Whamit!

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

The syntax-semantics reading group is meeting on Monday at 11:30am in room 32-D461. Micha Breakstone will talk about Measure Phrase licensing and Evaluativity using Vector Space Semantics.

Nobuko Hasegawa of Kanda U of Int’l Studies will guest lecture in the East Asian Linguistics Seminar this week: Tuesday, November 24, @ Harvard, Boylston 303, 11AM (not 10AM) - 1PM. (Note also that Mamoru Saito will guest lecture Tuesday, December 1, @MIT, 66-156, 10 AM (not 11AM) - 1PM.

“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

Please join us for Ling-lunch this week:

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!

Please join us for Ling-lunch this week:

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.)

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)

Please join us for Ling-lunch this week:

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

Join us for this week’s Ling-lunch talk:

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.

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:

Join us for this week’s Ling-lunch talk:

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

Shigeru Miyagawa is giving a Richauer Institute talk at Harvard, Friday, October 23, 4-5:30

“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.

Join us for this week’s Ling-lunch talk:

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.

Join us for this week’s Ling-lunch talk:

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

Title: TBA

Speaker: Jim McCloskey (UC Santa Cruz)
Title: Further Reflections on Movement and Resumption
Time: Friday, October 9, 2009, 3:30pm
Place: 32-141

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

Join us for this week’s Ling-lunch talk:

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.

The Syntax-Semantics Reading Group is meeting for two special sessions on Monday, September 21, to hear practice talks for Sinn und Bedeutung:

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.

Join us for this week’s Ling-Lunch talk:

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.

Please join us for a special session of the syntax-semantics reading group on Friday, 9/25.

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.

Speaker: Martina Wiltschko (University of British Columbia)
Title: The composition of INFL: An exploration of tense, tenseless languages and tenseless constructions.
Time: Friday, September 25, 2009, 3:30pm
Place: 32-141

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 will not meet this week, but will meet every Monday for the remainder of the semester. Here is the tentative schedule of presentations:

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.

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).

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.

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

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

With the beginning of the new semester, the Syntax-Semantics Reading Group gears up again.

• 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!

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.

Time: Monday 5/11, 5pm
Location: 32-D831
Speaker: Jelena Krivokapić (Yale University)
Title: The production and perception of prosodic structure

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.

Speaker: Carlo Semenza (Department of Neuroscience, University of Padova)
Title: Neuropsychology of nominal classes
Time: Thursday, May 14, 2009, 11:00 AM
Location: 46-3189

Speaker: Kirill Shklovsky
Title: Syntactically-Conditioned Phonology: The Case of Tseltal Vowel Hiatus Resolution
Time: Thurs 5/14, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speaker: Verner Egerland (Lund University)
Title: Tense in Gerunds
Time: Thurs 5/7, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461

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

1. I spent the afternoon sleeping on the couch.

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

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

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

Speaker: Sharon Rose (UCSD)
Title: Tone Distribution and Affix Order in Moro
Time: Friday, May 8th, 2009, 3.30pm-5pm
Place: 32-155 Please note special place

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

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

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

Speaker: Philippe Schlenker (Institut Jean-Nicod and NYU)
Time: Friday, May 1st 2009, 3.30pm-5pm
Place: 32-141
Title: Local Contexts: Problems and Extensions

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

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

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

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

Time: Monday 4/27, 5pm
Location: 32-D831
Speaker: Eulàlia Bonet
Title: Stem extensions in Catalan encliticized imperatives

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

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

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

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

TIME: Wed 4/22 3:00pm
PLACE: 34-303
TITLE: “Presuppositions of the gender features of anaphoric pronouns”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speaker: Omer Preminger
Title: Failure to Agree is Not a Failure: phi-agreement and (un)grammaticality
Time: Thurs 4/23, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speaker: Paul Kiparsky (Stanford University)
Title: Words and Paradigms
Time: Monday 4/13, 4pm
Location: Harvard Hall 202 (2nd floor)

Speaker: Guillaume Thomas
Title: Incremental comparatives
Time: Thurs 4/16, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461

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

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

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

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

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

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

Date: 4/17/09
Time: 2.30pm-4pm
Place: 32-141 (the usual)
Speaker: Hedde Zeijlstra (University of Amsterdam)
Title: On the origin of Berbice Dutch VO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speaker: Shigeru Miyagawa
Title: Distinguishing A- and A’-movements Without Reference to Case
Time: Thurs 4/9, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461

