Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

Archive for October, 2009

Syntax-Semantics Reading Group - Mon 10/26 - Igor Yanovich

In Monday’s Syntax-Semantics Reading Group, Igor Yanovich will talk about the nature and formal analysis of indexical presuppositions (this is a practice talk for LENLS 6).

TIME: Monday 11.30AM - 1PM
PLACE: 32-D461

For further information, please visit: http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/groups/synsem/

Phonology Circle - Mon 10/26 - Graff, Halpert (UMMM practice talks)

This week’s Phonology Circle features a double-header of two talks, in preparation for UMMM at UMass this weekend

Time: Monday 10/26, 5pm, 32-D461

Speaker: Claire Halpert (MIT)
Title: Place assimilation changes its triggers

Speaker: Peter Graff (MIT) and Gregory Scontras (Harvard)
Title: Metathesis as Asymmetric Perceptual Realignment

We investigate the perceptual salience of consonant order in intervocalic stop–fricative (ST/TS) and stop- nasal clusters (NT/TN) and present evidence that speakers of English (N=24) more readily perceive these clusters with the stop in prevocalic position, regardless of their native lexical statistics or whether the fricatives or nasals are native sounds. This bias is amplified when the stop-burst is removed, indicating that perceptual repairs increase as a function of the availability of phonetic cues. Our findings support the proposal that CC-metathesis is driven by optimization of auditory cues in consonant clusters (Hume 2001; Steriade 2001) rather than symmetric confusability.

Upcoming schedule: (contact Adam for open slots)

Nov 2 NELS Practice talks, first installment (Gallagher, Johnsen)
Nov 9 NELS practice talks, second installment (Michaels)
Nov 16 Igor Yanovich
Nov 23 OPEN
Nov 30 OPEN
Dec 7 Maria Giavazzi

BCS Cog Lunch - Tues 10/27 - Evelina Fedorenko

Speaker: Evelina Fedorenko, Ph.D. (Post-doctoral Fellow, Kanwisher Lab)
Title: Functional localization in the domain of language: A new take on the questions of functional specificity
Time: Tues 10/27, 12:00 to 1:00
Location: 46-3310

Ling-Lunch - Thurs 10/29- Ted Gibson

Join us for this week’s Ling-lunch talk:

Speaker: Ted Gibson
Time: Thurs 10/29, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461
Title: Quantitative investigations of syntactic representations and processing

Joint work with Denise Ichinco, Ev Fedorenko, Steve Piantadosi, Nat Twarog, and Melissa Troyer.

We present a new method to quantitatively evaluate similarity and differences in language representations and processes: Inter-Subject Analysis of Covariation (ISAC). The method is a quantitative version of an approach that has been traditionally used in the syntactic literature. In this method, participants rate materials for their acceptability. It is assumed that judgments will correlate more across individuals on materials with overlapping structures or similar processing demands. In order to evaluate this novel method, we demonstrate that relative clauses and wh-questions are rated very similarly to each other across different kinds of transformations, much more so than several control structures. This method holds a lot of promise for addressing questions concerning the nature of linguistic representations and processes.

MIT Linguistics Colloquium 10/30 - Maria Gouskova (NYU)

Speaker: Maria Gouskova (NYU)
Title: Exceptionality as a Property of Morphemes: the Case of Yers
Time: Friday, October 30, 2009, 3:30pm
Place: 32-141

Most languages have some phonological rules that apply only to a subset of eligible morphemes (for example, in English, regressive voicing assimilation, “thie[f]”/”thie[vz]” vs. the default progressive assimilation, “chie[f]”/”chie[fs]”). The question examined in this talk is whether there are rules that apply only to a subset of eligible segments. I will explore the hypothesis that exceptionality is a property of whole morphemes. This theory of exceptionality has many incarnations (Chomsky and Halle 1968 et seq.), but my version is formalized as Lexically Indexed Constraints in Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993): in any given language, a universal constraint can be indexed to individual morphemes in the lexicon and ranked in two different positions in the language’s hierarchy (Pater 2000, 2006). I test this theory on a famous purported case of segment-by-segment exceptions: Slavic yers, vowels that idiosyncratically alternate with zero (e.g., [mox] vs. [mx-a] `moss (nom/gen sg)’ alongside [mex] vs. [mex-a] `fur (nom/gen sg)’). The dominant analysis of these “ghost vowels” is that they must be underlyingly marked as exceptional on a segment-by-segment basis. Yers are also usually underlyingly marked as representationally defective—either nonmoraic or lacking features (Kenstowicz and Rubach 1987, Melvold 1990, Yearley 1995, inter alia). In this talk, I revisit yers from a different perspective. Instead of treating the individual vowels as special, I argue that entire morphemes are indexed to special phonologies. I show that there are generalizations as to the quality and the position of alternating vowels in Russian. These generalizations are phonologically sensible, but they are lost in accounts where vowels are labeled as deletable on a segment-by-segment basis. Finally, I survey yers in other Slavic languages and test the OT hypothesis that a phonological rule can only be exceptional in one language if it is general in another.

