Whamit!

There is a syntax-semantics reading group meeting on Monday at 11:30am
in room 32-D461. Floris Roelofsen will talk about inquisitive
semantics. The relevant background readings can be found on the group’s website. Everyone is welcome!

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

Time: Monday 11/30, 5pm, 32-D461
Speaker: Sverre Johnsen (Harvard)
Title: Contrast maintenance effects in Norwegian retroflexion

Norwegian contrasts morpheme initial /s/ and /ʂ/ before a vowel (/sV-/ - /ʂV/), but not before a consonant (/sC-/ - */ʂC-/). Initial /s/ undergoes retroflexion to /ʂ/ when preceded by a morpheme ending in /-r/. Before a vowel, the contrast between /s/ and /ʂ/ is then lost (/sV-/, /ʂV-/ > /ʂV-/), but no contrast is lost before a consonant (/sC-/ > /ʂC-/). I present data from two experiments showing that Norwegian speakers apply this retroflexion significantly more often before a consonant than before a vowel. The effect is that a contrast is better maintained. Retroflexed /ʂV/-tokens have, however, more lexical neighbors and a higher phonotactic probability than retroflexed /ʂC/-tokens. Experiments in lexical access have shown that items with a high lexical neighborhood and phonotactic probability are more prone to be misidentified. I show that under an exemplar model of speech perception/production, the asymmetry in retroflexion between /sV-/ and /sC-/ is a direct consequence of such misidentifications.

Upcoming schedule:

Stay up to date! Check out the online schedule, or subscribe via iCal

This week, Mamoru Saito will give a double-header guest lecture in the East Asian Linguistics seminar.

Speaker: Mamoru Saito
Tuesday, December 1, 10-1, 66-156
Talk 1: “A Comparative Syntax of Ellipsis in Japanese and Korean”
Talk 2: “Clause Types and the Japanese Right Periphery”

Please join us for Ling-lunch this week:

Speaker: Coppe van Urk
Time: Thurs 12/3, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461
Title: Movement and Antecedency in Obligatory Control

The two most prominent contemporary theories of control echo early theories in transformational grammar, Equi-NP Deletion (Rosenbaum 1967) and Postal’s (1970) null pronoun Doom. Hornstein (1999) suggests that control is derived through movement. Landau (2000 et seq.), on the other hand, argues for a PRO analysis. Regardless of what conceptual problems are associated with each analysis, there are significant empirical arguments for both approaches. In this talk, I go over some of these and conclude that both strategies are necessary. The empirical observation behind this is that some control complements behave like raising: the thematic positions have to be non-distinct, can share a single Case and the lower copy can be spelled out. Others behave more like non-obligatory control: they allow partial control and the lower position needs to have independent Case. These properties correlate across languages. I show that this account greatly simplifies the theory of control. Many of the special mechanisms that are necessary in Hornstein’s and Landau’s account can be dispensed with. In addition, the empirical coverage derived in this way is superior to that of other theories.

Michael Tanenhaus, visiting MIT to give a colloquium talk, will talk about speech at a special meeting of the Phonology Circle December 4th, 1:30pm-2:30pm. Please stay tuned for an announcement about the exact location.

Speaker: Michael Tanenhaus (University of Rochester)
Title: Fine-grained phonetic detail in spoken word recognition
Time: Friday 12/4, 1:30-2:30 pm
Location: TBA

Despite considerable evidence to the contrary, it is widely assumed that some classes of speech sounds are perceived categorically in a way that exemplars from other types of non-speech categories are not. Yet, the articulation of many sounds, including consonants, varies systematically with position in a prosodic domain. A system that discarded sub-phonetic detail would thus be ignoring potentially useful information. I’ll review recent data from eye-tracking studies demonstrating that spoken word recognition does, in fact, exploit fine-grained sub-phonetic detail to make probabilistic hypothesis about lexical candidates, including within-category variation for stop consonants—the poster child for categorical perception.

MIT Linguistics Colloquium 12/04: Michael Tanenhaus (University of Rochester)

Speaker: Michael Tanenhaus (University of Rochester)
Title: Common ground and perspective-taking in language processing
Time: Friday, December 04, 2009, 3:30pm
Place: 32-141

Successful communication would seem to require that speakers and listeners distinguish between their own knowledge, commitments and intentions, and those of their interlocutors. A particularly important distinction is between shared knowledge (common ground) and private knowledge (privileged ground). Keeping track of what is shared and what is privileged would seem, however, to be too computationally expensive and too memory intensive to inform real-time language processing—a position supported by striking experimental evidence that speakers and listeners act egocentrically, showing strong and seemingly inappropriate intrusions from their own privileged ground. I’ll review recent results from my laboratory demonstrating that (a) speaker’s utterances provide evidence about whether they believe information is shared or privileged and (b) listeners are extremely sensitive to this evidence. I’ll suggest an integrative framework that explains discrepancies in the literature.