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

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

Speaker: Jeroen van Craenenbroeck (KU Brussels)
Title: Ellipsis and accommodation: the (morphological) case of sluicing
Time: Friday, April 3, 2009, 3:30pm
Place: 32-141

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

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

4/6 Diana Apoussidou
4/13 Bronwyn Bjorkman
4/20 Patriots Day
4/27 Eulàlia Bonet
5/4 Peter Graff
5/11 Jelena Krivokapić

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

Speaker: Maria Giavazzi
Title: Output driven morpho-phonological alternations in the adjectival paradigm? Preliminary results from a study with French Huntington Disease patients.
Time: Mon 3/16, 5pm
Location: 32-D831

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

Speaker: Patrick Grosz
Title: “Movement and Agreement in Right-Node Raising Constructions”
Time: Thurs 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461

Speaker: Anna Szabolcsi (NYU)
Title: Raising Verbs as Quantifiers
Time: Friday, Mar 20, 3:30-5:00pm
Place: 32-141

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

Consider the following two scenarios:

“HI scenario”
Who is getting good roles before April? Mary: no; Susan: no; Eva: yes
after April? Mary: yes; Susan: no; Eva: yes

“LO scenario”
Who is getting good roles before April? Mary: yes/no; Susan: no; Eva: yes
after April? Mary: yes; Susan: no; Eva: no

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

In April only Mary began to get good roles.

HI: ‘only Mary went from not getting good roles to getting them’
LO: ‘it began to be the case that only Mary is getting good roles’

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

Kusumoto 2005, On the quantification over times in natural language. Natural language Semantics 13: 317-357.
Lechner 2007, Interpretive effects of head movement. http://ling.auf.net/lingBuzz/000178
Schlenker 2006, Ontological symmetry in language: A brief manifesto. Mind and Language 21: 504-539
Szabolcsi 2009, Overt nominative subjects in infinitival complements in Hungarian. To appear in den Dikken & Vago, eds. http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/jBkM2QxZ/

Speaker: Herbert H. Clark (Stanford University)
Title: Rational Ways of Using Language
Time: Fri 3/20 4:00 PM, Singleton Auditorium, 46-3002

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

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

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

Speaker: Asaf Bachrach
Title: Syntactic Sharing and Semantic Interpretation
Time: 5:30-7pm, 32-D831

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

(Work in progress with Roni Katzir)

Guillaume Thomas will give a talk titled “Against the use of counterpart functions in the analysis of proxy counterfactuals” on Wednesday at 3:00 PM in room 34-303. We hope to see you there! More information, including a tentative schedule for the semester, can be found on the LF Reading Group’s webpage.

Speaker: Lisa Travis (McGill University)
Time: Friday, March 6th, 2009, 3:30pm
Place: 32-141

The Malagasy cleft: what and why

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

Rasoa no mividy ny vary
Rasoa no pres.at.buy det rice
‘It is Rasoa who buys the rice.’

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

(i) the nature of the [no XP] (clause or DP?),
(ii) the nature of no (Det, Focus head, or Comp?), and
(iii) the relation between the pre-no constituent and the following material (movement, predication, or something else?).

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

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

References
Keenan, Edward L. 1976. Remarkable Subjects in Malagasy. In Subject and Topic, ed. Charles Li, 249-301. New York: Academic Press.
Law, Paul. 2005. Questions and clefts in Malagasy. In Proceedings of Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association, eds. Jeffrey Heinz and Dimitris Ntelitheos, 195-209. UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics.
Paul, Ileana. 2001. Concealed pseudo-clefts. Lingua 111:707-727.
Pearson, Matt. 2006. What’s No? Clause linking in Malagasy. San Diego: Workshop on Comparative Austronesian Syntax.
Potsdam, Eric. 2004. Wh-questions in Malagasy. In Proceedings of the 11th Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association ed. Paul Law, 244-258. ZAS Working Papers in Linguistics.
Travis, Lisa deMena. 2005. VP, D0 movement languages. In Negation, Tense and Clausal Architecture: Cross-linguistic Investigations, eds. Raffaella Zanuttini, Héctor Campos, Elena Herburger and Paul Portner. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Travis, Lisa deMena. 2006. Voice Morphology in Malagasy as Clitic Left Dislocation or Malagasy in Wonderland: through the looking glass. In Clause structure and adjuncts in Austronesian languages, eds. Hans-Martin Gärtner, Paul Law and Joachim Sabel, 281-318. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