Suggested readings:

UMMM @ UMass, Sunday 11/1

The fall meeting of UMMM (UMass-MIT Meeting in phonology) will take place this Sunday 11/1 at UMass. (Please note that it will be Sunday instead of the usual Saturday!) Presenters from MIT will include Youngah Do, Peter Graff, and Claire Halpert. If you would like to attend, please let Donca know if you need a ride or if you can offer rides.

For the full program, click here (via John Kingston)

Phonology Circle 10/19 - Youngah Do

In this week’s installment of the Phonology Circle, Youngah Do will present on the acquisition of Korean morphophonology.

Time: Monday 10/19, 5pm, 32-D461
Speaker: Youngah Do
Title: Child Preference of Base Correspondence: the Asymmetry of the Inflection of Regular and Irregular Verbs in Korean

In this talk, I examine the distinctive ways in which children inflect Korean verbs with respect to the (ir)regularity of the verbal stem. An experiment of picture description asks children to inflect two verb forms in a coordinated sentence. The result shows that the inflectional structure of the two coordinated verbs are always identical. Interestingly, an asymmetry of the inflection is found according to the order of the appearance of regular and irregular verbs in a sentence. When the first verbal position is occupied by regular verb and irregular verb follows, children inflect both verbs in a simple way(C category stem+C category suffix), not using any extra morpheme. On the contrary, when the inflection of irregular verb is required first and regular one is following, they inflect the verbs in a complex way by using an extra morpheme (A category stem+A category suffix+ Extra morpheme +C category suffix).Adopting the hypothesis that that the A category is the base in the Korean verbal inflectional paradigm (Albright and Kang 2009), I argue that this asymmetry is due to children’s tendency for respecting base correspondence in the process of verbal inflection.

Upcoming schedule:

Oct 26 UMMM practice talks (Graff, Halpert)
Nov 2 NELS Practice talks, first installment (Gallagher, Johnsen)
Nov 9 NELS practice talks, second installment (Michaels)
Nov 16 Igor Yanovich
Nov 23 Hyesun Cho
Nov 30 OPEN
Dec 7 Maria Giavazzi

Current issue of Theoretical Linguistics features paper by Tue Trinh + commentary

The October issue of the journal Theoretical Linguistics is devoted to third-year grad student Tue Trinh’s paper “A constraint on copy deletion” — followed by eight “peer commentaries”. Tue’s paper proposes a new theory of pronunciation patterns under movement that relates the choice of which position gets pronounced to its linear position within the phrase that contains it. The commentators on Tue’s paper include Enoch Aboh, who was a visiting faculty member here last Fall, MIT alums Shin Ishihara (PhD 2003) and Hubert Truckenbrodt (PhD 1995), as well as Josef Bayer, Nigel Duffield, Roland Hinterhölzl, Anders Holmberg, and Gereon Müller. Congratulations, Tue!

NECPhon 3 @ MIT - 10/24

This coming weekend, MIT will host the 3rd annual meeting of the Northeast Computational Phonology meeting. A preliminary program is below. (Actual times may shift a bit; a finalized version will be sent around later in the week.)

All are welcome to attend! If you plan on coming, it would be helpful if you could let Adam know so we have a rough nose-count.


NECPhon 3 - The Northeast Computational Phonology Circle
Date: October 24, 2009
Location: MIT, 32-D461


12:30 Lunch
1:00 Michael Becker and Anne-Michelle Tessier (Harvard and University of Alberta)
Trajectories of faithfulness in child-specific phonology
1:30 Kyle Root (UMass)
Agent-based simulation of sound change in Martha’s Vineyard
2:00 Engin Ural (Brown)
A computational investigation of the effect of phonological variation on word segmentation and lexical acquisition
2:30 Coffee
2:50 Kevin Roon and Diamandis Gafos (NYU)
Modeling phonetic detail and reaction times in a cue-distractor task
3:20 Naomi Feldman (Brown)
Using wordforms to constrain phonetic category acquisition
3:50 Giorgio Magri (MIT)
How to extend Tesar and Smolensky’s analysis of Constraint Demotion to Constraint Demotion/Promotion
4:20 Coffee
4:40 Bruce Tesar (Rutgers)
Error Detection and Alternation Subsets
5:10 Karen Jesney, Joe Pater and Robert Staubs (UMass)
Learning distributions over underlying representations
5:40 Gaja Jarosz (Yale)
Learning phonology with Stochastic Partial Orders


Ling-Lunch 10/22: Andrew Nevins

Join us for this week’s Ling-lunch talk:

Speaker: Andrew Nevins
Time: Thurs 10/18, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461
Title: TBA

Friday 10/23: Miyagawa at Harvard

Shigeru Miyagawa is giving a Richauer Institute talk at Harvard, Friday, October 23, 4-5:30

“Murasaki Shikibu Meets Generative Grammar: What Can the Old Japanese Particle ‘wo’ Tell Us About Human Language?”

1730 Cambridge St, Room S250

Phonology Circle **TUESDAY 10/13*** - Michael Kenstowicz

Please note the special day (Tuesday) for this week’s Phonology Circle- normal place and time!

