Whamit!

We are as delighted as can be to announce that Shota Momma will be joining our faculty as Associate Professor of Linguistics this Fall!  Prof. Momma is a specialist in psycholinguistics and its interaction with linguistic theory — with a particular focus on the mechanisms of sentence production, an area in which he is a true pioneer. Shota comes to us from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he has been an Assistant Professor since 2019.  He received his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Maryland in 2016, with a dissertation directed by our alum Colin Phillips (PhD 1996), and subsequently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at UC San Diego with Vic Ferreira.  Asked about his thoughts and plans as our newest faculty member, Shota wrote:

 ”I’m deeply honored and excited to be joining the MIT linguistics department, which has been home to so many people I deeply respect, past and present. I’m looking forward to learning from my future colleagues and to building a vibrant intellectual community together. My research aims to understand how people construct sentences in their minds during both comprehension and production, drawing on insights from linguistics and cognitive science more broadly. I’m confident that exciting new research directions will emerge at MIT - something I already began to experience during my visit in 2023.”

Welcome!  We can’t wait for you to join us!

photo source: https://bpb-us-e2.wpmucdn.com/websites.umass.edu/dist/5/13737/files/2020/02/Shota-Momma.jpg

Speaker: Hani Al Naeem (MIT)
Title: On the nature of emphasis spread in Jordanian Arabic
Time: , 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: The phenomenon of emphasis spread (ES), a type of tongue root harmony in Arabic, is triggered by emphatics, coronal obstruents with a secondary posterior articulation near the upper pharyngeal wall. The most salient effect of ES is the backing of adjacent low vowels, with notable directionality differences in the extent and magnitude of this effect. While previous works agree that leftward ES is more robust (i.e. has a uniform effect and broader span) than rightward ES, there have been differences in the descriptions of the two patterns of spreading and in the analyses thereof. This work reconsiders the empirical description of ES in Jordanian Arabic (JA) based on data from a production experiment and provides a novel analysis of the phenomenon. The JA data reaffirm that ES uniformly lowers F2 in all leftward low vowels within a stem, while the effect gradually fades out to the right. I argue that this asymmetry reflects two distinct underlying mechanisms, feature harmony and coarticulation. Following Hayes & Londe (2006), feature changing effects are modeled through a distal constraint targeting leftward segments non-locally and a local constraint iterating to a right-adjacent vowel. Once those effects are accounted for, a model of coarticulation that is informed by the locus equation and vowel undershoot (Flemming 2001) is proposed as a basis for the residual coarticulatory rightward effects. I claim that the present analysis provides an explanation of the directional asymmetry in ES and clarifies the nature of the long-distance rightward effects by attributing them to a phonetic mechanism, explicitly modeled.

Speaker: Janet Pierrehumbert (University of Oxford)
Title: LLMs can pass the Turing Test — are they intelligent?
Time: Thursday, May 14, 12:30pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: In 1950, Turing proposed that if a person can not tell whether they are in conversation with another person or a computer algorithm, we can consider the algorithm to be intelligent. The Turing Test effectively launched the field of AI, and advanced a strong connection between natural language and intelligence. The newest Large Language Models (LLMs) engage in conversations and produce amazingly human-like output. Often, people cannot reliably tell whether they are talking to a chatbot or another person. LLMs seem to pass the Turing Test. Does this mean they are intelligent?

In this talk, I will discuss the nature of the Turing Test and the current level of evidence that LLMs can pass it. I will argue that the Turing Test in its original formulation had a limited conception of intelligence, failing to capture aspects of intelligence that come to the fore in theories of embodied cognition. These aspects of intelligence play a crucial role for humans in acquiring a mental lexicon of meaningful units, and mastering semantic operators (such as markers of temporal, numerical and logical relationships). When probed, LLMs exhibit persistent shortcomings in these areas of language, shortcomings which are systematic consequences of their architecture and training.

This year, the 44th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL44) was held at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City on May 6-8. Some of our current students, faculty and alums presented their work:

• Tamari Berulava (2nd year): Shifting Identity: the Interaction of phi-features, Honorification and Indexical shift
• Michela Ippolito (PhD 2002)[University of Toronto] & Anastasia Tsilia (5th year): What if and its kin
• Norvin Richards (Faculty; PhD 1997): Long-distance agreement by proxy in Passamaquoddy
• Jessica Coon (PhD 2010)[McGill University], Stefan Keine, Juan Jesús Vázquez Álvarez & Michael Wagner (PhD 2005)[McGill University]: Reconsidering Animacy Hierarchy Effects in Mayan: Experimental Evidence from Ch’ol
• Adam Singerman, Andrew Nevins (PhD 2005)[UCL], Susana Bejar, Maka Tetradze: Suppletion as inflection: insights from two endangered languages
• Ken Hiraiwa (PhD 2005)[Meiji Gakuin University], Kimiko Nakanishi: Japanese Free Choice Items at the Syntax–Semantics–Phonology Interface
• Anna Carolina Almeida, Raimundo Cox-Casals, Michael Wagner (PhD 2005)[McGill University]: Adjectival agreement is interpretable: Evidence from summative agreement in Mexican Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese
• Sam Alxatib (PhD 2013)[CUNY], Alexander Podobryaev (PhD 2014)[HSE]: On the (non-) vacuity of the Russian participial present

Speaker: Daniar Kasenov (NYU)
Title: Salvation by deletion in Russian LBE
Time: Tuesday, May 12, 1:00pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Russian does not allow left branch extraction from NPs that are complements of P. Sluicing alleviates this restriction. I argue that the pattern is best explained by the Cyclic Linearization view of “island repair”: ungrammaticality results from conflicting linearization statements but ellipsis can resolve the conflict.

The talk will cover: 
— Why the pattern must involve salvation by deletion (against the general attitude expressed by Barros et al. 2014)

— Extension to other restrictions on extraction from Russian NPs which are alleviated by sluicing based on the scattered deletion view of left branch extraction (Fanselow, Ćavar 2003; Bondarenko, Davis 2023).

— An account of what we call the Sole Remnant Generalization: the remnant must be the only pronounced item in its clause (observed for preposition drop in other languages too). The model is a mix of Fox & Pesetsky (2003) and Johnson (2020) which allows for scattered deletion and predicts the Sole Remnant Generalization straightforwardly.

The talk is an extension of the material written up in Kalyakin, Kasenov (2025): https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/009308