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

3/2 [open]
3/9 [open]
3/16 Maria Giavazzi
3/23 Spring Break
3/30 [open]
4/6 Diana Apoussidou
4/13 Bronwyn Bjorkman
4/20 Patriots Day
4/27 Eulàlia Bonet
5/4 Peter Graff
5/11 Jelena Krivokapić

Speaker: Alistair Knott
Title: “A sensorimotor interpretation of Minimalist syntax”
Time: Thurs 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461
Abstract: in PDF format

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

Speaker: T. Florian Jaeger (University of Rochester)
Title: Efficient Language Production?
Time: Friday, February 27th, 2009, 3:30pm
Place: 32-141

Abstract:

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

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

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

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

Speaker: Michael C. Frank (MIT)
Title: Early Word Learning Through Communicative Inference
Time: Thurs 2/19, 10am
Location: 46-3189

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

Speaker: Tara McAllister
Title: Articulatory and Perceptual Factors in a Child-Specific Error Process
Time: Tues 2/17, 5pm
Location: 32-D831

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

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

Title: “Movement goals and feedback and feedforward mechanisms in speech production.
Time: Thurs 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461

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

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

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

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

January 30th, 4:00pm
Boylston Hall 104
Elisabeth Selkirk, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
“Spelling out syntactic constituents as prosodic domains: match constraints and the syntax-prosodic structure interface”

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

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

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

“Symmetric and Interacting Alternatives for Implicature and Accommodation.”

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

Speaker: Michael C. Frank (Graduate Student, Gibson Lab)
Title: Numerical cognition in the absence (or temporary unavailability) of language for number
Time: Tues 12/9 Noon, 46-3310

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

Title: The Ranking Problem in Optimality Theory
Time: Wed 12/10, 5pm, 32-D831

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

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

Title: Why Agree? Why Move? Unifying Agreement-based and Discourse-configurational Languages
Time: December 2nd, Tuesday
Location: Boylston Hall Room 303; 6 p.m.

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

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

Title: Learning to Model Text Structure
Speaker: Regina Barzilay, CSAIL
When: Wednesday Dec 3, 3-4:30pm
Where: 26-310

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

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

This is joint work with Mirella Lapata and Lillian Lee.

Phonology circle this week features a presentation by Jen Michaels.

Title: Summing Up Constraint Interaction: Chain Shifts in a Split Additive Model
Time: Wed 12/3, 5pm, 32-D831

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

Peter Graff
“The Culture-Phonology Interface: Implications of Laboratory Sociophonetics for Phonological Theory”
Thursday, Dec. 4
12:30-1:45
Room 32-D461

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

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

Speaker: Leston Buell (Leiden University Centre for Linguistics)
Title: Purpose WHY in vP, reason WHY in CP: evidence from Zulu

Time: Friday, December 5th, 2008, 3:30pm
Place: Room 32-141

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

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

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

Title: Clefts, Inverse Copulas, and Passives: Understanding Their Delayed Acquisition as Phasal Difficulties
Time: Tuesday, November 18th, 6 p.m. Boylston Hall Room 303

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

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

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

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

Vanja de Lint
“Argument Structure in Classifier Constructions in ASL”

Thursday, Nov. 20
12:30-1:45
Room 32-D461

Ora Matushansky (University of Utrecht)

“Special Cases”

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

Room 32-141

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

Abstract in pdf format

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

Title: Formerly stressed vowels in Western Armenian
Time: Wed 11/12, 5pm, 32-D831

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

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

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

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

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

Title: Spoken Conversational Systems
Speaker: Stephanie Seneff, Spoken Language Systems group, CSAIL
When: Wednesday Nov 12, 3-4:30pm
Where: 26-310

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

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

Claire Halpert
Thursday, Nov. 13
12:30-1:45
Room 32-D461

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

Thursday, Nov. 6
12:30-1:45
Room 32-D461

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

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

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