Phonology circle will return next week, after the Thanksgiving holiday break.

Upcoming schedule:

Stay up to date! Check out the online schedule, or subscribe via iCal

The syntax-semantics reading group is meeting on Monday at 11:30am in room 32-D461. Micha Breakstone will talk about Measure Phrase licensing and Evaluativity using Vector Space Semantics.

A very nice article about Shigeru Miyagawa’s new book appeared last Friday on the MIT news site.

Nobuko Hasegawa of Kanda U of Int’l Studies will guest lecture in the East Asian Linguistics Seminar this week: Tuesday, November 24, @ Harvard, Boylston 303, 11AM (not 10AM) - 1PM. (Note also that Mamoru Saito will guest lecture Tuesday, December 1, @MIT, 66-156, 10 AM (not 11AM) - 1PM.

“Person Agreement and Subject Ellipsis at the CP Level”
Nobuko Hasegawa (Kanda University of International Studies)

Japanese has been considered as a non-agreement language unlike English and other European languages (cf. Kuroda 1988, Fukui 1986). It is in fact not easy to convincingly argue that Japanese exhibits agreement between the subject and the predicate at the IP level (or in embedded sentences). In this presentation, however, I will show that Japanese does exhibit rather extensive agreement processes between the subject and the predicate, once matrix phenomena are taken into consideration, such as Imperatives and Volitionals. I will resort to Rizzi’s (1997) CP system to account for these phenomena. That is, the sentential Force (Clause Type) marked at the CP projection, such as Imp(erative), Vol(itional), requires a particular predicate form, which in turn requires (or agree with) a particular type of a subject, [+Addressee], [+Speaker], respectively. With such agreement, the subject can be null.

I will then extend this analysis to other null subject cases, which I will argue result from agreement at CP level. One is the 1st person deletion phenomenon, which is allowed only at the matrix subject. The other case is PRO in infinitives, whose interpretation is also tied with the structure of CP, as pointed out in Borer (1989) (cf. (5)). Our analysis of PRO provides an account for an interesting (and novel) fact of matrix arbitrary PRO in Japanese. Based on these cases, I claim that a null subject is allowed only when Force of the CP requires a particular predicate form that agrees with a particular person of subject.

If the analysis proposed is on the right track, we seem to come up with a picture quite different from what has been assumed in the GB framework with respect to null subject phenomena in general. Null subject phenomena are relevant to what a head of the CP level specifies and even pro of null subject languages (NSLs) may be analyzed in a similar way, if the predicate (or Infl) is supposed to communicate with CP, as often has been assumed. Then, a null subject is not special to NSLs but is to be observed in more prevalent environments where the function of a CP is more apparent, namely, at the matrix level.

References:

• Hasegawa, Nobuko. 2009. Agreement at the CP Level: Clause Types and the ‘Person’ Restriction on the Subject. The proceedings of the Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics 5: 131-152. MITWPL, MIT.
• Portner, Paul. 2004. The Semantics of Imperatives within a Theory of Clause Types. ms. Georgetown University.
• Rizzi, Luigi. 1997. The Fine Structure of the Left Periphery. In L. Haegeman (ed.) Elements of Grammar: Handbook of Generative Syntax. 281-331. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
• Ueda, Yukiko. 2009. Person Restriction on C in Japanese , The proceedings of the Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics 5, MITWPL, MIT.

Readings: Hasegawa 2009, Portner 2004

Phonology circle is on hiatus this week, recuperating from a highly successful weekend of NELS talks. There is also a slot available next week (11/23)—please contact Adam if you would like to sign up for it.

Upcoming schedule:

Stay up to date! Check out the online schedule, or subscribe via iCal

Please join us for Ling-lunch this week:

Speaker: Omer Preminger
Time: Thurs 11/19, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461
Title: On the nature of ergativity: New and old evidence from Basque

Basque unergatives have long been held as evidence that unergatives have an implicit object (Hale & Keyser 1993). Recently, I have argued that the presence of absolutive agreement-morphology in Basque is by no means an indication of an agreement relation being successfully established with a nominal target (Preminger 2009, LI). Building on this, I present two new arguments (and one old one) that Basque unergatives systematically lack an implicit object.

