Whamit!

Seventeenth Manchester Phonology Meeting
28-30 MAY 2009
Deadline for abstracts: 2nd March 2009

Special session: ‘The History of Phonological Theory’ featuring John Goldsmith, D. Robert Ladd, and Tobias Scheer, and with a contribution from Morris Halle. The session will be introduced by Jacques Durand.

Held in Manchester, UK. Organised through a collaboration of phonologists at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Manchester, the Universite Toulouse-Le Mirail and elsewhere.

Conference website: http://www.englang.ed.ac.uk/mfm/17mfm.html

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 Krivokapi?

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)

This week’s Ling Lunch features a talk by Pritty Patel, Patrick Grosz, Evelina Fedorenko and Ted Gibson (MIT)

Title: “Restrictions on E-type pronouns: Making the case for Uniqueness”
Time: Thurs 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461

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

Diane Rak ‘10, a junior majoring in Linguistics, has been selected as a 2009 Burchard Scholar, an award “given to students who demonstrate unusual abilities and academic excellence in the areas embraced by” the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at MIT. Congratulations!!

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.

This semester, we welcome several visiting faculty. Hedde Zeijlstra joins us from the University of Amsterdam. He will be co-teaching “More Advanced Syntax” with Sabine this semester. Sigrid Beck comes from the University of Tübingen. She will be co-teaching Topics in Semantics with Irene (on comparatives), and teaching Pragmatics. In addition, Tamina Stephenson (PhD 2007) will be joining us to teach 24.910 - the “capstone” course of our undergraduate major and minor.

The most recent issue of Linguistic Inquiry contains an article by graduate student Jessica Coon entitled “Interrogative Possessors and the Problem of Pied-Piping in Chol”.

In addition, the most recent issue of Natural Language and Linguistic Theory contains an article by graduate student Marie-Christine Meyer with alum Uli Sauerland, entitled “A pragmatic constraint on ambiguity detection: A rejoinder to Büring and Hartmann and to Reis”.

Norvin Richards and David Pesetsky are back from the workshop Diagnosing Syntax, held in Leiden and Utrecht, in the Netherlands. The conference was organized by Norbert Corver and alum Lisa Cheng. Also presenting at the conference were alums Hamida Demirdache, Chris Tancredi, Heidi Harley and Ora Matushansky, and a cast of thousands. Norvin and David report that it was an excellent workshop.

Phonology circle resumes this week. Please note that we are returning to our usual Monday afternoon time slot!

Speaker: Hrayr Khanjian
Title: Stress-dependent vowel reduction
Time: Monday 2/9, 5pm
Location: 32-D831

Hrayr Khanjian will give a talk at the Berkeley Linguistic Society next weekend on “Stress-Dependent Vowel Reduction”.

Claire Halpert’s paper “Superiority Effects in Zulu and Kinande Inversion” has been accepted for the workshop “Inversion constructions in Bantu” to be held in Tervuren, Belgium this March, immediately following the 3rd International Conference on Bantu Languages. (Rumor has it that she might also pay a visit to the local carillons while she’s there…)

The 2009 GLOW conference, to be held in Nantes this year, will feature several talks by MIT students, faculty, recent alums and friends. Jeremy Hartman will be presenting a paper on “The Position and Variety of Traces with respect to MaxElide”. Patrick Grosz will be presenting “Movement and Agreement in Right-Node Raising Constructions”. A joint paper by Luka Crnic, Tue Trinh, and Yasutada Sudo on “Indefiniteness in Vietnamese” is an alternate for the GLOW semantics workshop. Recent alum Shoichi Takahashi (PhD 2006) will also be presenting, as will Elena Anagnostopoulou, who taught at MIT in Spring 2007. And finally…Danny Fox is an invited speaker.

(Pay no attention to the fact that clicking on the website for the conference currently produces an error screen with the message “site désactivé”. We have it on reliable authority that the conference will happen and will be great!)

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”

This year’s ECO5 (East Coast 5) syntax workshop will be held at the University of Maryland on Saturday, April 4th. ECO5 is a yearly event and involves presenters from 5 east coast schools: MIT, Harvard, UMass, UMd, and UConn. It is an informal and friendly graduate student workshop and is a great place to present work and work in progress, get feedback from lots of people, and to get practice presenting.

This year they are looking for three presenters from each of the 5 schools. Titles and abstracts (for the program) will be due March 21st and we hope to have a preliminary list of presenters by March 7th. Abstracts are just for the program. Unless there is a huge amount of interest, you will be accepted to the conference just by sending an email to MIT’s ECO5 liaison, Jessica Coon.

Please let Jessica know if you have any questions and if you are interested in presenting or attending. It’s possible that we will be able to get a carpool together, so if you need or are able to offer a ride, please let her know as well. Also, flights are quite cheap right now (about $120), so that is another option.

The Department of Linguistics & Philosophy will hold its annual ice cream social.

When: Registration Day, February 2, 2009
Where: 32-D850 (Lounge)
Time: 2:00—4:00

Sabine Iatridou and Agustin Rayo will be hosting games starting at 3:00 PM.

Welcome Back!

Whamit! welcomes all the members of the MIT Linguistics community to the spring semester.

Class descriptions will be added to this week’s newsletter throughout the week.

Please submit items for inclusion in Whamit!

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.