesday Feb. 25 — 26.

Please come to his talk:

Monday, Feb. 25, 3 - 4:30pm
32-D461
“Basics in complex causatives”

Abstract:

In the standard semantics for resultatives (like `pound it flat’), the object enters thematic relations only to the two constituent predicates. But grammatical evidence from a number of languages, Mandarin in particular, shows that this is wrong. Rather, both the object and the subject bear relations to the event of change described by the whole verb phrase, independently of any others they might enter. The arguments which demonstrate this clarify the analysis of natural language causatives, contra several recent discussions (e.g.Rothstein 2004). They also have broader consequences for our understanding of the relation between lexical predicates and the concepts they signify. I briefly oppose these to the different conclusions in Kratzer 2003.

Our next job talk will be by Thomas McFadden. Tom will be at MIT this Thursday and Friday, Feb 21 - 22. His talk is scheduled in the Ling lunch slot:

“DPs aren’t licensed, they’re selected (or not)”
Thursday, Feb 21, 12:30 - 2pm
32-D461

Please note the different time of day from our other job talks!

The sign-up sheet for appointments with Tom is up in the usual place, on the faculty mailroom door.

The Phonology Circle will be meeting at 5—6 Mondays in 32D-831 again this semester. We will have our first meeting this Monday 11 Feb to plan the schedule for the term. If you cannot attend but would like to reserve a date, please contact Michael Kenstowicz (kenstow AT …)

[from Michael Kenstowicz]

Below is the spring schedule for the MIT Linguistics Colloquium:

February 15 - Klaus Abels, University of Tromso
February 29 - Paul Boersma, University of Amsterdam
March 7 - Bart Geurts, University of Nijmegen
March 14 - Roumyana Pancheva, University of Southern California
April 11 - Adamantios Gafos, New York University
April 18 - Henk van Riemsdijk, Tilburg University
May 2 - Jaye Padgett, UC Santa Cruz
May 9 - Junko Shimoyama, McGill University

The talks will take place on the aforementioned Fridays, at 3:30pm, in room 32-141, unless a specific change is announced.

[From the colloquium co-organizers, Jonah Katz and Omer Preminger]

Doris Penka
Monday, 2/11, 3pm, 32D-461
“A cross-linguistically unified analysis of negative indefinites”

Abstract: Negative indefinites (English ‘nobody’,’nothing’ etc. and their counterparts in other languages) have been discussed controversially in languages that exhibit negative concord, i.e. where two or more morphologically negative elements contribute only one negation to the semantics. In this talk, I will bring negative concord together with two other phenomena that negative indefinites give rise to, namely scope splitting in German and distributional restrictions in the Scandinavian languages. Taken together, the discussed phenomena suggest that negative indefinites should not be analysed as negative quantifiers. Rather, negative indefinites are morpho-syntactic markers of sentential negation. I present a cross-linguistically unified analysis of negative indefinites and show how the three phenomena discussed follow from it. This analysis is based on the assumption that negative indefinites are semantically non-negative and must be licensed by a (possibly abstract) negation. It is proposed that negative indefinites cross-linguistically are of essentially the same nature and that differences between languages regarding their behaviour are due to parametric variation.

Klaus Abels
University of Tromso

“On Improper Movement”

Friday
February 15th, 2008, 3:30pm

Room 32-141

There will be a party in Klaus’ honor beginnning at 6:30pm at Pritty and Patrick’s place.

Abstract:

In this talk I propose to take a fresh look at the phenomenon of improper movement. How does (im)propriety of movement interact with remnant movement? How — with extraction from movement elements, i.e., with exceptions to the freezing principle? How — with a more articulated typology of movement relations than GB’s A/A’-distinction? On the basis of data largely from German and English, I reach the tentative conclusion that movement types must be ordered linearly.

If true, this gives rise to a more integrated and restrictive theory of movement than is currently available. I discuss one case, cross serial dependencies, where this restrictiveness is immediately apparent.

Mark your calendar to come and join us this Thursday for a Ling-lunch talk by:

Omer Preminger (MIT)
“Basque Ling-Lunch Redux.”

WHEN: Feb 14, 12:30
WHERE: 32-D461

ABSTRACT:

Part II of the Basque Ling-Lunch series will begin with a recap of Episode One - attendance of previous talk will not be assumed! - where it was shown that apparent cases of Long-Distance Agreement (LDA) in dialectal Basque do not in fact constitute a case of true LDA (construed as agreement that spans across the boundaries of established locality domains). I provide evidence that the cases in question fall into one of two categories: either (i) the apparent LDA relation is comprised of two separate agreement relations, “stacked” on top of one another, each of which is perfectly well-behaved with respect to the relevant locality restrictions; or (ii) the agreement relation in question spans the boundaries of neither DP nor CP, and is thus typologically unexceptional.