Since the single argument of these predicates is nonetheless marked with ergative Case, these facts furnish an argument against ergative in Basque adhering to a Case-competition logic (i.e., against ergative in Basque being “dependent Case”; Marantz 1991). At first glance, this seems to favor an account of ergative as inherent Case (Woolford 1997, Legate 2008, among others). However, there is evidence internal to Basque which casts doubt on such an account: (i) raising-to-ergative constructions (Artiagoitia 2001), and (ii) the existence of ergative Theme arguments (Etxepare 2003, Holguín 2007, among others).

In response to these facts, I propose a slight variation on the inherent Case theory of ergativity: ergative Case is still assigned in [Spec,vP], but [Spec,vP] is not unambiguously a base-generation site; it can be the target of movement, as well. If a DP is base-generated in [Spec,vP], it will receive not only ergative Case, but also an Agent theta-role; but if a DP moves into [Spec,vP], it will get ergative Case but retain whatever theta-role it already had.

Speaker: Jonathan David Bobaljik (University of Connecticut)
Title: Idiosyncratic syncretic patterns: Some Chukotko-Kamchatkan evidence
Time: Friday, November 20, 2009, 3:30pm
Place: 32-141

Syncretism (homophony within paradigms) has played a significant (if somewhat controversial) role in morphological theory. There is relatively broad agreement that there are no limits on the patterns of surface homophony that may be attested. In addition to stipulated accidental homophony, many current theories have powerful mechanisms (feature-manipulating rules, for example) that ultimately allow for essentially any pattern to be described. In this talk, I aim to support the rather conservative notion that there is nevertheless a line to be drawn between natural syncretic patterns on the one hand, and idiosyncratic patterns on the other. The natural patterns are those that can be represented as underspecification of vocabulary items (exponents), while the idiosyncratic patterns require the invocation of special rules, the residue of contingent factors such as historical changes.

I start with a brief discussion of a feature inventory motivated by categorical universals in the area of person marking, which are independent of the issue of syncretism. I show that this feature inventory defines a division between natural and idiosyncratic patterns that is robustly supported by the distribution of language types in large scale surveys (thus converging with Pertsova 2007 over a different sample). I then turn to an in-depth investigation of one set of extremely idiosyncratic patterns in a single language family, looking at the reflexes of Proto-Chukotko-Kamchatkan agreement prefix *næ-. Comrie (1980) has famously discussed this prefix as providing evidence for a functional “inverse” alignment in these paradigms, leading to a complicated form:function mismatch, and requiring a theory in which rules of vocabulary insertion are governed by constraints on the overall shape of the paradigm. Continuing a line of work arguing against appeals to such paradigm-level constraints (e.g., Bobaljik 2002, 2008), I argue that the proper description of the quirky Chukotko-Kamchatkan facts is best stated in terms of deletion (impoverishment) rules (ranging over specific features, or in some cases entire terminal nodes, cf. Arregi & Nevins 2007, Calabrese 2008), but that the explanation of these rules is entirely diachronic. An appeal to paradigmatic constraints is neither sufficient, nor necessary to explain the observed idiosyncratic syncretic patterns.

In this week’s installment of Phonology Circle, Jen Michaels will give a practice talk for NELS:

Time: Monday 11/9, 5pm, 32-D461
Speaker: Jennifer Michaels (MIT)
Title: To alternate or not to alternate: What is the boundary?

Abstract: http://web.mit.edu/nels40/program/abstracts/NELS40Michaels.pdf

Upcoming schedule: (contact Adam for open slots)

Stay up to date! Check out the online schedule, or subscribe via iCal

Syntax-Semantics Reading Group: NELS practice talk on Uyghur indexicals

Time: Monday at 11.30AM in room 32-D461
Speakers: Kirill Shklovsky and Yasutada Sudo
Title: Shifted indexicals in Uyghur (NELS practice talk)
Abstract: here

We hope to see you there!

Please join us for Ling-lunch this week:

Speakers: Jonah Katz and David Pesetsky
Time: Thurs 11/12, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461
Title: The Identity Thesis for Language and Music

This paper argues for the following proposal:

Identity Thesis for Language and Music:
All formal differences between language and music are a consequence of differences in their fundamental building blocks (arbitrary pairings of sound and meaning in the case of language; pitch-classes and pitch-class combinations in the case of music). In all other respects, language and music are identical.

