Whamit!

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

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.

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.

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.

Peter Graff and T. Florian Jaeger will be presenting their talk, The OCP is a pressure to keep words distinct: Evidence from Aymara, Dutch and Javanese at the 45th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society.

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.

Mary Ann Walter (PhD 2007), who has been a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University, has accepted an Assistant Professor position at the Middle East Technical University, in Northern Cyprus. Mary Ann’s dissertation was about Repetition avoidance in human language. Congratulations, Mary Ann!

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.

Conference news of the past…

Last week, Claire Halpert returned from Tervuren, Belgium where she presented a paper on “Superiority Effects in Zulu and Kinande Inversion” at a special workshop on Bantu inversion constrations at the 3rd International Conference on Bantu Languages.

Conference news of the present…

Meanwhile, this weekend was an active one for talks by the MIT linguistics community!

Third-year grad student Bronwyn Bjorkman and first-year grad students Igor Yanovich and Rafael Nonato all presented papers at ECO-5, the “Maryland-MIT-Harvard-UMass-UConn Workshop in Formal Linguistics”, held this year at Maryland. Bronwyn’s talk was entitled ‘Go Get, Come See: the Syntax of a Double Verb Construction in North American English’; Igor’s talk was called “How likely to be viable is a PF theory for A-reconstruction?’; and Rafael’s talk asked the question “What is quantification again?”

At the same time, a few states away, second-year student Jeremy Hartman presented his paper “The semantic effects of non-A-bar traces: evidence from ellipsis parallelism” at Semantics and Linguistic Theory (a.k.a. SALT) at Ohio State.

More or less simultaneously with all these talks, one state to the west, fourth-year student Jessica Coon and second-year student Guillaume Thomas presented papers at the 14th annual Workshop on Structure and Constituency in the Languages of the Americas (WSCLA 14) held at Purdue. Jessica’s paper was entitled “A biclausal analysis of aspect based split ergativity”, and Guillaume’s was “Incremental comparatives and inherently evaluative ‘many’ in Mbya”. Conor Quinn, who was a post-doc at MIT from 2006 through last Spring, also presented a paper at WSCLA, entitled “Incorporated verbal classifiers in a predictive typology of noun incorporation”.

And finally, one more state to the west, Adam Albright was at the University of Chicago, giving a linguistics colloquium talk about “Phonetic faithfulness and affix-by-affix differences in derived words”, and a talk in the Workshop on Language, Cognition, and Computation series entitled “Why are cumulative markedness effects so rare?”

Conference news of the future…

Peter Graff’s joint paper with Florian Jaeger entitled The OCP is a pressure to keep words distinct: Evidence from Aymara, Dutch and Javanese” has been accepted for presentation at the upcoming meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society

Papers…

Omer Preminger’s paper “Breaking Agreements: Distinguishing Agreement and Clitic-Doubling by Their Failures” has been accepted for publication by Linguistic Inquiry and should appear next Fall.

And please remember…

Please remember to send us your news items about talks and papers so we can announce them in Whamit!

[From Shigeru:]

The program for the 6th Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics (May 22-24, Nagoya, Japan) has been announced.

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.

Tamina Stephenson (PhD 2007), who has been teaching at MIT this year, has accepted a post-doctoral position in semantics at Yale. Congratulations Tamina!

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.