Speaker: Michael Kenstowicz
Title: Laryngeal (Mis)alignments: the Adaptation of Mandarin Loanwords into Yanbian Korean
Coordinates: TUESDAY (10/13) 5pm, 32-D461

This presentation (based on Ito & Kenstowicz 2008 and 2009) examines the ways in which two laryngeal categories of Mandarin Chinese are adapted into the Yanbian dialect of Korean in a corpus of c. 250 contemporary loanwords. The first concerns the mapping of the Mandarin binary aspirated-unaspirated distinction with respect to the Yanbian ternary tense-lax-aspirated contrast and the second the correspondences between the Mandarin four-way tonal contrast with respect to the Yanbian high-low pitch opposition. In both cases the phonetic correlates of the phonological categories play a crucial role in understanding the correspondences.

Ling-lunch 10/15: Aysa Arylova

Join us for this week’s Ling-lunch talk:

Speaker: Asya Arylova
Time: Thurs 10/15, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461

The talk will focus on the Russian predicative possession BE-construction.

BCS Cog Lunch 10/13 - Nadya Modyanova

Speaker: Nadya Modyanova, PhD, Simons Postdoctoral Fellow, BCS
Date: Tuesday, Oct 13, 12pm, 46-3015 (Note special location!)
Title: Semantic and Pragmatic Language Development in Typical Acquisition, Autism Spectrum Disorders and Williams Syndrome

This talk focuses on understanding the reasons for children’s overuse of definite article ‘the’, to refer to one of several objects in a context set, as opposed to the unique established referent. Competing theories argue the deficit is either in children’s semantic computational knowledge (of uniqueness/maximality), or in their pragmatic/social awareness/theory-of-mind development. Experiments in this dissertation focused on children’s comprehension and interpretation of the indefinite and definite determiners, as well as ‘that’, anaphors ‘another’ and ‘same’, and free relative clauses.

The results suggest that in typically developing (TD) children the late acquisition of determiner ‘the’ is due to the late maturation of the semantic principle of maximality. Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and with Williams syndrome (WS) either manifested an adult-like competence, an absence of manifestation of knowledge, or a pattern found in TD younger children (where ‘that’ is understood better than ‘the’ as referring to the salient unique referent) - indicating delay of development of the language faculty, but no deviance. This suggests that the observed deficits in ASD and WS pattern with those in TD, and hence are also semantic in nature.

Beyond posing an explanatory challenge to linguistic theories, the research comparing typical and atypical development sheds light on the mechanisms of language development and impairment, and provides endophenotypic descriptions of ASD and WS, which are crucial for elucidating not only genetics of neurodevelopmental disorders, but also the genetic basis of the human language faculty.

Phonology Circle 10/5 - Peter Graff

This week, Peter Graff will present the background/design of an experiment that he is proposing to run (abstract below).

The format is intended to be like a lab meeting for discussing experimental work in progress, and is the kick-off of what we hope will be more regular meetings of this sort. Since we already have a full docket of regular talks throughout the semester, we will discuss on Monday the scheduling of future lab meeting sessions.

Speaker: Peter Graff
Title: Evolutionary vs. Phonetically Driven Phonology: An Iterative Learning Experiment
Time: 10/5 5pm, 32-D461

In this talk, I will propose an iterative learning experiment trying to test the predictions of Evolutionary Phonology (Blevins, 2006) and Phonetically Driven Phonology (Hayes and Steriade, 2004). Both hypotheses about phonological learnability and knowledge predict phonological systems to be optimized for transmission. The crucial difference is that Phonetically Driven Phonology hypothesizes phonetic optimization of phonology to be speaker driven, while Evolutionary Phonology attributes phonetic optimality to unbiased or “innocent” misperception and production independent of the grammar of the speaker. I will suggest simulating diachronic transmission in iterative learning and propose ways in which to manipulate speaker driven optimization to see whether such manipulation affects the course of simulated linguistic history as might be predicted by certain conceptions of Phonetically Driven Phonology.

Ling-Lunch 10/8: Norvin Richards

Join us for this week’s Ling-lunch talk:

Speaker: Norvin Richards
Time: Thurs 10/8, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461

Title: TBA

MIT Linguistics Colloquium 10/9 - Jim McCloskey

Speaker: Jim McCloskey (UC Santa Cruz)
Title: Further Reflections on Movement and Resumption
Time: Friday, October 9, 2009, 3:30pm
Place: 32-141

The syntax of apparently unbounded dependencies in Irish has for long been viewed as providing evidence for the (successive) cyclic view of long WH-movement, and also as making available a rich set of puzzles by which the nature of such movement operations could be probed. In Irish, this set of puzzles is further enriched by the relatively free availability of resumption as an additional option for forming A-bar binding relations. This paper (a progress report in a long-running struggle) is concerned with a couple of inter-related questions in this area: (i) how we should understand the choice between resumption and movement and what the availability of that choice implies (ii) how the choice, once made, is reflected in the morphosyntax of the language. At stake ultimately is the fundamental question of how we should understand locality requirements in syntax.