In this brand new episode, I turn to the distinction between Agree (conceived of as a relation between a probing head and a goal) and clitic-doubling (conceived of as the generating of a clitic which is matched in phi-features with a full argument DP). Certain asymmetries in the reach of so-called LDA when targeting dative noun-phrases and targeting absolutive ones suggest that absolutive agreement is an instance of Agree proper, whereas the dative (and ergative) exponents on the auxiliary are the result of clitic-doubling. In the climactic finale, I present an independent diagnostic for distinguishing Agree from clitic-doubling: when so-called LDA fails to obtain, the agreement-bearing form of the auxiliary is obviously ruled out; the question is whether what shows up is default agreement on the corresponding exponent, or rather an auxiliary form that lacks the relevant exponent altogether. I show that precisely in those relations hypothesized here to be Agree relations, failure of the relation results in default agreement-whereas in those relations hypothesized here to be clitic-doubling, failure results in the wholesale absence of the relevant exponent.

Ling Lunch Schedule
Spring Semester 2008

February
7. Joan Mascaró
14. Omer Preminger
21. Thomas McFadden (job talk)
28. Edward Garrett

March
6. Sverre Johnsen
13. Conor Quinn
20. Enoch Aboh

April
3. TBA (cancellation: open date)
10. Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin
17. Bob Ladd
24. Dong-Whee Yang

May
1. Elena Benedicto
8. Alya Asarina & Kirill Shklovsky
15. Nabila Louriz

Roger Levy, UCSD Assistant Professor, PhD from Stanford linguistics (2006), is the second BCS cognitive candidate. He studies syntactic processing. All are welcome.

SPECIAL SEMINAR

ROGER LEVY, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Linguistics
University of California, San Diego
La Jolla, California

“Probabilistic Knowledge in Human Language Comprehension and Production”

Monday, February 4
NOON
46-3015

[Thanks to Ted Gibson]

Here are the five job talks for our open syntax/semantics position:

• Feb 6: Keir Moulton
• Feb 11: Doris Penka
• Feb 21: Thomas McFadden
• Feb 25: Alexander Williams
• Mar 3: Martin Hackl

The first of these is this Wednesday at 3:00pm:

Keir Moulton: “Introducing Clausal Complements”
Wed Feb 6, 3pm, 32-D461

[Ben and Patrick write:]

We are currently working out the Spring 2008 schedule for the LF Reading Group. One possible option for a permanent slot (which we would strongly favor) seems to be to maintain last semester’s Monday 11:30am-1pm. Alternatives would be Wednesday afternoon (on days where there is no faculty meeting etc.), or slots after 5PM.

If you are interested in attending the LF Reading Group, please could you let us know by Friday (Feb.8) whether Monday 11:30am-1pm will not work for you?

Joan Mascaró Altimiras
“Phonologically (and syntactically and lexically) conditioned allomorphy.”

WHEN: Feb 7, 12:30-1:45
WHERE: 32-D461

Abstract is below.

The schedule of talks for the rest of the semester will be posted later this week at: http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/www/linglunch/

Hope to see you there!

Your ling-lunch organizers, Jen & Jessica

ABSTRACT:

Phonologically conditioned allomorphy has been analyzed as an instance of The Emergence of The Unmarked (TETU). Allomorphs are listed in the lexicon with no contextual subcategorization, and the phonology chooses the allomorphs that yield a less marked structure, depending on the context in which they appear. I will analyze two specially difficult cases of phonologically conditioned allomorphy, Haitian definite suffix selection and Northeastern Central Catalan s-deletion.

In the first case allomorph selection seems to be governed by unnatural phonological conditions: the allomorph la appears after consonants, as in liv-la ‘book-the’, and the allomorph a appears after vowels, as in papa-a ‘father-the’. I will show that once we allow partial ordering allomorphs in the lexicon (ordering reflecting relative markedness), natural alignment conditions derive the right results.

The second case regards s-deletion. Here “deletion” is subject two three heterogenous conditions: a phonological condition (s must be final in a complex coda and followed by a consonant), a lexical condition (s must be the plural morph), and a syntactic condition (the lexical element ending in s must be prenominal). Thus in bon-s vin-s blanc-s franceso-s ‘good-pl wine-pl white-pl French-pl’, the plural marker in prenominal bon-s doesn’t appear, but plural markers in postnominal vin-s and blanc-s show up. Assume N is final within the DP and raising causes agreement with elements appearing to its right, but agreement with the rest takes place at PF. This forces postnominal agreement but leaves prenominal agreement subject to PF conditions. The bare root bon will be preferred to the number-inflected bon-s because it doesn’t violate the marked structure CsC even if it violates (PF) Concord. Other cases of prenominal-postnominal asymmetry will be briefly discussed.

We will continue this term in the Ling-lunch tradition. We will meet every Thursday from 12:30 to 1:45 pm in room 32-461. And, of course, we are looking for speakers for this term. As you may know, Ling-lunch is a perfect space for presenting work in progress and practicing conference talks. You can also present more developed papers, of course.

Please contact Jen (jenmich AT …), if you want to present something.

Phonology Circle
date: 15 Jan
time: 4 PM
location: 32D-831
presenter: Donca Steriade
title: Metrical Evidence for an Interlude Theory of Weight [pdf abstract]

Thursday, 17 January, 2-4pm, in 32-D461

Raj Singh: “On the proviso problem for presuppositions” (practice job talk)