Whamit!

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

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

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

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

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

Abstract in pdf

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

Paul Boersma
University of Amsterdam

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

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

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

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

Please come to his talk:

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

Abstract:

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

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

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

“CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The evolution of human speech was far more complex than is implied by some recent attempts to link it to a specific gene, says Robert Berwick, professor of computational linguistics at MIT.”

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

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

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

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

We welcome two new visitors who have arrived this week:

• Nabila Louriz (Assistant Professor, English Department at Hassan II University in Casablanca, Morocco)
  Visiting Scholar until July
  Research interests: loanword phonology
• Georgios Spathas (PhD student, University of Utrecht)
  Post-Doctoral Fellow until December 08
  Research interests: syntax and semantics of gender features on bound pronouns, especially in Modern Greek

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

[from Michael Kenstowicz]

Congratulations to Sophia Tapio for successful completion of her MA thesis, The Effects of Frequency and Composition on Production Duration in Morphological Processing.

Ling Lunch Schedule
Spring Semester 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ABSTRACT:

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

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

Klaus Abels
University of Tromso

“On Improper Movement”

Friday
February 15th, 2008, 3:30pm

Room 32-141

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

Abstract:

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

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

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

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

Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 18 will take place March 21-23, 2008 at UMass Amherst. The program includes the following MIT people:

• Jon Gajewski (UConn): More on quantifiers in comparative clauses
• Paul Elbourne (Queen Mary, University of London): Implicit content and the argument from binding
• Marta Abrusan (Institut Jean-Nicod/Collegium Budapest): Islands of contradiction: Presuppositional and negative interveners
• Jon Nissenbaum (McGill) & Bernhard Schwarz (McGill): The scope of ‘too’ with gapped infinitival clauses (Poster)
• Alan Bale (Concordia) & Hrayr Khanjian (MIT): Armenian classifiers and number marking (Poster)
• Ezra Keshet (MIT): Only the strong: Restricting situation variables (Poster)
• Pranav Anand (UC Santa Cruz) & Valentine Hacquard (Maryland): Epistemics, embedding, and sentience: A case for information states (Poster)

And last but not least, Philippe Schlenker (Institut Jean-Nicod/NYU) is giving an invited lecture on “Local contexts”.

Below is the spring schedule for the MIT Linguistics Colloquium:

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

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

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

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

Course description:

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

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

Schedule of Topics (subject to revision):

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

Brief description:

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

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

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

Abstract is below.

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

Hope to see you there!

Your ling-lunch organizers, Jen & Jessica

ABSTRACT:

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

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

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

[Ben and Patrick write:]

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

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

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

Course description

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

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

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

Provisional outline:

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

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

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

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

The Department of Linguistics & Philosophy

ICE CREAM SOCIAL

When: Registration Day, Monday, February 4, 2008
Where: 32-D850 (Lounge)
Time: 2:00—4:00

Games will start at 3:00pm

WELCOME BACK

A special warm welcome to visiting professor Enoch Oladé Aboh, who is visiting from the University of Amsterdam this semester, until May 08.

Research interest: theoretical syntax; comparative syntax (e.g., Kwa vs. Germanic/Romance, Kwa vs. Sinitic, Kwa vs. Caribbean creoles); discourse-syntax interface; language creation and language change.

Enoch will be teaching an undergraduate seminar and co-teaching a graduate seminar with Michel DeGraff:

24.910 Topics in Linguistic Theory: Information Structure at the Edge
24.921 Special Topics in Linguistics: A transatlantic sprachbund? Gbe and Haitian Creole in a comparative-syntax perspective

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

SPECIAL SEMINAR

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

“Probabilistic Knowledge in Human Language Comprehension and Production”

Monday, February 4
NOON
46-3015

[Thanks to Ted Gibson]