Whamit!

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

Jaye Padgett
University of California, Santa Cruz

Nathan Sanders
Williams College

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

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

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

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

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

Monday 4/28, 11.30AM
36-112

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

Ezra Keshet has accepted a one-year visiting professorship in semantics at the University of Michigan. Congratulations, Ezra!

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

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

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

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

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

Stanford keeps a comprehensive list of funding opportunities available to linguistics grad students. Have a look.

[Thanks Hrayr!]

The Endangered Language Fund provides grants for ‘language maintenance and linguistic field work’. The deadline to apply for this year is Monday, April 21st. More information is available on the ELF’s website.

[Thanks Jessica!]

This Tuesday (4/15), Omer Preminger is off to give a talk at the CUNY Syntax Supper, on the topic of “Breaking Agreements: Distinguishing Agreement and Clitic-Doubling by Their Failures”

This one doesn’t have a deadline until November, but it looks like a rather involved application process, with potentially great rewards. The NSF, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Humanities, is offering sizable grants and fellowships to support work on endangered languages. Details can be found here.

[Thanks Jessica!]

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

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

Abstract:

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

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

Henk van Riemsdijk
Tilburg University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adamantios Gafos
New York University

“On the temporal organization of phonological form”

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

Courtesy of Ora Matushansky (via David Pesetsky):

From left to right: Ora Matushansky, Idan Landau, Martina Gracanin Yuksek, David Pesetsky, Omer Preminger.