In particular, we argue, developing but also extending earlier proposals by Lerdahl and Jackendoff (1983), that music, like language, contains a syntactic component in which headed structures are built by iterated, recursive, binary Merge. This is the component that Lerdahl and Jackendoff called Prolongational Reduction, which represents hierarchical patterns of tension and relaxation in tonal harmony. We further argue that the distinct component that Lerdahl and Jackendoff called Time Span Reduction is a musical prosodic component (a point anticipated by Lerdahl and Jackendoff themselves) — whose interface with the syntactic component is strikingly similar to the comparable interface between syntactic and prosodic structure in language.

Though our discussion takes Lerdahl and Jackendoff’s work as a starting point and touchstone throughout, our proposals also constitute a significant realignment of their model — necessary in order to reveal similarities between musical and linguistic structure that were not evident in their presentation. This realignment also reflects a distinction in goals between our proposal and theirs. Their work took as its starting point the question “Given a piece of music in a particular musical idiom I, what laws govern the class of analyses that a listener assigns to it in I?” Our proposals arise from a related but distinct question, more typical of generative linguistic work: “What general laws define the class of possible pieces in I?” That is, what is the grammar of I?

Our realignment of Lerdahl and Jackendoff’s proposals in light of the Identity Thesis allows us to ask questions not taken up in their work. For example, does Internal Merge (i.e. syntactic movement) apply in the construction of musical syntactic structure, in addition to External Merge? We argue that the phenomenon of cadence is an instance of exactly this: head-movement from the penultimate constituent of a musical passage (the dominant) to the final tonic chord.

Finally, we will suggest (but probably not have time to argue) that the output of musical syntax feeds a Tonal-Harmonic Component whose formal relation to the music syntax strongly resembles the relation between linguistic syntax and the semantic system that interacts with it — and is subject to a Principle of Full Interpretation with respect to that component.

(A draft of a paper related to this talk is available on LingBuzz.)

There are still two remaining openings for Ling-lunch this semester: 11/19 & 12/10. If you are interested in presenting your work on either of these dates, please contact Bronwyn Bjorkman (bmbjork@mit.edu) or Guillaume Thomas (gthomas@mit.edu).

Don’t forget that NELS 40 is this weekend, November 13-15! For the full program and other information, visit the NELS40 website. See you there!

We’d like to get back in the habit of announcing talks (or posters) given by members of our department. If you are giving a talk somewhere, or recently gave a talk, please email whamit@mit.edu with the name of your talk and the venue where you presented.

To get the ball rolling, here’s some news from last week and this week:

Two students presented papers at the Ehu International Workshop on Ergativity in Bilbao, Spain, November 4-6. Jessica Coon gave a talk entitled ‘Rethinking Aspectually Based Split Ergativity’ and Omer Preminger gave a talk entitled ‘Basque Unergatives, Case-competition, and Ergative as Inherent Case’.

Moving north, Jeremy Hartman gave a paper entitled `When e-GIVENness over-predicts identity’ at the 4th Brussels Conference in Generative Linguistics, November 9-10. Former visiting students Gary Thoms and Marlies Kluck also presented papers.

Coming back to Cambridge, a slate of MIT students will be presenting at NELS 40 this weekend:

Hadas Kotek (joint work with Alexander Grosu): ‘On ‘restricted degrees”
Jen Michaels: ‘To alternate or not to alternate: What is the boundary?’
Kirill Shklovsky and Yasutada Sudo: ‘Shifted indexicals in Uyghur’
Bronwyn Bjorkman: ‘The syntax of syncretism’
Gillian Gallagher: ‘Perceptual similarity in laryngeal cooccurrence restrictions’

Shigeru Miyagawa’s new Linguistic Inquiry Monograph has just been published by MIT Press. Why Agree? Why Move? Unifying Agreement-based and Discourse Configurational Languages comes with a terrific endorsement by Mark Baker (see back cover, and also the website).

This week, we will have two talks in preparation for the upcoming NELS meeting:

Time: Monday 11/2, 5pm, 32-D461

• Speaker: Gillian Gallagher (MIT)
  Title: Perceptual similarity in laryngeal cooccurrence restrictions
• Speaker: Sverre Stausland Johnsen (Harvard)
  Title: Perceptual distance in Norwegian retroflexion

Upcoming schedule: (contact Adam for open slots)

Please join us for Ling-lunch this week:

Speaker: Artemis Alexiadou
Time: Thurs 11/5, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461
Title: TBA